Michael Curtiz Ranked Part 1

Michael Curtiz is one of the most prolific directors Hollywood ever knew. The number of classics he turned out during his three decade plus tenure in Hollywood is startling, yet Curtiz is routinely excluded from auteurist lists of greatest directors. This is because Curtiz was a journeyman director, a reliable craftsman who would turn his hand to whatever project the studio assigned him and create something of quality. So while you don’t necessarily get the consistent ideological or thematic vision you might find in the catalogue of an auteur (politically, Curtiz’s films go all over the map), there is a strong stylistic continuity across a much broader range of genres. Curtiz took on practically everything, from Westerns and Noirs to Comedies and Gangster films to Musicals and Swashbucklers, and he struck gold time and again. The most vapid criticism you often hear levelled at Curtiz is that anyone making that amount of films was bound to create a classic occasionally. This is patently nonsense. If you gave just anyone the chance to make five films a year for a decade, I’m pretty sure most wouldn’t come back with Casablanca. Curtiz’s prolific schedule is to be admired rather than denigrated, considering how frequently he made great films despite the necessity to then move immediately onto the next.

Given how much I already loved a handful of Curtiz’s classics, I’ve long been determined to have a bash at watching his whole filmography. In this article, I’ve come as close as I can to doing just that, ranking and reviewing the films as I went. Curtiz worked on many films in Hungary, Denmark and Austria before he came to Hollywood. I opted to exclude this period, largely because the majority of those films are lost and the ones that exist are often harder to track down. There are several lost films from the beginning of Curtiz’s Hollywood years too but in the event there were only four of his American works I failed to view. Bright Lights, Janie and The Boy from Oklahoma are all available but I could only find very expensive DVD copies that I wasn’t quite willing to pay for sight unseen. And Under a Texas Moon is only viewable on a single nitrate Technicolor print at the UCLA archive so I classed that as lost to all intents and purposes. Apart from those, I managed to see all 87 other Curtiz films and it’s been quite an experience. Though there are inevitably a lot of weak films, almost half of them are at least good and a large chunk of the others have things of interest about them. Even in this first part of my list, in which we look at the very bottom of the barrel, you’ll see glimmers of potential scuppered mainly by poor source material. I still found them interesting to watch but these first twenty films on the list are those I’d most advise all but the most dedicated cineaste to avoid.

ALL ENTRIES CONTAIN SPOILERS.

87. MISSION TO MOSCOW

Being a journeyman director can be tough. You can direct masterpieces like Casablanca and Angels with Dirty Faces and people will essentially pooh-pooh your creative contribution. Then again, there’s an upside to being a journeyman director too, in that you can direct a piece of pro-Stalin propaganda and when that proves to have been a very bad idea the blame doesn’t rest with you. That was just the film to which you were assigned at that time. Michael Curtiz’s filmography is not defined by a consistent political viewpoint so repugnant films like Santa Fe Trail and Mission to Moscow did not become a blot on his legacy in the same way they would to an auteur who decisively chose those projects. You can detect Curtiz’s presence in his stylistic techniques and storytelling verve but his personal detachment from the material allows for an incredibly diverse filmography in terms of genre, tone and ideology. 

Mission to Moscow is interesting in that it gives us a glimpse of a brief political window during which Hollywood made a handful of pro-Soviet films in order to strengthen the wartime allied relationship between the USA and Russia. Mission to Moscow was made by the special request of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is once again portrayed in the film by Captain Jack Young, as he had been in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Walter Huston stars as Joseph E. Davies, whose 1941 book of the same name chronicled Davies’s experiences as American Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Davies appears before the film begins to give a dry direct address to the viewer about the importance of the film. Unfortunately, this sets the tone for the semi-documentary style approach taken by Howard Koch’s screenplay and the result is dry and, across the course of two hours, somewhat torturous. Curtiz attempts to bring some flair to proceedings but there’s a clear detachment here. Curtiz and Koch had just collaborated on Casablanca, a career highlight that won the Best Picture Oscar. You can understand the less than enthusiastic response to being stuck on such a drearily mechanical piece of propaganda. Mission to Moscow would later attract the attention of HUAC and poor old Koch carried the can for it. It played a part in his 1951 blacklisting, something that Jack Warner avoided despite having been the one who requested that Koch write the screenplay. So maybe being a journeyman isn’t quite as safe as I imagined.

For those who have a particular interest in this era of US/Soviet relations, Mission to Moscow might hold some interest as a piece of hokey propaganda. As someone who knows little beyond the fact that Stalin wasn’t just everyone’s favourite uncle, the full horror of Mission to Moscow’s deliberate omissions and distortions only became fully apparent through subsequent research. Ultimately, I enjoyed reading up on Mission to Moscow’s production story more than I did watching the tedious film itself. I’d honestly rather rewatch the Police Academy film of the same name.

86. FRANCIS OF ASSISI

In reviewing Michael Curtiz’s penultimate film, Francis of Assisi, the Los Angeles Times critic Philip K. Scheuer observed “the picture’s appeal is limited decidedly to the devout and to those who would seek serene affirmation of their Christian faith.” I tend to agree with Scheuer’s assessment and, while there is no reason such a film shouldn’t be made, it should hardly have come as a surprise when it became a box office bomb. Such pious pictures were going out of fashion as anti-authoritarian attitudes began to crack the overbearing facade of Hays Code governed cinema. Of course, Ben-Hur had just been a huge hit but it supplemented its religious content with spectacular action sequences. Viewing it felt like an event, whereas viewing Francis of Assisi feels like a sermon delivered by an especially uncharismatic preacher. The film certainly takes some inspiration from Ben-Hur in its frustrated aspirations to epic scope. Francis of Assisi only runs to 105 minutes but its almost complete lack of narrative conflict creates an interminably dry experience that makes it seem almost as long as Ben-Hur’s three and a half hours. The screenplay is all lumbering rhetoric and the performances over-enunciated and underacted. Unless you have a particular interest in Francis of Assisi, whose life story is apparently treated with an attention to facts uncharacteristic of Hollywood Biopics, then there’s practically nothing to recommend seeking out this film. It may be a pleasing and validating experience for believers but in the case of non-believers the only conversion it is likely to affect is turning agnostics into atheists.

