The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)

Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed

Cast: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Evelyn Varden, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper, Henry Jones, Paul Fix, Joan Croydon, Gage Clarke, Jesse White, Frank Cady. Screenplay: John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson and a novel by William March. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Alex North. 

The Bad Seed stands out today as one of the more muddle-headed products of Production Code censorship. In the play and novel on which the movie was based, Christine Penmark, the unwitting carrier of the gene that turns her daughter, Rhoda, into a serial killer, commits suicide after giving the child an overdose of sleeping pills. One of the shocks of the novel and play is that Rhoda survives to kill again. But suicide as a positive plot resolution and crimes that go unpunished were taboo under the Code, so John Lee Mahin's adaptation blunts the ending for both characters. And then, to add farce to bathos, someone thought it a good idea to add a "curtain call" sequence in which the actress playing Christine, Nancy Kelly, gives the actress playing Rhoda, Patty McCormack, a spanking. Since spanking is hardly a punishment for murder, you have to wonder if Kelly is punishing McCormack for upstaging her. (In any case, McCormack seems to be enjoying it a little too much.) Still, if you take the movie on its own terms, it has its creepy moments, most of them involving McCormack, whom we spot as a bad kid from the moment she shows up with her braids so tight it looks like they hurt and wearing a starchy, spotless outfit that no decent child would have tolerated for a moment. There's some entertaining overplaying by Evelyn Varden as the psychologizing landlady and Henry Jones as the nosy hired man. The production is stagy and the performances often overblown, with the exception of Kelly, who strives to make her character -- and the ridiculous premise that evil is inherited -- credible. It's a role that could easily have tipped over into camp -- as the rest of the film often does -- but Kelly balances right on the edge. 

On the Town (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1949)

Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, and Gene Kelly in On the Town

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Vera-Ellen, Florence Bates, Alice Pearce, George Meader. Screenplay: Adolph Green, Betty Comden, based on their book for a musical play. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters. Music: orchestrations by Conrad Salinger, songs by Leonard Bernstein, Roger Edens, Adolph Green, Betty Comden.

A funny thing happened after I watched On the Town: I found myself humming "Lucky to Be Me" and "Some Other Time," songs by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden that aren't in the movie. They were in the original Broadway production, but were cut by producer Roger Edens, along with several others, and replaced by his own songs, almost all of which are forgettable. Bernstein was pissed off, as he should have been: "Lucky to Be Me" was perfect for one of Gene Kelly's numbers, and "Some Other Time" almost begged to be sung by Frank Sinatra and the rest of the company. Those excisions, and the Breen Office's insistence that the song "New York, New York" had to describe the city as "a wonderful town," instead of the original "helluva town," weigh down this much-loved but overrated MGM musical, which at least managed to do some location filming in the city after Kelly and co-director Stanley Donen rebelled against shooting the entire musical in the New York sets of the studio's back lot. The location shots give some life to the movie, but it still looks cheap and stagy in comparison with later, more lavish productions like An American in Paris (1951). Kelly and Donen, along with Comden, Green, and cinematographer Harold Rosson, would redeem themselves with Singin' in the Rain (1952), which has the wit and buoyancy On the Town sadly lacks.

The Cat and the Fiddle (William K. Howard, 1934)

Ramon Novarro and Jeanette MacDonald in The Cat and the Fiddle

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Jeanette MacDonald, Frank Morgan, Charles Butterworth, Jean Hersholt, Vivienne Segal, Frank Conroy, Henry Armetta, Adrienne D'Ambicourt, Joseph Cawthorn. Screenplay: Bella Spewack, Sam Spewack, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and Jerome Kern. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke, Ray Rennahan, Harold Rosson. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Frank E. Hull. Music: Herbert Stothart, songs by Jerome Kern and Otto A. Harbach.

