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.

Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931)

Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi, and Eleanor Wesselhoeft in Street Scene

Rose Maurrant: Sylvia Sidney
Sam Kaplan: William Collier Jr.
Anna Maurrant: Estelle Taylor
Emma Jones: Beulah Bondi
Frank Maurrant: David Landau
Vincent Jones: Frank McHugh
Steve Sankey: Russell Hopton
Mae Jones: Greta Granstedt
Greta Fiorentino: Eleanor Wesselhoeft
Bert Easter: Walter Miller
Abe Kaplan: Max Montor
Shirley Kaplan: Ann Kostant
Dick McGann: Allen Fox
Karl Olsen: John Qualen
Willie Maurrant: Lambert Rogers
Filippo Fiorentino: George Humbert
Laura Hildebrand: Helen Lovett
Alice Simpson: Nora Cecil

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Elmer Rice
Based on a play by Elmer Rice
Cinematography: George Barnes
Production design: Richard Day
Film editing: Hugh Bennett
Music: Alfred Newman

Eighty-seven years later, King Vidor's Street Scene remains one of the best translations ever made of a stage play into a movie. I think it's largely because Vidor and screenwriter Elmer Rice, adapting his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, avoided the temptation to "open out" the play. The focus of both play and film has to be the façade of the tenement house in which the characters live. Director and writer resist the temptation to go inside, even to show the double murder that forms the climax of the drama. Vidor does give the setting a little more context, with shots of the street and the city rooftops, and there's a scene inside a taxicab arriving at the brownstone, as well as a swish-pan montage of faces popping into windows along the street as people hear the gunshots. But virtually all of the action takes place where it should: on the front steps and in the flanking and upper-story windows of the tenement. What keeps Street Scene from bogging down as one-set films tend to do is the constant mobility of the camera, seeking out a variety of angles on the characters as they come and go. Several of the actors, including Beulah Bondi, John Qualen, Eleanor Wesselhoeft, George Humbert, and Ann Kostant, had performed their roles on Broadway, so they were already keyed into the kind of ensemble playing that Street Scene demands. This was Bondi's film debut, and she's a standout in the key role of the malicious gossip Emma Jones, a hypocrite whose son is a bully and whose daughter behaves like what Emma would call a tramp if she were someone else's daughter. The newcomers to the play also handle themselves admirably, especially Sylvia Sidney and Estelle Taylor as Rose Maurrant and her mother, Anna. The weak link in the cast is William Collier Jr. as Sam Kaplan, who comes across as something of a wuss, unable to defend himself against the bullying Vincent Jones, and a sap in his love scenes with Sidney's Rose, making us wonder what she sees in him. Street Scene also trades a little heavily in stereotypes: the Italians who love music, the Irishman who's a drunk, the Jews who are somewhat isolated from the rest of the tenants, and even the Swede with a comic accent -- one of John Qualen's specialties. Like most of the films produced by Sam Goldwyn, Street Scene has high production values, particularly Richard Day's set, which was modeled on Jo Mielziner's Broadway set; the cinematography by George Barnes with some uncredited assistance from Gregg Toland; and Alfred Newman's score, which features a bluesy Gershwinesque theme that he would re-use in half a dozen other movies even after he left Goldwyn for 20th Century Fox.

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Barbara O'Neil and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas

Stella Dallas: Barbara Stanwyck
Stephen Dallas: John Boles
Laurel Dallas: Anne Shirley
Helen Morrison: Barbara O'Neil
Ed Munn: Alan Hale
Mrs. Martin: Marjorie Main
Charlie Martin: George Walcott
Miss Phillibrown: Ann Shoemaker
Richard Grosvenor: Tim Holt

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty and its dramatization by Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Gertrude Purcell
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Sherman Todd
Costume design: Omar Kiam
Music: Alfred Newman