85. SANTA FE TRAIL

Santa Fe Trail was the final Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland film directed by Michael Curtiz (the stars reunited one last time a year later for They Died with Their Boots On directed by Raoul Walsh, as well as making separate guest appearances as themselves in David Butler’s 1943 musical novelty Thank Your Lucky Stars). Their collaborations, particularly Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Dodge City, had been decisive in Curtiz’s transition to big name director but aside from the three aforementioned films most of the collaborations had been a bit below par. Given the Action/Adventure genre in which they usually appeared together, the spotlight was generally thrown on Flynn while de Havilland was woefully marginalised. It happens again in Santa Fe Trail, with de Havilland clearly being too good to be sprinkling obligatory romance around the periphery while an awkward Flynn and a wooden Ronald Reagan take centre stage. But bad acting is the least of Santa Fe Trail’s problems. The film has become notorious in more recent times for the at best ambivalent attitude it takes towards slavery. At one point, Flynn’s J.E.B. Stuart sagely declares “It’s not our job to decide who’s right and who’s wrong about slavery” and the film clearly prods us to agree. Its main thesis proclaims to be about how whatever your cause, violence is not the way to achieve your ends, a controversial opinion when it comes to a cause in which violence is being systematically meted out to the victims. But Santa Fe Trail goes a step further, wanting us to believe that the morality of slavery is a nuanced subject rather than a bleeding obvious abomination. The film sets out its argument with the same bad faith stubbornness as those internet millions who don’t know the difference between being entitled to an opinion and every opinion being valid.

I don’t have a lot to say about Santa Fe Trail. Normally I at least try to contextualise problematic material and weigh it against a film’s other qualities but Santa Fe Trail is so dull that it’s hard to focus on anything but its foul ideology. The main villain of the piece of John Brown, a real historical abolitionist whose controversial methods make him a promising subject. But the film portrays him as a wild-eyed maniac, seemingly agog that he could get this steamed up over something like slavery. The talented Raymond Massey, who would portray Brown a second time fifteen years later in Seven Angry Men, is wasted in this version of the role, the one-note screenplay not allowing for anything but the most basic ranting and raving. That screenplay was by Robert Buckner who also wrote Curtiz’s previous Westerns, Dodge City and Virginia City. The latter, released the same year as Santa Fe Trail, also looked at the tensions between the North and South but didn’t weigh in on the issue of slavery. Both films seem designed to unite Americans with opposing attitudes in the face of the looming threat of war from abroad, but only Santa Fe Trail seeks to do so at the expense of a whole race of people whose plight it casually shrugs off. Emancipation would be nice, it seems to say, but not if it’s going to drive a wedge between people who look like me.

Santa Fe Trail is competently directed with a few decently realised bits of action but the foul stench of its attempts to downplay a historical evil is just impossible to ignore. I was actually pleased that the storytelling itself was so bland as no part of me wanted to like this film. United Artists Television, who inherited the pre-1950 Warner Bros. library, seemed to agree and let the copyright lapse in 1968, the same year John Lennon was being criticised by certain activists for decrying violence as a route to peace in The Beatles’ Revolution. But Lennon was much clearer in his messaging across three and a half minutes than the dithering slavery-sympathetic Santa Fe Trail manages in 110 minutes.

84. THE EGYPTIAN

The Egyptian is notable in Michael Curtiz’s filmography for one reason: it was his first Hollywood film not made for Warner Bros. Curtiz had been with Warner Bros. for 27 years but a pay dispute ultimately ended that working relationship. He would make one last film for Warner’s in 1957 but for the rest of his career Curtiz became a director for hire, mostly working for Paramount and 20th Century Fox. It was for that latter studio that Curtiz made the Historical Epic The Egyptian. Curtiz was not really a director known for his Epics. The last one had been 1928’s Noah’s Ark during which he killed a bunch of people. At a push you could maybe include 1936’s The Charge of the Light Brigade during which he killed a bunch of horses. Such heinous negligence must’ve seemed like too much of a gamble when it came to such large scale productions but Curtiz’s style was more suited to intimate, human stories anyway. When Warner’s big name director suddenly became available, it makes sense that another studio would want to put him on their most prestige project but The Egyptian proved to be a turkey unsuited to both Curtiz’s abilities and the audience’s desire to be entertained. Based on the 1945 novel by Mika Waltari, regarded as a masterpiece of Finnish literature, Curtiz and screenwriters Philip Dunne and Casey Robinson adapted The Egyptian into a film so lumpen that it’s a struggle to even Finnish watching! 

The fact that I’ve resorted to half-baked puns so early in my review (that’s usually a third paragraph thing at the earliest) betrays the fact that I don’t have a great deal to say about The Egyptian. This kind of po-faced pseudo-historical dirge has never been my thing, though I’ve seen several examples over the years. Some have been tolerable or even good, like Ben-Hur or The Fall of the Roman Empire, but mostly I find them quite tedious. The Egyptian is one of the most egregious examples I’ve endured and while its 140 minute runtime is comparatively economical, its unbearably sluggish storytelling, clunky dialogue, garish look and stilted acting make Ben-Hur’s 222 minutes seem like a breeze by comparison. Despite the talents of Jean Simmons, Gene Tierney, Victor Mature and Peter Ustinov, the human element on which Curtiz’s work thrives feels completely missing. Working at a new studio in a genre with which he was rarely associated, it seems clear that Curtiz is out of his element, just grinding his way through the material and hoping the opulence of the production will be enough alone to carry it. It isn’t. The Egyptian, despite its grand canvas, feels oddly artificial and small. The only moment of action is a tepid lion hunt with some feeble effects and no real tension. Don’t be waiting for a chariot race to bail you out. This is nearly two hours of melodramatic anguish and people in rooms spouting ripe dialogue as if it is Shakespeare in the hope that no one will notice its first-draft dreariness.

83. A SOLDIER’S PLAYTHING

You don’t have to get too far into A Soldier’s Plaything before you realise that Michael Curtiz just isn’t trying here. In his defence, he clearly realised he’d been stuck with inferior material and adjusted his level of enthusiasm accordingly. The film was an attempt to transition the popular silent comedian Harry Langdon into sound films, although he gets lumbered with the second-banana sidekick role to Ben Lyon’s conventional romantic lead. At the time of writing, I’ve still never seen any of Langdon’s other work but while he lives in the shadow of silent comedy’s big three – Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd – Langdon does have his fans even if his films are rarely screened anymore. I’m reluctant to judge Langdon from this performance as it would likely be as misguided a move as judging the merits of Buster Keaton based on his terrible sound pictures alone, but Langdon is clearly at his best here when he is performing silent physical routines, such as when he mimes along with the hypothetical orders being barked by a superior officer, or when he is dancing around the gunfire of a sideshow patron who shoots down targets quicker than Langdon can reset them. When he is saying things, as he all too often is, Langdon seems to be struggling to approximate his strange, wide-eyed manchild act in a verbal world that can’t really contain him. He is also trying and inevitably failing to compensate for a conspicuously lousy screenplay by Perry N. Vekroff, that meanders through a string of vignettes that fail time and again to make use of their army setting or game but floundering cast.

