Anthony Adverse (Mervyn LeRoy, 1936)

Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland in Anthony Adverse

Cast: Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Woods, Anita Louise, Edmund Gwenn, Claude Rains, Gale Sondergaard, Louis Hayward, Steffi Duna, Akim Tamiroff, Ralph Morgan, Fritz Leiber, Luis Alberni, Billy Mauch, Henry O'Neill, Pedro de Cordoba, Scotty Beckett. Screenplay: Sheridan Gibney, based on a novel by Hervey Allen. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold. 

This lead-footed, tin-eared attempt at an epic runs for almost two and a half hours, but it seems longer. Warner Bros. threw a lot of resources into it, including some top-flight actors, and earned Oscars for Gale Sondergaard (the first ever supporting actress award), cinematography, film editing, and score (an award that at the time went to the head of the studio music department, Leo Forbstein, and not to the one who deserved it, Erich Wolfgang Korngold). In fact, Korngold's score is the liveliest thing about the film, which is hamstrung by Fredric March's lack of charisma in the title role. March was a fine actor, but he seems miscast and a little too old (he was in his late 30s) in a role that calls on him to be dashing and occasionally reckless. The script, drawn from the first volume of Hervey Allen's doorstop bestseller, is full of contrivances and coincidences, made worse by some cliché-clotted dialogue and characters. The villains, Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard, are as deep-dyed as you could want. Scheming and sneering at virtue, Rains produces one of the most memorable of villainous cackles when he laughs triumphantly, and Sondergaard narrows her eyes and flashes her teeth with snakelike relish. There's also an unfortunate episode in which Anthony goes to the Warners backlot version of Africa and becomes a slave trader, taking as a mistress a vixen named Neleta, played by the Viennese actress Steffi Duna, who does a hoochy-koochy dance that's surely not African. The problem with any summary of the movie is that it makes it sound like more fun than it is. 

The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn, Kenneth Tobey, Jane Darwell, Peggy Maley, Lilian Fontaine, Matt Dennis, John Maxwell. Screenplay: Lawrence B. Marcus, Lou Schor, Collier Young. Cinematography: George E. Diskant. Art direction: James W. Sullivan. Film editing: Stanford Tischler. Music: Leith Stevens.

There are some curiously "meta" moments in The Bigamist: At one point, Eve Graham (Joan Fontaine) says that the man who is helping arrange their adoption of a child reminds her of Santa Claus. We smile because the man is being played by Edmund Gwenn, who won an Oscar as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947). And just in case we missed it, a little later in the film we are on a bus touring the homes of the stars in Beverly Hills and the driver announces that the house they're passing is the residence of "a little man who was Santa Claus to the whole world -- Edmund Gwenn." But then there's something meta about the whole movie: It was produced and its screenplay written by Collier Young, who was married to Fontaine after divorcing the film's other major female star, as well as its director, Ida Lupino. I suppose if you don't believe in divorce you might say that Young is the bigamist of the film's title. But that, of course, is Harry Graham, played by Edmond O'Brien, a character actor who never failed to give a subtle and insightful performance when it was called for. Here he's a weak man, the supposed head of the Graham household, who has found himself taking a back seat in the business to his wife, Eve, whom he refers to at one point as "a career woman" -- a pejorative of sorts in the 1950s. The thing of it is, when we see Eve she's always pleasant and loving -- we sense that she doesn't want to be emasculating Harry, but she's got too much intelligence not to do so. While he's on the road for their company, he gets more and more depressed about playing second fiddle to his wife, so he takes up with Phyllis Martin (Lupino), who's a little depressed herself about her failure to make her mark in the world. One thing leads to another and they get married because she's pregnant. Harry is really a nice guy at heart, but somehow he can't help himself. Finally, he spills the beans to Mr. Jordan (Gwenn), who stumbles onto Harry's double life while investigating the Grahams' fitness to adopt a child. Jordan speaks for the viewer when he says, "I can't figure out my feelings toward you. I despise you and I pity you. I don't even want to shake your hand, and yet I almost wish you luck." There are no villains to be found in The Bigamist, only flawed people getting themselves ensnared in situations they can't resolve. Fortunately, the film doesn't resolve things for us either. It ends with Harry in court where he receives a scolding from the judge, who says he will pronounce sentence a week later. Wisely, the film leaves it up to us to deliver that sentence.