I'm bothered by an inconsistency in the title character of King Vidor's Stella Dallas. When Stella's estranged husband, Stephen, shows up unexpectedly at Christmastime bearing gifts for her and their daughter, Laurel, Stella makes a determined effort to look "respectable": She rummages through her closet, rejecting all the flowery, overtrimmed dresses she usually favors, and chooses a black dress, removing most of its trimmings, and even goes so far as to wipe off the lipstick she has just applied. But later, when she takes Laurel to a snooty resort, she's a blowsy horror again, swaggering vulgarly through the amused upperclass crowd -- and thereby precipitating the final separation between her and Laurel. What happened to the self-aware Stella who knew how to present herself as a suitable mate for Stephen Dallas? But the thing about this inconsistency, and other little melodramatic clichés that infest the film, is that it doesn't matter: Stella Dallas triumphs because Barbara Stanwyck believes in her and because King Vidor knows how to manipulate our responses to the characters. Stella's appearance at the resort is played as simultaneously comic -- who doesn't laugh at the way she's dressed, swanning around with a white fox fur? -- and tragic -- Stella's insistence on being herself is her fatal flaw. Similarly, when Ed Munn shows up drunk, wagging around a large turkey he has brought for Stella and Laurel's Christmas and stuffing it head, feet, and all into the oven, the scene is hilarious -- Alan Hale is wonderful here -- until it isn't, until we realize the damage it is going to do to Stella and her daughter. And the celebrated final scene, of Stella watching Laurel's wedding through the window, is beautifully performed by Stanwyck, chewing on her handkerchief, and magisterially staged by Vidor. Tears are flowing in the audience as Stella strides across the street, but she's beaming, having accomplished her chief goal: to see Laurel happy. Critiques of the movie's treatment of maternal self-sacrifice, or of marriage as the consummation of a woman's happiness, are many and cogent. But let's just take a moment to reflect on the skill with which these ideas and attitudes, retrograde as we may find them, have been presented on film.

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead

Howard Roark: Gary Cooper
Dominique Francon: Patricia Neal
Gail Wynand: Raymond Massey
Ellsworth M. Toohey: Robert Douglas
Peter Keating: Kent Smith
Henry Cameron: Henry Hull
Roger Enright: Ray Collins

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Ayn Rand
Based on a novel by Ayn Rand
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Art direction: Edward Carrere
Music: Max Steiner

Ayn Rand, proponent of a "philosophy" beloved of 20-year-old frat-boy business majors, is still very much with us, as the would-be Randian Übermensch currently inhabiting the White House too well demonstrates. So it's probably worth brushing up on the ideas that seem to captivate perpetual adolescents and sociopaths. Fortunately, you don't have to slog through her doorstop novels to get the gist: All you have to do is watch The Fountainhead, for which she wrote the screenplay. Its sociopath hero, Howard Roark, would be intolerable if he weren't played by Gary Cooper, taking on a role that is a curious inversion of the "common man" he played for Frank Capra in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) or the pawn of the Establishment in Meet John Doe (1941). Cooper's occasional eye twinkles or wry smiles help keep us from believing that he's really the kind of arrogant shit who says things like "I don't give or ask for help" or "The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing." As Dominique Francon, Patricia Neal does a lot of seething and surging about; it's not a good performance by a long shot, but it's watchable. But Raymond Massey manages to give an almost good performance, even when forced to deliver lines like: "What I want to find in our marriage will remain my own concern. I exact no promises and impose no obligations. Incidentally, since it is of no importance to you, I love you." Was ever woman in this humor wooed? The real saving grace of The Fountainhead, however, is its director, King Vidor, whose career began and flourished in the silent era, with classics like The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928), which honed his visual sense before he had to work with dialogue. If The Fountainhead had been a silent movie, not cluttered with Rand's dialogue and sermonizing, it might have been a classic itself, especially since it had a first-rate cinematographer in Robert Burks and a clever set designer in Edward Carrere. Max Steiner's overbearing score also helps distract us from the clanking and clattering of Rand's screenplay. The Fountainhead, in short, is a hoot, but a perversely fascinating one.