It’s only fair to mention that the version of A Soldier’s Plaything that I saw is the 56 minute US cut. The brief runtime is due to the film being chopped up to remove musical numbers after the Musical genre began to fall from favour. Reportedly, a 71 minute version was originally screened in other countries but it is the shorter cut that remains readily available today. Perhaps the hacking up of A Soldier’s Plaything accounts for its extremely choppy approach, which keeps interrupting the action with intrusive title cards that seem to be telling us things the film could quite easily be showing us instead. The comedy premise of two disruptive new recruits repeatedly falling foul of a huffy superior would become something of a comedic staple but the situations are so poorly conceived and delivered with such a complete lack of verve that it’s hard to believe as little as 15 minutes has been removed from the film. At times it seems the punchlines and even the setups have ended up on the cutting room floor, with only meandering middles remaining.

There is an initiating event in the plot in which Lyon’s Georgie believes he has killed a man in a fight and so reluctantly follows Langdon’s Tim into the service in order to evade the law. This plot thread is not revisited until the final few minutes of the film when it becomes a barrier to Georgie’s plans to take his new fiancé home with him. It’s a shame this plot resurfaces so late given that this is the one part of the film where some kind of interest is briefly stimulated, with Curtiz layering transparent images of Coney Island over the homesick Georgie as he waxes lyrical about America. Literally one scene later, the problem is hurriedly resolved when Georgie discovers that his supposed victim didn’t die at all. There’s no dramatic tension there whatsoever. The scenario inflates and then deflates with the speed of a rapidly pumped pair of bellows.

A Soldier’s Plaything isn’t an absolute abomination but it is so drearily uneventful that it leaves the viewer feeling that a spectacular failure might’ve been preferable. Aside from a couple of very mildly agreeable moments, I sat stony faced throughout its mercifully brief runtime. 

82. JIMMY THE GENT

As a fan of James Cagney and Bette Davis, and having been largely impressed by Michael Curtiz’s Pre-Code Comedies, I was really looking forward to watching Jimmy the Gent. Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of Curtiz’s weakest films. A convoluted comedy about rival agencies that search for the heirs of unclaimed fortunes (and try and fake it if they can’t find them), there is a promisingly amoral air to the film’s premise but the peculiar plotting makes it easy to lose the thread amidst the 100mph yammering. This high-speed approach would work wonders in the imminent Screwball genre but in the case of Jimmy the Gent everyone seems to be talking fast to cover up the lack of wit rather than enhance the comedy.

Reportedly neither Cagney nor Davis were happy to be assigned this lacklustre screenplay and their performances play more like acts of sabotage than star turns. If that sounds a bit harsh, it’s worth noting that Cagney deliberately adopted a strange haircut in order to scupper the film. He appears with the sides of his head shaved, much to the chagrin of Curtiz and Davis, the latter refusing to appear in publicity photos with him. It might be fair to say Cagney’s hair is the funniest thing in Jimmy the Gent. He tackles the feeble material by overplaying fiercely, like a bad Cagney impersonator or a caricature from one of those Hollywood themed cartoons of the Golden Age. The miscast Davis goes the other way, clearly making zero effort to the point that she could be mistaken for a bad actor. There’s little more to say about Jimmy the Gent. Even at 67 minutes, its abrasive unfunniness is excruciating and its tangled plot bewildering and tedious. 

81. FEMALE

Whenever I watch an older film in which the protagonist is an empowered woman, I often spend the runtime trying to figure out whether the character is meant to be a role model or is being set-up for an eleventh hour conversion to domesticity. In nearly every case I end up disappointed, if hardly surprised, that the second option proves to be the case. With Female however, the eventual turnaround was so instantaneous and drastic that it felt like a deliberate parody of my expectations. Indeed, some have even suggested that it is just that, a sarcastic overreaction to the demands of censors that still affected even Pre-Code cinema. The excellent site Pre-code.com points out that the moment in which Ruth Chatterton’s sexually liberated businesswoman prepares herself to forsake her lifestyle and marry George Brent’s chauvinistic traditionalist, she approaches him at a carnival shooting gallery next to a large sign that reads ‘Take Home a Pig.’ Having made the compromise, the betrothed couple drive away with a small piglet squealing over the top of chunks of their dialogue. I can only imagine it is a male piglet and its squealing is an attempt to explain the metaphor to the woman.

Were these details inserted as a deliberate kiss off to the censors? If so, were they placed there by the writers, one of whom, Kathryn Scola, was a woman? As Michael Curtiz displayed no consistent political outlook in his work I can’t imagine the director was responsible, although this slim 60 minute feature actually passed through the hands of three different directors on its way to the screen. It could be that the pig metaphor only seems obvious through modern eyes and was not intended at all, but then the final moment in which Chatterton’s Alison hands over control of her business to her fiancé and then declares her intention to have nine children just seems too excessive to not be at least partially facetious. Even though the implication of subversive dissent makes for a tantalising prospect, without some kind of confirmation of this from a reputable source the film remains a frustrating relic. 

Female will not play at all for those who cannot adjust for historical context and even then it’s a hard sell. That lumbering one word title is one jagged exclamation mark away from being a Horror movie moniker and that fear of the unknown often seems palpable amongst the men depicted in the film, the ones who made it and the ones expected to view it. But there’s something more interesting and alarming going on here than just the standard “powerful women need to be married off and shut down” narrative, especially in the context of the MeToo era. Chatterton’s Alison Drake isn’t just the headstrong, successful owner of an automobile company, she’s a sexual predator who abuses her power in order to bed a string of male employees. In its era, the film probably frowned upon Alison’s sexual exploits chiefly because they were being enjoyed by a woman and outside of wedlock. But what is far more likely to raise eyebrows now is the fact that she targets attractive members of staff, demands they meet her for dinner at her house ostensibly to discuss work issues, deliberately plies them with vodka to lower their defences and then sleeps with them. Those who threaten to get too attached afterwards are shipped off to work in Canada. Interestingly, the film acknowledges that this is merely the flipside of how men of the era treated women but there’s also the overwhelming sense that it is worse when the behaviour is perpetrated by a… Female!

