Scaramouche (Rex Ingram, 1923)

Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry in Scaramouche

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Alice Terry, Lewis Stone, Lloyd Ingraham, Julia Swayne Gordon, William Humphrey, Otto Matieson, George Siegmann, Bowditch M. Turner, James A. Marcus, Edith Allen, John George, Willard Lee Hall, Rose Dione. Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck, based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. Cinematography: John F. Seitz. Art direction: Harold Grieve. Film editing: Grant Whytock.

A year after Ramon Novarro, as Rupert of Hentzau, threatened to steal Rex Ingram's The Count of Monte Cristo away from Lewis Stone's Count, we find the two actors in reversed roles. In Scaramouche Novarro is the dashing hero and Stone the cunning villain. Actually, Scaramouche could have used a bit more dash and cunning in both roles. Novarro isn't given much opportunity to display the impishness he brought to Rupert, even though a title card proclaims, in Rafael Sabatini's words, that Novarro's character, André-Louis Moreau, "was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Nor does Ingram provide enough swashbuckling for Novarro to do: Most of his duels are fought off camera, and the crucial one with Stone's Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr is somewhat awkwardly staged. Ingram seems to be more interested in Harold Grieve's opulent sets, beautifully filmed by John F. Seitz, and in the menacing crowd scenes of his version of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. It's all hokum, of course, but it has its moments.

China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in China Seas

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith, Dudley Digges, Robert Benchley, William Henry, Hattie McDaniel, Liev De Maigret, Lilian Bond, Edward Brophy, Soo Yong, Akim Tamiroff, Ivan Lebedeff. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, James Kevin McGuinness, based on a novel by Crosbie Garstin. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William LeVanway. Music: Herbert Stothart.

China Seas is a pretty good romantic adventure that seems to have been pieced together from better movies. Its romantic triangle of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Rosalind Russell mimics that of Gable, Harlow, and Mary Astor in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932). Harlow and Wallace Beery have a relationship that echoes the one their characters had in Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933). And the byplay between Harlow's character and her maid (Hattie McDaniel, of course) is a lot like the banter between Mae West and her maids in She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) and I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933). China Seas has a few standout moments of its own: There's a terrific typhoon sequence involving a runaway steamroller on the deck of the tramp steamer captained by Gable's Alan Gaskell, and Robert Benchley has some funny bits as an alcoholic writer who's usually too drunk to know where he is or to respond to other people with anything more than non sequiturs. There's a kind of uptightness to the movie that reminds us that the Production Code censors were breathing down people's necks, whereas all of those better movies mentioned above were pre-Code. But Gable and Harlow are in fine form. She's Dolly Portland, aka "China Doll," the shady lady (sometimes introduced as "an entertainer") who used to be involved with Capt. Gaskell and has now booked passage on his steamer from Hong Kong to Singapore in an effort to win him back. Russell plays Sybil Barclay, a high-class English lady who also has a past with the captain and nearly does succeed in recapturing him. Russell seems to be trying too hard at the role, slipping into stiff-upper-lip mannerisms and becoming rather arch, so there's no real heat between her character and Gable's. Another old flame of Dolly's, Jamesy McArdle (Beery), is also on board, and he's in cahoots with Malaysian pirates to board the ship and steal the gold it's carrying. Rejected by the captain, who decides to marry Sybil, Dolly joins forces with McArdle, though she doesn't really mean to. You've seen this sort of thing before, so there are no surprises, but relax and be entertained.

Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929)

Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929)

Cast: Ruth Chatterton, Lewis Stone, Raymond Hackett, Holmes Herbert, Eugenie Besserer, Ullrich Haupt, Mitchell Lewis. Screenplay: Willard Mack, based on a play by Alexandre Bisson. Cinematography: Arthur Reed. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William S. Gray. Music: William Axt, Sam Wineland.

