Blind Alley (Charles Vidor, 1939)

Cast: Chester Morris, Ralph Bellamy, Ann Dvorak, Joan Perry, Melville Cooper, Rose Stradner, John Eldredge, Ann Doran, Marc Lawrence, Stanley Brown, Scotty Beckett, Milburn Stone, Marie Blake. Screenplay: Philip MacDonald, Michael Blankfort, Albert Duffy, based on a play by James Warwick. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: George Parrish. 

Blind Alley has a familiar setup: a killer on the run from the cops takes a family hostage in their own home. Chester Morris plays the killer, Hal Wilson, who moves in on the Shelby household, whose head is a college professor and psychiatrist played by Ralph Bellamy. Wilson, it turns out, is a psychopath, plagued by a recurrent dream, and Dr. Shelby sees the opportunity to disarm him by using the tools of psychotherapy. It works, sort of, in a rather too simplistic fashion, as the shrink decodes the symbolism of Wilson's dream as a traumatic event from his childhood that the killer has been repressing. The movie is a little stagy, as any adaptation of a play to screen is likely to be, but it's tidy enough in its storytelling that I didn't mind the obvious curtain lines and creaky attempts to "open out" the action -- for example, by visualizing the contents of Wilson's nightmare. It's nice to see Bellamy playing something other than a stooge for Cary Grant, as he did so memorably in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1941). Morris is given to chewing the scenery but Ann Dvorak is good as his moll, Mary, who knows how to handle him well enough that Shelby can work his cure. The movie is sometimes cited as one of the first films noir, which only shows how flexible any definition of that genre has to be. 

Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941)

Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941)

Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Beulah Bondi, Edgar Buchanan, Ann Doran, Eva Lee Kuney, Leonard Willey, Wallis Clark, Walter Soderling, Jane Biffey. Screenplay: Morrie Ryskind, based on a story by Martha Cheavens. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: W. Franke Harling.

Penny Serenade was released in April 1941, which explains the cozy, rosy japonaiserie of the scenes set in the country that would be vilified by Americans after Pearl Harbor, only eight months later. The idyllic sojourn of the Adamses in Japan would be brief, however, cut short by an earthquake that brings on Julie Adams's miscarriage, complications of which leave her unable to bear the children she so longs for. But that's only the beginning of their misfortunes, which left many moviegoers holding soggy handkerchiefs. The phrase "they don't make 'em like this anymore" comes to mind, except that they do: Millions of people tune in every week to follow the fortunes of the Pearson family on This Is Us. It's easy to dismiss this kind of cathartic cinema and its TV descendants, but it serves a need that shouldn't be dismissed cynically. We may prefer the Irene Dunne and Cary Grant of The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940), but their starry presence helps lift Penny Serenade out of the vale of tears. Grant earned one of his two Oscar nominations -- the other was for None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets, 1944) -- for this film. The Academy always prefers acting that shows over acting that naturally arises out of a performer's established persona, and while his performance is by no means one of Grant's best -- there are dozens more that could be cited as essential for their Cary-Grantness -- it does make Penny Serenade more watchable than it might be today. Dunne is less challenged by her role: Noble suffering was her forte in most of her films; comic giddiness was the exception. But she doesn't overdo it here. Everything else, however, is overdone: the chubby moppets who play the Adamses' adopted daughter at different ages; the motherly rule-bending adoption agency head played by Beulah Bondi; the gruff but tender chum known as Applejack and played by Edgar Buchanan; the sentimental old songs that key each flashback. It comes as a shock to learn that so much of this tearjerking was done by screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, who got his start writing gags for the Marx Brothers and was the screenwriter for Gregory La Cava on the screwball My Man Godfrey (1936) and the acerbic Stage Door (1937).

Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)

Cary Grant, Edward Everett Horton, and Jean Dixon in Holiday

Linda Seton: Katharine Hepburn
Johnny Case: Cary Grant
Julia Seton: Doris Nolan
Ned Seton: Lew Ayres
Nick Potter: Edward Everett Horton
Susan Potter: Jean Dixon
Edward Seton: Henry Kolker
Seton Cram: Henry Daniell
Laura Cram: Binnie Barnes

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Donald Ogden Stewart, Sidney Buchman
Based on a play by Philip Barry
Cinematography: Franz Planer
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Al Clark, Otto Meyer
Music: Sidney Cutner

Of the four films Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn made together, I think George Cukor's Holiday may be my favorite. Their first, Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor, 1935), is just, well, weird. The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940) has maybe a touch too much MGM gloss for my tastes, and James Stewart has a better role than Grant does. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) is a greater movie than Holiday and one of the funniest films ever made, but as a showcase for the talents and the chemistry of Grant and Hepburn it falls short because they're mostly called on for one note: zaniness. But Holiday allows them to show off almost everything they could do. It allows Grant to be suave and ardent and acrobatic and sexy. It lets Hepburn be intense and vulnerable and glamorous and noble. And it gives them one of the best supporting casts ever assembled to play off of. As films like his David Copperfield (1935) and The Women (1939) show, Cukor was a master at directing ensembles of colorful players. Here he directs the usually bland Lew Ayres in a heartbreaking performance as Ned Seton, the trapped, alcoholic younger brother of Linda and Julia. He makes Doris Nolan's Julia first a credible match for Grant's Johnny Case and then eases her transition into a chip off the old ice block: the die-hard capitalist tycoon paterfamilias played by Henry Kolker. Johnny's background is illuminated by his friendship with the witty, professorial Potters as that of the Setons is by the snide, snobbish Crams. Of course, all of these relationships are built into the film by its source, a play by Philip Barry adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman, but it's Cukor's skill at keeping them in balance that allows the film to stay away from sentimentality or getting bogged down in satire of the rich. There's a bit of the latter -- and of the leftist views that would later get Stewart blacklisted -- when Seton calls Johnny's desire to take time off from making money "un-American," to which Linda replies, "Well, then, he is, and he won't go to heaven when he dies, because apparently he can't believe that a life devoted to piling up money is all it's cracked up to be." Holiday has a little more satiric bite than the other Barry-Stewart-Cukor-Grant-Hepburn collaboration, The Philadelphia Story, but this is Depression-era political commentary with a light touch. Best of all, Holiday is one of the greatest members of a much-abused genre, the romantic comedy.