In this second part, we’re looking at the next tier of Michael Curtiz films after the barrel-scrapers of Part 1. These begin at a similarly lowly level but improve significantly by the end. This is still only the mildly interesting or OK stuff, we’ll get into the really good films in Part 3.
You can find Part 1 here.
ALL ENTRIES CONTAIN SPOILERS.
67. THE VAGABOND KING
The Vagabond King is often reckoned to be Michael Curtiz’s worst film. While I’d put it several notches above that, it is indeed a very odd film, especially for 1956. Based on the 1925 stage operetta by Rudolf Friml, The Vagabond King had been made into a film once before in 1930. Curtiz’s version is a curious mix of aesthetics and styles taken from the stage and the past. Though its public domain status and a general lack of interest have condemned the film to a level of visual deterioration that surely robs it of the vibrancy that should’ve been its trump card, the majority of actors here seem to have reverted to a stiff style of performance associated with the early sound era, creating a barrier that even glorious Technicolor can’t break through. There are a couple of familiar faces here, including Leslie Neilsen perfecting the melodramatic seriousness that would eventually stand him in such fine comedic stead, and Rita Moreno whose irrepressible charisma and energy easily outshines the rest of the cast. Our leads are Kathryn Grayson, a stage soprano with a few hit films under her belt, and Oreste Kirkop, a Maltese singer who was quite understandably never allowed to act in films again.
Hearing that The Vagabond King was one of the death-knell sounding films of the once popular Operetta genre, I feared that my evening would be marred by caterwauling. In fact, the musical moments of The Vagabond King are the highlights, with lively songs like Vive La You picking up the lulling energy. It’s when the music stops that things drag the worst. This is largely due to Oreste’s terrible performance, although to be fair the cast largely match his style so Curtiz should probably bear the blame for choosing such an outdated approach. The cheap-looking sets enhance the feeling that you’re watching a high-quality school play rather than an actual Hollywood film. The Vagabond King was saved from the bottom of the barrel by my general love of cinematic pageantry, intermittent pieces of decent music (though I don’t remember how any of the songs went) and one sloppy but spirited swordfight. But don’t go into this expecting a rejuvenation of Curtiz’s classic Swashbucklers. The Vagabond King makes The Adventures of Robin Hood feel like a very distant memory in the Curtiz filmography.
66. THE CABIN IN THE COTTON
In contrast with Michael Curtiz’s more obscure Pre-Code films, The Cabin in the Cotton has a slightly wider modern day audience thanks to a couple of factors. One of them is the presence of star-in-waiting Bette Davis, whose performance is generally considered to be the highlight of the picture, but even more than Davis herself, a particular line she speaks has passed into Hollywood legend: the strange non-sequitur “I’d like to kiss you but I just washed my hair.” Chosen by Davis herself as her favourite line from all her films, it is actually ripped directly from Harry Harrison Kroll’s source novel. One of the reasons it is a part of cinema, as opposed to literary, legend is that its appealing absurdity is enhanced tenfold by the unconventional sexuality of Davis and her playful performance. But there is more to The Cabin in the Cotton than the work of one actress and the original posters for the film featured the name Richard Barthelmess in letters bigger than the title itself, along with a close-up drawing of the actor’s face which consumed the whole page and indicated nothing about the film beyond his presence in it. It’s hard to imagine while watching The Cabin in the Cotton today that Barthelmess was considered the most promising selling point but at this point he was still emerging from his years of silent era fame, a medium that most viewers agree suited his brooding intensity better than sound. Many reviews are quite harsh on Barthelmess, suggesting he is stiff and wooden, but his style actually seems to be quite naturalistic, if occasionally also undoubtedly undersold. The effectiveness of his quiet subtlety depends on the film into which he is dropped. In Only Angels Have Wings, for instance, I found his underplaying to be positively enigmatic. In The Cabin in the Cotton, especially set against Davis’s gambit for star status, Barthelmess just seems inadequate.
