The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1966)

Cast: Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, E.G. Marshall, Angie Dickinson, Janice Rule, Miriam Hopkins, Martha Hyer, Richard Bradford, Robert Duvall, James Fox, Diana Hyland, Henry Hull, Jocelyn Brando. Screenplay: Lillian Hellman, based on a novel by Horton Foote. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Production design: Richard Day. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: John Barry.

Bad movies are often fun to watch anyway, and most of the people involved with The Chase, including director Arthur Penn, screenwriter Lillian Hellman, and star Marlon Brando, agreed that it was a bad movie. Brando let his opinion show, giving a sluggish performance that validates the old criticism that he mumbled his lines. Hellman had her script taken away and rewritten, and Penn struggled to deal with an ill-conceived project. The chief interest the film generates today is seeing actors like Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, and Robert Duvall on the brink of major stardom. There's a good deal of miscasting, including E.G. Mashall as the boss of a small town that seems to be in Texas or Louisiana. Marshall lacks the ruthless aura that the character needs. Angie Dickinson is wasted as the loving and dutiful wife of the town sheriff played by Brando. And Redford feels out of place in the role of Bubber Reeves, the town bad boy who escapes from prison (it's never quite clear what he did to be sent there) and stirs a manhunt, a lynch mob, and a conflagration in a junkyard. The town itself is a hotbed where everyone sleeps with everyone else's spouse and goes orgiastic on the Saturday night when the news of Bubber's escape breaks. It's a silly and lurid movie, but a little too long to be entertainingly bad.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Cast: Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Charles Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, based on a play by Aladar Laszlo. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Music: W. Franke Harling. Costume design: Travis Banton.

If you want a good example of the damage done to American movies by the enforcement of the Production Code, look no further than Trouble in Paradise. Ernst Lubitsch's comic masterpiece could not have been made two years later, when the Code went into effect. It could not even be re-released or shown commercially until the death of the Code in the late 1960s. The loss to the art of cinema is incalculable, even though filmmakers including Lubitsch went on to find other ways of being witty and sexy. On the face of it, Trouble in Paradise sounds trivial: Con artists Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall) fall in love when each tries to filch the other's belongings: a wallet, a brooch, a watch, a garter. So they team up and go off to Paris where their target becomes the wealthy and beautiful Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), owner of a leading parfumerie. What will happen to Lily when Gaston falls in love with Mariette? What makes it work is Lubitsch's unflagging wit: A film that will soon be wafting the scent of Mme. Colet's perfume opens with a Venetian garbage man dumping the contents of a can into a loaded garbage scow and punting off into a canal singing "O Sole Mio." It's only the first of the many Lubitsch touches. But perhaps the greatest touch of all is the casting: Hopkins was never funnier or sexier and Francis never more radiant. I have to admit that on my first viewing I was initially put off by the casting of Marshall: a sad-eyed, somewhat slumped middle-aged man with a wooden leg. (The scenes in which Gaston sprints up and down Mariette's staircase are probably the work of a body double.) But Marshall turns out to be perfectly charming in the role, credibly wooing both leading ladies. A heartthrob like Cary Grant would have wrecked the chemistry, becoming the apex of what needs to be an equilateral triangle. William Powell would have been too vivid in the part, echoing his previous teamings with Francis. Fredric March had a touch too much of the ham -- Marshall succeeds by underplaying the role. There are some other nice surprises: Those peerless character actors Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton were usually used as comic relief, but Trouble in Paradise is a comedy that needs no relieving; Ruggles and Horton are there to do their own thing and they do it well. The ending, which flouts a key commandment of the Code, is suitably bittersweet, but paradise needs a little trouble to make you appreciate it the more.

The Children's Hour (William Wyler, 1961)

Audrey Hepburn, James Garner, and Shirley MacLaine in The Children's Hour

Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner, Miriam Hopkins, Fay Bainter, Karen Balkin, Veronica Cartwright, Mimi Gibson, Debbie Moldow, Diane Mountford, William Mims, Sally Brophy, Hope Summers. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, Lillian Hellman, based on a play by Hellman. Cinematography: Franz Planer. Art direction: Fernando Carrere. Film editing: Robert Swink. Music: Alex North.