Although several reviewers find Female quite witty and enjoyable, as far as I could tell the only source of interest came from its unfathomable gender politics. There’s no denying that the sheer excesses of its apparent chauvinism are so extreme that they become hysterical, although whether I’m supposed to be laughing at or with the film is annoyingly unclear and I might potentially get different responses depending on which definitely dead contributors I consulted. But even if the ending was indeed laced with satirical intent, at best that would still make Female an open-minded celebration of how sexual harassment ought to be available to all genders. Or “both genders” as they would have said back in the 30s. Bastards.

80. THE MATRIMONIAL BED

The second of four collaborations between Michael Curtiz and the largely forgotten (and, by his peers, widely detested) vaudevillian Frank Fay, The Matrimonial Bed is an extremely minor entry in the Curtiz filmography. Based on a farcical French play, this is the stagiest of Curtiz’s productions, with the plot and setting giving him little opportunity to do anything visually interesting or open the film out to make it cinematic. The English version of the play adapted by Seymour Hicks reportedly closed after thirteen performances and it’s not hard to see why. Though the stage version may have been blessed with a better cast and the more receptive theatrical environment, the film of The Matrimonial Bed clearly betrays the overly silly plot and how it struggles to sustain even 70 minutes of runtime. The story concerns Adolphe Noblet, a man who apparently died in a train wreck five years before the opening of the film. When a man bearing a striking resemblance to Adolphe turns up at his old residence claiming to be a hairdresser named Leopold Trebel it quickly becomes apparent that Adolphe did not die in the crash but rather sustained a prolonged case of amnesia, to the extent that he has remarried and fathered two children since. Adolphe’s wife Juliet, who has also remarried and had a child, is taken aback by this arrival and when a doctor hypnotises her old husband to help him remember his previous life, he immediately resumes his old role as head of the household, much to the shock of Juliet’s new husband.

I suppose there’s a hint of potential in The Matrimonial Bed’s outlandish plot, perhaps dulled by how often the concepts of amnesia and hypnotism have been used in absurd Comedies since 1930. It’s also probably fair to mention that the print I saw wasn’t in the best shape and the occasionally amusing dialogue might’ve hit the target more frequently had it not sounded like it was being delivered through a mouthful of washcloth. There is the occasional highpoint, chiefly James Gleason’s performance as new husband Gustave, and the overt pre-Code gay jokes were worthy of historical note, if not especially funny to modern audiences. Probably the main issue with The Matrimonial Bed is Fay himself, who clearly doesn’t have the makings of a movie star. He would fare slightly better in Curtiz’s later God’s Gift to Women but his inability to play his dual role with anything approaching comedic differentiation feels like a disastrous missed opportunity. Still, it’s hard to mourn what could’ve been too much when it’s clear that at best The Matrimonial Bed was destined to be an amusing theatre experience neutered by its awkward transfer to the screen.

79. BRITISH AGENT

Coming right off the back of Michael Curtiz’s previous film The Key, I can’t say I was delighted to be immediately faced with another weak Melodrama with elements of espionage but British Agent proved to be just that. The film has a slightly higher budget and a couple of stars in Leslie Howard and Kay Francis (the latter working with Curtiz for the third time) but the more impressive settings and small snatches of action can’t overcome the flatness of the concept or screenplay. Howard is the kind of actor who, given the right role as in that same year’s The Scarlet Pimpernel or the later Pygmalion, could be thoroughly charming but given the wrong role, most famously his misjudged turn as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, could feel awkwardly stiff. It’s hard to say that Howard isn’t a good fit for the role of a British agent (certainly more so than The Key’s William Powell) but he sleepwalks through the part in a manner that, to be fair, is almost inevitable given the stuffy script. Francis is slightly more interesting as his Russian lover who will always choose her country over him and British Agent does manage to keep its politics and love story convincingly intertwined, which The Key failed to do. That said, The Key had a bit more life to it whereas British Agent lives up to its spectacularly uninteresting title.

78. A BREATH OF SCANDAL

The artistic, critical and commercial failure of the American/Italian film A Breath of Scandal is usually blamed entirely on Michael Curtiz. Although it is a terribly directed film, there is more wrong here than just the lacklustre work of an ageing director. A Breath of Scandal feels like the epitome of a Euro-pudding, an international co-production in which too many cooks have soiled the bed. The film is often described as “lavish” and there is certainly an evident budget in Mario Montuori’s Technicolor cinematography, the lush Viennese locations and especially George Hoyningen-Huene’s excellent costumes. But whoever was in charge of casting immediately erected a barrier to credibility by casting the British Isabel Jeans and the French Maurice Chevalier as the parents of the Italian Sophia Loren, all characters who are supposedly Austrian. In truth, I’ve never had too much problem with this nationality-blind casting because my desire to see certain actors has often fuelled my willingness to suspend disbelief. Certainly, Loren is crucial in just about holding this thing together, her startling beauty too often highlighted above the strong comedic timing and charisma she exudes. Chevalier still has an impish twinkle, although there’s a creakiness beginning to make itself evident as he is forced to croak out snatches of songs with a dwindling enthusiasm. Angela Lansbury is underused as a scheming Countess and her fleeting appearances are highlights. But it is John Gavin who really torpedoes the film with a stiff, lifeless performance in a leading role that requires passion and range. 

Gavin’s own recollections about A Breath of Scandal have been instrumental in fingering Curtiz as the chief culprit behind its weakness. Gavin reportedly voiced his concerns to Loren that they were making a very bad film and soon afterwards Vittorio De Sica began showing up on set to reshoot scenes behind Curtiz’s back. Exactly which scenes De Sica supposedly shot is unclear but there is no noticeable uptick in quality at any point and perhaps the confusion of adding a second director’s work to the mix resulted in an even more confused production. Screenwriter Walter Bernstein was responsible for adapting Ferenc Molnár’s play Olympia and he was so unhappy with the resulting film that he asked for his name to taken off the credits. This was despite the fact that Bernstein had been blacklisted for many years and was keen to get his name back out there. This is illustrative of just how much people dislike A Breath of Scandal, although to be fair there is little evidence of salvageable wit in Bernstein’s adaptation. The combination of miscast players, a bad screenplay, a shambolic production and, yes, an ill-equipped director result in a flabby, tedious Period Comedy that is best left to drift in the obscurity it quickly made its own.

77. THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

The more of Michael Curtiz’s films I watch, the more I love him as a director but the more I read about him, the more I despise him as a man. Aside from his legendary rudeness and coldness towards the actors with whom he worked, Curtiz clearly thought the end result was worth pretty much any sacrifice. During the making of the 1928 Epic Noah’s Ark, Curtiz’s cavalier attitude to safety ended up costing the lives of three extras, leading to the implementation of stunt safety regulations the following year. Eight years later, that same cavalier attitude resulted in the death of twenty-five horses on the set of The Charge of the Light Brigade, a cruel sacrifice that caused the film’s star Errol Flynn to physically attack Curtiz in a fit of rage. The fight was broken up but while the two men continued to work together on many more successful films, their relationship reportedly never recovered. In this case, Curtiz’s actions led to the US congress and the ASPCA creating legislature to ban animal cruelty by filmmakers.

Given its harrowing history, it’s hard to go into The Charge of the Light Brigade with a smile and a song. It’s a shame considering what a joyous film the first Flynn/Curtiz collaboration Captain Blood had been. Then again, The Charge of the Light Brigade is a very different kind of film from Captain Blood and while both have been referred to as Adventure films, Captain Blood was lively, fast-paced and fun, while The Charge of the Light Brigade is draggy, pompous and dull. Olivia de Havilland is back as the love interest and once again she acts her male co-stars off the screen, although she apparently also acts herself off the screen as she is absent from the militaristic tedium for lengthy stretches. To be honest, epic War films have always been amongst my least favourite kinds of movie and The Charge of the Light Brigade is no exception. I tried to go in with an open mind but it quickly became clear that the film was going to fit my preconceptions about a load of mustachioed men talking about war punctuated by a few confusing and dull battle scenes. That’s fine if the dialogue is good and the battles exciting but Michael Jacoby and Rowland Leigh have turned in the most basically functional screenplay imaginable. There’s also a love triangle in here which is never remotely engaging. If Captain Blood made Flynn’s star quality abundantly clear, sticking him with a stuffy role like this one shows how fragile that quality is. Flynn’s charisma simply drains away as he is bolted to a horse and strictly forbidden to swing from chandeliers or crack a boyish grin.

The final battle scene of The Charge of the Light Brigade is frequently cited as its greatest achievement or, for those not keen on the rest of the film, its saving grace. The scene is big, that’s undeniable, but that’s a non-achievement akin to Spinal Tap’s enshrinement as “one of England’s loudest bands.” Curtiz used tripwires to knock down the horses and with this knowledge it quickly becomes clear that all you’re really watching is droves of unsuspecting animals racing forward and being violently floored. The lucky ones get back up again. Watching the flood scenes in Noah’s Ark is an experience tainted by knowledge of their tragic cost but at least those scenes are so massive that you’d never pick out the actors who drowned. The Charge of the Light Brigade’s finale involves little else but having to watch the horses smash into the dirt and I presume many of the deaths were caught on camera. You could say that the scenes are well edited to create a frantic forward motion but it’s just a lot of visual noise really, less spectacular than it is just upsetting. You can see why Flynn wanted to punch Curtiz in the nose as it’s left me feeling much the same way.

The moral considerations surrounding The Charge of the Light Brigade’s infamous finale certainly have a major bearing on why I couldn’t stand the film but it was all I could do to get that far through it. The build up to the mass slaughter is just so incredibly tedious that even a spectacular battle scene with zero real life cruelty wouldn’t have done anything to save it. This just isn’t my kind of film and to be honest that’s something of a relief given the complexity involved in liking such an ethically repugnant article. 

76. PRIVATE DETECTIVE 62

Private Detective 62 is a curious little Pre-Code Crime film. In general, most of Michael Curtiz’s early Hollywood work has something of note about it but the only real takeaway from Private Detective 62 is how much better star William Powell is than practically everything else in the film. Curtiz’s previous film The Keyhole had felt like it was struggling to stretch its material to feature length. By contrast, Private Detective 62 feels like a screenplay with too many ideas and too little time. The screenplay offers no explanation as to what the 62 in the title refers but I can only imagine it’s either the number of plot threads the film attempts to establish or the number of minutes it takes the film to really get going. Often the slender runtimes of these Pre-Code films suit them down to the ground, allowing modest premises to be executed in flab-free fashion. But Private Detective 62 feels like it needs about an extra hour to properly flesh out every plot point it so frivolously zips past.

It’s a shame Private Detective 62 fumbles its material so badly because it’s easy to glimpse the merest hint of a really enjoyable Crime Thriller with a comedic edge. After about twenty minutes, I was quite enjoying the film but I couldn’t fight the disconcerting sense that it was already a third over and nothing had really happened. That is to say, nothing had happened onscreen. In terms of the plot, Powell’s State Department spy had been issued with a mission to steal French state papers, been caught, disavowed, deported and then struggled to find work in a society hit by the Depression. Of these potentially exciting details, the only one the film opts to show is the unsuccessful job search. The entire spy set-up is covered by a brief meeting of Powell and his superiors to discuss the plan in the vaguest terms, followed by shots of a newspaper reporting the failure of the mission and then a fleeting courtroom address in untranslated French. I’m not asking for Mission Impossible: Pre-Code Nation here but if you’re going to attempt a story with such a promising premise you could at least show us something.

Perhaps I’m missing the point. Perhaps Private Detective 62 was always meant to be a down-and-dirty look at desperate times and unscrupulous measures in Depression era America, without the glamour that a French caper prologue might’ve brought. But the film never quite balances its depiction of seedy deals and violent consequences with its half-realised comedic aspirations. As with the multiple storylines, too many tones have been tossed into the pot and curdled into confusion. After a denouement involving grim deception and death, the image of a lust-propelled Powell racing up multiple flights of stairs to get to his lover feels like an ending spliced in from a Screwball Comedy. Curtiz and Powell would reteam later that same year for the much better The Kennel Murder Case in which Powell played a detective once again before the Thin Man series provided his best known PI role. Powell did also star in some other earlier Detective films before Private Detective 62, though sadly not 61 of them. That would’ve explained a lot.