The majority of latter day reviews of The Cabin in the Cotton spend their entire word-count fawning over Davis and what a natural star she was. While she does stand out amongst the cast, I’d say her performance here is still one of her rather mannered early efforts which are enjoyable but lack the dimension of naturalism that characterised her better work down the line. Far more interesting are the politics of the film and its missed opportunity to be something really thought-provoking. The film opens with a crawling caption that reads:
“In many parts of the South today, there exists an endless dispute between the rich land-owners, known as planters, and the poor cotton pickers, known as tenants or ‘peckerwoods’. The planters supply the tenants with the simple requirements of every day life and in return, the tenants work the land year in and year out. A hundred volumes could be written on the rights and wrongs of both parties, but it is not the object of the producers of “The Cabin in the Cotton” to take sides. We are only concerned with an effort to picturize these conditions.”
The natural reaction to such a fence-sitting introduction is one of concern that we’re about to see a politically-neutered, pointless plod through the sort of story that requires a strong viewpoint to work. But anyone who has seen enough Pre-Code films will instantly understand that this sort of nervous concession was mostly appended to films that very clearly took one side over the other, in an attempt to appease the party who had been depicted in a negative light by essentially denying it before the fact. The Cabin in the Cotton depicts members of both groups as imperfect but it does so in a way that, rather than lean into “bad people on both sides” rhetoric, indicates that the whole damn system is out of order. The transgressions of the poor cotton pickers are still portrayed in the light of the unjust stronghold of the rich landowners and only a complete do-over seems like it could provide the chance to build something better.
Unfortunately, The Cabin in the Cotton fumbles its nuanced thesis by being unable to put it across in an interesting or enlightening manner. Curtiz directs well enough from a technical standpoint but there’s a sense of punches either being pulled or else propelled by insufficient passion. As a director who would turn his hand to many different kinds of project, Curtiz’s filmography is defined more by stylistic patterns than ideological ones, and The Cabin in the Cotton really could’ve used the guiding hand of a director more invested in the message. Still, with Barthelmess miscast in the lead role and Davis doing her best to drag the spotlight onto the romantic subplot (a distraction that holds only a simplistic symbolic relevance), The Cabin in the Cotton finds itself in an awkward position from the start. The black migrants whom Curtiz inserts into the story through stock footage but struggles to get into the main narrative become indicative of how badly the film is missing its intended targets.
65. THE MAD GENIUS
The Mad Genius is a frustrating film in that it features easily the best direction by Michael Curtiz up to this point but it is sadly in the service of a dull and repetitive story. Curtiz plays a blinder on this one, from the rain-soaked expressionism of the atmospheric prologue through to the opulence of the ballet. He sets the perfect mood for each scene, aided admirably by Barney McGill’s crisp black and white cinematography and the evocative art direction of Anton Grot. But there’s no escaping the fact that The Mad Genius has very little to say, meandering terribly though an 80 minute rehash of the same year’s hit predecessor Svengali. That film’s stars, John Barrymore and Miriam Marsh, are back for The Mad Genius, joined by a droll Charles Butterworth and a stiff Donald Cook. The Mad Genius was rushed into production in order to capitalise on Svengali’s success and it was fortunate that the always entertaining, if wilfully over-the-top Barrymore and the ever-reliable Curtiz were available to provide the film with what little momentum it has. The Mad Genius failed to repeat Svengali’s popularity, perhaps because it so blatantly attempted to do so to the point that cinema goers may have avoided the latter film in the mistaken belief that they’d already seen it.
The Mad Genius is the story of a frustrated puppeteer who replaces his wooden figurines with a flesh and blood one when an abused boy he rescues seems to show the natural agility to become the ballet star that the puppeteer’s disability prevented him from becoming himself. Initial success turns into all-consuming obsession when romance threatens the puppeteer’s carefully mapped out future for his adopted protégé. The lurid title and promotional stills of Barrymore wielding a giant axe seemed to suggest a Horror inflection but that genre would have to wait until the following year for Curtiz’s first contribution. Instead, The Mad Genius aims for a more verbose appeal, filling Barrymore’s mouth with endless streams of florid dialogue that quickly becomes tedious despite their passable eloquence. The plot plods through a dull string of manipulations, defiances and retaliations before a quick burst of well-staged shadowy action mercifully puts the whole thing to bed.
In order for The Mad Genius to have succeeded as adequate entertainment it either needed a richer psychological component for the like of which the rushed production deadlines did not allow, or a willingness to be a little more lurid in its execution in order to live up to its title. Instead, the film seems to be aspiring to a certain level of prestige that the simplicity of its plot can’t accommodate. Perhaps this is just an illusion caused by the fact that the film has such a weight of talent behind it but no decent outlet for that talent to thrive. That’s why we have a beautiful looking, well directed and amusingly acted film that still can’t seem to get off the ground.