Between Two Worlds (Edward A. Blatt, 1944)

Between Two Worlds (Edward A. Blatt, 1944)

Cast: John Garfield, Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet, Eleanor Parker, Edmund Gwenn, George Tobias, George Coulouris, Faye Emerson, Sara Allgood, Dennis King, Isobel Elsom, Gilbert Emery. Screenplay: Daniel Fuchs, based on a play by Sutton Vane. Cinematography: Carl E. Guthrie. Art direction: Hugh Reticker. Film editing: Rudi Fehr. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Sutton Vane's old warhorse of a play Outward Bound made its debut on Broadway in 1924 and became a community theater staple for many years after. It's a fantasy about the afterlife, in which passengers on a ship gradually come to realize that they're dead and will be judged by a man known as the Examiner, who will send them to their just deserts. Warner Bros. filmed it in 1930 with Leslie Howard as the cynical newspaperman Tom Prior and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as the suicidal Henry, a role Howard had played on stage. In 1944 the studio decided it was time for a remake that would update the story to the war years: A group of people are desperate to get out of England during the bombing and decide to risk sailing to America. Among them is Henry Bergner, a concert pianist who has been part of the Resistance in France but whose nerves have been shattered so that he can't take it anymore. When he's turned down because he doesn't have an exit permit, he decides to kill himself, so he returns to the flat he shares with his wife, Ann (Eleanor Parker), seals the windows shut, and turns on the gas. But Ann has pursued him to the steamship office, and when she finds out he has just left, she rushes into the street just in time to see a car carrying people who have successfully booked passage -- we have been introduced to them earlier -- blown to bits. She hurries on to the flat and discovers what Henry has done, so she decides to join him in death. Cut to the ship, where she and Henry join the people who have just been blown up. Henry and Ann realize that they're dead, but they're advised by the ship's steward, Scrubby (Edmund Gwenn), not to let the others know just yet. And so it goes, as the passengers gradually awake to the truth of their condition and undergo judgment by the Examiner, who was once an Anglican clergyman. Sydney Greenstreet plays him with his usual affably sinister manner -- in his scenes with Henreid it's a bit like watching Victor Laszlo being judged by Kasper Gutman. The bad people -- an arrogant capitalist played by George Coulouris and a snobbish society dame played by Isobel Elsom -- get dispatched to punishment; the sinful but worthy -- Garfield's raffish journalist and Faye Emerson's conscience-stricken playgirl/actress -- are provided with a measure of redemption. And then there are the suicides, Henry and Ann. It's revealed that their lot is to serve aboard these postmortem ships for eternity, like the steward Scrubby, who had killed himself. Since condoning suicide was taboo, especially under the Catholic-administered Production Code, the script has to provide an out for the attractive, repentant couple, and it does. There's a lot of stiff acting in the movie -- Garfield's is the only really naturalistic performance -- and the dialogue is full of heavy-handed exposition speeches. The capitalist and the socialite never rise above caricature, and there's a sentimental tribute to mother love. This is the first of only three films directed by Edward A. Blatt, and it's easy to see why there weren't more. 

The Rocket From Calabuch (Luis García Berlanga, 1956)

Valentina Cortese and Edmund Gwenn in The Rocket From Calabuch

Cast: Edmund Gwenn, Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese, Juan Calvo, José Isbert, Félix Fernández. Screenplay: Leonardo Martín, Florentino Soria, Ennio Flaiano, Luis García Berlanga. Cinematography: Francisco Sempere. Film editing: Pepita Orduna. Music: Guido Guerrini, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.

In his last film role, Edmund Gwenn plays an atomic scientist who hides out in a small Spanish town, fleeing the demands made on him by the American military. But his cover gets blown when he helps the villagers in their annual fireworks competition with another town. It's the usual droll, loving comedy from one of its masters, Luis García Berlanga.

The Skin Game (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)

Phyllis Konstam and Edward Chapman in The Skin Game

Mr. Hillcrist: C.V. France
Mrs. Hillcrist: Helen Haye
Jill Hillcrist: Jill Esmond
Mr. Hornblower: Edmund Gwenn
Charles Hornblower: John Longden
Chloe Hornblower: Phyllis Konstam
Rolf Hornblower: Frank Lawton
Dawker: Edward Chapman
Mr. Jackman: Herbert Ross
Mrs. Jackman: Dora Gregory
Auctioneer: Ronald Frankau

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville
Based on a play by John Galsworthy
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

Despite winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, John Galsworthy is one of those authors nobody reads much anymore, partly because his reputation was eclipsed by the great modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf whom the Nobel committee overlooked. His series of novels that constitutes The Forsyte Saga came back in vogue for a while in 1967 and again in 2002 when they were adapted for British television, playing on that nostalgia for the good old days of the British class system that more recently made a hit of Downton Abbey. Class, especially the conflict of the landed aristocracy and the new-monied bourgeoisie, was his big theme, and he explored it not only in his novels but also in plays like The Skin Game, which was first performed in 1920 and immediately snapped up for a silent film adaptation. Hitchcock apparently saw the play and liked the idea of turning it into a talkie, wrote the screenplay with his wife, Alma, and even cast Edmund Gwenn and Helen Haye in the roles they had played in the silent film. The problem is that Galsworthy forbade any deviation from the original plot and dialogue, leaving Hitchcock for the most part stagebound. There's occasionally some interesting camerawork, especially in the auction scene in which swish pans are used to build suspense during the competitive bidding over the property that the old-money Hillcrist wants to keep out of the hands of the self-made industrialist Hornblower. But too often Hitchcock reverts to stage tableaus -- some of them badly blocked -- that show off the melodramatic hamming of some of the actors, as well as some stilted dialogue carried over from the play. There's a long take in which Chloe Hornblower confronts Hillcrist's scheming agent, Dawker, that particularly exposes Phyllis Konstam's mannered acting. The plot hinges on Chloe's dark secret, which seems much ado about nothing today: that she once worked as a professional co-respondent in divorce cases before marrying Hornblower's son, Charles. But Hitchcock retains Galsworthy's ambivalence about his characters, making neither Hillcrist not Hornblower purely admirable or villainous. We dislike Hornblower for his callous treatment of some old tenants of Hillcrist's after he buys property from the squire and for his willingness to despoil the land with his factories, but we also have to condemn Hillcrist's snobbery and his readiness to drag Chloe Hornblower's name through the mud. As he often did, Galsworthy put his faith in the younger generation, Hornblower's son Rolf and Hillcrist's daughter, Jill, who seem fated to bring both houses together, but Hitchcock doesn't quite give these characters room enough in the film version to make that point. He later told François Truffaut that he "didn't make [The Skin Game] by choice, and there isn't much to be said about it," but as so often, Hitchcock was fiddling with the truth. It's not one of his better films, hindered as he was by Galsworthy's restrictions, but there's some meat on it.

The Trouble With Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Jerry Mathers in The Trouble With Harry

Sam Marlowe: John Forsythe
Jennifer Rogers: Shirley MacLaine
Capt. Albert Wiles: Edmund Gwenn
Miss Ivy Gravely: Mildred Natwick
Mrs. Wiggs: Mildred Dunnock
Arnie Rogers: Jerry Mathers
Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs: Royal Dano
The Millionaire: Parker Fennelly
Dr. Greenbow: Dwight Marfield
The Tramp: Barry Macollum
Harry Worp: Philip Truex

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: John Michael Hayes
Based on a novel by Jack Trevor Story
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Music: Bernard Herrmann

The Trouble With Harry, which many people remember as "the one in which Beaver Cleaver finds a corpse," needs to be thought of in connection with Alfred Hitchcock's other films about small towns, such as Santa Rosa in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Bodega Bay in The Birds (1963). Like the Vermont village of The Trouble With Harry, these are places where anomalous events, like the return of a native son turned serial killer or a disruption in the natural order or just a mysterious dead body, can be viewed through a privileged, if somewhat cracked, lens. Cities can take serial killers, birds behaving badly, and the occasional unidentified corpse in stride, but they're a big deal in small towns. For an urbanite like Hitchcock, the small town settings are themselves anomalous, which is why he treats them to varying degrees with condescending whimsy. Of those films, The Trouble With Harry is the most whimsical, which may have something to do with its source novel, which was set in one of those cozy English villages so beloved of mystery readers. There are some who think Hitchcock should have left it in that setting, but I don't think much harm was done by the change. For one thing, it gives us a chance to look at New England fall foliage unblocked by tour buses full of leaf-peepers. Even though it was hindered by an unexpected storm that caused many of the leaves to fall prematurely, Robert Burks's achingly lovely cinematography combines well with Bernard Herrmann's score -- his first for Hitchcock -- to meld whimsy with an autumnal wistfulness. It helps, too, that we have actors skilled at sprinkling a little salt and vinegar on the whimsy, particularly Edmund Gwenn and the two great Mildreds, Natwick and Dunnock. Shirley MacLaine's debut film went a long way toward establishing her as a specialist in quirky, but it would take a more charismatic actor than John Forsythe to bring off his role: With his disregard for convention and monetary reward, Sam Marlowe seems to have wandered in from a Frank Capra film like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), which needed Gary Cooper -- though James Stewart could have handled it equally well -- to pull it off. I think in the end, your reaction to The Trouble With Harry mostly depends on your tolerance for twee, and if it's low you may not want to stay much past the opening credits designed by Saul Steinberg.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor, 1935)

Edmund Gwenn, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Natalie Paley, and Brian Aherne in Sylvia Scarlett

Sylvia Scarlett: Katharine Hepburn
Jimmy Monkley: Cary Grant
Michael Fane: Brian Aherne
Henry Scarlett: Edmund Gwenn
Maudie Tilt: Dennie Moore
Lily Levetsky: Natalie Paley

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Gladys Unger, John Collier, Mortimer Offner
Based on a novel by Compton MacKenzie
Cinematography: Joseph H. August
Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Sturges Carne
Film editing: Jane Loring
Music: Roy Webb

Bear with me while I try to remember the plot of Sylvia Scarlett because I'm not entirely sure that I didn't fall asleep and dream it: When the wife of an Englishman living in France dies, he decides to return to England with his daughter. But because he is suspected of having embezzled money from the company for which he is an accountant, he and his daughter decide that she will disguise herself as a boy because the authorities will be looking for a man traveling with a girl. So on the boat crossing the Channel, they meet a cheerful Cockney con-man, to whom the other Englishman confesses that he's smuggling a bolt of fine lace through customs. But when they arrive in England, the Cockney points them out to the officials and the Englishman and his daughter-disguised-as-a-boy are detained and fined and the lace is confiscated. Then on the train to London, they coincidentally find themselves in the same compartment as the Cockney, who not only repays the fine but even gives the Englishman a little extra money, while also revealing that he's a smuggler with diamonds concealed in the heel of his shoe, and that he turned them in to divert attention from himself. All is square, except that now the Cockney proposes that they team up and run a few cons together. They're not very good at it, so when the Cockney reads an article saying that a rich couple are taking an extended holiday out of the country, he decides that they should rob the deserted house. The plan is thwarted by the maid the couple has left behind, so they persuade her to go on the road with them as traveling entertainers. They hire a wagon and go to Cornwall and give a show that attracts the attention of a rich young artist and his Russian girlfriend. The artist tells the son/daughter that he wants to paint him/her, but he/she swipes a dress and a hat that were left behind on the beach by a woman who has gone swimming and shows up at his studio as a woman, but the Russian girlfriend is outraged to find her there. Meanwhile, the Englishman has taken to drink and fallen in love with the maid and one night wanders out drunkenly in the fog and falls to his death from a cliff. After his funeral, the daughter and the Cockney return to their wagon (the maid has somehow disappeared for good), but they hear a cry for help from the Russian, who has apparently attempted suicide because the artist doesn't love her anymore, so the daughter plunges into the ocean and rescues her, returning her to the artist. Then the Cockney and the Russian decide to run away together, so the daughter and the artist pursue them, winding up on a train and somehow realizing that they're in love with each other. Now, to the point: Why in hell did anyone ever think this made enough sense to film? Or that the completed film would please critics and attract audiences? (It didn't.) And why is this not on the usual lists of the worst films ever made? Because the truth is, it's not unwatchable, and sometimes, if you're in the mood for the utterly bizarre, it's sort of fun to watch, mainly because the Cockney is played by Cary Grant and the son-daughter by Katharine Hepburn, in their first on-screen teaming.* And perhaps because Edmund Gwenn as the Englishman is as charming as ever. And also perhaps because George Cukor is one of the few directors of the period who could leaven this lump of Edwardian nonsense: It's based on a novel by Compton MacKenzie, a now-forgotten writer with a taste for whimsy and a tolerance for sexual ambiguity. The screenplay was mostly written by John Collier, another writer with a decidedly eccentric view of the world, with the help of Gladys Unger and Mortimer Offner. Naturally, the Production Code weighs heavily on the ambiguous sexuality of the film, though we are never really quite sure whether the artist played by Brian Aherne is more attracted to Sylvia than to Sylvester. (Hepburn is quite beautiful as either.) But mostly the film gives us a chance to see Grant before Archibald Leach, the product of a troubled working-class family, became "Cary Grant," the embodiment of sophistication: There's a darkly threatening sexuality to his character, Jimmy Monkley, that's compelling and makes us wonder why Hepburn's Sylvia should prefer Aherne's much softer Michael Fane. Sylvia Scarlett has a cult following today that it doesn't entirely deserve, but it remains a fascinatingly mad mess.

