The Divorce of Lady X (Tim Whelan, 1938)

Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X

Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Binnie Barnes, Ralph Richardson, Morton Selten, J.H. Roberts, Gertrude Musgrove, Gus McNaughton, H.B. Hallam, Eileen Peel. Screenplay: Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, Arthur Wimperis, based on a play by Gilbert Wakefield. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Film editing: Walter Stovkis. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Screwball comedy movies, in which an otherwise sober and respectable male, usually a lawyer, a professor, or a businessman, is prodded into absurd behavior and outlandish situations by a giddy, beautiful, and usually rich female, seem to be a particularly American genre. They may have their antecedents in the French farces of Feydeau and Labiche, but they need that American sense, particularly common in the Great Depression, that the rich are idle triflers, not to be trusted by everyday hard-working folk. Which may be why the British attempt at screwball seen in The Divorce of Lady X is a bit of a misfire. Merle Oberon plays the madcap lady in the film, who delights in deceiving and annoying the barrister played by Laurence Olivier until he inevitably falls in love with her. One problem with the film lies in the casting: Olivier's vulpine mien is not one that easily expresses naïveté, which the barrister Everard Logan must possess in order to fall for Leslie Steele's wiles, when she allows him to believe that she's really the scandalous Lady Mere. The real Lady Mere is played by Binnie Barnes, and the subplot revolves around the desire of her husband, played by Ralph Richardson, to divorce her, with the aid of Logan in the dual role of both barrister and corespondent -- how he got into that predicament is the rather clumsy setup for the film. Barnes and Richardson are far better suited to this kind of comedy than Oberon and Olivier, and they contribute some of the more amusing moments in the movie. It's filmed in the rather wan hues of early Technicolor, which only contribute to the general sense of underachievement.

Knight Without Armor (Jacques Feyder, 1937)

Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armor

Countess Alexandra: Marlene Dietrich
A.J. Fothergill: Robert Donat
Duchess: Irene Vanbrugh
Vladinoff: Herbert Lomas
Col. Adraxine: Austin Trevor
Axelstine: Basil Gill
Maronin: David Tree
Poushkoff: John Clements
Station Master: Hay Petrie
Drunken Commissar: Miles Malleson

Director: Jacques Feyder
Screenplay: Frances Marion, Lajos Biró, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Production design: Lazare Meerson
Film editing: Francis D. Lyon
Music: Miklós Rózsa

After the success of his film Carnival in Flanders (1935) Belgian director Jacques Feyder was lured to England by Alexander Korda to make Knight Without Armor, a rather preposterous thriller in which a British spy helps a Russian countess escape from the turmoil of the Russian revolution in 1917. He had two top-rank stars to work with: Robert Donat had just made a name for himself in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), in which he showed his skill at making outlandish thriller situations plausible, and Marlene Dietrich was looking for roles that would remove the "box-office poison" label that distributors had pasted on her after the failure of her last films for Josef von Sternberg, in which she had become an over-stylized figure. Knight Without Armor allows Dietrich to loosen up quite a bit, to get her hair mussed and her face dirtied as she goes on the run from the warring Red and White factions of the revolution. She does, however, get a chance to glam up, first as the pre-Revolution countess and then, when she's rescued by the Whites, to take a bubble bath and put on a gold lamé gown that has somehow been found for her. But Dietrich in disguise as an ordinary Russian woman is ridiculous: One look at those plucked and penciled-in eyebrows would give her away in a second. It's a silly film, a concoction of cliff-hanging moments, in which the denouement depends on a Russian commissar becoming so sentimental about the imperiled couple that he commits suicide to help them escape. But both Dietrich and Donat are game for whatever the script throws at them, and there are some bright moments. While waiting at a station for a train, they discover that the station master has gone mad: He announces trains that don't appear, and when Donat's character says he doesn't see them, the station master shushes him, explaining, "Trains that are seen get blown up." If Feyder had been able to sustain this sense of the lunacy prevalent in the revolution, Knight Without Armor might actually have been a good film.

