marcslope

Influential pre-Code drama pours on the atmosphere and the sex in a most un-MGM way, and this is the one that made a star out of Jean Harlow. She'd been decorative but not much good in such notable movies as "Hell's Angels" and "Public Enemy," and somehow Victor Fleming turned her into an ace comedienne who could also make you care. Here she's Vantine, a no-better-than-she-should-be spirit who happens upon Clark Gable's Malaysian rubber plantation, just as he's receiving assistant Gene Raymond and his comely wife, Mary Astor. And the battle of the women is on, as Harlow and Astor vie for Gable's attention. He's all man in a way even he seldom achieved, and we understand his surliness even as we admire his competence and efficiency. There's atmosphere galore, including a lengthy sequence on how rubber is made, and everyone's helped immensely by John Mahin's rude, funny, sexy screenplay, which allots ripe ripostes to Gable and Harlow, who reel them off expertly. Astor's gorgeous and womanly as ever, and we believe her conflicting feelings for Gable and Raymond. (In "A Life on Film," she answers the question many asked her, "What was it like to kiss Clark Gable?": what with Victor Fleming yelling and hot lights pouring on them and technicians running around, not much.) You have to put up with the casual racism of "those lying, cheating coolies" and a comic-relief manservant whose function is to laugh idiotically at everything, but accept that and you have a lively, adult, HOT movie that showed what Harlow could really do, and further developed the masculine characteristics that Gable displayed in many, many movies.

The 1933 Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach musical, adapted from a novel by Alice Duer Miller, wasn't that well reviewed to begin with. But audiences liked the songs, especially "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and the gowns, and loved a scene set in a bar with 1,000 actual liquor bottles (Prohibition had just been repealed). Most of Harbach's unwieldy, and rather unfunny, libretto gets preserved in this film adaptation, and while the score is considerably reduced, as usually then happened in Hollywood, some of the missing songs at least survive as underscoring. He wasn't the most dexterous lyricist, either. ("Now laughing friends deride/ Tears I cannot hide." Some friends!) Fortunately, Dorothy Fields was retained to rewrite some Harbach lyrics (she's billed with Jimmy McHugh, but he had nothing to do with it), and contribute one new song, the lovely "Lovely to Look At." That helps the musical presentation; nothing's going to help this slim plot. Irene Dunne, a little over-prim to these eyes, is the dress designer who variously loves and hates an impossibly handsome Randolph Scott, the Indiana bumpkin who's come to Paris to visit his aunt Helen Westley, a renowned couturier. He's traveling with Fred Astaire's band, and Fred hooks up with Ginger Rogers, who's a cabaret star with a fake Polish accent (a tribute to Lyda Roberti, who did the part onstage) but is really, coincidence of coincidences, his old flame, Lizzie Gatz. Sit through this tiresome plot and you'll get rewards, mostly Fred and Ginger dancing, and a brief display of Fred's excellent jazz piano playing, Irene's pretty soprano, and Ginger's way of hoisting a so-so comic line. Also dresses, lots and lots of dresses. Claire Dodd plays her patented shrew, ably, and it's over in under two hours. William Seiter's direction is nothing special, and the screenplay certainly isn't. You'll have a good time anyway.

Maybe I'm overrating this; it's just a pretty-good adaptation of a pretty-good boulevard comedy that fit snugly into the theatergoing atmosphere of 1958. But viewed from this advanced vantage point, it conjures up a long-lost world that looks incredibly seductive. The Paramount mountain appears, Alfred Newman's lush scoring begins, some gorgeous still photos of 1961 San Francisco grace the credits, and we're off to an appetizing array of sophisticated bon mots, expert comic playing, and the most glamorous sets and costumes this side of "Pillow Talk." Astaire, not just playing Astaire and genuinely acting, oozes charm and regret as the long-neglectful father of Debbie Reynolds (who does overplay a bit), returning to San Francisco to witness her marriage to Tab Hunter, who's surprisingly excellent. Ex-wife Lilli Palmer, now married to gruff Gary Merrill, eyes her ex's intervention with well-justified suspicion, while dad Charlie Ruggles makes caustic remarks and quaffs a lot of bourbon. It's a very white world, and the casual racism thrown at the well-played Japanese servant becomes wearying, but it's such and eyeful and earful, and Astaire's so marvelous, you end up loving it. And when he dances a few steps with Reynolds and Palmer, you think, why on earth didn't they give him a whole number.

