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.

Roberta (William A. Seiter, 1935)

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Roberta

Cast: Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Helen Westley, Claire Dodd, Victor Varconi, Luis Alberni, Ferdinand Munier, Torben Meyer, Adrian Rosley, Bodil Rosing. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Allan Scott, Glenn Tryon, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and a novel by Alice Duer Miller. Cinematography: Edward Cronjager. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Jerome Kern, Max Steiner.

If Roberta is less well-known than most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, it's partly because it was out of circulation for a long time after 1945, when MGM bought up the rights to the film and the Broadway musical on which it was based, planning to remake it in Technicolor as a vehicle for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. That plan fell through, and the actual remake, Lovely to Look At (Mervyn LeRoy, 1952) with Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Red Skelton, and Marge and Gower Champion, is nothing special. But MGM's hold on the property meant that, unlike the other Astaire-Rogers films, it didn't show up on television until the 1970s. But it was also a kind of throwback to the first of their movies, Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933), in that they weren't the top-billed stars of Roberta, and their plot is secondary to that of the star, Irene Dunne, and her leading man, Randolph Scott. It doesn't matter much: What we remember from the film are the great Astaire-Rogers dance numbers, "I'll Be Hard to Handle," "I Won't Dance," and the reprises of "Lovely to Look At" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Scott's inability to sing resulted in the big number for his character in the Broadway version, "You're Devastating," being cut from the song score of the movie. "I Won't Dance" was brought in from another Jerome Kern musical, and Kern and Jimmy McHugh composed that fashion-show/beauty-pageant classic "Lovely to Look At," with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, for the film, earning Roberta its only Oscar nomination. Except when Astaire and Rogers are doing their magic, the film is a little draggy, and Dunne and Scott strike no sparks. Look for a blond Lucille Ball, draped in a feathery wrap, as one of the models in the fashion show.

Come and Get It (Howard Hawks, William Wyler, 1936)

Frances Farmer and Walter Brennan in Come and Get It

Barney Glasgow: Edward Arnold
Lotta Morgan / Lotta Bostrom: Frances Farmer
Swan Bostrom: Walter Brennan
Richard Glasgow: Joel McCrea
Karie: Mady Christians
Emma Louise Glasgow: Mary Nash
Evvie Glasgow: Andrea Leeds
Tony Schwerke: Frank Shields
Josie: Cecil Cunningham

Director: Howard Hawks, William Wyler
Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Jules Furthman
Based on a novel by Edna Ferber
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté, Gregg Toland
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Edward Curtiss
Music: Alfred Newman

William Wyler had just finished Dodsworth (1936) when the producer to whom he was under contract, Samuel Goldwyn, called on him to finish Come and Get It, which had been started under the direction of Howard Hawks. Goldwyn was unhappy with the way Hawks had treated Edna Ferber's novel Come and Get It, so he fired him. Goldwyn, a man of little education, was impressed with writers of big reputations, and liked to think of his movies as prestige items. Ferber was a big bestselling author of the day, best-known for multigenerational historical novels with colorful settings like the Mississippi riverboats of Show Boat and the Oklahoma land rush of Cimarron. The former had become a celebrated musical that had been filmed twice, first as a part-talkie by Harry A. Pollard in 1929 and then by James Whale in 1935, though it was not released until 1936. Cimarron had been made into a best-picture Oscar winner by Wesley Ruggles in 1931, so Goldwyn had been eager to cash in on the novelist's celebrity. He hired Hawks as director because the raucous frontier section of Ferber's novel reminded him of the director's Barbary Coast (1935), but when Goldwyn was sidelined by illness, Hawks jettisoned much of Jane Murfin's Ferber-approved screenplay and brought in one of his frequent collaborators, Jules Furthman, to rewrite and to build up the part of Walter Brennan's Swan Bostrom. Hawks shifted the focus away from Ferber's novel, much of which was about the exploitation of the land by timber interests, and built up the relationship between Bostrom and the protagonist, the ambitious lumberman Barney Glasgow. He also replaced Goldwyn's original choice for Lotta, Miriam Hopkins, with an actress he had discovered, Frances Farmer. Wyler was reluctant to take over from Hawks, and not only resisted Goldwyn's plan to give him sole billing as director but also insisted that Hawks receive top billing as co-director. In any case, Come and Get It turned into a rather curious mess, not least because Hawks was a notoriously freewheeling director with an intensely personal style whereas Wyler was a consummate perfectionist who seldom let his personality show through his work. Although there's some Hawksian energy to the film, it feels like it has been held in check. Moreover, the central character, Barney Glasgow, has been miscast. Goldwyn wanted Spencer Tracy for the part, knowing that Tracy could play both the romantic lead and the driven businessman that the part called for. But when Tracy couldn't get out of his contract with MGM, Goldwyn settled for one of his own contract players, Edward Arnold, a rather squat, rotund character actor with none of Tracy's sex appeal. The best thing about the film is that it gives us a chance to see Farmer before her career was derailed by mental illness. She sharply delineates the two Lottas, mother and daughter, playing the former with a kind of masculine toughness and the latter with a defensive sweetness. As the mother, she growls out the song "Aura Lee" in a Marlene Dietrich baritone, but later as the daughter she sings it in a light soprano. She also sometimes looks strikingly like the actress who played her in the biopic Frances (Graeme Clifford, 1982), Jessica Lange. The other impressive moments in the film are provided by the logging sequences directed by Richard Rosson and filmed by Rudolph Maté. Brennan won the first of his three Oscars for his "yumpin' Yiminy" Swedish-accented character.

