Hold Your Man (Sam Wood, 1933)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Burgess, Muriel Kirkland, Garry Owen, Barbara Barondess, Elizabeth Patterson, Blanche Friderici, Theresa Harris, George Reed. Screenplay: Anita Loos, Howard Emmett Rogers. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. 

Part sexy pre-Code romp and part weepie melodrama, Hold Your Man succeeds on both counts. Clark Gable plays small-time con man Eddie Hall, who while fleeing from the cops winds up in the apartment of Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow), while she's taking a bath. He winds up there for good until he slugs an intruder into her apartment, accidentally killing him. He takes it on the lam and she takes the rap, going to a women's prison where she learns that she's carrying his child. The denouement, in which Ruby's fellow inmates help unite her with Eddie, is full of suspense. In a surprisingly almost enlightened twist, the heroine of this section of the movie is a Black prisoner, Lily Mae (Theresa Harris), whose father, a minister (George Reed), just happens to be at the prison for visitors' day, and thus available with a little maneuvering to marry Ruby and Eddie. (I say "almost enlightened" because neither Harris nor Reed gets a screen credit, and an alternate ending was filmed for Southern release, in which the minister was played by Henry B. Walthall.) The switch from hijinks among lowlifes to redemptive love story is a little jarring, but Harlow was never more in her element, and Gable's smirky charm is engaging.  

Ivy (Sam Wood, 1947)

Joan Fontaine in Ivy

Cast: Joan Fontaine, Patric Knowles, Herbert Marshall, Richard Ney, Cedric Hardwicke, Lucile Watson, Sara Allgood, Henry Stephenson, Rosalind Ivan, Lilian Fontaine, Molly Lamont, Una O'Connor, Isobel Elsom, Alan Napier. Screenplay: Charles Bennett, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Cinematography: Russell Metty. Art direction: Richard H. Riedel. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Ivy is a fair-to-middling melodrama made memorable by its production design and cinematography, which evokes Edwardian London as a place of contrasts, from the ornately affluent milieu to which Ivy (Joan Fontaine) aspires to the sparse and gloomy world which she tries to escape. Russell Metty's images are filled with shadows and Expressionist angles even when they're showing us the gilded life of the privileged classes. The nominal art director is Richard H. Riedel, but he was working for a producer better known today as a production designer, William Cameron Menzies. Ivy is stuck in a marriage to the feckless Jervis Lexton (Richard Ney) but is carrying on an affair with a doctor, Roger Gretorex (Patric Knowles), who has chosen to work among the city's poor. So when she catches the eye of the wealthy Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall), she sees the chance to make it big if she can escape from her current entanglements. The doctor has poisons in his lab, so the rest is obvious. But Ivy has the bad luck to run up against one of those impossibly intuitive Scotland Yard detectives (Cedric Hardwicke), who manages to riddle through the motives, means, and opportunity, and to do so at a crucial moment. Director Sam Wood isn't very skilled at building suspense, preferring to let the screenplay do it on its own, so Ivy doesn't have the tension and snap that it needs. The story comes from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, who is better known as the author of The Lodger, which helped Alfred Hitchcock make his name when he filmed it as a silent in 1927 and gave Laird Cregar a memorable role in John Brahm's 1944 film. Ivy, unfortunately, isn't in the league of either of those films.

Stamboul Quest (Sam Wood, 1934)

 Stamboul Quest (Sam Wood, 1934)

Cast: Myrna Loy, George Brent, Lionel Atwill, C. Henry Gordon, Rudolph Anders, Mischa Auer. Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on a story by Leo Birinsky. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Music: William Axt. 

Stamboul Quest is a middling spy-vs.-spy romance based very loosely (i.e., hardly at all) on the career of the World War I German spy known as “Fräulein Doktor” (real name Elsbeth Schragmüller). The film makes a nod to the better-known German spy Mata Hari, herself the titular subject of a 1931 MGM film directed by George Fitzmaurice and starring Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro. Mostly Stamboul Quest is an excuse for Myrna Loy to slink about in various alluring states of dress and undress. There is, for example, a scene in which Fräulein Doktor (aka Helena Bohlen) takes a bath with the door open between her and the spymaster Herr von Sturm (Lionel Atwill), and a key moment in the plot turns on Helena’s slipping down one shoulder of her evening gown to allow the Turkish spy Ali Bey (C. Henry Gordon) to write a message in invisible ink on her naked back. Loy does all of this nonsense with grace and wit. Unfortunately, she’s matched romantically in the movie with George Brent as an American studying medicine at Leipzig. Brent was unaccountably borrowed from Warner Bros. for the film even though MGM had a stable of contract leading men that included Clark Gable and Loy’s frequent co-star William Powell. As a leading man, Brent was never much more than a foil for powerhouse leading ladies like Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck, and it’s awfully hard to see why Fräulein Doktor should fall in love so swiftly and thoroughly with him. Stamboul Quest is a sort of bridge in Loy’s career from the earlier roles in which she was cast as a femme fatale, often with exotic origins, and the years in which she took on the image of a witty, sophisticated wife or girlfriend, often paired with Powell, as in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) and its string of sequels. 

Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942)

Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan in Kings Row

Cast: Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan, Betty Field, Charles Coburn, Claude Rains, Judith Anderson, Nancy Coleman, Kaaren Verne, Maria Ouspenskaya, Harry Davenport, Ernest Cossart, Ilka Grüning. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a novel by Henry Bellamann. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Fifteen years before the producers of Mark Robson's version of Peyton Place tangled with the enforcers of the Production Code, the producers of Kings Row went through a similar ordeal. Like the Grace Metalious novel on which the later film was based, Henry Bellamann's Kings Row was a sensational picture of small town sordidness and hypocrisy that had to be sanitized against the pecksniffery of the censors. Screenwriter Casey Robinson had to eliminate incest, a gay character, and any hint that the young residents of Kings Row were actually having sex and enjoying it. Robinson's evasions were artful, though sometimes at the expense of the characters: Dr. Tower's murdering his daughter, Cassandra, and then committing suicide seems a little less credible when the incestuous relationship of father and daughter is excised. Still, Kings Row holds up well enough, thanks in large part to solid production values, especially James Wong Howe's cinematography and one of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's best scores. Today, the movie is probably most remembered for giving Ronald Reagan one of his best roles, one that he was so proud of that he borrowed his most famous line from the film, "Where's the rest of me?", as the title of his autobiography. He's well supported by Ann Sheridan, and the cast also includes such always watchable character actors as Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, Judith Anderson, and the hammy but lovable Maria Ouspenskaya. Unfortunately the film's leading role went to Robert Cummings, never the most skillful or charismatic of actors. He's not terrible, but he brings no credibility to the role of Parris Mitchell, supposedly a gifted medical student and amateur pianist. It's this void at the center of the movie that perhaps makes people remember it as a Ronald Reagan film.

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.

Our Town (Sam Wood, 1940)

 

Our Town (Sam Wood, 1940)

Cast: William Holden, Martha Scott, Frank Craven, Thomas Mitchell, Fay Bainter, Beulah Bondi, Guy Kibbee, Stuart Erwin, Doro Merande, Philip Wood. Screenplay: Thornton Wilder, Frank Craven, Harry Chandlee, based on a play by Thornton Wilder. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Sherman Todd. Music: Aaron Copland.

A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935)

Watched 10/7/2018

Groucho Marx and Kitty Carlisle in A Night at the Opera

Otis B. Driftwood: Groucho Marx
Fiorello: Chico Marx
Tomasso: Harpo Marx
Rosa Castaldi: Kitty Carlisle
Ricardo Barone: Allan Jones
Herman Gottlieb: Sig Ruman
Mrs. Claypool: Margaret Dumont
Rudolfo Lassparri: Walter Woolf King

Director: Sam Wood
Screenplay: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, James Kevin McGuinness
Cinematography: Merritt B. Gerstad
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: William LeVanway
Music: Herbert Stothart

Verdi's Il Trovatore is one of my favorite operas, but it only works if it's performed by a cast willing to give it their all. To see what I mean, try to find the live recording from the 1962 Salzburg Festival conducted by Herbert von Karajan and starring Leontyne Price, Franco Corelli, Ettore Bastianini, and Giulietta Simionato. Thrill to Price and Corelli in a duel of high notes, Corelli and Bastianini trying to out-ham each other, and Simonato camping the hell out of Azucena. That's what opera is all about and why it's such a natural target for the Marx Brothers. A Night at the Opera is not my favorite of their films, however. It was made after they left Paramount for MGM, where Irving G. Thalberg seemed determined to file down the team's rough edges, Louis B. Mayer didn't get their jokes, and the direction was assigned to Sam Wood, who earned his surname honestly. So we get an insipid romance between the opera singers played by Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones, who are allowed to do the "Miserere" scene straight-faced, and one of those gooey musical interludes in which Chico and Harpo are allowed to charm a bunch of kids with their piano and harp playing. For many, the comic highlight of the film is the stateroom scene, in which much of the cast is crammed into a tiny space, but I'm afraid too many viewings have left me cold to it. But I will never grow cold to Groucho, who rises above all inanities. Any moment he's on screen cracking wise is golden. The rest ranges from silver to Wooden.