Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948)

Kurt Kreuger, Linda Darnell, and Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours

Cast: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Kurt Kreuger, Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, Al Bridge, Julius Tannen, Torben Meyer, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Robert Finch, Stuart Gilmore. Musical director: Alfred Newman. 

Preston Sturges's familiar "stock company" of character actors like William Demarest, Jimmy Conlin, Julius Tannen, Robert Greig, and others served an important role in creating a context in which otherwise straight leading actor types like Joel McCrea, Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck could let themselves go and behave in ways that they normally wouldn't on screen. No film demonstrates this function better than Unfaithfully Yours, in which the silliness of performers like Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, and others let Rex Harrison and Linda Darnell loosen up and go a little bit crazy -- or in Harrison's case, quite a bit more than crazy. Psychotic, to be blunt about it. This was Sturges's least successful with audiences of his major comic films of the 1940s, and it marked the start of the  decline of his career. It may be that postwar audiences were not ready to laugh at the kind of mayhem that Unfaithfully Yours contains -- after all, a man brutally slashing his wife with a freshly sharpened razor is not an image that normally elicits laughs. There's a failure of tone in the way Sturges writes and stages the scene, which takes place only in the mind of Harrison's character, Sir Alfred De Carter, as he conducts a symphony orchestra in a performance of Rossini's Overture to Semiramide (somewhat padded out with a Rossiniesque pastiche by music director Alfred Newman). It's all a setup, of course, for the slapstick sequence in which Sir Alfred tries to follow through on the imagined murder, only to screw things up monumentally and hilariously. But the premise is sour to start with. It encourages us to believe that Sir Alfred is the kind of man who would not only imagine killing his wife but also follow through on the idea persistently, like Wile E. Coyote attempting to off the Road Runner. The film may end with the restoration of order, and the De Carters cozily snuggling up to each other, but it's hard to resist the thought that something else could happen to make him snap tomorrow. Still, that's the major blemish on what is, if you don't think too closely about it, a very funny movie with one of Harrison's best performances, and a lot of sublime comic bits supplied by the stock company players. Sturges's dialogue, as usual, is mile-a-minute laugh lines, going by so fast that the captioners have trouble keeping up with them. It would be pure giddy fun, if the plot weren't intrinsically so dark. 

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946)

Lizabeth Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, and Van Heflin in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, Judith Anderson, Roman Bohnen, Darryl Hickman, Janis Wilson, Ann Doran, Frank Orth, James Flavin, Mickey Kuhn, Charles D. Brown. Screenplay: Robert Rossen, John Patrick. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier, John Meehan. Film editing: Archie Marshek. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers doubles up on Lorenz Hart's line about "the double-crossing of a pair of heels" to give us a quartet of duplicity. There are no really good guys in the movie, though it tries to persuade us that tough guy Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) and lost girl Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) are more to be admired than ruthless Martha Ivers O'Neil (Barbara Stanwyck) and her weakling alcoholic husband, Walter (Kirk Douglas). After all, teenage Martha (Janis Wilson)  did kill her imperious aunt (Judith Anderson) and, with the connivance of young Walter (Mickey Kuhn) and his father (Roman Bohnen), not only cover up the murder but also frame someone else for the job. So when Sam returns to Iverstown after 18 years, Martha and Walter naturally think that he witnessed the murder and is there to blackmail them. Actually, young Sam (Darryl Hickman) beat it out the door before the aunt was conked on the head and fell downstairs, so he's ignorant -- until well into the film -- of their crime. It's not exactly clear why Sam, who makes a living by gambling, has drifted back in town, but he's not there long before he hooks up with Toni, fresh out of prison for a theft she didn't really commit, and the two of them get dragged unwittingly into the machinations of Martha and Walter. The movie was Douglas's film debut, so he receives fourth billing after Scott. He feels a little miscast as the manipulated Walter. For one thing, he was nine years younger than Stanwyck, but he also had, even then, a stronger hold on the screen than Heflin. This is, I think, a movie that doesn't have the courage of its own nastiness, trying to make us think that Sam and Toni really deserve a happy ending when it's more likely that they will eat each other alive. Trivia note: The sailor in the car with Sam when he has his accident is played by future writer-producer-director Blake Edwards. 

Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)

Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)

Cast: Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn, Isabel Jewell, Jane Darwell, Wyndham Standing. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, based on a play by Noël Coward. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Film editing: Frances Marsh. Music: John Leipold.

