Man Wanted (William Dieterle, 1932)

David Manners and Kay Francis in Man Wanted

Cast: Kay Francis, David Manners, Una Merkel, Andy Devine, Kenneth Thomson, Claire Dodd, Elizabeth Patterson, Edward Van Sloan. Screenplay: Robert Lord, Charles Kenyon. Cinematography: Gregg Toland. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: James Gibbon. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Man Wanted is an arch, sophisticated romantic comedy that needed an Ernst Lubitsch to handle its racy moments and a Howard Hawks to handle its snappy dialogue. William Dieterle was a good director, but he was neither of those men, so the movie feels slow when it should be lively, choppy when it should be speedy. The premise is this: Lois (Kay Francis) is a high-powered career woman, the editor of a magazine, married to a wealthy playboy (Kenneth Thomson) who cares more about playing polo and chasing other women than he does about their marriage. So when Tom (David Manners), a salesman for exercise equipment, pays a sales call on Lois and reveals that he knows shorthand -- from taking notes in his classes at Harvard -- he gets hired to replace the secretary she has just fired. You can fill in the rest. Francis carries a lot of the film on charm, even when the situations feel over-familiar and the dialogue doesn't sparkle the way it should. Check out her work for Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise, made the same year as this film, to see what might have been. Manners, best known today for his work in the horror movies Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932), and The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934), is a pleasantly forgettable leading man, and Andy Devine and Una Merkel are miscast as Tom's buddy and girlfriend, providing comic relief that doesn't quite relieve. 

The Bank Dick (Edward F. Cline, 1940)

This is what I watched on election night once it became apparent that the votes might take the depressing direction they eventually did. Better a lovable con man like W.C. Fields than a real-life flamboyant fraud, thought I. Fields is Egbert Sousé (the accent is aigu, not grave, as he insists), ne'er-do-well paterfamilias of a dysfunctional household, who escapes from his nagging wife (Cora Witherspoon) and mother-in-law (Jessie Ralph) and his horrid daughters Myrtle (Una Merkel) and Elsie Mae (Evelyn Del Rio) to the corner saloon as well as a brief stint as a movie director that somehow leads to his employment as a detective in the local bank. (Honestly, never try to summarize the plot of one of Fields's movies.) It's all inspired, slightly surreal nonsense, adorned by characters with names like Og Oggilby (Grady Sutton), J. Pinkerton Snoopington (Franklin Pangborn), and A. Pismo Clam (Jack Norton). All I can say is that it made me laugh when I felt like crying. 

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.

True Confession (Wesley Ruggles, 1937)

A somewhat too frantic screwball comedy, True Confession plays fast and loose not only with the legal profession but also to an extent with the careers of its stars. Fred MacMurray plays Kenneth Bartlett, a lawyer who insists on defending only those he thinks are really innocent, which gives him some trouble when his wife, Helen (Carole Lombard), goes on trial for murder. She's a would-be writer who can't always be trusted to tell the truth, so even though she didn't commit the crime, she winds up saying she did and pleading self-defense. Meanwhile, the trial is being watched by Charley Jasper (John Barrymore), an alcoholic loon who knows who really did the deed. None of these people make much sense, especially Barrymore, who seems at times to be reprising his earlier, far more successful performance as Oscar Jaffe opposite Lombard's Lily Garland (aka Mildred Plotka) in Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934). Alcohol had taken a serious toll on Barrymore, who was 55 when he made this film; he looks 70. Lombard was better, more controlled in her comic flights in Twentieth Century, too. Here she verges on grating at times. Comparisons are seldom fair, but it has to be said that the difference between the two films has to be that the earlier and better one was directed by Hawks from a screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and True Confession was directed by Wesley Ruggles from a screenplay by Claude Binyon based on a French farce. Still, there's some fun to be had here, and the cast includes such stars from the golden age of character actors as Una Merkel being giddy, Porter Hall being irascible, Edgar Kennedy doing multiple face-palms, and Hattie McDaniel playing one of her always watchable (if regrettable) roles as the maid.