Feu Mathias Pascal (Marcel L'Herbier, 1926)

Ivan Mozzhukhin in Feu Mathias Pascal 

Mathias Pascal: Ivan Mozzhukhin
Romilde: Marcelle Pradot
Adrienne: Lois Moran
Mathias's Mother: Marthe Mellot
Aunt Scholastica: Pauline Carton
Sylvia Caporale: Irma Perrot
The Widow Pescatore: Mireille Barsac
Jérôme Pomino: Michel Simon
Terence Papiano: Jean Hervé
Scipio: Pierre Batcheff
Batta Maldagna: Isaure Douvan

Director: Marcel L'Herbier
Screenplay: Marcel L'Herbier
Based on a novel by Luigi Pirandello
Cinematography: Jimmy Berliet, Fédote Bourgasoff, Paul Guichard, René Guichard, Jean Letort, Nikolas Roudakoff
Art direction: Erik Aaes, Alberto Cavalcanti, Lazare Meerson

Feu Mathias Pascal takes nearly three hours to demonstrate the truth of Kris Kristofferson's observation that "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Mathias is a studious young man working on a magnum opus, The History of Freedom, while the world around him begins to crumble: His widowed mother is cheated out of her home by an unscrupulous magistrate in their small Italian town. Meanwhile, his shy, homely friend Pomino wants him to court Romilde on his behalf, but she secretly has a crush on Mathias, who falls in love with and marries her. Because Romilde is under the thumb of her shrewish, demanding mother the marriage quickly sours, and when the two people Mathias loves more than any others, his mother and his infant daughter, die, he decides to leave town. In Monte Carlo, he wins a fortune at roulette, but after deciding to go home he learns that he has been declared dead. Embracing this new opportunity for freedom, he goes incognito to Rome, where he spots the pretty Adrienne and, following her home, takes a room that her father has for rent. There's much ado involving a plot to marry Adrienne to the odious Terence, and in the course of it Mathias realizes that you can't have your freedom and enjoy it too. It's a fascinating mess of a film, with startling shifts in tone from pathos -- the death of Mathias's mother and child -- to Kafkaesque surrealism -- Mathias's stint as an assistant librarian in a dusty, rat-filled jumble of a library -- to romantic comedy -- his rescue of Adrienne from the clutches of Terence and his fake-spiritualist cohorts. The narrative gets a little elliptical, especially toward the end, when Mathias exposes the corrupt magistrate who cheated his mother. But the Russian actor Ivan Mozzhukin is adept at both the pathos of Mathias's life and the Buster Keaton-like deadpan comedy of much of the film, and he's well-supported by the cast, including Michel Simon in one of his earliest roles as Pomino. Filmed on location in San Gimignano, Monte Carlo, and Rome, the movie provides glimpses of such familiar places as the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Forum, strikingly free of traffic and tourists.

Under the Roofs of Paris (René Clair, 1930)

Under the Roofs of Paris, writer-director René Clair's sometimes shaky but often charming bridge between silent films and talkies, begins with cinematographer Georges Périnal's lovely crane shot that slowly descends from the rooftops of Paris -- actually the rooftops of art director Lazare Meerson's elaborate and ingenious set --  to the street where song-plugger Albert (Albert Préjean) is conducting a singalong of "Sous les Toits de Paris," the film's French title song, trying to sell copies of the sheet music. As the camera pans around the crowd, we meet several more characters prominent in the film: the thief Émile (Bill Bocket), who is carefully lifting small valuables from women's purses; the dandyish gangster Fred (Gaston Modot); and a pretty young Romanian woman, Pola (Pola Illéry), who becomes a target for both Émile's thievery and Fred and Albert's attentions. Albert is a success at selling the song, as we see in a vertical pan up the façade of an apartment building, from each window of which comes the sound of someone singing it. This beautiful shot demonstrates how quickly Clair, a reluctant convert, caught on to the innovations possible in sound films. It may have influenced Rouben Mamoulian's brilliant montage in Love Me Tonight (1932), which tracks from Maurice Chevalier singing "Isn't It Romantic?" in his Paris tailor shop as the song spreads across country to Jeanette MacDonald singing it in her château. But Clair also displays some of the uncertainty of silent filmmakers in his dialogue scenes, which have the curious sluggish pace found in early talkies whose directors haven't figured out the rhythm of scenes that aren't interrupted by intertitles. In fact, Clair uses synchronized dialogue sparingly: There are a lot of scenes in which we don't hear what characters are saying, sometimes because the music in the bar where they're talking is too loud, and sometimes because we're viewing them through windows and glass doors. Much of the film uses familiar silent storytelling techniques -- to good effect. The story deals with Albert's ill-fated love for Pola, which develops when Fred steals her house key, making it necessary for her to spend the night (chastely and comically) in Albert's apartment. But then Albert is caught with some of Émile's loot -- the thief has stashed it in Albert's room -- and sent to jail. During his absence, Pola falls for Albert's friend Louis (Edmond T. Gréville), leaving things to be resolved at the film's bittersweet end, when the camera tracks away from Albert plugging a new song back up to the rooftops. The film plays on a characteristic fascination with Parisian lower-class life that includes slumming well-dressed upper-class types dropping in on the dives to see how the other half lives -- a motif that recurs in other French films set in the Paris underworld, like Jacques Becker's Casque d'Or (1952).

