On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951)

Doris Day and Gordon MacRae in On Moonlight Bay

Cast: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Billy Gray, Leon Ames, Rosemary DeCamp, Jack Smith, Mary Wickes, Ellen Corby, Sig Arno, Jeffrey Stevens, Eddie Marr, Henry East. Screenplay: Jack Rose, Melville Shavelson, based on stories by Booth Tarkington. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Douglas Bacon. Film editing: Thomas Reilly. Music: Max Steiner. 

Leon Ames must have felt right at home playing the paterfamilias of a Midwestern household in 1917 in the Warner Bros. musical On Moonlight Bay: It was the same role he had played in 1944, when he was the paterfamilias of a St. Louis household in 1904 in Vincente Minnelli's MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. In both films he comes under fire for making the household move, upsetting his wife (Rosemary DeCamp in the former movie, Mary Astor in the latter), his daughter (Doris Day/Judy Garland), his bratty kid (Billy Gray/Margaret O'Brien), and even the family servant (Mary Wickes/Marjorie Main). In both films, the daughter falls in love with the boy next door (Gordon MacRae/Tom Drake). There's even a big scene set at Christmas in both movies. Granted, On Moonlight Bay suffers from comparison with Meet Me in St. Louis. For one thing, the songs in the latter are better, and Garland brings a note of heartbreak to the film that Day can't quite match. But the Warners movie gets a little life from a screenplay based on the Penrod stories by Booth Tarkington, a writer not much read anymore but who inspired two classic movies, Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935) and The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942). The stories, about the misadventures of an 11-year-old boy, clearly inspired On Moonlight Bay's subplot about Wesley Winfield (Gray), kid brother to Marjorie Winfield (Day). Wesley is a scamp who purloins one of Marjorie's letters to her boyfriend, William Sherman (MacRae), and tries to pass it off in English class as his own composition. He torments Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith), who tries to court Marjorie, and he even manages to convince his teacher, Miss Stevens (Ellen Corby), that the reason he falls asleep in class is that his father is a drunkard who abuses his mother and sister. Much of this stuff is clumsily directed, but it's an effective enough distraction from the rather routine romance of Marjorie and William and from the tepid musical numbers, set mostly to old parlor ballads and turn-of-the-century love songs like the one that gives the film its title. Day is in sweet voice as usual, but her role in the movie and the songs she's asked to sing don't give her much to do, and she doesn't really have much chemistry with MacRae. Nevertheless, On Moonlight Bay was popular enough that it inspired a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953), that reunited most of the cast. 

The Animal Kingdom (Edward H. Griffith, 1932)

Ann Harding, Leslie Howard, and Myrna Loy in The Animal Kingdom

Cast: Leslie Howard, Ann Harding, Myrna Loy, William Gargan, Neil Hamilton, Ilka Chase, Henry Stephenson, Leni Stengel, Don Dillaway. Screenplay: Horace Jackson, based on a play by Philip Barry. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Daniel Mandell. Music: Max Steiner.

The odd, arch, talky The Animal Kingdom is based on one of Philip Barry's plays about rich people yearning to be free, like his Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, film versions of which were directed by George Cukor in 1938 and 1940 respectively. And here the connection among the films gets more intricate, for the director of The Animal Kingdom, Edward H. Griffith, had directed an earlier film version of Holiday in 1930, also starring Ann Harding, with a screenplay by Horace Jackson. And Cukor was an uncredited co-director on The Animal Kingdom. Moreover, the 1932 stage version had starred Leslie Howard, as well as William Gargan and Ilka Chase. So maybe everybody concerned with filming The Animal Kingdom was a little too close to the material, because the movie is a bit of a mess. The central love triangle -- Daisy Sage (Harding) is the former mistress of Tom Collier (Howard) who plans to marry Cecelia Henry (Myrna Loy) just as Daisy comes back into his life -- is clear enough, but the movie is cluttered with secondary characters whose function in the lives of the central characters is a bit obscure, as if their backstories were more interesting than what we actually see on the screen. Tom, for example, has a butler named Regan (William Gargan) who is an ex-boxer completely unsuited to his duties as butler, which causes tensions with Cecelia. What Tom and Regan's obligations to each other are based on remains unknown. Daisy similarly has a friend named Franc (Leni Stengel), who plays the cello and speaks with a German accent, attributes that are obvious but of no significance to the plot. Still, there are some bright lines and some nice pre-Code naughtiness like a reference by Tom to a brothel he used to visit in London, not to mention the fact that the film is quite open about the relationship between Tom and Daisy: At one point she refers to herself as "a foolish virgin... Oh, foolish anyway," which is the kind of line no American movie could get away with for several decades after the 1934 Production Code went into effect. But I think I might have enjoyed The Animal Kingdom more if I didn't think it was radically miscast, that Loy should have played the somewhat free-spirited Daisy and Harding the more conventional Cecelia. In fact, this was a breakthrough role for Loy, who had been typecast as sultry, often "Oriental" women. In The Animal Kingdom, Loy comes across as sexy and Harding as bland, which is the reverse of the way it should be. Their pairing shows why Loy became a major star and Harding began to fade out of films in the mid-1930s. But both deserved better than this comedy of manners that's more mannered than comic.

