D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949)

Neville Brand and Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A.

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Lynn Baggett, William Ching, Henry Hart, Neville Brand, Laurette Luez, Jess Kirkpatrick, Cay Forester, Frank Jaquet, Lawrence Dobkin, Frank Gerstle, Carol Hughes, Michael Ross, Donna Sanborn. Screenplay: Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene. Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Arthur H. Nadel. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Who knew that being a notary public could be so dangerous? D.O.A. is a frenetic, mostly implausible thriller that somehow works, even though no one in it acts like a human being. I mean, if you found that you'd been poisoned and had only a short time to live, you'd get in touch with the police, check into a hospital, and call your loved ones, right? Not Frank Bigelow, a tax accountant on a rather odd vacation to San Francisco, who visits a jazz bar where he's given a drink containing a "luminous toxin." The next morning, feeling a little unwell, he goes to a doctor who gives him the bad news, so he rushes to a hospital for a second opinion, and then, following a slim lead, rushes to Los Angeles to try to find out why he's being done in. All this rushing, which includes a famous tracking shot of Bigelow running down Market Street, elbowing aside the crowds, can't have been good for him, perhaps only speeding up the effects of the poison. But by this time we have been so caught up in his plight that we don't really care. One of the reasons is that Edmond O'Brien, an actor who was typically a kind of movie Everyman, is perfectly cast as Bigelow. The other is that Rudolph Maté, abetted by a pounding score by Dimitri Tiomkin, never gives us time for anything so mundane as thought. It's a film full of absurdities, starting with Bigelow's curiously distant relationship with his secretary and lover, Paula (Pamela Britton), and continuing through his arrival at a hotel in San Francisco during "Market Week," where hordes of salesmen, clients, and (presumably) hookers are partying. (I don't know who thought it was a great idea to add a slide-whistle wolf whistle on the soundtrack every time a pretty woman appears on screen. Surely it isn't indicated on Tiomkin's score.) Anyway, Bigelow gets swept away to a bar where a lot of hipsters are grooving to some hyped-up jazz, and it's there that he gets slipped the mickey. The film takes off and never lets up from there, with some fisticuffs and gunplay and a toothy psychopath named Chester (Neville Brand), as the plot thickens so much that by the end I really couldn't tell you why Bigelow's notarizing a bill of sale put him in such final jeopardy. Nor do I care: By the end, I was so exhausted by its audacious silliness that I was content to accept it as the classic good bad movie.

When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951)

Richard Derr and Barbara Rush in When Worlds Collide

Cast: Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, Peter Hansen, John Hoyt, Larry Keating, Rachel Ames, Stephen Chase, Frank Cady, Hayden Rorke, Sandro Giglio. Screenplay: Sidney Boehm, based on a novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. Cinematography: W. Howard Greene, John F. Seitz. Art direction: Albert Nozaki, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Arthur P. Schmidt. Music: Leith Stevens.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a bunch of white folks rocketing off to another planet that looks like it was painted by Chesley Bonestell. Well, that's the way it ended in 1951. Today, one hopes that the survivors would be a good deal more diverse and the preparations for their flight a good deal better organized. (Actually, today it looks like it will end with a lot of coughing and political posturing.) When Worlds Collide is very much of its era, sacrificing plausibility for sentiment (small boys and puppies) and romance (tinged with much self-sacrifice). It's a movie that can't be taken seriously for a minute, which is part of its enduring charm for many people. I find that, after many years of serious science fiction, the charm has worn thin. I hunger for some serious treatment of science and for some semblance of actual human behavior. Even though I was 11 years old in 1951, I can't believe that we were dumb enough to swallow what the movie gives us.

My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940)

My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940)

Cast: Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott, Gail Patrick, Ann Shoemaker, Scotty Beckett, Mary Lou Harrington, Donald MacBride, Granville Bates, Pedro de Cordoba. Cinematography: Rudolph Maté. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Mark-Lee Kirk. Film editing: Robert Wise. Music: Roy Webb.

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Barbara O'Neil and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas

Stella Dallas: Barbara Stanwyck
Stephen Dallas: John Boles
Laurel Dallas: Anne Shirley
Helen Morrison: Barbara O'Neil
Ed Munn: Alan Hale
Mrs. Martin: Marjorie Main
Charlie Martin: George Walcott
Miss Phillibrown: Ann Shoemaker
Richard Grosvenor: Tim Holt

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty and its dramatization by Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Gertrude Purcell
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Sherman Todd
Costume design: Omar Kiam
Music: Alfred Newman