64. THE KEY
A lacklustre film set during the Irish War of Independence but seemingly content with being a Romantic Melodrama to the extent that its setting starts to matter little, The Key is an adequately diverting film that could’ve been a great one. There’s ample opportunity to make this story of a husband and wife and the ex-lover who comes between them into something far more moving and exciting. With actors like William Powell, Edna Best and Colin Clive on board, things looked promising. But the story languishes too long over dull personal details and sidelines the action that ought to complement the romance rather than feel pushed out by it. Compounding the problem is the fact that both Powell and Best feel miscast, leaving Clive the fool’s errand of trying to carry a film that is in the process of falling apart. Powell is playing a supposedly British officer but no-one told his accent, which is a strange, wavering thing. A line later in the film suggests he is Canadian and you have to wonder if this was added as an attempt to compensate for Powell’s faltering attempts at sounding British, although he doesn’t sound particularly Canadian either.
With its love triangle and climactic noble gesture, The Key is often compared to Curtiz’s later masterpiece Casablanca, although the comparison is thin and you could just as easily suggest this is a variation on Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Whatever your chosen reference point however, it’s likely you’ll be calling The Key a poor man’s version of it. It passes the time reasonably but its 71 minutes seem longer than that and the ending feels anticlimactic rather than moving as it aspires to be. Forgettable stuff.
63. THE WOMAN FROM MONTE CARLO
It’s probably fair to begin my review of The Woman from Monte Carlo by stating that the print I saw wasn’t in the best shape. Although that might not seem to matter to some, I’ve known bad public domain prints to have robbed great films of their appeal. Muffled, bubbly versions of His Girl Friday abound, completely destroying the dialogue and rhythm so crucial to its magnificence. By contrast, though the picture was a tad grainy, I could hear every word of The Woman from Monte Carlo and at times began to wish I couldn’t. The screenplay by Harvey Thew, based on the play Veille d’Armes by Claude Farrere and Lucien Nepoty, is certainly not one of the film’s strengths and the cast visibly struggles to make the chewy dialogue sound naturalistic. This is Melodrama, of course, which often benefits from leaning into its most ludicrous excesses but it’s a very fine line. I can’t tell you why I’m enthralled by the full-throttle garment-rending passions of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life but find the same director’s Magnificent Obsession too rich to digest. In the case of The Woman from Monte Carlo, however, I can pinpoint several reasons why the melodrama fails to work. As previously mentioned, the screenplay is a little too preposterous even for this ripest of genres, which is a shame because the story of forbidden passions and treacherous deceptions aboard a WWI battle cruiser actually has some promise and builds to a downbeat finale that pulls a few surprises out of the bag and could’ve been stupendously entertaining with the right cast and writer.
What The Woman from Monte Carlo does have going for it is the right director. Although he is stymied by the tools at his disposal, Michael Curtiz once again proves himself adept at turning his hand to whatever genre comes his way. The Woman from Monte Carlo is lumbered with the grey interiors of a warship as the backdrop to the majority of its runtime and there’s a lengthy stretch of exposition scenes and turgid dialogue that Curtiz either can’t save or can’t be bothered with, but he sneaks in some nice moments of visual invention where he can. The opening pan across a group of sailors peering through a row of potholes is playfully appealing, as is a shot of the protagonist and her husband spying each other through telescopes. When a badly needed action scene arrives about 50 minutes in, Curtiz supplements the obvious but charming model shots with a burst of exciting onboard action in which torrenting water does its best to help us out by drowning the dialogue. A final courtroom sequence is decently staged before culminating in the film’s most memorable shot, as one character’s unravelling is symbolised by the screen beginning to spin rapidly until it becomes the wheels of a train that will carry her back to her old life. This finale added at least half a star to my rating and it only made me wish it were appended to a better film.
