Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, and Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match

Cast: Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Edward Arnold, Virginia Davis, Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, Buster Phelps. Screenplay: Lucien Hubbard, Kubec Glasmon, John Bright. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ray Curtiss.

This crisply directed and tightly edited Warner Bros. crime movie is almost too snugly put together. It runs for only a little over an hour and still manages to tell a pretty complex story that spans the years from 1919 to 1932 in the lives of three women as they grow from schoolgirls to adults. The "bad girl," Mary Keaton, is first played by Virginia Davis as a tomboy showing off her black bloomers on the monkey bars. She barely graduates from elementary school, then spends time in a reformatory before taking a job as a show girl, played by Joan Blondell. The "rich girl," Vivian Revere, played by Anne Shirley under her first screen name, Dawn O'Day, is a bit of a flirt, who confides in the boys that her bloomers are pink, but doesn't show them off. She grows up to be played by Ann Dvorak as a bored socialite married to Robert Kirkwood (Warren William) with whom she has an adorable (read: cloyingly cute) child (Buster Phelps), but runs off with a ne'er-do-well played by Lyle Talbot, who gets in trouble with the mob, headed by Ace (Edward Arnold) and his enforcer, Harve (Humphrey Bogart). The "smart girl," Ruth Westcott, starts out as the class valedictorian (Betty Carse) and goes to business school. Her story, even though she's played by Bette Davis, is the least interesting of the three. In fact, she seems to be there only to make it possible for the three women to light their cigarettes on one match, setting off the supposed curse on the third to catch the flame, who happens to be Mary. The result is that Dvorak, though her career never took off like that of Blondell or Davis, gets the juiciest part in the film and makes the most of it. Of course, Warners didn't know that Davis would become its biggest star, but anyone who decides to watch Three on a Match thinking it's a "Bette Davis movie" is going to be disappointed. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching formative moments in the careers of stars like Davis -- or for that matter, Bogart, in one of his first gangster roles.

The Sea Hawk (Michael Curtiz, 1940)

Gilbert Roland and Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk

Cast: Errol Flynn, Brenda Marshall, Claude Rains, Flora Robson, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale, Henry Daniell, Una O'Connor, James Stephenson, Gilbert Roland. Screenplay: Howard Koch, Seton I. Miller. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold. 

Warner Bros. doing one of the things it did best (besides backstage musicals and gangster films), the Errol Flynn swashbuckler. The Sea Hawk has rousing action sequences (sweetened by George Amy's editing and Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score), a cast drawn from the ranks of the studio's seemingly inexhaustible store of character players, and a loving disregard for historical actuality. If only it had Olivia de Havilland as the love interest instead of the frozen-faced Brenda Marshall, it might have been more of a classic than it is. Still, there's Flora Robson doing her second turn as Queen Elizabeth I -- she had played her three years earlier in William K. Howard's Fire Over England -- and Claude Rains in a black wig as the Spanish ambassador. Henry Daniell has the role that might better have gone to Basil Rathbone as Flynn's chief antagonist, the villainous (and fictional) Lord Wolfingham. For audiences in 1940 the whole thing was an obvious analogue to the conflict raging in Europe, with plucky England standing up against the German Spanish dreams of world conquest. The United States was still officially neutral, but everyone knew what Queen Elizabeth's final patriotic exhortation was all about.

The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936)

The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936)

Cast: Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Genevieve Tobin, Dick Foran, Porter Hall, Charley Grapewin, Joe Sawyer, Paul Harvey. Eddie Acuff, Adrian Morris, Nina Campana, Slim Thompson, John Alexander. Screenplay: Charles Kenyon, Delmer Daves, based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: John Hughes. Film editing: Owen Marks. Music: Bernhard Kaun. 

