Crisis (Richard Brooks, 1950)

Ramon Novarro, Cary Grant, Paula Raymond, and Leon Ames in Crisis

Cast: Cary Grant, José Ferrer, Paula Raymond, Signe Hasso, Ramon Novarro, Gilbert Roland, Leon Ames. Screenplay: Richard Brooks, George Tabori. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

In Crisis, Cary Grant plays a brain surgeon, which led one critic to snark that he looked like he should be holding a martini glass instead of a scalpel. That only points up the problem of movie star image: We expect Grant to be suave and wisecracking and not hung up on the dilemma of whether to perform an operation on a cruel dictator (José Ferrer) who is trying to fend off a revolution. Naturally, Grant's Dr. Ferguson sticks by the Hippocratic Oath and goes through with the operation. Meantime, unbeknownst to Dr. Ferguson, his wife (Paula Raymond) has been kidnapped and the revolutionaries are threatening to kill her if the dictator lives. Ferguson is unaware of this because the dictator's wife (Signe Hasso) has intercepted the message from the revolutionaries and destroyed it. It's a pretty good thriller premise, but writer-director Richard Brooks doesn't know how to build the suspense it needs. This was Brooks's first feature film as director, so we may want to cut him some slack. After all, he does a few things well, including a demonstration of brain surgery techniques that adds a little documentary realism to the film. To my eyes, Grant's performance is perfectly fine, and Ferrer and Hasso know how to play villains. Raymond is a little bland as the wife, but there are solid supporting performances from Ramon Novarro as a colonel backing up the dictator, Gilbert Roland as a leader of the revolutionaries, and Leon Ames as an oil company executive trying to remain neutral in the political conflict in this unnamed Latin American country so he can build a pipeline. It's the film's own neutrality -- dictators are bad, but revolutionaries can be, too -- that saps a good deal out of the drama. 

The Cat and the Fiddle (William K. Howard, 1934)

Ramon Novarro and Jeanette MacDonald in The Cat and the Fiddle

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Jeanette MacDonald, Frank Morgan, Charles Butterworth, Jean Hersholt, Vivienne Segal, Frank Conroy, Henry Armetta, Adrienne D'Ambicourt, Joseph Cawthorn. Screenplay: Bella Spewack, Sam Spewack, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and Jerome Kern. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke, Ray Rennahan, Harold Rosson. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Frank E. Hull. Music: Herbert Stothart, songs by Jerome Kern and Otto A. Harbach.

The Cat and the Fiddle marks a change in Jeanette MacDonald's career: It was her first film for MGM after the classic series of witty, racy movies co-starring Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, and it neatly bridges her way into the more famous but less interesting operetta films she made with Nelson Eddy at MGM. Here her co-star is Ramon Novarro, a charming actor with great comic skills and a nice singing voice, but they don't mesh the way she did with either Chevalier or Eddy; she seems a little too stiff, he a little too boyish. Made before the full introduction of the Production Code, the movie tries for some of the sexiness of the Paramount films made under the aegis of the master of the sly wink, Ernst Lubitsch. The lovers, Novarro's Victor and MacDonald's Shirley, live together without benefit of clergy, a thing impossible under the code. There is fun to be had watching the film: The dialogue -- among the uncredited contributors to the screenplay are Anita Loos and James Kevin McGuinness -- is often smart and funny, the songs are pleasant, and the giddy nonsense of the plot skips along merrily. And at the end there's a nice surprise: The final reel is in Technicolor, giving audiences a first glimpse of MacDonald's red hair. But this is minor MGM musical stuff, even in comparison with the later MacDonald/Eddy movies.

Scaramouche (Rex Ingram, 1923)

Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry in Scaramouche

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Alice Terry, Lewis Stone, Lloyd Ingraham, Julia Swayne Gordon, William Humphrey, Otto Matieson, George Siegmann, Bowditch M. Turner, James A. Marcus, Edith Allen, John George, Willard Lee Hall, Rose Dione. Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck, based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. Cinematography: John F. Seitz. Art direction: Harold Grieve. Film editing: Grant Whytock.