Watched on Filmstruck

The Patsy (King Vidor, 1928)

King Vidor is not generally known as a comedy director, and The Patsy shows why: Vidor seems to have no sense of how to set up a gag, merely letting the skilled comic acting of Marion Davies as the put-upon younger sister, Pat Hamilton, and Marie Dressler and Dell Henderson as her parents, do the work. The result is a giddy, silly movie with a good many laughs, but not much coherence. Pat is smitten with Tony Anderson (Orville Caldwell), but her sister, Grace (Jane Winton) has her hooks in him -- until, that is, she starts running around with playboy Billy Caldwell (Lawrence Gray). Pat tries to win Tony by memorizing joke books -- for a silent film The Patsy is unusually heavy on gags in the intertitles -- but this only makes her parents, especially her domineering mother, think she's gone mad. Then she tries to make Tony jealous by pretending that she's in love with Billy, arriving at his house when he's drunk and trying to woo him by imitating movie stars like Mae Murray, Lillian Gish, and Gloria Swanson. Davies's skill and charm makes all of this palatable if not plausible, but almost every scene is stolen by Dressler, who uses face and body to upstage everyone. Vidor and Davies teamed again the same year for Show People, another comedy.

Bardelys the Magnificent (King Vidor, 1926)

This entertaining swashbuckler was long thought to be lost, apparently because of a contractual agreement between MGM and Rafael Sabatini, author of the novel on which it was based. When the studio failed to renew the rights to the novel in 1936, it destroyed the negative and all the prints it could get its hands on. Fortunately, 70 years later a print surfaced in France, missing only one reel that the restorers pieced together with production stills and footage from the original trailer. It was a good save, especially for the legacy of its director, King Vidor, and its star, John Gilbert. Vidor stages several lively swordfights and a memorable love scene in which Bardelys (Gilbert) woos Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman) in a boat as it passes through the overhanging branches of a willow tree. But the film's highlight is a spectacular escape from the gallows, in which Gilbert (almost certainly with the help of his stunt double) outdoes Douglas Fairbanks in swinging from ropes and curtains, climbing walls, and fencing with pursuers. The story is romantic nonsense in which Bardelys, a womanizing marquis at the court of Louis XIII, makes a wager that he can win the hand of Roxalanne, who has spurned the advances of the very hissable villain, Châtellerault (Roy D'Arcy). To win the bet, Bardelys finds himself assuming the identity of a man he finds dead, Lesperon (played by Theodore von Eltz in the missing reel), an enemy of the king. Sure enough, he and Roxalanne fall in love under the willows, but his imposture not only turns her against him when she finds proof that Lesperon is engaged to someone else, but also puts him in danger of being hanged for treason, especially after Châtellerault turns up and refuses to disclose that Lesperon is really Bardelys. Dorothy Farnum adapted the novel, and the cinematography is by William H. Daniels. The cast supposedly includes the 19-year-old John Wayne as a guard, in only his second film appearance, but good luck spotting him. I didn't.

Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)

Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun

Pearl Chavez: Jennifer Jones
Lewt McCanles: Gregory Peck
Jesse McCanles: Joseph Cotten
Senator Jackson McCanles: Lionel Barrymore
Scott Chavez: Herbert Marshall
Laura Belle McCanles: Lillian Gish
The Sinkiller: Walter Huston
Sam Pierce: Charles Bickford
Lem Smoot: Harry Carey
Mrs. Chavez: Tilly Losch
Vashti: Butterfly McQueen

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: David O. Selznick, Oliver H.P. Garrett
Based on a novel by Niven Busch
Cinematography: Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, Harold Rosson
Production design: J. McMillan Johnson
Film editing: Hal C. Kern
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

