Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935)

Claire Trevor and Edmund Lowe in Black Sheep

Cast: Edmund Lowe, Claire Trevor, Tom Brown, Eugene Pallette, Adrienne Ames, Herbert Mundin, Ford Sterling, Jed Prouty, Billy Bevan, David Torrence. Screenplay: Allen Rivkin, Allan Dwan. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Alex Troffey. Music: Oscar Levant. 

Is it because it stars Edmund Lowe and Claire Trevor, and not, say, William Powell and Carole Lombard, that I had never seen Black Sheep before? Because Lowe, a second-string leading man at best, is perfectly fine as the suave but penniless gambler trying to recoup his fortunes on a ship sailing back to the States. And Trevor is delightful as the similarly broke actress going home after failing to make it big on the stage in Europe. Trevor, in fact, is something of a revelation: She's now best known for playing hard-bitten dames like Dallas, who was run out of town by the respectable ladies and put onto the titular vehicle of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). And she won an Oscar as the gangster's moll Gaye Dawn in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948). Who knew she had the gift for comedy that she shows in Black Sheep? And it's mostly a comedy, with a melodramatic twist provided by Allan Dwan, who wrote the story for which Allen Rivkin provided some lively dialogue. Lowe's John Francis Dugan and Trevor's Janette Foster team up to save the naïve young Fred Curtis (Tom Brown) from being fleeced by the card sharps Belcher (Eugene Pallette) and Schmelling (Jed Prouty) and by the slinky Millicent Bath (Adrienne Ames). Young Curtis, from a proper Bostonian family, owes Mrs. Bath a large sum, which she uses to blackmail him into helping her smuggle into the States a valuable pearl necklace that she has stolen. It's the usual shipboard intrigue plot we've seen before, played for comedy. But Dwan gives it a turn toward melodrama when Dugan discovers that the young man he's protecting is his own son. (Dwan seems to have borrowed this device from his own movie, East Side, West Side (1927), which likewise involves a father being separated from his son by a snooty family.) But it's mostly a comedy with some sharp repartee and a gallery of supporting actors like Pallette and Prouty, Herbert Mundin as a man in top hat and tails who's so drunk he doesn't know where he is or even who he is, and Ford Sterling as Mather, the shipboard detective who's Dugan's nemesis. There's also a sappy song, "In Other Words, I'm in Love," with lyrics by Sidney Clare and music by Oscar Levant, sung sappily by Dick Webster, which doesn't bear mentioning except that Levant's Gershwinesque music also serves as the film's score. 

Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express

Shanghai Lily: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Donald Harvey: Clive Brook
Hui Fei: Anna May Wong
Henry Chang: Warner Oland
Sam Salt: Eugene Pallette
Carmichael: Lawrence Grant
Mrs. Haggerty: Louise Closser Hale
Eric Baum: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Maj. Lenard: Emile Chautard

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Based on a story by Harry Hervey
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Music: W. Franke Harling

There's something claustrophobic about Shanghai Express: Its characters are always enclosed -- in train cabins, in interrogation rooms, even in crowds of other people. Even the titular train gets itself into a tight spot, navigating the narrow passage through the streets of what the film calls "Peking." Which makes it all the better for Lee Garmes's camera, tasked as it is with making the most of Marlene Dietrich's face. Garmes (with director Josef von Sternberg looking over his shoulder) always finds ways to frame that face with veils and feathers and furs, with the actress's own hands, with misted windows, and when nothing else will do, a simple shaft of light caressing those eyelids, cheekbones, and lips. Fortunately, the movie is more than glamorous poses: There's a good deal of snappy dialogue and some wily character acting from the likes of Eugene Pallette, Louise Closser Hale, and -- in a role that seems to have been a kind of audition for his most famous one, Charlie Chan -- Warner Oland. I only wish that a leading man more attractive, or less plummily British, than Clive Brook had been provided for Dietrich. The story is nonsense, of course, and it verges dangerously on colonialist poppycock in its treatment of the Chinese, though even there it pulls back somewhat by turning Anna May Wong's Hui Fei from a stereotypical dragon lady into a genuinely heroic figure. It must also be said that Shanghai Express was made at the right time: A couple of years later, the sexual adventurism of its women would have been taboo under the Production Code and Hui Fei would have been made to pay for murdering her rapist.