Roberta (William A. Seiter, 1935)

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Roberta

Cast: Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Helen Westley, Claire Dodd, Victor Varconi, Luis Alberni, Ferdinand Munier, Torben Meyer, Adrian Rosley, Bodil Rosing. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Allan Scott, Glenn Tryon, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and a novel by Alice Duer Miller. Cinematography: Edward Cronjager. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Jerome Kern, Max Steiner.

If Roberta is less well-known than most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, it's partly because it was out of circulation for a long time after 1945, when MGM bought up the rights to the film and the Broadway musical on which it was based, planning to remake it in Technicolor as a vehicle for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. That plan fell through, and the actual remake, Lovely to Look At (Mervyn LeRoy, 1952) with Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Red Skelton, and Marge and Gower Champion, is nothing special. But MGM's hold on the property meant that, unlike the other Astaire-Rogers films, it didn't show up on television until the 1970s. But it was also a kind of throwback to the first of their movies, Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933), in that they weren't the top-billed stars of Roberta, and their plot is secondary to that of the star, Irene Dunne, and her leading man, Randolph Scott. It doesn't matter much: What we remember from the film are the great Astaire-Rogers dance numbers, "I'll Be Hard to Handle," "I Won't Dance," and the reprises of "Lovely to Look At" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Scott's inability to sing resulted in the big number for his character in the Broadway version, "You're Devastating," being cut from the song score of the movie. "I Won't Dance" was brought in from another Jerome Kern musical, and Kern and Jimmy McHugh composed that fashion-show/beauty-pageant classic "Lovely to Look At," with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, for the film, earning Roberta its only Oscar nomination. Except when Astaire and Rogers are doing their magic, the film is a little draggy, and Dunne and Scott strike no sparks. Look for a blond Lucille Ball, draped in a feathery wrap, as one of the models in the fashion show.

Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933)

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Adolphe Menjou, Mary Duncan, C. Aubrey Smith, Don Alvarado, Fred Santley, Richard Carle, Tyler Brooke, Geneva Mitchell, Helen Ware. Screenplay: Howard J. Green, based on a play by Zoe Akins. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Max Steiner.

Morning Glory earned Katharine Hepburn her first Oscar. It was only the sixth Academy Award for best actress ever given, and in some ways it was the first "modern" Oscar for acting. The initial one went to Janet Gaynor for a silent-film performance, and the subsequent ones were for Hollywood grande dames making their way out of silence, Mary Pickford and Norma Shearer; for beloved old trouper Marie Dressler; and for a Broadway diva making a temporary detour into movies, Helen Hayes. That last one shows what Hollywood was looking for, and what it found in Hepburn: actors who could talk. But unlike the diminutive and rather plain Hayes, Hepburn could hold the camera. Hollywood had never seen anything quite like her: beautiful in an imperious way, she had real presence and a unique style. That style would harden into mannerism after a few years and get her branded as "box-office poison" until she managed to turn things around again in the 1940s, with The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) and the subsequent potent teaming with Spencer Tracy. But for the time she was praised for a tonic, refreshing hold on the screen. Morning Glory itself is not much: the familiar story of the hopeful who goes out there and comes back a star. Lowell Sherman, who directed, had just appeared in a similar fable, the ur-Star Is Born movie What Price Hollywood? (Cukor, 1932), and the pattern hardened when Ruby Keeler subbed in for Bebe Daniels in 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Hepburn manages to segue convincingly from the naive chatterbox trying to muscle her way onto Broadway to the mature, toughened but still insecure character at the end, though it's a little unclear why such veterans as Adolphe Menjou's producer and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s playwright would be so susceptible to the pest that Eva Lovelace makes of herself at first. Also unclear is why Eva's performances of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy and Juliet's part of the balcony scene so impress the guests at the party: Hepburn rattles them off with no attention to the meaning behind the familiar words. She seems, for example, to take the line "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" as a question about his location rather than about his name. The film is pre-Code, so one thing is clear:  that Eva and the producer have slept together after she gets soused at the party. 

In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942)

In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942)

Cast: Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, George Brent, Dennis Morgan, Charles Coburn, Frank Craven, Billie Burke, Ernest Anderson, Hattie McDaniel, Lee Patrick, Mary Servoss. Screenplay: Howard Koch, based on a novel by Ellen Glasgow. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: William Holmes. Music: Max Steiner.

