History Is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)

Leo Carrillo, Charles Boyer, and Jean Arthur in History Is Made at Night

Cast: Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur, Leo Carrillo, Colin Clive, Ivan Lebedeff, George Meeker, Lucien Prival, George Davis. Screenplay: Gene Towne, C. Graham Baker, Vincent Lawrence, David Hertz. Cinematography: David Abel. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Margaret Clancey. Music: Alfred Newman.

It starts as a domestic drama about a failing marriage, then becomes a suspense thriller, then a romance, then a rom-com with screwball touches, and winds up as a disaster movie. Objectively viewed, History Is Made at Night is a mess. But somehow it holds together, partly because of the chemistry of its leads, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur, as well as some good comic acting by Leo Carrillo and the creepiness of Colin Clive, outdoing even his Dr. Frankenstein. And most of all, I think, by the direction of Frank Borzage, an under-recognized helmsman who seems willing to take anything the screenwriters and producer Walter Wanger throw at him. I've always been a fan of Arthur, and I think she's at her best here. She's not the sort of leading lady that makes you think men readily fall deeply in love with her, but here her character, Irene Vail, causes both the sinister steamship magnate Bruce Vail (Clive) and the suave Parisian headwaiter Paul Dumond (Boyer) to become obsessed with her, to the point that Dumond pursues her from France to America and Vail is willing not only to murder his chauffeur but even to sink an ocean liner with 3,000 passengers for her sake. Somehow, Arthur imbues the character with a quirky charm that makes all this credible. No, it's not a great movie by anyone's standards, but as a sample of Hollywood hokum it's at least great fun.  

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936)

Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 

Longfellow Deeds: Gary Cooper
Babe Bennett: Jean Arthur
MacWade: George Bancroft
Cornelius Cobb: Lionel Stander
John Cedar: Douglass Dumbrille
Walter: Raymond Walburn
Judge May: H.B. Warner
Mabel Dawson: Ruth Donnelly
Dr. Emile Von Hallor: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Morrow: Walter Catlett
Farmer: John Wray
Mrs. Meredith: Emma Dunn

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a story by Clarence Budington Kelland
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick
Music: Howard Jackson

Frank Capra's perennially popular Mr. Deeds Goes to Town currently has an 8.0 score on IMDb and an 89% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So let me cavil a little bit about its psychological dishonesty, namely the scene in which Deeds, engagingly played by Gary Cooper, is subjected to a sanity hearing because of his attempt to give away to distressed farmers the $20 million he has inherited -- a scheme that economically speaking doesn't bear much close scrutiny. Capra (and Robert Riskin, who as writer must bear his share of blame) brings on an "expert," a caricature Viennese psychiatrist, who explains that Deeds suffers from "manic depression," the now-discarded term for bipolar disorder, and exhibits a peaks-and-valleys chart of Deeds's mood swings. It's pretty clear that Capra and Riskin want us to regard this testimony as quackery. But anyone who has dealt with bipolarity, either first-hand or with family or friends, can see the element of truth in the diagnosis. We don't know enough about Deeds's daily life in Mandrake Falls, Vt., where, as the Faulkner sisters testify, everyone is "pixilated" but them, to give a confident diagnosis that Deeds is in fact bipolar, and the attempt to use the diagnosis as a smear is reprehensible. But Deeds's decision to refuse legal council at the hearing is the act of someone who really is depressed, and while we are supposed to dismiss as chicanery the attempt to classify his eccentricities -- playing the tuba, sliding down banisters, chasing firetrucks, feeding doughnuts to a horse, and above all wanting to give away his money -- as manic behavior, there's a grain of truth there. Moreover, Deeds does in fact exhibit violent tendencies: witness his punching out the poets who mock his greeting-card verses -- who beats up poets? -- and his assaulting the lawyers at the trial. Capra intends his film as a valorization of small-town virtues against city cynicism, but even that doesn't bear much close scrutiny, especially in the age of more critical looks at small town life as Sinclair Lewis's Main Street or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. It has always struck me that Capra was the most empty-headed of the great American directors, making films that annihilate thought, or at least anesthetize it. I like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town more than most Capra films: At its best it's lively and funny, but its worst is pretty annoying and even pernicious stuff.

