Idiot's Delight (Clarence Brown, 1939)

Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in Idiot's Delight

Cast: Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn, Joseph Schildkraut, Burgess Meredith, Laura Hope Crews, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Peter Willes, Pat Paterson, William Edmunds, Fritz Feld. Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, based on his play. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Herbert Stothart.

To make a critic's obvious joke, Idiot's Delight is sometimes idiotic and rarely delightful. It's mostly a rather ill-advised filming of Robert E. Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 play about a world on the brink of war. The world was even further out on that brink by the time the film was made, and two distinct endings were shot. One, for U.S. audiences, is conventionally neutral (as the United States was at the time) about whether a world war was about to happen. The other, to be shown abroad, takes a more pessimistic view. But the whole film is riddled with a confusion of tone. This is the movie in which Clark Gable, playing a vaudevillian, sings and dances to Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" and is carried offstage by a group of chorus girls -- a sequence revived by its inclusion in the 1974 celebration of MGM musical numbers, That's Entertainment. Gable is game throughout the film, especially when he has to play opposite Norma Shearer at her most arch. The original Broadway version starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Gable and Shearer are not the Lunts.

The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941)

Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster

Cast: Walter Huston, Edward Arnold, James Craig, Anne Shirley, Jane Darwell, Simone Simon, Gene Lockhart, John Qualen, H.B. Warner, Frank Conland, Lindy Wade, George Cleveland. Screenplay: Dan Totheroh, based on a story by Stephen Vincent Benet. Cinematography: Joseph H. August. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Alfred Herman. Film editing: Robert Wise. Music: Bernard Herrmann.

With its historical figures and rural setting The Devil and Daniel Webster could have sunk into sentimental Americana, but it stays just shy of that with the help of a good screenplay, solid direction, and most of all some fine performances, particularly Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch and Edward Arnold as Webster, a turn away from Arnold's usual fat-cat persona. (Arnold was a replacement for Thomas Mitchell, injured in an on-set accident just after filming started.) Bernard Herrmann's Oscar-winning score, giving a sophisticated twist to old folk tunes like "Pop Goes the Weasel," and Joseph H. August's moody cinematography also help. James Craig gives a solid performance as Jabez Stone, the victim of Scratch's soul-buying, especially in his scenes with Simone Simon as the little devil Belle sent to tempt him. 

The Barbarian (Sam Wood, 1933)

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Myrna Loy, Reginald Denny, Louise Closser Hale, C. Aubrey Smith, Edward Arnold, Blanche Friderici, Marcel Corday, Hedda Hopper, Leni Stengel. Screenplay: Anita Loos, Elmer Harris, based on a story by Edgar Selwyn. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Tom Held. Music: Herbert Stothart.

Orientalist fiddle-faddle with Ramon Novarro as an Egyptian prince disguised as a translator and tour director wooing a wealthy American tourist played by Myrna Loy. Novarro is dashing and handsome, but not quite a match for Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (George Melford, 1921), the classic film in this dubious genre. Loy is still emerging from her "exotic" phase, playing the sultry woman of the world -- she's supposedly half Egyptian on her mother's side.

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.

Come and Get It (Howard Hawks, William Wyler, 1936)

Frances Farmer and Walter Brennan in Come and Get It

Barney Glasgow: Edward Arnold
Lotta Morgan / Lotta Bostrom: Frances Farmer
Swan Bostrom: Walter Brennan
Richard Glasgow: Joel McCrea
Karie: Mady Christians
Emma Louise Glasgow: Mary Nash
Evvie Glasgow: Andrea Leeds
Tony Schwerke: Frank Shields
Josie: Cecil Cunningham

Director: Howard Hawks, William Wyler
Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Jules Furthman
Based on a novel by Edna Ferber
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté, Gregg Toland
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Edward Curtiss
Music: Alfred Newman