Two by Jacques Feyder

Jacques Feyder

Belgian-born director Jacques Feyder established his career in France during the silent era, and went to work for MGM in Hollywood in 1929 to direct Greta Garbo in her last silent movie, The Kiss. But Hollywood was more interested in having him direct foreign-language versions of movies after talkies came in: Before dubbing became a common practice, films were often made in two versions, one in English for the American and British markets, others in various languages for overseas audiences. So Feyder was tasked with making a German-language version of Garbo's first talkie, Anna Christie (1931), though he also made two movies starring Ramon Novarro, Daybreak (1931) and Son of India (1931). Disillusionment with Hollywood sent him back to France, where he made his most famous film, Carnival in Flanders, in 1935. The rise of the Nazis, who banned that film after they invaded France in 1940, caused Feyder and his wife, Françoise Rosay, who starred in many of his movies, to move to Switzerland, where his career stalled and he died, only 62, in 1948. After the New Wave filmmakers began to dominate French film, Feyder's reputation began to wane: François Truffaut said of Carnival in Flanders that it represented a tendency to make everything "pleasant and perfect," As a result, David Thomson has said, "Feyder may be unfairly neglected today just as once he was injudiciously acclaimed."

Gribiche (Jacques Feyder, 1926)

The young actor Jean Forest had been discovered by Feyder and his wife, Françoise Rosay, and he starred in three films for the director, of which this was the last. It's a peculiar fable about charity. Forest plays Antoine Belot, nicknamed "Gribiche," who sees a rich woman, Edith Maranet (Rosay), drop her purse in a department store and returns it to her, spurning a reward. Edith is a do-gooder full of theories about "social hygiene." Impressed by the boy's honesty, Edith goes to his home, a small flat above some shops, where he lives with his widowed mother, Anna (Cécile Guyon), and proposes that she adopt Gribiche and educate him. Anna is reluctant to give up the boy, but Gribiche, knowing that Anna is being courted by Phillippe Gavary (Rolla Norman), and believing that he stands in the way of their marriage, agrees to the deal. When her rich friends ask about how she found Gribiche, Edith tells increasingly sentimental and self-serving stories -- dramatized by Feyder -- about the poverty in which she found him and his mother. But the boy is unhappy with the cold, sterile environment of Edith's mansion and the regimented approach to his education, and on Bastille Day, when the common folk of Paris are celebrating in what Edith regards as "unhygienic" ways, he finds his way back to his mother's home. Edith is furious, but eventually is persuaded to see reality and agrees to let him live with Anna and Phillippe, who have married, while she pays for his education. The whole thing is implausible, but the performances of Forest and Rosay, and especially the production design by Lazare Meerson, make it watchable and occasionally quite charming.

Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder, 1935)

Feyder's best-known film is something of a feminist fable, a kind of inversion of Lysistrata, in which the women of Boom, a village in 17th century Flanders that is occupied by the Spanish save the town from the pillage and plunder that the men of the village expect. Françoise Rosay plays the wife of the burgomaster (André Alerme), who holes up in his house, pretending to have died. The other officials of the town likewise sequester themselves. But the merry wives of Boom decide to wine, dine, and otherwise entertain the occupying Spaniards. It's all quite saucily entertaining, though undercut by a tiresome subplot (suspiciously reminiscent of that in Shakespeare's own play about merry wives) involving the burgomaster's daughter (Micheline Chierel) and her love for the young painter Julien Brueghel (Bernard Lancret), of whom the burgomaster disapproves. Again, Rosay's performance is a standout, as is Lazare Meerson's design: The village, with its evocation of the paintings of the Flemish masters, was created in a Paris suburb, with meticulous attention to detail, including the men's unflattering period costumes, designed by Georges K. Benda. The cinematography is by the American Harry Stradling Sr., who built his reputation in Europe before returning to Hollywood.