This is a bad movie, but it's one distinguished in the annals of bad movies because it was made by David O. Selznick, who as the poster shouts at you was "The Producer Who Gave You 'GONE WITH THE WIND.'" Selznick made it to showcase Jennifer Jones, the actress who won an Oscar as the saintly Bernadette of Lourdes in The Song of Bernadette (Henry King, 1943). Selznick, who left his wife for Jones, wanted to demonstrate that she was capable of much more than the sweetly gentle piety of Bernadette, so he cast her as the sultry Pearl Chavez in this adaptation (credited to Selznick himself along with Oliver H.P. Garrett, with some uncredited help by Ben Hecht) of the novel by Niven Busch. Opposite Jones, Selznick cast Gregory Peck as the amoral cowboy Lewt McCanles, who shares a self-destructive passion with Pearl. Both actors are radically miscast. Jones does a lot of eye- and teeth-flashing as Pearl, while Peck's usual good-guy persona undermines his attempts to play rapaciously sexy. The plot is one of those familiar Western tropes: good brother Jesse against bad 'un Lewt, reflecting the ill-matched personalities of their parents, the tough old cattle baron Jackson McCanles and his gentle (and genteel) wife, Laura Belle. Pearl is an orphan, the improbable daughter of an improbable couple, the educated Scott Chavez and a sexy Indian woman, who angers him by fooling around with another man. Chavez kills both his wife and her lover and is hanged for it, so Pearl is sent to live with the McCanleses -- Laura Belle is Chavez's second cousin and old sweetheart -- on their Texas ranch. It's all pretentiously packaged by Selznick: not many other movies begin with both a "Prelude" and an "Overture," composed by Dimitri Tiomkin in the best overblown Hollywood style. It has Technicolor as lurid as its story, shot by three major cinematographers, Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, and Harold Rosson. But any attempt to generate real heat between Jones and Peck was quickly stifled by the Production Code, which even forced Selznick to introduce a voiceover at the beginning to explain that the character of the frontier preacher known as "The Sinkiller" (entertainingly played by Walter Huston) was not intended to be a representative clergyman. There are a few good moments, including an impressive tracking shot at the barbecue on the ranch in which various guests offer their opinions of Pearl, the McCanles brothers, and other things. Whether this scene can be credited to director King Vidor, who was certainly capable of it, is an open question, because Vidor found working with the obsessive Selznick so difficult that he quit the film. Selznick directed some scenes, as did Otto Brower, William Dieterle, Sidney Franklin, William Cameron Menzies, and Josef von Sternberg, all uncredited. The resulting melange is not unwatchable, thanks to a few good performances (Huston, Charles Bickford, Harry Carey), and perhaps also to some really terrible ones (Lionel Barrymore at his most florid and Butterfly McQueen repeating her fluttery air-headedness from GWTW).

The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)

The Crowd begins with the birth of John Sims (James Murray) and the prophecy that he will be somebody, a belief that he clings to 12 years later, on the day his father dies suddenly. And then there's a jump to 21-year-old John arriving in New York City, still fired with ambition. The jump leaves an odd hole in the narrative: We expect his father's death to have made an impact on his expectations -- to have shown him, for example, the threat of the unexpected or the value of hard work. But 21-year-old John is a bit feckless, a dreamer who can't quite get in gear to succeed. He falls in love too easily, and is soon married to a woman named Mary (Eleanor Boardman), because the John-and-Mary trope is a little too hard for Vidor and his co-scenarists John V.A. Weaver and Harry Behn to resist. This is a 20th-century Everyman story. If the hole in John's backstory is obvious, however, Vidor makes the father's death a visual motif by an expressionistic shot of young John in the stairwell of his house when he learns of the death, a remarkable image of entrapment that Vidor echoes throughout the film: The skyscrapers of New York, for example, loom in the same funnel-like way as the stairwell. But most celebrated image of entrapment in The Crowd is the web-like rows of desks in the insurance office where John finds work but not fulfillment -- an image frequently imitated, most notably by Billy Wilder in The Apartment (1960). (It's worth noting the work of cinematographer Henry Sharp here, as well as the set designers Cedric Gibbons -- who may or may not have done actual work on the sets, since as head of MGM's design department, Gibbons had his name put on every film -- and A. Arnold Gillespie.) As a parable about modern work, The Crowd is an enduring film. John gets what little satisfaction he has from creativity -- in his case, entering contests to write advertising slogans -- and not from what he has to do to earn a living. Murray turned out to be a case of life imitating art: He was an alcoholic who, like John Sims, had trouble staying employed, but while the movie ends on an optimistic note for the character, the actor died at age 35, in a drowning that was possibly a suicide.