William Wyler had just finished Dodsworth (1936) when the producer to whom he was under contract, Samuel Goldwyn, called on him to finish Come and Get It, which had been started under the direction of Howard Hawks. Goldwyn was unhappy with the way Hawks had treated Edna Ferber's novel Come and Get It, so he fired him. Goldwyn, a man of little education, was impressed with writers of big reputations, and liked to think of his movies as prestige items. Ferber was a big bestselling author of the day, best-known for multigenerational historical novels with colorful settings like the Mississippi riverboats of Show Boat and the Oklahoma land rush of Cimarron. The former had become a celebrated musical that had been filmed twice, first as a part-talkie by Harry A. Pollard in 1929 and then by James Whale in 1935, though it was not released until 1936. Cimarron had been made into a best-picture Oscar winner by Wesley Ruggles in 1931, so Goldwyn had been eager to cash in on the novelist's celebrity. He hired Hawks as director because the raucous frontier section of Ferber's novel reminded him of the director's Barbary Coast (1935), but when Goldwyn was sidelined by illness, Hawks jettisoned much of Jane Murfin's Ferber-approved screenplay and brought in one of his frequent collaborators, Jules Furthman, to rewrite and to build up the part of Walter Brennan's Swan Bostrom. Hawks shifted the focus away from Ferber's novel, much of which was about the exploitation of the land by timber interests, and built up the relationship between Bostrom and the protagonist, the ambitious lumberman Barney Glasgow. He also replaced Goldwyn's original choice for Lotta, Miriam Hopkins, with an actress he had discovered, Frances Farmer. Wyler was reluctant to take over from Hawks, and not only resisted Goldwyn's plan to give him sole billing as director but also insisted that Hawks receive top billing as co-director. In any case, Come and Get It turned into a rather curious mess, not least because Hawks was a notoriously freewheeling director with an intensely personal style whereas Wyler was a consummate perfectionist who seldom let his personality show through his work. Although there's some Hawksian energy to the film, it feels like it has been held in check. Moreover, the central character, Barney Glasgow, has been miscast. Goldwyn wanted Spencer Tracy for the part, knowing that Tracy could play both the romantic lead and the driven businessman that the part called for. But when Tracy couldn't get out of his contract with MGM, Goldwyn settled for one of his own contract players, Edward Arnold, a rather squat, rotund character actor with none of Tracy's sex appeal. The best thing about the film is that it gives us a chance to see Farmer before her career was derailed by mental illness. She sharply delineates the two Lottas, mother and daughter, playing the former with a kind of masculine toughness and the latter with a defensive sweetness. As the mother, she growls out the song "Aura Lee" in a Marlene Dietrich baritone, but later as the daughter she sings it in a light soprano. She also sometimes looks strikingly like the actress who played her in the biopic Frances (Graeme Clifford, 1982), Jessica Lange. The other impressive moments in the film are provided by the logging sequences directed by Richard Rosson and filmed by Rudolph Maté. Brennan won the first of his three Oscars for his "yumpin' Yiminy" Swedish-accented character.

You Can't Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938)

Halliwell Hobbes, Spring Byington, Dub Taylor, Ann Miller, and Mischa Auer in You Can't Take It With You

Alice Sycamore: Jean Arthur
Martin Vanderhof: Lionel Barrymore
Tony Kirby: James Stewart
Anthony P. Kirby: Edward Arnold
Kolenkhov: Mischa Auer
Essie Carmichael: Ann Miller
Penny Sycamore: Spring Byington '
Paul Sycamore: Samuel S. Hinds
Poppins: Donald Meek
Ramsey: H.B. Warner
DePinna: Halliwell Hobbes
Ed Carmichael: Dub Taylor
Mrs. Kirby: Mary Forbes
Rheba: Lillian Yarbo
Donald: Eddie Anderson
Charles Lane: Henderson
Judge: Harry Davenport

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick

"Opening up" a stage play when it's adapted for the movies is standard practice, and even a necessary one when the play takes place on a single set the way George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take It With You does. But director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin have done more than open up the play, they have eviscerated it, scooping out much of its wisecracking satire on bourgeois conformity and red-scare jitters to replace them with Capra's characteristic sentimental populism, some high-minded speeches about Americanism, and a rather mushy romance. It unaccountably won the best picture Oscar and Capra's third directing award, in a year when the nominees included Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion. Capra and Riskin load on a kind of superplot: an attempt by the villain, Anthony P. Kirby, to corner the munitions market by buying up the property surrounding his rival's factory. The property includes the home of Grandpa Vanderhof and his family of Sycamores and Carmichaels, along with some others who turned up there at one time or another and just stayed on to pursue their various eccentric pastimes, which include making fireworks in the cellar. The goings-on in the household are enough to sustain the play, especially when Alice Sycamore brings home her boyfriend, Tony Kirby, and he invites his stuffy parents to come to dinner. (As in their play The Man Who Came to Dinner, the Kaufman-Hart formula punctures bourgeois stuffiness by putting the squares and the nonconformists into confining circumstances with one another.) The film puts more emphasis on the romance of Alice and Tony with scenes in which they are taught by a group of kids to dance the Big Apple and go to a high-toned restaurant where Alice is introduced to the Kirbys, resulting in some not very funny slapstick. Eventually, the Kirbys and the Vanderhof household wind up in jail and night court, where Capra musters his usual sentimental tribute to the people: As in Capra's 1934 Oscar-winner, It Happened One Night, in which a busload of the common folk join in singing "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," the inmates sharing the cell with Grandpa Vanderhof as well as the Kirbys père et fils join in a chorus or two of "Polly Wolly Doodle." (A cut to the other occupants of the cell reveals a throng of fresh-faced working men, not the thugs and drunks you'd expect to find.) And in the courtroom scene, Grandpa's neighbors gather to pay his fine, with even the judge tossing some money into the hat. All ends well, of course: Mr. Kirby decides not to buy the Vanderhof house after his defeated rival suffers a fatal heart attack. (The rival, Ramsey, is played by H.B. Warner, who as Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings saved all of mankind with his death; here his death just saves Anthony P. Kirby's soul.) Kirby undergoes a wholly unconvincing change of heart, and we end with all of the Kirbys, Sycamores, Carmichaels, and hangers-on at the dinner table where Grandpa delivers a prayer of thanks. Capra never got cornier than this.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)