75. FORCE OF ARMS

Force of Arms is a War film that must have already felt woefully outdated in 1951. With its similar title and plot, this tale of a romance between a wearied soldier and Women’s Army Corps Officer is frequently compared to Frank Borzage’s 1932 adaptation of A Farewell to Arms, another film that did very little for me. In the case of Curtiz’s film, the major problem is how absolutely flat the central romance is. William Holden and Nancy Olson were both good in Sunset Boulevard but their decent chemistry wasn’t really begging for a whole slate of films throwing them together. Force of Arms was the third of four such films but the actors seem noticeably skeptical of their material, failing to sell their hurried infatuation. To be a fan of Golden Age Hollywood, you have to accept the tendency to depict love as something that happens in a matter of hours, sometimes even seconds, but as a genuine romantic I find this notion more of a mockery of love than a beautiful notion to make me swoon. When Holden’s Pete is declaring undying, lifelong devotion to Olson’s Eleanor after a very short amount of time, it just seems laughable. Films like A Matter of Life and Death have managed to make even shorter courtships work but that film wrapped its preposterous romance in a fantasy context. When set against Force of Arms’ gritty battle sequences, the love story here just seems like throwaway schmaltz, speeded up for the sake of the story’s timeframe.

To be honest, I didn’t approach Force of Arms with an especially open mind. I’ve never been much of a fan of the sort of War film that features confusing battle scenes in which shots are fired at indeterminate targets and random explosions go off all around the protagonist until someone shouts something like “They’ve taken the hill” and it all stops. There’s a bit of that incoherent battlefield tedium in Force of Arms but after a few minutes of the romantic plot I was keen to get back to it. If you’re particularly fond of wartime stories and see love at first sight as more than a concept that shallow people use to elevate their everyday lust to heroic levels then you might enjoy Force of Arms. Otherwise you’re probably safe to give it a miss.

74. JIM THORPE- ALL AMERICAN

Jim Thorpe – All American is the sort of bland, serious-minded Biopic with which I have always struggled. It also suffers from the same roster of problems that scupper so many Biopics, old and modern. The remarkable achievements of its subject, great Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, are supplemented by standard Biopic tropes that show scant consideration for the real story. I could forgive that to some extent if it made the film more entertaining but quite the opposite is true. This strange Hollywood allegiance to hitting certain beats in all its Biopics made the majority of them so grindingly similar that it’s hard to feel any level of excitement, while the fudged facts make it tough to maintain interest when all the viewer wants to do is look up what really happened. 

Jim Thorpe – All American has a particular problem of its own in the casting of Burt Lancaster as a Native American icon. It’s highly unlikely that an actual Native American actor would’ve even been considered for the lead role in 1951 so perhaps we should cut the film a little slack for its desire to get a story about Native Americans told that wouldn’t otherwise have reached the screen. But when we reach the plot point of Thorpe losing a job for which he is not qualified to a rival who happens to be white it’s just completely impossible to countenance the moralising tone when Burt is stood there in all his non-Native glory. Had Jim Thorpe – All American been properly cast then it still would’ve been a boring, derivative Biopic but at least it might’ve earned its right to wag a finger. Robbed of desperately needed credibility in the face of everything else, the film is rendered untenable.

73. THE STORY OF WILL ROGERS

I can only imagine the Freudian nightmare Will Rogers Jr. must’ve experienced while playing his own father in The Story of Will Rogers: “OK, Will, so today you’re going to be kissing Jane Wyman. She’ll be dressed as and acting like your mother. This is the scene where she agrees to marry you. Aaaaaand… action!”

This thought occurred to me while watching The Story of Will Rogers mainly because my brain was looking for alternative entertainment. I’m not going to waste too much time discussing this film lest my review just turn into me reiterating my general dislike of Biopics once again. To be fair, this one doesn’t so much fall victim to the usual tropes of the genre as get bogged down in an oppressively folksy vibe. It’s the correct tone for its subject but having very little knowledge of or attachment to Will Rogers himself, I found this a bit of a chore. I actually like the idea of a gentle, witty “humorist” but I’ve never been overly impressed by the handful of Rogers films I’ve seen and his schtick here, as rather ghoulishly performed by his own son, fell flat for me too. And no part of me wants to watch defenceless steer being roped. If you like Will Rogers, you may like this more than I did. It is handsomely mounted at the very least, with Wilfred M. Cline’s colour cinematography indicating that Warner Bros. probably had high hopes for this to be the next Yankee Doodle Dandy. It failed in this regard and received mostly lukewarm reviews, perhaps marking the moment Curtiz was finally let out of the Biopic box after directing three in a row.

72. PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE

There was a joke many years ago on the music panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks about the 1980s band The Vapors that went something like this: “The Vapors were often compared to The Jam. People would say “Compared to The Jam, they’re rubbish.”” This is essentially how I feel about Passage to Marseille in relation to Casablanca, the only difference being that I quite like The Vapors.

The demands of wartime had temporarily made Michael Curtiz’s filmography less invigoratingly unpredictable, with a flavour of propaganda hanging heavily over many of his films of the early 40s. The better ones, like Casablanca or The Sea Wolf, kept the connections allegorical or tangential, but Passage to Marseille leans heavily into maudlin themes of patriotism and duty. It’s easy to be dismissive of this stuff in retrospect but it’s understandable that it would be seen as important to deliver these propagandist tracts to audiences living through the hell of wartime. In the case of Passage to Marseille, the point was to pay homage to the French resistance. This laudable intention to honour allies during the time of war had recently seen the creation of the deeply regrettable pro-Stalin Mission to Moscow but in the case of Passage to Marseille the major problem is just that the story is extremely dull. Comparisons with Casablanca are frequently made largely on the basis of the two films sharing a director and several cast members, including Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine and Sydney Greenstreet. What they unfortunately don’t share is a writer. In particular, the absence of Julius and Philip Epstein, whose Casablanca dialogue was smooth, poetic and witty, is keenly felt in Passage to Marseille’s mechanically plodding screenplay. In an attempt to compensate for its shortcomings, the film is structured as a series of flashbacks within flashbacks, a Chinese boxes gimmick which adds very little to the narrative apart from mild confusion.

With so little by way of an emotionally engaging script to get their teeth into, the wonderful cast seem to be struggling a bit. As French gunner Jean Matrac, Bogart seems badly miscast and when he briefly looked like he would be unable to take part in the film, his suggested replacement, Jean Gabin, seemed to make a lot more sense. Not that the accent needs to match the actor to make it a great film. Claude Rains, after all, was a very British-sounding Frenchman in Casablanca and his performance there is one of my favourite of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In Passage to Marseille he is tasked with playing a Frenchman again, only this time with no good lines or notable scenes on which to fall back. Bogart and Rains, two extremely reliable screen presences, both seem bored by their material. Not only does Passage to Marseille take a long time to ramble to a close, it climaxes with yet another heroic protagonist death. I understand the purpose of ending so many propaganda films in this way. It had the dual intention of convincing potential soldiers that the risk was worth it while comforting the families of those already killed in combat by painting their deaths as a glorious sacrifice. But after you’ve seen so many War films that end with the main character being killed and eulogised, it does start to feel like Hollywood saw dying for your country as the objective rather than the worst case scenario.