Robert E. Sherwood was once America's pre-eminent playwright, winning three Pulitzer Prizes for drama (plus one for a biography of FDR's relationship with Harry Hopkins). But his plays are rarely revived today, and The Petrified Forest shows why: It's talky and its characters are more vehicles for ideas than human beings. The protagonist, Alan Squier, wears the label Effete Intellectual like a badge of honor. The leading lady, Gabrielle Maple, is the Wide-Eyed Naïf. The villain, Duke Mantee, is all Animalistic Evil. The actors who play them in the film -- Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, respectively -- do what they can to bring them to life, but they still have to speak Sherwood's lines, or the equivalents provided by screenwriters Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves. Sometimes the dialogue consists of things no human being ever found the way to utter: "The trouble with me, Gabrielle, is I, I belong to a vanishing race. I'm one of the intellectuals.... Brains without purpose. Noise without sound, shape without substance." Howard makes what he can of this self-pitying poseur, but who sheds a tear when he gets his comeuppance? Bogart, who was in the original Broadway production along with Howard, fares a little better: All Duke Mantee has to do is snarl and growl his lines. It's not prime Bogart, who learned to give a little more depth to his bad guys, but it gave his career a boost after Howard insisted that Bogart be cast in the role instead of the then better-known Edward G. Robinson. Davis comes off best, especially when you remember that her previous teaming with Howard was in John Cromwell's 1936 Of Human Bondage as the slutty Mildred, a character 180 degrees away from the dewy-eyed hopeful Gabrielle. The rest of the cast is entertaining, though Charley Grapewin's gramps, a garrulous old foof who can't help telling tale tales about his encounter with Billy the Kid, gets a little grating after a while. The cast also includes two African-Americans, Slim Thompson as the wealthy couple's chauffeur and John Alexander as a member of Mantee's gang. They are not stereotyped, and they have a brief moment of interaction in which the gangster lords it over the chauffeur, one of the few moments in which the reality of black life in America surfaces convincingly in a mainstream mostly white movie of the era. 

Old Acquaintance (Vincent Sherman, 1943)

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, John Loder, Gig Young, Dolores Moran, Phillip Reed, Roscoe Karnes, Anne Revere, Esther Dale. Screenplay: John Van Druten, Lenore J. Coffee, based on a play by John Van Druten. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: John Hughes. Film editing: Terry O. Morse. Music: Franz Waxman.

One of those actress pairings that you can't help being drawn to, no matter the quality of the movie: Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Fortunately, the movie, Old Acquaintance, is pretty good. (So was their earlier teaming in 1939, in William Goulding's The Old Maid, during which they are said to have had off-screen battles.) It's a story of two childhood friends who both grow up to be successful novelists, though Davis's Kit Marlowe is a critical darling while Hopkins's Millie Drake is a commercial success. They also grow up orbiting the same man, Preston Drake (John Loder), though Millie is the one who marries him and has a daughter with him. Eventually, Millie and Preston split, and the daughter, Dede, grows up to be played by Dolores Moran, and wouldn't you know it, to take Kit's much younger lover, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young), away from her. The central fact of the relationship between Kit and Millie, however, is that they represent opposite temperaments: Kit is solid and cynical, while Millie is high-strung and manic. All of this makes for some entertaining scenes, which is all that's needed in a Bette Davis movie, or a Miriam Hopkins one, for that matter.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Paul Muni in the final scene of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang

James Allen: Paul Muni
Marie Woods: Glenda Farrell
Helen: Helen Vinson
Pete: Preston Foster
Barney Sykes: Allen Jenkins
The Judge: Berton Churchill
Bomber Wells: Edward Ellis
The Warden: David Landau
Robert Allen: Hale Hamilton
Mother Allen: Louise Carter
Linda: Noel Francis

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Howard J. Green, Brown Holmes
Based on a book by Robert Elliott Burns
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Jack Okey
Film editing: William Holmes
Music: Bernhard Kaun