I'm bothered by an inconsistency in the title character of King Vidor's Stella Dallas. When Stella's estranged husband, Stephen, shows up unexpectedly at Christmastime bearing gifts for her and their daughter, Laurel, Stella makes a determined effort to look "respectable": She rummages through her closet, rejecting all the flowery, overtrimmed dresses she usually favors, and chooses a black dress, removing most of its trimmings, and even goes so far as to wipe off the lipstick she has just applied. But later, when she takes Laurel to a snooty resort, she's a blowsy horror again, swaggering vulgarly through the amused upperclass crowd -- and thereby precipitating the final separation between her and Laurel. What happened to the self-aware Stella who knew how to present herself as a suitable mate for Stephen Dallas? But the thing about this inconsistency, and other little melodramatic clichés that infest the film, is that it doesn't matter: Stella Dallas triumphs because Barbara Stanwyck believes in her and because King Vidor knows how to manipulate our responses to the characters. Stella's appearance at the resort is played as simultaneously comic -- who doesn't laugh at the way she's dressed, swanning around with a white fox fur? -- and tragic -- Stella's insistence on being herself is her fatal flaw. Similarly, when Ed Munn shows up drunk, wagging around a large turkey he has brought for Stella and Laurel's Christmas and stuffing it head, feet, and all into the oven, the scene is hilarious -- Alan Hale is wonderful here -- until it isn't, until we realize the damage it is going to do to Stella and her daughter. And the celebrated final scene, of Stella watching Laurel's wedding through the window, is beautifully performed by Stanwyck, chewing on her handkerchief, and magisterially staged by Vidor. Tears are flowing in the audience as Stella strides across the street, but she's beaming, having accomplished her chief goal: to see Laurel happy. Critiques of the movie's treatment of maternal self-sacrifice, or of marriage as the consummation of a woman's happiness, are many and cogent. But let's just take a moment to reflect on the skill with which these ideas and attitudes, retrograde as we may find them, have been presented on film.

Come and Get It (Howard Hawks, William Wyler, 1936)

Frances Farmer and Walter Brennan in Come and Get It

Barney Glasgow: Edward Arnold
Lotta Morgan / Lotta Bostrom: Frances Farmer
Swan Bostrom: Walter Brennan
Richard Glasgow: Joel McCrea
Karie: Mady Christians
Emma Louise Glasgow: Mary Nash
Evvie Glasgow: Andrea Leeds
Tony Schwerke: Frank Shields
Josie: Cecil Cunningham

Director: Howard Hawks, William Wyler
Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Jules Furthman
Based on a novel by Edna Ferber
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté, Gregg Toland
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Edward Curtiss
Music: Alfred Newman

William Wyler had just finished Dodsworth (1936) when the producer to whom he was under contract, Samuel Goldwyn, called on him to finish Come and Get It, which had been started under the direction of Howard Hawks. Goldwyn was unhappy with the way Hawks had treated Edna Ferber's novel Come and Get It, so he fired him. Goldwyn, a man of little education, was impressed with writers of big reputations, and liked to think of his movies as prestige items. Ferber was a big bestselling author of the day, best-known for multigenerational historical novels with colorful settings like the Mississippi riverboats of Show Boat and the Oklahoma land rush of Cimarron. The former had become a celebrated musical that had been filmed twice, first as a part-talkie by Harry A. Pollard in 1929 and then by James Whale in 1935, though it was not released until 1936. Cimarron had been made into a best-picture Oscar winner by Wesley Ruggles in 1931, so Goldwyn had been eager to cash in on the novelist's celebrity. He hired Hawks as director because the raucous frontier section of Ferber's novel reminded him of the director's Barbary Coast (1935), but when Goldwyn was sidelined by illness, Hawks jettisoned much of Jane Murfin's Ferber-approved screenplay and brought in one of his frequent collaborators, Jules Furthman, to rewrite and to build up the part of Walter Brennan's Swan Bostrom. Hawks shifted the focus away from Ferber's novel, much of which was about the exploitation of the land by timber interests, and built up the relationship between Bostrom and the protagonist, the ambitious lumberman Barney Glasgow. He also replaced Goldwyn's original choice for Lotta, Miriam Hopkins, with an actress he had discovered, Frances Farmer. Wyler was reluctant to take over from Hawks, and not only resisted Goldwyn's plan to give him sole billing as director but also insisted that Hawks receive top billing as co-director. In any case, Come and Get It turned into a rather curious mess, not least because Hawks was a notoriously freewheeling director with an intensely personal style whereas Wyler was a consummate perfectionist who seldom let his personality show through his work. Although there's some Hawksian energy to the film, it feels like it has been held in check. Moreover, the central character, Barney Glasgow, has been miscast. Goldwyn wanted Spencer Tracy for the part, knowing that Tracy could play both the romantic lead and the driven businessman that the part called for. But when Tracy couldn't get out of his contract with MGM, Goldwyn settled for one of his own contract players, Edward Arnold, a rather squat, rotund character actor with none of Tracy's sex appeal. The best thing about the film is that it gives us a chance to see Farmer before her career was derailed by mental illness. She sharply delineates the two Lottas, mother and daughter, playing the former with a kind of masculine toughness and the latter with a defensive sweetness. As the mother, she growls out the song "Aura Lee" in a Marlene Dietrich baritone, but later as the daughter she sings it in a light soprano. She also sometimes looks strikingly like the actress who played her in the biopic Frances (Graeme Clifford, 1982), Jessica Lange. The other impressive moments in the film are provided by the logging sequences directed by Richard Rosson and filmed by Rudolph Maté. Brennan won the first of his three Oscars for his "yumpin' Yiminy" Swedish-accented character.

