"Battle of the Blondes" Round Nine: Grace Kelly vs. Kim Novak

One of the commonly used cliches to describe Grace Kelly is that she was "the quintessential icy, Hitchcock blonde," referring to the feminine model that Hitchcock forged in many of his films during the fifties and early sixties. Kelly, in addition to playing the blond lead in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, the film I chose to watch for Battle of the Blondes, also filled that role in his Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, and I do not dispute the widely-accepted allegation that Kelly was Hitchcock's favorite leading lady, or that others, like Hitchcock himself, found her to be ideal expression of his vision; what I have always disputed is the notion that Kelly is in any way "icy." Grace Kelly, to me, is not icy. She has a coolness about her, yes; a pristine quality; occasionally even a closed-off aura that puts her on a pedestal; but to call her icy? Or cold? No. I just don't see it. Gene Tierney is icy. Katharine Hepburn is icy, except when she's around Spencer Tracy. Joan Crawford can be icy, albeit in a different way. But Grace Kelly is not icy.

I don't say this in some misguided attempt to "defend" Grace Kelly. The truth is, I don't particularly like Kelly, and if I did find her icy, I might be more inclined to find her interesting. As she is, I find her rather bland. I've liked her well enough in some roles, like The Country Girl, and I've hated her in others, like Mogambo, where she both pales in comparison to her costar Ava Gardner and to Mary Astor, who played her part in the original version of the film. As for her projects with Hitchcock, I've been fairly ambivalent: she's good in Dial M for Murder, and she's an appropriate puzzle piece in the masterwork that is Rear Window, but I thoroughly disliked her in To Catch a Thief the first time I saw  it, which is part of why I chose to rewatch it for Battle of the Blondes; the other reason is because I sort of disliked the movie itself, and as it has such a good reputation among film critics, I thought I ought to give it a second chance. Well, I did like it better the second go round, although I still wouldn't rate it among my favorite Hitchcock films, and I liked Kelly better in it as well, but I was also struck by how... unimportant Kelly's character is to the development of the film, which only reinforced my impression of her as very pretty window dressing. Yes, her fireworks scene with Cary Grant is probably the most famous from the film, but when you actually look at the story itself, all it would take is moving a few things around and you don't need her character at all; the same could be said for her character in Rear Window. This is not Marion Crane in Psycho, or even Carol Fisher in Foreign Correspondent. Frances Stevens in To Catch a Thief is only essential if you're impressed by Kelly's on-screen magic, and because I'm not, well, you can see my difficulty.

To me, Kim Novak is a much better example of an icy blonde, not because she lacks warmth but because she always seems to be holding something back, both as the characters she plays and as an actress, to the point that I agree with Hitchcock's post-Vertigo assessment wherein he said something to the effect of, "You feel like you're getting a lot [from her]... but you're not." Novak is beautiful, obviously -- even more beautiful, I would argue, than Kelly -- and she has a captivating screen presence, and in her first major film role in the 1954 noir Pushover, playing a gangster's girlfriend who seduces the detective (Fred MacMurray) assigned to keep an eye on her, I didn't have any trouble accepting her as the sort of woman who would tempt a man into  throwing away his life. The problem is that if you scratch the surface of Novak's characterization, I'm not sure there's enough there to merit a man actually ruining his life, especially when you compare Pushover to the film that clearly inspired it, Billy Wilder's classic Double Indemnity, which also stars Fred MacMurray and has Barbara Stanwyck in the femme fatale role. Stanwyck was an actress who always delved deeply into her roles, and (in addition to the fact that she was working with a superior script) she makes you believe that she could lead a man to ruin, even if she's not as glamorous as Novak and sports one of the worst hairstyles in movie history.

All the same, I like Novak in movies like Bell, Book and Candle and The Man with the Golden Arm, and between Kelly and her, I'm always more excited to see her, although I know I'm probably in the minority with that opinion. And, regardless of my feelings on Grace Kelly, I think ending the Battle of the Blondes showdowns with her was a good idea, just as I think starting with Marilyn Monroe was a good idea; more than anybody else, they are the two quintessential blondes of the classic movie era, and any consideration of blondes on film would be incomplete without them.

To Catch a Thief: B+

Pushover: B   

Film Review: The Hard Way

There's often a large disparity when it comes to classic films between what the producers wanted us to think about their films and what we actually think about those films from our modern perspective, and that is nowhere more true than in the genre of women's films, where some of the notions about gender roles and a woman's place in society seem outdated at best, and sometimes downright laughable. I've already talked about women's films here, but suffice it to say that during the thirties and forties, films marketed toward women were intended not only to appeal to female moviegoers but also, in many cases, to act as cautionary tales about how not to live their lives, especially relative to men; as such, they have a greater capacity than, say, Westerns or screwball comedies to seem archaic in our current, post-feminist landscape.

The Hard Way, released in 1943 and directed by Vincent Sherman, is a quintessential women's film, and it's also a prime example of how a film's message can become skewed and invalidated with the passage of time. What we're supposed to think when we watch The Hard Way is that the film's main character, Helen Chernan (Ida Lupino), is a cold, conniving woman who will do anything to ensure a better life for her younger sister Katie (Joan Leslie), including cutting herself off from all feminine attributes (except the manipulative ones, of course) and stepping on other people in her quest to make her sister a star. We're supposed to feel sorry for the rather dumb vaudeville actor Albert Runkles (Jack Carson), to whom she hitches her sister in order to get them both out of their small mining town, and we're supposed to agree with Albert's partner Paul (Dennis Morgan), the only other character in the film cynical enough to see through Helen and label her as what she is: a heartless machine. And while we're supposed to have some sympathy for Helen, being that her motives are honorable and she truly loves her sister, we're also meant to understand that, like all tragic heroes, she is undone by her own flaws -- that is, rejecting her womanhood and harboring a misguided notion of what constitutes a "better life."

An entirely different story comes across watching this film today, though. Helen is manipulative, yes, but aside from a few moments here and there, nothing she does is that bad, nor anything that doesn't need to be done in pushing yourself or someone you love to the top of the show business ladder. She plows down people who get in her way, but this determined quality is only deemed "heartlessness" because she's a woman; if she were a man, she'd be thought of as tenacious. Her one true flaw is that she doesn't listen when her sister stops wanting to pursue bigger and better things -- what starts as a desire to help her sister eventually becomes her own personal obsession -- but even this is understandable, because for most of the movie, Katie is complicit in what Helen does; The Hard Way is not one of those "stage mother" movies where the child has no desire to be in the entertainment industry in the first place. It is Katie's aspiration to be an entertainer that sets Helen on her quest; it is Katie's own plea to get out of their coal town that sets both of them in motion.

