It Happened Tomorrow (René Clair, 1944)

Cast: Dick Powell, Linda Darnell, Jack Oakie, Edgar Kennedy, John Philliber, George Cleveland, Sig Ruman, George Chandler, Eddie Acuff, Edward Brophy, Paul Guilfoyle. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, René Clair, based on a story by Hugh Wedlock Jr. and Howard Snyder, and a play by Lord Dunsany. Cinematography: Archie Stout. Art direction: Ernö Metzner. Film editing: Fred Pressburger. Music: Robert Stoltz. 

It Happened Tomorrow is a screwball romantic comedy fantasy about a newspaperman (Dick Powell) who magically receives a copy of the next day's edition of the paper. This enables him to land some scoops that advance his career, make a small fortune at the race track, and win the hand of the assistant (Linda Darnell) to a vaudeville fortune teller (Jack Oakie). But then he gets a copy of the paper that predicts his death. The feathery direction of René Clair keeps this nonsense aloft, despite the tendency of some of the supporting players like Oakie and Edgar Kennedy to try to steal every scene they're in. It also has a slightly clumsy frame that turns the movie into a flashback from the 50th wedding anniversary of Powell's and Darnell's characters, cuing us into the fact that he doesn't die. Setting the film in the 1890s was probably a way to avoid any mention of the war going on when It Happened Tomorrow was made.  

Station West (Sidney Lanfield, 1948)

Dick Powell and Jane Greer in Station West

Cast: Dick Powell, Jane Greer, Agnes Moorehead, Tom Powers, Gordon Oliver, Steve Brodie, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Raymond Burr, Regis Toomey, Burl Ives. Screenplay: Frank Fenton, Winston Miller, based on a novel by Luke Short. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Feild M. Gray. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson. Music: Heinz Roemheld. 

Station West is an odd duck of a Western. Oh, there's the usual stagecoach and saloon stuff, some gunplay, and a big fistfight. But it also has the kind of snappy dialogue you associate with film noir, and nobody is exactly what they seem. It's also threaded through with songs performed by an uncredited Burl Ives, who plays a hotel owner who's also a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the action with his ballads. One of the refrains of his songs, "A man can't grow old where there's women and gold," is sung often enough that we get the point. The women are played by Jane Greer and Agnes Moorehead, and they give no quarter. Greer is Charlene, known as Charlie, and she owns most of the business in the town, but not the gold mine, which belongs to Mrs. Caslon, played by Moorehead. And then a stranger named Haven (Dick Powell) comes to town. He's really an undercover agent from military intelligence investigating the deaths of two soldiers who were guarding a shipment of gold from Mrs. Caslon's mine that got hijacked. Powell's character is a boots-and-sixguns variation on his Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), quick with a quip, catnip to the women, able to take a licking and keep on sleuthing. Somehow this mash-up of film noir and horse opera works. There's nice camera work, too, from Harry J. Wild, who knows how to use shadows effectively.    

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Cast: Dick Powell, Ellen Drew, Raymond Walburn, William Demarest, Ernest Truex, Franklin Pangborn, Georgia Caine. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier, A. Earl Hedrick. Film editing: Ellsworth Hoagland. Music: John Leipold, Leo Shuken.

The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952)

The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952)

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, Walter Pidgeon, Gloria Grahame, Barry Sullivan, Gilbert Roland. Screenplay: Charles Schnee, George Bradshaw. Cinematography: Robert Surtees. Art direction: Edward C. Carfagno, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig. Music: David Raksin.

Gold Diggers of 1935 (Busby Berkeley, 1935)

Cast: Dick Powell, Gloria Stuart, Alice Brady, Adolphe Menjou, Hugh Herbert, Glenda Farrell, Dorothy Dare, Wini Shaw. Screenplay: Manuel Seff, Peter Milne, Robert Lord. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy. 

Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948)

Lizabeth Scott and Dick Powell in Pitfall

John Forbes: Dick Powell
Mona Stevens: Lizabeth Scott
Sue Forbes: Jane Wyatt
J.B. MacDonald: Raymond Burr
Bill Smiley: Byron Barr
District Attorney: John Litel
Tommy Forbes: Jimmy Hunt
Ed Brawley: Selmer Jackson

Director: André De Toth
Screenplay: Karl Kamb
Based on a novel by Jay Dratler
Cinematography: Harry J. Wild
Art direction: Arthur Lonergan
Film editing: Walter Thompson
Music: Louis Forbes

André De Toth's Pitfall is a noir-tinged cautionary fable about midlife ennui. Married to his childhood sweetheart, Sue, John Forbes is bored with his job at an insurance company and with his suburban life in general. But then he gets a case involving the recovery of the assets of Bill Smiley, who is doing time for embezzlement. The sleazy private eye Forbes has hired, J.B. MacDonald, has tracked down some of the loot to Smiley's mistress, Mona Stevens. Forbes decides to pay her a visit, but not before MacDonald, with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, urges him to put in a good word with Mona about him. Forbes's visit to Mona will turn into an affair that earns the enmity of not only MacDonald, who is obsessed with her, but also Smiley, whose jail term is almost up. The whole thing ends with a couple of corpses and a badly damaged marriage. De Toth handles it with a minimum of sugarcoating on the life of the Forbeses, even though they have a cute little boy named Tommy, and with a great deal of suspense as the hulking MacDonald, well-played by Raymond Burr in his heaviest heavy mode, gets Forbes more deeply involved in his relationship with Mona -- despite the best efforts of both Forbes and Mona to put an end to it.

Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

Chester Kent: James Cagney
Nan Prescott: Joan Blondell
Bea Thorn: Ruby Keeler
Scotty Blair: Dick Powell
Francis: Frank McHugh
Silas Gould: Guy Kibbee
Harriet Gould: Ruth Donnelly
Bowers: Hugh Herbert
Vivian Rich: Claire Dodd

Director: Lloyd Bacon
Screenplay: Manuel Seff, James Seymour
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Anton Grot, Jack Okey
Film editing: George Amy
Choreography: Busby Berkeley

Busby Berkeley's great trifecta of 1933 also includes 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy). Footlight Parade is the least distinguished of the three by virtue of having the most inane of plots, but it also has a blazingly wonderful performance by James Cagney as the harried impresario Chester Kent, who creates "prologues" for movies -- live action musical numbers designed to precede feature films, a phenomenon that survives today only at Radio City Music Hall. Cagney not only gets to display his typical volcanic persona but also gets to strut his stuff as a dancer. As in other early Berkeley films, the great mad production numbers are not spread throughout but instead clustered at the end. First comes "Honeymoon Hotel," which is a string of double entendres about the fact that people have sex in hotels, and aren't necessarily newlyweds: e.g., everyone registers as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Then there's the lavish "By a Waterfall," which anticipates (and excels) the swimming pool numbers that Berkeley would later craft for Esther Williams at MGM. And finally, Chester Kent gets to save the show by going on for a lead dancer who comes down with stage fright in the "Shanghai Lil," number with Ruby Keeler in yellowface, dancing on the top of waterfront bars with Cagney -- her clunky, anxious tapping is an odd mixture with Cagney's stiff-legged style. (We are fortunately spared one of Kent's more appalling ideas, a musical number about slavery in which the female dancers would appear in blackface and be captured by the male dancers.) The whole thing is good, mildly ribald pre-Code stuff: Joan Blondell's Nan, who crushes on Chester Kent, introduces the predatory Vivian Rich by "accidentally" almost pronouncing her last name with a B, and comments that as long as there are sidewalks, Vivian will never be without a job.

