Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Cast: Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly, Virginia O'Brien, Rags Ragland, Zero Mostel, Donald Meek, Douglass Dumbrille, George Givot, Louise Beavers, Tommy Dorsey. Screenplay: Nancy Hamilton, Irving Brecher, based on a play by Herbert Fields and Buddy G. DeSylva. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof, songs by Cole Porter, Burton Lane, Ralph Freed, Roger Edens, E.Y. Harburg. Costume design: Gile Steele.

Natalie Kalmus must have been in heaven. The ex-wife of Technicolor founder Herbert Kalmus, and the contract-designated "color supervisor" for any film using the process (as well as the bane of any directors or cinematographers who wanted to do it their own way), was surely delighted when MGM chose Red Skelton and Lucille Ball to star in Du Barry Was a Lady, thereby ensuring that Technicolor's most vivid hue, red, would be on display throughout the film. Ball's hair stylist, Sydney Guilaroff, even devised a new red hair dye for the star, one that she would continue to use -- even to make jokes about -- for the rest of her career. The movie itself is nonsense, one of MGM's second-string musicals, based on a Broadway hit that had starred Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman, but jettisoning not only its stars but also most of Porter's songs. Before it gets to the central gimmick -- Skelton accidentally gets slipped a mickey and dreams he's back in the court of Louis XV -- it's a string of night club routines, including a trio of singers who imitate the famous but now-forgotten big bands of the day, but also featuring one of the best big bands, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Skelton mugs a lot, but Zero Mostel, cast as a fortune-teller, mugs even more. At least Gene Kelly, the nominal romantic lead, gets to dance a bit. Ball was still in that stage of her career in which nobody seemed to know what to do with a beautiful woman who was also a gifted clown. Her best moments in the film come when she gets to do her clowning, as in a sequence in which Skelton (as Louis XV) chases her (as Madame DuBarry) around a bedroom and across a trampoline disguised as a bed. She also gets some funny moments in the film's closing number, Porter's "Friendship," goofing around with the rest of the cast. (It's also the one number in which her own singing voice is heard; the rest of the time she's dubbed by Martha Mears.) This is one of those movies for which the fast-forward button on the remote control was designed: Skip anything savoring of plot, most of the tedious mugging, the calendar-girl fashion show, but stop for the Dorsey numbers, the Kelly dances, and any time Ball is allowed to show what she did best.

Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)

Peter Lorre in Mad Love

Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy, Sara Haden, Edward Brophy, Henry Kolker, Keye Luke, May Beatty. Screenplay: Guy Endore, P.J. Wolfson, John L. Balderston, based on a novel by Maurice Renard. Cinematography: Chester A. Lyons, Gregg Toland. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Peter Lorre's American debut made him a specialist in creepy roles. He's Dr. Gogol, a mad physician, obsessed with a lovely actress (Frances Drake) married to a concert pianist (Colin Clive) who, when his hands are injured in an accident, allows the doctor to operate on them. But the doctor replaces the pianist's hands with those of a murderer, a specialist in knife-throwing, who has just been guillotined for his crimes. Naturally, this means that the pianist can't play anymore but develops a new talent for throwing sharp objects. And so on. It's a pretty well made piece of hokum that gained some late notoriety when Pauline Kael accused Orson Welles of stealing from it when he made Citizen Kane (1941), largely because both films had the same cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

The Horror, The Horror

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)

Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye in Dracula

Count Dracula: Bela Lugosi
Mina: Helen Chandler
John Harker: David Manners
Renfield: Dwight Frye
Van Helsing: Edward Van Sloan
Dr. Seward: Herbert Bunston
Lucy: Frances Dade

Director: Tod Browning
Screenplay: Garrett Fort
Based on a play by Hamilton Dean and John L. Balderston adapted from a novel by Bram Stoker
Cinematography: Karl Freund
Production design: John Hoffman, Herman Rosse
Film editing: Milton Carruth

Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)

Dwight Frye, Colin Clive, and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein

Henry Frankenstein: Colin Clive
Elizabeth: Mae Clarke
Victor Moritz: John Boles
The Monster: Boris Karloff
Baron Frankenstein: Frederick Kerr
Fritz: Dwight Frye
Dr. Waldman: Edward Van Sloan
The Burgomaster: Lionel Belmore
Little Maria: Marilyn Harris

Director: James Whale
Screenplay: Garrett Fort, Francis Edward Faragoh
Based on a story treatment by John L. Balderston of a play by Peggy Webling adapted from a novel by Mary Shelley
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Art direction: Charles D. Hall
Film editing: Clarence Kolster
Music: Bernhard Kaun

Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein have a lot in common. Both were based on stage plays adapted from celebrated novels; together they established the Universal studios as specialists in horror movies, the way gangster movies seemed to characterize Warner Bros. and musicals became identified as an MGM specialty; both launched the careers of actors known almost exclusively for their roles as monsters -- a millstone around the neck of the very talented Boris Karloff, an alternate identity for the less-gifted Bela Lugosi. There are some other incidental similarities: Both feature performances by Dwight Frye, a rather ordinary looking character actor who became a specialist in creep roles. In Dracula he's the vampire's stooge, Renfield, marked by a wheezing laugh that sounds like a cat trying to heave up a hairball. In Frankenstein he's the hunchbacked Fritz, stooge to the titular scientist. Both feature Edward Van Sloan as professorial types: the vampire expert Van Helsing and the ill-fated Dr. Waldman. Both have ingenues preyed upon by the monsters and handsome juveniles who try to be their stalwart defenders but mostly just get in the way. But Frankenstein is by far the better film than Dracula. It may be that James Whale was a more gifted director than Tod Browning, although Browning had a long career in silent films. including some standout Lon Chaney features, before Whale made his mark in Hollywood. Or it may just be that Dracula was made first, so that everyone working on Frankenstein could learn from its mistakes. Browning, I think, hadn't quite gotten used to making talkies, so that the pacing of Dracula is off: Scenes and speeches seem to halt a little longer than they need to. Dracula also betrays its origins on the stage more than Frankenstein. Apart from the spectacle of the storm at sea, there's little in Dracula that couldn't have been put on stage, whereas Frankenstein is loaded with spectacle: the opening funeral and grave-robbing scene; the sparking and flashing laboratory equipment and the thunderstorm; the murder of Little Maria; the torch-bearing villagers and the burning of the old mill. One thing they don't have much of is actual scary stuff, especially as compared to today's blood-and-gore horror movies. To contemporary audiences, Dracula and Frankenstein seem bloodless and gutless, and Dracula in particular has been deprived of its shock value by Lugosi's lack of sex appeal -- vampirism is a sexual threat, given its preoccupation with the exchange of bodily fluids, which is why vampires have gotten hotter over the years. The monster in Frankenstein on the other hand elicits sympathy: It's alone in a world it never made, which is why some think Whale, a gay man, betrays an identification with the character.  

Camille (George Cukor, 1936)

Henry Daniell and Greta Garbo in Camille

Marguerite Gautier: Greta Garbo
Armand Duval: Robert Taylor
Baron de Varville: Henry Daniell
M. Duval: Lionel Barrymore
Prudence Duvernoy: Laura Hope Crews
Nanine: Jessie Ralph
Olympe: Lenore Ulric
Gaston: Rex O'Malley
Nichette: Elizabeth Allan

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, James Hilton
Based on a novel and play by Alexandre Dumas fils
Cinematography: William H. Daniels, Karl Freund
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis
Music: Herbert Stothart
Costume design: Adrian

MGM was notoriously a producers' studio, a factory system in which the director was rarely allowed to stand out as the guiding influence on a movie. But somehow out of MGM's producer-driven concentration on high style in sets and costumes, and above all on the production of "more stars than there are in the heavens," George Cukor managed to emerge as one of the great directors. He did it in part by his ability to elicit definitive performances from actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford -- and later Judy Holliday and Judy Garland -- but most especially from Greta Garbo in Camille. Garbo's Marguerite Gautier is of course one of the great creations by an actress in the movies, but the remarkable thing about Camille is that Cukor is able to keep her performance from swamping the film. He remembers that there is an ensemble to work with that includes not only such formidable scene-stealers as Lionel Barrymore and Laura Hope Crews, but also a raw, untrained leading man, Robert Taylor. It's to Cukor's credit that Taylor holds up as well as he does against a luminous presence like Garbo, though it's perhaps to Garbo's credit that she makes us believe Marguerite is so profoundly infatuated with a man who has nothing but good looks to work with. Though Camille was always destined to be The Greta Garbo Show, Cukor makes her part of a very entertaining whole. He manages to modulate Lionel Barrymore's usual camera-hogging and turn him into a credible concerned paterfamilias -- in fact, Cukor directed two of the few Barrymore performances I really find myself enjoying, the other being Mr. Peggotty in David Copperfield (1935). He tames another performance that could have got out of hand in Henry Daniell's arrogant Baron de Varville, though he might have reined in Daniell's attempt to turn the French baron into an English upperclass ass: Daniell lays on the r-tapping (e.g., "veddy" for "very") a little heavily, and when he's asked if he wants to dine replies, "Ai'm not hungreh." Which brings us back to Garbo, who is glorious from her febrile first moment, clutching the camellias as if they were life itself slipping away, to her last, a death scene that has never been equaled. Garbo knew that the best performances are the most "actressy," the ones that transcend realism, that throw down a challenge to other actresses: Top this if you can. It's a knowledge demonstrated by many others, from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep. (Jennifer Lawrence shows signs of learning it, too.) Call it camp if you will, label them divas if you want, but the movies would be poorer without it.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)

This was the fourth and last of the films that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, but the movie was stolen by Claire Trevor, who won a supporting actress Oscar, and by Bogart's old partner in Warner Bros. gangster movies, Edward G. Robinson. It's a little too talky and stagy, partly because it was based on a 1939 Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson, a once-admired playwright whose specialty was blank-verse dramas. Huston and co-screenwriter Richard Brooks took great liberties with the play, changing the characters and the ending, and updating the action to the postwar era, but occasionally you can hear a bit of Anderson's iambic pentameter in the dialogue. Bogart's Frank McCloud was originally called King McCloud and was a deserter from the Spanish Civil War; in the movie he's a World War II veteran, something of a hero, who comes to Key Largo to visit the father (Lionel Barrymore) and the widow (Bacall) of an army buddy who was killed in Italy. He finds them being held in the hotel they own by a group of gangsters, headed by Johnny Rocco (Robinson), a Prohibition-era mobster who is trying to sneak back into the States after being deported. As so often -- cf. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) and To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944) -- the Bogart character is called on to make a choice between taking the kind of action he has renounced and remaining neutral. Bacall's role is somewhat underwritten, and what few sparks she and Bogart strike seem to be the residue of their previous films together, especially To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946). Having to play opposite that scene-stealing old ham Barrymore doesn't help much, either. But Trevor fully deserved her award as Rocco's moll, an alcoholic club singer known as Gaye Dawn. She has a big moment when she's forced by Rocco to sing "Moanin' Low" on the promise that he'll let her have a drink -- which he then sadistically refuses her. As usual, Robinson is terrific, and also as usual, he failed to receive the Oscar nomination he deserved and was never granted. Karl Freund's cinematography helps overcome the studio's decision not to film on location.