The Cat and the Fiddle marks a change in Jeanette MacDonald's career: It was her first film for MGM after the classic series of witty, racy movies co-starring Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, and it neatly bridges her way into the more famous but less interesting operetta films she made with Nelson Eddy at MGM. Here her co-star is Ramon Novarro, a charming actor with great comic skills and a nice singing voice, but they don't mesh the way she did with either Chevalier or Eddy; she seems a little too stiff, he a little too boyish. Made before the full introduction of the Production Code, the movie tries for some of the sexiness of the Paramount films made under the aegis of the master of the sly wink, Ernst Lubitsch. The lovers, Novarro's Victor and MacDonald's Shirley, live together without benefit of clergy, a thing impossible under the code. There is fun to be had watching the film: The dialogue -- among the uncredited contributors to the screenplay are Anita Loos and James Kevin McGuinness -- is often smart and funny, the songs are pleasant, and the giddy nonsense of the plot skips along merrily. And at the end there's a nice surprise: The final reel is in Technicolor, giving audiences a first glimpse of MacDonald's red hair. But this is minor MGM musical stuff, even in comparison with the later MacDonald/Eddy movies.

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

Cast: Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, Sydney Greenstreet, Adolphe Menjou, Ava Gardner, Keenan Wynn, Edward Arnold, Aubrey Mather, Richard Gaines. Screenplay: Luther Davis, Edward Chodorov, George Wells, based on a novel by Frederic Wakeman. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. Music: Lennie Hayton.

The Hucksters was made in the era depicted in Mad Men, when men who had served in World War II were returning to their civilian jobs. In the advertising business, that included men like Don Draper in the TV series and Victor Norman in the movie, men whose wartime experience had toughened them and given them a fresh angle on the business of selling to the postwar clientele. If Mad Men seems to us to have a more reliable point of view than The Hucksters on that business, it's partly because hindsight is keener than the contemporary view, but also because popular entertainment is less tight-assed now. Frederic Wakeman's novel was a bestseller in part because it was frank about the sex lives of its characters, which movies in the Production Code era couldn't be. So Gable's Victor Norman is turned into a more buttoned-up character than Jon Hamm's Don Draper, but censorship especially worked to a disadvantage for Deborah Kerr, in her first American film. Kerr is forced to be chaste and prim -- characteristics that would type her in the movies until 1953, when Fred Zinnemann finally allowed her to have a sex life in From Here to Eternity.  Kerr's character may agree to go away for a weekend with Vic, but only after she's assured that they will have separate rooms at opposite ends of the hotel. And when she discovers that they instead have adjoining rooms with a connecting door, she bolts. The effect on the movie is to sap any chemistry that MGM might have hoped Gable and Kerr would have. In contrast, Gable and Ava Gardner, as one of Vic's old girlfriends, strike fire immediately, which makes the ending of the movie, in which Gable's and Kerr's characters wind up together, feel phony. The Hucksters, coming a year after her breakthrough performance in Robert Siodmak's The Killers, helped make Gardner a star. Kerr had to muddle through in costume parts in movies like Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) and The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952) before finally getting a chance to be sexy. There is some zippy dialogue in the movie, and the hits on the advertising business are often funny, but the only real reason to see The Hucksters today is to watch some skillful old character actors like Adolphe Menjou and especially Sydney Greenstreet do their thing. Greenstreet plays an imperious soap manufacturer sponsor with non-negotiable ideas about what his commercials should be, and likes to intimidate his advertising clients by doing things like hocking a loogie on the conference table to get their attention. If the film had stuck with the ad biz and not strayed off into tiresomely predictable romance, it might have been a classic, or at least a lot better.

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.