John Sims, age 12 (Johnny Downs), learns of his father's death.

A skyscraper echoes the stairwell scene in The Crowd.

The insurance office in The Crowd.

La Bohème (King Vidor, 1926)

Bohème without Puccini, except for a few themes from the opera interpolated into the piano accompaniment for the print shown on Turner Classic Movies. The screenplay by Fred De Gresac is said to be "suggested by Life in the Latin Quarter" by Henri Murger, which is also the source of the opera libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. But since the librettists took liberties with Murger, combining several characters and incidents from his fiction, it's pretty clear that De Gresac was a good deal closer to the opera version than to Murger. It's very much a vehicle for Lillian Gish, who wanted John Gilbert to play Rodolphe to her Mimi, but sometimes seems to be playing an anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better game with her co-star. There is, for example, a scene in which Gilbert acts out the proposed ending to the play he is writing, with much swashbuckling. Then, a few scenes later, Gish acts it out again with similar verve for a potential backer for the play. Their courtship is a surprisingly hyperactive one, particularly in the scene in which they and their fellow bohemians go on a picnic that involves much running about. And Gish is not content to die calmly: On hearing that she won't live through the night, she makes a mad dash across Paris to be reunited with her lover, at one point allowing herself to be dragged along the streets while hanging onto the back of a horse-cart. Gilbert poses with feet apart and arms akimbo once too often, and the starving bohemians are given to much dashing and dancing. (Among them is the endearing and enduring Edward Everett Horton as Colline.) It's all a bit too much, and I have a feeling that the TCM print is being shown at the wrong speed, giving it that herky-jerky quality we used to attribute to silent films before experts corrected the speed at which they should be projected. The costumes are by the celebrated designer Erté, who is said to have had so much trouble working with Gish that he gave up designing for Hollywood.

Show People (King Vidor, 1928)

William Haines and Marion Davies in Show People

Peggy Pepper: Marion Davies
Billy Boone: William Haines
Col. Pepper: Dell Henderson
Andre Telfair: Paul Ralli
Casting Director: Tenen Holtz
Comedy Director: Harry Gribbon
Dramatic Director: Sidney Bracey
Maid: Polly Moran
Producer: Albert Conti

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Agnes Christine Johnston, Laurence Stallings, Wanda Tuchock; Titles: Ralph Spence
Cinematography: John Arnold
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Hugh Wynn

It's a shame that Marion Davies is known today primarily as William Randolph Hearst's mistress, and hence the presumable model for the talentless opera singer Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). For Davies was not only not an opera singer, she was also bursting with talent. King Vidor's Show People demonstrates her skill for comedy, acknowledged as an inspiration by such later glamorous comedians as Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball. Everything Davies could do except talk -- this is one of her last silent films -- is on display, including her skill at slapstick: She does a fine pratfall and takes copious amounts of seltzer in the face. (Hearst reportedly forbade her being the recipient of a custard pie -- that was somehow one shtick beneath her.) She mugs divinely as the comic actress Peggy Pepper who is "promoted" into the serious artiste Patricia Pepoire. Attempting a Mae Murray-style bee-stung lips, Davies comes up with a hilariously rabbity moue. The movie also gives us a chance to see William Haines at work. One of the few leading men of the day who dared to lead an almost openly gay life, Haines plays the comic actor who gives Peggy her first break into pictures, loses her when she tries to become a dramatic actress, but of course finally gets her after she sheds the Patricia Pepoire persona. When he was ordered by MGM's bullying Louis B. Mayer to pretend to be straight in his offscreen life, Haines quit pictures and became a successful interior designer; his life partner, Jimmie Shields, became his business partner as well. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were among their clients. Show People also has cameos by Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, and other stars of the day. Peggy Pepper even encounters Marion Davies herself in one scene.