The Hard Way (Vincent Sherman, 1943)

Ida Lupino, Jack Carson, and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way

Cast: Ida Lupino, Dennis Morgan, Joan Leslie, Jack Carson, Gladys George, Faye Emerson, Paul Cavanaugh. Screenplay: Daniel Fuchs, Peter Viertel. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Tomas Pratt. Music: Heinz Roemheld. 

Repeat Performance (Alfred L. Werker, 1947)

Louis Hayward and Joan Leslie in Repeat Performance

Cast: Joan Leslie, Louis Hayward, Virginia Field, Tom Conway, Richard Basehart, Natalie Schafer, Benay Venuta, Ilka Grüning. Screenplay: Walter Bullock, based on a novel by William O'Farrell. Cinematography: L. William O'Connell. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Lewis Sackin. Music: George Antheil. 

When Repeat Performance ended, I thought, "That was different. I wish it were better." The premise is a good one: the time loop, usually the stuff of sci-fi movies and seldom of noirish melodramas. And who hasn't wished to live a year (or day or week or month) over, knowing what you know now. That happens to Broadway star Sheila Page (Joan Leslie), who shoots her husband, a blocked playwright and alcoholic philanderer named Barney Page (Louis Hayward) just before midnight on New Year's Eve in 1946. She flees into the night, wishing that she had the year that had led up to the shooting to live over again, sure that she could prevent what had just happened. Well, sure enough she can. As New Year's Day arrives, she discovers that it's not 1947 but January 1, 1946 again. And that she's not wearing the nightgown that she threw a coat over when she ran from the apartment, but instead the new party dress she bought for New Year's. Of course, she can't convince anyone else what has happened, though she does manage to interest her Gay Best Friend, the poet William Williams (Richard Basehart), with her story that he's going to meet a woman, Eloise Shaw (Natalie Schafer), who will have him committed to a mental institution. She also knows that in the first 1946 she and Barney went to London where they met a playwright, Paula Costello (Virginia Field), who wrote the play she starred in but also started an affair with Barney. So can the past be course-corrected? Would there be a movie if it could be? What Repeat Performance needs is a somewhat better script and much better actors. Leslie doesn't make Sheila into a credible figure: She's too much the suffering wife and not enough the resourceful woman who rose to the top on Broadway. And Hayward gabbles some of the soap operatic dialogue and never shows us what Sheila saw in Barney in the first place. The best performance in the movie is Basehart, who handles the coded role of the gay man well enough to let the audience glimpse his secret life. To its credit, the screenplay handles the coding well, too, although we never find out why he was committed to the asylum: Something happened in a toy store, it seems, so maybe we're supposed to infer that William was a pedophile rather than gay. (Although in 1946, the two were often regarded as synonymous.) But despite these flaws, Repeat Performance is a watchable, if frustrating, movie. 

Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)

Gary Cooper and Joan Leslie in Sergeant York

Alvin C. York: Gary Cooper
Pastor Rosier Pile: Walter Brennan
Gracie Williams: Joan Leslie
Mother York: Margaret Wycherly
"Pusher" Ross: George Tobias
Major Buxton: Stanley Ridges
Ike Botkin: Ward Bond
Buck Lipscomb: Noah Beery Jr.
Rosie York: June Lockhart
George York: Dickie Moore
Zeke: Clem Bevans
Lem: Howard Da Silva

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Abem Finkel, Harry Chandlee, Howard Koch, John Huston
Based on a diary by Alvin C. York edited by Tom Skeyhill
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: John Hughes
Film editing: William Holmes
Music: Max Steiner