A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948)

Watched 10/5/2018

Phoebe Frost: Jean Arthur
Erika von Schluetow: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. John Pringle: John Lund
Col. Rufus J. Plummer: Millard Mitchell
Hans Otto Birgel: Peter von Zerneck
Mike: Stanley Prager
Joe: William Murphy

Director: Billy Wilder
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Richard L. Breen, Robert Harari
Based on a story by David Shaw
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Walter H. Tyler
Film editing: Doane Harrison
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

It occurs to me that it might be interesting to watch Roberto Rossellini's neorealistic drama Germany Year Zero (1948) back-to-back with Billy Wilder's satiric romantic comedy A Foreign Affair, if only to illuminate the respective visions of the two directors. Both are set in the ruins of postwar, pre-wall Berlin, using the ruins of the city as a correlative for the evil of Nazism. But for Rossellini, that evil is persistent, a lurking danger. For Wilder it's something that may persist but also something that can be overcome by good will and humor. A Foreign Affair is sometimes accused of a nasty cynicism about politics, and certainly its embodiment of American democracy, the congressional fact-finding delegation, is seen as rather clueless and superficial. But for Wilder, a good joke is our best defense against even such evils as Nazism, just as it was for Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch in To Be or Not to Be (1942) -- and later for Mel Brooks in his 1983 remake of the Lubitsch film and his own The Producers (1967).

You Can't Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938)

Halliwell Hobbes, Spring Byington, Dub Taylor, Ann Miller, and Mischa Auer in You Can't Take It With You

Alice Sycamore: Jean Arthur
Martin Vanderhof: Lionel Barrymore
Tony Kirby: James Stewart
Anthony P. Kirby: Edward Arnold
Kolenkhov: Mischa Auer
Essie Carmichael: Ann Miller
Penny Sycamore: Spring Byington '
Paul Sycamore: Samuel S. Hinds
Poppins: Donald Meek
Ramsey: H.B. Warner
DePinna: Halliwell Hobbes
Ed Carmichael: Dub Taylor
Mrs. Kirby: Mary Forbes
Rheba: Lillian Yarbo
Donald: Eddie Anderson
Charles Lane: Henderson
Judge: Harry Davenport

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick

"Opening up" a stage play when it's adapted for the movies is standard practice, and even a necessary one when the play takes place on a single set the way George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take It With You does. But director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin have done more than open up the play, they have eviscerated it, scooping out much of its wisecracking satire on bourgeois conformity and red-scare jitters to replace them with Capra's characteristic sentimental populism, some high-minded speeches about Americanism, and a rather mushy romance. It unaccountably won the best picture Oscar and Capra's third directing award, in a year when the nominees included Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion. Capra and Riskin load on a kind of superplot: an attempt by the villain, Anthony P. Kirby, to corner the munitions market by buying up the property surrounding his rival's factory. The property includes the home of Grandpa Vanderhof and his family of Sycamores and Carmichaels, along with some others who turned up there at one time or another and just stayed on to pursue their various eccentric pastimes, which include making fireworks in the cellar. The goings-on in the household are enough to sustain the play, especially when Alice Sycamore brings home her boyfriend, Tony Kirby, and he invites his stuffy parents to come to dinner. (As in their play The Man Who Came to Dinner, the Kaufman-Hart formula punctures bourgeois stuffiness by putting the squares and the nonconformists into confining circumstances with one another.) The film puts more emphasis on the romance of Alice and Tony with scenes in which they are taught by a group of kids to dance the Big Apple and go to a high-toned restaurant where Alice is introduced to the Kirbys, resulting in some not very funny slapstick. Eventually, the Kirbys and the Vanderhof household wind up in jail and night court, where Capra musters his usual sentimental tribute to the people: As in Capra's 1934 Oscar-winner, It Happened One Night, in which a busload of the common folk join in singing "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," the inmates sharing the cell with Grandpa Vanderhof as well as the Kirbys père et fils join in a chorus or two of "Polly Wolly Doodle." (A cut to the other occupants of the cell reveals a throng of fresh-faced working men, not the thugs and drunks you'd expect to find.) And in the courtroom scene, Grandpa's neighbors gather to pay his fine, with even the judge tossing some money into the hat. All ends well, of course: Mr. Kirby decides not to buy the Vanderhof house after his defeated rival suffers a fatal heart attack. (The rival, Ramsey, is played by H.B. Warner, who as Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings saved all of mankind with his death; here his death just saves Anthony P. Kirby's soul.) Kirby undergoes a wholly unconvincing change of heart, and we end with all of the Kirbys, Sycamores, Carmichaels, and hangers-on at the dinner table where Grandpa delivers a prayer of thanks. Capra never got cornier than this.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)

James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Jefferson Smith: James Stewart
Clarissa Saunders: Jean Arthur
Sen. Joseph Paine: Claude Rains
Jim Taylor: Edward Arnold
Gov. Hopper: Guy Kibbee
Diz Moore: Thomas Mitchell
Chick McGann: Eugene Pallette
Ma Smith: Beulah Bondi
Senate Majority Leader: H.B. Warner
President of the Senate: Harry Carey
Susan Paine: Astrid Allwyn
Mrs. Hopper: Ruth Donnelly
Sen. MacPherson: Grant Mitchell
Sen. Monroe: Porter Hall
Himself: H.V. Kaltenborn
Nosey: Charles Lane
Bill Griffith: William Demarest
Sweeney Farrell: Jack Carson