A year after Ramon Novarro, as Rupert of Hentzau, threatened to steal Rex Ingram's The Count of Monte Cristo away from Lewis Stone's Count, we find the two actors in reversed roles. In Scaramouche Novarro is the dashing hero and Stone the cunning villain. Actually, Scaramouche could have used a bit more dash and cunning in both roles. Novarro isn't given much opportunity to display the impishness he brought to Rupert, even though a title card proclaims, in Rafael Sabatini's words, that Novarro's character, André-Louis Moreau, "was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Nor does Ingram provide enough swashbuckling for Novarro to do: Most of his duels are fought off camera, and the crucial one with Stone's Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr is somewhat awkwardly staged. Ingram seems to be more interested in Harold Grieve's opulent sets, beautifully filmed by John F. Seitz, and in the menacing crowd scenes of his version of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. It's all hokum, of course, but it has its moments.

The Barbarian (Sam Wood, 1933)

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Myrna Loy, Reginald Denny, Louise Closser Hale, C. Aubrey Smith, Edward Arnold, Blanche Friderici, Marcel Corday, Hedda Hopper, Leni Stengel. Screenplay: Anita Loos, Elmer Harris, based on a story by Edgar Selwyn. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Tom Held. Music: Herbert Stothart.

Orientalist fiddle-faddle with Ramon Novarro as an Egyptian prince disguised as a translator and tour director wooing a wealthy American tourist played by Myrna Loy. Novarro is dashing and handsome, but not quite a match for Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (George Melford, 1921), the classic film in this dubious genre. Loy is still emerging from her "exotic" phase, playing the sultry woman of the world -- she's supposedly half Egyptian on her mother's side.

The Prisoner of Zenda (Rex Ingram, 1922)

Ramon Novarro in The Prisoner of Zenda

Rudolf Rassendyll/King Rudolf: Lewis Stone
Princess Flavia: Alice Terry
Col. Zapt: Robert Edeson
Grand Duke Michael: Stuart Holmes
Rupert of Hentzau: Ramon Novarro
Antoinette de Mauban: Barbara La Marr
Capt. Fritz von Tarlenheim: Malcolm McGregor

Director: Rex Ingram
Screenplay: Mary O'Hara
Based on a novel by Anthony Hope
Cinematography: John F. Seitz
Art direction: Amos Myers
Film editing: Grant Whytock

What Rex Ingram's silent version of the old chestnut The Prisoner of Zenda needs is more Ramon Novarro as Rupert of Hentzau, the impish villain. What there is of Novarro's Rupert is delightful; more than almost any other member of the cast he shows the kind of awareness that the camera sees all, which would take him from silents into the sound era. It was near the start of his career, a year before became a star in Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur, and he's still billed as Ramon Samaniego, so it's possible that Ingram didn't fully see his potential. His Rupert is not quite as charmingly wicked as Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s in the 1937 John Cromwell version of the Anthony Hope tale, but that's partly because Ingram chooses not to play up the role, putting Rupert amid a cadre of Black Michael's henchmen until the final climactic duel with Rudolf. Lewis Stone plays the two Rudolfs with more reserve and less dash than Ronald Colman did in 1937, and Alice Terry is pretty but rather forgettable as Princess Flavia, a role that Madeleine Carroll brought to life in the sound version. Some spectacular sets make up for the tedium of Ruritanian intrigue that threatens to stifle the film whenever Novarro isn't around.

Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice, 1931)

Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in Mata Hari

Mata Hari: Greta Garbo
Lt. Alexis Rosanoff: Ramon Novarro
Gen. Serge Shubin: Lionel Barrymore
Andriani: Lewis Stone
Dubois: C. Henry Gordon
Carlotta: Karen Morley
Caron: Alec B. Francis
Sister Angelica: Blanche Friderici
Warden: Edmund Breese
Sister Genevieve: Helen Jerome Eddy

Director: George Fitzmaurice
Screenplay: Benjamin Glazer, Leo Birinsky
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Costume design: Adrian
Music: William Axt

