Our Modern Maidens (Jack Conway, 1929)

Joan Crawford and Anita Page in Our Modern Maidens

Cast: Joan Crawford, Rod La Rocque, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Anita Page, Edward J. Nugent, Josephine Dunn, Albert Gran. Screenplay: Josephine Lovett, titles by Marian Ainslee, Ruth Cummings. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist. Music: Arthur Lange. 

Cedric Gibbons got a lot of credit for designs he didn't do: His name was listed as art director on almost all of MGM's movies from 1925, when he joined the studio, through 1956, when he retired, but largely because he was head of the art department; the actual hands-on design work on any given film was probably that of the person listed along with Gibbons, usually as assistant art director. That said, I think it's almost a sure thing that the set designs for Our Modern Maidens were done by Gibbons himself: The giveaway is that they're a splendidly, almost over-the-top art deco, a style associated with Gibbons, which influenced even his most famous design: the Oscar statuette. The décor of B. Bickering Brown's mansion is a fabulous assemblage of deco staircases, columns, cornices, and whatnots, an almost cubist setting for Billie Brown (Joan Crawford) to sashay about in, wearing designs by Adrian. The truth is, the movie needs the boost it gets from the design, given that the story is a fairly banal account of modern maidens Billie and Kentucky (Anita Page) in dangerous liaisons designed to point the moral: Don't get too modern when it comes to sex. Billie, who has her fling at several wild parties, gets secretly engaged to Gil (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), who has a little thing going with Kentucky, but when Billie meets Glenn Abbott (Rod La Rocque), things get complicated. She flirts with Abbott, who has connections in the state department, to get Gil posted to the embassy in Paris, but breaks off with Abbott when he gets a little too hot and bothered. Then, on her wedding day, she learns that Kentucky is pregnant with Gil's child, and she realizes that she really loves Abbott. Not to worry, he'll forgive her. This was Crawford's last silent film, and it's not entirely silent: Leo roars over the MGM logo, there's a music soundtrack, some sound effects and crowd noises, and once we hear a public announcement over a loudspeaker. It's not quite as entertaining as the movie to which it's a sequel, Harry Beaumont's 1928 Our Dancing Daughters, which also starred Crawford and Page, but it holds the eye if not the mind. 

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Jack Conway, 1987)

Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Cast: Maggie Smith, Bob Hoskins, Wendy Hiller, Marie Kean, Ian McNeice, Alan Devlin, Rudi Davies, Prunella Scales, Áine Ní Mhuiri, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Peter Nelson, based on a book by Brian Moore. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Michael Pickwoad. Film editing: Terry Rawlings. Music: Georges Delerue.

The Dublin of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is a nest of vipers, full of people with stunted lives, blinkered vision, and downright meanness. The effect of this is to make Judith Hearne (Maggie Smith) look good by comparison, even though her life has been stunted and her vision is none too wide either. Perhaps she has had enough of the meanness exhibited by her late Aunt D'Arcy (Wendy Hiller) and by her spiky landlady (Marie Kean) and the other denizens of the boarding house into which she has recently moved, that she seems almost sunny and pleasant as if to defy them. She carries with her two icons of her past: a dour portrait of her aunt and a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These images represent her efforts to control her alcoholism through self-discipline and religion, but the truth is that both only serve to make the problem worse, exacerbating her guilt when she fails at the task. In late middle age, with a small annuity and a clump of savings, she has little to look forward to, so she grasps at anything that represents hope -- or at least a surcease from loneliness -- which manifests itself as her landlady's brother, James Madden (Bob Hoskins), a stubby middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed mustache who has recently returned from the United States. He's a phony, of course, a man full of schemes like opening a hamburger restaurant in Dublin that will never turn out, and whose American career in the New York hotel business amounted to being a doorman. He latches on to Judith because he thinks she has money stashed away. She gravitates to him because he represents a wider world than she has known in her years taking care of her aunt and earning a little money by giving piano lessons. It's a bleak and unforgiving tale, spiked with a little unsavory sex -- the rivalry between Madden and his nephew (Ian McNeice), a corpulent would-be poet who sponges off of his mother, for the attentions of the housemaid Mary (Rudi Davies), whom Madden rapes when she spurns him. No one comes off well in this movie, but I couldn't help being drawn in by the performances of Smith, Hoskins, Hiller, and the others, even when their characters were at their most unlikable.

The Smart Set (Jack Conway, 1928)

William Haines in The Smart Set

Cast: William Haines, Jack Holt, Alice Day, Hobart Bosworth, Coy Watson, Constance Howard, Paul Nicholson, Julia Swayne Gordon. Screenplay: Byron Morgan, Ann Price; titles: Robert E. Hopkins. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist.

Given that we now know what everyone in Hollywood knew at the time, namely that William Haines was one of the few openly gay leading men of the 1920s and '30s, it's fascinating to watch how he camps up the role of Tommy Van Buren in The Smart Set. Haines mugs, poses, and generally upstages everyone in the film -- and gets away with it, considering that his performance is almost the only entertaining thing about this silly romantic comedy. Tommy is a conceited champion polo player, and the plot, such as it is, deals with his self-centered sabotage of the United States polo team in a match against the British, and his developing relationship with the pretty Polly Durant (Alice Day), the daughter of a wealthy owner of polo ponies. Does Tommy come to his senses and save the day at the film's end, winning the game and Polly, too? What do you think?

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.

A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935)

Cast: Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Edna May Oliver, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, Henry B. Walthall, Donald Woods, Walter Catlett, Fritz Leiber, H.B. Warner, Mitchell Lewis, Claude Gillingwater, Billy Bevan, Isabel Jewell, Lucille La Verne. Screenplay: W.P. Lipscomb, S.N. Behrman, based on a novel by Charles Dickens. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis. Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig. Music: Herbert Stothart.

It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies. The best part is that Ronald Colman is a handsome Sydney Carton, who delivers the familiar closing line at the guillotine -- "It is a far, far better thing I do...." -- with the necessary nobility, and that the cast includes such ever-watchable character actors as Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka (an implacable Mme. De Farge), and Lucille La Verne (as The Vengeance, literally but not figuratively toothless). The worst part is that the screenplay leans heavily on the sentimental parts of the novel and Elizabeth Allan is, like most Dickens heroines, a pallid and forgettable Lucie Manette. David O. Selznick produced, but it's not as successful a foray into Dickens as his superb David Copperfield, made the same year and with a better director, George Cukor. 

Arsène Lupin (Jack Conway, 1932)

Cast: John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Karen Morley, John Miljan, Tully Marshall. Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, Bayard Veiller, Carey Wilson, based on a play by Maurice Leblanc and Francis de Croisset. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Costume design: Adrian. Film editing: Hugh Wynn.

The brothers Barrymore do some delightful upstaging of each other in Arsène Lupin, with John as the suave duke whom Lionel as the dogged police inspector suspects of being the thief known as Arsène Lupin. There's some sexy business involving Karen Morley as a socialite who may be more than what she seems, and everything culminates in the theft of the Mona Lisa. It's maybe a little more creaky in its joints than is good for it, in the way of early talkies.