Time has not been kind to Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, either the play or the second film adaptation. It had been filmed once before, also under the direction of William Wyler, as These Three, in 1936, only two years after it had become a Broadway sensation. At that time, the central accusation that the two schoolmistresses, Karen and Martha, were lesbians had to be changed to a heterosexual moral transgression -- that both were lovers of the same man, Dr. Joe Cardin. Despite this bowdlerization, there are many who think that the earlier movie is the better one, largely because it puts the emphasis on what Hellman said was the play's theme: "the power of a lie." In our contemporary climate, the idea that Karen and Martha might be lovers has much less power to shock, so that to our eyes, the furor that arises from a child's confused and devious accusation seems excessive. But perhaps more to the point is an artistic one: In today's LGBT community the idea that a work of fiction dealing with non-heterosexual relationships has to end in the death of one or more of its supposed transgressors has been labeled a "kill the queers syndrome." Even more recent films such as Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999) and Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), though praised for dealing candidly with transgender characters and gay relationships, have been faulted for too easily resolving their plots by having their central characters murdered by bigots. The Children's Hour falls more blatantly into this trap with Martha's suicide, which seems not to come out of anything integral to the character but instead out of the need for a dramatic conclusion to the play and film. It's a film with good performances, though its actors sometimes have to struggle against their star personae. James Garner was so familiar as a smart aleck on the TV series Maverick that he feels a little miscast as Dr. Cardin, Karen's fiancé, who is unable to convince her that he may indeed have believed in the rumor about her relationship with Martha. Audrey Hepburn, too, carries the aura of winsome romantic comedy heroine into her performance as Karen, but is more successful at overcoming the image. Of the three leads, Shirley MacLaine is the most successful, since she doesn't have to deal with a too-precisely established screen persona, and she brings real depth to Martha's conflicts, including her simmering resentment of Karen's supposed abandonment of their plans in order to marry Joe, and her anguished recognition of her possibly repressed lesbianism. But the real standouts in the cast are the supporting players, Miriam Hopkins (who had played Martha in These Three) as the flibbertigibbet Aunt Lily and Fay Bainter, Oscar-nominated for her role as Amelia Tilford, whose credulity when her niece tells her the lie about Karen and Martha brings about the crisis. Wyler's direction is, as always, precise and professional, and the art direction of Fernando Carrere and the cinematography of Franz Planer make the primary setting, the girls school, follow the film's changes in mood, from innocent to grim.

Old Acquaintance (Vincent Sherman, 1943)

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, John Loder, Gig Young, Dolores Moran, Phillip Reed, Roscoe Karnes, Anne Revere, Esther Dale. Screenplay: John Van Druten, Lenore J. Coffee, based on a play by John Van Druten. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: John Hughes. Film editing: Terry O. Morse. Music: Franz Waxman.

One of those actress pairings that you can't help being drawn to, no matter the quality of the movie: Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Fortunately, the movie, Old Acquaintance, is pretty good. (So was their earlier teaming in 1939, in William Goulding's The Old Maid, during which they are said to have had off-screen battles.) It's a story of two childhood friends who both grow up to be successful novelists, though Davis's Kit Marlowe is a critical darling while Hopkins's Millie Drake is a commercial success. They also grow up orbiting the same man, Preston Drake (John Loder), though Millie is the one who marries him and has a daughter with him. Eventually, Millie and Preston split, and the daughter, Dede, grows up to be played by Dolores Moran, and wouldn't you know it, to take Kit's much younger lover, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young), away from her. The central fact of the relationship between Kit and Millie, however, is that they represent opposite temperaments: Kit is solid and cynical, while Millie is high-strung and manic. All of this makes for some entertaining scenes, which is all that's needed in a Bette Davis movie, or a Miriam Hopkins one, for that matter.

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.

Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)

Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)

Cast: Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn, Isabel Jewell, Jane Darwell, Wyndham Standing. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, based on a play by Noël Coward. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Film editing: Frances Marsh. Music: John Leipold.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Lily: Miriam Hopkins
Mariette Colet: Kay Francis
Gaston Monescu: Herbert Marshall
The Major: Charles Ruggles
François Filiba: Edward Everett Horton
Adolph J. Giron: C. Aubrey Smith
Jacques: Robert Greig

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones
Based on a play by Aladar Laszlo
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling

It's a measure of the stupidity of American censorship that this gemlike sophisticated comedy could not have been made in Hollywood two years later, after the Production Code was implemented, but was also withheld from re-release for years afterward, all because it dared to indicate that its adult characters were having sex with one another without benefit of clergy and because the blithely larcenous Lily and Gaston were allowed to get off without apparent punishment -- indeed, with considerable reward -- for their crimes. It's essential for anyone who wants to know why Ernst Lubitsch and his so-called "touch" were so highly prized for so long.