The promise of a salacious Melodrama kept me going while watching The Woman from Monte Carlo but it never quite lives up to its Pre-Code potential. The cast are all stiff and awkward, with even the generally reliable Walter Huston battling unsuccessfully to bring the heightened humanism his tragic character demands. German star Lili Dagover is unable to capitalise on her one shot at Hollywood stardom and returned to Germany soon after. Many reviewers claim she was a Garbo imitation but I don’t think she’s attempting anything of the sort. As a strong-accented woman in a melodramatic role, it’s certainly possible that Hollywood was aiming to exploit such a comparison, but the fact that she has the line “I vant to be alone” in the same year Garbo made it immortal in Grand Hotel seems entirely coincidental. Dagover never quite convinces as the passionate, conflicted character she is meant to be but compared with the men she is a powder keg of emotion. Between Huston, Warren William and the particularly dreadful John Wray, the male cast’s contribution here is like the march of the moustachioed marionettes. The perils of a sea battle are severely reduced when it’s clear that the majority of the cast could just float away like driftwood.
Something is off about The Woman from Monte Carlo from the beginning. Unlike Curtiz’s previous film The Mad Genius, which was dull in many ways but flowed smoothly and looked nice, The Woman from Monte Carlo feels choppily edited and disconcertingly jerky. At one point I’m pretty sure there’s a cut from Dagover delivering a line in close-up to a shot from further away in which a chunk of the line is repeated. Perhaps a better print would make the film easier on the eye but it wouldn’t clear up awkward moments like this. Still, there’s something vaguely endearing about this small failure of a film that aspires to epic emotional heights. I wouldn’t rush to watch it again but in the unlikely event of a remaster I’d be interested to see just how much effect the deteriorated print had on my enjoyment.
62. THE WALKING DEAD
Ostensibly The Walking Dead is Michael Curtiz’s final excursion in the Horror genre. It certainly has a persuasively ghoulish title and an icon of the genre, Boris Karloff, in the lead role but the film itself feels maybe about 10% Horror, with the rest of the runtime made up of tentative Sci-fi, unconvincing Gangster film and superfluous Romance. Given that The Walking Dead only runs to 65 minutes that’s a bit too much to cram in, although the plethora of storytelling styles seems to have been born of desperation rather than ambition. The tale of a quiet, nervous man who is framed by mobsters and subsequently executed for the murder of a judge, The Walking Dead follows his artificial resurrection by a scientist who wants to learn the secrets of the afterlife which leads to the deaths of those who set him up. The twist is they are killed not by their reanimated victim but by their own guilt.
There’s a promising concept hiding in there somewhere but The Walking Dead struggles to root it out. Karloff was determined not to immediately remind audiences of his most famous role as Frankenstein’s monster so more writers were brought on to tinker with an already overcrowded screenplay. In the end five writers worked on this thing but judging from the results I’m not sure any of them were ever in the same room. Perhaps we shouldn’t blame the writers too much though, given that Curtiz is reported to have been extremely disinterested in The Walking Dead, rushing through it as quickly as possible to get to his next project. The mega-success of Captain Blood the previous year had likely made Curtiz more ambitious and The Walking Dead would be the last of his films to have that sub-hour B-movie runtime. His disconnection from the material is palpable but to be fair it is difficult to connect to something so muddled. The film closes with a Bible quote: “Leave the dead to their maker. The Lord our God is a jealous God” and it is repeated for emphasis. I’m not convinced that’s what the film is really about though. This theme is floating around in there somewhere for sure but not to the extent that it justifies being double underlined at the end.
Curtiz never returned to the Horror genre after The Walking Dead and that’s probably for the best. His earlier dabblings in the genre, Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum, are far better than this half-hearted shrug of a film and tend to be better remembered. And ultimately, despite the best efforts of Karloff and five writers, it’s almost certain that you’ll think of James Whale’s classic Frankenstein when watching The Walking Dead. I’m not entirely convinced they tried that hard to discourage this association, to be honest. I mean, someone could at least have removed the line “He’s alive” in one of the redrafts.
61. GOLD IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
1938 would prove to be a banner year for Michael Curtiz. He directed five films across the course of the year, two of which ended up being nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. One of those films was one of the top ten highest earning films of the year, two of them remain enshrined as classics to this day, and between three of the five they garnered twelve Oscar nominations including three wins. Curtiz also became the only director to compete against himself in the Best Director category until Stephen Soderbergh did the same in 2001.
