Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Busby Berkeley, 1949)

Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Betty Garrett in Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Betty Garrett, Edward Arnold, Jules Munshin, Richard Lane, Tom Dugan. Screenplay: Harry Tugend, George Wells, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Roger Edens, Conrad Salinger, songs by Edens, Betty Comden, Adolph Green.

Energetic almost to the point of frenzy, Take Me Out to the Ball Game had a legendarily troubled production. Although the credited director is Busby Berkeley, he reportedly had some sort of breakdown early in the filming and the direction was taken over by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, who are also credited with coming up with the rather thin story, as well as the choreography. Esther Williams, who later confessed her unhappiness with the shoot, was not the first choice for female lead, but Ginger Rogers turned it down and Judy Garland was deemed too unwell to take on the role of K.C. Higgins, the woman who inherits a baseball team on which Kelly's and Frank Sinatra's characters are star players. Williams doesn't even get her usual water ballet extravaganza, but just a turn in a swimming pool that sets the ogling Kelly and Sinatra characters in pursuit of her. Though Sinatra was in the midst of his early fame as an idol of the bobby-soxers, he wasn't considered handsome or strong enough to be a romantic lead, so he lost Kathryn Grayson to Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945). This time, Kelly's Eddie O'Brien wins K.C., and Sinatra's Dennis Ryan is left with Betty Garrett's character, as the Sinatra character would be in On the Town (Kelly and Donen, 1949). Take Me Out to the Ball Game belongs to the peak MGM Technicolor musical era, and it was produced by the head of the musicals unit, Arthur Freed, but it's a decidedly second-rank movie. Although billed third, after Sinatra and Williams, Kelly takes over, including a long solo number, "The Hat My Dear Old Father Wore Upon St. Patrick's Day," in which he dances jigs and shows off Irish step-dancing moves, as well as borrowing a few of James Cagney's familiar struts and stiff-legged movements. The best Freed Unit musicals can leave you exhilarated, but the clumsy plot, the flat romance (Kelly and Williams have no chemistry), and the mediocre songs of this one are more likely to induce exhaustion.

The Animal Kingdom (Edward H. Griffith, 1932)

Ann Harding, Leslie Howard, and Myrna Loy in The Animal Kingdom

Cast: Leslie Howard, Ann Harding, Myrna Loy, William Gargan, Neil Hamilton, Ilka Chase, Henry Stephenson, Leni Stengel, Don Dillaway. Screenplay: Horace Jackson, based on a play by Philip Barry. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Daniel Mandell. Music: Max Steiner.

The odd, arch, talky The Animal Kingdom is based on one of Philip Barry's plays about rich people yearning to be free, like his Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, film versions of which were directed by George Cukor in 1938 and 1940 respectively. And here the connection among the films gets more intricate, for the director of The Animal Kingdom, Edward H. Griffith, had directed an earlier film version of Holiday in 1930, also starring Ann Harding, with a screenplay by Horace Jackson. And Cukor was an uncredited co-director on The Animal Kingdom. Moreover, the 1932 stage version had starred Leslie Howard, as well as William Gargan and Ilka Chase. So maybe everybody concerned with filming The Animal Kingdom was a little too close to the material, because the movie is a bit of a mess. The central love triangle -- Daisy Sage (Harding) is the former mistress of Tom Collier (Howard) who plans to marry Cecelia Henry (Myrna Loy) just as Daisy comes back into his life -- is clear enough, but the movie is cluttered with secondary characters whose function in the lives of the central characters is a bit obscure, as if their backstories were more interesting than what we actually see on the screen. Tom, for example, has a butler named Regan (William Gargan) who is an ex-boxer completely unsuited to his duties as butler, which causes tensions with Cecelia. What Tom and Regan's obligations to each other are based on remains unknown. Daisy similarly has a friend named Franc (Leni Stengel), who plays the cello and speaks with a German accent, attributes that are obvious but of no significance to the plot. Still, there are some bright lines and some nice pre-Code naughtiness like a reference by Tom to a brothel he used to visit in London, not to mention the fact that the film is quite open about the relationship between Tom and Daisy: At one point she refers to herself as "a foolish virgin... Oh, foolish anyway," which is the kind of line no American movie could get away with for several decades after the 1934 Production Code went into effect. But I think I might have enjoyed The Animal Kingdom more if I didn't think it was radically miscast, that Loy should have played the somewhat free-spirited Daisy and Harding the more conventional Cecelia. In fact, this was a breakthrough role for Loy, who had been typecast as sultry, often "Oriental" women. In The Animal Kingdom, Loy comes across as sexy and Harding as bland, which is the reverse of the way it should be. Their pairing shows why Loy became a major star and Harding began to fade out of films in the mid-1930s. But both deserved better than this comedy of manners that's more mannered than comic.

Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954)

William Holden and June Allyson in Executive Suite

Cast: William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, Dean Jagger, Tim Considine. Screenplay: Ernest Lehman, based on a novel by Cameron Hawley. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Edward C. Carfagno, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters.

It has been called "Grand Hotel in the boardroom" more than a few times, because what it has in common with Edmund Goulding's 1932 best picture winner is that it was made by MGM and features an all-star cast. Executive Suite doesn't have much else in common with the earlier film, which was an entertaining stew of intrigue among the glamorous guests of a Berlin hotel. This is a story about power plays in a Pennsylvania furniture manufacturing company, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. The company's president has died without leaving a designated successor. We even see him die -- or rather, we die with him, as the film opens with a subjective camera as Avery Bullard leaves his Manhattan office to take a plane to Pennsylvania for a meeting with his vice-presidents. Through his eyes we see employees greet him as he leaves his office, the elevator doors closing on him, and finally the sidewalk as he collapses from a stroke. A passerby filches the wallet he drops, empties it of cash, and tosses it in a trashcan, thereby postponing the identification of his body. So much for any real action in the movie: The rest is talk, as the company's vice-presidents gather for the meeting and then gradually learn of his death. But one person knew of Bullard's death before them: George Caswell (Louis Calhern), a member of the company's board of directors who from his office window saw Bullard's body taken away by an ambulance and now uses this knowledge to try to pull a fast one with the company's stock. Eventually, there will be a struggle among the vice-presidents to take over Bullard's job as president. It will pit Loren Shaw (Fredric March), the bean-counting company controller, against Don Walling (William Holden), the v.p. for development who is excited about a new manufacturing technique he and his staff have been working on. And that's about as dramatic as it sounds. We all know that Walling will triumph over Shaw, probably because Walling has a nice, faithful wife played by June Allyson and a son who plays Little League baseball, and Shaw doesn't. It looks for a long time like Shaw will win, partly because he is in cahoots with Caswell, promising to make his stock deal work in exchange for his vote. Walling has to win over the other members of the board, who include old-timer Fred Alderson (Walter Pidgeon), who is on his side from the start; Walter Dudley (Paul Douglas), the v.p. for sales who is carrying on an affair with his secretary (Shelley Winters), making him susceptible to blackmail by Shaw; and most crucially of all, the daughter of the company's founder, Julia Tredway (Barbara Stanwyck), who had been involved in a frustrating love affair with Bullard and now threatens to dump her stock in the company. In the end, Walling triumphs with a big speech about the company's ideals and how they're being undermined by Shaw's insistence that the only thing that matters is the stockholders' return on investment, which has led to the construction of cheap and shoddy products. It's a sentimental fable about the "good capitalist" that mercifully doesn't indulge in the red-baiting that might have been expected in a film of the 1950s but ultimately rings false. Ernest Lehman's screenplay does what it can with Cameron Hawley's novel, Robert Wise directs as if it were a better film than it is, and Nina Foch won an Oscar for her role as the company's capable executive secretary, the only woman in the film who isn't completely under the thumb of the men. A trivia note: The narrator and the off-screen voice of Tredway is future NBC newman Chet Huntley.