Barbary Coast (Howard Hawks, 1935)

Miriam Hopkins and Edward G. Robinson in Barbary Coast

Mary Rutledge: Miriam Hopkins
Luis Chamalis: Edward G. Robinson
Jim Carmichael: Joel McCrea
Old Atrocity: Walter Brennan
Col. Marcus Aurelius Cobb: Frank Craven
Knuckles Jacoby: Brian Donlevy
Jed Slocum: Harry Carey
Sawbuck McTavish: Donald Meek

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur
Cinematography: Ray June
Art direction: Richard Day

The chill, clammy hand of the Production Code's Joseph Breen is detectable in Barbary Coast, and only the diligent playfulness of director Howard Hawks and the cheeky irreverence of screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur make it watchable today. That, and the performances of Miriam Hopkins, Edward G. Robinson, Joel McCrea, and Walter Brennan, each of whom knows the whole thing is nonsense as far as actual history and human behavior are concerned, but are happy to go along with the joke. Hopkins's Mary Rutledge is a shady lady -- perhaps a prostitute and certainly the mistress of Robinson's Luis Chamalis -- but she becomes a Hawksian woman, who gets along in the world of men by keeping them at arm's length with wisecracks and wry condescension. She arrives in San Francisco supposedly to marry a man who has struck it rich in the gold fields, but finds out that he's dead and his winnings have been confiscated by Chamalis after losing at the roulette wheel. She's greeted with enthusiasm by the waterfront crowd, who keep exclaiming, "A white woman!" But in the face of bad luck she neither faints nor falls but instead takes her turn running the crooked wheel for Chamalis while coyly locking her door against him at night. Eventually, she will find her true love, McCrea's Jim Carmichael, who will have his own fortune robbed at the wheel, but through various improbable turns will wind up sailing back to New York with his recouped fortune and Mary herself. Brennan, after removing his false teeth, plays a character called "Old Atrocity," cackling and spitting his way through the scenes he steals. Though the film was produced by Sam Goldwyn,  Robinson is nothing more than one of his Warner Bros. gangsters wearing a frilled shirt and an earring, with Brian Donlevy, as a character called "Knuckles," to rough up his enemies, which include the newly arrived newspaper editor played by Frank Craven, who wants to clean up the town and install "law and order." Eventually, the cleaning up is done by vigilantes, who string up Knuckles, which is not exactly the kind of law and order that the editor had in mind. When he's rounded up by the vigilantes, Chamalis turns noble and releases Mary from her promise to marry him if he'll spare her true love's life. Melodrama never got more blatant than Barbary Coast, but there's wit in the lines and spirit in the performances.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931; Victor Fleming, 1941)

MGM's 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a virtual remake of Paramount's 1931 version of the Robert Louis Stevenson novella: John Lee Mahin's screenplay is clearly based on the earlier one by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath. The similarities are so obvious that MGM, having bought the rights to Paramount's version, tried to buy up all prints of it.* Seeing the two versions back-to-back is a pretty good lesson in how things changed in Hollywood over ten years: For one thing, the Production Code went into effect, which means that the "bad girl" Ivy (Miriam Hopkins in 1931, Ingrid Bergman in 1941) ceased to be a prostitute and became a barmaid. Hopkins shows a good deal more skin than does Bergman, and in the 1931 we see the scars on her back, inflicted by Hyde's whip, whereas in 1941 we see only the shocked reaction of those who witness them. As for Jekyll/Hyde (Fredric March in 1931, Spencer Tracy in 1941), the earlier version gives us a lustier Jekyll -- we sense that he's so eager to marry the virtuous Muriel Carew (Rose Hobart) because he wants to go to bed with her. Tracy's Jekyll indulges in a little more PDA with his fiancée, Beatrix Emery (Lana Turner), than her Victorian paterfamilias (Donald Crisp) would like, but there's no sense of urgency in his attraction to her. It's widely known that the original casting had Turner playing Ivy and Bergman as Beatrix, but that Bergman wanted to play the bad girl for a change -- it's clearly the better part -- and persuaded director Victor Fleming to make the switch. March's Hyde is a fearsome, simian creature with a gorilla's skull and great uneven teeth; Tracy's is just a man with a lecherous gaze, unruly hair, bushy eyebrows, and what looks like an unfortunately oversize set of false teeth. March's Jekyll -- pronounced to rhyme with "treacle" -- is a troubled intellectual, whereas Tracy's -- pronounced to rhyme with "heckle" -- is a genial Harley Street physician who genuinely wants to find a cure for bad behavior. March won an Oscar for his performance, and he does lose his sometimes rather starchy manner in the role. Tracy, I think, was just miscast, though in real life he had his own Jekyll/Hyde problems: The everyman persona hid a mean drunk.

*MGM did the same thing to Thorold Dickinson's 1940 film of Gaslight when it made its own version, directed by George Cukor, in 1944, but didn't succeed in either case.

