Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Busby Berkeley, 1949)

Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Betty Garrett in Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Betty Garrett, Edward Arnold, Jules Munshin, Richard Lane, Tom Dugan. Screenplay: Harry Tugend, George Wells, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Roger Edens, Conrad Salinger, songs by Edens, Betty Comden, Adolph Green.

Energetic almost to the point of frenzy, Take Me Out to the Ball Game had a legendarily troubled production. Although the credited director is Busby Berkeley, he reportedly had some sort of breakdown early in the filming and the direction was taken over by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, who are also credited with coming up with the rather thin story, as well as the choreography. Esther Williams, who later confessed her unhappiness with the shoot, was not the first choice for female lead, but Ginger Rogers turned it down and Judy Garland was deemed too unwell to take on the role of K.C. Higgins, the woman who inherits a baseball team on which Kelly's and Frank Sinatra's characters are star players. Williams doesn't even get her usual water ballet extravaganza, but just a turn in a swimming pool that sets the ogling Kelly and Sinatra characters in pursuit of her. Though Sinatra was in the midst of his early fame as an idol of the bobby-soxers, he wasn't considered handsome or strong enough to be a romantic lead, so he lost Kathryn Grayson to Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945). This time, Kelly's Eddie O'Brien wins K.C., and Sinatra's Dennis Ryan is left with Betty Garrett's character, as the Sinatra character would be in On the Town (Kelly and Donen, 1949). Take Me Out to the Ball Game belongs to the peak MGM Technicolor musical era, and it was produced by the head of the musicals unit, Arthur Freed, but it's a decidedly second-rank movie. Although billed third, after Sinatra and Williams, Kelly takes over, including a long solo number, "The Hat My Dear Old Father Wore Upon St. Patrick's Day," in which he dances jigs and shows off Irish step-dancing moves, as well as borrowing a few of James Cagney's familiar struts and stiff-legged movements. The best Freed Unit musicals can leave you exhilarated, but the clumsy plot, the flat romance (Kelly and Williams have no chemistry), and the mediocre songs of this one are more likely to induce exhaustion.

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Cast: Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly, Virginia O'Brien, Rags Ragland, Zero Mostel, Donald Meek, Douglass Dumbrille, George Givot, Louise Beavers, Tommy Dorsey. Screenplay: Nancy Hamilton, Irving Brecher, based on a play by Herbert Fields and Buddy G. DeSylva. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof, songs by Cole Porter, Burton Lane, Ralph Freed, Roger Edens, E.Y. Harburg. Costume design: Gile Steele.

Natalie Kalmus must have been in heaven. The ex-wife of Technicolor founder Herbert Kalmus, and the contract-designated "color supervisor" for any film using the process (as well as the bane of any directors or cinematographers who wanted to do it their own way), was surely delighted when MGM chose Red Skelton and Lucille Ball to star in Du Barry Was a Lady, thereby ensuring that Technicolor's most vivid hue, red, would be on display throughout the film. Ball's hair stylist, Sydney Guilaroff, even devised a new red hair dye for the star, one that she would continue to use -- even to make jokes about -- for the rest of her career. The movie itself is nonsense, one of MGM's second-string musicals, based on a Broadway hit that had starred Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman, but jettisoning not only its stars but also most of Porter's songs. Before it gets to the central gimmick -- Skelton accidentally gets slipped a mickey and dreams he's back in the court of Louis XV -- it's a string of night club routines, including a trio of singers who imitate the famous but now-forgotten big bands of the day, but also featuring one of the best big bands, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Skelton mugs a lot, but Zero Mostel, cast as a fortune-teller, mugs even more. At least Gene Kelly, the nominal romantic lead, gets to dance a bit. Ball was still in that stage of her career in which nobody seemed to know what to do with a beautiful woman who was also a gifted clown. Her best moments in the film come when she gets to do her clowning, as in a sequence in which Skelton (as Louis XV) chases her (as Madame DuBarry) around a bedroom and across a trampoline disguised as a bed. She also gets some funny moments in the film's closing number, Porter's "Friendship," goofing around with the rest of the cast. (It's also the one number in which her own singing voice is heard; the rest of the time she's dubbed by Martha Mears.) This is one of those movies for which the fast-forward button on the remote control was designed: Skip anything savoring of plot, most of the tedious mugging, the calendar-girl fashion show, but stop for the Dorsey numbers, the Kelly dances, and any time Ball is allowed to show what she did best.

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

Cast: Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan, Ian Hunter, Florence Rice. Screenplay: Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer, Jack McGowan, Dore Schary. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh, Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Songs: Cole Porter.

Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

Greta Garbo and John Barrymore in Grand Hotel

Grusinskaya: Greta Garbo
Baron Felix von Geigern: John Barrymore
Flaemmchen: Joan Crawford
General Director Preysing: Wallace Beery
Otto Kringelein: Lionel Barrymore
Dr. Otternschlag: Lewis Stone
Senf: Jean Hersholt
Suzette: Rafaela Ottiano
Pimenov: Ferdinand Gottschalk
Meierheim: Robert McWade
Zinnowitz: Purnell Pratt

Director: Edmund Goulding
Screenplay: Béla Balász, William Absalom Drake, Edgar Allan Woolf
Based on a novel by Vicki Baum and a play by William Absalom Drake
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Blanche Sewell
Costume design: Adrian
Music: Charles Maxwell