Judging from the TCM print, which runs just an hour, as opposed to the original, 15-minute-longer version, this is a tense little thriller with a few loose threads. First, despite the title of the novel on which it's based, there are not 13 women in it, at least not the 13 alluded to in the title. The ones remaining are all former sorority sisters being tormented and summarily bumped off, mostly through the power of suggestion, by jealous former student Myrna Loy, still in her Eastern-temptress phase, though not for much longer. She's the most interesting thing in it, quite gorgeous and with a cool hauteur that suits Ursula Georgia very well. The most rational and combative sister, Irene Dunne in her noblest mode, is rather a dullard. She's widowed and lives, awfully well, somewhere near Beverly Hills, and has an irritating adorable son whom Loy targets. Other women include Kay Johnson, reduced to supporting parts after such disasters as "Madame Satan," and Jill Esmond, then married to Laurence Olivier, who has a lilting British accent and gives off an intriguing, somewhat Sapphic vibe. Peg Entwistle, about to throw herself off the Hollywood sign, is another, and her footage is too brief to reveal much about her. Ricardo Cortez, always welcome, is the uninteresting detective who pieces the case together, and some of the murders--a nervous trapeze artist, Johnson's--are quite strikingly filmed. It's far-fetched and racist and wildly unlikely, but entertaining, and an excellent look at the pre-Nora Charles Loy.

Saw the black-and-white restoration on TCM; it's lovely, with all that delectable Laszlo Kovacs outdoorsiness, but as a movie it just doesn't work very well, as sincerely as Peter Bogdanovich must have intended it. He loved old movies and knew many silent directors, and in fact dedicated this to Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh, whose memories partly inspired it. But what we have is a slow-moving retrospective of 1910 to 1915 and movies' move out West, with Ryan O'Neal as an inept lawyer and Burt Reynolds as a promoter who both somehow end up making movies for an almost unrecognizable Brian Keith. It's something of a history of the Patents Company, which monopolized moviemaking, but that's quite secondary to a series of not-very-funny slapstick sequences, involving characters who don't make a lot of sense. There's little emotional resonance to the love triangle involving the two men and Jane Hitchcock, whom I liked and don't find as inexpressive as a bunch of reviewers did. Tatum O'Neal is a know-it-all kid who drives and keeps a rattlesnake, also the subjects of some unpersuasive slapstick, Stella Stevens is a nondescript troupe member, and John Ritter, who, as several reviewers have mentioned, seems to be in a different decade altogether, is the DP. There's a lot of love for D. W. Griffith, whom one character calls "the greatest movie director who ever lived" even in 1910, before Griffith had made much of a mark, and extended sequences of "The Birth of a Nation," minus the now-offensive parts. It's meant to be elegaic and nostalgic and affectionate, but mostly what I see are thin characters doing a lot of unmotivated pratfalls. And hey, I liked "At Long Last Love."

Stodgy, inept, illogical melodrama throws a lot of emotions on the screen, but they're not consistent, and they don't pay off. Bank teller Conrad Nagel is studying to be a lawyer, while his best bud, fellow clerk Robert Ames, likes to chase the broads and hit the speakeasies. Nagel's bride, Betty Compson with an uncertain Scandinavian accent, arrives on the boat and first seems besotted with her fiance, but becomes increasingly intrigued by his pal. Ames steals her away from Nagel, though he doesn't love her and doesn't really intend to marry her-so why? Nagel, up till now so studious and ethical that he's dull, makes a bad investment and covers it with bank notes, then is able to pin the crime on Ames, who lands in Sing Sing. Nagel then marries Compson, though she's already said she doesn't love him, and five years later they're raising Dickie Moore. Ames breaks out of prison and heads to the mansion Nagel built for Compson, where he demands she hide him yet confesses he never really cared for her. Nagel decides he has to come clean with Detective Robert Emmett O'Connor, playing what he always played, but a hilariously unlikely ending puts everything right. The emotions don't hang true on this one, and I don't believe any of it, but Nagel is good, and Ames, who died shortly after making it, had the makings of a good slimy villain.