The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

With 12 Oscar nominations and three wins for directing, William Wyler holds a firm place in the history of American movies. But not without some grumbling on the part of auteur critics like Andrew Sarris, who observed, "Wyler's career is a cipher as far as personal direction is concerned." His movies were invariably polished and professionally made, but if what you're looking for is some hint of personality behind the camera, the kind that Hitchcock or Hawks or Ford displayed no matter what the subject matter of the film, then Wyler is an enigma. His most personal film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), grew out of his wartime experiences, but they are subsumed in the stories he has to tell and not revealed with any assertively personal point of view on them. And anyone who can trace a Wylerian personality latent in movies as varied as Mrs. Miniver (1942), Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and Funny Girl (1968) has a subtler analytical mind than mine. What they have in common is that they are well made, the work of a fine craftsman if not an artist. The other thing they have in common is that they won Oscars for their stars: Greer Garson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston, and Barbra Streisand, respectively. The Heiress, too, won an Oscar for its star, Olivia de Havilland, suggesting that in Wyler we have a director whose virtue lay not in his personal vision but in his skill at packaging, at arranging a showcase not just for performers -- he also directed Oscar-winning performances by Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938) and by Fredric March and Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives -- but also for production designers, costume designers, composers, and cinematographers: Oscars for The Heiress went to John Meehan, Harry Horner, and Emile Kuri for art direction and set decoration, to Edith Head and Gile Steele for costumes, and to Aaron Copland for the score, and Leo Tover was nominated for his cinematography. Wyler lost the directing Oscar to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives, but is there any doubt that The Heiress would have been a lesser film than it is without Wyler's guidance? All of this is a long-winded way to say that although I honor, and in many ways prefer, the personal vision that shines through in the works of directors like Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, et al., there is room in my pantheon for the skilled if impersonal professional. As for The Heiress itself, it's a satisfying film with two great performances (de Havilland's Catherine and Ralph Richardson's Dr. Sloper), one hugely entertaining one (Miriam Hopkins's Lavinia Penniman), and one sad miscasting: Montgomery Clift's Morris Townsend. It's a hard role to put across: Morris has to be plausible enough to persuade not only Catherine but also the somewhat more worldly Lavinia that he is genuinely in love with Catherine and not just her money, but he also needs to give the audience a whiff of the cad. Clift's Morris is too callow, too grinningly eager. There is no ambiguity in the performance. If we like Morris too much, we risk seeing Dr. Sloper more as an over-stern paterfamilias and less as the cruelly self-absorbed man he is. Richardson's fine performance goes a long way to righting this imbalance, but he's fighting Clift's sex appeal all the way.  

The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933)

William Faulkner claimed that he wrote the novel Sanctuary for the money, which may have some truth in it -- it was one of his few best-selling novels. But if it's not on a par with The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying or Go Down, Moses, it's a well-wrought book with a good deal more art than its sensational plot suggests: Temple Drake is a hedonistic Ole Miss coed who winds up at a bootlegger's hangout after an automobile accident and is abducted by a thug called Popeye who rapes her with a corncob (he's impotent) and forces her into prostitution. Naturally, Hollywood jumped at the chance to capitalize on the book's reputation, and equally naturally found itself unable to do anything but bowdlerize the story. Temple (Miriam Hopkins) is still a "bad girl," but gone are Popeye's impotence and the corncob, along with his name (presumably to avoid a lawsuit from the holders of the copyright on the cartoon character). In the movie he's called Trigger (Jack La Rue), and although the rape takes place (after a fadeout) in a corncrib, there's no hint of his incapacity. And in the end, Temple gets a chance to redeem herself in court at the trial of a man accused of the murder that Trigger actually committed -- a complete reversal of what happens in the book. Nevertheless, the film became one of the most notorious of the Pre-Code films that led to Hollywood's rigorous system of self-censorship. The problem is that it's a rather muddled movie. Roberts was a second-string director, and he fails to impose shape or coherence on the story, which was adapted by Oliver H.P. Garrett. Hopkins, in her 30s, is miscast as the flighty young Temple, and William Gargan, who plays the lawyer Stephen Benbow, alternately chews the scenery and fades into the background. La Rue, on the other hand, had a long career as a heavy and brings real menace to the part of Trigger, almost evoking Faulkner's description of Popeye's "vicious depthless quality of stamped tin." The best performance, though, is probably Florence Eldridge's as the downtrodden Ruby, who grudgingly tries to protect Temple from Trigger and the other men at the bootlegger's hangout. There is some Paramount gloss on the film: When she isn't in her underwear, Hopkins wears gowns by Travis Banton, and the cinematography by Karl Struss gives the movie a more sophisticated look than it really deserves. But the general feeling one gets is that Faulkner has once again been badly served by the movies.