Too Many Girls (George Abbott, 1940)

Hal Le Roy, Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz in Too Many Girls

Cast: Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz, Hal Le Roy, Libby Bennett, Harry Shannon, Douglas Walton, Chester Clute, Tiny Person, Ivy Scott, Byron Shores, Van Johnson. Screenplay: John Twist, based on a play by George Marion Jr. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Songs: Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart.

When Desi met Lucy -- that's the most memorable thing about this silly college musical that was directed on stage by George Abbott, who brought over several members of the original cast when he was hired to make the film version at RKO. It was designed to be a vehicle for Lucille Ball, an RKO contract player who hadn't been in the stage production and whose singing voice wasn't up to the demands of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songs of the original show, so she was dubbed by Trudy Erwin. Among the cast hired out of the original were Eddie Bracken, Hal Le Roy, and Desi Arnaz, as well as a young chorus boy, Van Johnson, who has a couple of lines but goes uncredited. Although Arnaz is paired in most of the film with Ann Miller, he and Ball hit it off when they weren't on screen and married shortly after the movie wrapped. The story is nonsense about Connie Casey (Ball), a playgirl whose father wants her to settle down and go to college at his alma mater, Pottawatomie, in New Mexico. But he also hires some bodyguards, four young college football players, to keep her out of trouble. And so it goes, as the four bodyguards lead the Pottawatomie football team to a string of victories, and one of them, Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), falls hard for Connie. It's very loose-jointed stuff, with some lively musical numbers spotlighting Arnaz, Miller, Frances Langford, and a large company of dancers directed by LeRoy Prinz, but a lot of dull filler in between. It's amusing to see Eddie Bracken before he got stereotyped as a doofus in Preston Sturges movies, and a crewcut Richard Carlson before he wound up as the very square star of such 1950s sci-fi movies as It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (Arnold, 1954). 

Roberta (William A. Seiter, 1935)

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Roberta

Cast: Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Helen Westley, Claire Dodd, Victor Varconi, Luis Alberni, Ferdinand Munier, Torben Meyer, Adrian Rosley, Bodil Rosing. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Allan Scott, Glenn Tryon, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and a novel by Alice Duer Miller. Cinematography: Edward Cronjager. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Jerome Kern, Max Steiner.

If Roberta is less well-known than most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, it's partly because it was out of circulation for a long time after 1945, when MGM bought up the rights to the film and the Broadway musical on which it was based, planning to remake it in Technicolor as a vehicle for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. That plan fell through, and the actual remake, Lovely to Look At (Mervyn LeRoy, 1952) with Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Red Skelton, and Marge and Gower Champion, is nothing special. But MGM's hold on the property meant that, unlike the other Astaire-Rogers films, it didn't show up on television until the 1970s. But it was also a kind of throwback to the first of their movies, Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933), in that they weren't the top-billed stars of Roberta, and their plot is secondary to that of the star, Irene Dunne, and her leading man, Randolph Scott. It doesn't matter much: What we remember from the film are the great Astaire-Rogers dance numbers, "I'll Be Hard to Handle," "I Won't Dance," and the reprises of "Lovely to Look At" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Scott's inability to sing resulted in the big number for his character in the Broadway version, "You're Devastating," being cut from the song score of the movie. "I Won't Dance" was brought in from another Jerome Kern musical, and Kern and Jimmy McHugh composed that fashion-show/beauty-pageant classic "Lovely to Look At," with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, for the film, earning Roberta its only Oscar nomination. Except when Astaire and Rogers are doing their magic, the film is a little draggy, and Dunne and Scott strike no sparks. Look for a blond Lucille Ball, draped in a feathery wrap, as one of the models in the fashion show.

Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933)

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Adolphe Menjou, Mary Duncan, C. Aubrey Smith, Don Alvarado, Fred Santley, Richard Carle, Tyler Brooke, Geneva Mitchell, Helen Ware. Screenplay: Howard J. Green, based on a play by Zoe Akins. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Max Steiner.

