This Land Is Mine (Jean Renoir, 1943)

Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, Walter Slezak, Kent Smith, Una O'Connor, Philip Merivale, Thurston Hall, George Coulouris, Nancy Gates, Ivan F. Simpson, John Donat. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Production design: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Frederick Knudtson. Music: Lothar Perl.

Charles Laughton plays a cowardly mama's boy schoolteacher in a Nazi-occupied country not unlike director Jean Renoir's native France. Albert Lory is secretly in love with his fellow teacher, Louise (Maureen O'Hara), but she's engaged to George Lambert (George Sanders), the administrator of the local railway yard who thinks the best way to proceed under the occupation is to submit to the Nazis under the command of Major von Keller (Walter Slezak). But Louise's brother, Paul (Kent Smith), is a member of the Resistance who tries to assassinate von Keller, provoking reprisals -- and a good deal of plot complications -- when he fails. Some dubious casting -- Sanders and O'Hara make an odd couple -- and a too-heavy reliance on melodramatic posing undermine a film that seems aimed more at Renoir's compatriots than at American audiences, though it was a box office success. 

Judge Priest (John Ford, 1934)

Stepin Fetchit and Will Rogers in Judge Priest

Cast: Will Rogers, Tom Brown, Anita Louise, Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, Henry B. Walthall, David Landau, Rochelle Hudson, Charley Grapewin, Berton Churchill. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, Lamar Trotti, based on stories by Irvin S. Cobb. Cinematography: George Schneiderman. Art direction: William S. Darling. Film editing: Paul Weatherwax. Music: Samuel Kaylin.

John Ford's Judge Priest fits neatly into that period, roughly from 1915 (the year of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation) to 1939 (the year of David O. Selznick's* Gone With the Wind), when Hollywood filmmakers were catering to audiences in the American South, eager for validation that their "lost cause" had been sacred and not the act of treason that it really was. So it's not surprising to find in the cast of Judge Priest both an actor from Griffith's film, Henry B. Walthall, and one from Selznick's, Hattie McDaniel. Ford's film, in which there's a joke about lynching and which concludes with a rousing performance of "Dixie" complete with waving of the Confederate battle flag, is hard to watch today, except for its historical interest, not only as an example of what movie audiences tolerated in 1934, but also for its glimpses of a then much-loved star, Will Rogers, and his occasional film sidekick, Stepin Fetchit, a comedian who was attacked as an Uncle Tom, but whose work has since been re-evaluated and appreciated for its skill. Judge Priest is also one of the few films in which McDaniel was allowed to sing, a talent she possessed in abundance. Otherwise, it's pretty wince-inducing.

*Yes, Victor Fleming was the credited director of GWTW, but if ever a movie deserved to be credited mainly to its producer, it's that one.

The Toast of New York (Rowland V. Lee, 1937)

The Toast of New York (Rowland V. Lee, 1937)

Cast: Edward Arnold, Cary Grant, Frances Farmer, Jack Oakie, Donald Meek, Thelma Leeds, Clarence Kolb, Billy Gilbert. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, John Twist, Joel Sayre, based on a book by Bouck White and a story by Matthew Josephson. Cinematography: J. Peverell Marley. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark, Darrell Silvera. Film editing: Samuel E. Beetley, George Hively. Music: Nathaniel Shilkret.

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.

Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943)

John Garfield, George Tobias, and Harry Carey in Air Force

Capt. Quincannon: John Ridgely
Lt. Williams: Gig Young
Lt. McMartin: Arthur Kennedy
Lt. Hauser: Charles Drake
Sgt. White: Harry Carey
Cpl. Weinberg: George Tobias
Cpl. Peterson: Ward Wood
Pvt. Chester: Ray Montgomery
Sgt. Winocki: John Garfield
Lt. "Tex" Rader: James Brown
Maj. Mallory: Stanley Ridges
Col. Blake: Moroni Olsen
Susan McMartin: Faye Emerson

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols
Cinematography: James Wong Howe
Art direction: John Hughes
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Franz Waxman