The criticism most often made of Grand Hotel is that its performances are hammy. Greta Garbo's face, even in medium shots, is never at rest, eyebrows arching, nostrils flaring, lips curling and pouting. John Barrymore poses shamelessly, always managing to find a way to lift his chin the better to display his celebrated profile. Joan Crawford, whose best feature was her eyes, manages to open them so wide you'd think she was playing opposite an optometrist instead of Wallace Beery and the Barrymore brothers. One conventional explanation for all of this preening and camera-hogging is that it's inherent to an all-star cast in which every star wants to shine brightest. Another is that all of the stars had been in silent films, where the absence of sound puts a premium on telegraphing emotions visually, and 1932 was still early enough that actors weren't fully accustomed to letting the dialogue do the work. But I think director Edmund Goulding deserves most of the blame. Compare, for example, the performance given by Garbo under the direction of George Cukor four years later in Camille: She has learned to let the dialogue and the camera do most of the work, so the tics and mannerisms have vanished. Cukor also directed the Barrymore brothers in Dinner at Eight just a year after Grand Hotel, and while their hamming is still a bit excessive, Cukor knows how to integrate it into another all-star ensemble. And no director got better performances out of Crawford than Cukor did in her sharply contrasting roles in The Women (1939) and A Woman's Face (1941). But I come not to praise Cukor or really to bury Goulding, except to note that for many years, Grand Hotel was the only best picture Oscar winner without a corresponding nomination for its director.* Still, it's a very entertaining movie, cramming a lot of characters into a small space and providing some real intrigue and even action -- it's the only film I can recall in which someone is beaten to death with a telephone. It looks good, too, for its age: Cedric Gibbons's art deco sets are spiffy and Adrian's gowns and negligees and frocks are sexy.

*Oscar trivia footnote: In fact, Grand Hotel remains the only best picture winner to receive no nominations in any other category. As for the picture-director correlation, Grand Hotel held on to that distinction until the 1989 Oscars, when Driving Miss Daisy was named best picture but Bruce Beresford went unnominated. And it didn't happen again until 2012 when Ben Affleck was passed over for directing Argo.

The Cossacks (George W. Hill, 1928)

John Gilbert and Renée Adorée in The Cossacks

Lukashka: John Gilbert
Maryana: Renée Adorée
Ivan: Ernest Torrance
Prince Olenin Stieshneff: Nils Asther
Sitchi: Paul Hurst
Ulitka: Dale Fuller

Director: George W. Hill
Screenplay: Frances Marion
Title cards: John Colton
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Percy Hilburn
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Blanche Sewell

Nobody comes off well in The Cossacks. Not even John Gilbert, for whom MGM made the movie, hoping the reteaming with Renée Adorée, his co-star in The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925), would strike fire at the box office. Gilbert spends much of the movie in a shaggy Astrakhan hat that makes his nose look big. Nor was the film much fun for screenwriter Frances Marion and director George W. Hill, who spent much of the production time fighting with studio interference and handling complaints from Gilbert and Adorée. Hill eventually quit and was replaced by an uncredited Clarence Brown. Nor does the film do much justice to the novel by Leo Tolstoy on which it's based. It completely inverts the story, in which Prince Olenin is the protagonist, an idealistic Russian who hates Moscow society and finds himself in the simpler, more primitive way of life in the Caucasus. In the film, Olenin has been sent by the tsar to mingle with the Cossacks and find a bride in some vaguely diplomatic attempt to cement relations between the urban Russians and the rural populace. Nils Asther is a very pretty Olenin, who of course lights on the equally very pretty Maryana, played by the very pretty Adorée, but she's in love with Lukashka, even though he's a "woman man" who doesn't like killing Turks, which is all that the male Cossacks seem to do. (The women, meanwhile, do all the work.) The film winds up as an absurd paean to the Cossack way of life, after Lukashka decides he really does like killing after all. True, The Cossacks is often fun to watch, and there's some spectacular stunt riding by a troupe of actual Cossacks brought to the United States for the film. But there's too much nonsense and too many clichés.

Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Queen Christina

Christina: Greta Garbo
Antonio: John Gilbert
Magnus: Ian Keith
Oxenstierna: Lewis Stone
Ebba: Elizabeth Young
Aage: C. Aubrey Smith
Charles: Reginald Owen
French Ambassador: Georges Renavent
Archbishop: David Torrence
General: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Innkeeper: Ferdinand Meunier

Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Screenplay: H.M. Harwood, Salka Viertel, Margaret P. Levino, S.N. Behrman
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Production design: Edgar G. Ulmer
Film editing: Blanche Sewell
Costume design: Adrian
Music: Herbert Stothart

A year later, with the Production Code in full enforcement, this would have been a very different movie, though probably not a better one. It certainly wouldn't have shown Christina and Antonio sharing a room, not to mention a bed, in an inn. It probably wouldn't have suggested so strongly that before Antonio became her lover, Christina had a thing going with Countess Ebba, and almost certainly wouldn't have had Christina kiss Ebba on the mouth. Unfortunately, those little touches of mild naughtiness are pretty much all Queen Christina has going for it, especially if you're looking for some faint resemblance to historical fact. But maybe Garbo is enough. She certainly gives this pseudo-historical melodrama more commitment than it deserves. It was her fourth film with Gilbert, their only talkie, and their last. At least it dispels the myth that Gilbert failed to make the move into sound films because of his voice, which is perfectly fine -- the real reason was alcoholism, which made him unemployable and destroyed his health. The number of uncredited hands that worked on the screenplay, including Ben Hecht, Ernest Vajda, Claudine West, and director Rouben Mamoulian, suggests that it became a problem no one ever quite solved. Today, it is mostly remembered for the final shot of Garbo alone at the prow of a ship that is taking her away from Sweden. The story has it that Mamoulian directed her to empty her mind and think of nothing during the long closeup, to allow audiences to project their own emotions on her character.