With the exception of the rather stilted early scene in which World War I veteran James Allen returns home to his stereotypical sweet, gray-haired mother and his oleaginous preacher brother, who urge him to give up his dreams and go back to his old job in the factory, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang mostly feels fresh and urgent. Its final scene gives up nothing in the way of a happy ending, as Allen backs away from his girlfriend into the darkness and chokes out the words "I steal," in response to her question about how he lives. It's above all a critique of American justice, particularly the concept of "states' rights," a shibboleth that was used for a long time as a defense of slavery and then of segregation and Jim Crow. The book on which the film was based was titled I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang, pointing the finger at the state at fault, and while Warner Bros. gave in to the government of Georgia, partly in deference to the Southern box office, and trimmed the title, everyone knew that this particular exploitation of convicts was primarily Southern in nature. And even the use of maps in the montages that show the course of Allen's travels makes it pretty clear where the chain gang is located. If American movies had remained as candid as this one is about social problems, they might have had a real impact. But two forces exerted pressure to tame the movies: the box office and the censors. I Am a Fugitive was made just before the Production Code went into effect, after which some of the brutal realism of the film would be forbidden -- along with the sexual frankness surrounding the character of Marie Woods. This was also Paul Muni's finest hour on film, along with his performance in Howard Hawks's Scarface the same year, before his energies as an actor were tamed by roles in William Dieterle's biopics The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937) or hidden behind yellowface makeup in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937).

Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)

Paul Henreid, Bette Davis, and John Loder in Now, Voyager

Charlotte Vale: Bette Davis
Jerry Durrance: Paul Henreid
Dr. Jaquith: Claude Rains
Mrs. Vale: Gladys Cooper
June Vale: Bonita Granville
Eliot Livingston: John Loder
Lisa Vale: Ilka Chase
Deb McIntyre: Lee Patrick
Mr. Thompson: Franklin Pangborn
Dora Pickford: Mary Wickes
Tina Durrance: Janis Wilson

Director: Irving Rapper
Screenplay: Casey Robinson
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Robert M. Haas
Film editing: Warren Low
Music: Max Steiner

"A campy tearjerker," "kitsch," "a schlock classic" -- that's pretty much what you have to call Now, Voyager if you're a critic trying to prove your tough-mindedness, like Pauline Kael or the unidentified New York Times reviewer who dismissed it as "lachrymose." But there are at least two moments in the movie that bring it into focus as something more than just a routine weepie, or rather that suggest that even a routine weepie has a point to make. One is the scene in which Charlotte Vale and Eliot Livingston break off their engagement in an off-handed, all-in-a-day's-work manner. Eliot is, after all, as square as John Loder's jaw, and not at all the mate for a woman who has just discovered who she is. Of course, the breakup kills Charlotte's mother, but that consequence is long past due. The other key moment for me is in the long final scene between Charlotte and Jerry Durrance. She has more or less adopted Tina, the daughter that Jerry's never-seen wife doesn't want. But when Jerry tells her that he's taking Tina away, there's one of the more magnificent Bette Davis moments from a career full of them. His reason, you see, is that by devoting herself to Tina, Charlotte is apparently depriving herself of the opportunity to catch a man. For a brief moment we see Charlotte incredulous at the reason, followed by another moment of something like, "Lord, what fools men are." Jerry drops several notches in Charlotte's esteem at the moment, which leads into the film's most famous line, in which she dismisses Jerry's egocentric wishful thinking: "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." Charlotte Vale emerges from the film as one of the more admirable, level-headed women ever seen on a movie screen.

Dames (Ray Enright, Busby Berkeley, 1934)

Mabel Anderson: Joan Blondell
Jimmy Higgens: Dick Powell
Barbara Hemingway: Ruby Keeler
Mathilda Hemingway: Zasu Pitts
Horace Hemingway: Guy Kibbee
Ezra Ounce: Hugh Herbert
Bulger: Arthur Vinton

Director: Ray Enright, Busby Berkeley
Screenplay: Delmer Daves, Robert Lord
Cinematography: George Barnes, Sidney Hickox, Sol Polito
Art direction: Robert M. Haas, Willy Pogany
Film editing: Harold McLernon
Music: Heinz Roemheld