Curtiz’s first film of 1938, Gold is Where You Find It, was not responsible for any of those Oscar nominations and is barely remembered today but it is, in some ways, an important film. Warner Bros. was in the process of trying to change its image, mostly founded on Busby Berkeley Musicals and gritty Gangster pictures, and shift towards a slate that included more prestige films. A big part of this change was embracing the new three-strip Technicolor process which allowed for far more vibrant, lavish visuals. The second Warner Bros. film to use the new technology, Gold is Where You Find It was a good choice given its grandiose shots of the Sacramento valley and glistening fields of wheat bathed in yellow sunshine. Even in the unrestored prints in which the film is currently available, it’s still clear what a handsome film it is. Unfortunately, no amount of vivid colour can hide what a boring film it is. By all accounts, it gives a realistic, unsensationalised depiction of the devastation caused to the California region by the gold mining industry, an ecological disaster from which the region has never fully recovered. There’s undoubtedly some fascinating history to be explored here but the film fumbles this possibility, supplementing its political content with a boundary-crossing romance between George Brent’s mining engineer and Olivia de Havilland’s daughter of a farming family. The romance is a dull distraction but there’s very little to sustain interest elsewhere. Warren Duff and Robert Buckner’s screenplay is as dry as they come, save for the overripe expository voiceover that bookends the film and makes it feel like a particularly patronising documentary.
With its rich imagery, Gold is Where You Find It ought to be a breath of fresh air but every inhalation is stifled by the stuffy dust of bad storytelling. The film was expensive and looks it, and it did make a profit upon release, but its rapid descent into obscurity speaks volumes about its quality. It is now often seen as little more than a dry run for the Technicolor process that would soon adorn the major hit The Adventures of Robin Hood, along with stars Olivia de Havilland and Claude Rains whose gallant struggles here paid off in much better roles in that classic Swashbuckler. In its beautified mediocrity Gold is Where You Find It’s amusingly redundant title succeeds equally in proving the implied flipside of that point, Gold Isn’t Where You Don’t Find It.
60. WE’RE NO ANGELS
We’re No Angels was Michael Curtiz’s second film for Paramount following the big budget Musical hit White Christmas. Both films are set at Christmas time but that is pretty much where the similarities end. White Christmas, while not one of the greatest Musicals ever made, was a picture of professionalism and showcased Curtiz’s directorial expertise. By contrast, We’re No Angels feels stilted and stagey. Though shot in Technicolor by White Christmas’s cinematographer Loyal Griggs, We’re No Angels looks strangely washed out and ugly. As it takes place largely in one large indoor set and with barely any musical score, an echoey emptiness and intrusive artificiality haunt the majority of the runtime. None of this would matter half as much, of course, if We’re No Angels was funny. It’s not. Based on the French play La Cuisine Des Anges which was adapted for Broadway as My Three Angels, the basic idea of We’re No Angels is pretty good: on Christmas Eve, a trio of escaped convicts await their boat to salvation from the French colonial town of Cayenne. As they wait, they become unexpectedly caught up in the life of a kindly store manager and his family. Moved by their financial struggles and enraged by the arrival of the bullying store owner, the convicts set about helping the family in whatever way they can. They are assisted by a small, deadly pet snake.
The premise is ripe with possibilities and it starts off quite strongly, in particular some well designed scenes in which the convicts offer to fix their host’s roof and then observe the plight of his family through various open skylights, thereby assuming the viewpoint of the titular celestial guardians. Unfortunately, Curtiz cannot compensate for the clunky dialogue. Between his screenplays for Mildred Pierce, Bright Leaf, The Breaking Point and Possessed, I’ve become quite a fan of Ranald MacDougall but he really drops the ball with this adaptation. His dialogue just never feels witty enough and often seems to be straining for greater eloquence. Whether it is these shortcomings or Curtiz’s direction that kills so many gags I’m not sure, but the actors often seem to be struggling with timing issues. There are strange gaps following many of the lines as if they’re waiting, somewhat optimistically, for the audience to laugh. Peter Ustinov, who would soon begin calmly stealing every film in which he appeared, really ought to be doing the same here but his amusing delivery is at odds with the dry words he’s speaking. Humphrey Bogart doesn’t feel like a natural choice for this kind of goofball comedy either.