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Sidney Buchman
Based on a story by Lewis R. Foster
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Lionel Banks
Film editing: Al Clark, Gene Havlick
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Perhaps only James Stewart (or Gary Cooper, who turned down the role of Jefferson Smith) could have made Frank Capra's preposterous, sentimental, flag-wavingly patriotic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington into what many people still regard as a beloved classic. But now that we've spent some time being governed by probably the most corrupt man ever to hold the White House, a president elected on populist promises to "drain the swamp" in Washington but who instead has spent his time wallowing in it and stocking it with still more alligators, maybe we can take a harsher look at the Capra film's politics. The people who elected Donald Trump seem to have thought they were voting for Jefferson Smith but instead elected the movie's Jim Taylor (played deliciously by that fattest of character actor fat cats, Edward Arnold). David Thomson, among others, has cogently observed that the film celebrates Jefferson Smith's bull-headed integrity, but that democracy necessarily involves the kind of compromises that Claude Rains's Senator Paine has made, and which have made him a popular and successful politician. True, he's under the thumb of the viciously corrupt Jim Taylor, who is even a manipulator of "fake news," but Thomson questions whether the people of Smith's state wouldn't have benefited more from the dam Taylor wants to put on Willett Creek, presumably one that would supply power and other benefits to the state, than from Smith's piddly boys' camp, which would benefit at best a few hundred boys. (No girls need apply?) Smith's dramatic filibuster also seems to be holding up a bill that would provide funding for some essential services. As it happens, I rewatched Mr. Smith on the night after the Senate reached an impasse on funding the entire federal government, and there could hardly be a better example of political stubbornness undermining the public good. Which is only to say that the merits of Capra's film -- and there are some -- transcend its simple-minded fable. Among its merits, it's beautifully acted, not only by Stewart, Rains, and Arnold, but also by Jean Arthur, that most underrated of 1930s leading ladies, and Thomas Mitchell, who appeared in no fewer than three of the films nominated for the best picture Oscar for 1939 -- this one, Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming), and Stagecoach (John Ford) -- and won the supporting actor award for Stagecoach. And just run down the rest of the cast list, which seems to be a roster of every great character actor in the movies of that day, all of them performing with great energy. Capra's mise-en-scène is sometimes stagy, but Lionel Banks's great re-creation of the Senate chamber gives Capra a fine stage on which to work.

Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, 1937)

Easy Living is one of my favorite screwball comedies, but I once had a nightmare that took place in the set designed by Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté for the film. It was the luxury suite in the Hotel Louis, with its amazingly improbable bathtub/fountain, and I dreamed that we had just bought a place that looked like it and were moving in. I don't remember much else, other than that I was terribly anxious about how we were going to pay for it. Most of my dreams are anxiety dreams, I think, which may be why I love screwball comedies so much: They take our anxieties about money and love and work, like Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) worrying about how she's going to pay the rent and even eat now that she's lost her job, and transform them into dilemmas with comic resolutions. Too bad life isn't like that, we say, but with maybe a kind of glimmer of hope that it will turn out that way after all. Easy Living, with its screenplay by Preston Sturges, is one of the funniest screwball comedies, but it's also, under Mitchell Leisen's direction, one of the most hilarious slapstick comedies. How can you not love a film in which a Wall Street fat cat (Edward Arnold) falls downstairs? Or the celebrated scene in which the little doors in the Automat go haywire, producing food-fight chaos that builds and builds? The fall of the fat cat and the rush on the Automat reveal that Easy Living was a product of the Depression, anxiety made pervasive and world-wide, when we needed hope in the form of comic nonsense to keep us going. This is also an essential film for those of us who love Preston Sturges's movies, for although he didn't direct it, his hand is evident throughout, not only in the dialogue but also in the casting, with character actors who would later form part of Sturges's stock company, Franklin Pangborn, William Demarest, and Robert Greig among them. Ray Milland displays a Cary Grant-like glint of amusement at what's going on, Luis Alberni spouts Sturges's wonderful malapropisms as the hotel owner Louis Louis, and Mary Nash brings the right amount of indignation and humor to her role as Arnold's wife. I only wonder why Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin weren't credited for their title song, which is heard (though without its lyrics), as background music throughout the film.

Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

I had forgotten how important the sexual tension between Shane (Alan Ladd) and Marian Starrett (Jean Arthur) is to the texture and motivation of the film. It's obvious from the moment when she watches him, shirtless and glistening with sweat, help her rather dull (and fully clad) husband, Joe (Van Helflin), uproot a tree stump, and it plays like a low bass note throughout the film, until it becomes the main reason why Shane feels he has to move on at the end. After all, he has just humiliated Joe by knocking him unconscious and taking on the role Joe assumes is his rightful duty, thereby reducing him in the eyes of his wife and son, Joey (Brandon De Wilde). It also doesn't escape the notice of the bad guys, one of whom taunts Shane with the fact that Joe has a pretty wife. (The filters used on some of Arthur's closeups are a giveaway: She was 50 when she made Shane, her last film, but she's plausible as a character 10 or 15 years younger.) It's to George Stevens's credit that he plays all of this as low-key as he does. It would have been much too easy to move the eternal triangle to the center of the film's structure. Shane is an intelligent film, though to my mind it gets a little heavy-handed with the introduction of the black-hatted Wilson (Jack Palance) as the potential nemesis to the knight errant Shane. As fine as Palance's performance is, I wish his character had been given a more complex backstory than just "hired gun out of Cheyenne." Otherwise, the screenplay by A.B. Guthrie Jr. does a fair job of not making its villains too deep-dyed: The chief tormenter of the sodbusters, the cattleman Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), is given a speech justifying himself as having gotten there first and settled the land -- we haven't yet reached the point in historical consciousness where the claims of the Native Americans are taken seriously. And Shane's first opponent, Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson), eventually has a change of heart -- not an entirely convincing one to my mind, considering Calloway's behavior in his first encounter with Shane -- and warns Shane that Joe's appointment with Ryker is a trap. Stevens uses Jackson Hole, Wyoming, almost as effectively as John Ford used Monument Valley, and Loyal Griggs won a well-deserved Oscar for his cinematography, even if Paramount's decision to trim the original images at top and bottom to make the film appear to have been shot in a widescreen process resulted in some oddly cropped compositions. Shane is undeniably a classic, but I think it takes itself a little too seriously: The great Western directors, like Ford and Howard Hawks, knew the value of a little comic relief, but in Shane even Edgar Buchanan plays it straight.

Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings

Geoff Carter: Cary Grant
Bonnie Lee: Jean Arthur
Bat McPherson: Richard Barthelmess
Judy McPherson: Rita Hayworth
Kid Dabb: Thomas Mitchell
Lee Peters: Allyn Joslyn
Dutchy: Sig Ruman

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Lionel Banks
Film editing: Viola Lawrence
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Thomas Mitchell had begun his acting career on stage, making his Broadway debut in 1916. It would be 20 years before he decided to leave the stage for Hollywood, and three years after settling there he found himself performing in no fewer than five of 1939's top movies: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle), Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra), Stagecoach (John Ford), and Only Angels Have Wings. He won an Oscar for Stagecoach, and four of the five films in which he appeared were nominated for the best picture Oscar. As it happens, the one film that didn't get nominated, Only Angels Have Wings, is my favorite of the bunch. That it wasn't nominated may have had something to do with its director, Howard Hawks, who refused to be tied down to any one of the major studios, feeling that he had been burned by a dispute with production head Irving Thalberg at MGM. For the rest of his career he made the rounds of the studios, producing and directing (and often writing without credit) some of the most enjoyable movies ever made. But he was nominated for the best director Oscar only once, for Sergeant York (1941), which has its Hawksian touches -- fast-paced dialogue and deft use of character players like Walter Brennan, Margaret Wycherly, Ward Bond, and Noah Beery Jr. -- but is more sentimental than typical Hawks films. In fact, Hawks must hold some kind of record for classic films that received no Oscar nominations at all, including the great gangster film Scarface (1930) and the dizziest of screwball comedies -- Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940) -- as well as the definitive Marilyn Monroe vehicle, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and the films that stand as landmarks in the careers of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). He finally got an honorary Oscar in 1975, after having been discovered by the French critics of Cahiers du Cinéma and American auteurist critics like Andrew Sarris. Only Angels is prime Hawks, with a sterling cast that includes not only Mitchell, as the aging pilot known as "Kid," but also Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. They bring a touch of the screwball comedy at which they excelled to what is essentially a serious story about the grace under pressure shown by fliers in a small South American port town who have to battle the weather to fly the mail across the Andes. Hawks and screenwriter Jules Furthman take the familiar "you can't send the kid up in a crate like that" premise and turn into something both funny and moving. The key is that that they refuse, like the pilots in their movie, to take anything really seriously, so the light touch keeps the peril and loss from bogging the film down. There is a startling moment near the end when we see tears in Grant's eyes, but the movie swiftly moves to a lighter-hearted conclusion. There is some corny artifice in the settings and flying sequences, and perhaps a little too much about the relationship between the characters played by Rita Hayworth (pushed on Hawks by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn) and Richard Barthelmess. Some see Only Angels as a kind of rough draft for To Have and Have Not, and Jean Arthur, who clashed with Hawks about her character, said she didn't understand what he wanted until he saw that later film. But Only Angels Have Wings stands on its own.