Pic via here

It is around the character of Katie that most of the dissonance between what we see in the movie and what we're supposed to see actually occurs, because she is the one who comes into closer contact with both of the male characters. As sorry as we're supposed to feel for the naive Albert, what actually happens between him and Katie is that they get married and form their own vaudeville act, traveling around the country and doing small gigs, but eventually a producer expresses interest in Katie as a solo act, and when Albert learns he isn't wanted, he throws a temper tantrum and decides he and Katie should break up their act, even as she begs to stay with him. (This is where we're supposed to realize that Helen is truly horrible, because she tells Albert and Katie about the solo opportunity, yet the film makes it quite clear that Albert and Katie's act is terrible, and Albert is the worst part.) When Katie finds success on her own, Albert returns in a dramatic fashion and tells her to drop everything and come back with him, which really only seems fair if you believe that a woman's proper, ultimate place is at her husband's side. Many people wouldn't agree with such a notion today, and I'm not so sure the filmmakers believed it then, either; I think they wanted to sell the idea, but part of the fun of women's films was that women in the audience got to see other women making the "wrong decision" and paying for it later, but making the wrong decision nonetheless.

The truly disappointing thing about The Hard Way is that it has many of the trappings of a great film -- and it is, in fact, quite a good film -- but because of its outdated gender statements and a few highly improbable plot points, it ends up seeming rather silly by the time the credits roll. Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan both do as much as they can with the characters of Albert and Paul, and Ida Lupino is fantastic as Helen, although she comes on a bit strong in the scenes in the coal town, punching each line when she maybe should have exhibited a quieter determination at that point in her journey; nevertheless, Lupino knows how to control the camera, and even when she's overacting, you don't really mind watching her. Joan Leslie was an interesting choice to play Katie, I think, because while she has the innocent charisma essential for the part, she is neither a great dancer nor singer, which makes an already weak spot in the film seem even more ridiculous: how does Katie, who is a fair performer at best, so quickly became a star on Broadway? Her star-making debut is truly nothing special, and Leslie, with her weak voice, is nothing special in it. What's more, although Leslie often got stuck playing good-girl roles, she has a stealth-bitch quality about her that Raoul Walsh used to great effect in the superior High Sierra (1941, also costarring Lupino), and which ultimately makes it hard to accept Katie as a victim of Helen's machinations; as it is, I never quite lost the feeling that the only thing separating Katie from Helen is the fact that, as Helen points out, Katie has Helen to guide her.

Grade: B

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twenty-Six Review: Royal Wedding

I did not want to watch Royal Wedding. I'll get that out of the way up front. I only picked it because it seemed to have the best reputation of any of the movies airing for Peter Lawford (other than maybe It Should Happen to You, which I'd already seen), and because I could tell he had a prominent enough role without being the actual star. I'm not a fan of Peter Lawford. I'm not really a fan of the Rat Pack in general, although I do like Frank Sinatra in most of his solo acting efforts, and even pre-Rat-Pack, I find Lawford extremely unappealing, perpetually smarmy and boozy even when he's straight sober. I also apparently don't find him that memorable, because I didn't remember until just now, looking through a list of his other movies, that he was in the Judy Garland musical Easter Parade, which I watched only last year. (To be fair, I don't remember the plot of that movie, either, so maybe Lawford isn't the one I should blame.)

Lawford's costar in Royal Wedding, as in Easter Parade, is Fred Astaire, and the two of them are joined by Jane Powell and Sarah Churchill as their respective love interests. Astaire and Powell are the stars of the film, playing Tom and Ellen Bowen, a brother and sister dance act, which is always doomed to come off a little hinky, I think, no matter what the context -- it's weird on reality TV dancing shows, and it's weird here, especially during the opening number, in which the siblings dance as characters who definitely aren't brother and sister. Anyway, Tom and Ellen travel to England for the wedding of Elizabeth II (hence the title of the film), where Ellen falls in love with an English lord (Lawford) and Astaire falls for a fellow dancer played by Churchill, but also spends a lot of time by himself, which leads to the two most famous moments of the film and, in my opinion, the only two reasons to watch it: the first is Astaire's dance number with a hat rack, the second is his "dancing on the ceiling" number, which the filmmakers achieved by constructing a model of the room inside of a giant steel barrel and slowly rotating it. These two dance numbers, just like most of Astaire's dance numbers, stand the test of time; the rest of the dance numbers in the movie are fine, but, much like the movie itself, nothing terribly special.

Which brings me to something I've noticed about a lot of Fred Astaire's movies, which is that he often dances with women -- including Jane Powell -- who are clearly multitalented but aren't dancers in the sense that he was a dancer, or Gene Kelly was a dancer, or many of the women whom Kelly danced with in his movies (Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron) were dancers. Astaire is often paired with actresses who learned to dance for their roles opposite him, or for movies and stage work in general; he is rarely paired with women who broke into movies because they were dancers. Even Ginger Rogers, his most frequent (and arguably best) dance partner was an actress first, dancer second, and I think the reason the two of them had so much success was because she moved perfectly with him in all ways, not because she was as skilled of a dancer as he was. Jane Powell does a fine job dancing with him in Royal Wedding, but the thing that sets her apart from other actresses is her singing voice, not her footwork. The reason I mention this is because I think the usual formula for a Fred Astaire movie is "Such-and-such actress dances with Fred Astaire," where dancing is (usually) a form of romantic coupling and he is always leading, always in control; when he dances with a woman whose skills equal his own, the effect is quite different. Take a look at his famous dance with Rogers in Swing Time versus his dance with Eleanor Powell, an experienced tap dancer, in The Broadway Melody of 1940.

Both numbers are great, but they're great for different reasons. I don't know enough about Fred Astaire to know whether he danced with non-dancers more because the studio bosses wanted him to, or because he wanted to, or because that's just how it worked out, but I find the disparity interesting, especially when you consider that skilled female dancers like Powell and Anne Miller never became as big of stars as Astaire or Gene Kelly. (I also think, after watching that Astaire and Powell clip, that Kim Novak might want to write another letter to Variety, because The Artist may have "stolen" more than the Vertigo love theme. Or maybe I've just seen the trailer for The Artist so many times that I'm seeing it everywhere.)

Grade: B-

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twenty-Five Review: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)

I don't often finish watching a movie feeling like I would have benefited from a brief lesson on Sicilian history prior to starting it, but my advice to anyone planning to watch The Leopard for the first time is to familiarize yourself at least slightly with the decline of the aristocracy and rise of the middle class in Sicily during the 1860s, because that rise and fall makes up the entirety of the story in The Leopard, yet the film itself makes no attempt to explain the finer points of that history through the story. The director, Luchino Visconti, assumes we know the larger historical significance of the time period during which his film is set, and instead chooses to show how the decline of the aristocracy affects on man in particular, the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster), and his immediate family, including his traditional wife Maria (Rina Morelli) and his more flexible nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon). This is actually to the Luchino's credit, because it allows him to tell his story without bogging down the plot in historical detail, but it can also make watching The Leopard a confusing experience for people (like myself) whose knowledge of Sicilian history is nearly non-existent.

Fortunately, while the academic nature of The Leopard combined with the obvious language barrier (the movie was filmed in Italian, although the two lead actors -- Lancaster and Delon -- are American and French, respectively, and had their lines dubbed), the film is well-made enough to stand up to the initial befuddlement it may cause. Delon is Delon, exactly as you might expect him to be (I'm not much on early-sixties' pretty boys, including the pretty boy Visconti initially wanted for the part of Tancredi, Warren Beatty), but Lancaster is great as the Prince, full of the same quiet power he demonstrates in Judgement at Nuremberg, and Claudia Cardinale is excellent as the vivacious Angelica, striking the right balance between previously-low-class roughness and luminous beauty. The film starts off a bit slow, especially -- again -- if you don't quite understand what is going on with some of the revolutionary battles scenes, but the forty-minute climactic ball sequence that closes the film is a marvel of filmmaking, with excellent direction from Visconti and especially strong work from Lancaster. The Leopard isn't the sort of movie you want to watch when you're in the mood for something light and mindless, but it's well worth watching when you want something a bit heavier and artistic.

Grade: A-

"Battle of the Blondes" Round Eight: Julie Christie vs. Diana Dors

The eighth showdown in Battle of the Blondes, between British actresses Julie Christie and Diana Dors, was a nice lesson on how to make the most of a small role in a film... and how not to. In both cases, neither actress has the lead role in her respective film (Billy Liar for Christie and An Alligator Named Daisy for Dors), but whereas Dors -- who actually had the larger role, comparatively speaking -- took her part and turned in an adequate but thoroughly unmemorable performance, Christie manages to take her roughly ten minutes in Billy Liar and almost steal the picture from lead actor Tom Courtenay. This may seem unsurprising, considering Christie is thought of as a bona fide "actress" who still wins accolades for her performances today, while Dors is often lumped in with other fifties' sexpots, but remember that fellow sexpot Jayne Mansfield turns in an extremely memorable performance in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, as does Marilyn Monroe in any number of her films. The issue at hand here is not Christie's and Dors' overall careers but the way they handled their roles in two specific films.

What helps highlight Christie's and Dors' performances is that both Billy Liar and An Alligator Named Daisy are okay, but not great, films; in other words, their ability to make a mark on the minds of the viewer rests entirely on their own shoulders, and not on the shoulders of a particularly skilled writer or director. Billy and Daisy are quite different in their own rights, the former an example of Britain's late-fifties/early-sixties "Kitchen Sink Realism" (which turned its eye on the hum-drum lives of the post-war British middle class, searching for the pain and melodrama hidden underneath), the latter a light, silly comedy that decides at odd intervals it's also going to be a musical, and Billy is certainly the "better" film overall, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's more entertaining to watch or even a better vehicle for its respective stars. The problem with Billy Liar, which tells the story of a young funeral clerk who invents elaborate fantasies in his head to compensate for the tedium of his everyday life, is that for all it gets right, including the nuances of working-class ennui and the tragic combination of family responsibility versus personal ambition, in the end it doesn't have anything very captivating to say about Billy's story that we couldn't have surmised without watching the film; in fact, the only truly captivating thing about Billy Liar, period, is Christie's performance. Tom Courtenay, as Billy, does a wonderful job, but what Christie does in her scant ten minutes on screen is create a complete picture of a girl who not only represents Billy's romantic ideal but also lives her life in the way he wishes he could live his. What's more, much of this characterization comes from her, not from the words she speaks or the artful way the director films her. Her character Liz is a jolt of energy in Billy's bleak world, just as she provides a jolt to the film itself.

An Alligator Named Daisy, meanwhile, is better than it ought to be, considering the premise -- a man happens into the possession of a pet alligator, which disrupts his romance with one woman (Dors) while bringing him closer to a female zookeeper (Jeannie Carson) -- but it's still not very good, and as I already mentioned, twice decides it's going to be a musical without showing any inclination toward that genre throughout the rest of the film. Carson, not Dors, is actually the female lead, and her ability to sing is likely the only reason for the film's two musical numbers, but Dors' character Vanessa becomes more important in the second half of the film, which is unfortunately where Daisy really starts to go off the rails and shift from being amusingly silly to ridiculous. Dors is given little to do in a part intended to emphasize her appearance over her acting (she has one extended sequence in a bubble bath), but the fact that she chooses to do even less with the part than she might have is what makes her performance truly disappointing. She's not bad; she's just not memorable, or really anything other than blond -- which might seem like enough in a contest entitled "Battle of the Blondes," but is far from it when her competition is Julie Christie.

Billy Liar: B

An Alligator Named Daisy: B-

Film Review: Hanna

[Warning: Review Contains Spoilers]

Hanna is one of those movies that you can't stop watching the first time you see it, but once it's done, you kind of don't need to ever see it again. For all its pulsing music and choreographed fight scenes (and twists in the story), the climax never quite lives up to the build-up, and the holes in the plot that feel incidental while we're caught in the film's thrall suddenly seem important after the word "HANNA" flashes across the screen for the last tim:. If Hanna's father is going to train her as an assassin, and tell her the violent way in which her mother died, wouldn't he go ahead and mention he's not actually her biological father? Is that really a bridge too far? And why did Cate Blanchett's character Marissa suddenly decide to scrap her super-soldier project and kill all the children she had biologically engineered? And why did Hanna and her father have to let Marissa know where they were in order to get the ball rolling in seeking revenge on her? Wouldn't it have been better to appear out of nowhere and surprise her? And why did Hanna's father look so pissed off in the flashback scene right before Marissa killed Hanna's mother? Basically, it felt like a lot of the movie got left on the cutting room floor, particularly in regards to Hanna's origins and Marissa's connection to her family.

Which is not to say that Saiorse Ronan doesn't do a great job portraying Hanna, or that Blanchett and Eric Bana don't also do good work in their supporting roles as Hanna's antagonist and her mentor, respectively. The problem is that Hanna is one of those sci-fi/spy thriller hybrids where none of the main characters express a lot of emotion, either because it's been trained out of them or, in Hanna's case, literally pulled out of them via their DNA, and thus after all the twists and turns and fight scenes are over, the film doesn't have a lot besides its beautiful cinematography to leave a lasting impression. Ironically, the most memorable characters in Hanna, a film about a young girl with super-human abilities, are the thoroughly normal family she meets up with on her way to Berlin, including a befuddled father (Jason Flemyng), hippie mother (Olivia Williams), and two slightly spoiled kids (Jessica Barden and Aldo Maland). They provide the only real spark of life in Hanna, and the only bit of warmth, as well.

Grade: B

"Battle of the Blondes" Round Seven: Betty Grable vs. Doris Day

I went into Round Seven of Battle of the Blondes cautiously optimistic about both of the films I had chosen to watch. I'm not a big fan of either Betty Grable or Doris Day, nor the type of cheery musicals they typically made, but Down Argentine Way, my choice for Grable, sounded like unassuming fun (and was made before she became BETTY GRABLE, owner of the most expensive legs in Hollywood), and my choice for Day, That Touch of Mink, has Day teamed with Cary Grant in one of her trademark romantic comedy roles from the early sixties, complete with expensive outfits and a jet setting storyline. I tend to overestimate how much I'm going to enjoy romantic comedies, both old and new, but after the dreariness that was Brigitte Bardot in A Very Private Affair, I was ready for something a little bit more buoyant.

Fortunately, Down Argentine Way is everything you would hope an early-forties musical comedy would be, without any of the tedium or over-earnestness that can sometimes creep into movies of that kind: it's bright, colorful, and well-paced with entertaining song-and-dance numbers from Grable, The Nicholas Brothers, and especially Carmen Miranda (pictured), making her English-language debut. Grable plays a rich American who travels to Argentina to buy a racehorse and falls in love with the son of a wealthy horse breeder, only to discover that their families have a long-standing rivalry. Don Ameche plays her love interest, and does a nice job playing a native Argentinian without stepping too far into the realm of caricature. The film is thin but entertaining, and it was nice to see Grable in one of her earlier roles, as the only other movie I had seen her in was How to Marry a Millionaire, which came near the end of her career and in which she's good, but definitely the least impressive in a trio that also includes Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe.

Perhaps I would have been better off sticking to one of Doris Day's earlier films roles as well, because while I don't have the strong either-or opinion on her that many classic film fans have, I do tend to prefer her in her pre-1960 roles, before her acting tics took over and she became that persona many people associate with "Doris Day." I thoroughly enjoyed her and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk (1959), but in That Touch of Mink, which came out only three years later, both she Cary Grant seem too old for the roles they're playing: Day is almost forty and looks it, and Grant is 58 and acts it, seeming exhausted and noticeably lacking in his own personal tics and mannerisms, which might have to do with age or might just have to do with the character he's playing, because he's markedly more Cary-Grant-esque in the following year's Charade with Audrey Hepburn. Day is still a beautiful woman, but in playing a character who's constantly described as gorgeous and irresistible to men, she sports a serious case of JBF hair for much of the film and has noticeable crow's feet forming around her eyes. There's nothing wrong with growing -- or looking -- older, but the sixties are notorious as a decade when stars who were past their rom-com prime were still trying to play characters who should have been played by actors ten or twenty years younger.

That Touch of Mink suffers because, like Down Argentine Way, the story is pretty thin, but unlike Way, it doesn't have a lot of spectacle to carry the extra weight -- unless you're satisfied simply by the presence of nice clothes and the combination of Grant and Day, which I wasn't. Day plays an out-of-work woman in New York City who falls for a rich executive played by Grant, only to discover he's interested in a no-strings-attached sort of relationship; it's a wholesome sex comedy, basically, but Grant and Day lack the spark she shares with Hudson in the equally-sly Pillow Talk. (I'll leave it to other people to discuss why Day has more chemistry with a confirmed gay man than a man long-rumored to have been gay.) In Pillow Talk, Day's character isn't afraid of sex so much as she's afraid of sex with her promiscuous neighbor (Hudson), whereas in Mink she breaks out in hives at the mere sight of a bed. Mink is loopy where Pillow Talk is coy, and thus Mink falls victim to the same trap many rom-coms of today fall into: Day's character type is in her late twenties, while she herself is in her late thirties, and yet she's playing the character with all the skittish silliness of a girl in her late teens.

Down Argentine Way: B+

That Touch of Mink: B-

"Battle of the Blondes" Round Six: Janet Leigh vs. Brigitte Bardot

Round Six of the Battle of the Blondes ended up being a perfect example of how unsuccessful I usually am at predicting whether or not I'll like a movie, because in the case of the two films I watched here, I actually liked the one I thought I was going to hate, and as for the one I thought I was going to like...well, I'll get to that in a minute. Let me say first, though, that this particular showdown -- between Janet Leigh and Brigitte Bardot -- struck me from the beginning as the most odd of the nine that TCM devised, not because I thought it was the most unfair (I already talked about that one here), but because I couldn't -- and still can't, really -- see what TCM was going for by the pitting the two of them against one another. I called their round the "Battle of the Postmodern Blondes" in my initial rundown of the BotB schedule, but that was really only because I didn't know how else to describe it; though they were roughly the same age (Leigh was seven years older) and worked at roughly the same time (though, again, Leigh started earlier), their actual careers were vastly different, with the only comparable point that I can see being that they both starred in a string of important films during the late fifties and early sixties, Bardot in a number of French New Wave films and Leigh in game-changers like Touch of Evil, Psycho, and The Manchurian Candidate.

Prior to Touch of Evil, my impression of Janet Leigh is of an actress more similar to actors of today than a cultural icon like Brigitte Bardot. She got her start in the late forties, with her first well-known role being the eldest sister Meg in 1949's Little Women (with Margaret O'Brien, Elizabeth Taylor and June Allyson), and for much of the early part of her career, she was largely known as one half of her romance with Tony Curtis. She was pretty, and she was a good actress, coming off as comfortable and exceedingly natural on screen, but if it weren't for those movies in the middle of her career -- especially Psycho -- I don't know if she'd be particularly well-remembered today, which is why I was surprised TCM didn't show any of those films for BotB.

The two films they did show were 1955's remake of My Sister Eileen, which I'd already seen (and isn't anywhere near as good as the 1942 original), and 1953's Houdini, which is the one I mentioned above that I went into expecting to hate but, fortunately, didn't. I didn't have any legitimate reason to expect I would hate it except that I always think I'm going to hate biographical films, either because the subject matter doesn't interest me or because I'm afraid they're going to be well-made movies that are nevertheless a snooze to watch (which, to be fair, is sometimes the case), but Houdini ended up being a thoroughly entertaining film that managed to cover a wide swath of the magician's life without meandering too long on any one thing. It took quite a few liberties with Houdini's story, to be sure, but it managed to make his magic tricks entertaining in a medium where we're used to seeing things that appear to be magic, thanks in part to impeccable camerawork and scoring on the part of the filmmakers. It also ended up being a good choice for Leigh, whose character Bess is just as important in the film as Tony Curtis's Harry.

Why I chose to watch A Very Private Affair for Brigitte Bardot instead of And God Created Woman, the film that turned her into a superstar, I'll never know. I realized after I recorded A Very Private Affair (but before I watched it) that I might have made a mistake, but at the same time, I genuinely expected to like Affair, if for no other reason that I had always wanted to see a Bardot film and the premise sounded interesting enough: Bardot plays Jill, a French actress and tabloid sensation who retreats to her home town of Geneva after suffering a mental breakdown and soon starts a relationship with a man from her past. (This man, contrary to both the introduction to the film on TCM and the write-up on IMDb, is the ex-husband of one of her close friends, not an ex-lover of her mother. I understand that the people behind TCM write copy for a lot of different films over the course of a month, but come on...maybe have somebody double-check the plot of the movie, maybe even on your own website, which has the correct description available.)

What could have been an interesting examination of the European celebrity culture starring a real-life tabloid sensation ends up being remarkably boring in execution. The cinematography is decent but the actual quality of the film stock is terrible, looking rather like a late-seventies after school special, and the English over-dub in the version I watched is horrendous. The story itself is remarkably boring, to the point that I'm not sure a single thing of note happens in the entire film, except maybe Jill's breakdown and the far-too-predictable conclusion, and even if the emptiness of the story is the point, to show how Jill's fame has trapped her in an ultimately uneventful life, why would anyone want to watch a movie in which nothing happens? Especially when, as I've already noted, the artistic elements of the film are almost nonexistent? Bardot and her costar Marcello Mastroianni have very little chemistry, and neither of their characters are particularly likeable, nor is anyone else in the film; to put it simply, the whole thing is a waste of their talent and our time. Bardot and Janet Leigh might well have been an odd pair to match up, but any way you look at it, Houdini is the better of the two films.

Houdini: B+

A Very Private Affair: C

"Battle of the Blondes" Round Five: Carole Lombard vs. Mae West

Ideally, whenever I decide to watch films for something like "Battle of the Blondes" or "Summer Under the Stars," I'll get to watch films I've never seen before, but that's more difficult with something as restricted as "Battle of the Blondes" (two films per actress, versus the roughly ten to choose from for each actor in Summer Under the Stars), so I guess it's pretty fortunate that it took me until the fifth round of BotB to either have to rewatch a film or skip the respective actress entirely. As it turned out, I had to rewatch a film for each of the two actresses featured: I had already seen both of TCM's choices for Carole Lombard (Nothing Sacred; To Be or Not to Be), as well as both of their picks for Mae West (She Done Him Wrong; I'm No Angel).

I went with Nothing Sacred for Lombard mostly because it had been longer since I'd seen it than To Be or Not to Be, but also because it's unusual in the Lombard canon in that it was her only film shot in color, and as such, looks pretty crappy compared to her other films, color photography not being as good in 1937 as it was even two years later with 1939's Gone with the Wind. I had heard somewhere (maybe a TCM promo?) that the version of Nothing Sacred they were showing for BotB had been remastered, and so a big part of why I chose to watch it again was in the hopes that it would be less blurry than it was the last time I watched it, and it was -- I guess -- but not so much that it merited a second viewing (the picture of Lombard to the right is from Nothing Sacred; she looks beautiful, but the colors are also unnatural enough to make her look a little like a J.C. Leyendecker print.)

Fortunately, Nothing Sacred does bear a second viewing because of how good it is, and how perfectly it demonstrates Lombard's talents as an actress and a comedian. Lombard plays Hazel Flagg, a small town Vermont girl who pretends to have radiation poisoning in order to nab a trip to New York City, where a newspaperman (Fredric March) who's already in trouble for trying to pass off a shoe shiner as an African king takes her on a whirlwind sympathy tour and turns her into a tragic heroine. As the title suggests, nothing is sacred in this satirical comedy, where terminal illness, suicide, and the morbid fascination people have for misfortune in others are all played for laughs, down to the ridiculous "Great Women of History" show put on by a ritzy club in Hazel's honor. Lombard and March are at their most charming playing basically selfish people who fall in love through their mutual deceptions, and the scene in which they exchange punches to the face in an attempt to make Hazel appear as if she's truly sick is no less endearing than when they embrace at the film's conclusion.

For Mae West, I chose to rewatch She Done Him Wrong, since it had been years since I had seen it (eight, I think), versus a matter of months since I had seen I'm No Angel. West adapted She Done Him Wrong from her stage play Diamond Lil, and she dominates the film, doing her by-now familiar Mae West thing and giving her costars, who include Gilbert Roland and a very young Cary Grant, little to do except make references to her when she's not on-screen. The story is thin -- West plays a Gay Nineties' saloon singer who loves men almost as much as she loves her diamonds -- and is basically a vehicle for West's best one-liners and winking innuendos. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, I feel confidant in saying that if you think you know something about Mae West without seeing any of her films, you probably do, and watching She Done Him Wrong isn't going to change your opinion very much.

I don't actually dislike Mae West, but while I can appreciate her contributions to screenwriting and film history in general, I have rarely found her films anything more than mildly amusing, and sometimes downright irritating. Admittedly, I've only seen She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, as TCM seems to never want to air any of her other films (of which there aren't many), but in those two films she is never not "Mae West," that perpetually pre-orgasmic caricature who walks like she can neither breathe nor move in her clothes and never passes up an opportunity to leer at a man. She represents sex, but she never has sex, and while she talks a good talk about feminine independence, her characters aren't exactly independent, either. I also don't appreciate the way she always makes sure to paint herself as the Most Awesome of All Awesome Characters at all times, and, in that same vein, has scenes in both She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel where her black maid basically says, in the most stereotypical, antebellum dialect possible, "Ooh, I sure does like working for you, Miss _____, yes I does!" Literal slavery aside, how is that not as racist as anything in Gone with the Wind?

Lombard and West were an interesting pair to match up, because while they were both glamorous screen comediennes during the thirties, their respective styles of comedy were very different, just as they were very different. West was pure platinum blond vaudeville; Lombard was a screwball heroine. A more apt pairing might have been to combine this showdown with the third round of BotB and pit Mae West against Jean Harlow, while using Carole Lombard as a partner for Judy Holliday, whose Born Yesterday would have made an excellent counterpoint to Nothing Sacred. Now those would have been two battles worth watching.

Nothing Sacred: A

She Done Him Wrong: B-   



Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twenty-Four Review: Cry 'Havoc'

War films about women that came out in the forties have one major leg up (no pun intended) on war films about men that came out around the same time: to put it simply, the women are allowed to hate each other. Perhaps it's because Hollywood viewed men and women so differently, or perhaps because they didn't want to confuse audiences by drawing a firm line between American soldiers and their enemies and then throwing too much inter-American conflict into the mix, but whereas the conflict between male soldiers is usually contained to big-topic disagreements about class or ethnicity (or something comparable), women in these sort of movies often dislike each other because, well, they just do. In some ways, this makes World War II films about women easier to understand today, because we're able to relate to them in a manner more intimate than history or war; it certainly helps Cry 'Havoc' and So Proudly We Hail!, two films released in 1943 that were based on the real-life ordeals of the nurses stationed in Bataan during the Japanese sweep down the Pacific during the early part of the war. Neither film pulls any punches in portraying the hardships the women face, but both also heavily concern themselves with the everyday drama between their characters.  

The main conflict in Cry 'Havoc' occurs between Ann Sothern's character Pat and...well, just about every other woman in her group of nurses, but especially Lieutenant Smith, played by Margaret Sullavan in her second-to-last film role. Pat is supposed to be a variation on the sort of tough-talking-broad-with-a-heart-of-gold Sothern frequently played during the early forties, but more often than not she just comes off as a bitch, as when she needlessly victimizes a former cosmetics saleswoman (Ella Raines) who's crumbling under the pressure of being a nurse. You see, the basic story in Cry 'Havoc' is that a rag-tag group of women have come to the island of Bataan to volunteer their services as army nurses, despite their not having any experience with medicine or the military, and Sothern's Pat has it out for just about everybody, from the fellow nurses she feels aren't rising to the occasion to the higher-ups -- like Lieutenant Smith -- who try to give her orders. Complicating matters further, she soon falls for Lieutenant Holt, the communications officer who also happens to be Lieutenant Smith's secret husband (secret because military regulations during WWII forbid fellow officers from marrying.)

Joan Crawdord allegedly turned down a role in Cry 'Havoc', dismissing it as "The Women Go to War," and she may have had a point: like The Women, the sharp-tongued 1939 comedy that costarred Crawford and explored the complex (and sometimes conniving) relationships between modern women, there are no male characters on-screen in Cry 'Havoc,' aside from a few dying soldiers; the oft-discussed Lt. Holt is only seen once, from a distance, and when he eventually dies and Lt. Smith and Pat are forced to come together in their mourning, we don't even have a face to attach to his name. This no-men gimmick works in The Women, where the way women pick at each other in regards to men is sort of the point, but in Cry 'Havoc,' it really only serves to bring the drama between the women so much into the foreground that the story consists of little else. War-related things occur, of course, and the ultimate point is that the women need to put their personal differences aside in order to be successful nurses, but when I think about Cry 'Havoc,' two things stick out to me: the women are tired (understandably), and Pat and Lt. Smith fight over a man.

So Proudly We Hail! has even more to do with war-time romance than Cry 'Havoc,' with separate storylines for lead actresses Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, and Veronica Lake, and yet it manages to mix the themes of love and war together in such a way that neither finds itself trumped by the other. The nurses in Hail! are just as prone to infighting as the women in Havoc, with Lake taking up the part of the odd woman out, who won't talk with the other nurses or even let them borrow her jewelry, but in a twist from the pattern set forth in Havoc, their bickering subsides as men enter the picture (literally, since we get to see the men here) and the rigors of war become more demanding. Ironically, the more the women talk about, think about, and interact with their men, the more we see them as people separate from their men, as flesh and blood humans with distinct personalities and motives, just as in real life. When we find out why Lake's character is so hostile to the other nurses, we have sympathy for her, or at least more sympathy than we can spare for Pat in Havoc when she realizes she's been throwing herself at another woman's husband.  

Hail is the lighter of the two films but also probably the better of the two, because despite its emphasis on romantic storylines, it has genuinely exciting and well-filmed battle scenes and keeps the story moving at a brisk but never skimpy pace, utilizing flashbacks along with a few surprise twists and deaths. Havoc started as a play and feels like a play, spending an inordinate amount of time in the women's bunker, and though its ending is more nihilistic and perhaps more realistic than the ending of Hail, it has far too many supporting characters, so many that by the film's conclusion I still couldn't identify some of the characters by face or name. (Hail keeps its focus on a select few and is all the better for it.) Cry 'Havoc' is quite a good movie, with an especially good performance from Margaret Sullavan, but it never strikes the right balance between humor, romance, action, and drama, whereas So Proudly We Hail! manages to meet all the criteria of a forties' war film while still adressing the specific concerns of the women it set out to portray.

Grade: B+

"Battle of the Blondes" Round Four: Marlene Dietrich vs. Ursula Andress

Pitting Marlene Dietrich against Ursula Andress is probably the most unfair fight in Battle of the Blondes, because I can't imagine any scenario in which Andress is going to win, except maybe a battle of who's still living. Andress was a Swiss actress who came to Hollywood during the fifties and made her big break in Dr. No (1962), playing the first Bond girl, Honey Rider; the scene in which we first see Andress emerging from the water in a white bikini in Dr. No is an iconic moment in mid-century cinema, but unfortunately, nothing Andress did thereafter lived up to that brief, wordless moment, and the closest she came to having a starring role was in She (1965), the film I chose to watch for Battle of the Blondes.

She, released by England's Hammer studio (usually associated with horror films), tells the story of an immortal woman in Africa who believes that a British soldier is her reincarnated lover of two thousand years past. Andress plays Ayesha, the immortal woman (and the "she" of the title), while John Richardson plays Leo, the soldier she seduces; Christopher Lee, star of Hammer's Dracula, has a supporting role as Ayesha's head priest Billali. Why Ayesha and Leo are white instead of black like every other African character in the movie is never explained, but She isn't the sort of film you want to think about too closely; you want to just watch it, and hope that your suspension of disbelief will be enough to keep the plot from falling apart all on its own. I'm not saying She is entirely without merit -- as expected, it succeeds mostly in the horrific aspects of the story, especially the ritual scene in which Leo almost loses his head, which is genuinely unsettling -- but the majority of the film is ridiculous, too self-serious to be campy and too silly to be effective. Richardson is really the star; Andress is only there to act as the centerpiece, looking pretty and wearing outfits reminiscent of what Cher would wear years later.

At the opposite end of the film spectrum is Josef von Sternberg's 1932 Shanghai Express, my choice for Marlene Dietrich. Shanghai is a bit like Grand Hotel on a train, with a disparate group of characters coming together and intertwining on a train bound from Peking to Shanghai before going their separate ways again after they reach their destination, but unlike Grand Hotel, in which much of the action derives from the personal relationships between the characters, Shanghai is set against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War, and the climax of the story actually takes place off the train. Dietrich plays Shanghai Lily, a woman of dubious morals who survives by jumping from one man to the next; other passengers on the train include Lily's former lover Dr. Harvey (Clive Brook); fellow fallen woman Hui Fei (Anna May Wong); a rich American (Eugene Pallette); a pompous missionary (Lawrence Grant); and a mysterious half-Chinese/half-white revolutionary (Warner Oland).

Shanghai Express was Dietrich and Sternberg's fourth film together (after The Blue Angel, Morocco, and Dishonored), and as much as I liked The Blue Angel, I have to say that Shanghai is the best I've seen so far. Part of this estimation probably comes from my natural inclination toward movies with large casts contained in small places, derived from a youth spent reading old Agatha Christie mysteries, but Shanghai is also a genuinely great film. Dietrich is phenomenal, as are Wong, Oland, and Pallette, who, despite the generally serious tone of the film, made me laugh out loud several times. Sternberg made a star out of Dietrich with The Blue Angel, and Shanghai is the height of the image he crafted for her; she is thin, beautiful, and intimidating in this film, lit beautifully (I believe the picture of her above this review is from Shanghai Express) and directed in every way to enhance her reputation as an exotic femme fatale. Dietrich was somewhat of an alternative to Greta Garbo in the early thirties, but where Garbo was soft and tragic, Dietrich was more assertive and dangerous, sometimes harboring a heart of gold, sometimes not, and she plays her part to the hilt in Shanghai.

The interesting thing about Marlene Dietrich -- and I mentioned this briefly in my post on Conrad Veidt -- is that as much as she was sold as a wholly foreign entity at the beginning of her career, playing up her German-ness whenever possible, she was one of the strongest Hollywood supporters of the Allied cause during World War II and therefore managed to supersede that "foreign" quality and become a permanent USO fixture throughout the early forties, performing for US soldiers both at home and on the front lines in Europe. One of her most famous quotes was also her answer to why she put so much effort into supporting the troops: "aus Anstand" -- it was the decent thing to do.

She: C+

Shanghai Express: A+



(pic via here)

"Battle of the Blondes" Round Three: Judy Holliday vs. Jean Harlow

One of the finest parts of Judy Holliday's Oscar-winning performance in Born Yesterday is also, unfortunately, one of the film's only drawbacks: Holliday is so spot-on in her portrayal of the educationally-deprived girlfriend of a corrupt businessman that she captures not only the humorous and occasionally charming side of stupidity, but also the aggravating, off-putting side, to the point that her Billie Dawn is rather unlikeable for the first third or so of the film. What Born Yesterday acknowledges is that truly stupid people are often unlikeable: they're rude, they're aggressive, they're strangely defensive of their own ignorance, and they're nothing like the lovable ditzes or airheads Hollywood usually portrays. Billie Dawn is less confrontational with her stupidity than her shady boyfriend Harry Brock (played by Broderick Crawford), but when we first meet her, she has a perpetual look of blank boredom on her face, as if she literally has nothing going on in her head except maybe a few sparks of mild discontentment, though she certainly couldn't be bothered to figure out why. Is it any coincidence that she shares her real first name, Emma, with the stupid, restless heroine of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary?

What makes Billie Dawn different from Harry, however, is that she does want to learn, and it is within that desire that she quickly wins us over. Holliday is at her best in the scene when Billie, under the book-reading tutelage of newspaper man Paul Verrall (William Holden), begins to see both herself and Harry in a different light, her newfound intelligence both a boon to her self-esteem and a curse, because, of course, with knowledge comes the responsibility to actually use her mind rather than turning a blind eye to things she knows are wrong. Holliday, a theatre actress, originated the role of Billie on stage during the late forties, but she almost lost out on the part when it moved to the screen: Columbia wanted Rita Hayworth to play Billie, and it wasn't until Holliday gained attention in a supporting role in the Tracy-Hepburn comedy Adam's Rib that she seemed like a viable alternative. Looking at the movie now, of course, it's hard to picture anyone else playing the role, especially since Holliday ended up playing variations of Billie throughout the remainder of the fifties. That she won an Oscar for playing Billie is also a testament to how well she understood the part, not because an Oscar is necessarily the be-all and end-all in actor validation but because the Best Actress category in 1950 was especially stacked: in addition to Holliday, there was Eleanor Parker for Caged, Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for All About Eve, and Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard, one of the most formidable row of performances that category has ever seen.

Jean Harlow, Holliday's competition in the third round of Battle of the Blondes, also made a name for herself playing secretly-smart dumb blondes, but she also had a vampish, glamorous side to her screen persona, and she uses -- and satirizes -- both of those images in the 1933 comedy Bombshell. Harlow plays movie star Lola Burns, a flighty but basically good-hearted woman trying to support her eccentric family and battle a rumor-mongoring studio publicity man (Lee Tracy) while looking for romance first with a Marquis, then a Boston society man (Franchot Tone). The character of Lola was largely based on twenties film star Clara Bow, but Harlow lampoons herself as well, reshooting scenes from Red Dust while flirting with the marquis (a reference to the real film she made with Clark Gable in 1932) and posing for hack magazine photos while pretending to boil a potato. Bombshell is heavy on Hollywood in-jokes and light on actual story, but Harlow is wonderful in it, and Tone is funny in a wink-wink nod to sentimental Hollywood romance.

Many people consider Jean Harlow to be the original blond superstar, which of course is technically not true, as both Marlene Dietrich and Constance Bennett (among many others) predate her in terms of being big stars who happened to have blond hair, but Harlow may well have been the first actress to become famous in part because of her blond hair. Her entire image, from her white-blond dye job to her dark eyeliner, was an essential part of her fame, and she more or less maintained her look for the duration of her career (she died unexpectedly in 1937 from uremic poisoning brought on by kidney failure). The funny thing about Jean Harlow is that, by today's standards, she is not typically what we think of as a really beautiful woman -- she has a rather large forehead, and her penciled-in eyebrows look a little alien -- but she was a major sex symbol in her day, and the sum total of her appearance still translates, as does her sense of humor and the way she fires off her dialogue in that voice that swings from high-class to low-class at will. She and Holliday have that in common (though Holliday's voice goes nasally in a way Harlow's rarely does), and it's possible to look at the type of characters Holliday played as the natural successor to the characters played by Harlow, a little less independent after World War II and the move toward conservatism in the late forties, but still lovable, and still capable of great insight when given half a chance.

Born Yesterday: A

Bombshell: B

"Battle of the Blondes" Round Two: Veronica Lake vs. Lana Turner

Just as with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, comparing Veronica Lake and Lana Turner is more difficult than it initially seems, because aside from their common hair color and their status as pin-up girls during World War II, they don't actually have a lot in common. Lake's career more or less began and ended within the forties, while Turner maintained starring roles from the late thirties until the late sixties, and although both had shaky off-screen lives, Turner's was far more notorious, culminating with the 1957 murder of her gangster boyfriend by her teenage daughter; moreover, despite playing similar femme fatale roles during the forties, Turner had a more varied career overall, playing ingenue roles in the thirties and taking parts in soapy melodramas (Peyton Place; Imitation of Life) as she neared middle age. Ironically, Lake is probably better known today because of her iconic hairstyle, but like many of her contemporaries who became famous for particular looks or aspects of their images, her filmography only briefly mirrored her level of fame.

Watching a Veronica Lake movie can be a surprising experience, because despite her va-va-va-voom reputation today, she really doesn't act or come across that way in her films. She is pretty, certainly, and her peekaboo hairstyle gives her an air of mystery, but there is rarely anything overtly sexual about her roles; rather, she has a hard, reserved quality that says "bitch" more than it does "seductress." She is tiny, for one thing, a far cry from other voluptuous pin-up girls, and even when she's letting her hair down, she doesn't seem like the kind of girl who really knows how to have a good time. As she herself said, "I wasn't a sex symbol; I was a sex zombie." Part of this on-screen quality probably came from her off-screen personality, where she was allegedly extremely difficult to work with, to the point that Joel McCrea, her costar in Sullivan's Travels, refused to ever work with her again, saying, "Life's too short for two films with Veronica Lake."

If I sound like I dislike Veronica Lake, I don't; I think she brought a unique quality to movies in the early forties, and in most instances I think she was the perfect person to play the parts she was given, as in The Blue Dahlia, the movie I watched for Battle of the Blondes. The Blue Dahlia was Lake's third film with her most frequent costar, Alan Ladd, and tells the story of a soldier who returns from World War II and finds himself accused of murdering his unfaithful wife. (Lake plays the woman who helps Ladd try to prove his innocence.) Lake and Ladd were initially paired because she was the only actress short enough to make him look tall on screen, but they ended up being a good match because of their shared remoteness, an almost disenchanted quality that fits the tone of a post-war film perfectly. The Blue Dahlia is a tightly-paced, exciting film, featuring a genuine "whodunit?" mystery and a strong performance by Bill Bixby as one of Ladd's fellow soldiers. Lake doesn't have a lot to do, but she is effective nonetheless, especially in the scene where Bixby's character starts to have a flashback -- an instance where her tendency to underact serves her well.

My Battle of the Blondes choice for Lana Turner, meanwhile, was a completely different sort of film, a (mostly) light comedy released in 1939 entitled These Glamour Girls. Turner became a star with her very first film, 1937's They Won't Forget, but Glamour Girls was her first lead role, playing a taxi dancer who accompanies a rich boy to his college's weekend bash. (That's taxi dancer, not taxi driver, as I originally thought when I read the description of the movie; a taxi dancer is -- or was -- a girl who works in a dance hall as a professional dancer, dancing on a dance-by-dance basis with the male patrons, who buy her time with tickets. It was a popular profession to portray in the movies during the thirties and forties.) Glamour Girls is better than it ought to be, mostly because it's populated by talented actors that, in addition to Turner, include Lew Ayres, Jane Bryan and Marsha Hunt, but it also isn't as good as it could have been: Jane Bryan, as a debutante trying to keep up appearances despite her family's dwindling fortune, was clearly capable of a lot more, and Marsha Hunt's storyline as a pitiful party girl past her prime at the age of twenty-three ends in a spectacularly melodramatic fashion, yet is neither commented upon nor even noticed by the other characters. (I won't say what the melodramatic end is, but if you look at the screen shot of Hunt below, I bet you can guess.)

Turner is warm and friendly in These Glamour Girls, yet I never quite lost the feeling that someone who looks like her would never be intimated by a group of rich girls -- or need a job as a taxi dancer. (For the record, her hair is actually red in this movie; it wasn't until the early forties that she became known as a platinum blonde.) She really is beautiful, and she wears a strikingly modern-looking halter dress for most of Glamour Girls, but many classic movie actresses were beautiful, and I never get much else out of Turner's performances. She's good, but I've yet to see her be great, even in The Postman Always Rings Twice. She's icy in a different way than Lake, in a more superior way, as if she knows she's pretty and doesn't have a lot of time for people who aren't, and while I liked These Glamour Girls and her in it, I have to wonder if it would have been better with a different lead actress, or even if Turner's and Bryan's roles had been reversed.

The Blue Dahlia: A-

These Glamour Girls: B

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twenty-Three Review: The Thief of Bagdad

I've already talked about how TCM has their quintet of actors they always feature during any of their special movie programming, but one of the nice things about Summer Under the Stars is that they also feature lesser-known (or simply less popular) actors, particularly silent screen stars who have faded from the public consciousness, like Lon Chaney and the actor I'm focusing on today, Conrad Veidt. Chaney at least has some name recognition because of his innovative makeup work and the fact that he shares his name with his son, The Wolfman, but prior to this August I had never heard of Veidt, a German actor who spent most of his career in Europe and only settled in Hollywood during the last three years of his life. And that's why I appreciate Summer Under the Stars, because as I found out, Veidt was an extremely interesting man who deserves to be better known outside of silent movie circles.



The Man Who Laughs

One of Veidt's most famous roles came early in his career, as the sleepwalking murderer in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), where he is virtually unrecognizable under heavy makeup and jet black hair. Like Chaney, many of his movies throughout the twenties required him to obscure his features to play men existing on the fringe of society, whether as Ivan the Terrible in Waxworks or the tragic Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs, whose mutilated smile was allegedly the inspiration for The Joker in the original Batman comics. Despite being a big star in Germany, Veidt was virulently anti-Nazi, and after marrying a Jewish woman in the early thirties he left Germany and took up residence in Britain, where, among other films, he made the 1937 spy thriller Dark Journey with Vivien Leigh. It wasn't until 1940 that he moved to Hollywood to shoot The Thief of Bagdad (which, despite being a British film, was produced in California because of World War II); ironically, he spent much of his time thereafter playing Nazis, most famously as Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942).

Different From the Others

Veidt was characteristic of the liberal Weimar Republic that preceded the Nazi regime in Germany, during which time many of the masterpieces of German film were produced: Robert Weine's Caligari; Fritz Lang's Metropolis; G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box; and Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, among others. These films dealt with social issues that the Nazi government would later denounce as debauched or insubordinate, including the plight of the working class under capitalism and homosexuality: Veidt himself played one of the first gay characters ever put on screen (and certainly one of the first sympathetic gay characters ever put on screen) in Different From the Others (1919). He was supportive of the Jewish people and in 1934, after moving to Britain, made the anti-persecution film Jew Suss (the title of which unfortunately later gained infamy as an anti-Semitic propaganda film released by the Nazis in 1940), and like his compatriot Marlene Dietrich, he dedicated a good amount of his own time and money to helping the Allied cause during the war. He died in 1943, two years before the end of the war in Europe, making it impossible to know what his relationship would have been with his native country in the post-War period, or whether he would have moved on to playing non-German roles in Hollywood films.

With his varied life in consideration, then, it's disappointing that TCM chose to focus primarily on his work playing Nazis in war-time films, rather than exploring his work in Germany during the silent era. I almost chose to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari because it was one of his few German films they did include, but in the end I went with The Thief of Bagdad because its buoyant storyline seemed more appropriate for a summer movie festival, and because it was directed by Michael Powell, who, along with Emeric Pressburger, created two classics of post-War British cinema: Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. Like those films, The Thief of Bagdad is full of bright colors and exotic cinematography, translating parts of the Arabian Nights into a story about a king, ousted from his kingdom by an evil vizier, who teams up with a petty thief before falling in love with a princess and losing his sight to a magical curse. Veidt plays the vizier, Jaffar, while John Justin plays the ousted king and the Indian actor Sabu plays the thief Abu (and, in probably the most famous sequence from the film, Rex Ingram plays a giant genie who grants Abu three wishes in return for freeing him from his bottle; the similarities between this story and Disney's Aladdin are very much intentional, right down to the way Jafar in Aladdin greatly resembles Veidt).

The Thief of Bagdad really is, in effect, a perfect summer movie, high on beautiful scenery, visual effects, and action, but pretty skimpy when it comes to acting and character development. Veidt is far and away the best actor of the bunch; John Justin is serviceable as the king, kind of like a thinner, less charming version of Errol Flynn, but June Duprez lacks any personality at all as the Princess. (Alexander Korda, who produced the film, reportedly wanted Vivien Leigh to play the Princess, and I would have loved to see what she could have done with the part -- if anything could have been done with it.) The acting isn't really important in a film like this, though, and it's well worth watching for the vibrant photography and levity of the story lines -- as well as the chance to see Veidt in the role that kicked off the final stage of his career. My hope, however, is that TCM will highlight Veidt again in the future, with more of a focus on the work that first made him a star.

Grade: A