Just mentioning that Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland play sisters named Stanley and Roy should be enough to suggest what sort of movie In This Our Life is. And yes, it's a good sister (de Havilland/Roy) versus bad sister (Davis/Stanley) plot, with George Brent and Dennis Morgan as the men in the middle. As the movie starts, Stanley is on the brink of marrying Craig (Brent) but instead runs off with Roy's husband, Peter (Morgan), after which Roy gets divorced and falls in love with Craig, but Stanley's marriage to Peter goes sour and he commits suicide. So then she sets her eye on Craig again, and so on, accompanied by an almost nonstop score by Max Steiner to make sure you're feeling what you're supposed to feel. But this adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Ellen Glasgow wants to be more. The crux of the plot hangs on Stanley's attempt to frame a young black man named Parry (Ernest Anderson) for a hit-and-run accident that she committed. Unfortunately, the sensitivity of Hollywood studios about offending Southern audiences waters down this part of the narrative, even though Anderson has a good scene in which Parry despairs of receiving justice. Censorship also weakens the incest motif in Stanley's relationship with her uncle William (Charles Coburn), which was stronger and clearer in Glasgow's novel. Davis didn't want the role of the bad sister, and made things difficult for director John Huston (and for uncredited director Raoul Walsh, who filled in after Pearl Harbor when Huston was called into service as a documentarian/propagandist for the Department of War). The result is some of Davis's more flamboyantly mannered acting. De Havilland, however, gives a solid performance as the tough and thoughtful Roy. It would have been a more entertaining movie if it had had the courage to be trashier and less tepidly social-conscious.

Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Cast: Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ronald Reagan, Henry Travers, Cora Witherspoon, Dorothy Peterson, Virginia Brissac. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a play by George Emerson Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: William Holmes. Music: Max Steiner.

Absurd but hypnotically entertaining, Dark Victory is one of the essential Bette Davis movies, if only because she has a great character arc to follow: from spoiled rich brat to repentant dying woman. It was nominated for three Oscars (picture, actress, score) but won none of them -- it was 1939, of course, the Hollywood annus mirabilis dominated by Gone With the Wind. This is the one in which Humphrey Bogart plays an Irish stablemaster with the hots for Davis's Judith Traherne and Ronald Reagan plays an alcoholic playboy whom a later audience would easily spot as her gay best friend. In the end it's her brain surgeon, played by George Brent, who wins her, but not before the brain tumor he has failed to remove kills her. Geraldine Fitzgerald is the faithful friend who sees her through at the end, and together she and Davis make the moment more moving than mawkish. 

The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950)

John Garfield and Patricia Neal in The Breaking Point

Cast: John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernandez, Wallace Ford, Edmon Ryan, Ralph Dumke, Guy Thomajan, William Campbell, Sherry Jackson, Donna Jo Boyce, Victor Sen Young. Screenplay: Ranald MacDougall, based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Ted D. McCord. Art direction: Edward Carrere. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Max Steiner.

If the setup, an honest fishing-boat captain forced into some intrigue he really doesn't want to get mixed up in, sounds familiar, that's because The Breaking Point was based on Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. And that had been the basis for a much looser adaptation (it mostly just kept the title) by Howard Hawks, with the aid of screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, in 1944. But here, instead of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, we get John Garfield and Patricia Neal -- considerable actors both, but striking no sparks and teaching no one how to whistle. The New York Times's ineffable film critic Bosley Crowther much preferred The Breaking Point, calling the Hawks version a "feeble swing and a cut at Ernest Hemingway's memorable story of a tough guy" whereas director Michael Curtiz and screenwriter Ranald MacDougall "got hold of that fable and socked it into a four-base hit." Crowther's baseball metaphors aside, it's possible to admire the professionalism of Curtiz's direction and the adherence to a downer ending for Garfield's Harry Morgan, while still feeling that in their film Hawks, Furthman, Faulkner, Bogart, Bacall, et al. knew and displayed a lot more about the Hemingway virtue of grace under pressure.

The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939)

Bette Davis in The Old Maid

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Jane Bryan, Louise Fazenda, James Stephenson, Jerome Cowan, William Lundigan. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a play by Zoe Akins and a novel by Edith Wharton. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Max Steiner.

The Old Maid is the kind of melodrama that never really made much sense, except in the original version, the novel by Edith Wharton, where the social taboos and psychological hangups could be dealt with more convincingly. And given that filmmakers under the Production Code had to tiptoe around topics like having a child without being married, the evasions of such key issues became even more ludicrous and artificial. Still, though the movie is fun to watch today because the evasions are so glaring, and because troupers like Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins knew how to make them entertaining. The making of the film is notorious because Davis and Hopkins were constantly feuding over old wrong: The one losing a coveted role to the other who was also suspected of sleeping with her husband, and so on. Davis is more fun when she's scheming and trying to get even in her movies than when she's suffering and self-sacrificing, so The Old Maid is not one of her juicier films.

Christopher Strong (Dorothy Arzner, 1933)

Christopher Strong (Dorothy Arzner, 1933)

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Colin Clive, Billie Burke, Helen Chandler, Ralph Forbes, Irene Browne, Jack La Rue, Desmond Roberts. Screenplay: Zoe Akins, based on a novel by Gilbert Frankau. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Charles M. Kirk. Film editing: Arthur Roberts. Music: Max Steiner.

The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941)

The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941)

Cast: Bette Davis, Mary Astor, George Brent, Hattie McDaniel, Lucile Watson, Jerome Cowan. Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, based on a novel by Polan Banks. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl. Music: Max Steiner.