Mannequin (Frank Borzage, 1937)

Spencer Tracy and Joan Crawford in Mannequin

Jessie Cassidy: Joan Crawford
John L. Hennessey: Spencer Tracy
Eddie Miller: Alan Curtis
Briggs: Ralph Morgan
Beryl: Mary Philips
Pa Cassidy: Oscar O'Shea
Mrs. Cassidy: Elisabeth Risdon
Clifford: Leo Gorcey

Director: Frank Borzage
Screenplay: Lawrence Hazard, Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Based on a story by Katharine Brush
Cinematography: George J. Folsey
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Fredrick Y. Smith
Costume design: Adrian
Music: Edward Ward

Joan Crawford in her MGM prime, tough but slinky, convincing as the factory girl trudging up the stairs to the Hester Street flat she shares with her family, but also as the chorus girl, the high-fashion model, the fur-bedecked millionaire's wife. Mannequin is a very talky melodrama, but one with a kind of reassuring confidence about what it's doing, helped along by Crawford's skill and commitment as an actress. She never does anything by rote. The screenplay is by Lawrence Hazard, but anyone who knows the work of the film's producer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, as a screenwriter can sense the uncredited contribution of the writer-director of A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). Not that Mannequin is up to the standard of those films, but that someone connected to all three movies knows that smart talk can bring a film to life. Frank Borzage, who had won Oscars for directing the "women's pictures" 7th Heaven (1927) and Bad Girl (1931), had just the right touch for this movie. It somehow manages to overcome a lack of chemistry between its leads, Crawford and Spencer Tracy, who didn't hit it off -- she later accused him of stepping on her feet when they were dancing together and of chewing garlic before their love scenes, in addition to his typical "bad drunk" behavior -- and never worked together again. There is, however, a good performance by Alan Curtis as her sleazy first husband, a would-be fight promoter who comes up with the scheme that she should divorce him to marry Tracy's millionaire shipping magnate, then soak him of his millions. And Oscar O'Shea as her ne'er-do-well father, Elisabeth Risdon as her doormat mother, and a terrific Leo Gorcey as her wise-ass brother all make it clear that Crawford's character has no way to go but up.

The Letter (Jean de Limur, 1929)

Her fascinating performance in this version of the Somerset Maugham melodrama might have won Jeanne Eagels an Oscar -- the second one ever given for best actress -- if the Academy hadn't been determined to give it to Mary Pickford, who had been one of its founders. Certainly Eagels outshone Pickford's ridiculously hammy Southern belle in Coquette (Sam Taylor, 1929). Though there were no "official" nominations for the award this year, Academy records show that Eagels had been under consideration -- as well she should have been. Her Leslie Crosbie is edgy, nervous -- a sharp contrast to the grim, icy Leslie that Bette Davis created in the 1940 remake of the story. Only at the end of the film, in a blazing release of the tension she has stored up does Eagels demonstrate the full power of the character, with her celebrated pronouncement, "With all my heart, with all my soul, I still love the man I killed." In sharp contrast to the later film, made under the watchful eye of the Production Code, which insisted that all criminals must receive their due punishment, this version ends with Leslie walking free, though she's hardly in an enviable emotional state. Eagels had been a sensation on Broadway in another Somerset Maugham vehicle, playing Sadie Thompson in Rain in 1922. Her stage career was troubled by her alcoholism and addiction to heroin, but the reception of her performance in The Letter suggested that she could have made a remarkable career in Hollywood. Six months after the film's release, however, she died suddenly; the toxicology report found alcohol, heroin, and chloral hydrate, which she took to help her sleep, in her system. Both versions of The Letter, incidentally, feature Herbert Marshall, though in this one he plays the man Leslie murders, whereas in the 1940 film he is Leslie's husband. But Eagels is pretty much the main reason for the survival of this version. As a very early talkie, it feels almost primitive: There's no music track, and throughout the film there's very little ambient sound. We see the streets of Singapore which, though they're thronged with people, are shown with no crowd noises, and even when we get to the Crosbies' plantation we see men playing on musical instruments from which no sound comes. This was Jean de Limur's first film as a director -- he had worked as an actor and writer in Hollywood. George J. Folsey, the film's cinematographer, later claimed that it had really been directed by the more experienced Monta Bell, the credited producer, who wanted to launch de Limur's directing career. After making one more film, Jealousy (1929), also starring Eagels, de Limur moved to his native France, where he continued his directing career into the 1940s.