Morning Glory earned Katharine Hepburn her first Oscar. It was only the sixth Academy Award for best actress ever given, and in some ways it was the first "modern" Oscar for acting. The initial one went to Janet Gaynor for a silent-film performance, and the subsequent ones were for Hollywood grande dames making their way out of silence, Mary Pickford and Norma Shearer; for beloved old trouper Marie Dressler; and for a Broadway diva making a temporary detour into movies, Helen Hayes. That last one shows what Hollywood was looking for, and what it found in Hepburn: actors who could talk. But unlike the diminutive and rather plain Hayes, Hepburn could hold the camera. Hollywood had never seen anything quite like her: beautiful in an imperious way, she had real presence and a unique style. That style would harden into mannerism after a few years and get her branded as "box-office poison" until she managed to turn things around again in the 1940s, with The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) and the subsequent potent teaming with Spencer Tracy. But for the time she was praised for a tonic, refreshing hold on the screen. Morning Glory itself is not much: the familiar story of the hopeful who goes out there and comes back a star. Lowell Sherman, who directed, had just appeared in a similar fable, the ur-Star Is Born movie What Price Hollywood? (Cukor, 1932), and the pattern hardened when Ruby Keeler subbed in for Bebe Daniels in 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Hepburn manages to segue convincingly from the naive chatterbox trying to muscle her way onto Broadway to the mature, toughened but still insecure character at the end, though it's a little unclear why such veterans as Adolphe Menjou's producer and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s playwright would be so susceptible to the pest that Eva Lovelace makes of herself at first. Also unclear is why Eva's performances of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy and Juliet's part of the balcony scene so impress the guests at the party: Hepburn rattles them off with no attention to the meaning behind the familiar words. She seems, for example, to take the line "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" as a question about his location rather than about his name. The film is pre-Code, so one thing is clear:  that Eva and the producer have slept together after she gets soused at the party. 

In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

Cast: Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Kay Francis, Charles Coburn, Helen Vinson, Katharine Alexander, Jonathan Hale, Nella Walker, Alan Baxter, Maurice Moscovitch, Peggy Ann Garner, Spencer Charters. Screenplay: Richard Sherman, based on a novel by Bessie Breuer. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Perry Ferguson. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Roy Webb.

You have to feel a little sorry for Kay Francis in In Name Only, stuck there as the villain opposite two witty luminaries, Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. Their background as comic actors make Grant and Lombard even more appealing in this mostly serious drama about frustrated love. We see the potential for happiness in their characters even as Lombard's is suffering and Grant's almost dies, mostly because we've seen the actors be giddy and funny before. Poor Francis is stuck in full grim glower as her character, Maida Walker, tries to hold on to her husband, Alec (Grant), and it doesn't help that we have seen Francis be funny before, in Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), though even there she was the other woman to Miriam Hopkins. Maida's motives are impure, of course: She married Alec for his money, even though she was in love with another, less affluent man. Their marriage has long since gone sour, so when Alec finds himself falling for the pretty widow Julie Eden (Lombard), Maida has to pull out all stops to put a kibosh on their affair. In Name Only is one of the more cynical movies about marriage to come out of Hollywood under the Production Code, which while it didn't prohibit the treatment of married couples falling out of love with each other and even getting divorced to marry their true loves, tried, under the Catholic leadership of Joseph Breen, to discourage it -- or at least to make sure that it was as painful for the participants as possible. So Maida has to be as cunningly deceitful as possible in her attempts to hold on to her man, and other marriages in the movie are just as unhappy: Maida's friend Suzanne (Helen Vinson) is married to a lush, so she plays the field, making a stab at Alec, and Julie has an embittered sister, Laura (Katharine Alexander), who divorced her philandering husband and now distrusts all men. Naturally, in the end Maida gets her comeuppance and agrees to divorce Alec so he can marry Julie, but it's a long time coming. Alec even has to be on the brink of death before this can happen, which provides one of the weaker moments in the film: Grant is so typically full of life that it's almost beyond his considerable acting skills to seem to be seriously ill. In Name Only is no great film, but you probably can't even care about its defects when Grant and Lombard are on the screen -- they're that good.