I’ve got very little else to say about Passage to Marseille. I could talk more about The Vapors though. Their first album, New Clear Days, is perhaps more famous as it contains the hit Turning Japanese, but I’ve always really liked their second album, Magnets, from 1981. Still, compared to The Jam they were rubbish.

71. NIGHT AND DAY

Night and Day has never had a very good reputation and, despite it being a big hit upon release, few people have seen it these days. A Biopic of songwriter Cole Porter which is infamously fictionalised to the point of redundancy, Night and Day is a film I approached having already made allowances. I knew that the film bore very little comparison with reality, even less so than most examples of this freely-fudging genre, and that Cary Grant was wildly miscast in the lead role. As well as his general lack of singing talent (his vocal performances are competent but passionless), Grant bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real Porter, to the point where the natural reaction is incredulous laughter. Porter, still very much alive during the film’s production and release, quite rightly pointed out that few people would object to hearing that Cary Grant would be playing them in a Biopic, although there are some reports that his casting stemmed from a sarcastic joke by Porter that was taken seriously by the studio. Whatever the case, I was more than happy to watch Grant play a Grantified version of a man living a life that bore little resemblance to that of the supposed subject. The problem with Night and Day then is not that it is so inaccurate but that it is so terribly boring. Grant was not happy with the screenplay and was often grumpy on set, demanding rewrites before he would cooperate. Although this sounds like the behaviour of a prima donna, one shouldn’t judge until they’ve seen the film itself. Given that what we’re watching is presumably the redraft, imagining what came before it is almost enough to drive me to a hissy fit of my own.

Of course, the main event of Night and Day is the music and there are bucketloads of Cole Porter tunes here for those who are interested. Personally, though some are undeniably great, I’ve only ever had a passing interest in Porter’s work and some of his songs are a tad irritating. Either way, the versions presented here are mostly far inferior to those I’ve heard elsewhere, with big showstoppers rendered pedestrian by lacklustre performances and insipid choreography. Even the glorious Technicolor is oddly muted. Night and Day, from its subject matter to its loose presentation, feels like a transparent attempt to recapture the success of Michael Curtiz’s previous hit Yankee Doodle Dandy but it lacks the energy, wit and warmth of that film, not to mention the dynamite central performance. This is not Grant’s fault, given that he has practically nothing to work with, and the stacked cast that includes the likes of Jane Wyman, Eve Arden, Dorothy Malone and Alexis Smith struggles to introduce any supporting colour. It is left to Monty Woolley, playing a variation on himself, to carry the film and he is a delight, although the majority of his dialogue seems to consist of responding to questions by going “LOOK AT MY MASSIVE BEARD!”

If you’re not a Cole Porter fan, Night and Day is unlikely to make one of you, and if you are a Cole Porter fan its wilful inaccuracy is likely to annoy you. I can see how the temptation of the Porter catalogue was too strong to resist building a film around but the comparative dramatic mundanity of his actual life ought to have put paid to the notion of making it a Biopic. What they should’ve done instead is taken the songs and built a fictional story about a different man around them. Actually, scratch that, that’s exactly what they did!

70. MY DREAM IS YOURS

After the success of Michael Curtiz’s first collaboration with his new discovery Doris Day, it made sense that the two would collaborate again immediately. Romance on the High Seas, their first film together, was a lighthearted, insubstantial but fun film and several cast members, including Day and her leading man Jack Carson, were carried over from that production for the subsequent My Dream is Yours. Having enjoyed Romance on the High Seas, I sat down to watch My Dream is Yours expecting more of the same. Instead, I was greeted with a very bad film that didn’t even manage to squeeze a few drops of charm from one of the most charming movie stars of the era. The main problem here is the screenplay, based on the 1934 film Twenty Million Sweethearts. Why anyone felt compelled to remake such a basic and boring story I’m not sure, although there is a sense of a hurried process that hangs over this baggy mess of a picture. Harry Kurnitz and Dane Lussier’s screenplay scuppers the central love triangle by making it so unconvincing that there is never any tension. Day is rising singer Martha Gibson who signs with Carson’s manager Doug Blake after his major star Gary Mitchell (Lee Bowman) gets too big for his boots and ditches him. Matters are complicated when Martha, for whom Doug is falling, meets and falls in love with Gary. The mishandling of this central plot is twofold. In the first case, the fact that Martha falls for Gary at all is a betrayal of her character. There is nothing evidently charming about the man and we barely see him romancing her. This is the other problem. For some reason, the film seems determined to keep Gary off the screen as much as possible, so we don’t get any impression of the romance that is standing in the way of the one for which we’re supposed to be rooting. The whole thing is completely flat and unconvincing to the point of bafflement.

Speaking of bafflement, My Dream is Yours goes to some very strange places in its vain pursuit of a structure. The film is billed as a Comedy but it is far more of a mushy Drama, with Day’s character saddled with a doe-eyed kid and a dead husband. Romance on the High Seas gave Day the freedom to demonstrate her full talents but My Dream is Yours quickly manacles her to that tedious wholesome image that would underscore her subsequent career to varying levels of detriment. With the predictable rise-to-fame plot failing to excite and the songs by Harry Warren and Ralph Blane mostly falling flat (one of them is about a Geiger counter, I kid you not!), the film makes a desperate third act grab for something noteworthy by inserting an Easter themed dream sequence starring Bugs Bunny. A lot of My Dream is Yours feels patched together from borrowed ideas and this sequence is patently Warner Bros. response to the legendary scene in MGM’s Anchors Aweigh in which Gene Kelly danced with Jerry Mouse. Directed by Friz Freleng, even this flourish fails to ignite much interest in the film. The song, Freddie, Get Ready, is weak and collapses into a version of that old cartoon standby, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. The dance, with Day and Carson sporting grotesque rabbit costumes, is underwhelming and Bugs seems completely drained of his comedic potential when inserted into such a cloying context.

There are moments when My Dream is Yours threatens to get better. By far the best thing in the film is Eve Arden as the wisecracking, put-upon Vi, and when the storyline brought Martha and Vi together as roommates there was a tantalising flicker of comic potential. Sadly, this premise is not capitalised upon and too much time is lavished upon Carson’s uncaptivating Doug. The inevitable romance that eventually emerges between Doug and Martha is rushed into being in the film’s final moments in a way that makes Doug feel very much like a willing consolation prize. As it drew to a close, I felt not a glimmer of the joy or romantic fulfilment that My Dream is Yours so badly needs to succeed. A very feeble film.