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

To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)

Carole Lombard and Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be

Maria Tura: Carole Lombard
Joseph Tura: Jack Benny
Lt. Stanislav Sobinski: Robert Stack
Col. Ehrhardt: Sig Ruman
Greenberg: Felix Bressart
Rawitch: Lionel Atwill
Prof. Siletsky: Stanley Ridges

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Melchior Lengyel, Edwin Justus Mayer
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Production design: Vincent Korda
Film editing: Dorothy Spencer
Music: Werner R. Heymann

Topical humor and satire has always been a risky business, as Kathy Griffin learned recently with her gag involving a severed Trump head. When a joke about current events offends rather than amuses an audience, producing stunned silence or at best nervous laughter, comedians usually try to defuse the situation by asking, "Too soon?" For Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, it was "too soon" for a very long time. Begun before Pearl Harbor and completed after the United States had declared war on Nazi Germany, To Be or Not to Be had the further misfortune to be released shortly after the death of its star, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash while on a tour selling war bonds. The unavoidable bad timing resulted in a critical and commercial failure, with many critics echoing the reaction of the New York Times's Bosley Crowther, admittedly a man not known for his lively sense of humor, that To Be or Not to Be was a "callous and macabre" treatment of "a subject which is far from the realm of fun." Even the father of the film's star, Jack Benny, walked out of the picture when he saw his son wearing a Nazi uniform. (He was later persuaded to sit through the movie and liked it.) Critical nervousness about To Be or Not to Be lingered for a very long time, especially among the generation that fought in or grew up during the war. Andrew Sarris, who placed Lubitsch in his "Pantheon" of great directors in his 1968 book The American Cinema, took notice of the film's reputation as "an inappropriately farcical treatment of Nazi terror," and rather oddly commented, "For Lubitsch, it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable." As late as 1982, in her collection of short reviews, 5001 Night at the Movies, Pauline Kael said that "the burlesque of the Nazis ... is so crudely gleeful that we don't find it funny." That last is, incidentally, a prime example of the Kaelian "we," her tendency to include the reader in her own experience of films. As Sam Goldwyn reportedly said, "Include me out." I'll admit that the first time I saw To Be or Not to Be, I was a little shocked by its tone, and especially its portrayal of the Gestapo as a gaggle of brainless schnooks, epitomized by Sig Ruman's easily duped Col. Ehrhardt. Yes, the Gestapo was a formidable instrument of terror, to the point that they remain emblematic of the utmost viciousness of Nazism, especially when countless movies made after the entrance into the war freed Hollywood filmmakers from their obligation to remain neutral. On the other hand, the Spanish Inquisition was an equally formidable instrument of terror, and is anyone really offended when they turn up as a gag line -- "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" -- in Monty Python sketches? Time allows us to distance ourselves from horror, so today most people acknowledge and admire the skill and wit of Lubitsch's satiric farce, which is also a pretty good spy thriller, with genuinely suspenseful moments. Lombard is at her most poised and glamorous, as well as a surprisingly effective foil for Benny, who as the "great, great Polish actor Joseph Tura" for once in his rather undistinguished career in movies -- which never showcased him as well as radio or TV did -- has a chance to display his perfect comic timing. Tura's reaction -- an indignant slow burn -- when the start of his "To be or not to be" soliloquy cues Lt. Sobinski to leave his seat for an assignation with Mrs. Tura is Benny at his best. But the film is also laced with moments of real awareness of the horrors beneath, an awareness that is not really compromised by being made part of a comedy. The most famous line of the film is probably Ehrhardt's observation, in response to the disguised Tura's request for an evaluation of his work on the stage, "What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland." How this double entendre made it past the Production Code censors, I don't know, but it's evidence that Lubitsch was certainly aware of the reality and not just being "inappropriately farcical."

