Lydia (Julien Duvivier, 1941)

Joseph Cotten and Merle Oberon in Lydia

Cast: Merle Oberon, Joseph Cotten, Alan Marshal, Edna May Oliver, Hans Jaray, George Reeves, John Halliday, Sara Allgood. Screenplay: Julien Duvivier, Leslie Bush-Fekete, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: William Hornbeck. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Produced by Alexander Korda with his usual opulent taste as a showcase for his wife, Merle Oberon, Julien Duvivier's Lydia takes a sentimental romance and subtly undercuts its romanticism. Oberon's Lydia starts out as a giddy girl under the watchful eye of her grandmother (Edna May Oliver), who thrills to her first ball, keeps the sensible man who is infatuated with her at arm's length, falls for a football player and almost elopes with him, turns to charitable work with blind children, meets a blind pianist and composer  who also falls for her, has a passionate affair that ends badly, and decides to stay unmarried and concentrate on charity work. The film is structured as a flashback -- with flashbacks inside flashbacks -- from a reunion with her old flames: the sensible Michael (Joseph Cotten), the quarterback Bob, and the pianist Frank (Hans Jaray). Richard (Alan Marshal), the passionate fling, is invited, but doesn't show until the end, when he makes the film's point: we remember what we want to remember, and not what actually happened. The production values, including Lee Garmes's cinematography, Vincent Korda's sets, and Miklós Rózsa's score, are first-rate, although the old-age makeup in which the principals spend most of the film isn't entirely convincing. Lydia is a little too leisurely in its story-telling, and while its ironic anti-romantic structure and ending give the film some bite, they feel at odds with the romantic fluffiness of its production.   

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.

The Lodger (John Brahm, 1944)

Merle Oberon and Laird Cregar in The Lodger

Cast: Laird Cregar, Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, Sara Allgood, Aubrey Mather, Queenie Leonard, Doris Lloyd, David Clyde, Helena Pickard. Screenplay: Barré Lyndon, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: James Basevi, John Ewing. Film editing: J. Watson Webb Jr. Music: Hugo Friedhofer.

Laird Cregar's great gift as the heaviest of heavies was to elicit a kind of sympathy for the bad guys he played. Which is no easy task when you're playing the most infamous of serial killers, Jack the Ripper. Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel was only "based on" the notorious murderer of ladies of the night -- it wasn't explicit that the character was Jack (whoever that was) -- and the earlier filmings, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent version, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, followed her lead, perhaps because Hitchcock's lodger was played by matinee idol Ivor Novello, which led to a twist in which the character turned out not to be the killer after all. But screenwriter Barré Lyndon and director John Brahm were perfectly happy to capitalize on the Ripper's perennial notoriety. This is a good, atmospheric version of the story, with effective shadowy, expressionistic camerawork by Lucien Ballard, and a solid cast.

That Uncertain Feeling (Ernst Lubitsch, 1941)

That Uncertain Feeling (Ernst Lubitsch, 1941)

Cast: Merle Oberon, Melvyn Douglas, Burgess Meredith, Harry Davenport, Eve Arden, Olive Blakeney, Alan Mowbray, Sig Ruman. Screenplay: Donald Ogden Stewart, Walter Reisch, based on a play by Victorien Sardou and Emile DeNajac. Cinematography: George Barnes. Film editing: William Shea. Music: Werner R. Heymann.