69. THE JAZZ SINGER

By 1952, Michael Curtiz seemed somewhat like a victim of his own success. His films still made money and the work kept coming in but he’d become known as a “reliable” director, which meant he was often entrusted with the sort of projects whose strong studio backing implied a bland safety that was at odds with Curtiz’s greater artistic abilities. In the run up to The Jazz Singer, Curtiz had been mostly making dull, repetitive Biopics and, while this film saw him break free of that, the tired aesthetic and plodding 50s commercialism still hang heavy over the project. A remake of The Jazz Singer had been floating around as a prospect for many years but the concept feels born of that naïve Hollywood thinking that the success of a film can be repeated through basic replication. The assumption that people were crying out to see an update of The Jazz Singer seems especially flawed given that the original’s success had little to do with its thin story and everything to do with it being the first film with synchronised dialogue. Its importance in cinema history cannot be underestimated and yet I’ve never thought the 1927 version of The Jazz Singer holds up as much more than a historical document. It was a star vehicle for Al Jolson, which of course meant lots of blackface, but Jolson was also a natural entertainer and his presence was the film’s other main asset. The studio recognised this, originally intending to also cast Jolson in the remake, but by the time it was greenlit he was too old to play the part of the titular showbiz entertainer who devastates his highly religious cantor father by not following in his footsteps. While Bing Crosby was apparently considered for the role, it ultimately went to Danny Thomas, with the intention of reuniting him with his I’ll See You in My Dreams costar Doris Day. Ultimately, the role intended for Day went to Peggy Lee.

One thing Curtiz’s version of The Jazz Singer has over the original and even the 1980 remake is the removal of blackface. But, while obviously a talented and likeable presence, Danny Thomas seems completely miscast here. His singing is not up to much and his audience banter is excruciatingly awkward and unfunny, making its rapturous reception seem implausible. For The Jazz Singer’s story to really work, you have to feel that its protagonist belongs on the stage and that to hide him away in a synagogue would be a great loss to the world. Having seen Thomas’s act in the film, my reaction was instead to think, Hmmm, maybe he should be a cantor. Though Ray Heindorf and Max Steiner’s music bagged them an Oscar nomination, there are no remotely memorable tunes here, to the point that I honestly temporarily forgot this was a Musical at all while writing this review. In terms of the cast, Peggy Lee is likeable but unconvincing in a similar manner to Thomas. The two hit it off and their working relationship developed into an offstage friendship, but there’s not a great deal of onscreen chemistry really. The standout performances come from the solid, sentimental turns by Mildred Dunnock and Eduard Franz as the mother and father. The best scenes in the film are their melodramatic confrontations with Thomas, though these are undoubtedly made to look better than they are by the drear that surrounds them. Franz impressed enough to be offered the same part in the TV remake of The Jazz Singer that emerged seven years later, starring Jerry Lewis.

While Jolson’s Jazz Singer had been a three-hankie weepie, Curtiz’s update lowers the emotional stakes considerably, replacing the father’s climactic death with an unconvincing, unearned eleventh hour reconciliation and a mortal reprieve for the ailing cantor. Despite being highly susceptible to sentimentality myself, I found Jolson’s version to be nauseating and creepy. While the 1952 Jazz Singer didn’t quite turn my stomach in that way, it also failed to provoke any kind of emotional response in me. It felt like a pointless remake of a very basic plot which failed to deliver the punctuating musical sideshows it requires to keep the energy up. Having now seen two of the four feature length versions of this story, I can confidently say that my favourite version is still Tex Avery’s eight minute animated short I Love to Singa starring Owl Jolson.

68. RIVER’S END

The night I watched River’s End, I had been planning to watch Virginia City, Michael Curtiz’s 1940 Western starring Errol Flynn. But when this rare early Curtiz film suddenly became available, I back-tracked in my chronological journey to watch it instead. Having just reached the end of Curtiz’s 30s work, it was something of an adjustment to hop right back to 1930 and the dawn of the sound era where I’d begun. Having got into the swing of bigger, more polished productions again, I was concerned that the readjustment to the muddy aesthetic and muffled sound of an early Pre-Code film might artificially affect my rating but I needn’t have worried. The copy of the film I found was in surprisingly good shape and its fairly gripping opening stretch reminded me of the joys of Pre-Code cinema that I’d only recently left behind. The plot of River’s End is thoroughly ludicrous but I was initially willing to go with it for the sake of entertainment. Against a remote, blizzardy North Canadian backdrop, a Mountie and his alcoholic guide pursue an escaped convicted-murderer who turns out to be the Mountie’s exact double. As they are bringing their quarry to justice, their sled overturns and he escapes. But feeling bad about leaving his pursuers for dead, the escapee returns to help them. Convinced of his innocence, the guide helps the convict to assume the Mountie’s identity after the lawman dies of a frozen lung. But as the convict heads down into town in the guise of the Mountie, he finds several complications in the form of an estranged lover, a doting young boy and a group of suspicious and volatile fellow Mounties.

Despite its cartoonishly daft premise, River’s End starts out really well as a tense little Action/Adventure film. It is modestly mounted (or Mountied!) but the snowy scenery and the tension between the three isolated men (two of whom are played by the same actor, Charles Bickford, in smoothly executed split-screen) is enough to generate atmosphere and interest. Unfortunately, once the identity switch has taken place, the film becomes a bit of a bore, more concerned with the romance between the convict and the Mountie’s disillusioned lover who prefers this new version of him. The fact that the convict masquerades as the Mountie the entire time he is falling in love presents a number of awkward questions about informed consent that you’d never expect to be addressed in a 30s film but which make for slightly uncomfortable viewing nonetheless. The acting here is largely flat, with the comedy relief of the very funny ZaSu Pitts easily stealing the show from the leads. 

River’s End isn’t terrible but it is terribly silly. Based on the 1919 novel by James Oliver Curwood, this was actually the second film of the story after a 1920 silent version, and it would be remade again by Warner Bros. in 1940. What exactly made the movie industry so convinced that this story needed remaking once a decade is anyone’s guess but there’s enough here in the strong setup to make me intrigued as to whether any of the other versions made a better job of the whole thing. As it is, Curtiz’s version is a promising film that collapses under the diminishing returns of its own story.