"Fried Jap coming down!" crows gunner Weinberg as a Japanese fighter pilot and his plane attacking the Mary-Ann are consumed in flames. It's a much-quoted and much-parodied line that puts Howard Hawks's Air Force squarely where it belongs: in the wounded jingoism of the period immediately post Pearl Harbor. We wince at the line today, but Air Force has endured not so much because it's a period piece as because it's a tremendously effective piece of filmmaking. Hawks, who was a licensed pilot and had served in the Army Air Corps during World War I, was the exactly right person to make the film, which producer Hal B. Wallis put into production shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and which he wanted to release on the first anniversary of the attack in 1942. Hawks was too savvy and persistent a craftsman to allow anything like an arbitrary deadline to hinder him, and his failure to adhere to Wallis's schedule led to a brief replacement as director by Vincent Sherman. Wallis was exasperated in particular by Hawks's constant departure from the producer-approved screenplay, particularly the dialogue. Nevertheless, Hawks persisted, and called in William Faulkner to rewrite Concannon's death scene, which the director found too saccharine. The result is one of the most affecting moments of the film. The rest is pretty much razzle-dazzle heroism and entertaining male-bonding: There's no Hawksian woman in the movie to take the guys down a peg, although Faye Emerson's bit as McMartin's sister and Williams's girlfriend has a good deal of the Hawksian tough cookie about her. Hawks wanted the film to be a wartime version of his great movie about pilots, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), but the propagandist pressures to support the war effort, and probably a good deal of meddling from Wallis and Warner Bros., kept him from achieving that goal. Still, the action is exciting and the performances are good, especially John Garfield as the reluctantly heroic Winocki and Harry Carey as the oldtimer mechanic -- though Carey, in his mid-60s, was probably more of an oldtimer than the role strictly calls for.

The Informer (John Ford, 1935)

Time has not been kind to The Informer, though it was celebrated as a masterpiece at the time, and won four Academy Awards: John Ford for director, Victor McLaglen for best actor, Dudley Nichols for best screenplay, and Max Steiner for score.* Today, The Informer looks a little stiff and stagy and McLaglen's performance vastly overdone. The film invites comparison to much better manhunt films like Fritz Lang's M (1931) and especially Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), which also takes the Irish revolution for its subject. Ford has a way of overstating things, such as the constant visions that Gypo Nolan (McLaglen) has of the "Wanted" poster that inspired him to inform against Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford). And the final scene in the church now feels impossibly mawkish: Frankie's mother (Una O'Connor), veiled and -- thanks to cinematographer Joseph H. August's lighting -- as beatific as a Raphael madonna, forgives Gypo, who then expires before a crucifix proclaiming, "Frankie! Your mother forgives me!" It has to be said, though, that The Informer is full of great energy, and some of the supporting performances, like J.M. Kerrigan's Terry, who sponges off of the newly flush Gypo, or May Boley as the madam of a Production Coded brothel, are vivid and colorful. McLaglen's performance lacks the kind of nuance that would help us see Gypo as more than just a drunken loudmouth with no moral compass, which would make the ending feel less unearned, but you can't take your eyes off of him even when you wish you could. Legend has it that Ford kept McLaglen liquored up throughout the film to get the performance he wanted, but there are many long takes and ensemble scenes that suggest to me that McLaglen was more in control of himself than the legend suggests.

*It also contributed to Oscar statistics: This was the first of Ford's record-setting Oscar wins as director. The others were for The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952). (None of Ford's wins were for the genre with which is is most associated, the Western.) And Nichols became the first person to decline an Oscar: As a member of the Screen Writers Guild, Nichols was suspicious of the Academy because it had been founded in part as an attempt by the film industry to reduce the influence of unions. After the Academy began to disassociate itself from union-busting efforts, Nichols quietly accepted the award.

Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)

Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street is based on the same novel by Georges de la Fouchardière that Jean Renoir had adapted for his 1931 film that retained the novel's title, La Chienne. Both films came at oddly significant points in their directors' careers: Renoir's was only his second talkie, but one in which he demonstrated his mastery of the relatively new medium by a creative use of ambient sound. Lang's was made just as World War II was ending -- a moment when it became possible for him to return to Europe, which he had fled to avoid Nazi persecution. Lang chose, however, to stay on in Hollywood for 12 more years, though he grew increasingly annoyed at the creative restrictions imposed on him by the big studios and Production Code censorship. In this context, Scarlet Street stands out as edgy and somewhat defiant. The Code prescribed a kind of lex talionis: any criminal act demands a punishment equivalent in kind and degree. But in Scarlet Street, Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) gets away with not only fraud and theft but also murder -- a double murder, if you consider that the man wrongly accused of the murder goes to the electric chair for it. Cross is punished by homelessness and by auditory delusions of the voices of those who drove him to crime, but that's much less severe than the Code usually prescribed. There were those, of course, including censors in New York State, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, who noticed the Code's laxness and proceeded to ban the film on their own. Today, Scarlet Street is regarded as a classic, one of the premier examples of film noir at its darkest. It doesn't quite measure up to Renoir's version, perhaps because Renoir was freer in expressing his vision of the material than Lang was. Renoir's film had touches of humor and a gentler, more ironic ending, but the ending of Scarlet Street is entirely in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film, with its traces of unfettered Lang: for example, the shocking viciousness of Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), who if you know how to decode the Code is clearly the pimp to the prostitute Kitty March (Joan Bennett). And Cross's behavior at the end of the film, derelict and delusional, echoes some of the frantic paranoia of Peter Lorre's child murderer in Lang's M (1931). The screenplay is by Dudley Nichols.

The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952)

Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin in The Big Sky

Jim Deakins: Kirk Douglas
Boone Caudill: Dewey Martin
Teal Eye: Elizabeth Threatt
Zeb Calloway: Arthur Hunnicutt
Romaine: Buddy Baer
"Frenchy" Jourdonnais: Steven Geray
La Badie: Henri Letondal
Poordevil: Hank Worden
Streak: Jim Davis

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, Ray Buffum, DeVallon Scott
Based on a novel by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Perry Ferguson
Film editing: Christian Nyby
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

The Big Sky is a good Henry Hathaway or Budd Boetticher movie, except that it was made by Howard Hawks, from whom we have come to expect more. Hawks had just passed through one of the peak periods of his long career, with the sterling achievement of To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and Red River (1948), and he was to return to form in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959). But The Big Sky looks like a routine Western adventure in that company, even though it has some old Hawksian hands on board in screenwriter Dudley Nichols, cinematographer Russell Harlan, and composer Dimitri Tiomkin. It has the director's characteristic touches in places: overlapping dialogue and the usual male-bonding moments. Some of the latter, especially between Kirk Douglas's Jim Deakins and Dewey Martin's Boone Caudill, verge on the homoerotic, since Boone is given to wearing tight leather pants and both go around with their shirts flared open, making one scene look like it's taking place in a West Hollywood bar and not a St. Louis saloon. The absence of the usual "Hawksian woman," able to return wisecrack for wisecrack, is particularly noticeable. The only woman in the large cast is Elizabeth Threatt, playing an Indian woman named Teal Eye, who doesn't speak English. This was the only film appearance for Threatt, a model Hawks had spotted in a photograph. Her chief function in the film is to provide sexual tension among the members of a crew of fur traders making their way up the Missouri River and to spark a bit of rivalry between Jim and Boone. Teal Eye has been brought along on the expedition by Zeb Calloway to act as a go-between with the Blackfoot tribe, to which she belongs. Also along for the journey is a somewhat addled Blackfoot known as Poordevil, played by Hank Worden, a regular member of John Ford's stock company who sometimes moonlighted for Hawks. The journey is interrupted by Indian attacks, river rapids, and the threats from a rival trading company, in scenes that are staged and shot well but never provide more than the routine excitement of the genre. Hunnicutt and Harlan received Oscar nominations for their work.

Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

Although it's often called the greatest of all screwball comedies, to my mind Bringing Up Baby transcends that label: It's the finest example I know of a nonsense comedy. Screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936) and Nothing Sacred (William A. Wellman, 1937) usually have one foot in the real world -- the Depression and its Hoovervilles in the case of the former, exploitation journalism in the latter. Bringing Up Baby exists only in a universe where an impossible thing like an "intercostal clavicle"* could exist. Its world is a place where nobody listens to anyone else and everyone seems to be marching to their own drummer. It's what puts Bringing Up Baby in the sublime company of Lewis Carroll's works or James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Fortunately it's more accessible than the latter and at least as much fun as the former. Nonsense is harder to bring off on film than in literature. Cinema by nature is a documentary medium -- one that's assumed to be recording reality -- and has less flexibility than words do. It's also a collaborative medium, which means that everyone involved in writing, directing, and acting in it has to be on the same wave length, or the whole thing will collapse like a soufflé with too many cooks. That's why Bringing Up Baby is almost sui generis: The only other movies that approach the sublimity of its nonsense are some of the ones with the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields. Even Howard Hawks once admitted that he thought he had gone too far in crafting a comedy with "no normal people in it." Nevertheless, the soufflé continues to rise, thanks in very large part to Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, whose four movies together -- the other three were directed by George Cukor: Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940) -- seem to me to demonstrate a more potent teaming than the more iconic one of Hepburn with Spencer Tracy. And then there's the sine qua non of the screwball comedy, a supporting cast of character players like Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, and Fritz Feld. The screenplay was put together by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, from a magazine story by Wilde that Hawks bought and then with their help -- and doubtless much ad-libbing from the cast -- revised out of all recognition. I only hope that whoever came up with the phrase "intercostal clavicle," which Grant delivers with such delight in its rhythms, received a bonus.

*In case you've never thought to look it up, "intercostal" means "between the ribs" and usually refers to the muscles and spaces in the ribcage. The clavicle, or collarbone, sits atop the ribs and therefore can't be between them.

Swamp Water (Jean Renoir, 1941)

Swamp Water has a few things working against it other than its title. For one, having a cast of familiar Hollywood stars pretending to be farmers, hunters, and trappers living on the edge of the Okefenokee swamp, and saying things like "I brung her" and "He got losted," makes for a certain lack of authenticity. And at 32, its leading man, Dana Andrews is about a decade too old to be playing the callow youth he's supposed to be in the movie. Add to that the director, Jean Renoir, is a wartime exile from France, making his first film in Hollywood, and you might expect the worst. Fortunately, it has a screenplay by a master, Dudley Nichols, and an eminently watchable cast that includes Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Eugene Pallette, who while they may never quite convince us that they're Georgia swamp-folk, do their professional best. It turns out to be a thoroughly entertaining movie that, while it doesn't add any luster to Renoir's career, doesn't detract from it either. This was Andrews's second year in movies, and he gives the kind of energetic performance that mostly overcomes miscasting. Born in Mississippi and raised in Texas, he also seems to know the character he's called on to play, perhaps a little better than the city-bred Baxter, whose efforts at being the village outcast are a bit forced. Brennan as usual plays an old coot, but without overdoing the mannerisms -- it's a slyly engaging performance. Much of the footage was shot by cinematographer J. Peverell Marley and the uncredited Lucien Ballard in the actual swamp and environs near Waycross, Georgia. There is some obvious failure to match the location footage with that shot back in the 20th Century-Fox studio, but it's not terribly distracting.

Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941)

Walter Pidgeon spent much of his movie career at MGM, playing prince consort to Greer Garson: He was Mr. Miniver, Mr. Parkington, and M. Curie -- they made nine films together, if you count their cameos as themselves in The Youngest Profession (Edward Buzzell, 1943). So it's interesting to see him on his own in a 20th Century-Fox film, playing an action hero, the big-game hunter Alan Thorndike, who nearly assassinates Hitler, is beaten by the Gestapo, is pushed off a cliff and survives, escapes to a seaport where he boards a freighter for England, eludes his relentless pursuers, goes to ground in a cave, survives by killing his chief antagonist, and at the film's end parachutes into Germany, presumably to start it all over again. In fact, Pidgeon is a little too starchy for the role, which was better suited to someone like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, and he's upstaged (as who wasn't?) by George Sanders as the villain. Joan Bennett gives a nice performance as Jerry Stokes, the cockney "seamstress" (read: prostitute) who helps Thorndike escape. There's an entertaining scene in which Jerry encounters Thorndike's snooty sister-in-law, Lady Riseborough (Heather Thatcher). Roddy McDowall makes his American film debut as the cabin boy Vaner. This was the first of four films Bennett made with Fritz Lang as director, and they remain probably the highlights of her long career. Although Lang's American films never reached the heights of the ones he made in Germany, such as M (1931) and Metropolis (1927), he had a sure hand with the kind of suspense on display in Man Hunt. Dudley Nichols did the screenplay based on Geoffrey Household's novel Rogue Male.