Fred_Rap

Compelling hokum. Lionel Barrymore, in a variation of his trod-upon tycoon from "Dinner at Eight," plays the doting, selfless head of an insensitive, selfish family. Wife Fay Bainter, having just sold a novel to the movies, is on a spending spree before heading to Hollywood; son Tom Brown has his heart set on joining a college fraternity; elder daughter Mae Clark is torn between two lovers; dithery sister Mary Carlisle has thoughts of eloping with her nitwit boyfriend.

Meanwhile, Barrymore is facing scandal and prison on a trumped-up embezzlement charge, a crisis he withholds from his self-absorbed brood. Will the family rally to his side before he ends it all in suicide?

The film is so cunningly constructed that we squirm in suspense in spite of our conviction that all must end well. It's the kind of skillful schmaltz that leaves you feeling at once satisfied and foolish. With Una Merkel as a knuckleheaded maid, saving Louise Beavers and Hattie MacDaniel the indignity of demeaning themselves.

Among the sundry delights to be found in this British white slavery sexpose is the gonzo turn by Herbert Lom. As London's mac daddy supreme Nick Biaggi, Lom is a sight to behold, a horn-doggie dandy in homburg, lapel carnation and spats (au courant fashion be damned). He's low-key at first, oozing oily charm and generosity, the better to bamboozle naive French waif Odile Versois, who's been lured into a life of shame by Lom's field procurer/mamasan/mistress Brenda De Banzie. But behind closed doors it's a whole 'nother Herb. Channeling his inner Michael Gough, he's all over Odile like a cheap suit, manhandling her love handles and assaulting her face with wet, slobbering kisses. It's truly an unhinged spectacle; even Lom's toupee looks like it has an erection.

Also in the house: affable tough guy Eddie Constantine as the world's least likely Canadian, the always welcome Robert Brown (Tumak's dad in One Million Years B.C., 'M' in the Bond films of the '80s) as a two-fisted cabbie who rouses his fellow hacks to do battle with the 'ho-mongers, Diana Dors, poured into bum-busting skirts and Frederick's of Soho lingerie, as a hooker with a score to settle, and, as the groom at a wedding party, a remarkably young Michael Caine.

All this plus a wacky weed-induced dream scene that must be seen to be disbelieved.

Lowdown high times guaranteed.

Brutal, straightforward bio-pic of the notorious Jewish gang boss. Writers Wesley Lau and Tamar Hoffs tell their sprawling story with fidelity to the headlines and nary a hint of what made this complicated mobster-cum-family man tick. (Curiously, there's never a mention of Lepke's infamous Murder Inc. operation, opting instead to concentrate on his drug trafficking and extortion enterprises.) Luckily, Tony Curtis' riveting performance fills in what the writers' have neglected, transforming Lepke Buchalter into a disturbingly three-dimensional character. Tossing off Yiddishisms with a sneer, keeping his impish smile to a minimum, he plays Lepke as a stone-faced ruthless street thug with a yen for power and conservative family values. It's as though Sidney Falco from "Sweet Smell of Success" had finally taken over J.J. Hunsecker's column. Whether snarling out death orders or tremulously asking his prospective father in law for permission to marry, Curtis invests the role with a skillful understatement (as well as a Bronx boy's veracity).

In the film's best scene, a queasy mixture of eroticism and complex emotions, Lepke is on the lam and holed up in a trollop's apartment. As the woman brazenly tempts him, Curtis silently and eloquently conveys the anguish of a lonely man struggling to remain faithful to his wife.

The director Menachem Golan is rarely this subtle, striving for ethnic texture and period color and overdoing both. Grubby hook-nosed Jews, swarthy pasta-eating Italians, and outsize Fedoras are shoved in our face. The violence is luridly overblown (a prostitute gets an ice pick thrust in her neck during lovemaking), and sometimes downright preposterous (a plate of spaghetti camouflages an explosive device). But just try to turn away from Curtis. With Anjanette Comer as Lepke's doting wife; Milton Berle, surprisingly restrained as her father; Barry Miller as the young Lepke; Vaughn Meader as an unlikely Walter Winchell.

Seminal Joan Crawford campfest. Returning to her home studio after a ten-year exile at Warners, she celebrates her triumph with all the pomp and circumstance of a battle-hardened legion entering Rome after a decade in the field. Single-handedly, she turns this moth-eaten meller into an audacious display of venom-spewing bitchery and vainglorious posturing.

