Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933)

Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933)

Cast: May Robson, Warren William, Guy Kibbee, Glenda Farrell, Ned Sparks, Walter Connolly, Jean Parker, Nat Pendleton, Barry Norton, Halliwell Hobbes, Hobart Bosworth, Robert Emmett O'Connor. Screenplay: Robert Riskin, based on a story by Damon Runyon. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Stephen Goosson. Film editing: Gene Havlick. Music: Howard Jackson.

There's almost enough salt in Robert Riskin's screenplay for Lady for a Day -- much of it supplied by the Damon Runyon story on which it's based -- to offset Frank Capra's characteristic indulgence in sweets. Much of the fiber of the movie is provided by such worthy character actors as pickle-faced Ned Sparks, brassy Glenda Farrell, florid Guy Kibbee, and beefy Nat Pendleton, who help us tolerate the saccharine qualities of the tale of mother love. We never find out a lot of the backstory of Apple Annie, the gin-swigging street vendor who must pose as a society dame to fulfill the illusions she has raised in the letters she's written over the years to her daughter, Louise. The girl was raised in a convent in Europe and is now engaged to the son of a Spanish count; she wants to bring her fiancé and prospective father-in-law to New York to meet her mother. Covering up the truth about Annie necessitates a lot of manipulation by the swanky Dave the Dude, one of the denizens of the Runyon underworld. But what is the truth about Annie? Riskin and Capra never tell us who Louise's father was, let alone how Annie managed to send the child abroad and keep her secret all these years. Or, at the end, exactly how Dave the Dude saves the day when all looks lost. But this is for the good: Finessing the backstory turns Lady for a Day into what it has to be in order to be palatable at all: a fairy tale. To my tastes, which usually can't tolerate Capra's sentimental populism, this is one of his best films. Just don't look to it for plausibility.

Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)

Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)

Cast: John Barrymore, Carole Lombard, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Ralph Forbes, Charles Lane, Etienne Girardot, Dale Fuller, Edgar Kennedy. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, based on a play by Charles Bruce Millholland. Cinematography: Joseph H. August. Film editing: Gene Havlick.

Nothing Sacred (William A. Wellman, 1937)

It's a bit startling to see a classic screwball comedy like Nothing Sacred in color. We're used to movies from the 1930s in the crisp elegance of black and white, so if you came across this movie without knowing anything about it, you might think it was one of those films that Ted Turner tried to "colorize." Part of the problem is that the tones in early Technicolor films are so muted: Some have faded with age, but getting the true sharp color contrasts that we're used to was more difficult in these early films, especially since Technicolor had very conservative ideas about what could be done with the process, and its "consultants," like the oft-credited Natalie Kalmus, the wife of the company's founder, were there to peer over the cinematographer's shoulder at all times. In addition, one of the problems with the color on Nothing Sacred is that a lapse of copyright on the film allowed many inferior prints to circulate before it could be restored to its original version. To my way of thinking, color adds little to this particular film, except in the glimpses of New York City in 1937. Carole Lombard plays Hazel Flagg, who, through a misdiagnosis by her small-town Vermont physician, Dr. Downer (Charles Winninger), is thought to be dying of radium poisoning. A New York reporter, Wally Cook, reads a short item about Hazel in the newspaper and persuades his editor, Oliver Stone (Walter Connolly), that it has the makings of a circulation-building sob story. Although Hazel and her doctor have subsequently learned that she's perfectly healthy, they agree to go along with the scheme to celebrate her as a dying heroine in the big city. And so it goes, in a frequently deft skewering of high-pressure journalism -- the very thing you might expect from the screenwriter, Ben Hecht, a former newspaperman who did a similar skewering in his play The Front Page. After Hecht had a falling-out with the film's producer, David O. Selznick, the screenplay was worked over by a number of uncredited wits, including Dorothy Parker, Moss  Hart, George S. Kaufman, and Budd Schulberg. The film could have used a somewhat lighter hand at directing: William A. Wellman is best known as a tough guy -- his nickname was "Wild Bill" -- with credits like Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), and Battleground (1949), but he does get to stage a very funny fight scene between Lombard and March.

It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night

This is one of the few Frank Capra movies I can watch without getting annoyed or queasy. It was made before he let his sentimental populism go to his head, so it has just the right amount of social consciousness, especially the sympathy for the victims of the Great Depression. We see that especially in the camaraderie of the bus riders singing "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," the willingness of Peter (Clark Gable) to give his last dollar to help a mother and son who have spent all their money on bus fare and have none left for food, and in the sense of entitlement shown by rich girl Ellie (Claudette Colbert), who learns a lesson when she tries to jump the queue for the showers at the trailer court. Later, Capra would want to preach at us about the power of The People in Meet John Doe (1941) and the way One Man Can Change the World in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), films I can barely watch today. But here he's just content to give us a good-natured romantic comedy with a social subtext. It has all the earmarks of the genre: a meet-cute, a hate-at-first-sight, a falling-in-love, a crisis, and a happy ending -- the paradigmatic runaway bride. It's not especially a laugh-riot, which may be why Gable and Colbert, who didn't want to make the movie to start with, thought when they'd finished it that it would be a bomb. Its charms are quieter but in their way entirely satisfying, in part because whatever their doubts about the movie they were making, the two stars were consummate pros and Capra allowed their natural charm and charisma to shine. All three of them won Oscars, of course, as did the movie and Robert Riskin for his screenplay. Joseph Walker's cinematography deserves a mention, as does a cast that includes Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale, and, as the dimwit bus driver whose only response to Peter's insults is a feeble "Oh, yeah," Ward Bond.