Double Harness (John Cromwell, 1933)

Ann Harding and William Powell in Double Harness

Cast: Ann Harding, William Powell, Lucile Browne, Henry Stephenson, Lilian Bond, George Meeker, Reginald Owen, Kay Hammond, Leigh Allen, Hugh Huntley, Wallis Clark, Fred Santley. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, based on a play by Edward Poor Montgomery. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: George Nichols Jr.

Double Harness is a rather brittle comedy of manners that might be better known if it hadn't vanished for years, owing to a dispute between producer Merian C. Cooper and RKO. Because it was withheld from release until Turner Classic Movies obtained the rights to it in 2007, we had one less opportunity to see Ann Harding, once expected to become a major Hollywood star on the strength of her looks and her stage-trained voice, the latter a great asset in the early years of talking pictures. Harding gives a good performance in Double Harness, but she lacked the vivid personality of actresses of the period who became bigger stars, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck, so her career never quite took off. She plays Joan Colby, member of a well-to-do family that finds itself on the skids in the depression, so that she and her giddy sister, Valerie (Lucile Browne), need to marry well in order to regain status. Valerie does marry, but her spendthrift ways keep her on the hunt for money to pay the debts she hides from her husband. Joan is taken with John Fletcher (William Powell), heir to a successful shipping company but more interested in playing polo than in running the business -- or in getting married. Joan overcomes the latter obstacle by a trick: She arranges for her father (Henry Stephenson) to discover her in Fletcher's apartment, which she has more or less moved into, one night. Fletcher does the right thing and marries her, unaware that he's been tricked, but he and Joan also come to an agreement that they will divorce after a suitable period of time elapses. Naturally, they begin to fall more deeply in love, as Fletcher begins to realize that Joan has not only made life more pleasant for him, she has also begun to take a hand in his shipping business. But then Valerie spills the beans about how Joan had tricked Fletcher into marrying her, and an old flame of his, Monica Page (Lilian Bond), takes advantage of his anger and tries to snare him for herself. And so on to the anticipated outcome. Double Harness is a little too arch and stagey for its own good, and the idea that a man might have to marry a young woman because she's found in his apartment at night was a little old-fashioned even at the time, but Harding and Powell do what they can with the material.

Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948)

After George Cukor's 1935 David Copperfield, I think this is my favorite adaptation of Dickens for film or TV, and god knows there have been plenty of them. What Lean does right is to treat the Dickens book as a fable, not a novel. A novel takes its characters seriously as human beings; a fable sees them as embodiments of good and evil. And there's plenty of evil on display in Oliver Twist, from the brute evil of Bill Sikes (Robert Newton) to the venal evil of Fagin (Alec Guinness) to the stupid evil of Mr. Bumble (Francis L. Sullivan) and Mrs. Corney (Mary Clare). Oliver (John Howard Davies) is innocently good, whereas Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson) is a man of good will. Nancy (Kay Walsh) and, to a lesser extent, the Artful Dodger (Anthony Newley) are potentially good people who have been corrupted by evil. We need fables like this from time to time, just to keep ourselves from despair. The performers are all beautifully cast, especially Davies as Oliver: He's just real-looking enough in the role that he doesn't become saccharine, the way some prettier Olivers do. This is Lean in what I think of as his great period, when he was making beautifully filmed movies with just the right measure of sentiment: Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946) in addition to this one. But he would be bit by the epic bug while working on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and its success would betray him into bigger but not necessarily better movies: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and the rest of his later oeuvre would have the same attention to visual detail that make his early movies so rich, but they seem to me chilly in comparison. Here he benefits not only from a perfect cast, but also from Guy Green's photography of John Bryan's set designs. There are probably few more terrifying scenes in movies than Sikes's murder of Nancy, which sends Sikes's dog (one of the most impressive performances by an animal in movies) into a frenzy. Running it a close second is Sikes's death, seen from a vertiginous rooftop angle. We don't actually see the death, but only the swift tautening of the rope as he plunges, punctuated by a sudden snap. The film is not as well known in America as in Great Britain, where it engendered controversy: Guinness's portrayal of Fagin elicited charges of anti-Semitism, especially since the film appeared so soon after the world learned about the Holocaust. The truth is, Guinness doesn't play to Jewish stereotypes, but Fagin's absurdly exaggerated nose (which makeup artist Stuart Freeborn copied from George Cruikshank's illustrations for the novel) does evoke some of the caricatures in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. The film was edited to remove some of the shots of Fagin in profile, and was held from release in the United States until 1951.