El Dorado (Howard Hawks, 1967)

James Caan, Robert Mitchum, Arthur Hunnicutt, and John Wayne in El Dorado 

Cole Thornton: John Wayne
J.P. Harrah: Robert Mitchum
Mississippi: James Caan
Bull: Arthur Hunnicutt
Maudie: Charlene Holt
Dr. Miller: Paul Fix
Josephine (Joey) MacDonald: Michele Carey
Bart Jason: Edward Asner
Neise McLeod: Christopher George
Kevin MacDonald: R.G. Armstrong
Luke MacDonald: Johnny Crawford

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Leigh Brackett
Based on a novel by Harry Brown
Cinematography: Harold Rosson
Art direction: Carl Anderson, Hal Pereira
Film editing: John Woodcock
Music: Nelson Riddle

Like his later Rio Lobo (1970), Howard Hawks's El Dorado isn't so much a remake of his Rio Bravo (1959) as a movie built on its template: Gunfighter John Wayne teams up with a drunken sheriff, a greenhorn, and an old coot to stand off an assault by the bad guys, who greatly outnumber them. Wayne retains his earlier role in El Dorado, but here the drunken sheriff is Robert Mitchum, the greenhorn is James Caan, and the old coot is Arthur Hunnicutt, replacing Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Walter Brennan, respectively, in the earlier film. Unfortunately, Hawks was unable to find a suitable replacement for Angie Dickinson's Feathers, the "Hawksian woman" in Rio Bravo, and tried without much success to sub in two C-list actresses, Charlene Holt as Maudie, the woman with a past that involves both Wayne and Mitchum, and Michele Carey as the hoydenish Joey. Neither makes the impression that Dickinson made. Leigh Brackett was disappointed to find that Hawks had turned her screenplay into a reworking of Rio Bravo, but she was used to his freewheeling ways by then, having worked for him on The Big Sleep (1946) and Hatari! (1962). There are diminishing returns to any kind of remake, and by the time Hawks made Rio Lobo, the template had worn thin, but El Dorado is solid enough entertainment, especially when Wayne and Mitchum are on screen together, playing off of each other gleefully. Except for the rather hackneyed "El Dorado" theme song over the opening credits, with its by-the-numbers lyrics by John Gabriel, Nelson Riddle's score is a pleasant surprise in its avoidance of Western movie clichés -- no cowboy songs or "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie." The one sour note in the movie comes when Caan puts on a racial-caricature "Chinaman" act to get the jump on a lurking gunman.

Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952)

Egotism is accounted a sin, or at best a character flaw, but what would art, at least since the Renaissance, be without it? Imagine the history of motion pictures without the egotism of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, or Orson Welles, not to mention countless movie stars. So it comes as a bit of a shock to find David Thomson, in his essay on Singin' in the Rain in Have You Seen ...?, making reference to "[Gene] Kelly's rather frantic ego." I do know what he means: I've always found the "Broadway Melody/Broadway Rhythm" number overlong and overdone, suggesting Kelly's attempt at being regarded as "serious" dancer, especially in the pas de quatre with Cyd Charisse, her train, and a wind machine. And its ending, with the zoom-in-close of Kelly's face, does seem a bit de trop. Thomson also hints that producer Arthur Freed may have been indulging his ego by loading the film with his and Nacio Herb Brown's catalog of songs, instead of those of better songwriters. Freed, as the head of the legendary "Freed Unit" at MGM, had won a best picture Oscar for another Gene Kelly musical based on a songwriter's catalog, An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), which was wall-to-wall George Gershwin. And even though Singin' in the Rain is a better movie, it might have been nicer if it had songs by Harold Arlen or Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart. Porter at least gets plagiarized in Donald O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh" number, the tune for which is virtually identical to that of "Be a Clown," which Porter wrote for the Freed-produced The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948). That said, the Freed-Brown songs are entirely appropriate to the era depicted: They date from such 1929 MGM musicals as The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont) and The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner), exactly the ones parodied in Singin' in the Rain's montage of early movie musicals. My point is that egos are not enough to spoil the wonder that is Singin' in the Rain, widely regarded as one of the greatest movie musicals, and in my opinion just plain one of the great movies. Much credit goes to the expert comedy writing of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and to Harold Rosson's cinematography. Kelly and Stanley Donen wisely did what directors of movie musicals so often fail to do: rely on long takes and full-body shots during dance numbers. As for the performers, no one in the film, and that includes Kelly and O'Connor, ever reached this peak again. Debbie Reynolds was too often betrayed into perkiness, but she is human and appealing here. Jean Hagen stole scenes from everyone and received one of the movie's two Oscar nominations -- the other was to Lennie Hayton for scoring -- but her movie career stalled and she wound up doing TV guest appearances. As for egotism, it pains me to remember that Singin' in the Rain was not nominated for the best picture Oscar winner for 1952. The winner was The Greatest Show on Earth, directed by one of the great egotists, Cecil B. DeMille. Some egotists are geniuses; others are hacks.

Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)

Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun

Pearl Chavez: Jennifer Jones
Lewt McCanles: Gregory Peck
Jesse McCanles: Joseph Cotten
Senator Jackson McCanles: Lionel Barrymore
Scott Chavez: Herbert Marshall
Laura Belle McCanles: Lillian Gish
The Sinkiller: Walter Huston
Sam Pierce: Charles Bickford
Lem Smoot: Harry Carey
Mrs. Chavez: Tilly Losch
Vashti: Butterfly McQueen

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: David O. Selznick, Oliver H.P. Garrett
Based on a novel by Niven Busch
Cinematography: Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, Harold Rosson
Production design: J. McMillan Johnson
Film editing: Hal C. Kern
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

This is a bad movie, but it's one distinguished in the annals of bad movies because it was made by David O. Selznick, who as the poster shouts at you was "The Producer Who Gave You 'GONE WITH THE WIND.'" Selznick made it to showcase Jennifer Jones, the actress who won an Oscar as the saintly Bernadette of Lourdes in The Song of Bernadette (Henry King, 1943). Selznick, who left his wife for Jones, wanted to demonstrate that she was capable of much more than the sweetly gentle piety of Bernadette, so he cast her as the sultry Pearl Chavez in this adaptation (credited to Selznick himself along with Oliver H.P. Garrett, with some uncredited help by Ben Hecht) of the novel by Niven Busch. Opposite Jones, Selznick cast Gregory Peck as the amoral cowboy Lewt McCanles, who shares a self-destructive passion with Pearl. Both actors are radically miscast. Jones does a lot of eye- and teeth-flashing as Pearl, while Peck's usual good-guy persona undermines his attempts to play rapaciously sexy. The plot is one of those familiar Western tropes: good brother Jesse against bad 'un Lewt, reflecting the ill-matched personalities of their parents, the tough old cattle baron Jackson McCanles and his gentle (and genteel) wife, Laura Belle. Pearl is an orphan, the improbable daughter of an improbable couple, the educated Scott Chavez and a sexy Indian woman, who angers him by fooling around with another man. Chavez kills both his wife and her lover and is hanged for it, so Pearl is sent to live with the McCanleses -- Laura Belle is Chavez's second cousin and old sweetheart -- on their Texas ranch. It's all pretentiously packaged by Selznick: not many other movies begin with both a "Prelude" and an "Overture," composed by Dimitri Tiomkin in the best overblown Hollywood style. It has Technicolor as lurid as its story, shot by three major cinematographers, Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, and Harold Rosson. But any attempt to generate real heat between Jones and Peck was quickly stifled by the Production Code, which even forced Selznick to introduce a voiceover at the beginning to explain that the character of the frontier preacher known as "The Sinkiller" (entertainingly played by Walter Huston) was not intended to be a representative clergyman. There are a few good moments, including an impressive tracking shot at the barbecue on the ranch in which various guests offer their opinions of Pearl, the McCanles brothers, and other things. Whether this scene can be credited to director King Vidor, who was certainly capable of it, is an open question, because Vidor found working with the obsessive Selznick so difficult that he quit the film. Selznick directed some scenes, as did Otto Brower, William Dieterle, Sidney Franklin, William Cameron Menzies, and Josef von Sternberg, all uncredited. The resulting melange is not unwatchable, thanks to a few good performances (Huston, Charles Bickford, Harry Carey), and perhaps also to some really terrible ones (Lionel Barrymore at his most florid and Butterfly McQueen repeating her fluttery air-headedness from GWTW).