Utterly inane and completely delightful, Dames is mostly a showcase for three great Busby Berkeley dance spectacles, each giddier and more kaleidoscopic than the one that went before. The big numbers -- "The Girl at the Ironing Board," "I Only Have Eyes for You," and the title song -- are clustered at the end of the film, the supposed (if impossible) production numbers in a Broadway musical. Until we get to them, there's a lot of nonsense about multimillionaire Ezra Ounce's moral crusade and his cousin Horace Hemingway's kowtowing to Ounce in order to get a sizable chunk of his millions, which involves keeping his daughter, Barbara, from marrying her 13th cousin, Jimmy, who is banking on his ability to put on the big show, which supposedly offends Ounce's moral code. Got that? Fortunately, the bluenoses are played by such grand grotesques as Hugh Herbert, Guy Kibbee, and Zasu Pitts, and there's a lot of silliness about Ezra Ounce's hiccup cure, which is something like 70 percent alcohol. There's also the invaluable Joan Blondell as a chorus girl on the make. Unfortunately, we also get a couple of songs from Dick Powell, in his sappy tenor avatar, and some clunky tap-dancing from Ruby Keeler. But Berkeley's extravaganzas are worth the wait, including the title number, which features chorus girls riding a miniature Ferris wheel. Standing. Backward.

Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944)

Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre in Arsenic and Old Lace

Mortimer Brewster: Cary Grant
Abby Brewster: Josephine Hull
Martha Brewster: Jean Adair
Elaine Harper: Priscilla Lane
Jonathan Brewster: Raymond Massey
Dr. Einstein: Peter Lorre
O'Hara: Jack Carson
Mr. Witherspoon: Edward Everett Horton
Teddy Brewster: John Alexander
Lt. Rooney: James Gleason

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein
Based on a play by Joseph Kesselring
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Max Parker
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Max Steiner

This may be Cary Grant's worst performance. Certainly director Frank Capra put no restraints on Grant's lurching, mugging, groaning, and whinnying as he tries to portray Mortimer Brewster's reaction to the discovery that his beloved maiden aunts have been killing old men and burying him in their basement. But then Capra doesn't bother to restrain anyone else in this too-frantic version of the very popular Broadway farce. It's a film in which nobody listens to anyone else, producing complications that are supposed to be hysterically funny but are just hysterical. The Epstein twins do a fairly good job of adapting Joseph Kesselring's one-set stage play into a slightly opened-out movie -- though some scenes, such as the opening baseball park sequence and the bit at City Hall where Mortimer and Elaine get their wedding license, seem to be staged just for the sake of getting out of the confines of the Brewster house. No one covers themselves with comedy glory here, with the possible exception of Peter Lorre, who remains on the fringes of most of the action, providing a wry, restrained point of view on the nonsense. The film was made in 1941, but was held from release for three years because it couldn't be exhibited before the play had ended its Broadway fun.

Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)

Gary Cooper and Joan Leslie in Sergeant York

Alvin C. York: Gary Cooper
Pastor Rosier Pile: Walter Brennan
Gracie Williams: Joan Leslie
Mother York: Margaret Wycherly
"Pusher" Ross: George Tobias
Major Buxton: Stanley Ridges
Ike Botkin: Ward Bond
Buck Lipscomb: Noah Beery Jr.
Rosie York: June Lockhart
George York: Dickie Moore
Zeke: Clem Bevans
Lem: Howard Da Silva

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Abem Finkel, Harry Chandlee, Howard Koch, John Huston
Based on a diary by Alvin C. York edited by Tom Skeyhill
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: John Hughes
Film editing: William Holmes
Music: Max Steiner