*They went on to make two more films for George Cukor, Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), but their most memorable work together was for Howard Hawks on Bringing Up Baby (1938).

Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Foreign Correspondent was made by people walking on eggs as they worked their way through a minefield. It displays Alfred Hitchcock's gift for witty surprises and edgy suspense, but it was made at a peculiar moment in history: Britain had gone to war against Hitler, but the United States was officially neutral -- thanks to a series of Neutrality Acts forced through Congress by isolationists. Moreover, Hitchcock himself had left his native country, signing a contract with David O. Selznick shortly before the war began in Europe.* So making a film about espionage and the outbreak of war in Europe that stuck to the American party line was tricky business, especially if your director was an Englishman. The surprise is that Foreign Correspondent turned out as well as it did. The plotting is fairly ramshackle, which is not surprising, considering the number of hands that were put to it: The screenplay is credited to Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, but there's also a dialogue credit for James Hilton and Robert Benchley, and it's well known that lots of others, including the ubiquitous script-doctoring Ben Hecht, were involved. The romantic subplot involving the titular foreign correspondent Johnny Jones aka Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) and peace activist Carol Fisher (Laraine Day), whose father (Herbert Marshall) turns out to be the villain, is particularly flimsy, but even the central espionage plot, involving an especially obscure MacGuffin, doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. And yet Foreign Correspondent zips along because Hitchcock's direction distracts us from the niggling inconsistencies. If we ever start to wonder if things make sense, there's a new gag -- a chase through a crowd of umbrellas, a windmill whose blades are turning backward,  a new threat on the hero's life, a spectacular plane crash at sea -- to distract us. Or there's a bit of witty casting: Edmund Gwenn, who also played Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard) in 1940 and later became one of the more beloved embodiments of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947), here plays a murderous Cockney, and the usually villainous George Sanders is the stalwart if cynical good guy named Scott ffolliott, complete with funny story about why his surname is spelled without a capital letter. So much is going on in Foreign Correspondent, in short, that thinking too closely about its plausibility feels irrelevant. Despite the pressures to keep the film's message neutral, at its end there's a sense that even isolationist America is about to yield to reality, with a stirring speech, written by Hecht, urging the United States to "keep the lights burning." Foreign Correspondent received a best picture Oscar nomination but lost to Hitchcock's other film of the year, Rebecca.

*Hitchcock's American stay was much criticized in Britain, although he didn't become a citizen of the United States until 1955. His absence from Britain, especially during the war, may be one reason why, even though he retained dual citizenship, he was not knighted by Queen Elizabeth II until the year of his death, 1980. In 1943 and early 1944, partly in response to the criticism, he went to Britain to make two short propaganda films for the British Ministry of Information. Both of them, Aventure Malgache and Bon Voyage, were in French and were designed to be shown to the Free French forces as morale boosters for the Resistance, although whether they were actually released as such is unclear. After the war they disappeared into the British National Archives and were not rediscovered until the 1990s, when Hitchcock scholars retrieved them for public showing and video release. The story of Aventure Malgache is framed by a group of actors putting on their makeup. One of them remarks on how much another of the group resembles a Vichy official he knew when he was in the Resistance on Madagascar. The official had the actor imprisoned, but after the Vichy government was ousted by the Battle of Madagascar in 1942, the official hid his portrait of Pétain, hung a portrait of Queen Victoria, and stuck his bottle of Vichy water in a cabinet -- perhaps an echo of Claude Rains's dropping the Vichy bottle in a wastebasket in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Bon Voyage is a more complex narrative about an RAF pilot who is shot down in France and is aided in his return to Britain by the Resistance -- or so he thinks. When he reaches London he learns that the supposed Resistance man was actually a German counter-spy using him to unmask real members of the Resistance. Neither film is first-rate, though both, especially the unreliable narrative of Bon Voyage, show the sure-handedness of an experienced director.