Garbo ... dances? Well, only if you call the posing, prancing, and strutting she does before a statue of Shiva in George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari dancing. It unaccountably brings on a storm of applause, though that may be because in the version shown on Turner Classic Movies we don't see the finale of the dance that audiences saw in the original pre-Code version of Mata Hari: an apparently nude Garbo. The movie was such a big hit for Garbo that it was re-released after the Production Code went into effect three years later, at which time the censors swooped in with their scissors, cutting not only the nude scene -- which in any case featured Garbo's body double with only a suggestion of nudity -- but also some scenes showing Mata Hari and Lt. Rosanoff in bed together. The film is mostly proof that Garbo in her prime could sell almost anything, even this piece of MGM claptrap. Here she vamps a very pretty Ramon Novarro, playing a Russian aviator with a Mexican accent, and connives with the Russian general overplayed by Lionel Barrymore and the sinister spymaster played by the almost as hammy Lewis Stone. Swanning about in some preposterous outfits by Adrian, Garbo's Mata Hari is the typical wicked lady -- she even persuades Rosanoff to snuff the candle he has promised his mother to keep burning before the icon of Our Lady of Kazan -- redeemed by falling in love. Rosanoff atones for his weakness by being blinded in a plane crash, and Mata Hari conceals from him the fact that she's been sentenced to the firing squad and goes off bravely to face her doom. They don't make them like this anymore, and there's a reason: We have no Garbos to pull them off. 

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927)

Norma Shearer, Ramon Novarro, and Jean Hersholt in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg

Prince Karl Heinrich: Ramon Novarro
Kathi: Norma Shearer
Dr. Jüttner: Jean Hersholt
King Karl VII: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Lutz: Edgar Norton
Kellermann: Bobbie Mack
Young Karl Heinrich: Philippe De Lacy
Old Ruder: Otis Harlan

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Hanns Kräly
Based on a book and play by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster
Cinematography: John J. Mescall
Art direction: Richard Day, Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Andrew Marton

Though The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg sometimes seems as overextended as its title, given the slightness of its love-or-duty plot, it gets a good deal of zip from Ernst Lubitsch's direction and from the charm of its leads, Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer. The latter, especially, is seen to good advantage in a role that doesn't call on her to over-emote, a trap she sometimes fell into in many of her sound roles. Lubitsch inserts sly gags here and there to leaven the obviousness of the plot. After perhaps one too many scenes of students quaffing beer, there's a card to remind us that they were at the university to learn, too, followed by a shot of a professor droning away at a lectern to a classroom of a single student. Eventually, the film bogs down a bit when Novarro's Karl Heinrich is called away to princely duties and has to forsake Shearer's lovely barmaid. 

We Were Strangers (John Huston, 1949)

Fidel Castro, who died this year, came to power in 1959, ten years after We Were Strangers, which deals with an earlier Cuban revolution, was made. Castro's own revolution is probably why this film, despite its major director and stars, is so little known. It was never revived after its initial showing, and didn't become available on video until 2005 despite the reputation of its director, John Huston. It's a fairly scathing look at the failure of the United States to support the overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in 1933. John Garfield plays Tony Fenner, a Cuban-born American who works with the underground revolutionaries to overthrow Machado. He comes up with a rather complicated plot to tunnel into the Colón Cemetery and plant a bomb that will kill the regime's leaders. He enlists a group who have no previous ties with one another, including China Valdés (Jennifer Jones), a bank clerk whose brother was killed by the Havana police chief, Armando Aréte (Pedro Armendáriz), and who lives in a house across the street from the cemetery. The plan is to assassinate a high-ranking member of the regime and detonate the bomb when the dignitaries gather for his funeral. But Fenner's plan is just a little too complicated, and things go awry. It's a curious film to be made just as the red scare was heating up in Washington and Hollywood, for the script by Peter Viertel and director John Huston has no scruples about portraying the violent revolutionaries as heroic. The revolutionaries even countenance the collateral damage of killing innocent people at the funeral, although one of their company has serious reservations about it and, worn down by the hard work of tunneling, goes mad. Garfield, who would soon be threatened with blacklisting as a leftist, gives a typically intense performance, and Jones, though miscast, does a passable imitation of a determined Cuban revolutionary. Armendáriz, whom Hollywood often relegated to Latino sidekick roles, is a fine, sinister villain. Gilbert Roland, as a singing, wisecracking member of the revolutionary team, provides what levity the film possesses, and Ramon Novarro has a cameo as the chief who authorizes Fenner's plan. There's some obvious use of rear projection in which the actors are superimposed against scenes actually filmed in Havana, but Russell Metty's cinematography is mostly quite effective.