Topper (Norman Z. McLeod, 1937)

Roland Young, Cary Grant, and Constance Bennett in Topper

In a golden age for character actors, Roland Young stood out because he put the emphasis on "actor" as much as on "character." If you wanted a character type, such as a prissy fussbudget or an irascible fat man, you went to Franklin Pangborn or Eugene Pallette, but if you wanted depth and versatility, you went to Young, whose range extended from the fawning, vicious Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935) to the slyly lecherous Uncle Willy in The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940). The role for which he's most remembered, and the one that earned him his only Oscar nomination, was that of the repressed, henpecked husband Cosmo Topper in Topper. It was followed by two sequels, Topper Takes a Trip (Norman Z. McLeod, 1938), and Topper Returns (Roy Del Ruth, 1941). The first film, also directed by McLeod, is the best, partly because it's the only one with Cary Grant as the ghostly George Kerby, who with his (also ghostly) wife, Marion (Constance Bennett), haunts Topper out of his stuffy funk. The Kerbys, a wealthy, fun-loving couple, have died in an automobile accident and, finding themselves in a kind of limbo, decide that they must redeem themselves with a good deed. They hit upon the idea of cheering up the morose Topper, president of the bank on whose board George serves. The characters come from a pair of novels by Thorne Smith, a now mostly forgotten author of comic novels that in their day, the 1920s and early '30s, were thought to be quite risqué. As a kid, after seeing the Topper movies and the 1950s TV series based on them, I went to the library in search of the books and was told quite firmly that they were not suitable for young people. Whatever bawdiness may have been in the source has been edited out by the Production Code, although there are some glimpses of it still in the scenes in which Topper, at odds with his wife, Clara (Billie Burke), retreats to a hotel and is spied upon by the hotel detective (Pallette in his element), who thinks Topper has a woman in his room after overhearing Marion Kerby talking to him. There is also a bit involving Clara's discovery of a woman's undergarment -- Marion's -- in her husband's possession. Topper is a lightweight farce, but an engaging one, thanks to its cast, which also includes Alan Mowbray as the Toppers' butler. Young stands out not only for his portrayal of the put-upon husband but also for his skill at physical comedy. He gets drunk and hilariously demonstrates his dancing skills to Marion, and then, having passed out, is carried down the hall by the invisible Kerbys -- a brilliant bit in which Young has to walk on tiptoes with arms lifted to suggest their support. Young is his own special effect in a film full of clever ones.

My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936)

I don't know if director Gregory La Cava and screenwriters Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch intentionally set out to subvert the paradigm of the romantic screwball comedy in My Man Godfrey, but they did. It has all the familiar elements of the genre: the "meet-cute," the fallings-in and fallings-out, and the eventual happily-ever-after ending. And it is certainly one of the funniest members of the genre. William Powell is his usual suave and sophisticated self, and nobody except Lucille Ball ever played the beautiful nitwit better than Carole Lombard. But are Godfrey (Powell) and Irene (Lombard) really made for each other? Isn't there something really amiss at the ending, when Irene all but railroads Godfrey into marriage? Knowing that marriage is an inevitability in the genre, I kept wanting Godfrey to pair off with Molly (Jean Dixon), the wisecracking housemaid who conceals her love for him. And even Cornelia (Gail Patrick), the shrew Godfrey has tamed, seems like a better fit in the long run than Irene, with her fake faints and tears. The film gives us no hint that Irene has grown up enough to deserve Godfrey. Or is that asking too much of a film obviously derived from the formula? Perhaps it's just better to take it for what it is, and to enjoy the wonderful performances by Alice Brady, Eugene Pallette, Alan Mowbray, and Mischa Auer, and the always-welcome Franklin Pangborn doing his usual fussy, exasperated bit. A lot could be written, and probably has been, about how the film reflects the slow emergence from the Depression, with its scavenger-hunting socialites looking for a "forgotten man." a figure that only three years earlier, in Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy), had been treated with something like reverence in the production number "Remember My Forgotten Man." Had sensibilities been so hardened over time that the victims of the Depression could be treated so lightly? In any case, My Man Godfrey was a big hit, and was the first movie to have Oscar nominations -- for Powell, Lombard, Auer, and Brady -- in all four acting categories. It was also nominated for director and screenplay, though not for best picture.

Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916)

At the New York Film Festival, Ang Lee recently premiered his new movie, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which he shot in 3D with 4k resolution at 140 frames per second -- the usual frame rate for movies is 24 frames per second. The result is said to be "hyperreal," but almost all the critics who saw it said the technology was a distraction, involving the audiences much more in the visuals than in the story. One critic commented that "the distracting unpleasantness of [Lee's] movie's highly attuned visual clarity makes for an undiscerning and artificial experience the eye just won't follow." Watching the hundred-year-old Intolerance last night, I wondered if viewers of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in 2116 might find such criticisms of its technological innovations as shortsighted as we now do those of audiences who objected to D.W. Griffith's narrative innovations in Intolerance. Griffith told four stories in his film, each set in a different era, and constantly cut between each of them. We're used to that way of finding a unity in multiple stories, having seen it in films as various as Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) and Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), to name a couple of more recent examples, but audiences in 1916 were unready for Griffith's attempt at it, and the hugely ambitious and expensive film was a calamitous flop that the director paid for throughout the rest of his life. To some extent I sympathize with those original audiences: The constant cutting from story to story is often frustrating and annoying, but not so much because of the cutting as because half of the stories are not well-told. The scenes from the life of Jesus are too familiar and too scattershot to develop any dramatic tension, and the part that deals with the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre is muddled by a lack of involvement with the characters. (Each sequence, incidentally, features a performer who would last well into the sound era: Bessie Love, wearing an improbable pointed headdress, plays the bride of Cana, and a surprisingly slim Eugene Pallette plays Prosper, who meets his fate on St. Bartholomew's Day.) The Babylonian sequence and the "modern" story are the two that work the best. The former succeeds because of its wild spectacle, centering on probably the most famous set ever built for a movie. It was perhaps inevitable that the sequence should turn into a series of tableaus, with a cast of thousands striking what seem to us affected poses, but were really based on 19th-century historical genre paintings. (See below.)  Constance Talmadge overdoes the striding about that's meant to suggest the Mountain Girl is a liberated woman, the equal of any man, but she's fun to watch. The modern sequence is the only one with developed and interesting characters, even if some of the acting takes time to get used to. Mae Marsh jumps around goofily to suggest the Dear One's joie de vivre, but when she settles down and starts suffering, she becomes quite touching as the woman whose husband (Robert Harron) is wrongly imprisoned and who loses her baby to well-meaning but puritanical do-gooders. And Miriam Cooper gives the film's best performance -- that is to say, the one that looks most natural to contemporary eyes -- as the Friendless One. Still, the star of the show is Griffith himself, demonstrating his mastery at building suspense with the intertwined conclusions of the French, Babylonian, and modern sequences. We can laugh at the final scene of the heavenly host bringing peace to a war-torn world, but it must have had a different effect on audiences in the midst of World War I.

The Belshazzar's Feast set for Intolerance

Edwin Long, The Babylonian Marriage Market, 1875.

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

Preston Sturges, who was a screenwriter before he became a hyphenated writer-director, has a reputation for verbal wit. It's very much in evidence in The Lady Eve, with lines like "I need him like the ax needs the turkey."  But what distinguishes Sturges from writers who just happen to fall into directing is his gift for pacing the dialogue, for knowing when to cut. What makes the first stateroom scene between Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) and Charles (Henry Fonda) so sexy is that much of it is a single take, relying on the actors' superb timing -- and perhaps on some splendid coaching from Sturges. But he also has a gift for sight gags like Mr. Pike (Eugene Pallette) clanging dish covers like cymbals to demand his breakfast. And his physical comedy is brilliantly timed, particularly in the repeated pratfalls and faceplants that Fonda undergoes when confronted with a Lady Eve who looks so much like Jean. Fonda is a near perfect foil for gags like those, his character's dazzled innocence reinforced by the actor's undeniable good looks. There's hardly any other star of the time who would make Charles Pike quite so credible: Cary Grant, for example, would have turned the pratfalls into acrobatic moves. The other major thing that Sturges had going for him is a gallery of character actors, the likes of which we will unfortunately never see again: Pallette, Charles Coburn, William Demarest (who made exasperation eloquent), Eric Blore, Melville Cooper, and numerous well-chosen bit players.  

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.