Perhaps because Lionel Barrymore had directed a few silent films and because he had acted on stage before giving over his career entirely to movies, MGM drafted him into directing Ruth Chatterton, making her own transition from stage to screen, in this remake of the old chestnut Madame X. Alexandre Bisson's 1908 play had been a hit starring Sarah Bernhardt and was filmed twice as a silent before being dusted off for the novelty of the talkies. The 1929 film was enough of a hit to put Barrymore and Chatterton in the running for the second annual Academy Awards. There were no official nominations that year -- only winners were announced -- but Academy records show that they were under consideration for the Oscars that went to Frank Lloyd for The Divine Lady and Mary Pickford for Coquette (Sam Taylor). That they were considered at all is a sign of how weak the direction and performances of the year were -- it was the first time talking pictures were allowed to compete for the awards. Barrymore boasted of one feat he achieved as a director on the film: He improvised a boom microphone with a fishing pole. But even that claim has been contended by others, and it's likely that MGM's novice sound engineer Douglas Shearer was as responsible as Barrymore for the innovation. Otherwise, Madame X is stiffly staged and filmed, betraying not only its theatrical origins but also the difficulty filmmakers were having with recorded sound. Scenes are often badly framed, with a character's nose and mouth peeping into the shot or the lower half of a face disappearing at the bottom on the screen. In a scene in which Lewis Stone and Holmes Herbert are at a table for an intense discussion, Herbert keeps standing up and sitting down, and you can sense the cameraman's effort to tilt the bulky sound camera up and down to follow him. As for the acting, Chatterton starts off badly in the opening scenes in which her character is still a lady. She retains the intonations of stage elocution, with "cruel" coming out as "crew-ell" and her voice pitched and her mannerisms exaggerated so they can reach the recesses of the theater.  But later in the film, after she has "fallen," she's often quite effectively naturalistic as the weary, tough woman of the world, and she pulls off her drunk scene well. The plot of Madame X is familiar stuff: Woman sins, woman suffers, woman achieves a kind of redemption, and woman dies. But it's substantial enough that it continued to be remade, as soon as 1937 with Gladys George directed by Sam Wood, in British, Philippine, Greek and Mexican versions, in a glossy Ross Hunter-produced version starring Lana Turner directed by David Lowell Rich in 1966, and even in a 1981 TV film with Tuesday Weld. 

The Prisoner of Zenda (Rex Ingram, 1922)

Ramon Novarro in The Prisoner of Zenda

Rudolf Rassendyll/King Rudolf: Lewis Stone
Princess Flavia: Alice Terry
Col. Zapt: Robert Edeson
Grand Duke Michael: Stuart Holmes
Rupert of Hentzau: Ramon Novarro
Antoinette de Mauban: Barbara La Marr
Capt. Fritz von Tarlenheim: Malcolm McGregor

Director: Rex Ingram
Screenplay: Mary O'Hara
Based on a novel by Anthony Hope
Cinematography: John F. Seitz
Art direction: Amos Myers
Film editing: Grant Whytock

What Rex Ingram's silent version of the old chestnut The Prisoner of Zenda needs is more Ramon Novarro as Rupert of Hentzau, the impish villain. What there is of Novarro's Rupert is delightful; more than almost any other member of the cast he shows the kind of awareness that the camera sees all, which would take him from silents into the sound era. It was near the start of his career, a year before became a star in Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur, and he's still billed as Ramon Samaniego, so it's possible that Ingram didn't fully see his potential. His Rupert is not quite as charmingly wicked as Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s in the 1937 John Cromwell version of the Anthony Hope tale, but that's partly because Ingram chooses not to play up the role, putting Rupert amid a cadre of Black Michael's henchmen until the final climactic duel with Rudolf. Lewis Stone plays the two Rudolfs with more reserve and less dash than Ronald Colman did in 1937, and Alice Terry is pretty but rather forgettable as Princess Flavia, a role that Madeleine Carroll brought to life in the sound version. Some spectacular sets make up for the tedium of Ruritanian intrigue that threatens to stifle the film whenever Novarro isn't around.

Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice, 1931)

Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in Mata Hari

Mata Hari: Greta Garbo
Lt. Alexis Rosanoff: Ramon Novarro
Gen. Serge Shubin: Lionel Barrymore
Andriani: Lewis Stone
Dubois: C. Henry Gordon
Carlotta: Karen Morley
Caron: Alec B. Francis
Sister Angelica: Blanche Friderici
Warden: Edmund Breese
Sister Genevieve: Helen Jerome Eddy

Director: George Fitzmaurice
Screenplay: Benjamin Glazer, Leo Birinsky
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Costume design: Adrian
Music: William Axt

Garbo ... dances? Well, only if you call the posing, prancing, and strutting she does before a statue of Shiva in George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari dancing. It unaccountably brings on a storm of applause, though that may be because in the version shown on Turner Classic Movies we don't see the finale of the dance that audiences saw in the original pre-Code version of Mata Hari: an apparently nude Garbo. The movie was such a big hit for Garbo that it was re-released after the Production Code went into effect three years later, at which time the censors swooped in with their scissors, cutting not only the nude scene -- which in any case featured Garbo's body double with only a suggestion of nudity -- but also some scenes showing Mata Hari and Lt. Rosanoff in bed together. The film is mostly proof that Garbo in her prime could sell almost anything, even this piece of MGM claptrap. Here she vamps a very pretty Ramon Novarro, playing a Russian aviator with a Mexican accent, and connives with the Russian general overplayed by Lionel Barrymore and the sinister spymaster played by the almost as hammy Lewis Stone. Swanning about in some preposterous outfits by Adrian, Garbo's Mata Hari is the typical wicked lady -- she even persuades Rosanoff to snuff the candle he has promised his mother to keep burning before the icon of Our Lady of Kazan -- redeemed by falling in love. Rosanoff atones for his weakness by being blinded in a plane crash, and Mata Hari conceals from him the fact that she's been sentenced to the firing squad and goes off bravely to face her doom. They don't make them like this anymore, and there's a reason: We have no Garbos to pull them off. 