Metro all over the place in personnel: stars Robert Montgomery and Wallace Beery, director George Hill, Doug Shearer on sound and Cedric Gibbons on set, and Oscar-winning Frances Marion doing a bang-up screenplay. But the studio that reveled in pretty people doing pretty things went all Warners on this one, unleashing a tough, unglamorous prison epic that created many cliches that the genre reveled in for decades. It also gave an Oscar-nominated Chester Morris probably his best chance, as an unscrupulous yet likable, redeemable convict whose cellmates are Montgomery, as a spoiled pretty boy in on a manslaughter rap, and Beery, the toughest con on the lot. The relationships are interesting, the pace is fast, the climactic prison riot is a doozy. One complaint: Montgomery's family, mainly his sister, Leila Hyams, is portrayed sympathetically, and it's stated that they'll just lose it if he doesn't get parole (but they look like just a jocular, happy upper-class family in their one scene, laughing and enjoying each other's company and not even mentioning Montgomery). Yet the screenplay has to go through some unlikely contortions to link Morris, who's made a jail break, with Hyams, who grows fond of him, and is reunited with him in a happy ending that could never happen (and again, no mention of her brother, whose fate is not a happy one). But hey, it's unusually fluent for an early talkie, and exciting, and rife with quirkier cons than your average prison movie.

Widely considered, on the IMDB at least, as one of the least deserving Best Picture winners ever. And I disagree. Yes, there were other great films in 1933: Dinner at Eight, Gold Diggers of 1933, Duck Soup, State Fair, to name a few. This one is, first of all, unusually lavish, in the way Academy voters then tended (and still do, to an extent) to admire. It's from a stage success by a major playwright, and offers spectacle and crowd scenes even the Drury Lane never could have contained. It has a lively, Upstairs Downstairs/Downton Abbey vibe, and the reliable Una O'Connor and Herbert Mundin making the most of the downstairs couple. Clive Brook is a solid patriarch, and if Diana Wynyard tends to play to the second balcony more than she ought, she has some fine quiet moments, too. There are some very well-written scenes (the young couple on the Titanic, Wynyard telling O'Connor off late in the proceedings), some very accurate depictions of what was considered mass entertainment at the time, and some good montages. The constant passage-of-time device of those people and horses parading across the screen does get tired, and one can detect a certain self-congratulatory air in Frank Lloyd's direction; oh, look how capable I am at handling the sheer volume of this. But I'm interested throughout, and can see how it may well have been the most impressive of the Best Picture nominees that year. Give it a break.

It's a lusty, strapping, multigenerational American history in Edna Ferber's patented style, a look at the Wisconsin lumber industry from the 1880s to about 1910, with a surprising-for-its-time sidebar on the environmental cost of lumbering. A scrappy, ambitious lumber foreman brawls, barks and blusters his way to the top, in the process falling for Frances Farmer's saloon barmaid-singer. What's implausible is, Edward Arnold is playing him. He's in his mid-40s and not remotely credible, or attractive, as our flawed hero, and you wonder why on earth someone as beautiful and accomplished as Frances Farmer would ever fall for him. He runs off to marry the boss's daughter, leaving Farmer to wed Arnold's best pal Walter Brennan, who at least isn't as Walter Brennan-like as usual, but does have to exclaim "Yumpin' yimminy!" a lot. Flash forward 20 years, and Farmer has died, leaving a lovely daughter played by... Frances Farmer, and Arnold, now a more plausible 50, sees in her a chance to recapture his youth. His son, Joel McCrea, second-billed but not having much to do, also falls for her, and which one she's going to end up with doesn't generate a whole lot of suspense. There is one lovely scene between Arnold and his daughter, Andrea Leeds, and some good actors on the periphery-Mady Christians, Mary Nash, Richard Shields, Cecil Cunningham. It's lavish, with some striking Gregg Toland/Rudolph Mate montages, and capably directed by Howard Hawks and William Wyler, though their styles do clash, with Hawks presiding over the outdoorsy-action stuff and Wyler handling the domestic drama of the third act. Entertaining, and the best chance Frances Farmer ever had, but you'll see why Arnold, a reliable character actor who mainly played tycoons and villains, seldom got top billing again.

