Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941)

Constance Bennett, Melvyn Douglas, Greta Garbo, and Robert Sterling in Two-Faced Woman

Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett, Roland Young, Ruth Gordon, Robert Sterling, Frances Carson. Screenplay: S.N. Behrman, Salka Viertel, George Oppenheimer, based on a play by Ludwig Fulda. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Daniel B. Cathcart. Film editing: George Boemler. Music: Bronislau Kaper. 

Two-Faced Woman is famous for only one thing: It was Greta Garbo's last film. Otherwise, it's a confused attempt at a screwball comedy, meant in part to revamp Garbo's image, which had largely been created in costume dramas like Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935), and her greatest triumph, Camille (George Cukor, 1936). Her most recent hit, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), had been hyped with the tagline "Garbo Laughs," and MGM thought giving Garbo a looser, more contemporary image might be profitable. So in Two-Faced Woman, she not only laughs, she skis, swims, and even dances. She's also reunited with her Ninotchka co-star, Melvyn Douglas, who plays Larry Blake, a New York magazine editor-publisher who falls (quite literally, down a mountainside) for Garbo's outdoorsy ski instructor. They marry in haste, and you know what that means. Garbo's character, Karin, doesn't want to live in the city, but when Larry spends more and more time there, she gets fed up and pursues him. Eventually, through a variety of plot contrivances, she pretends to be her own twin sister, Katherine, a vamp who drinks and smokes and dances -- all things that Karin doesn't do. At some point, the censors intervened and made the script indicate that Larry sees through this imposture, so that when he falls for the vivacious Katherine instead of the virtuous Karin, we know that he's just pretending. It's a familiar trope in sitcoms and screwball comedy, but the screenplay botches it badly. There are some bright moments contributed by Constance Bennett as the "other woman" in Larry's life and Ruth Gordon as his secretary, but for the most part it's confused and unfunny -- even the usually reliably brilliant Roland Young feels off his game, and Cukor, who had often demonstrated such a sure hand with this kind of material, doesn't seem to have his heart in it. That it was a critical and box office flop is often cited as the reason Garbo never made another movie; she asked to be let out of her MGM contract after it was made, but there's plenty of evidence that she toyed with returning to the screen over the remaining almost 50 years of her life.  

Comrade X (King Vidor, 1940)

Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X

Cast: Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Oskar Homolka, Felix Bressart, Eve Arden, Sig Ruman, Natasha Lytess, Vladimir Sokoloff, Edgar Barrier, Georges Revenant, Mikhail Rasumny. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, Walter Reisch. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown. Film editing: Harold F. Kress. Music: Bronislau Kaper.

Comrade X is one of those "what could they have been thinking" movies. It's a farce about international relations made as Europe was skidding into nightmare. Hitler and Stalin had just signed their infamous pact and the Germans were beginning to bomb London. Although the United States was still officially neutral, it was clear that everything was about to be sucked into a major war. So why make such a silly movie about the love affair of an American reporter and a beautiful Soviet streetcar conductor? Actually, it's quite clear what MGM was thinking: Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) was a hit, and we've got this new star Hedy Lamarr who has an accent, and Clark Gable's available, so why don't we put them in a kind of remake? Walter Reisch, who worked on the screenplay for Ninotchka, can surely come up with some sort of variation on the theme of lovely Russian commie seduced by Western capitalist, and we can get some reliably funny writers like Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer to punch up the dialogue. We can even throw in some of the guys from the cast of Ninotchka that we've got under contract, like Felix Bressart and Sig Ruman. Write a part for a wisecracking dame like Eve Arden and hire a top director like King Vidor, and what could go wrong? Pretty much everything, as it turned out. Comrade X's lampoon of Soviet spycraft and censorship would look rather odd only a couple of years later, when the United States entered the war and found itself allied with the Soviets. The comedy turned sour when references to mass executions found their way into the script. Lamarr is pretty and Gable is virile but they don't really connect. And the plot climaxes with an absurd scene in which the protagonists steal a tank and lead a whole battalion of tanks (pretty obviously miniatures) on a chase that ends with all of them plunging off a cliff. It's as clumsy as that sounds. Hecht and Lederer do contribute a few bright lines: "You can't have a revolution in a country where the people love hot dogs and boogie-woogie." There's some fun in the character bits contributed by Bressart, Ruman, and Oskar Homolka, and in Arden's acerbic asides. But the whole thing feels cobbled together from leftovers and uninspired by original thought.

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

Cast: Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan, Ian Hunter, Florence Rice. Screenplay: Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer, Jack McGowan, Dore Schary. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh, Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Songs: Cole Porter.

Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942)

Ronald Colman in Random Harvest

Charles Rainier: Ronald Colman
Paula: Greer Garson
Dr. Jonathan Benet: Philip Dorn
Kitty: Susan Peters
Dr. Sims: Henry Travers
"Biffer": Reginald Owen
Harrison: Bramwell Fletcher
Sam: Rhys Williams
Tobacconist: Una O'Connor
Sheldon: Aubrey Mather
Mrs. Deventer: Margaret Wycherly
Chetwynd: Arthur Margetson
George: Melville Cooper

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Claudine West, George Froeschel, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Harold F. Kress
Music: Herbert Stothart

It's a good thing that amnesia is as rare an affliction in real life as it is, because it gives the crafters of melodrama free rein to imagine its effects, such as the case of what might be called "double amnesia" that plagues Charles Rainier in Random Harvest. For not only does Rainer forget who he is once, after suffering shell shock in the trenches of World War I, he then forgets what happened to him during that bout of amnesia after being hit by a taxi and brought back to his senses. That is, having once forgotten that he was heir to a lucrative family business, he now forgets that he wandered away from the asylum where he was being treated and fell in love with Paula, a music hall performer who devoted herself to him as he launched a career as a writer named John Smith -- she calls him Smithy. But plucky Paula learns the truth about her Smithy, goes to business school and learns to be a high-powered corporate secretary, and gets herself hired as Charles Rainier's executive secretary -- all without revealing the truth about that lost passage in their lives. Was ever such nonsense taken seriously? Yes, indeed, because it's filmed through MGM's highest-quality gauze, with Ronald Colman at his handsome stoic best and Greer Garson at her plummiest and dewiest, full of trembling self-sacrifice. It was a huge hit, partly because it hit wartime audiences where they lived: separated wives and husbands, uncertain whether they they would be reunited and made whole again. Today, we can look back on Random Harvest with irony, or view it as a product of a particular period of Hollywood history that will never come again. But it's made with such affection for its improbabilities, which are manifold, that I can't help admiring it.

Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight

Paula Alquist: Ingrid Bergman
Gregory Anton: Charles Boyer
Brian Cameron: Joseph Cotten
Miss Thwaites: May Whitty
Nancy: Angela Lansbury
Elizabeth: Barbara Everest

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L Balderston
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: William Ferrari, Cedric Gibbons

There is a tendency among critic-historians to prefer the 1940 Thorold Dickinson film of Gaslight to the slicker and more opulent 1944 version directed by George Cukor, partly because MGM attempted to suppress the earlier film -- an absurd and vicious effort that evidently failed. But although I myself went along with that attitude in my entry on the Dickinson version, I have to admit that rewatching Cukor's film has brought me around, partly because Cukor is a director I have more and more come to appreciate for his warm professionalism. He loves actors and showcasing them, which he does to great effect in the 1944 film, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman -- largely, I think, for her wonderful scene in which Paula turns the tables on Anton -- as well as bringing out Charles Boyer's great gift for attractive menace. And perhaps best of all, giving the teenage Angela Lansbury an opportunity to shine -- and to earn the first of her sadly unrewarded Oscar nominations. Lansbury's Nancy is a saucy baggage, and she steals the show from the stars by wielding her sharp little chin like a knife, making Paula's fear of Nancy entirely credible while flirting boldly with Anton. May Whitty as the nosy Miss Thwaites, with her delight in the macabre, provides a needed bit of comic relief, too. Her curtain line, "Well!", when she comes upon Paula with Brian Cameron after Anton's arrest, provides a satisfactory ending, partly because it's delivered in a different tone -- this time one of delight -- than her earlier scandalized "Well!" when she saw Paula and Anton kissing. This is high Hollywood filmmaking at its most satisfying.