In a story tailor-made for the occasion, La Crawford plays a hard-as-nails Broadway diva with a ruthless tongue and a flaming orange helmet of hair. We are asked to believe that beating beneath her tyrannical front is the love-starved heart of a lonely woman. And we are supposed to root for her to tumble for the blind and gentle pianist (Michael Wilding) who won't take her guff. This is impossible, of course, since we are too busy either laughing derisively or gawking in slack-jawed disbelief at Crawford's gargantuan ego run amok.

The opening scene, in which Torch Song director Charles Walters performs a cameo as Crawford's cowering dance partner, seems to reflect the truth behind the making of the movie. We get the creepy feeling that Walters, fearful of Joan's wrath, just stepped back and let his aging star run this sideshow. How else to explain the unchecked excess of Crawford's costumes (especially her garish yellow nightgown-cum-muumuu), her eye-popping penthouse digs (where the bedroom windows come with three, count 'em, three sets of drapes), or the song and dance numbers in which she flaunts her legs like a ten-dollar hooker and even lip-syncs a tune in blackface? It's a treasure trove of Crawfordisms for drag queens and freak show enthusiasts alike: See Joan clean lint from the floor, dismiss gigolos with the wave of a cigarette, nitpick over line readings with her devoted secretary, offer apologies to her victims that seem crueler than her insults.

Scarier than "Strait-Jacket" and twice as much ghoulish fun.

With Marjorie Rambeau, hilariously salty as Joan's crude stage mother, and Gig Young as her affable paid lover.

Yet another in the seemingly endless slew of Depression-era Cinderella stories with a lead character gender switch as its sole source of inspiration.

A principled young working man (Joel McCrea), poor and content to be so, captures the heart and libido of a spoiled and flighty heiress (Dorothy Mackaill). Despite his reservations, they tie the knot, a decision he quickly (and predictably) lives to regret as he discovers that being rich isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when you feel like a neutered house cat.

Unlike the kept husband of Frank Capra's similarly themed "Platinum Blonde," who retained a jaundiced sense of humor about his fairy tale predicament, McCrea's Cinderella Man is a sulking dolt. Wearing a perpetual scowl, our blue collar hero takes every opportunity to rain on his new bride's parade. He gripes about extending their European honeymoon, grouses about her spending sprees, beats himself up for taking hand-outs from his father-in-law, and spends an uncomfortable amount of time nestled in the arms of his gray-haired mama (and kissing her flush on the mouth to boot).

The witless, by-the-numbers writing seems all the more leaden under Lloyd Bacon's stodgy, snail-paced direction. Worse yet is the horrendous miscasting of the leads. As if McCrea's wet-blanket turn wasn't tough enough to bear, the usually reliable Mackaill is forced to play the thankless role of an empty-headed ditz, a stretch for (and insult to) this intelligent and sophisticated Ziegfeld beauty. With Clara Kimball Young, Ned Sparks.

In THE DARK HORSE, Guy Kibbee plays a candidate for state governor so incredibly stupid that "every time he opens his mouth he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge." Topically thrown together during an election year, this rollicking, refreshingly jaundiced political farce still packs a razor-sharp bite.

Consider the relevance to modern day affairs: Warren William is the fast-talking con artist hired to manage Kibbee's campaign and sell the unknown candidate to the public. He coaches his brain-dead charge in the finer points of evasive double-talk (Kibbee's response to reporters' probing questions: "Yes... and then again no"), provides him with arcane speeches by Abe Lincoln for debates, drums up smear campaigns and law suits against the opposition, manipulates media attention, and displays utter contempt for the easily-duped voter that remains uncompromising to the end (Kibbee is last seen tipping his hat in a motorcade after a landslide victory).

This acid-drenched comedy directed by the gifted workhorse Alfred E. Green and written by Joseph Jackson can be forgiven its occasional buffoonish slapstick and formula romantic subplot (with a throwaway Bette Davis). Timeless satire always gets a pass.

The film's comic highlight: Kibbee's strip-poker game with opposition vamp Vivienne Osborne. With Frank McHugh, Harry Holman, Berton Churchill.

Half-Maugham, half-Melville and all hooey, this tropical potboiler is chock full of sin and salvation, with a giant sting ray tossed in as -- I kid you not -- a romantic deus ex machina.

The setting is a West Indies island where a bunch of grimy sponge divers lust after barefoot temptress Raquel Torres, who only has eyes for the beautiful (and, with his thick Swedish accent, virtually unintelligible) Nils Asther. But when he dies in the clutches of the title monster villain, she turns her back on God and offers herself as reward to the man who destroys the beast. It's a decision she quickly comes to regret, and as the body count increases, the guilt-ridden Raquel flails her arms and pounds her breasts with the frenzy of a silent movie diva.

As if this plot weren't febrile enough, Torres begins falling for newly arrived man of the cloth Charles Bickford, who does his damnedest to resist her overtures since he's actually an escaped convict from Devil's Island.

This awesomely wacky nonsense was concocted by the radical left-wing screenwriter John Howard Lawson without a hint of the political agitprop that infused his later screen work. The film, however, is not without interest: the camera work by Ira Morgan is sensuous and inventive (particularly when underwater) and the cast of scurvy Island rats is populated with such compelling character types as John Miljan (in a departure from his usual urban smoothie), Boris Karloff (as the glowering Corsican), and silent film veterans Gibson Gowland and Mack Swain.

In his early years of stardom, James Cagney had a volatile working relationship with the brass at Warner Brothers. He rebelled against the interchangeable tough guy vehicles routinely foisted upon him, and if this standard issue product is any example, he had every right to grumble. It's a dour, slackly paced retread of "They Knew What They Wanted," and probably the least representative, most disappointing of Cagney's early showcases.

As directed by Lloyd Bacon, this one doesn't even have the saving grace of the star's dynamic energy. Perversely, he plays a low-key, laid-back ex-convict (with polished diction, no less) on the lam from vengeful gangsters who hide out among Portuguese fishermen on the California coast.

Perhaps Cagney's moribund performance was his way of blowing a raspberry at the lame material (earlier that year, he shaved his head in protest over the far superior "Jimmy the Gent"), and his lack of enthusiasm seems to have been shared by his co-stars. Joan Blondell, leading lady to Cagney in seven previous films, turns in one of her rare sullen performances as a hooker torn between the ex-con and a naive villager. It's a dispiriting spectacle to watch the Depression-era's most vivacious good-time girl reduced to a cloying, lachrymose sob sister, not to mention an ignoble end to a memorable screen partnership.

A cast of Warner's brightest farceurs work overtime in this frantic, sporadically funny gold-digger farce. In the first of several pairings, Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell play gum-chomping burlesque chorines looking to strike it rich in Havana. Though pains are made to show Blondell as a tootsie of morals (early on, she refuses her boss's request to dance at a stag party), she apparently has no qualms about trapping vacationing millionaires into breach of promise settlements.

True to form, Blondell has a last minute change of heart when she falls for the son (Lyle Talbot) of her intended mark. Luckily for the viewer the sucker happens to be Guy Kibbee, whose rooftop escape from a Cuban Turkish bath is a low comedy hoot.

Hyperthyroid Allen Jenkins provides amusing support as (what else?) a gangster's lamebrained flunky, and the wonderful Ruth Donnelly appears all too briefly as Kibbee's carnivorous wife. Only Frank McHugh is a repetitious drag; he plays a constantly inebriated lawyer in the obvious speech-slurring style common to the thirsty days of Prohibition. You have to wonder whether such witless drunk acts contributed to the repeal.

The zaftig ex-Ziegfeld girl Dorothy Mackaill radiates a sensual worldliness in this saucy little morality play about an open marriage. As directed by Clarence Badger, the unsung stylist who helped guide Clara Bow to flaming youth stardom, Mackaill delivers a winning, naturalistic performance as a newlywed whose sophisticated arrangement with husband James Rennie is quickly put to the test. Rennie is aggressively pursued by man-eating author Mary Doran, while Mackaill gets similar attention from her lecherous boss Donald Cook.

Surprisingly, this generates a sizable degree of sexual tension; which of these would-be libertines will be first to succumb? Once answered, the film turns by-the-numbers as Mackaill's wise and wily mom shows up to restore marital bliss and moral propriety. The finale, intended as upbeat, now comes off as the sad final dousing of the flaming youth spirit. With Dorothy Petersen, Paul Procasi.

A striking, deeply felt version of Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" -- even though it purports to be derived from a novel by John Monk Saunders.

The Lost Generation of disillusioned post-Armistice Yanks is vividly etched in this episodic portrait of four wounded vets in Paris. Refusing to return home to the pity of their loved ones, they decide to remain in Europe, sleeping all day and spending their nights hopping from bistro to bistro in an orgy of self-destructive benders. Along the way they happen upon Nikki, a dizzy American heiress with more than a passing resemblance to Lady Brett Ashley (minus the promiscuity), and she quickly becomes part of their ranks. There's also a sixth wheel, the smug, lecherous Robert Cohn-like newsman Frink, who makes graceless advances toward Nikki.

Richard Barthelmess, John Mack Brown, Elliot Nugent and David Manners, actors who rarely got to work with such superior material, show surprising sensitivity and conviction (especially Manners, released from his insipid juvenile fetters and displaying sharp tragicomic skills). But the film pivots around the beautiful performance by Helen Chandler. The screwball, naively erotic Nikki and the ethereal, bird-like Chandler merge into one, and though the character is rather vague and underdeveloped, the wistful actress turns this to her advantage -- she makes Nikki seem mysterious and dreamy, like the product of a wounded man's delirious vision.

With Walter Byron as Frink; directed by William Dieterle in his American debut.

John Garfield as the real-life World War II hero Al Schmid gives perhaps his most subtle and nuanced screen performance. Playing a fully realized character with an emotional arc instead of his usual mercurial, Depression-bruised archetype, Garfield eschews the mannered excesses to which he often brought to inferior material. The film itself is a sharply observed, deeply felt biopic about a combat veteran and his period of readjustment after being blinded in action on Guadalcanal.

Garfield's Schmid is a forty-buck-a-week factory worker, a jaunty, macho Average Joe, and the first half-hour traces his romance with working-class Jane Eleanor Parker (whose proletarian pretenses can't disguise her tony roots). Despite some sitcom-witty repartee and Parker's cloying nobility, the relationship is effectively (and appealingly) charted. It's all a set-up for the film's final hour in which Schmid holes up in a veteran's hospital, refusing to return home to the imagined charity of his loved ones.

What threatens to be overly lachrymose becomes affectingly low-key in Garfield's controlled hands. Without resorting to raging tantrums or a raised voice, Garfield conveys bitterness with blank, downcast eyes and a careful emphasis on dialog -- the way he spits out the word 'pity' almost makes it sound obscene. In his most eloquent moment he barely says a word. During a protracted bout of proselytizing in the hospital ward, a gaggle of wounded vets gripes about their dim future while director Delmer Daves cuts to close-ups of Garfield silently betraying a perverse satisfaction at the communal self-pity. Amidst all the polemical chatter the visual understatement is devastating.

Despite an occasional misstep (Garfield's dream scene is hokey and far too literal), Daves' direction is assured and textured. His handling of the action on Guadalcanal is particularly impressive, a harrowing twenty-minute firefight set in a cramped foxhole that stands as one of the bleakest, most terrifyingly visceral combat scenes ever committed to celluloid; you can almost smell the stench of blood, sweat and other bodily fluids emanating from that godforsaken hellhole.

With Dane Clark, bursting with energy and overacting up a storm as if angling to steal the spotlight from an atypically reserved Garfield.

No way, no how.

This poignant and graceful doomed-love weeper deals with a facet of American history rarely explored. In a beautifully restrained performance, Barbara Stanwyck plays a Daughter of the American Revolution who marries gentle German immigrant Otto Kruger. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, they become victimized by anti-German sentiments.

With tasteful understatement and an unusual attention to period detail, director Archie L. Mayo paints a vivid tableau of social intolerance that must have been quite daring in its time (the scars of the Great War were still fresh in '33). The writers, unfortunately, couldn't resist a nosedive into Mata Hari-like spy machinations, an eleventh hour plot contrivance that strikes an indelicate note. Even so, the film's quiet sensitivity stays with you long after.

With Ralph Bellamy (as the inevitable jilted boyfriend), Ruth Donnelly, Laura Hope Crews, and Clara Blandick.

The exclamation point in the title is appropriate, albeit an understatement. This movie doesn't just cry -- it shrieks loud enough to shatter glass.

Filmmakers Andrew and Virginia Stone made shrill, humorless suspense thrillers that strove for a semi-documentary feel. Here, they shot on actual New York locations with tinny "real-life" acoustics to jack up the verisimilitude. But the naturalism of the sound recording only serves to amplify the Stones' maladroit dialog and the mouth-frothing histrionics of tortured butterfly Inger Stevens.

In a performance completely devoid of modulation, Stevens plays the wife of electronics whiz James Mason (looking haggard and bored); both are held captive by extortionist Rod Steiger (looking bloated and bored) and his slimy cohorts in a scheme to blackmail an airline with a deadly bomb that Mason has unwittingly helped construct.

Here is another credibility-straining instance of a criminal mastermind so brilliantly attentive to every detail, yet knuckleheaded enough to hire a drug-addicted degenerate as an underling. The Stones' idea of nail-biting tension is to trap the hysterical Stevens alone with Benzedrine-popping rapist Neville Brand, filling the frame with his sweaty, drooling kisser. But the camera work is so leaden and Brand so (uncharacteristically) demure that the effect is hardly lurid, much less suspenseful. The Stones, a square pair at heart, don't even have the courage of their own lack of convictions.

The film, which ends with the portly Steiger chasing the fleet-footed Stevens on a subway train track, is as clumsy as its ungainly heavy. With Angie Dickinson as Steiger's amoral girlfriend, Jack Klugman, Kenneth Tobey, and Barney Philips.

The gangling young vaudeville hoofer Hal LeRoy stars in this feature version of a long-forgotten comic strip, and the casting couldn't be more apt. With his reed-thin frame, impossibly long legs and goofy, Jack-o-lantern grin, LeRoy is a cartoon figure come to life. Unfortunately, the film doesn't live up to the star's oddball potential. It's a slapdash, hopelessly corny take on small town life that derives its paltry humor from the silly names of its characters.

LeRoy plays the teenage cub reporter for the local paper in his hick town (Covina, no less) who takes mail order dance lessons to win back his sweetheart Lillums after she falls for a rich older man, the banker Mr. Snatcher. In a gross misuse of his talents, LeRoy doesn't even kick up his heels until the finale. As consolation, we are offered several forgettable ditties warbled by such unlikely thrushes as Rochelle Hudson, Patricia Ellis and the frog-throated Chick Chandler, whose sweet shop number is at least sprightly.

But when the insanely spirited LeRoy finally gets to strut his stuff it's a sight to behold -- a miracle of rubber limbs and boundless energy rivaled only by Ray Bolger at his most manic.

With the ubiquitous Guy Kibbee and Clara Blandick as Lillum's parents, Douglas Dumbrille as the oily Snatcher, Hugh Herbert, wasted as per Warners' habit, as the theatrical director.

Several first-rate farceurs are saddled with inconsequential material in this tepid, disappointing comedy.

Six disparate travelers fly to Paris for a weekend jaunt and find various adventures. Naive English rose Claire Bloom finds first romance with middle-aged lady killer Claude Dauphin; art lover Margaret Rutherford buys a fake Mona Lisa and winds up preferring it to the original; marching band member Ronald Shiner has a close encounter with a prostitute; Scotsman James Copeland picks up a pert French girl, then suspects her of snatching his wallet; pompous Jimmy Edwards spends the entire weekend downing ale in a British pub. And, best of all, treasury minister Alastair Sim goes on a drinking binge with a recalcitrant Russian official and teaches him the pleasures of the word 'yes.' In this one instance, the material rises to meet the actor with hilarious results. (The highpoint comes when a cockeyed Sim attempts to negotiate an economic treaty while swilling Vodka and pawing a Russian chanteuse.)

The rest of the cast aren't so fortunate, left to founder on Parisian locations at the mercy of writer Anatole de Grunwald's toothless whimsy and Gordon Parry's unimaginative direction. The filmmakers deserve to be charged with criminal negligence.

With Richard Wattis, Stringer Davis, and in throwaway bits, Gregoire Aislan and Luis de Funes.

The director Lewis Seiler followed up his stark, exciting D-Day aftermath saga "Breakthrough" with this utterly humdrum companion piece. The story concerns the Third Armored Division's push through France toward the Siegfried Line, and it's a measure of the film's dramatic shortcomings that the stock shots of Panzer tanks and American iron bellies seem far more compelling than the actual footage.

Steve Cochran brings a spark of surly charisma to the proceedings as a bluntly unsentimental sergeant who takes over a squadron consisting of some of the dullest, least engaging, most ill-defined dog-faces ever to battle it out on a Hollywood sound stage; these ciphers almost make one long for the clichéd likes of William Bendix's Brooklyn lug and Richard Jaeckel's combat-green kid.

The dreadful screenplay by Robert Hardy Andrews has the temerity to give Cochran a change of heart, and by the climax the snarling top kick is shaking hands with cowering German citizens and even cuddling a stray pooch! Crusty old warrior Sam Fuller is credited with the story; he must have choked on his stogie when he saw the finished product. With Phil Carey, Mari Aldon, Paul Picerni, Robert Horton, Harry Belaver.

This delicate shipboard romance was a popular favorite in its time and it's not hard to see why. Robert Lord grabbed a well-earned Oscar for his original story, a fanciful but ingenious doomed lovers yarn that must have offered solace to Depression-era audiences whose miseries could only pale next to those of hard-luck leads William Powell and Kay Francis.

The elegant pair fall in love on a Frisco-bound ocean liner, each harboring a terrible secret that curtails their future happiness -- he's a convicted murderer returning to the gallows, she has a heart ailment and is living on borrowed time. Never mind why a dying woman is aboard a cruise ship instead of being ensconced in a terminal ward. Or why the authorities would send thick-witted Warren Hymer of all cops to bring in Powell.

This is irresistible hoke, and the director Tay Garnet invests it with wonderfully eccentric touches (like the burly lesbian among the trio of portly harmonizers in a Hong Kong bar) and innovative dream-like imagery (i.e., the startling camera zoom when Powell spots Francis at the ship's railing). He also manages the near-impossible feat of keeping Francis, the lisping clotheshorse, to a minimum of cloying eye-rolls, with no small help from Powell's wry and charmingly self-effacing performance.

The heavy sentiment is deftly balanced by the sparkling deadpan humor of Aline MacMahon as the Russian Countess Barrelhaus (in actuality the Brooklyn con-artist, Barrel House Betty), who conspires with perpetual drunk Frank McHugh (his grating presence is the film's sole detriment) to assist the lovers.

The coda, set in a Mexican bar on New Year's Eve, is unforgettable.

Compulsively entertaining spiritual regeneration yarn with a surprising layer of sensitivity and depth to offset the mawkishness. The dapper Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is more than a mite improbable as the title character, a middleweight boxing champ, but delivers a charming and sympathetic portrait of a hard-luck cynic.

Framed for a murder and thought to be dead, an embittered Jimmy D. takes to the lonely road and winds up on a health ranch for invalid children. Run by sad-eyed earth mother Aline MacMahon and the winsome Loretta Young, and populated with the likes of such professional heart-tuggers as Mickey Rooney and Allen "Farina" Hoskins, you can bet that Jimmy's redemption is waiting around the bend. But the film is so sharply written and cunningly played that the shamelessly convenient finale still packs an emotional punch.

With Guy Kibbee as the myopic ex-detective, Lyle Talbot as the crooked manager, and a youthful John Wayne in the antithesis of his macho image as a diffident amateur boxer.

For thirty-three years I'd been jonesing to see THE TEACHER, grindhouse auteur Hikmet Avedis' homage to THE GRADUATE, which somehow eluded me during its original Times Square run. Blessed is the patient schlock film fan, for his forbearance shall be rewarded. Thanks to the miracle of DVD and the munificence of BCI Eclipse, I finally caught up with this much-touted jewel in the Crown International catalog, and am pleased to report that it was all that and a bag of Swavorski rhinestones. Like its contemporary, THE GODFATHER: PART II, THE TEACHER is daring in its narrative structure. Unlike the Coppola film it's also ludicrous in the extreme, but then you can't have everything. Part leering soft-core romp, part tender coming-of-age drama, part stalk-and-chill suspenser, the movie's mismatched ingredients come together to form a blissfully surreal, silly whole.

The cast list alone makes it deserving of enshrinement in the Psychotronic Hall of Fame.

First and foremost, there's top-billed and bottom-perfect Angel Tompkins as a middle schooler's fantasy come to life, the hubba hubba homeroom teacher who just happens to be freshly divorced, hot to trot, and living right down the block. Charming and sensitive, Tompkins gives a performance that goes above and beyond the call of booty. She invests the role with such persuasive passion that one can almost believe her attraction to a most unlikely lust object: Jay North, the actor formerly known as Dennis the Menace, age twenty-two, sporting a double chin, a perpetual smirk, a Little Lord Fauntleroy page boy, and no discernible acting talent. To his credit, North is in the moment and then some during several graphic clinches with Angel.

Mr. Wilson would have been aghast. Or green with envy. I was both.

The call sheet also includes such bizarro world superstars as Med Flory (Worshefski, the bullying football player, in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR) as North's bullying father, Barry "Janos Skorzeny" Atwater as a snoopy sheriff, BURNT OFFERING's Anthony James as a psycho stalker, and in WTF-writ large cameos, Katherine "Mother of John" Cassevetes and Lady "Mother of Gena" Rowlands as a pair of chattering restaurant patrons.

The title is meaningless, the story just as pointless, and whatever interest there is to be derived from this girl-loves-gambler weepie comes from the delicate beauty of Loretta Young. The film is a feast for the eyes (with nary a morsel of food for thought) as masterly cinematographer Gregg Toland captures the poetry of Young's huge, soulful peepers and full promising lips with one lovestruck close-up after another. The following year's "Zoo in Budapest" and "Man's Castle" would cement her position as the Depression's most desirable waif, the pin-up girl of the bread lines. With the barrelhouse comedienne Winnie Lightner as her wisecracking pal and Guy Kibbee, criminally wasted as Lightner's swain.

A lightning-paced Grand Hotel knockoff that crams more incidents into its brief running time than most films twice as long. It's a marvel of fat-free story telling, hokey, predictable and rarely less than delightful. Manhattan's famous landmark is re-imagined as an urban Sherwood Forest filled with merry paupers, evil bandits, benevolent Irish cops, homicidal madmen, and even a herd of braying sheep. Destitute Wallace Ford and Joan Blondell meet in the park, trading flirtatious smiles and glib wisecracks in the face of hunger and homelessness. The action quickly shifts into overdrive when Joan is suckered into a gangster's robbery scam. Meanwhile, a vengeance-seeking psycho prowls the park and an abused lion escapes from the zoo. John Adolphi, director of George Arliss' screen vehicles, seems to bask in his freedom from stodgy period pieces, taking lurid pleasure in protracted fistfights, gory lion maulings, and Blondell's plunging décolletage. His lowbrow enthusiasm is infectious. With Guy Kibbee in a rare non-comic turn as a park cop dreading retirement, John Wray as the giggly, eye-rolling maniac.

In this leisurely-paced Technicolor flag-waver, grizzled, beer-bellied lout Wallace Beery plays a thirty-year sergeant major stationed in the Philippines just before the war. When he's forced into retirement, long-suffering wife Fay Bainter has to cope with his refusal to adapt to civilian life in their sleepy island village. He antagonizes the peace-loving neighbors with his gross manners and anti-Japanese sentiments, trains the local children in military maneuvers, and gets into brawling confrontations with shifty Niponese sailors. But once Pearl Harbor is attacked and the enemy advances on their town, Beery rallies the villagers to defense and goes out in a blaze of glory.

The climactic combat action is a long time coming, since the bulk of the movie is devoted to Beery's fatuous, self-aggrandizing antics. Whether condescending to his native troops (he refers to them as "little fellers" as though they were exotic incarnations of Jackie Cooper) or pouring on the 'aw shucks' geniality to a passel of adoring kids, this slob-king is a grating, grandstanding humbug. (What appeal could this man have possibly held for contemporary audiences? Perhaps as a fanciful role model for home front-bound middle-aged men -- the run-to-seed but still vital codger.)

No less phony is the hubba-hubba Marilyn Maxwell as his incessantly smirking daughter; it's tough enough to believe the refined, genteel Bainter could have ever had a booty call with Beery, much less produced so dishy a specimen from such rot-gut sperm.

If one can last through all this spurious slop, the final thirty minutes deliver a Johnny-come-lately wallop. As Japanese bombers hover over a crowded church, director S. Sylvan Simon uses rapid-fire editing to build tension to a fever pitch. What follows is a grand scale action set-piece that is eye-filling and surprisingly fierce, weakened only by the unhinged spectacle of the tubby, lead-footed Beery traipsing through brush to single-handedly knock out an enemy machine gun emplacement. The movie seems to be telling us that a regiment of lumbering, dissipated fat men could have shortened the war by years. Fat chance.