Blondie of the Follies (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

Billie Dove and Marion Davies in Blondie of the Follies

Cast: Marion Davies, Robert Montgomery, Billie Dove, Jimmy Durante, James Gleason, Zasu Pitts, Sidney Toler, Douglass Dumbrille, Sarah Padden, Louise Carter, Clyde Cook. Screenplay: Frances Marion, Anita Loos. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George Hively. Music: William Axt. 

Marion Davies is always a delight to watch, but Blondie of the Follies is a mess. A sort of backstage, rags-to-riches, romantic comedy with music, it was tailor-made for Davies, who had once been a Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl. In fact, it was where she caught the eye of William Randolph Hearst, But why Hearst would have okayed a story so reflective of his liaison with Davies is something of a mystery, especially since he meddled in the production to make sure it wasn't too close to real life. Not that he was a reluctant meddler: He set up his own production company with MGM for her and made sure that she was photographed and clothed in the most flattering ways possible. Davies is such an adroit comedian, the forerunner of such glamorous funny women as Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball, that she didn't need Hearst's help, especially his desire to see her in serious dramatic roles. There's some drama in Blondie of the Follies, but it's much less entertaining than Davies's clowning, as when she mimics Greta Garbo in a sendup of Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) with Jimmy Durante as John Barrymore. The story isn't much: Blondie McClune (Davies) and Lottie Callahan (Billie Dove) are on-and-off friends and neighbors in a tenement before Lottie runs off to become a Follies girl. Visiting Lottie (now known as Lurline Cavanaugh), Blondie meets Larry Belmont (Robert Montgomery), who has set Lottie/Lurline up in a swank apartment. Blondie decides that the life of a chorus girl isn't so bad after all, and sure enough she follows in Lottie's footsteps, becoming a star and getting set up in her own swell digs by an oilman (Douglass Dumbrille). Moreover, Larry decides that Blondie is more his type than the pretentious Lurline, who is outraged when she finds out. Even though this is a pre-Code movie, there needs to be some indication that the filmmakers don't fully endorse all of this gold-digging and living-in-sin, so Blondie's dad (James Gleason) shows up to disapprove. Finally, he gives in and decides to let Blondie live how she wants to, but not without touching her conscience a bit. Blondie's ambivalence about her lifestyle and her attraction to Larry will be tested, forming what amounts to the plot. There's an interpolated party scene to let Durante do his comic shtick, which hasn't aged well, and a couple of rather clunky production numbers, but they only add to the generally unfocused character of the movie.  

Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Cast: Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ronald Reagan, Henry Travers, Cora Witherspoon, Dorothy Peterson, Virginia Brissac. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a play by George Emerson Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: William Holmes. Music: Max Steiner.

Absurd but hypnotically entertaining, Dark Victory is one of the essential Bette Davis movies, if only because she has a great character arc to follow: from spoiled rich brat to repentant dying woman. It was nominated for three Oscars (picture, actress, score) but won none of them -- it was 1939, of course, the Hollywood annus mirabilis dominated by Gone With the Wind. This is the one in which Humphrey Bogart plays an Irish stablemaster with the hots for Davis's Judith Traherne and Ronald Reagan plays an alcoholic playboy whom a later audience would easily spot as her gay best friend. In the end it's her brain surgeon, played by George Brent, who wins her, but not before the brain tumor he has failed to remove kills her. Geraldine Fitzgerald is the faithful friend who sees her through at the end, and together she and Davis make the moment more moving than mawkish. 

The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939)

Bette Davis in The Old Maid

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Jane Bryan, Louise Fazenda, James Stephenson, Jerome Cowan, William Lundigan. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a play by Zoe Akins and a novel by Edith Wharton. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Max Steiner.

The Old Maid is the kind of melodrama that never really made much sense, except in the original version, the novel by Edith Wharton, where the social taboos and psychological hangups could be dealt with more convincingly. And given that filmmakers under the Production Code had to tiptoe around topics like having a child without being married, the evasions of such key issues became even more ludicrous and artificial. Still, though the movie is fun to watch today because the evasions are so glaring, and because troupers like Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins knew how to make them entertaining. The making of the film is notorious because Davis and Hopkins were constantly feuding over old wrong: The one losing a coveted role to the other who was also suspected of sleeping with her husband, and so on. Davis is more fun when she's scheming and trying to get even in her movies than when she's suffering and self-sacrificing, so The Old Maid is not one of her juicier films.

The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941)

The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941)

Cast: Bette Davis, Mary Astor, George Brent, Hattie McDaniel, Lucile Watson, Jerome Cowan. Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, based on a novel by Polan Banks. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl. Music: Max Steiner.

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.