A standard Betty Grable Fox musical, with some swell Jack Cole choreography and a below-par Jule Styne-Leo Robin score, this backstage frolic compromises itself somewhat in the casting and a lot in the plotting, a tortured screenplay by director Richard Sale and Mary Loos. Betty's starring in a hit musical (good opening number) produced by hubby MacDonald Carey. MacDonald Carey? He's hardly an expert at musicals, though he does warble a little at one point, and he's playing a rotter, romancing a wealthy backer who happens to look like Lois Maxwell. Betty's also receiving heavy attention from her leading man, Eddie Albert, who did do musicals, but the casting still seems a little odd. Meantime the central couple gets a separation (but he's paying her alimony, without her divorcing him-how does that work?), and after a minor accident, she develops amnesia, or appears to, sending her down to Miami, where she lives like it's 1944 again and begins a romance with a buff Rory Calhoun. The contrivances pile up on top of one another, and the ending is rushed. Certainly the dances are the best thing, including a production number with Betty and a just-starting-out Gwen Verdon, who does get billing in the program insert. But you have to slog through some dreary story to get to them.

Deborah Kerr can't decide between Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum, and we should all have such problems, while best friend Jean Simmons stands on the sidelines in fabulous 1960 designer outfits and makes catty remarks. What more could we ask from a movie? This elegant drawing room comedy harks back to an earlier era, say the 1930s, when great-looking actors inhabited great-looking interiors and engaged in witty conversation. The screenplay, adapted by Hugh Williams and Margaret Vyner from their West End stage success, is loaded with smart repartee, and Stanley Donen directs this estimable quartet in high style. (There's hardly anybody else in the movie, though Moray Watson does a fine butler turn.) As a married couple of 10 years (they must have wed rather late) with two children, Grant and Kerr have an easy rhythm, and they live in a magnificent Downton-style estate, where part of the upkeep includes hustling tourists through. One such tourist is oil millionaire Mitchum, and when he encounters Kerr, a great flirtation begins. They'd worked together before in "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" and "The Sundowners," and they clearly adored co-starring and remained great friends; when Mitchum gazes with droopy-eyed lust on Kerr, the heat's palpable. There's a delightful score of Noel Coward standards, including several choruses of "The Stately Homes of England," a fun title sequence, and intelligent drawing-room conversation throughout. It wasn't that well reviewed at the time and isn't that well liked here, and personally, I can't imagine why.

"Kid Galahad" was only four years old when Warners decided to remake it, changing the setting from boxing to a second-rate circus, and upping Bogart from villain to lead. But he's still sort of a villain, an unscrupulous circus manager whose thoughts turn murderous when nice guy Eddie Albert starts eyeing Bogie's innocent sister, Joan Leslie. First, Bogie was 42 and Leslie 15 or 16, and second, it's a little discomfiting watching Albert romancing a teen. Albert's a grocer who becomes a lion tamer (implausible) when a lion escapes the circus and heads downtown (implausible) and Albert expertly captures him (implausible). He's a pleasant presence, but he's not a star, as Warners appears to have been grooming him for. Meantime, Sylvia Sidney, the best thing in the movie, is on the sidelines, in a kind-of romance with both men, and other fun people pop up, Sig Rumann as the other lion tamer and Clara Blandick playing another Aunt Em. It strains credibility that, first, Bogie would turn murderous, and, second, that he'd repent on his deathbed, in time for a happy-ish ending. Some nice circus atmosphere, efficient direction by the never-more-than-efficient Ray Enright, and some well edited encounters with kings of the jungle. There's just nothing special about it.

Somehow I'd never seen this very large, very successful adaptation of a James A. Michener novel detailing the cruel post-World War II military policy of discouraging intermarriage between American soldiers and, as Paul Osborn's screenplay has it, "indigenants," meaning Japanese women. It's lavishly shot in Technicolor and Technirama, doting on beautiful Japanese locations, and as a plea for tolerance, it must have had considerable bite in 1957. Marlon Brando, affecting a strange, intriguing Southern accent (he even had a dialogue coach), is the major who's happy enough to be engaged to Patricia Owens until he meets Miiko Taka and finds his well-curated prejudices against the former enemy evaporating. He counsels buddy Red Buttons against marrying Miyoshi Umeki but is quickly won over to their side-as in a Rodgers and Hammerstein show, including "South Pacific" (also derived from Michener), there has to be a tragic second couple to allow the primary one its happy ending. Buttons and Umeki both won Oscars; he's excellent, showing a serious side we never knew he had, while she's, well, rather passive-it's a delicate performance, but she hasn't that much to do. There's also Ricardo Montalban, of all people, as a Japanese kabuki master, and a young James Garner for Brando to play off of. Director Joshua Logan revels in the pageantry, and, this being a Josh Logan movie, if there's an excuse for a hunky man to take his shirt off, he does. Martha Scott and Kent Smith, somewhat on the sidelines as Owens' parents, do good jobs, and if the whole thing's a bit bloated at two and a half hours, in the end it's affecting. Dated by current standards, of course, but fairly honest, socially conscious Big Hollywood for its time.

You can't imagine two more dissimilar movies, the sleek verbal sophistication and lively comedic jousting of "Eve" versus the heated urban urgency of this hard-hitting drama, an ugly exploration of white-trash racism, unfortunately still current 74 years later. Sidney Poitier, in his debut (and he had to do supporting parts for years after), is fourth-billed but very much the protagonist, a young doctor unluckily assigned to treat two brothers shot up during a gas station robbery, unbilled Dick Paxton and a very chilling Richard Widmark-a prejudiced lowlife who blames Poitier for his brother's death on the operating table, and no amount of evidence is going to dissuade him. Senior doctor/administrator Stephen McNally backs Poitier, and so, eventually, does the dead brother's widow, Linda Darnell, who looks like hell here and.plunges into an unsympathetic role with abandon. Widmark's racism is almost too ugly to witness, but it captures the thinking of this sad class of people. There's some stilted dialogue: A bit too much is made of Poitier's happy home life and loving, trusting wife, who has a long soliloquy that reeks of stilted overwriting. A host of dignified, mostly unbilled African-American actors fills out the cast (Ruby Dee is Poitier's sister-in-law), and the plotting, with Widmark's antagonism turning into a race riot and murder attempt, builds excitingly and tensely. Maybe some bigots in 1950 saw this and recognized their own irrational hate; wouldn't happen today. Not an easy watch, but a worthwhile one, and you may find yourself shaking your head a lot at how little has changed.

A hit Broadway play, adapted by the playwright (and later turned into a hit musical); what more could you ask for? Well, for starters, you could ask that the premise, a love story set at the very predominantly Jewish summer camps that thrived in the Catskills from the 1920s into the 1970s, not have virtually every trace of Jewishness removed from it. We have one Jewish waiter here, and possibly a couple of older Jewish campers, and from there it's on to Ginger Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Peggy Conklin, Lucille Ball, Lee Bowman, Eve Arden, and a very young, very annoying Red Skelton, whose two extended comedy routines land with a thud. That Rogers would even be living with her large family in that section of the Bronx strains credibility. They're pretty people, the summer-camp setting is pretty and convincing, and for a post-Code item, it's pretty frank about the sleeping-around that's going on, or at least suspected. Lucille, being built up by RKO, has some funny moments, and Eve, playing the "intellectual" camper (we can tell she's intellectual because she wears glasses), makes a great deal out of little. At a little over an hour, it speeds by, and Rogers, playing a not-very-nice heroine, at least is photographed lovingly. But the goy-izing of it kind of deprives it of any point.

Dan Levy, going way beyond "Schitt's Creek" or any of his previous efforts, attempts a warm comedy-drama about grieving and friendship, and makes it about halfway. As Marc, the unexpectedly widowed husband of a fabulously successful writer trafficking in Harry Potter-style fantasy, he's earnest, somber, and well-dressed. (Lots of tenty sweaters; are you trying to hide the waistline, Dan?) His best friends, an annoying Ruth Negga and a verbose Himesh Patel, try to rally around him; we never find out much about them, except their past relationships with him (he and Patel are exes), and that, despite whatever financial troubles they occasionally proclaim, they live very well. The three trek off to a gorgeously photographed Paris, where Marc investigates a troubling factoid that has just come up about his marriage, and where he meets a too-good-and-handsome-to-be-true possible boyfriend (what he'd see in Marc I fail to see), and we're left hanging about that relationship. The grieving feels real enough, and it's a placid, pretty movie. Just...quiet, and while one applauds Levy for trying to break out of his mold, I wanted more confrontation, more excitement, deeper exploration.

Went to this kind of grudgingly, not being a fan of Timothee Chalamet and after seeing some so-so reviews. It was delightful! Still don't entirely get Chalamet, but he's game, sings at least as well as Gene Wilder, and dances a bit, quite capably. I didn't realize it was a brand-new story from Paul King, and it's quite a dexterous one, giving Wonka a credible origin story and allowing for plenty of sight gags, warmth, and satire. Calah Lane is adorable, and there are fun turns from Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Colman, Rowan Atkinson, and, especially, Hugh Grant. It's visually sumptuous, especially in IMAX. The new songs, by somebody I never heard of, are just fine-OK, they have some lazy rhymes, but they tell the story, inform us about the characters, and generally do the heavy lifting musical scores used to do. It made me laugh out loud, and the "secret message" revealed at the end (but not here) is a charming, touching finishing touch. What a surprise this one was!

Noel Coward's famous macabre stage comedy gets somewhat cut down for this TV adaptation but survives handily, aided by Coward's direction, an appreciative live studio audience, and an excellent cast, headed by Coward himself. As Charles, he nails the comedy lines, as how couldn't he, and he paces it swiftly; even the camerawork is unusually sophisticated for 1956. He loathed working with Colbert-"I'd wring her neck, if she had one," he's famously alleged to have said-but she plays Ruth expertly, and even gets exit applause on a key scene. He got along fine with Lauren Bacall, and she's a seductive, husky-voiced Elvira, though her accent varies a bit. Mildred Natwick might be the funniest Madame Arcati I've seen, and I've seen Angela Lansbury; she underplays, and exhibits a joie de vivre that other Arcatis haven't quite mastered. The noted British character actress Brenda Forbes is also on hand, and young Marion Ross keeps up with her estimable fellow players. Other Blithe Spirits are out there-David Lean's quite successful film version, and a somewhat flat 1966 TV remake-but this one has the immediacy of a live play, and it would be hard to top the comic playing here.

When MGM remade Noel Coward's operetta in 1940, they made such a botch of it that he a) wept, b) promised he would never sell anything to Hollywood again, and c) kept his promise. He might have been happier with this 1933 British adaptation, which is at least closer to the source material and less pretentious. It's not ideal: The third act is missing, and the leads, Anna Neagle and Fernand Gravey, are leaden. British audiences loved Ms. Neagle, but she simpers a lot, her vocal ability isn't up to this challenging score, and her performance is mostly about her blonde ringlets. Gravey seems rather young for the part, and his voice is way too light. The director, Herbert Wilcox, indulges in a lot of fancy twirling cameras and feet-only shots, but he's merely calling attention to.himself and detracting from the touching little story. The movie comes vibrantly to life with the appearance of Ivy St. Helier, who originated the role onstage and is so.charismatic and urgent, her performance hasn't dated at all; she's postmodern. She makes a banquet out of "If Love Were All," and she and Miles Mander, playing a reprehensible military man, outshine the rest of the cast. Certainly it could have been better, especially with better casting, but it captures a fair amount of Coward's stage vision, and remains an operetta far more intelligent and atmospheric than most operettas.

Ignore the story as much as you can, and the erratic production design, and enjoy the Irving Berlin, there's a lot of it. 20th's big 1938 musical is mainly an excuse to cram as much Berlin as it can into a screenplay that makes utterly no sense. What year we're in at any given moment is almost never clear, but we start in, oh, 1914 or so, where longhair musician Tyrone Power (he mimes violin playing badly, but conducts rather well later) steers toward ragtime, to the disappointment of aunt Helen Westley and music professor Jean Hersholt, who have practically nothing to do. He forms a San Francisco swing band with the aid of pals Don Ameche and Jack Haley, and first despises then falls very suddenly in love with their singer, Alice Faye. Faye had first been hired by 20th to be a sort of Jean Harlow but quickly had her image changed to lady contralto; here, she reverts to sassy platinum blonde, for at least the first third. The Power-Faye romance is rather pointless, they stay apart and reunite without much provocation. The picture gets a boost with the late arrival of Ethel Merman; the first thing out of her mouth is, "AAAAHHH!" She belts some choice Berlin; too bad her best song, "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil," leaves out its clever counterpoint. Power doesn't sing, he couldn't, but he does look like Tyrone Power, and for most audiences that was enough. Faye, as film historian David Shipman said, was no great shakes as an actress, but hers was a supreme example of an ingratiating temperament caught by the camera; she's a pleasure to watch, in sassy or dignified mode. Ameche leads a sappy rendition of "Easter Parade," and Haley hasn't much to do besides "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning." The fashions and cars go directly from 1918 to 1938 with nothing in between, and the stars, of course, never age, the better to keep them looking their best in time for the finale. Henry King, one of 20th's most reliable directors, guides it surely, though nothing can help that plot.

I'd somehow missed this 1941 melodrama from screenwriters Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and director Mitch Leisen, and it was something of a revelation. A clear-eyed, still-relevant look at the problems of immigrants at the Mexican border, it's also an intriguing romantic triangle, laced with ample Brackett-Wilder wit. A needless flashback structure, offering a generous glimpse of Leisen himself playing a Paramount director, frames the story of an experienced gigolo (Charles Boyer) with a faithful girlfriend/partner-in-crime (Paulette Goddard, relishing an unsympathetic part), who marries a naive schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland) to cross into the States. Some flaws: Boyer is a hard-to-root-for rotter for most of it, though the screenwriters nimbly turn him into a hero (via a slightly contrived third-act crisis); his character narrates too much; Goddard's denouement is too convenient; the ending's rushed. But de Havilland is just aces, there are some beautiful sequences, and a number of subplots involving a number of good character actors keep us interested. Walter Abel is a splendid crafty government agent, and Rosemary de Camp consistently compelling as a very pregnant would-be immigrant determined to cross over and deliver her baby in the U. S. The pro-American attitude isn't over-peddled, and we're convinced by the end that this couple was, indeed, made for each other. I had a lovely time.

20th Century Fox turned out plenty of musicals in the '30s and '40s, generally boasting the likes of Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda, Charlotte Greenwood, John Payne, and Sonja Henie. A rich roster of talent, but most of these were hampered by weak screenplays and weaker scores, often consisting mostly of old standards that were either public domain or at least cheap. The directors were studio hacks, and this one's no exception, it's helmed by the peerlessly dull Bruce Humberstone. But it's a rare 20th attempt at a real integrated Broadway-style musical, with a Josef Myrow-Mack Gordon score that evolves naturally from the action, even with some rhyming dialogue. And the screenplay, a sort-of remake of the 1938 "Three Blind Mice," at least has a little verve. Farm girls June Haver (proficient as always, and never any more than that), Vivian Blaine (hired by Fox to replace Faye, and she didn't last long, but she did have a lovely voice), and Vera-Ellen (dubbed, and dancing up a storm in a protracted "You Make Me Feel So Young" dream ballet), alight to a fetching studio-bound Atlantic City to find rich husbands, and the best they can do are the dullish George Montgomery, Frank Lattimore, and Charles Price. But it's very colorful and tuneful, and Celeste Holm, brought in two-thirds of the way through for some plot complications and a good specialty number, walks off with the rest of the movie. There's also a nicely shot fox hunt. Not much will surprise you, but the numbers are fun, the three little girls are appealing, and it isn't overlong.

Ronald Colman has never been a favorite of mine, but in this early talkie, as a convicted thief on Devil's Island who lucks into a job caring for warden's wife Ann Harding and engineers an escape, he's convincing, and even manages to generate some sex appeal. Ms. Harding, as ever, is womanly and subtle and beautiful, and the acting throughout is several notches above the early-talkie norm, with Dudley Digges an eminently hatable spouse, and Louis Wolheim doing one of his useful sidekick turns. But there's much more to it than that. Wesley Ruggles, about to be a top director, paces it far faster than most 1929 films struggling with the new technology, and the deep-focus photography and unusual angles are quite striking. Small wonder: Gregg Toland worked on it, and the production design, by William Cameron Menzies, is so bleached you can feel the French Guyana heat. Some dialogue gets lost, but the sound recording is pretty good for the period. It was a hit, and a deserved one, marred only by a too-rushed happy-ish ending that comes out of nowhere and seems awfully unlikely. I liked it quite a lot, though, and may even have to check out some more Ronald Colman output.

Remake of a durable Jean Webster story (it's also been the basis of at least two stage musicals), this lavish mid-50s Fox effort is a curious mixture of charm, studio efficiency, and pretentiousness. The latter manifests itself mainly in a couple of ponderous Roland Petit ballets, where Leslie Caron, as the enchanting young French orphan being sent to college by anonymous benefactor Fred Astaire, executes the steps beautifully and it's still dull. The rest is diverting, if you can get past (and many can't) the 32-year age difference between Astaire and Caron; do we believe this as a love story? Both stars give it their all, and when they're dancing together, in the lively "Sluefoot" and the Oscar-nominated "Something's Gotta Give," it's as good as an MGM Arthur Freed effort. The screenplay, by the Ephrons, is short on humor and long on exposition, and the capable supporting cast, including Fred Clark, Thelma Ritter, Terry Moore, and Larry Keating, hasn't a great deal to do. I had a good time revisiting this one after decades, but I was reminded of how superior Hugh Martin's score to "Love From Judy," a British stage adaptation of the same material that ran and ran, is to Johnny Mercer's efforts. And MGM would have had the good sense to at least trim some of the ponderous Roland Petit.

A flop George Abbott play gets a very respectable Warners filming in this 1934 B, which is boosted by two of the strongest women then on the lot, Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak. They're sisters, one butch and practical and the other feminine and yearning, running an out-of-the-way garage/cafe/hotel in the Southwest, not far from the Mexican border. Warners contract players keep dropping in, from Glenda Farrell to Frank McHugh to Ruth Donnelley, but bad news enters in the form of Preston Foster and Lyle Talbot. Dumb luck puts them there, in the first of a couple of unlikely coincidences, for it turns out Foster, generally an uninteresting actor who's unusually heated and virile here, had a long-ago tryst with MacMahon, and now he and Talbot have just robbed a bank and killed a couple of clerks. A short movie, it's a little light on plot but soaked in convincing studio atmosphere, with the titular heat lightning going off in the distance, and firmly steered by Mervyn LeRoy. MacMahon, "one of the screen's few perfect actresses," as film historian David Shipman had it, sinks her teeth into a meaty part and says more with an eyebrow than most actresses could say with pages of dialogue, and Dvorak is appealing in a somewhat hackneyed part. The rest of the Warners stock company do their usual things: Donnelley is haughty, Farrell flirty, McHugh the comic relief. But that's not to say they're unwelcome.