Four Frightened People (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)

Cast: Claudette Colbert, Herbert Marshall, Mary Boland, William Gargan, Leo Carillo, Nella Walker, Ethel Griffies, Tetsu Komai, Chris-Pin Martin, Joe De La Cruz. Screenplay: Bartlett Cormack, Lenore J. Coffee, based on a novel by E. Arnot Robertson. Cinematography: Karl Struss. Art direction: Roland Anderson. Film editing: Anne Bauchens. Music: Karl Hajos, John Leipold, Milan Roder, Heinz Roemheld. 

Four Frightened People is a film that keeps running off in various directions: Sometimes it's an adventure thriller, sometimes a romantic drama, and sometimes it's a comedy of manners. It's as if Gilligan's Island suddenly turned in mid-season into a grim struggle for survival, and then went goofy all over again. A movie so muddled needs the help of strong casting, but instead it has four actors who look like they needed the work and this was the best they could find. As the nominal romantic leads, Claudette Colbert and Herbert Marshall have no chemistry, even after she stops being a mousy schoolteacher and starts slinking around in leopard-skin outfits, Mary Ann metamorphosed into Ginger. Marshall's chief rival for her attention, a macho adventurer played by William Gargan, is just a bullying grouch. And Mary Boland is there for comic relief as a feather-brained dowager clutching her lapdog to her breast, a shtick that gets so tiresome we need relief from the relief. It's the kind of movie that raises only one question: What the hell were they thinking when they made it? 

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Cast: Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Charles Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, based on a play by Aladar Laszlo. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Music: W. Franke Harling. Costume design: Travis Banton.

If you want a good example of the damage done to American movies by the enforcement of the Production Code, look no further than Trouble in Paradise. Ernst Lubitsch's comic masterpiece could not have been made two years later, when the Code went into effect. It could not even be re-released or shown commercially until the death of the Code in the late 1960s. The loss to the art of cinema is incalculable, even though filmmakers including Lubitsch went on to find other ways of being witty and sexy. On the face of it, Trouble in Paradise sounds trivial: Con artists Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall) fall in love when each tries to filch the other's belongings: a wallet, a brooch, a watch, a garter. So they team up and go off to Paris where their target becomes the wealthy and beautiful Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), owner of a leading parfumerie. What will happen to Lily when Gaston falls in love with Mariette? What makes it work is Lubitsch's unflagging wit: A film that will soon be wafting the scent of Mme. Colet's perfume opens with a Venetian garbage man dumping the contents of a can into a loaded garbage scow and punting off into a canal singing "O Sole Mio." It's only the first of the many Lubitsch touches. But perhaps the greatest touch of all is the casting: Hopkins was never funnier or sexier and Francis never more radiant. I have to admit that on my first viewing I was initially put off by the casting of Marshall: a sad-eyed, somewhat slumped middle-aged man with a wooden leg. (The scenes in which Gaston sprints up and down Mariette's staircase are probably the work of a body double.) But Marshall turns out to be perfectly charming in the role, credibly wooing both leading ladies. A heartthrob like Cary Grant would have wrecked the chemistry, becoming the apex of what needs to be an equilateral triangle. William Powell would have been too vivid in the part, echoing his previous teamings with Francis. Fredric March had a touch too much of the ham -- Marshall succeeds by underplaying the role. There are some other nice surprises: Those peerless character actors Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton were usually used as comic relief, but Trouble in Paradise is a comedy that needs no relieving; Ruggles and Horton are there to do their own thing and they do it well. The ending, which flouts a key commandment of the Code, is suitably bittersweet, but paradise needs a little trouble to make you appreciate it the more.

Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)

Melvyn Douglas, Herbert Marshall, and Marlene Dietrich in Angel

Lady Maria Barker: Marlene Dietrich

Sir Frederick Barker: Herbert Marshall 

Anthony Halton: Melvyn Douglas 

Graham: Edward Everett Horton 

Wilton: Ernest Cossart 

Grand Duchess Anna Dimitrievna: Laura Hope Crews 

Mr. Greenwood: Herbert Mundin 

Emma: Dennie Moore 

Director: Ernst Lubitsch 

Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Guy Bolton, Russell G. Medcraft 

Based on a play by Melchior Lengyel 

Cinematography: Charles Lang 

Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher 

Film editing: William Shea 

Costume design: Travis Banton

Music: Friedrich Hollaender

In Ernst Lubitsch's Angel, you can almost feel the Production Code censors breathing hotly down the director's neck, driving some of the oxygen out of the room. What's meant to be a light and airy sophisticated comedy, like for example Lubitsch's pre-Code masterpiece Trouble in Paradise (1932), often feels starchy and coy. The emigrée grand duchess played by Laura Hope Crews is clearly a high-class procuress and her "salon" a very upscale brothel that enables a "fling" by Lady Maria Barker with a curiously naïve Anthony Halton. Their affair never seems to get consummated, although there are the usual narrative jumps when the relationship seems to come to the boiling point. And of course the Code's aversion to divorce and abhorrence of any sign that adulterers might get away with it unpunished means that the film must end with Lady Maria and Sir Frederick happily reconciled. We're used to such evasions in Hollywood movies of the 1930s through the 1950s, but it's a little depressing to see them stifle Lubitsch's usually sublime naughtiness. Sometimes it feels as if Marlene Dietrich is to blame: She never really strikes sparks with either Melvyn Douglas or Herbert Marshall -- certainly not the way Greta Garbo does with Douglas in Ninotchka (1939) or Miriam Hopkins with Marshall in Trouble in Paradise. But lovers of Lubitsch have plenty to enjoy in Angel, chiefly the way the director subverts expectations. When Sir Frederick invites Halton, an old war buddy, to dine with him and his wife, who neither man knows is the "Angel" Halton met in Paris and has been rhapsodizing about ever since, we expect a big explosion, especially when the husband points out his wife's picture to her lover. But just as Halton is about to look at the photograph, Lubitsch cuts. We don't see the awkward encounter between wife and lover we expect when she comes downstairs to meet the guest. Instead, we pick up with them later and realize that both have exerted exceptional self-control at the meeting. And we don't see the three of them at the dinner table; instead, Lubitsch takes us into the kitchen, where the servants are wondering why neither Lady Maria nor Mr. Halton has touched their food. Lubitsch leaves to our imagination scenes that other directors would have milked shamelessly. In another example, at their first encounter Maria and Halton are in a Parisian park at night, and after he proclaims his love for her he spots an old woman selling violets. He goes to buy the flowers, but Lubitsch holds the camera on the old woman, whose expressions tell us what's going on: Maria has chosen the moment to disappear and we hear Halton calling out "Angel!" in his pursuit of her. The flower seller sighs and picks up the dropped bouquet, dusts it off, and puts it back with the other flowers, then turns and walks away. Similarly, Lubitsch doesn't linger on the reconciliation scene between Maria and Frederick: They simply walk out the door, headed for Vienna and what we hope is a revived marriage. In the end, these "Lubitsch touches" aren't quite enough to lift Angel out of the middle tier of the director's films, but they constitute its saving grace notes.  

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Lily: Miriam Hopkins
Mariette Colet: Kay Francis
Gaston Monescu: Herbert Marshall
The Major: Charles Ruggles
François Filiba: Edward Everett Horton
Adolph J. Giron: C. Aubrey Smith
Jacques: Robert Greig

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones
Based on a play by Aladar Laszlo
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling

It's a measure of the stupidity of American censorship that this gemlike sophisticated comedy could not have been made in Hollywood two years later, after the Production Code was implemented, but was also withheld from re-release for years afterward, all because it dared to indicate that its adult characters were having sex with one another without benefit of clergy and because the blithely larcenous Lily and Gaston were allowed to get off without apparent punishment -- indeed, with considerable reward -- for their crimes. It's essential for anyone who wants to know why Ernst Lubitsch and his so-called "touch" were so highly prized for so long.

Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930)

Norah Baring, uncredited actress, and Herbert Marshall in Murder!

Sir John Menier: Herbert Marshall
Diana Baring: Norah Baring
Doucie Markham: Phyllis Konstam
Ted Markham: Edward Chapman
Gordon Druce: Miles Mander
Handel Fane: Esme Percy
Ion Stewart: Donald Calthrop
Prosecutor: Esme V. Chaplin
Defense Counsel: Amy Brandon Thomas
Judge: Joynson Powell
Bennett: S.J. Warmington
Miss Mitcham: Marie Wright
Mrs. Didsome: Hannah Jones
Mrs. Grogram: Una O'Connor
Jury Foreman: R.E. Jeffrey

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Walter C. Mycroft, Alma Reville
Based on a novel and play by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox
Art direction: John Mead

Hitchcock's third talkie, after the commercial success Blackmail (1929) and the comparative flop Juno and the Paycock (1930), is a solid start toward establishing his reputation as a master of the thriller, or in this case the murder-mystery subgenre. Hitchcock's direction of it is full of innovative touches: an opening sequence in which a scream is heard and the camera pans across a series of windows from which curious heads emerge; a neatly staged scene in which the investigation of the murder takes place in the wings of a theater, where people being interrogated sometimes interrupt their testimony to make their entrances; a scene that takes place in the jury room and lingers there as we overhear the sentence being delivered, with only a janitor tidying up in the actual frame; a voiceover by Herbert Marshall as we see his reflection in a mirror -- accomplished in those pre-dubbing days by playing a recording of Marshall speaking his lines. But frankly, Murder! is a bit of a mess, filled with improbable twists. For example, Marshall's character, Sir John Menier, an eminent actor-producer, winds up on the jury even though he has a prior acquaintance with the defendant, Diana Baring. And somehow, even though he believes her to be innocent, he is bullied by the other jurors into voting guilty. He then turns detective to try to overturn the verdict. The motive for the murder is equally muddled: something to do with the fact that the murderer, who turns out to be a circus trapeze artist who performs in drag, is "half-caste" -- a secret that he is willing to kill in order to protect. But this muddle has its moments, such as the one in which the dignified Sir John spends the night in a house near the murder scene, to be awakened by the landlady (the always valuable Una O'Connor) and her gaggle of noisy kids. Better, tighter scripts were to come, but Hitchcock gives this one better than it's due.

Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1953)

Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons in Angel Face

Frank Jessup: Robert Mitchum
Diane Tremayne: Jean Simmons
Mary Wilton: Mona Freeman
Charles Tremayne: Herbert Marshall
Fred Barrett: Leon Ames
Catherine Tremayne: Barbara O'Neil