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Cast: Dick Powell, Ellen Drew, Raymond Walburn, William Demarest, Ernest Truex, Franklin Pangborn, Georgia Caine. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier, A. Earl Hedrick. Film editing: Ellsworth Hoagland. Music: John Leipold, Leo Shuken.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Lily: Miriam Hopkins
Mariette Colet: Kay Francis
Gaston Monescu: Herbert Marshall
The Major: Charles Ruggles
François Filiba: Edward Everett Horton
Adolph J. Giron: C. Aubrey Smith
Jacques: Robert Greig

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones
Based on a play by Aladar Laszlo
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling

It's a measure of the stupidity of American censorship that this gemlike sophisticated comedy could not have been made in Hollywood two years later, after the Production Code was implemented, but was also withheld from re-release for years afterward, all because it dared to indicate that its adult characters were having sex with one another without benefit of clergy and because the blithely larcenous Lily and Gaston were allowed to get off without apparent punishment -- indeed, with considerable reward -- for their crimes. It's essential for anyone who wants to know why Ernst Lubitsch and his so-called "touch" were so highly prized for so long.

The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch, 1929)

Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade

Count Alfred Renard: Maurice Chevalier
Queen Louise: Jeanette MacDonald
Jacques: Lupino Lane
Lulu: Lillian Roth
War Minister: Eugene Pallette
Ambassador: E.H. Calvert
Master of Ceremonies: Edgar Norton
Prime Minister: Lionel Belmore

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Ernest Vajda, Guy Bolton
Based on a play by Leon Xanrof and Jules Chancel
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Merrill G. White
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Victor Schertzinger

It irritates me a little to think that MGM, thanks largely to those That's Entertainment clip shows in the 1970s, is celebrated for its movie musicals, when in fact the genre was pioneered and perfected at other studios: Warner Bros. with its Busby Berkeley dance spectacles, RKO with its Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers cycle, and Paramount, where Ernst Lubitsch virtually invented the story musical with The Love Parade and subsequent re-teamings of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. (Oddly, today MacDonald is better known for her inferior and unsexy MGM teaming with Nelson Eddy.) MGM didn't achieve musical greatness until the end of the 1930s, when after the success of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), the studio put its associate producer, Arthur Freed, in charge of the film musicals unit. True, MGM had won a best-picture Oscar with The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929), but that was a standard backstage musical, not one in which the songs and dances are fully integrated into the plot. Besides, it's almost unwatchable today, whereas thanks to the charm of Chevalier and the sexiness of MacDonald in her revealing pre-Code frippery, but most of all to what is known as "the Lubitsch touch," The Love Parade is still enjoyable. Lubitsch's "touch" as a director was based on a sly conviction that the audience would get the joke, usually a naughty one, and it was perfected during the silent era, when things had to be shown, not told. So the film opens with a mostly silent demonstration of why Count Alfred Renard has caused such a scandal with his dalliances in Paris that he has to be recalled to Sylvania and rebuked by Queen Louise. But this is also a film that wittily integrates sound into its sight gags, as the entire Sylvanian court eavesdrops on the burgeoning love of Alfred and Louise. The plot, derived by screenwriters Guy Bolton and Ernest Vajda from a French play, is standard, slightly sexist stuff about the prince consort, Alfred, feeling miffed by the fact that his marriage to the queen leaves him with nothing to do, but it's carried off well by the leads, as well as the saucy servants, Jacques and Lulu, and a court full of skilled character actors like Eugene Pallette, Edgar Norton, and Lionel Belmore. It's too bad that the song score by lyricist Clifford Grey and composer Victor Schertzinger isn't better -- there are too many reprises of "Dream Lover," for example -- but Lubitsch's staging compensates for its weakness.

The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)

There are few scenes in movies that I cherish more than the encounter of Gerry (Claudette Colbert) and the Wienie King (Robert Dudley). Then again, The Palm Beach Story is filled with things I cherish: The wonderfully enigmatic opening credits, which must have had people sitting through the film twice to comprehend. The way William Demarest drawls out "bangbaang" when he's pretending to shoot targets on the train -- before the rest of the Ale and Quail Club arrives with loaded shotguns to blow the hell out of the club car. J.D. Hackensacker III's (Rudy Vallee) inexhaustible supply of pince-nez. The fetching outfit Gerry fashions from a pair of men's pajamas and a bath towel, using the pajama shirt as a blouse, the pants as a kind of snood, and the towel as a wraparound skirt -- as she remains blithely unconscious that the word "Pullman" is emblazoned on the backside. The way Sig Arno as Toto steals every scene he's in, even if he's only standing in the background. Mary Astor's giddy, horny Princess Centimillia. The sly fun poked at Vallee's past as a crooner. The way Sturges finds something funny for even bit players, like the cops on the street, to do or say. Joel McCrea and Colbert are of course peerless at this sort of comedy. I do have to admit that I'm a little distracted every time I watch Colbert on screen, tracking the way she always manages to get on the right side in every scene, the better to show off the preferred left side of her face. I wonder, though, if Sturges and cinematographer Victor Milner didn't pull a trick on Colbert in the scene in which Gerry is sitting at a dressing table: Though she's on the right side of the screen, the only view we get of her face is a reflection in the mirror of her supposedly inferior right profile. The Palm Beach Story is not as sexy as The Lady Eve (1941) or as satiric as Sullivan's Travels (1941), but it remains for me an inexhaustible delight.