Dames (Ray Enright, Busby Berkeley, 1934)

Mabel Anderson: Joan Blondell
Jimmy Higgens: Dick Powell
Barbara Hemingway: Ruby Keeler
Mathilda Hemingway: Zasu Pitts
Horace Hemingway: Guy Kibbee
Ezra Ounce: Hugh Herbert
Bulger: Arthur Vinton

Director: Ray Enright, Busby Berkeley
Screenplay: Delmer Daves, Robert Lord
Cinematography: George Barnes, Sidney Hickox, Sol Polito
Art direction: Robert M. Haas, Willy Pogany
Film editing: Harold McLernon
Music: Heinz Roemheld

Utterly inane and completely delightful, Dames is mostly a showcase for three great Busby Berkeley dance spectacles, each giddier and more kaleidoscopic than the one that went before. The big numbers -- "The Girl at the Ironing Board," "I Only Have Eyes for You," and the title song -- are clustered at the end of the film, the supposed (if impossible) production numbers in a Broadway musical. Until we get to them, there's a lot of nonsense about multimillionaire Ezra Ounce's moral crusade and his cousin Horace Hemingway's kowtowing to Ounce in order to get a sizable chunk of his millions, which involves keeping his daughter, Barbara, from marrying her 13th cousin, Jimmy, who is banking on his ability to put on the big show, which supposedly offends Ounce's moral code. Got that? Fortunately, the bluenoses are played by such grand grotesques as Hugh Herbert, Guy Kibbee, and Zasu Pitts, and there's a lot of silliness about Ezra Ounce's hiccup cure, which is something like 70 percent alcohol. There's also the invaluable Joan Blondell as a chorus girl on the make. Unfortunately, we also get a couple of songs from Dick Powell, in his sappy tenor avatar, and some clunky tap-dancing from Ruby Keeler. But Berkeley's extravaganzas are worth the wait, including the title number, which features chorus girls riding a miniature Ferris wheel. Standing. Backward.

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.

42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

Julian Marsh: Warner Baxter
Dorothy Brock: Bebe Daniels
Peggy Sawyer: Ruby Keeler
Billy Lawler: Dick Powell
Abner Dillon: Guy Kibbee
Lorraine Fleming: Una Merkel
Ann Lowell: Ginger Rogers
Pat Denning: George Brent
Thomas Barry: Ned Sparks

Director: Lloyd Bacon
Screenplay: Rian James, James Seymour
Based on a novel by Bradford Ropes
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Jack Okey
Songs: Al Dubin, Harry Warren
Costume design: Orry-Kelly
Choreography: Busby Berkeley

42nd Street is only mildly naughty, bawdy, or sporty, as the lyrics of Al Dubin and Harry Warren's title song would have it, but once Busby Berkeley takes over to stage the three production numbers at the movie's end, it is certainly gaudy. What naughtiness and bawdiness it contains would not have been there at all once the Production Code went into effect a year or so later. It's doubtful that Ginger Rogers's character would have been called "Anytime Annie" once the censors clamped down, or that anyone would say of her, "She only said 'no' once and then she didn't hear the question." Or that it would be so clear that Dorothy Brock is the mistress of foofy old moneybags Abner Dillon. Or that there would be so many crotch shots of the chorus girls, including the famous tracking shot between their legs in Berkeley's "Young and Healthy" number. Although it's often remembered as a Busby Berkeley musical, it's mostly a Lloyd Bacon movie, and while Bacon is not a name to conjure with these days, he does a splendid job of keeping the non-musical part of the film moving along satisfactorily. It helps that he has a strong lead in Warner Baxter as the tough, self-destructive stage director Julian Marsh, balanced by such skillful wisecrackers as Rogers, Una Merkel, and Ned Sparks. But it's a blessing that this archetypal backstage musical became a prime showcase for Berkeley's talents. Dick Powell's sappy tenor has long been out of fashion, and Ruby Keeler keeps anxiously glancing at her feet while she's dancing, but Berkeley's sleight-of-hand keeps our attention away from their faults. Nor does anyone really care that his famous overhead shots that turn dancers into kaleidoscope patterns would not be visible to an audience in a real theater. In the "42nd Street" number, Berkeley also introduces his characteristic dark side: Amid all the song and dance celebrating the street, we witness a near-rape and a murder. It's a dramatic twist that Berkeley would repeat with even greater effect in his masterpiece, the "Lullaby of Broadway" number from Gold Diggers of 1935. Berkeley's serious side, along with the somewhat downbeat ending showing an exhausted Julian Marsh, alone and ignored amid the hoopla, help remind us that the studio that made 42nd Street, Warner Bros., was also known for social problem movies like I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) and the gangster classics of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson.