Being Pauline Kael (or at least aping her for a bit)
The following are a series of capsule movie reviews, written for a 1999 film festival at the Stanford Theatre in San Francisco when I was the Dance, Comedy and Theatre Editor for Triangle CitySearch. An old CSTriangle editor and friend who was then working at the San Jose office asked me to write up these movies for her site. Unfortunately, she didn't make the request until the series ("Our Top 50: 10th Anniversary Hit Parade") was nearly half over, but it gave me the chance to dash off a few film precis in something like the manner of my critical idol, Pauline Kael. "Manner," please note; I can't claim anything more for what follows. Kael was a (contradictory? mad? certainly maddening) kind of genius. I am merely, as Dick Cavett once claimed for himself in a different context, an entertainer and pantaloon.
It Happened One Night
Behold, the Walls of Jericho: Gable's back and Colbert's got him in Frank Capra's trend-setting screwball comedy.
It shouldn't have worked. Or if so, should only have been a routine little B picture. Instead, It Happened One Night swept the Academy Awards, made Frank Capra's bones, turned Columbia Pictures into a respected studio, unofficially inaugurated an entire genre and almost put the American undershirt industry out of business.
Robert Riskin's screenplay contains all the screwball totems—runaway heiress, cynical reporter, impending marriage—and mixes them up with gusto and sophisticated wit; the humor is both sharp-edged and gentle. This is probably the least pretentious of all Capra's sound comedies, and if it makes social points it makes them tangentially. The movie revealed Claudette Colbert as a beauty with brains and whip-crack timing, and brought Clark Gable to a new level of audience appreciation, setting his persona and defining him as the era's great masculine sex symbol: the sequence in which he strips off a shirt to reveal his naked chest caused undershirt sales to plummet. (His chewing of a carrot was also said to have inspired the creators of Bugs Bunny.)
Gable didn't want to make the film (he'd been sent by MGM to "Poverty Row" Columbia as punishment) and no one else expected much of it. But It Happened One Night was an enormous popular success and won the top five Academy Awards of its year: Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay—a feat unequalled for forty years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (and, later, The Silence of the Lambs.) This may be the cheeriest of all Depression-era comedies; the long bus sequence contains something many later screwball films omit: simple pleasure, and charm.
—August 16, 1999
It's a Wonderful Life
Lasso the moon: James Stewart gives one of his finest performances in Frank Capra's slightly queasy parable.
There's a terrible irony in the way this movie got over-exposed in the 1980s. Frank Capra pinned his hopes for a successful post-war independent venture on this gossamer fantasy, and when it failed the heartbreak pretty much ended his career. (It had been sliding anyway since the late '30s and while he made a handful of movies after 1946, none of them were worth his time.) And the irony is double-edged: through an oversight, Capra neglected to renew the movie's copyright and it passed into the public domain. This led to endless, marathon airings on television every December, from which Capra received not one penny, although the seemingly universal love his movie began to inspire surely salved the wounds a bit.
The movie is too long—over 2 hours—and the pace is sometimes off, especially in the first half. The setting, Bedford Falls, is so full of lovable small town types you may long for that little Vermont boy in Nothing Sacred who bit a chunk out of Frederic March's leg. The movie is Capra at his best, and worst, and your reaction will vary depending on your ability to digest the treacle; the stuff about the rumpled angel Clarence (Henry Travers) earning his wings could rot your back teeth. But the central notion is a good one, and when James Stewart, like Scrooge, is forced to confront an alternate realty, Capra unveils the darker sides of his nature with a vigor so bold it's almost shocking.
Still, the movie would be little more than a curiosity without James Stewart. His performance is one of the four or five most deftly shaded and achingly humane of his entire career, and it's a rare case of an American actor exposing his nerve endings so ruthlessly it's almost too painful to watch. There were hints of this deperation in his performance as Mr. Smith, but the sweaty, suicidal wildness he conveys here is terrifying.
Donna Reed is Stewart's radiant wife, Lionel Barrymore chews the scenery with gusto as the villain, and Thomas Mitchell gives a lovely, wounded performance as an undependable alcoholic. The screenplay is by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Capra, with additional material by Jo Swerling. With Beaulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Graham, H.B. Warner and, as a surly bartender, Sheldon Leonard.
—August 16, 1999
The General
Hold on, Buster: Keaton's masterpiece, and one of the greatest of all silent films.
This may not be the most hilarious silent comedy (The Navigator is far funnier) but it's certainly the greatest. Taking a daring Civil War train robbery as his source, Buster Keaton crafted one of the most beautiful American films of its era: a living recreation of Matthew Harrison Brady's period photographs wrapped in a cunningly constructed comic premise and topped by one of the most staggering movie sequences of its time. Orson Welles once called a movie soundstage "the biggest model train set any little boy ever had to play with." Keaton got the tracks, the engine—the whole damn show.
Keaton is Johnnie Gray, the General's civilian engineer. When the locomotive (and his girl, Annabelle Lee) are stolen by Union spies, he gives chase. That's the plot in a nutshell. What matters is how Keaton handles the material, his brilliant physical comedy always arising from the circumstances of the action, and the stark realities of war and death played seriously but not somberly. It's a movie piled high with great sequences and indelible images: Buster, rejected by Annabelle (Marion Mack), making a forlorn exit atop the gears of the engine; chasing the General from a railway handcart; and in one of the most gloriously romantic moments in American movies, first strangling Annabelle for her idiocy, then rapturously kissing her.
And then, of course, there's the death of the General itself, a sequence so colossal the shoot became something of a holiday among the Washington state locals, many of whom appear as supernumeraries. It would be a spectacular set-piece for any movie, but as the climax of a comedy, it's non pariel. This 1927 epic was the capstone of Keaton's career, but it didn't make much money and before long Buster was at the mercy of Louis B. Mayer, alcohol and a parade that had passed him by. Thankfully, the comedian lived long enough to see his masterwork embraced by a new generation of critics and audiences, who joined him in proclaiming The General as his finest film.
—August 17, 1999
My Man Godfrey
"Godfrey loves me!": Carole Lombard at her loopiest, in pursuit of reluctant butler William Powell in Morrie Ryskind's delirious screwball classic.
One of the freshest of all screwball comedies, and one of the most intelligent. Carole Lombard wins "forgotten man" William Powell in a scavenger hunt and installs him as her dizzy family's butler, then decides she's in love with him ... whether he likes it or not. Powell is at his fastidious best as the slightly mysterious Godfrey, and the off-kilter Park Avenue household consists of spoiled glamour-puss Gail Patrick, Alice Brady as the peripatetic mater familia and gravel-voiced, frustrated father Eugene Pallette. With Mischa Auer as Brady's pretentious gigolo. (His imitation of a gorilla is one of the great, grotesque images in American comedy.)
Good as they all are, you'll have a hard time noticing them when Lombard's on-screen. Unique among the popular actresses of American cinema, Lombard was not only ravishing but could play darma and high comedy with equal assurance. The moment in which she emerges with a look of absolute rapture, fully-dressed from a shower Powell has shoved her under and shouts, "Godfrey loves me!" is probably the most pig-headedly luminous declaration of its kind. She's either the funniest beauty or the most gorgeous clown in movie history.
The most surprising element of Godfrey is the fact that the mildly disgusted screenplay is by that old reactionary Morrie Ryskind. Here, he pins down the rich like so many squirming butterflies, yet the script never descends to Capra-corn idealization of the working class either. And the dialogue is laden with gems, like Lombard's breathless definition of a society scavenger hunt. Directed by Gregory LaCava, who guided another unruly phalanx of comic performers (mostly women) to perfection a few years earlier in Stage Door.
—August 17, 1999
The Wizard of Oz
A horse of a different color: Judy Garland, Bert Lahr, winged monkeys ... and Margaret Hamilton scaring several generations of American children silly.
Is there an American over the age of four with a television set who doesn't know "Over the Rainbow" better than any song except "Happy Birthday"? The MGM brass wanted it cut from the movie, but producer Arthur Freed protested until sanity reigned again (or the nearest Hollywood facsimile, anyway). There are more accidents, happy and unhappy, associated with the making of this musical jewel-box than almost any other movie of comparable worth. Buddy Ebsen nearly died from the Tin Man's make-up and had to be replaced by Jack Haley; Margaret Hamilton was severely burned in a freak smudge-pot fire; a plethora of directors—most of whom (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood) also worked on Gone With the Wind that year—shot the thing; and MGM wanted Shirley Temple for Dorothy but had to settle for the greatest musical talent of her time.
Imagining this movie without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to? It's her blend of openness and mid-western practicality that carries the movie from one supernatural crisis to the next. And when Garland isn't enough, you can always marvel at Bert Lahr's indelible performance as the Cowardly Lion. One of the funniest and most original comedians of his generation, Lahr never had much luck with the movies; even here, in his greatest role, he's covered with fur. But has there ever been a more intoxicating mix of pugnacious street-corner comedy, mangled verbal bravado and ineffable sweetness? Lahr was one of the lyricist E. Y. Harburg's two favorite comedians (Groucho Marx was the other) and his delicious opera parody lyric "If I Were King of the Forest" is the perfect meeting of writer and performer.
The other pleasures are considerable, from Harold Arlen's charming musical score—brilliantly arranged and augmented by Hebert Stothart—to Frank Morgan as a one-man army of Ozian bureaucrats. It can get a little cloying on repeated viewing (especially the sequence in Munckinland) but it's fair to say that The Wizard of Oz has probably entertained more people than any other movie in history.
—August 20, 1999
Gigi
Crashing through the ceiling: Collette's Paris by way of Minnelli, MGM and Lerner and Loewe.
The last great flower from the Arthur Freed hothouse at MGM. The musical structure by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe may too nearly resemble My Fair Lady—Gigi herself is a Gallic Liza Dolittle and the title song is very Henry Higgins—and the beach in the "I Remember it Well" sequence looks like the soundstage it most assuredly is. But who can cavil about when the trappings are this deluxe?
The education of a courtesan seems the least likely premise imaginable for an MGM musical, but after the success of My Fair Lady, the top brass probably would have let Lerner and Loewe adapt the New York telephone directory. Somehow Lerner, as screenwriter and lyricist, managed to retain the sharp satirical tone of Collette's short story without diluting its sophistication. As a result, Gigi may be the most adult of all movie musicals.
Vincente Minnelli's colorful evocation of fin de siecle Paris is just about perfect in its way, and Lerner's witty lyrics sit most agreeably on Loewe's chamer of a score. As the reluctant courtesan, Leslie Caron is both ingratiating child and disarming young woman. Maurice Chevalier gives his patented boulevardier sheen to the role of narrator, while Louis Jordan almost makes ennui a desirable state as Gigi's dissatisfied suitor. With Hermione Gingold as Gigi's robust grandmama and Isabel Jens as her imperious aunt. Cecil Beaton designed the movie, and Andre Previn arranged and conducted the score.
—August 27, 1999
The Philadelphia Story
With the rich and mighty, always a little patience: George Cukor's magnificent film of Philip Barry's biting stage comedy.
From the Lubitsch-like opening sequence to the freeze-frame finale, The Philadelphia Story delivers like no other comedy of its period. A tiny amount of Philip Barry's dialogue was bowdlerized for the screen, but Donald Ogden Stewart's screenplay (with uncredited contributions by Waldo Salt) is a miracle of adaptation. What it says about class and empathy is still pertinent, and the performances by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart are evergreen.
The screenplay makes a virtue of losing one of the play's main characters (Hepburn's brother) by giving his lines to Grant and strengthening his importance. He's agile and funny, and his performance has surprising gravity. This was Hepburn's "comeback" film after having been labelled box-office poison; she bought the play, originated the central role on stage, then cannily bargained with MGM for the movie rights. She's so right for the part that it's difficult to imagine the movie without her. She looks splendid in Adrian's graceful costumes, plays the high comedy to a fare-thee-well and her timing is a thing of beauty—her drunken sequence with Stewart is one of the high spots of pre-war American movies. (Unfortunately, the success of the movie also set up MGM's condescending blueprint for a Hepburn movie: make her the goddess who must be torn down and "humanized.")
There are those who believe the Oscar James Stewart won for his performance as the cynical news-hound was an apology from the Academy for not awarding his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the previous year. Nonsense. You only have to watch him as he describes Hepburn's heiress as having "hearth-fires and holocausts banked down inside" her to see what a superb and uniquely truthful actor he was. In 1956 the studio concocted a tepid musical remake called High Society. With Ruth Hussey, John Howard, Virginia Weidler, Roland Young and the wonderfully serpentine Henry Daniell. The jazzy score is by Franz Waxman.
—August 27, 1999
The Shop Around the Corner
You've got mail: Forget Hanks and Ryan—this is the original, and it doesn't get much better.
Arguably the greatest comedy director of the 1920s and '30s, Ernst Lubitsch was to European sophistication what Preston Sturges became to American knockabout. This is one of his most gentle and charming movies. It, and the Miklos Laszlo play on which it's based, have been the source for everything from a ho-hum Judy Garland musical called In the Good Old Summertime to Nora Ephron's recent Hanks/Ryan vehicle You've Got Mail. (The only edition that comes close to it in spirit or execution is the utterly delightful Broadway musical She Loves Me, a flop in the 1960s.)
The basic device concerns a pair of perfume-shop clerks who unwittingly write each other anonymous love letters. The only hitch: they despise each other. The movie's unwilling lovers, James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan, are just about perfect. Stewart somehow manages to be utterly charming and rather brutal, and the sequence in which he discovers the truth about his "Dear Friend" contains one of his tenderest performances. Sullivan is correspondingly haughty and endearing. The Sampson Raphaelson screenplay is one of the wittiest and most empathetic of all comedy scripts; even the delivery boy (William Tracy), the least of the perfumery's employees, is allowed his moment of comic dignity.
The supporting cast includes the great Frank Morgan as the besieged owner of the perfume shop; Felix Bressart as Stewart's practical, cowardly co-worker; and Joseph Schildkraut as a cad. Ben Hecht worked on the screenplay. The sumptuous black and white photography is by William Daniels.
—August 28, 1999
Singin' in the Rain
Let's make no bones about it: This is the best musical ever made.
It could have been another of MGM's run-of-the-mill musicals. The screenwriters, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, had only one order: turn the Herb Nacio Brown-Arthur Freed song catalogue into a movie. All they knew was "at some point, there'd be rain, and someone would be singing in it." Their first idea, involving a singing cowboy to be played by Howard Keel, was thankfully overpowered by their second: a loving if satirical look back at the beginnings of Talking Pictures. Somehow, a routine assignment gave birth to the best movie musical of all time.
Every sequence works, building on and then topping the one that came before. The repartee is as fast and crackling as a '30s screwball farce, and the musical numbers are so well integrated into the movie's themes and action as to be positively Hammersteinian: when Gene Kelly serenades Debbie Reynolds, he evokes the mood on a Hollywood sound-stage and his riotous "Moses Supposes" routine with Donald O'Connor takes off from a pompous lesson in elocution. The title number is without doubt the most joyous declaration of love ever filmed, and the massive "Broadway Ballet" is, seemingly, a satire on Kelly's own American in Paris ballet of the year before.
Gene Kelly deliciously mocks his own egocentric grandeur as the silent matinee idol Donald Lockwood—the ballet ends with an extreme close-up on his hammy, grinning face. Reynolds gives a spunky, determined performance as the girl he loves, and O'Connor out-does Danny Kaye in his loony perfection. His big number, "Make 'Em Laugh" is a classic (although the song itself is a shameless Freed rip-off of Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" from The Pirate.) Directed (nominally) by Kelly and (largely) Stanley Donen. With Millard Mitchell as the short-sighted studio boss; Douglas Fowley as the harassed movie director; and Cyd Charisse, all legs and green stockings as Kelly's partner in the ballet. Best of all is Jean Hagen as Kelly's impossibly thick-headed screen paramour. A true test of devotion is to imitate her saying, "And I can't stan' 'im!"—those who don't get it are probably not people you'd want to be around anway.
—September 4, 1999
Holiday
Can you really do a backwards flip? Grant and Hepburn in George Cukor's charming comedy of manners.
This elegant Philip Barry comedy, directed by George Cukor, kicked off a great period of collaboration between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. They'd already appeared together in Cukor's odd gender farce Sylvia Scarlett in 1935, and were about to co-star again in Howard Hawks' quintessential screwball, Bringing Up Baby—the movie that temporarily sealed Hepburn's fate as "box office poison." But Holiday is a tantalizing hint of the richness Grant and Hepburn would bring to their pairing in The Philadelphia Story two years later (again under Cukor's direction).
Grant plays Johnny Case, a nonconformist affianced to one of the daughters (Doris Nolan) of a stuffy 400 family. There's only one problem: Johnny wants to reverse the standard terms; he wants to enjoy a life of leisure before "retiring" into business. The family, needless to say, is appalled—everyone, that is, except Nolan's free-spirited sister (Hepburn). It's obvious from the beginning who Grant's going to end up with, but the Barry dialogue is so luscious the velveteen plot almost doesn't matter.
This was a breakthrough performance for Grant, whose light underplaying of the film's high comedy suggests considerable depths in Johnny's makeup, just as his own early acrobatic training gives his characterization a liquid physical grace. Hepburn is at her loveliest—you may gasp when she makes her first entrance. She's far from the arch, stereotyped image of her at the time; her playing has a freshness that even 60 years of changing fashion can't erase. There's also a heartbreaking performance by Lew Ayres as the bibulous scion of the family, who knows his future is a corporate prison sentence but lacks the strength to alter it. His presence lends the film a grave, disturbing beauty. Edward Everett Horton provides gentle support as one of Johnny's best friends. (A 1930 version also featured Horton, in the same role, paired with Hedda Hopper; Jean Dixon plays Horton's wife, delightfully, in this one.) The script is by Sidney Buchman, who wrote Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
—September 7, 1999
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
The Captain's paradise: Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney find love across the astral plane in Joseph L. Makiewicz's charming fantasy.
Joseph Mankiewicz craved a unique and perfect niche for himself as the writer and director of smart, sophisticated social comedy with the back-to-back Oscar winners A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. Before that, he was one of 20th Century-Fox's more reliable house directors, and this gentle romantic comedy gives a good indication of his gifts. It's also a damn good excuse for the not inconsiderable pleasure of staring at Gene Tierney's overbite.
Tierney is the youthful widow of the title, whose new home on the coast of Britain is said to be haunted by the shade of a sea captain. Rex Harrison gives one of his patented half-glamorous, half-bellowing performances as the spirit who prefers to live alone but who eventually succumbs to Mrs. Muir's charms. When you first see him, with his mandarin eyes, trim little beard and enviable waistline, he's almost shockingly desirable; all those re-runs of My Fair Lady can make you forget what a dashing figure Harrison cut in the 1940s.
The movie is slight and self-contained, but it slides down like honey. Aside from Harrison's outbursts (and the occasional bombast of Bernard Herrmann's otherwise glorious background score) it's a movie whose softness and gentle humor would not have been possible 10 or even 5 years later. It's a bit like a last fond adieu to a kind of lyrical, civilized pre-war romance. The film is lovely to look at, the central relationship one of refreshing maturity. The supporting cast includes Robert Coote as a nervous real estate salesman and George Sanders, whose less-cad-like-than- usual performance as the captain's rival is a mark of Mankiewicz's remarkable lightness of touch.
—September 14, 1999
Laura
But she's only a dream: Gene Tierney is radiant in Otto Preminger's nifty film noir.
Darryl Zanuck, the head of production at 20th Century-Fox, made it clear to Otto Preminger that he could produce this adaptation of the Vera Caspary novel but under no circumstances was he to direct it. That job fell to Rouben Mamoulian, a man largely at home more in the theater than on a Hollywood set. When Zanuck saw Mamoulian's rushes, he fired him. That left only Preminger to finish the job.
Zanuck needn't have worried. In Preminger's hands Laura became something of an instant classic, with Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity one of the first—and best—examples of the film noir genre. The movie made Gene Tierney a star, established Dana Andrews as a stolid leading man and, most peculiarly, set up the arch and slightly acrid Clifton Webb as a potential box office draw.
The story is lean and simple: a chic young woman named Laura has been murdered in her Manhattan apartment. A detective (Andrews) investigates the usual motley suspects: Laura's dissipated fiancee (Vincent Price); her aunt (Judith Anderson), with whom Price is obviously having an affair; and Waldo Lydecker (Webb), the cultural gadfly and radio commentator who claims to have been in love with Laura. The plot takes a perverse turn when, midway through the film, Laura (Tierney) suddenly turns up alive.
Preminger keeps the action and the occasionally purple dialogue moving at a zesty clip, and his style is shot through with noir shadings: dimly-lighted rooms full of shadow and subterfuge. It's by no means as great a film as the wonderfully ambiguous Anatomy of a Murder,which Preminger would direct 14 years later, but its pleasures are considerable. Among the incidental delights are Tierney's famous overbite, David Raksin's evocative theme music and, for the symbol-minded, the movie's central paradox: Anderson, Price and Webb—especially Webb—all seem to be playing homosexuals. (Zanuck later starred the former dancer and middle-aged specialist in priss as the urbane Mr. Belvedere in Sitting Pretty and its sequels, which were curiously popular. Imagine that Paul Lynde had become a superstar in the '60s and you have some idea just how curious.)
—September 15, 1999
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Fighting for that lost cause: Niavete, hope, cyncism, sentiment, wit and pure corn meshed miraculously together in Frank Capra's most characterstic movie.
David Denby once called James Stewart the greatest actor in American movies, and any serious study of that claim has to begin here. (Capra had used Stewart the year before, in his soft-hearted—and soft-headed—film of the Kauffman and Hart comedy You Can't Take it With You, and knew what he was getting.)
It's Stewart, in his brealthrough performance, who gives the occasionally cringe-inducing story its conviction; it's difficult to imagine any comparable actor of the period pulling off the almost grisly mix of shy gentleness, midwestern optimism, bulldog tenacity and general-purpose saintliness the role demands. His long filabuster is one of the great sequences in American movies, calling on everything Stewart could do and revealing that he could do it better than anyone—much as he would triumph over the treacle and sentimentality of Capra's It's a Wondeful Life a few years later, bringing out the darker and more desperate contours of the role and the story with greater intensity of feeling than any other star of his generation could, or would, have attempted.
1939 was a great year for the movies in general, and for Stewart in particular: he made Destry Rides Again and Made for Each Other the same year, proving his mettle in both comedy and drama—a rare feat for an actor at that time of rigid star stereotyping. In Mr. Smith he's brilliantly matched by Jean Arthur as the cynical newspaper reporter who first mocks and then embraces Smith's middle American ideals. With one of the greatest supporting casts ever assembled for one film, including Edward Arnold, Guy Kibbee, Eugene Pallette, Beaulah Bondi, Porter Hall, Charles Lane and William Demarest. Thomas Mitchell is Arthur's hard-boiled colleague, and the virtually-forgotten cowboy star Harry Carey plays the amused President of the Senate.Sidney Buchman wrote the schizophrenic screenplay (probably tampered with by the director.)
—September 17, 1999
It Happened One Night
Behold, the Walls of Jericho: Gable's back and Colbert's got him in Frank Capra's trend-setting screwball comedy.
It shouldn't have worked. Or if so, should only have been a routine little B picture. Instead, It Happened One Night swept the Academy Awards, made Frank Capra's bones, turned Columbia Pictures into a respected studio, unofficially inaugurated an entire genre and almost put the American undershirt industry out of business.
Robert Riskin's screenplay contains all the screwball totems—runaway heiress, cynical reporter, impending marriage—and mixes them up with gusto and sophisticated wit; the humor is both sharp-edged and gentle. This is probably the least pretentious of all Capra's sound comedies, and if it makes social points it makes them tangentially. The movie revealed Claudette Colbert as a beauty with brains and whip-crack timing, and brought Clark Gable to a new level of audience appreciation, setting his persona and defining him as the era's great masculine sex symbol: the sequence in which he strips off a shirt to reveal his naked chest caused undershirt sales to plummet. (His chewing of a carrot was also said to have inspired the creators of Bugs Bunny.)
Gable didn't want to make the film (he'd been sent by MGM to "Poverty Row" Columbia as punishment) and no one else expected much of it. But It Happened One Night was an enormous popular success and won the top five Academy Awards of its year: Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay—a feat unequalled for forty years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (and, later, The Silence of the Lambs.) This may be the cheeriest of all Depression-era comedies; the long bus sequence contains something many later screwball films omit: simple pleasure, and charm.
—August 16, 1999
It's a Wonderful Life
Lasso the moon: James Stewart gives one of his finest performances in Frank Capra's slightly queasy parable.
There's a terrible irony in the way this movie got over-exposed in the 1980s. Frank Capra pinned his hopes for a successful post-war independent venture on this gossamer fantasy, and when it failed the heartbreak pretty much ended his career. (It had been sliding anyway since the late '30s and while he made a handful of movies after 1946, none of them were worth his time.) And the irony is double-edged: through an oversight, Capra neglected to renew the movie's copyright and it passed into the public domain. This led to endless, marathon airings on television every December, from which Capra received not one penny, although the seemingly universal love his movie began to inspire surely salved the wounds a bit.
The movie is too long—over 2 hours—and the pace is sometimes off, especially in the first half. The setting, Bedford Falls, is so full of lovable small town types you may long for that little Vermont boy in Nothing Sacred who bit a chunk out of Frederic March's leg. The movie is Capra at his best, and worst, and your reaction will vary depending on your ability to digest the treacle; the stuff about the rumpled angel Clarence (Henry Travers) earning his wings could rot your back teeth. But the central notion is a good one, and when James Stewart, like Scrooge, is forced to confront an alternate realty, Capra unveils the darker sides of his nature with a vigor so bold it's almost shocking.
Still, the movie would be little more than a curiosity without James Stewart. His performance is one of the four or five most deftly shaded and achingly humane of his entire career, and it's a rare case of an American actor exposing his nerve endings so ruthlessly it's almost too painful to watch. There were hints of this deperation in his performance as Mr. Smith, but the sweaty, suicidal wildness he conveys here is terrifying.
Donna Reed is Stewart's radiant wife, Lionel Barrymore chews the scenery with gusto as the villain, and Thomas Mitchell gives a lovely, wounded performance as an undependable alcoholic. The screenplay is by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Capra, with additional material by Jo Swerling. With Beaulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Graham, H.B. Warner and, as a surly bartender, Sheldon Leonard.
—August 16, 1999
The General
Hold on, Buster: Keaton's masterpiece, and one of the greatest of all silent films.
This may not be the most hilarious silent comedy (The Navigator is far funnier) but it's certainly the greatest. Taking a daring Civil War train robbery as his source, Buster Keaton crafted one of the most beautiful American films of its era: a living recreation of Matthew Harrison Brady's period photographs wrapped in a cunningly constructed comic premise and topped by one of the most staggering movie sequences of its time. Orson Welles once called a movie soundstage "the biggest model train set any little boy ever had to play with." Keaton got the tracks, the engine—the whole damn show.
Keaton is Johnnie Gray, the General's civilian engineer. When the locomotive (and his girl, Annabelle Lee) are stolen by Union spies, he gives chase. That's the plot in a nutshell. What matters is how Keaton handles the material, his brilliant physical comedy always arising from the circumstances of the action, and the stark realities of war and death played seriously but not somberly. It's a movie piled high with great sequences and indelible images: Buster, rejected by Annabelle (Marion Mack), making a forlorn exit atop the gears of the engine; chasing the General from a railway handcart; and in one of the most gloriously romantic moments in American movies, first strangling Annabelle for her idiocy, then rapturously kissing her.
And then, of course, there's the death of the General itself, a sequence so colossal the shoot became something of a holiday among the Washington state locals, many of whom appear as supernumeraries. It would be a spectacular set-piece for any movie, but as the climax of a comedy, it's non pariel. This 1927 epic was the capstone of Keaton's career, but it didn't make much money and before long Buster was at the mercy of Louis B. Mayer, alcohol and a parade that had passed him by. Thankfully, the comedian lived long enough to see his masterwork embraced by a new generation of critics and audiences, who joined him in proclaiming The General as his finest film.
—August 17, 1999
My Man Godfrey
"Godfrey loves me!": Carole Lombard at her loopiest, in pursuit of reluctant butler William Powell in Morrie Ryskind's delirious screwball classic.
One of the freshest of all screwball comedies, and one of the most intelligent. Carole Lombard wins "forgotten man" William Powell in a scavenger hunt and installs him as her dizzy family's butler, then decides she's in love with him ... whether he likes it or not. Powell is at his fastidious best as the slightly mysterious Godfrey, and the off-kilter Park Avenue household consists of spoiled glamour-puss Gail Patrick, Alice Brady as the peripatetic mater familia and gravel-voiced, frustrated father Eugene Pallette. With Mischa Auer as Brady's pretentious gigolo. (His imitation of a gorilla is one of the great, grotesque images in American comedy.)
Good as they all are, you'll have a hard time noticing them when Lombard's on-screen. Unique among the popular actresses of American cinema, Lombard was not only ravishing but could play darma and high comedy with equal assurance. The moment in which she emerges with a look of absolute rapture, fully-dressed from a shower Powell has shoved her under and shouts, "Godfrey loves me!" is probably the most pig-headedly luminous declaration of its kind. She's either the funniest beauty or the most gorgeous clown in movie history.
The most surprising element of Godfrey is the fact that the mildly disgusted screenplay is by that old reactionary Morrie Ryskind. Here, he pins down the rich like so many squirming butterflies, yet the script never descends to Capra-corn idealization of the working class either. And the dialogue is laden with gems, like Lombard's breathless definition of a society scavenger hunt. Directed by Gregory LaCava, who guided another unruly phalanx of comic performers (mostly women) to perfection a few years earlier in Stage Door.
—August 17, 1999
The Wizard of Oz
A horse of a different color: Judy Garland, Bert Lahr, winged monkeys ... and Margaret Hamilton scaring several generations of American children silly.
Is there an American over the age of four with a television set who doesn't know "Over the Rainbow" better than any song except "Happy Birthday"? The MGM brass wanted it cut from the movie, but producer Arthur Freed protested until sanity reigned again (or the nearest Hollywood facsimile, anyway). There are more accidents, happy and unhappy, associated with the making of this musical jewel-box than almost any other movie of comparable worth. Buddy Ebsen nearly died from the Tin Man's make-up and had to be replaced by Jack Haley; Margaret Hamilton was severely burned in a freak smudge-pot fire; a plethora of directors—most of whom (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood) also worked on Gone With the Wind that year—shot the thing; and MGM wanted Shirley Temple for Dorothy but had to settle for the greatest musical talent of her time.
Imagining this movie without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to? It's her blend of openness and mid-western practicality that carries the movie from one supernatural crisis to the next. And when Garland isn't enough, you can always marvel at Bert Lahr's indelible performance as the Cowardly Lion. One of the funniest and most original comedians of his generation, Lahr never had much luck with the movies; even here, in his greatest role, he's covered with fur. But has there ever been a more intoxicating mix of pugnacious street-corner comedy, mangled verbal bravado and ineffable sweetness? Lahr was one of the lyricist E. Y. Harburg's two favorite comedians (Groucho Marx was the other) and his delicious opera parody lyric "If I Were King of the Forest" is the perfect meeting of writer and performer.
The other pleasures are considerable, from Harold Arlen's charming musical score—brilliantly arranged and augmented by Hebert Stothart—to Frank Morgan as a one-man army of Ozian bureaucrats. It can get a little cloying on repeated viewing (especially the sequence in Munckinland) but it's fair to say that The Wizard of Oz has probably entertained more people than any other movie in history.
—August 20, 1999
Gigi
Crashing through the ceiling: Collette's Paris by way of Minnelli, MGM and Lerner and Loewe.
The last great flower from the Arthur Freed hothouse at MGM. The musical structure by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe may too nearly resemble My Fair Lady—Gigi herself is a Gallic Liza Dolittle and the title song is very Henry Higgins—and the beach in the "I Remember it Well" sequence looks like the soundstage it most assuredly is. But who can cavil about when the trappings are this deluxe?
The education of a courtesan seems the least likely premise imaginable for an MGM musical, but after the success of My Fair Lady, the top brass probably would have let Lerner and Loewe adapt the New York telephone directory. Somehow Lerner, as screenwriter and lyricist, managed to retain the sharp satirical tone of Collette's short story without diluting its sophistication. As a result, Gigi may be the most adult of all movie musicals.
Vincente Minnelli's colorful evocation of fin de siecle Paris is just about perfect in its way, and Lerner's witty lyrics sit most agreeably on Loewe's chamer of a score. As the reluctant courtesan, Leslie Caron is both ingratiating child and disarming young woman. Maurice Chevalier gives his patented boulevardier sheen to the role of narrator, while Louis Jordan almost makes ennui a desirable state as Gigi's dissatisfied suitor. With Hermione Gingold as Gigi's robust grandmama and Isabel Jens as her imperious aunt. Cecil Beaton designed the movie, and Andre Previn arranged and conducted the score.
—August 27, 1999
The Philadelphia Story
With the rich and mighty, always a little patience: George Cukor's magnificent film of Philip Barry's biting stage comedy.
From the Lubitsch-like opening sequence to the freeze-frame finale, The Philadelphia Story delivers like no other comedy of its period. A tiny amount of Philip Barry's dialogue was bowdlerized for the screen, but Donald Ogden Stewart's screenplay (with uncredited contributions by Waldo Salt) is a miracle of adaptation. What it says about class and empathy is still pertinent, and the performances by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart are evergreen.
The screenplay makes a virtue of losing one of the play's main characters (Hepburn's brother) by giving his lines to Grant and strengthening his importance. He's agile and funny, and his performance has surprising gravity. This was Hepburn's "comeback" film after having been labelled box-office poison; she bought the play, originated the central role on stage, then cannily bargained with MGM for the movie rights. She's so right for the part that it's difficult to imagine the movie without her. She looks splendid in Adrian's graceful costumes, plays the high comedy to a fare-thee-well and her timing is a thing of beauty—her drunken sequence with Stewart is one of the high spots of pre-war American movies. (Unfortunately, the success of the movie also set up MGM's condescending blueprint for a Hepburn movie: make her the goddess who must be torn down and "humanized.")
There are those who believe the Oscar James Stewart won for his performance as the cynical news-hound was an apology from the Academy for not awarding his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the previous year. Nonsense. You only have to watch him as he describes Hepburn's heiress as having "hearth-fires and holocausts banked down inside" her to see what a superb and uniquely truthful actor he was. In 1956 the studio concocted a tepid musical remake called High Society. With Ruth Hussey, John Howard, Virginia Weidler, Roland Young and the wonderfully serpentine Henry Daniell. The jazzy score is by Franz Waxman.
—August 27, 1999
The Shop Around the Corner
You've got mail: Forget Hanks and Ryan—this is the original, and it doesn't get much better.
Arguably the greatest comedy director of the 1920s and '30s, Ernst Lubitsch was to European sophistication what Preston Sturges became to American knockabout. This is one of his most gentle and charming movies. It, and the Miklos Laszlo play on which it's based, have been the source for everything from a ho-hum Judy Garland musical called In the Good Old Summertime to Nora Ephron's recent Hanks/Ryan vehicle You've Got Mail. (The only edition that comes close to it in spirit or execution is the utterly delightful Broadway musical She Loves Me, a flop in the 1960s.)
The basic device concerns a pair of perfume-shop clerks who unwittingly write each other anonymous love letters. The only hitch: they despise each other. The movie's unwilling lovers, James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan, are just about perfect. Stewart somehow manages to be utterly charming and rather brutal, and the sequence in which he discovers the truth about his "Dear Friend" contains one of his tenderest performances. Sullivan is correspondingly haughty and endearing. The Sampson Raphaelson screenplay is one of the wittiest and most empathetic of all comedy scripts; even the delivery boy (William Tracy), the least of the perfumery's employees, is allowed his moment of comic dignity.
The supporting cast includes the great Frank Morgan as the besieged owner of the perfume shop; Felix Bressart as Stewart's practical, cowardly co-worker; and Joseph Schildkraut as a cad. Ben Hecht worked on the screenplay. The sumptuous black and white photography is by William Daniels.
—August 28, 1999
Singin' in the Rain
Let's make no bones about it: This is the best musical ever made.
It could have been another of MGM's run-of-the-mill musicals. The screenwriters, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, had only one order: turn the Herb Nacio Brown-Arthur Freed song catalogue into a movie. All they knew was "at some point, there'd be rain, and someone would be singing in it." Their first idea, involving a singing cowboy to be played by Howard Keel, was thankfully overpowered by their second: a loving if satirical look back at the beginnings of Talking Pictures. Somehow, a routine assignment gave birth to the best movie musical of all time.
Every sequence works, building on and then topping the one that came before. The repartee is as fast and crackling as a '30s screwball farce, and the musical numbers are so well integrated into the movie's themes and action as to be positively Hammersteinian: when Gene Kelly serenades Debbie Reynolds, he evokes the mood on a Hollywood sound-stage and his riotous "Moses Supposes" routine with Donald O'Connor takes off from a pompous lesson in elocution. The title number is without doubt the most joyous declaration of love ever filmed, and the massive "Broadway Ballet" is, seemingly, a satire on Kelly's own American in Paris ballet of the year before.
Gene Kelly deliciously mocks his own egocentric grandeur as the silent matinee idol Donald Lockwood—the ballet ends with an extreme close-up on his hammy, grinning face. Reynolds gives a spunky, determined performance as the girl he loves, and O'Connor out-does Danny Kaye in his loony perfection. His big number, "Make 'Em Laugh" is a classic (although the song itself is a shameless Freed rip-off of Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" from The Pirate.) Directed (nominally) by Kelly and (largely) Stanley Donen. With Millard Mitchell as the short-sighted studio boss; Douglas Fowley as the harassed movie director; and Cyd Charisse, all legs and green stockings as Kelly's partner in the ballet. Best of all is Jean Hagen as Kelly's impossibly thick-headed screen paramour. A true test of devotion is to imitate her saying, "And I can't stan' 'im!"—those who don't get it are probably not people you'd want to be around anway.
—September 4, 1999
Holiday
Can you really do a backwards flip? Grant and Hepburn in George Cukor's charming comedy of manners.
This elegant Philip Barry comedy, directed by George Cukor, kicked off a great period of collaboration between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. They'd already appeared together in Cukor's odd gender farce Sylvia Scarlett in 1935, and were about to co-star again in Howard Hawks' quintessential screwball, Bringing Up Baby—the movie that temporarily sealed Hepburn's fate as "box office poison." But Holiday is a tantalizing hint of the richness Grant and Hepburn would bring to their pairing in The Philadelphia Story two years later (again under Cukor's direction).
Grant plays Johnny Case, a nonconformist affianced to one of the daughters (Doris Nolan) of a stuffy 400 family. There's only one problem: Johnny wants to reverse the standard terms; he wants to enjoy a life of leisure before "retiring" into business. The family, needless to say, is appalled—everyone, that is, except Nolan's free-spirited sister (Hepburn). It's obvious from the beginning who Grant's going to end up with, but the Barry dialogue is so luscious the velveteen plot almost doesn't matter.
This was a breakthrough performance for Grant, whose light underplaying of the film's high comedy suggests considerable depths in Johnny's makeup, just as his own early acrobatic training gives his characterization a liquid physical grace. Hepburn is at her loveliest—you may gasp when she makes her first entrance. She's far from the arch, stereotyped image of her at the time; her playing has a freshness that even 60 years of changing fashion can't erase. There's also a heartbreaking performance by Lew Ayres as the bibulous scion of the family, who knows his future is a corporate prison sentence but lacks the strength to alter it. His presence lends the film a grave, disturbing beauty. Edward Everett Horton provides gentle support as one of Johnny's best friends. (A 1930 version also featured Horton, in the same role, paired with Hedda Hopper; Jean Dixon plays Horton's wife, delightfully, in this one.) The script is by Sidney Buchman, who wrote Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
—September 7, 1999
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
The Captain's paradise: Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney find love across the astral plane in Joseph L. Makiewicz's charming fantasy.
Joseph Mankiewicz craved a unique and perfect niche for himself as the writer and director of smart, sophisticated social comedy with the back-to-back Oscar winners A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. Before that, he was one of 20th Century-Fox's more reliable house directors, and this gentle romantic comedy gives a good indication of his gifts. It's also a damn good excuse for the not inconsiderable pleasure of staring at Gene Tierney's overbite.
Tierney is the youthful widow of the title, whose new home on the coast of Britain is said to be haunted by the shade of a sea captain. Rex Harrison gives one of his patented half-glamorous, half-bellowing performances as the spirit who prefers to live alone but who eventually succumbs to Mrs. Muir's charms. When you first see him, with his mandarin eyes, trim little beard and enviable waistline, he's almost shockingly desirable; all those re-runs of My Fair Lady can make you forget what a dashing figure Harrison cut in the 1940s.
The movie is slight and self-contained, but it slides down like honey. Aside from Harrison's outbursts (and the occasional bombast of Bernard Herrmann's otherwise glorious background score) it's a movie whose softness and gentle humor would not have been possible 10 or even 5 years later. It's a bit like a last fond adieu to a kind of lyrical, civilized pre-war romance. The film is lovely to look at, the central relationship one of refreshing maturity. The supporting cast includes Robert Coote as a nervous real estate salesman and George Sanders, whose less-cad-like-than- usual performance as the captain's rival is a mark of Mankiewicz's remarkable lightness of touch.
—September 14, 1999
Laura
But she's only a dream: Gene Tierney is radiant in Otto Preminger's nifty film noir.
Darryl Zanuck, the head of production at 20th Century-Fox, made it clear to Otto Preminger that he could produce this adaptation of the Vera Caspary novel but under no circumstances was he to direct it. That job fell to Rouben Mamoulian, a man largely at home more in the theater than on a Hollywood set. When Zanuck saw Mamoulian's rushes, he fired him. That left only Preminger to finish the job.
Zanuck needn't have worried. In Preminger's hands Laura became something of an instant classic, with Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity one of the first—and best—examples of the film noir genre. The movie made Gene Tierney a star, established Dana Andrews as a stolid leading man and, most peculiarly, set up the arch and slightly acrid Clifton Webb as a potential box office draw.
The story is lean and simple: a chic young woman named Laura has been murdered in her Manhattan apartment. A detective (Andrews) investigates the usual motley suspects: Laura's dissipated fiancee (Vincent Price); her aunt (Judith Anderson), with whom Price is obviously having an affair; and Waldo Lydecker (Webb), the cultural gadfly and radio commentator who claims to have been in love with Laura. The plot takes a perverse turn when, midway through the film, Laura (Tierney) suddenly turns up alive.
Preminger keeps the action and the occasionally purple dialogue moving at a zesty clip, and his style is shot through with noir shadings: dimly-lighted rooms full of shadow and subterfuge. It's by no means as great a film as the wonderfully ambiguous Anatomy of a Murder,which Preminger would direct 14 years later, but its pleasures are considerable. Among the incidental delights are Tierney's famous overbite, David Raksin's evocative theme music and, for the symbol-minded, the movie's central paradox: Anderson, Price and Webb—especially Webb—all seem to be playing homosexuals. (Zanuck later starred the former dancer and middle-aged specialist in priss as the urbane Mr. Belvedere in Sitting Pretty and its sequels, which were curiously popular. Imagine that Paul Lynde had become a superstar in the '60s and you have some idea just how curious.)
—September 15, 1999
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Fighting for that lost cause: Niavete, hope, cyncism, sentiment, wit and pure corn meshed miraculously together in Frank Capra's most characterstic movie.
David Denby once called James Stewart the greatest actor in American movies, and any serious study of that claim has to begin here. (Capra had used Stewart the year before, in his soft-hearted—and soft-headed—film of the Kauffman and Hart comedy You Can't Take it With You, and knew what he was getting.)
It's Stewart, in his brealthrough performance, who gives the occasionally cringe-inducing story its conviction; it's difficult to imagine any comparable actor of the period pulling off the almost grisly mix of shy gentleness, midwestern optimism, bulldog tenacity and general-purpose saintliness the role demands. His long filabuster is one of the great sequences in American movies, calling on everything Stewart could do and revealing that he could do it better than anyone—much as he would triumph over the treacle and sentimentality of Capra's It's a Wondeful Life a few years later, bringing out the darker and more desperate contours of the role and the story with greater intensity of feeling than any other star of his generation could, or would, have attempted.
1939 was a great year for the movies in general, and for Stewart in particular: he made Destry Rides Again and Made for Each Other the same year, proving his mettle in both comedy and drama—a rare feat for an actor at that time of rigid star stereotyping. In Mr. Smith he's brilliantly matched by Jean Arthur as the cynical newspaper reporter who first mocks and then embraces Smith's middle American ideals. With one of the greatest supporting casts ever assembled for one film, including Edward Arnold, Guy Kibbee, Eugene Pallette, Beaulah Bondi, Porter Hall, Charles Lane and William Demarest. Thomas Mitchell is Arthur's hard-boiled colleague, and the virtually-forgotten cowboy star Harry Carey plays the amused President of the Senate.Sidney Buchman wrote the schizophrenic screenplay (probably tampered with by the director.)
—September 17, 1999
posted by Scott Ross at 9:25 AM
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