Working Girls (Dorothy Arzner, 1931)

Judith Wood and Paul Lukas in Working Girls

Cast: Judith Wood, Dorothy Hall, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Paul Lukas, Stuart Erwin, Frances Dee, Mary Forbes, Frances Moffett, Claire Dodd, Dorothy Stickney. Screenplay: Zoe Akins, based on a play by Vera Caspary and Winfred Lenihan. Cinematography: Harry Fishbeck. Film editing: Jane Loring. Music: Ralph Rainger.

Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944)

George Brent, Paul Lukas, and Hedy Lamarr in Experiment Perilous

 Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Brent, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, Carl Esmond, Olive Blakeney, George N. Neise, Margaret Wycherly. Screenplay: Warren Duff, based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Roy Webb. 

Cary Grant was the original choice to play the male lead in Experiment Perilous and Gregory Peck was the second. If the role had gone to either of them, the film might be remembered as more than just the other gaslighting movie of 1944, but it has been eclipsed by George Cukor's Gaslight. The part of the psychiatrist Huntington Bailey went to the stolid old reliable George Brent. Dr. Bailey gets caught up in the drama of the Bederaux family when he has a chance encounter on a train with the slightly dotty Clarissa (Cissie) Bederaux (Olive Blakeney), who tells him she's writing the biography of her brother Nick (Paul Lukas), who has a beautiful wife named Allida (Hedy Lamarr). Bailey is intrigued, but not much more, until a mixup in luggage puts him in possession of one of Clarissa's bags. That, and the enthusiasm of his artist friends Clag (Albert Dekker) and Maitland (Carl Esmond) for Allida's beauty, draws him into the Bederaux circle and arouses his suspicions that Allida is not the mentally fragile woman that her husband and others say she is. When he learns that Cissie has died of a heart attack, he opens her valise and finds the manuscript of her biography and her diary, confirming his suspicion -- and putting him in jeopardy. This is solid melodrama stuff, and director Jacques Tourneur, who directed the Val Lewton romantic horror movies Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), knows just what to do with it. He's hindered a little by an over-complicated screenplay based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter, which necessitates a lot of flashbacks and switches in point of view, so the film doesn't proceed as smoothly as it might. But he maintains the right atmosphere as the plot moves to its resolution, which involves literally lighting gas as well as gaslighting. There's a goopy happy-ending coda to the main story that strikes the wrong note for the film, but Experiment Perilous deserves to be known as more than an also-ran.

Little Women (George Cukor, 1933)

Little Women (George Cukor, 1933)

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker, Frances Dee, Spring Byington, Paul Lukas, Henry Stephenson, Douglass Montgomery, Edna May Oliver, John Lodge. Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Henry W. Gerrard. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Jack Kitchin. Music: Max Steiner.

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in The Lady Vanishes

Iris Henderson: Margaret Lockwood
Gilbert: Michael Redgrave
Dr. Hartz: Paul Lukas
Miss Froy: May Whitty
Mr. Todhunter: Cecil Parker
"Mrs." Todhunter: Linden Travers
Caldicott: Naunton Wayne
Charters: Basil Radford
Baroness: Mary Clare
Hotel Manager: Emile Boreo
Blanche: Googie Withers
Julie: Sally Stewart
Signor Doppo: Philip Leaver
Signora Doppo: Selma Vaz Dias
The Nun: Catherine Lacy
Madame Kummer: Josephine Wilson

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

There are those who think that Alfred Hitchcock never surpassed The Lady Vanishes when it comes to the romantic comedy thriller. From the opening sequence of an obviously miniature Eastern European village to the concluding scene in which Miss Froy delightedly reunites with Iris and Gilbert, it's an utterly engaging movie. If I happen to prefer North by Northwest (1959), it may be only because Cary Grant is a greater movie star than Michael Redgrave and James Mason a more suavely subtle villain than Paul Lukas, and of course the thrills -- the crop-dusting scene, the Mount Rushmore chase -- are done more deftly (not to say expensively) and with greater sophistication. Because virtually everything in The Lady Vanishes works: There's real chemistry between Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood; May Whitty is a delight as the geriatric spy; the notion of a song being the MacGuffin is witty; Caldicott and Charters are the perfect ambiguously gay duo; and there's a nun in high heels who pauses to fix her makeup. It also has a genuinely serious subtext: 1938 was a year fraught with tension, and when Caldicott and Charters are preoccupied with getting the news from England, our first thought is that it has to do something with the threat of war and not with a cricket test match. The satiric glances at the insular Brits are also underscored by the relationship of Todhunter and his mistress, escaping to a place where nobody knows them to conduct their affair, and even by Gilbert's blithe preoccupation with collecting information about the native folk dances of the Bandrikans, who might indeed be next after the Czechs to be swallowed up by the Third Reich. 

Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)

Walter Huston in Dodsworth

Sam Dodsworth: Walter Huston
Fran Dodsworth: Ruth Chatterton
Edith Cortright: Mary Astor
Arnold Iselin: Paul Lukas
Captain Lockert: David Niven
Kurt Von Obersdorf: Gregory Gaye
Baroness Von Obersdorf: Maria Ouspenskaya
Matey Pearson: Spring Byington
Tubby Pearson: Harlan Briggs
Renée de Penable: Odette Myrtil
Emily: Kathryn Marlowe
Harry: John Payne

Director: William Wyler
Screenplay: Sidney Howard
Based on the play adapted by Sidney Howard from a novel by Sinclair Lewis
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Music: Alfred Newman
Costume design: Omar Kiam

I have a feeling that Dodsworth is not quite as well known as it ought to be. It's one of the few Hollywood dramas of the 1930s that seem to have been made for grownups, avoiding melodrama and sentimentality in its treatment of marriage and growing old, and sidestepping the Production Code's infantilizing attitudes toward adultery and divorce. And most of all, it has a wonderful performance by Walter Huston, who was nominated for an Oscar but lost, rather shamefully, to Paul Muni's hammy turn in The Story of Louis Pasteur (William Dieterle, 1936). Huston's Sam Dodsworth is a captain of industry, founder of an automobile company, who decides to sell the business and spend the rest of his life figuring out what to do with himself. His wife, Fran, knows exactly what she wants to do: Sail to Europe and flirt with all those interesting men who can't be found in the Midwestern city of Zenith -- which was also the setting for Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt, whose title character became a byword for Midwestern fatuousness. Fran is a few years younger than Sam -- Chatterton was 44, Huston 53 -- and unwilling to grow old gracefully, claiming to be 35 and unwilling to reveal that she has just become a grandmother. Opportunity presents itself immediately on shipboard in the form of a British military officer, but after flirting shamelessly with him, Fran takes fright when they reach England and he wants to take their relationship another step. But when the Dodsworths move on to Paris, Fran becomes bolder and after Sam, bored with life in Europe, returns alone to the United States for a visit with their daughter and her husband, she begins an affair with a suave European. Getting wind of the affair, Sam returns to Paris and confronts Fran, who breaks it off. But their efforts to patch things up fail and Fran asks him for a divorce. In Vienna she finds another suitor, a younger, rather effete aristocrat named Kurt Von Obersdorf, and is ready to marry him once the divorce goes through. Meanwhile, Sam travels on his own and in Naples is reunited with Edith Cortright, a divorcee he had met earlier. Sam moves in with Edith in the villa she is renting, but their happiness is interrupted by Fran's misery: Kurt's mother, the baroness, forbids their marriage on the grounds that Fran is not only divorced but also too old to provide an heir for the family line. A distraught Fran, facing up to failure, urges Sam to return to America with her, presenting him with the dilemma of continuing a marriage that has proved hopeless or exploring the new vistas that have opened for him. Lewis's novel is more in the satirical vein of Babbitt than the film version; Sidney Howard's screenplay, based on his Broadway play, which also starred Huston, evokes Henry James's stories about American encounters with Europeans. William Wyler, with his smooth, unobtrusive professionalism, is the perfect director for the film, which was made under the aegis of producer Samuel Goldwyn, who aimed for polish and prestige and for once achieved it. Given that Dodsworth was made in the mid-1930s, when Nazism was on the rise in Germany and fascism had taken hold in Italy, it seems a bit out of its time. Sam and Edith's dream of traveling the world together feels more than a little naive in the context of the period. The only reference to the rumblings of war perceptible in the film comes in Sam's comment that he prefers the United States because there are "no soldiers along the Canadian border."

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin, 1943)

Like Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949) or Cliff Robertson in Charly (Ralph Nelson, 1968), Paul Lukas had the good fortune to land a movie role that won him the best actor Oscar on his one and only turn as a nominee. His competition included Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood), Walter Pidgeon in Madame Curie (Mervyn LeRoy), and Mickey Rooney in The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown). Oh, and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz), the one performance that everyone remembers. It's not like Lukas hadn't had plenty of opportunities to attract attention before: He had begun acting in movies in his native Hungary in 1915, and after coming to Hollywood had appeared in mostly supporting roles in numerous films, playing Professor Bhaer opposite Katharine Hepburn in Little Women (George Cukor, 1933) and the sinister Dr. Hartz in The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938), for example. He had also played the role of Kurt Muller, the coordinator of resistance movements against the Nazis, in the original Broadway production of Watch on the Rhine in 1941, so he was a natural choice for the film version -- though producer Hal Wallis wanted Charles Boyer instead. As often happens, the Oscar was no step toward better roles in movies, and Lukas spent much of his later career on stage, though he continued to appear on film and TV up till his death in 1971. The play was written by Lillian Hellman, whose lover, Dashiell Hammett, did the screenplay with some input from her. Unfortunately, the result is less a movie than a sermon about doing one's patriotic duty in the struggle against fascism. It didn't help that Wallis hired the play's director, Herman Shumlin, for the film: Shumlin had never directed a movie and had to be assisted throughout by cinematographer Hal Mohr. He was also unable to rein in Bette Davis, who is miscast as the noble and dutiful wife and has a tendency to slip into some of her familiar and caricaturable mannerisms in the film.