James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Jefferson Smith: James Stewart
Clarissa Saunders: Jean Arthur
Sen. Joseph Paine: Claude Rains
Jim Taylor: Edward Arnold
Gov. Hopper: Guy Kibbee
Diz Moore: Thomas Mitchell
Chick McGann: Eugene Pallette
Ma Smith: Beulah Bondi
Senate Majority Leader: H.B. Warner
President of the Senate: Harry Carey
Susan Paine: Astrid Allwyn
Mrs. Hopper: Ruth Donnelly
Sen. MacPherson: Grant Mitchell
Sen. Monroe: Porter Hall
Himself: H.V. Kaltenborn
Nosey: Charles Lane
Bill Griffith: William Demarest
Sweeney Farrell: Jack Carson

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Sidney Buchman
Based on a story by Lewis R. Foster
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Lionel Banks
Film editing: Al Clark, Gene Havlick
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Perhaps only James Stewart (or Gary Cooper, who turned down the role of Jefferson Smith) could have made Frank Capra's preposterous, sentimental, flag-wavingly patriotic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington into what many people still regard as a beloved classic. But now that we've spent some time being governed by probably the most corrupt man ever to hold the White House, a president elected on populist promises to "drain the swamp" in Washington but who instead has spent his time wallowing in it and stocking it with still more alligators, maybe we can take a harsher look at the Capra film's politics. The people who elected Donald Trump seem to have thought they were voting for Jefferson Smith but instead elected the movie's Jim Taylor (played deliciously by that fattest of character actor fat cats, Edward Arnold). David Thomson, among others, has cogently observed that the film celebrates Jefferson Smith's bull-headed integrity, but that democracy necessarily involves the kind of compromises that Claude Rains's Senator Paine has made, and which have made him a popular and successful politician. True, he's under the thumb of the viciously corrupt Jim Taylor, who is even a manipulator of "fake news," but Thomson questions whether the people of Smith's state wouldn't have benefited more from the dam Taylor wants to put on Willett Creek, presumably one that would supply power and other benefits to the state, than from Smith's piddly boys' camp, which would benefit at best a few hundred boys. (No girls need apply?) Smith's dramatic filibuster also seems to be holding up a bill that would provide funding for some essential services. As it happens, I rewatched Mr. Smith on the night after the Senate reached an impasse on funding the entire federal government, and there could hardly be a better example of political stubbornness undermining the public good. Which is only to say that the merits of Capra's film -- and there are some -- transcend its simple-minded fable. Among its merits, it's beautifully acted, not only by Stewart, Rains, and Arnold, but also by Jean Arthur, that most underrated of 1930s leading ladies, and Thomas Mitchell, who appeared in no fewer than three of the films nominated for the best picture Oscar for 1939 -- this one, Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming), and Stagecoach (John Ford) -- and won the supporting actor award for Stagecoach. And just run down the rest of the cast list, which seems to be a roster of every great character actor in the movies of that day, all of them performing with great energy. Capra's mise-en-scène is sometimes stagy, but Lionel Banks's great re-creation of the Senate chamber gives Capra a fine stage on which to work.

Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, 1937)

Easy Living is one of my favorite screwball comedies, but I once had a nightmare that took place in the set designed by Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté for the film. It was the luxury suite in the Hotel Louis, with its amazingly improbable bathtub/fountain, and I dreamed that we had just bought a place that looked like it and were moving in. I don't remember much else, other than that I was terribly anxious about how we were going to pay for it. Most of my dreams are anxiety dreams, I think, which may be why I love screwball comedies so much: They take our anxieties about money and love and work, like Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) worrying about how she's going to pay the rent and even eat now that she's lost her job, and transform them into dilemmas with comic resolutions. Too bad life isn't like that, we say, but with maybe a kind of glimmer of hope that it will turn out that way after all. Easy Living, with its screenplay by Preston Sturges, is one of the funniest screwball comedies, but it's also, under Mitchell Leisen's direction, one of the most hilarious slapstick comedies. How can you not love a film in which a Wall Street fat cat (Edward Arnold) falls downstairs? Or the celebrated scene in which the little doors in the Automat go haywire, producing food-fight chaos that builds and builds? The fall of the fat cat and the rush on the Automat reveal that Easy Living was a product of the Depression, anxiety made pervasive and world-wide, when we needed hope in the form of comic nonsense to keep us going. This is also an essential film for those of us who love Preston Sturges's movies, for although he didn't direct it, his hand is evident throughout, not only in the dialogue but also in the casting, with character actors who would later form part of Sturges's stock company, Franklin Pangborn, William Demarest, and Robert Greig among them. Ray Milland displays a Cary Grant-like glint of amusement at what's going on, Luis Alberni spouts Sturges's wonderful malapropisms as the hotel owner Louis Louis, and Mary Nash brings the right amount of indignation and humor to her role as Arnold's wife. I only wonder why Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin weren't credited for their title song, which is heard (though without its lyrics), as background music throughout the film.

Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941)

Walter Brennan, Gary Cooper, Irving Bacon, Barbara Stanwyck, and James Gleason in Meet John Doe

John Doe: Gary Cooper
Ann Mitchell: Barbara Stanwyck
D.B. Norton: Edward Arnold
The "Colonel": Walter Brennan
Mrs. Mitchell: Spring Byington
Henry Connell: James Gleason
Mayor Lovett: Gene Lockhart
Ted Sheldon: Rod LaRocque
Beany: Irving Bacon
Bert: Regis Toomey

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a story by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell Sr.
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Meet John Doe opens with reporters and editors at a newspaper being fired because the owner wants it to be, as the paper's new slogan says, "streamlined ... for a streamlined age." And the plot involves a very wealthy man who uses a phony populist approach to try to get himself elected president. Who says a 74-year-old movie isn't relevant today? But the movie eventually falls apart because Frank Capra can't get his story to make sense. I never watch a Capra film without wanting to throw something at the screen, and that includes the beloved It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which makes me faintly nauseated. Meet John Doe has a few wonderful things going for it, principally the opportunity to see Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper at their starry prime. (Though they were much better in a movie they made together in the same year, Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire.) Experience tells, and by 1941 Stanwyck had been making movies for more than a decade, and Cooper had been in films since the mid-1920s. They had the kind of easy, spontaneous, natural manner on screen that could steady even the most wobbly vehicle. Meet John Doe starts to wobble about halfway through, when it becomes apparent that there is no easy way Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin can resolve the director's muddled populist sentiments: Capra always wants to celebrate the "common man" in his movies, but it was clear to anyone on the brink of the entry of the United States into World War II that the common man was a dangerous force to work with. So what we have in the film is an odd mix of sentimentality and cynicism. Stanwyck's character, Ann Mitchell, starts as a cynic, concocting a sob story about a "John Doe" who threatens to commit suicide because he's fed up with a corrupt society. She does it to save her job at the newspaper, and the equally cynical managing editor Henry Connell decides to run with it. That's when they find a homeless man (Cooper) to pretend to be the real John Doe. When he turns out to be an inspiration to the "common man" of Capra's fantasies, bringing about peace and harmony across the land, the sentimentality takes over, converting Ann and Connell, but also playing into the hands of the paper's owner, D.B. Norton, who tries to use John Doe's followers for political gain. And when John Doe is exposed as a fake, the adoring millions suddenly turn into a raging mob. If Capra weren't so invested in making things turn out all right, he could have created a powerful satire, but he couldn't find an ending to the film that would satisfy both his Hollywood-nurtured sentimentality and the logic of the plot.

Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Berthelet, 1916)

It's easy to see why William Gillette was such a success on stage as Sherlock Holmes: He has the calm centeredness that the best Sherlocks possess. I'm thinking of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett here; even though I like Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in their versions, the contemporary setting makes them more active and volatile, not to say eccentric, than the traditional Victorian Holmeses. But Conan Doyle's character was not, I think, a good fit for silent film: I missed the detective's ingenious deductions that provide so much of the wit in Conan Doyle's tales and don't fit neatly onto title cards. The plot, cobbled together from several stories, is also both needlessly complex and tiresomely chopped up into discrete "acts." Apparently the surviving version of the film is a conversion of the American original into a French four-part serial. Gillette and Edward Fielding as Dr. Watson (here limited for the most part to the fourth segment) seem to have an awareness that less is more when it comes to film acting, but most of the company is made up of scenery-chewers, particularly Mario Majeroni and Grace Reals as the villainous Larrabees. Ernest Maupain isn't a terribly convincing Emperor of Crime as Moriarty, considering that his chief function is to bluster about bumping off Holmes, in which he is repeatedly thwarted, and his henchmen (one of whom is reportedly the later-to-be-famous character actor Edward Arnold) do a lot of ludicrous skulking and crouching. Still, it's a valuable record of Gillette's famous role and really not an unwatchable movie.