The Sin of Madelon Claudet (Edgar Selwyn, 1931)

Lewis Stone and Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet

If it weren't for her work in movies and on TV, Helen Hayes would probably be consigned to that limbo where celebrated stage actresses of the past like Sarah Siddons or Ellen Terry or Minnie Maddern Fiske reside. But Hayes won two Oscars -- one for this film and the other, 38 years later, for Airport (George Seaton, 1970) -- and is one of only four actresses who have won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards in competitive categories -- the distinction known by the acronym EGOT.* The thing is, anyone who knows Hayes's work only from movies and TV may wonder why she is so famous. Neither The Sin of Madelon Claudet nor Airport (in which she plays a cute little old stowaway on a plane) nor her work on such TV series as The Snoop Sisters provides much of a clue as to why she was known as "The First Lady of the American Theater" and has a Broadway playhouse named after her. She spent the peak years of her career, from 1935 to 1956, primarily on stage, with only occasional films and TV appearances during that period. It was probably a wise move: She was already 30 when she followed her husband, Charles MacArthur, to Hollywood and made this film, her first talkie. (She had appeared in only a couple of silent films.) And while it won her the Oscar, and she followed it with a few more significant films, particularly Arrowsmith (John Ford, 1931) and A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932), it soon became clear to her that she was not cut out for film stardom. She was only five feet tall and although pleasant-looking, she was not especially pretty, and in a Hollywood that was looking for the next Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, she was no glamour girl. She would have found herself competing with younger actresses like Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck for the plum dramatic parts. So it was back to Broadway and success. Even so, she made her reputation in old-fashioned plays that don't get revived much anymore, like Lawrence Housman's Victoria Regina, Anita Loos's Happy Birthday, and Jean Anouilh's Time Remembered. Although she did play Amanda in a revival of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, the revolution in theater that Williams helped bring about took place after she had gone into semi-retirement. As for Madelon Claudet, it's a creaky vehicle at best, based on a play by Edward Knoblock that MacArthur and an uncredited Ben Hecht helped whip into shape after it had been filmed under the title The Lullaby and previewed to a disastrous reception. Hayes had already gone on to work on Arrowsmith, and shooting the new material had to wait until she was through with that film. Even so, Hayes is not particularly convincing as a French farm girl who is left pregnant by a caddish American (Neil Hamilton) and becomes the mistress of a jewel thief posing as an Italian count (Lewis Stone). It's only later, when she goes to jail for ten years as the thief's accomplice, then turns to prostitution to earn the money to put her son (Robert Young), who thinks she's dead, through medical school, that Hayes demonstrates her skill at suffering and pathos.

*The others are Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, and Whoopi Goldberg. Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli are sometimes included in the list, but Streisand's Tony and Minnelli's Grammy were honorary, not competitive, awards.

Their Own Desire (E. Mason Hopper, 1929)

Two years before A Free Soul, Norma Shearer made this rather thin talkie, which shows clearly her evolution from silence into sound. She hasn't yet found her voice level: It was only her third talking picture and she still sounds a bit thin, and her laugh is a little shrill. It probably helped that her brother, Douglas Shearer, was the head of MGM's sound department, and could help her get the right pitch, because her next film, The Divorcee (Robert Z. Leonard, 1930), won her the best actress Oscar. (In fact, the Oscar ballot listed her nomination as for both The Divorcee and Their Own Desire, but the official citation showed her as a winner for only the former. Academy record-keeping was primitive at the time, so no one today knows if the voters indicated a preference for the one film over the other -- as they should have, since her performance in The Divorcee is indeed the better one.) In Their Own Desire, Shearer is playing a post-flapper "new woman," lively and athletic: She plays polo, taking a spill from a horse with no ill effects, and gets the attention of men by doing high dives into the country club pool. The man she attracts is played by Robert Montgomery, who was two years younger than 27-year-old Shearer, and both are convincingly coltish in their infatuation. The plot, from a novel by Sarita Fuller adapted by Frances Marion, is pleasantly nonsensical: Shearer and Montgomery fall in love, not knowing that he is the son of the woman (Helene Millard) whom her father (Lewis Stone) has divorced her mother (Belle Bennett) to live with. (The movie was made, obviously, before the institution of the Prohibition Code's proscription on such goings-on.) It's complicated, as they say. MGM made the most of its entry into sound, including two musical numbers: the songs "Blue Is the Night," played during a dance at the country club, and "The Boyfriend Blues," sung to Shearer by a harmonizing quartet. Director Hopper had been making movies since 1911, but he retired from the business in 1935, leaving an oeuvre of no particular distinction though he lived on till 1967.