Sheer Hollywood biopic hokum made watchable by Howard Hawks and Gary Cooper, along with a colorful supporting cast. Sergeant York earned Hawks his one and only Oscar nomination for directing -- not Bringing Up Baby (1938) or Only Angels Have Wings (1939) or His Girl Friday (1940) or To Have and Have Not (1944) or The Big Sleep (1946) or Red River (1948) or Rio Bravo (1959), more than two decades of the most entertaining movies anyone ever made. It was in fact Hawks's lack of the kind of high seriousness so often rewarded with Oscars that makes Sergeant York still entertaining today, which is why he lost to John Ford for How Green Was My Valley, a directing Oscar that by rights should have gone to Orson Welles for Citizen Kane. It's fairly clear that Hawks doesn't take Sergeant York entirely seriously, with its exteriors built on the soundstage, its well-scrubbed hillbillies, its cornpone hijinks and caricature religiosity, not to mention dialogue that sounds straight out of Al Capp's "Li'l Abner." But it also takes a Gary Cooper to deliver speeches like "I believe in the bible and I'm a-believin' that this here life we're a-livin' is something the good lord done give us and we got to be a-livin' it the best we can, and I'm a-figurin' that killing other folks ain't no part of what he was intendin' for us to be a-doin' here." Granted, Cooper had just turned 40 and was a good deal too old to play Alvin C. York, but his characteristic sly, shy self-effacement is essential to the role. The old story that York himself said that he wouldn't allow himself to be played on film by anyone else but Cooper sounds like the work of a Warner Bros. publicist, and one biographer has suggested that it was a hoax cooked up by producer Jesse L. Lasky to persuade Cooper to take the part, but se non è vero, è ben trovato -- if it's not true, it ought to be. Sergeant York cleaned up at the box office, especially when it got a second run after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and raked in 11 Oscar nominations, winning for Cooper and for film editing. Other nominees include Margaret Wycherly as Mother York -- a far cry from her killer mama in Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949) -- and Walter Brennan, with his false teeth in and his eyebrows darkened, as Pastor Pile, along with the screenwriters, cinematographer Sol Polito, the art direction, the sound, and Max Steiner's patriotic tune-quoting score. It can't be taken seriously today, but it can be enjoyed.

High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra

Roy Earle: Humphrey Bogart
Marie: Ida Lupino
Red: Arthur Kennedy
Babe: Alan Curtis
Velma: Joan Leslie
Pa: Henry Travers
Louis Mendoza: Cornel Wilde
Big Mac: Donald MacBride
"Doc" Banton: Henry Hull
Algernon: Willie Best
Jake Kranmer: Barton MacLane
Healy: Jerome Cowan

Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: John Huston, W.R. Burnett
Based on a novel by W.R. Burnett
Cinematography: Tony Gaudio
Film editing: Jack Killifer
Music: Adolph Deutsch

Ida Lupino gets first billing in High Sierra, an indication of where Humphrey Bogart's career stood at the time. He had labored for Warner Bros. for more than a decade as a supporting actor, usually in gangster films and occasionally miscast in roles like the Irish stablemaster in Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939). High Sierra would be a breakthrough into leading man roles, establishing his persona as a tough guy with a soft heart, as in films like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944). He owes his role in High Sierra in large part to its screenwriter, John Huston, who as a director would emphasize the tough Bogart over the softie: the brutal Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the vicious Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). In High Sierra, however, although Roy Earle has just been released from prison and is off to pull another caper, he's full of nostalgia for his childhood as a farmboy and along the road adopts a family heading west, where Pa hopes to get a job and help his granddaughter, Velma, get surgery for her clubfoot. Roy gets soft on Velma and pays for the operation, but his proposal is turned down. Just as Roy has a soft side, Velma is at heart a party girl and wants to go back east and hook up with her ne'er-do-well boyfriend. High Sierra is full of reversals like that. Lupino, for example, plays a party girl who goes soft on Roy and turns into a stand-by-your-man accomplice. And there's even a cute little dog who turns out to be a jinx and rats on Roy at a crucial moment. There's a good deal of silliness in the plotting of High Sierra, as well as some lamentable racist shtick forced on the fine comic actor Willie Best, who is usually caught napping and awakens with his eyes crossed. But at its best, especially in the climactic chase scene along winding dirt roads in the Sierra, the film is a good vehicle for Bogart's leap into superstardom.