One Mile From Heaven (Allan Dwan, 1937)

Joan Carroll and Bill Robinson in One Mile From Heaven

Cast: Claire Trevor, Sally Blane, Douglas Fowley, Fredi Washington, Bill Robinson, Joan Carroll, Ralf Harolde, John Eldredge, Paul McVey, Ray Walker, Russell Hopton, Chick Chandler, Eddie Anderson, Howard HIckman. Screenplay: Robin Harris, Alfred Golden, Lou Breslow, John Patrick, based on a story by Ben B. Lindsey. Cinematography: Sidney Wagner. Art direction: Bernard Herzbrun. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin.

In One Mile From Heaven, a reporter happens upon a Black woman who is raising a white child and says that the little girl is her own daughter. The reporter immediately sees it as a hot news item. It's an odd and distasteful premise for a movie, especially if, as in this case, the child is happy, well cared-for, and loves her mother, who's entirely capable of raising her. It's the mere fact of the racial disparity that sets Lucy Warren (Claire Trevor) on the course of exposing the relationship of Flora Jackson (Fredi Washington) and her putative daughter, Sunny (Joan Carroll), leading to the discovery of Sunny's birth mother, the wealthy (and white) Barbara Harrison (Sally Blane). It winds up with what's supposed to be a happy ending. That the movie is played as a sentimental comedy laced with musical numbers supplied by a tap-dancing Black policeman (Bill Robinson) only makes it seem odder. It could, after all, have been an indictment of nosy journalism, or a story of racial injustice, but instead it's a grab-bag of movie tropes, including a press room filled with anything-for-a-scoop reporters straight out of The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931), and a thwarted prison escape that comes out of nowhere and has only a tangential relationship to the main plot. Allan Dwan handles all of this with his usual finesse, but is never quite able to make a coherent film out of it. This was Washington's last film before she retired from acting and devoted her life to civil rights activism. The movie, based on an actual case in Denver, serves as evidence why that activism was needed. 

Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935)

Claire Trevor and Edmund Lowe in Black Sheep

Cast: Edmund Lowe, Claire Trevor, Tom Brown, Eugene Pallette, Adrienne Ames, Herbert Mundin, Ford Sterling, Jed Prouty, Billy Bevan, David Torrence. Screenplay: Allen Rivkin, Allan Dwan. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Alex Troffey. Music: Oscar Levant. 

Is it because it stars Edmund Lowe and Claire Trevor, and not, say, William Powell and Carole Lombard, that I had never seen Black Sheep before? Because Lowe, a second-string leading man at best, is perfectly fine as the suave but penniless gambler trying to recoup his fortunes on a ship sailing back to the States. And Trevor is delightful as the similarly broke actress going home after failing to make it big on the stage in Europe. Trevor, in fact, is something of a revelation: She's now best known for playing hard-bitten dames like Dallas, who was run out of town by the respectable ladies and put onto the titular vehicle of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). And she won an Oscar as the gangster's moll Gaye Dawn in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948). Who knew she had the gift for comedy that she shows in Black Sheep? And it's mostly a comedy, with a melodramatic twist provided by Allan Dwan, who wrote the story for which Allen Rivkin provided some lively dialogue. Lowe's John Francis Dugan and Trevor's Janette Foster team up to save the naïve young Fred Curtis (Tom Brown) from being fleeced by the card sharps Belcher (Eugene Pallette) and Schmelling (Jed Prouty) and by the slinky Millicent Bath (Adrienne Ames). Young Curtis, from a proper Bostonian family, owes Mrs. Bath a large sum, which she uses to blackmail him into helping her smuggle into the States a valuable pearl necklace that she has stolen. It's the usual shipboard intrigue plot we've seen before, played for comedy. But Dwan gives it a turn toward melodrama when Dugan discovers that the young man he's protecting is his own son. (Dwan seems to have borrowed this device from his own movie, East Side, West Side (1927), which likewise involves a father being separated from his son by a snooty family.) But it's mostly a comedy with some sharp repartee and a gallery of supporting actors like Pallette and Prouty, Herbert Mundin as a man in top hat and tails who's so drunk he doesn't know where he is or even who he is, and Ford Sterling as Mather, the shipboard detective who's Dugan's nemesis. There's also a sappy song, "In Other Words, I'm in Love," with lyrics by Sidney Clare and music by Oscar Levant, sung sappily by Dick Webster, which doesn't bear mentioning except that Levant's Gershwinesque music also serves as the film's score. 

Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

John Wayne in Stagecoach

Ringo Kid: John Wayne
Dallas: Claire Trevor
Doc Boone: Thomas Mitchell
Hatfield: John Carradine
Curley: George Bancroft
Buck: Andy Devine
Lucy Mallory: Louise Platt
Samuel Peacock: Donald Meek
Gatewood: Berton Churchill
Lt. Blanchard: Tim Holt
Luke Plummer: Tom Tyler

Director: John Ford
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols
Based on a story by Ernest Haycox
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Alexander Toluboff
Film editing: Otho Lovering, Dorothy Spencer
Music: Gerard Carbonara

Stagecoach breaks a lot of rules: The celebrated sequence in which the Apaches chase the stagecoach is filmed from various angles instead of adhering to the practice of keeping the action moving in one direction across the screen. Some of its climactic moments, such as the final showdown between Ringo and the Plummer brothers, occur offscreen. And the whole film is a bewilderment of locations, with John Ford's beloved Monument Valley showing up whenever Ford wants to use it, and not when it matches the location of the previous shots. The great example of this last is the introduction of the Ringo Kid himself, a flourish of camerawork that zooms in on Ringo with a Monument Valley butte in the background, no matter that neither lighting nor lenses nor the ordinary scrubby landscape of the scenes that frame this moment match up. Clearly, Ford wanted to give the moment a special magic, establishing the character as the film's hero -- even though John Wayne, a veteran of B-movies, was forced to take second billing to the better-known Claire Trevor. The magic worked, to be sure: Wayne became a central figure in the American mythology. If Stagecoach had been a flop, American movies would have been quite different. John Ford would have been known as a director of solid "prestige" films like The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941), three of the record-setting four pictures for which won the best director Oscar.* and not as the man who turned the Western into the essential American genre. John Wayne might have stayed in B-movies, at least until the outbreak of World War II made him a good catch for war pictures. But Stagecoach would never have been a flop: It's too cannily written, directed, and cast not to succeed. It is essential entertainment, cliché-ridden and sometimes clumsy, too obvious by half, but it draws you in irresistibly with its revenge plotting, its damsels in distress, and its social commentary -- the blustering crooked banker Gatewood is far more of a lefty caricature than Wayne or even Ford would have wanted to be associated with later in their careers, and probably owes more to Dudley Nichols's political leanings than to Ford's.

*The fourth, of course, was The Quiet Man (1952), which like the other three was not a Western, even though it starred John Wayne. That Ford never won for a Western is one of the many anomalies of the Academy Awards.

Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)

Because it's based on a Raymond Chandler novel, Murder, My Sweet is inevitably subject to comparisons with another Chandler-based film noir, The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). Which is unfortunate, because Edward Dmytryk was no Hawks, and Dick Powell and Anne Shirley were certainly not Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. But then who is? Murder, My Sweet is good stuff anyway: a steady-moving, entertainingly complicated film noir. And though Dick Powell, the first actor to play Philip Marlowe on screen, doesn't eclipse Bogart's version, he holds his own well alongside other Marlowe incarnations like James Garner, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum. Powell had just turned 40 when Murder, My Sweet was released, and had lost the baby face that made him a star in Busby Berkeley musicals and in comedies like Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940). (It's said that RKO changed the title of the film from that of Chandler's novel, Farewell, My Lovely, because it was afraid that people would think it was a musical.) Powell looks a little slight to take as many sappings as he does in the film -- usually accompanied by the voiceover, "A black pool opened at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom." But he handles the tough-guy lines in John Paxton's screenplay well, and there are plenty of good ones like "She was a gal who would take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle." Or: "My throat felt sore, but the fingers feeling it didn't feel anything. They were just a bunch of bananas that looked like fingers." As usual, we don't know who's good or who's bad for a while, but they're almost all pretty bad, especially Claire Trevor as Helen Grayle, whose former identity as Velma Valento, whom Marlowe is initially hired to locate by Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki), is what ties together all the various plots and subplots about jade necklaces and the like. This was the last film for Anne Shirley, who married the producer of Murder, My Sweet, Adrian Scott, and retired. Scott later became one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. Dmytryk was also one of the Ten, but after his initial refusal to testify, he changed his mind, and gave the unverifiable testimony that Scott and the others had put pressure on him to insert communist propaganda into his films.

Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)

This was the fourth and last of the films that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, but the movie was stolen by Claire Trevor, who won a supporting actress Oscar, and by Bogart's old partner in Warner Bros. gangster movies, Edward G. Robinson. It's a little too talky and stagy, partly because it was based on a 1939 Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson, a once-admired playwright whose specialty was blank-verse dramas. Huston and co-screenwriter Richard Brooks took great liberties with the play, changing the characters and the ending, and updating the action to the postwar era, but occasionally you can hear a bit of Anderson's iambic pentameter in the dialogue. Bogart's Frank McCloud was originally called King McCloud and was a deserter from the Spanish Civil War; in the movie he's a World War II veteran, something of a hero, who comes to Key Largo to visit the father (Lionel Barrymore) and the widow (Bacall) of an army buddy who was killed in Italy. He finds them being held in the hotel they own by a group of gangsters, headed by Johnny Rocco (Robinson), a Prohibition-era mobster who is trying to sneak back into the States after being deported. As so often -- cf. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) and To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944) -- the Bogart character is called on to make a choice between taking the kind of action he has renounced and remaining neutral. Bacall's role is somewhat underwritten, and what few sparks she and Bogart strike seem to be the residue of their previous films together, especially To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946). Having to play opposite that scene-stealing old ham Barrymore doesn't help much, either. But Trevor fully deserved her award as Rocco's moll, an alcoholic club singer known as Gaye Dawn. She has a big moment when she's forced by Rocco to sing "Moanin' Low" on the promise that he'll let her have a drink -- which he then sadistically refuses her. As usual, Robinson is terrific, and also as usual, he failed to receive the Oscar nomination he deserved and was never granted. Karl Freund's cinematography helps overcome the studio's decision not to film on location.