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Frank S. Nugent, Oscar Millard
Based on a story by Chester Erskine
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Otto Preminger was about to take on the Production Code when he made Angel Face: His next film was The Moon Is Blue (1953), a rather tepid little romantic comedy that offended the Code enforcers because its heroine, though relentlessly virginal, demonstrated an awareness of and interest in extramarital sex that was one of the Code's taboos. With the backing of United Artists, Preminger went ahead and made the film, releasing it without the Code's imprimatur. The result was a succès de scandale, a hit far beyond any actual merits of the film, after it was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency and by some local censorship boards. Two years later, Preminger and United Artists would follow the same procedure with The Man With the Golden Arm (1952), a film about drug addiction that also flouted some of the Code's prohibitions. Preminger's stand is usually cited among the landmarks leading to the end of film industry censorship. I mention all this because I was struck by how Preminger also ignores the Code's conventional morality in Angel Face, which makes it clear that Frank Jessup has been sleeping with his girlfriend, Mary Wilton -- among other things, he reveals that he knows what she wears to bed, and when he goes to see her, she's in her slip getting ready to go out and doesn't bother coyly pulling on the usual bathrobe. The thing is, Mary is the film's "nice girl," the character meant to be the foil to the film's murderous Diane Tremayne. But Diane doesn't smoke or drink, and Mary does. Some of the reason for Preminger's blurring of the lines between the usual Hollywood ideas of good and bad in these characters probably stems from a desire to build suspense, keeping us from being entirely sure that Diane is the one who turned on the gas in her stepmother's room or if she really is guilty of the murder for which she stands trial. But I suspect that it has more to do with Preminger's desire to pull his characters out of the usual pigeonholes of Hollywood melodrama, to make them plausible, enigmatic human beings. To some extent he's fighting the script, adapted by Frank S. Nugent and Oscar Millard (with some uncredited help by Ben Hecht) from a story by Chester Erskine, which on the face of it is the usual stuff about a conniving woman who loves her daddy too much and who stands to gain from her stepmother's death, ensnaring an unsuspecting man along the way. Mitchum's sleepy-eyed raffishness could have been used to make him the usual tough-guy collaborator of a femme fatale, like Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) or John Garfield's Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), but it's not a knock on those two great noirs to say that Preminger does something more subtle with Mitchum's Frank Jessup: He's an accomplice and a victim only by accident, letting his hormones put him in harm's (i.e., Mary's) way, and struggling ineffectually, even a little tragically, not to be dragged down by her. Angel Face is not as well-known as those other films, but with its solid performances, its effective and unobtrusive score by Dimitri Tiomkin, and its knockout of an ending, it deserves to be.      

Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Foreign Correspondent was made by people walking on eggs as they worked their way through a minefield. It displays Alfred Hitchcock's gift for witty surprises and edgy suspense, but it was made at a peculiar moment in history: Britain had gone to war against Hitler, but the United States was officially neutral -- thanks to a series of Neutrality Acts forced through Congress by isolationists. Moreover, Hitchcock himself had left his native country, signing a contract with David O. Selznick shortly before the war began in Europe.* So making a film about espionage and the outbreak of war in Europe that stuck to the American party line was tricky business, especially if your director was an Englishman. The surprise is that Foreign Correspondent turned out as well as it did. The plotting is fairly ramshackle, which is not surprising, considering the number of hands that were put to it: The screenplay is credited to Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, but there's also a dialogue credit for James Hilton and Robert Benchley, and it's well known that lots of others, including the ubiquitous script-doctoring Ben Hecht, were involved. The romantic subplot involving the titular foreign correspondent Johnny Jones aka Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) and peace activist Carol Fisher (Laraine Day), whose father (Herbert Marshall) turns out to be the villain, is particularly flimsy, but even the central espionage plot, involving an especially obscure MacGuffin, doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. And yet Foreign Correspondent zips along because Hitchcock's direction distracts us from the niggling inconsistencies. If we ever start to wonder if things make sense, there's a new gag -- a chase through a crowd of umbrellas, a windmill whose blades are turning backward,  a new threat on the hero's life, a spectacular plane crash at sea -- to distract us. Or there's a bit of witty casting: Edmund Gwenn, who also played Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard) in 1940 and later became one of the more beloved embodiments of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947), here plays a murderous Cockney, and the usually villainous George Sanders is the stalwart if cynical good guy named Scott ffolliott, complete with funny story about why his surname is spelled without a capital letter. So much is going on in Foreign Correspondent, in short, that thinking too closely about its plausibility feels irrelevant. Despite the pressures to keep the film's message neutral, at its end there's a sense that even isolationist America is about to yield to reality, with a stirring speech, written by Hecht, urging the United States to "keep the lights burning." Foreign Correspondent received a best picture Oscar nomination but lost to Hitchcock's other film of the year, Rebecca.

