The Lodger (John Brahm, 1944)

Merle Oberon and Laird Cregar in The Lodger

Cast: Laird Cregar, Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, Sara Allgood, Aubrey Mather, Queenie Leonard, Doris Lloyd, David Clyde, Helena Pickard. Screenplay: Barré Lyndon, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: James Basevi, John Ewing. Film editing: J. Watson Webb Jr. Music: Hugo Friedhofer.

Laird Cregar's great gift as the heaviest of heavies was to elicit a kind of sympathy for the bad guys he played. Which is no easy task when you're playing the most infamous of serial killers, Jack the Ripper. Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel was only "based on" the notorious murderer of ladies of the night -- it wasn't explicit that the character was Jack (whoever that was) -- and the earlier filmings, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent version, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, followed her lead, perhaps because Hitchcock's lodger was played by matinee idol Ivor Novello, which led to a twist in which the character turned out not to be the killer after all. But screenwriter Barré Lyndon and director John Brahm were perfectly happy to capitalize on the Ripper's perennial notoriety. This is a good, atmospheric version of the story, with effective shadowy, expressionistic camerawork by Lucien Ballard, and a solid cast.

The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940)

Barber/undertaker Mort Borrow (Charles Halton) looks for payment for his services in burying a man Roy Bean (Walter Brennan) has hanged.

Roy Bean faces a group of farmers who want to lynch him for his support of the cattlemen.

Cole Harden (Gary Cooper) intercedes with the farmers who want to hang Bean.

Bean buys up all the tickets for Lily Langtry's appearance, but is forced to deal with Harden instead.

Having managed to escape being hanged by Bean, Harden seeks safety among the farmers, including Wade Harper (Forrest Tucker) and Jane Ellen Mathews (Doris Davenport) and her father (Fred Stone).

Wearing his Confederate Army uniform, Bean awaits Lily Langtry's performance, only to be confronted by Harden. 

The mortally wounded Bean meets his dream woman, Lily Langtry (Lilian Bond).

After a drinking bout, Harden wakes up in bed with the man who wanted to hang him. 

Jane Ellen interrupts Bean's trial of Harden to protest against his brand of frontier justice.

Having persuaded Bean that he has a lock of Lily Langry's hair, Harden finds his hanging postponed.

Cattlemen burn out the homesteaders' settlement and kill Jane Ellen's father, but she vows to Harden that she'll stay.

Harden gives the supposed lock of Lily Langtry's hair to Bean.

Chill Wills (center) plays Southeast, one of the men who have brought Harden to Bean as a supposed horse thief.

Harden persuades Jane Ellen to let him cut a lock of her hair, which he intends to use to trick Bean.

Having settled down together, Jane Ellen and Harden watch more homesteaders arrive. 

Cast: Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Doris Davenport, Fred Stone, Forrest Tucker, Paul Hurst, Chill Wills, Lilian Bond, Dana Andrews, Charles Halton, Trevor Bardett, Tom Tyler, Lucien Littlefield. Screenplay: Jo Swerling, Niven Busch, based on a story by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: Gregg Toland. Art direction: James Basevi. Film editing: Daniel Mandell. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

The Westerner is something of a generic title, even for a genre film. I suppose it refers to Gary Cooper's Cole Harden, who is westering toward California when he's brought up short in Texas by some men who think he's a horse thief. (A horse thief sold him the horse.) Tried and sentenced under Judge Roy Bean's "law West of the Pecos," Harden manages to play on Bean's infatuation with Lily Langtry to con his way out of the predicament, only to be forestalled again by a pretty homesteader, Jane Ellen Mathews, played by Doris Davenport, whose career peaked with this film. She's quite good, but for some reason she failed to impress its producer, Sam Goldwyn, who held her contract. We are thick into Western movie tropes here: frontier justice, cowpokes vs. sodbusters, and so on. But what turns The Westerner into one of the classics of the genre is the good-humored attitude toward the material, displayed most of all in the performances of Cooper and Walter Brennan, whose Roy Bean won him the third and probably most deserved of his Oscars. But much credit also goes to that ultimate professional among directors, William Wyler, who doesn't condescend to the material but gives it a lovingly leisurely pace that allows his performers to make the most of it. And there's a screenplay that stays brightly on target from the moment Bean announces that "in this court, a horse thief always gets a fair trial before he's hung." Jo Swerling and Niven Busch got the credit (and the Oscar nomination) for the script, but some other formidable writers had a hand in it, including W.R. Burnett, Lillian Hellman, Oliver La Farge, and Dudley Nichols. 

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.

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

Opening title cards for Spellbound

Constance Petersen: Ingrid Bergman
John Ballantyne: Gregory Peck
Alexander Brulov: Michael Chekhov
Murchison: Leo G. Carroll
Mary Carmichael: Rhonda Fleming
Fleurot: John Emery
Garmes: Norman Lloyd
House Detective: Bill Goodwin

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Angus McPhail
Based on a novel by Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: James Basevi, Salvador Dalí
Music: Miklós Rózsa

Although David O. Selznick held Alfred Hitchcock under contract, Hitchcock made only three films directly under his niggling presence: Rebecca (1940), Spellbound, and The Paradine Case (1947). The best of his work during this period -- Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), and Notorious (1946) -- was done on loanout to other producers and studios. It was clear from the tensions between director and producer during the work on Rebecca that things would never go smoothly in their relationship. So I have a strong suspicion that Spellbound represents a sly Hitchcockian subversion of Selznick, an attempt to undermine the producer's obsessiveness by playing off Selznick's own quirks, in this case his preoccupation with psychoanalysis. Selznick notoriously gave his own analyst, May E. Romm, a screen credit as "psychiatric advisor" on the film, leading to some criticisms of her by the psychoanalytic community. Though Romm isn't credited as a writer on the film, it's thought that the title cards "explaining" psychoanalysis in the opening of Spellbound are her work. Romm and Hitchcock clashed during the filming, he studiously ignoring her suggestions and once dismissing her criticism with a characteristic "It's only a movie" retort. The result is one of Hitchcock's wackier, more improbable films, one that probably sent many in the audience away convinced that analysis was movie hokum, and not a real-life solution to mental problems. From the outset, for example, it's clear that the doctors in Green Manors, the fancy mental hospital in the film, are at least as nutty as the patients, with Dr. Fleurot constantly horndogging his beautiful colleague, Dr. Petersen, and the rest of the staff showing off their own ineptness. When the supposed Dr. Edwardes, the replacement for the retiring Dr. Murchison, arrives, he turns out to be a twitchy young man, given to fainting spells and other bits of odd behavior, but he succeeds in winning over the icy Dr. Petersen in an instant. And so on, through various bits of Hitchcockian obsession, mistaken identities, and unlikely revelations. There's the famous Dalí-designed dream sequence and Miklós Rózsa's Oscar-winning score, one of the first to use the eerie-sounding theremin in key passages, but it's never terribly convincing. Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck are gorgeous, of course, and for once Peck doesn't seem like he was whittled out of wood -- perhaps because he and Bergman had an affair during the filming. The rest of the cast hams it up nicely, though the fact that the hammiest of them all, Michael Chekhov, got an Oscar nomination for his stereotypical shrink is lamentable. This is one of those movies that are more fun if you know all the backstories about the production.