The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)

Like most of Orson Welles's Hollywood work, The Lady From Shanghai is the product of clashing wills: Welles's and the studio's -- in this case, Columbia under its infamous boss Harry Cohn. And as usual, the clash shows, sometimes in Welles's brilliance, such as the celebrated shootout in a hall of mirrors at the film's end, and sometimes in his indifference to the material: Is there any real excuse for the farcical courtroom scene that so violates any sense of consistency in the film's tone? Welles miscast himself as the protagonist, Michael O'Hara, a two-fisted Irish seaman, complete with an accent that he must have picked up in his youthful days in the Dublin theater. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Rita Hayworth, was forced upon him by Cohn, whom he angered by having her cut her hair and dye it blond. Her Elsa Bannister is the epitome of the treacherous film noir femme fatale, but it's hard to say whether the screenplay -- mostly by Welles -- or Hayworth's limited acting ability prevents the character from coming into focus. The real casting coup of the film is Everett Sloane as as Elsa's crippled husband, Arthur, and Glenn Anders as his partner, George Grisby. I use the word "partner" intentionally, because the film dodges around the Production Code in its hints that Bannister and Grisby are more than just law-firm partners, evoking the stereotypical catty and mutually destructive gay couple. Welles insisted on filming on location, which means we get some fascinating glimpses of late-1940s Acapulco and San Francisco, shot by Charles Lawton Jr. and the uncredited Rudolph Maté and Joseph Walker. In short, the movie is a mess, but sometimes a glorious mess.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

Renée Jeanne Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc

Music has been an integral part of the cinematic experience since the days before sound, when the small-town exhibitor would hire a local pianist to play "Hearts and Flowers" to sweeten the love scenes. So it was a surprise to watch The Passion of Joan of Arc with no soundtrack at all on the new streaming service Filmstruck,* which has pulled the great Criterion Collection of classic films away from its old home on Hulu. I have seen The Passion before, and I'm certain that it had a music track then -- almost all restorations of silent films have some kind of music, typically a pastiche of themes from classical music. Over the years, since its rediscovery, there have been many attempts to add a music track to The Passion, including a pastiche of music by Baroque composers like Bach and Vivaldi that Dreyer heard and disliked. I notice on the Criterion site that the disc set includes an oratorio, "Voices of Light" by Richard Einhorn, that was inspired by the film, but it apparently wasn't approved for the streaming version. And after all that, I'm glad it wasn't. The Passion shines forth in silence, allowing you to reflect on the spareness of its images and the astonishing performance by Renée Falconetti as Joan. We don't need underscoring for Joan's emotions: They are present on Falconetti's face and in her extraordinarily expressive eyes. Dreyer's celebrated use of closeups throughout the film is varied with remarkable compositions of figures in groups that always feel organic, not something imposed by the director, and when the film erupts in violence as the soldiers attack the crowd at the film's end, the irruption of action is startling. The cinematographer was Rudolph Maté, who later turned director, and his low-angle camerawork -- Dreyer reportedly had holes dug in the floor of the set to get the angles he wanted -- anticipates that of Yasujiro Ozu, giving us a sense on the one hand of Joan as floating above us and on the other of her judges as looming menace. The final shots of Joan's slumped, burned body seen through the smoke and flames are harrowing and poignant without being grisly. There aren't many greater films than this one.

*So far, Filmstruck hasn't moved much beyond streaming on the computer, though it's supposed to be included on Roku early next year. In my household, with two others competing for bandwidth, this meant that I had frequent interruptions as the film refreshed itself. Oddly enough, I didn't mind as much as I usually would, because Dreyer's images are so compelling that I was content to pause and study them.

Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

In the catalog of vampire movies, Vampyr is probably the second scariest after Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922). Which is odd, because its narrative, based by Dreyer and co-writer Christian Jul on a story be Sheridan Le Fanu, is fractured and almost incoherent and its characterization scattered. But you get the feeling that Dreyer himself really believed in the malevolent creatures he put on film, not surprising since most of Dreyer's films were in one way or another about faith. One story has it that the look of the film came about accidentally: Cinematographer Rudolph Maté shot an early sequence slightly out of focus, and when he apologetically showed it to Dreyer, the director insisted that was exactly how he wanted the film to look. Maté consequently shot many sequences through gauze. Accident also dictated some of the story: Dreyer insisted on location shooting, and in scouting for places to shoot, discovered the flour mill, giving him the idea for the scene in which the doctor meets his rather gruesome end. The lead character, Allen Grey, was played by a non-professional, Nicolas de Gunzburg, under the pseudonym Julian West -- Gunzburg was also the principal financial backer of the film. Most of the rest of the cast were non-professionals as well, and the sense that Vampyr is the result of serendipitous filmmaking has given the film a certain cachet over the years, especially with filmmakers and critics struggling with the restrictions that the corporate bottom line places on their art. To my mind, Vampyr is a collection of fascinating, disturbing images -- the man with the scythe crossing the river, the play of eerie shadows, the unusually successful double exposure that gives us Allen Grey's out-of-body experience, the sequence in which Grey sees himself in a coffin, and so on. But it seems to me to be brilliant parts in search of a satisfying whole.