*Hitchcock's American stay was much criticized in Britain, although he didn't become a citizen of the United States until 1955. His absence from Britain, especially during the war, may be one reason why, even though he retained dual citizenship, he was not knighted by Queen Elizabeth II until the year of his death, 1980. In 1943 and early 1944, partly in response to the criticism, he went to Britain to make two short propaganda films for the British Ministry of Information. Both of them, Aventure Malgache and Bon Voyage, were in French and were designed to be shown to the Free French forces as morale boosters for the Resistance, although whether they were actually released as such is unclear. After the war they disappeared into the British National Archives and were not rediscovered until the 1990s, when Hitchcock scholars retrieved them for public showing and video release. The story of Aventure Malgache is framed by a group of actors putting on their makeup. One of them remarks on how much another of the group resembles a Vichy official he knew when he was in the Resistance on Madagascar. The official had the actor imprisoned, but after the Vichy government was ousted by the Battle of Madagascar in 1942, the official hid his portrait of Pétain, hung a portrait of Queen Victoria, and stuck his bottle of Vichy water in a cabinet -- perhaps an echo of Claude Rains's dropping the Vichy bottle in a wastebasket in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Bon Voyage is a more complex narrative about an RAF pilot who is shot down in France and is aided in his return to Britain by the Resistance -- or so he thinks. When he reaches London he learns that the supposed Resistance man was actually a German counter-spy using him to unmask real members of the Resistance. Neither film is first-rate, though both, especially the unreliable narrative of Bon Voyage, show the sure-handedness of an experienced director.

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.

The Letter (William Wyler, 1940)

As Tony Gaudio's camera travels across the Malayan rubber plantation we hear shots being fired, and as we track closer we see Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis), coming down her front steps with a grimly determined look on her face, firing the remaining bullets from her revolver into a man on the ground. And we sit back and relax and think, "Oh, yeah, Bette's here. This is gonna be good." Davis is one of the few stars who can almost always make us feel this way -- maybe Cary Grant or Barbara Stanwyck for me -- who else for you? And it is good, perhaps the best of the three films Davis made with William Wyler. For me, Jezebel (1938) is too steeped in the Hollywood Old South myth, and The Little Foxes (1941) too hamstrung by Lillian Hellman's dramaturgy. This one has a very fine screenplay by Howard Koch that deftly steps on and around the restrictions placed on it by the Production Code. For one thing, Leslie has to be punished for her crime, which involves not only murder but also, with the help of her lawyer, Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), suborning justice. (Joyce somehow gets off scot-free, though with an embittered conscience.) Wyler got a bad rap from the auteur critics like Andrew Sarris, who found his technical skills insufficiently personal. But we see something of Wyler's daring early in the film as Leslie is recounting her version of why she shot Geoffrey Hammond to her lawyer, her husband (Herbert Marshall), and a government official (Bruce Lester) who has been called to the scene. Wyler chooses to shoot a long segment of Leslie's story with the backs of Leslie and the three men to the camera: We don't see their faces, but only the room where the initial shooting took place. The effect, relying heavily on Davis's voice acting and Koch's script, is to place Leslie's narrative -- which as others comment rarely varies by a word -- in our minds instead of the truth. It is, for Davis, a splendidly icy and controlled performance. The major fault in the film today is in the condescension toward Asian characters typical of Hollywood in the era, though it's not as bad perhaps in 1940 as it would be after Pearl Harbor a year later. We learn that Hammond had a Eurasian wife (the Code-enforced substitute for the Chinese mistress of W. Somerset Maugham's 1927 play), and in 1940s Hollywood "Eurasian" invariable meant "sinister," especially when she's played by Gale Sondergaard. The other Asians in the film are treated as subordinates, including Joyce's Chinese law clerk, Ong Chi Seng (Victor Sen Yung), who is all smiles and passive aggressiveness. That we are expected to share in this colonialist order of things is especially apparent when Leslie is forced to deliver the payment for the incriminating letter to Mrs. Hammond, who lords it over Leslie, making her remove her shawl to bare her head and to place the money in her hands; then Mrs. Hammond drops the letter on the floor, making Leslie pick it up. If today we cheer at Mrs. Hammond's abasement of Leslie, who after all killed her husband, you can bet that 1940s audiences didn't.