Sheer Hollywood biopic hokum made watchable by Howard Hawks and Gary Cooper, along with a colorful supporting cast. Sergeant York earned Hawks his one and only Oscar nomination for directing -- not Bringing Up Baby (1938) or Only Angels Have Wings (1939) or His Girl Friday (1940) or To Have and Have Not (1944) or The Big Sleep (1946) or Red River (1948) or Rio Bravo (1959), more than two decades of the most entertaining movies anyone ever made. It was in fact Hawks's lack of the kind of high seriousness so often rewarded with Oscars that makes Sergeant York still entertaining today, which is why he lost to John Ford for How Green Was My Valley, a directing Oscar that by rights should have gone to Orson Welles for Citizen Kane. It's fairly clear that Hawks doesn't take Sergeant York entirely seriously, with its exteriors built on the soundstage, its well-scrubbed hillbillies, its cornpone hijinks and caricature religiosity, not to mention dialogue that sounds straight out of Al Capp's "Li'l Abner." But it also takes a Gary Cooper to deliver speeches like "I believe in the bible and I'm a-believin' that this here life we're a-livin' is something the good lord done give us and we got to be a-livin' it the best we can, and I'm a-figurin' that killing other folks ain't no part of what he was intendin' for us to be a-doin' here." Granted, Cooper had just turned 40 and was a good deal too old to play Alvin C. York, but his characteristic sly, shy self-effacement is essential to the role. The old story that York himself said that he wouldn't allow himself to be played on film by anyone else but Cooper sounds like the work of a Warner Bros. publicist, and one biographer has suggested that it was a hoax cooked up by producer Jesse L. Lasky to persuade Cooper to take the part, but se non è vero, è ben trovato -- if it's not true, it ought to be. Sergeant York cleaned up at the box office, especially when it got a second run after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and raked in 11 Oscar nominations, winning for Cooper and for film editing. Other nominees include Margaret Wycherly as Mother York -- a far cry from her killer mama in Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949) -- and Walter Brennan, with his false teeth in and his eyebrows darkened, as Pastor Pile, along with the screenwriters, cinematographer Sol Polito, the art direction, the sound, and Max Steiner's patriotic tune-quoting score. It can't be taken seriously today, but it can be enjoyed.

42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

Julian Marsh: Warner Baxter
Dorothy Brock: Bebe Daniels
Peggy Sawyer: Ruby Keeler
Billy Lawler: Dick Powell
Abner Dillon: Guy Kibbee
Lorraine Fleming: Una Merkel
Ann Lowell: Ginger Rogers
Pat Denning: George Brent
Thomas Barry: Ned Sparks

Director: Lloyd Bacon
Screenplay: Rian James, James Seymour
Based on a novel by Bradford Ropes
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Jack Okey
Songs: Al Dubin, Harry Warren
Costume design: Orry-Kelly
Choreography: Busby Berkeley

42nd Street is only mildly naughty, bawdy, or sporty, as the lyrics of Al Dubin and Harry Warren's title song would have it, but once Busby Berkeley takes over to stage the three production numbers at the movie's end, it is certainly gaudy. What naughtiness and bawdiness it contains would not have been there at all once the Production Code went into effect a year or so later. It's doubtful that Ginger Rogers's character would have been called "Anytime Annie" once the censors clamped down, or that anyone would say of her, "She only said 'no' once and then she didn't hear the question." Or that it would be so clear that Dorothy Brock is the mistress of foofy old moneybags Abner Dillon. Or that there would be so many crotch shots of the chorus girls, including the famous tracking shot between their legs in Berkeley's "Young and Healthy" number. Although it's often remembered as a Busby Berkeley musical, it's mostly a Lloyd Bacon movie, and while Bacon is not a name to conjure with these days, he does a splendid job of keeping the non-musical part of the film moving along satisfactorily. It helps that he has a strong lead in Warner Baxter as the tough, self-destructive stage director Julian Marsh, balanced by such skillful wisecrackers as Rogers, Una Merkel, and Ned Sparks. But it's a blessing that this archetypal backstage musical became a prime showcase for Berkeley's talents. Dick Powell's sappy tenor has long been out of fashion, and Ruby Keeler keeps anxiously glancing at her feet while she's dancing, but Berkeley's sleight-of-hand keeps our attention away from their faults. Nor does anyone really care that his famous overhead shots that turn dancers into kaleidoscope patterns would not be visible to an audience in a real theater. In the "42nd Street" number, Berkeley also introduces his characteristic dark side: Amid all the song and dance celebrating the street, we witness a near-rape and a murder. It's a dramatic twist that Berkeley would repeat with even greater effect in his masterpiece, the "Lullaby of Broadway" number from Gold Diggers of 1935. Berkeley's serious side, along with the somewhat downbeat ending showing an exhausted Julian Marsh, alone and ignored amid the hoopla, help remind us that the studio that made 42nd Street, Warner Bros., was also known for social problem movies like I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) and the gangster classics of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson.