Shining Victory (Irving Rapper, 1941)

 

Cast: James Stephenson, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Donald Crisp, Barbara O’Neil, Montagu Love, Sig Ruman, G.P. Huntley, Leonard Mudie, Doris Lloyd. Screenplay: Howard Koch, Anne Froelich, based on a play by A.J. Cronin. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Max Steiner. 

Shining Victory – not to be confused with Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939) or Bright Victory (Mark Robson, 1951) – is a solid Warner Bros. product about a research physician (James Stephenson) who gets exiled to a private sanitarium in Scotland after accusing a senior researcher of stealing his work for an article about the treatment of dementia praecox, which we now call schizophrenia. Embittered by the experience, he snarls at and offends his colleagues until he’s assigned an assistant for his work: a lovely young woman (Geraldine Fitzgerald) just graduated from medical school. “A woman!” he sneers, and his scorn is compounded when he learns that she wants to be a medical missionary in China after her term as his assistant is over. Eventually, she wins him over – largely, it seems, by cleaning up his messy lab – and they fall in love. But things are not to be…. Based on a play called Jupiter Laughs by A.J. Cronin, the movie is more interested in getting the two doctors together than in his research, although his somewhat dodgy workaround of medical ethics is what produces the film’s crisis. Bette Davis, who co-starred with Fitzgerald in the aforementioned Dark Victory, has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo as a nurse.

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. 

Nobody Lives Forever (Jean Negulesco, 1946)

Cast: John Garfield, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Walter Brennan, Faye Emerson, George Coulouris, George Tobias, Robert Shayne, Richard Gaines, Richard Erdman. Screenplay: W.R. Burnett, based on his novel. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Art direction: Hugh Reticker, Max Parker. Film editing: Rudi Fehr. Music: Adolph Deutsch.

Changes of heart are always risky, especially in film noir, so when Nick Blake (John Garfield) falls in love with the rich widow Gladys Halvorsen (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who has been chosen as the mark in a con game, things get a little screwed up. Originally planned as a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart, Nobody Lives Forever benefits from Garfield's good looks, making the romantic twist a little more interesting. Jean Negulesco, better known for glossy romance than for noir, handles the material well, especially the climactic shootout.

Three Strangers (Jean Negulesco, 1946)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Sydney Greenstreet in Three Strangers

Jerome K. Arbutny: Sydney Greenstreet
Crystal Shackleford: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Johnny West: Peter Lorre
Icey Crane: Joan Lorring
Bertram Fallon: Robert Shayne
Janet Elliott: Marjorie Riordan
Prosecutor: Arthur Shields
Lady Rhea Belladon: Rosalind Ivan
Junior Clerk: John Alvin
Gabby: Peter Whitney
David Shackleford: Alan Napier

Director: Jean Negulesco
Screenplay: John Huston, Howard Koch
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Art direction: Ted Smith
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Adolph Deutsch

This is the movie in which Peter Lorre gets the girl, though not the leading lady played by Geraldine Fitzgerald. Instead, Lorre's Johnny West winds up with Icey, the woman who adores him and even perjures herself to save him from being hanged. It's all the result of a rather charmingly tangled and entirely improbable plot cooked up by John Huston with the aid of Howard Koch and kicked around Warner Bros. for years until it finally settled in the hands of director Jean Negulesco. Like The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) it teams Lorre with Sydney Greenstreet and features a mysterious artifact as something of a MacGuffin. Instead of a priceless black bird, the artifact in Three Strangers is a statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin. Legend has it that if three people, strangers to one another, make a wish on the statue at the lunar New Year, the wish will come true. So Fitzgerald's character, Crystal Shackleford, lures the solicitor Jerome K. Arbutny and the down-on-his-luck Johnny to her flat, and the three agree that the only thing that will solve their problems -- she wants to win the love of her husband from whom she's separated, Arbutny wants to become a barrister, and Johnny just wants to own a bar -- is money. so they place their bets on a sweepstakes ticket. Sure enough, despite the skepticism of Arbutny and the comparative indifference of Johnny, Kwan Yin comes through. And equally sure enough, nothing goes right for the trio, with the possible exception of Johnny, who does, as we said, get the girl. Alfred Hitchcock had once expressed interest in the screenplay, and we might have gotten something great if he had settled on it, but Negulesco doesn't put much of an interesting spin on the material. But Lorre and Greenstreet, together or apart, are always fun to watch.

Wilson (Henry King, 1944)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Alexander Knox in Wilson

Woodrow Wilson: Alexander Knox
Edith Bolling Galt: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Joseph Tumulty: Thomas Mitchell
Ellen Wilson: Ruth Nelson
Henry Cabot Lodge: Cedric Hardwicke
Henry Holmes: Charles Coburn
William Gibbs McAdoo: Vincent Price
George Felton: William Eythe
Josephus Daniels: Sidney Blackmer
Col. House: Charles Halton
"Big Ed" Jones: Thurston Hall
Georges Clemenceau: Marcel Dalio

Director: Henry King
Screenplay: Lamar Trotti
Cinematography: Leon Shamroy
Art direction: James Basevi, Wiard Ihnen
Film editing: Barbara McLean
Music: Alfred Newman

Wilson was a famous flop, its failure magnified by the angry disappointment of its producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, who thought that a film about the man who was president during World War I would be just the ticket during World War II. Still seething about it when he accepted the best picture Oscar for Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947) three years later, Zanuck grumbled, "I should have got this for Wilson." One problem was that audiences were not particularly enthusiastic about sitting through a history lesson in mid-wartime, but another was that Woodrow Wilson was not one of our more charismatic presidents. He was nominated by a deadlocked Democratic convention and elected because the Republicans were split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" candidacy. Wilson was an intellectual, a college history professor who became president of Princeton University, and never mastered the technique of selling his lofty ideas about world peace to the electorate. Though Wilson is chock full of biopic clichés, including wall-to-wall patriotic music, and it's about an hour too long, it's not as boring as it is cracked up to be. It has moments of real energy, particularly in its depiction of the political conventions and their high-flown oratory, and the introduction of newsreel footage brings it back to reality. It's also opulently produced, with some spectacular interiors and some vivid (not to say lurid) Technicolor. Alexander Knox does what he can to warm up a man who was probably rather chilly in real life.