The Women (George Cukor, 1939)

Despite the sad novelty of its all-female cast, George Cukor's film flunks the Bechdel test completely: All the women in The Women talk about is men. They don't talk about their jobs because they don't have them: They circulate in a world of cocktail parties, kaffeeklatsches, spas, and venues for shopping. The one exception is Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford), who to my mind becomes the film's real heroine with her resigned "back to the perfume counter" final speech after she receives her comeuppance. Say what you will about Crystal, and the characters in The Women have plenty to say about her, she has a spine and a pretty solid view that the world is still there for her taking by any means necessary. Of course, the nominal heroine is poor Mary (Mrs. Stephen) Haines (Norma Shearer), who gets the final soft-focus scene as, dewy-eyed, she heads off to reconcile with her husband. I want to be a little more generous to Shearer than some have been: She has been given a thankless role -- generous, self-effacing, motherly to a fault -- and not only a formidable adversary but also a surrounding cast of colorful, wisecracking characters, from Rosalind Russell's bumptious, overdressed gossip to Paulette Goddard's wryly tough chorus girl on the make to Mary Boland's relentless serial divorcee. We are supposed to root for Mary, but why? This is where I think the gimmick, the all-female cast, does Shearer, a disservice. If we actually met Stephen Haines, we might have some clue as to why Mary takes so long to kick him out and then is so delighted to rush to his Crystal-stained arms at the film's end. Shearer is forced to play a role without a motive other than blindly enduring love. That she does it as well as she can gives her some default points, but for most of of the film she has to rely on Shearerisms: chin up, eyes moist, shoulders back. The character comes to life only at the end when Mary decides to fight back by marshaling all the dirty tricks she has been taught, and Shearer is fun to watch as she plays them. Still, her triumph over Crystal is only the product of a tired dramatic formula. It's Crawford who mops the floor with the rest of the cast with her performance and earns our respect for Crystal with her delivery of the famous exit line: "There a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society ... outside of a kennel. So long, ladies!" Everything else is anticlimax. Cukor gives the film great energy, though the adaptation by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin of the Clare Boothe Luce play (with uncredited help from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Donald Ogden Stewart) is so full of would-be zingers that they begin to get a little tiresome. Sadly, the only respite from the non-stop bitchery is to introduce another weepy scene between Mary and her mother (Lucile Watson) or her daughter (Virginia Weidler). At two hours and 13 minutes, The Women seems at least 13 minutes overlong.

What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor, 1932)

Bradley Cooper is reportedly directing a remake of A Star Is Born in which he and Lady Gaga will take the roles played by Fredric March and Janet Gaynor in 1937, James Mason and Judy Garland in 1954, and Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand in 1976. So maybe it's a good time to check out the ur-Star Is Born, What Price Hollywood?, that was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by George Cukor in 1932. The name is different but the plot's the same: A successful man in the entertainment business discovers a young woman whom he helps become a star, but as her career ascends, his personal problems send him into a tailspin.* The idea for the film is a natural in a Hollywood that had become increasingly conscious of its own myth, and many real-life analogs have been found in the history of the industry. Selznick commissioned Adela Rogers St. Johns, a former reporter for Photoplay and the Hearst newspapers, to write the story for the film, and various other hands turned it into a screenplay, though St. Johns and Jane Murfin claimed most of the credit when they were nominated for an Oscar for best original story. The film begins with a touch of screwball comedy when Max Carey (Lowell Sherman), an alcoholic director, encounters Mary Evans (Constance Bennett), a waitress at the Brown Derby looking for her chance to break into the movies. After some funny scenes involving Max's drunkenness and Mary's initial ineptness as an actress, the movie unfortunately begins to get serious. Though it's clear Mary really loves Max, when she becomes a big star she marries a society polo player, Lonny Borden (Neil Hamilton), after a somewhat cutesy courtship. But Borden is unhappy being "Mr. Mary Evans," and eventually storms out, though she's pregnant. Meanwhile, Max's decline continues, and after Mary rescues him from the drunk tank and promises to rehabilitate him, he shoots himself, thereby embroiling her in a headline-making scandal. But then Borden returns to apologize and all is well again. What keeps the film alive despite its clichés are the performances. Bennett is quite charming, and Sherman clearly models Max on John Barrymore, whom he knew well: He was married to Helene Costello, whose sister, Dolores, was Barrymore's third wife. The supporting cast includes Gregory Ratoff as the producer of Mary's films, Louise Beavers as (of course) her maid, and Eddie Anderson as Max's chauffeur -- five years before he became famous as Jack Benny's chauffeur, Rochester, on radio.  

*As if there were any doubt, there's a clear link between What Price Hollywood? and at least the first A Star Is Born in that both were produced by Selznick. RKO, which released What Price Hollywood?, threatened to sue Selznick over the similarities, but decided against it. Selznick also asked Cukor to direct the 1937 film, but Cukor declined, so William A. Wellman took it on. But then Cukor went on to direct the 1954 Star Is Born. I don't think there's any direct connection between What Price Hollywood? and the 1976 version, produced by Streisand and Jon Peters and directed by Frank Pierson, but the lineage by then was obvious.