A major issue with We’re No Angels is its tone. The tagline was “A strangler, a swindler, a safecracker… yet you’ll love them!” In truth, that very much undersells just how reprehensible this trio of leading characters is. Two of them are murderers and one heavily implied to be a rapist. The humour is partially derived from the fact that the setup pretty much negates a full blown redemption narrative from the off and this is what gives the film its edge. Had the convicts simply been three thieves, the premise wouldn’t have been as interesting. But the offhand manner in which the monstrous crimes of Aldo Ray’s Albert are treated make for very queasy viewing. The key gag finds Bogart’s Joseph explaining Albert’s crimes to Joan Bennett’s Amelie:
“How did he get into trouble?”
“Running after a girl.”
“Running after a girl? Is that a crime in France?”
“No, not exactly. Unfortunately, he caught her.”
Although I appreciate MacDougall’s decision not to soften the material, this boys-will-be-boys style shrug of an attitude to sexual assault is hard to stomach, especially given that Ray’s character, depicted as an inveterate arse pincher, is mostly paired up with Gloria Talbott’s teenage daughter character. You have to adjust expectations to a certain extent when watching older films but this dynamic sours the comedy with a side order of abject terror.
I’m not sure how the original play ended but the finale of We’re No Angels, in which the trio of convicts decide to voluntarily return to jail where they’ll find “a better class of people” feels satirically thin and narratively unlikely. Given that the Hays Code demanded that criminals be punished for their crimes, there’s a lack of dramatic tension regarding the ending for the main protagonists. We know they’ll either end up dead or back in prison. Having them make the choice to reincarcerate themselves might sound like an effective compromise and the closest thing to a happy ending available here but it still feels like a slight cop-out. It’s a flat ending to an all-round flat film and the whimsical final moment in which the pet snake is given a halo just feels like one last dollop of tonal discord.
59. THE HELEN MORGAN STORY
Though I’ve liked a handful of them, it is honestly a relief to arrive at the final Michael Curtiz Musical Biopic. Having read a plot summary beforehand, I didn’t exactly go into The Helen Morgan Story with an open mind as this promised to be yet another rise and fall narrative about a talented performer destroyed by alcohol. In the event, The Helen Morgan Story turned out to be quite a bit darker than I expected. Pairing the titular Helen with a loathsome, unethical promoter named Larry Maddux, we see her mistreated and degraded on the way up and down, which means we don’t get the usual delirious pleasures of the successes before the emotionally draining descent. While I appreciate the film’s largely consistent downbeat tone, The Helen Morgan Story does feel like quite a punishing watch as its subject is really put through the wringer. Curtiz directs well here, with beautiful black and white cinematography from Ted D. McCord, and there’s a grubbiness to the whole affair which refreshingly rejects the clichéd glamour of stardom we’ve seen in so many other Biopics.
The Helen Morgan Story has a major trump card in its leading actor, Ann Blyth, who is just terrific as the titular Morgan. It’s a restrained, human performance that presents the audience with a gradual but very apparent unraveling. Paul Newman gives good support as Maddux, although he was apparently forced into taking the role and there is a sense of reluctance to his performance. The musical interludes, despite not really being to my taste, are nicely realised and provide some respite from the intense misery. But what really scuppers The Helen Morgan Story is its preposterous ending. As was the standard for Hollywood Biopics of the era, the film is riddled with inaccuracies but the finale takes the biscuit. As Helen reaches rock bottom and ends up hospitalised in Bellevue, Maddux, a loathsome lowlife throughout, has a sudden redemptive epiphany and rushes to Helen’s side. He then arranges a surprise gala dinner in her honour, where she is cheered and celebrated and allowed to sing once again. I’ve seen tacked on happy endings in my time but this one is abysmal. It utterly betrays the characters it has taken the time to establish and basically crams in every Hollywood cliché of a rousing finale imaginable. It is essentially the same ending as Curtiz’s much better I’ll See You in My Dreams, but it fit the tone of that film and felt earned. In The Helen Morgan Story, it not only feels implausible but insulting. Though Helen did mount a brief comeback in 1941, this was also the year she collapsed and died on stage of cirrhosis of the liver. Although it would’ve made for a very depressing ending to the film, I feel like a picture called The Helen Morgan Story owed it to its subject to tell the whole story. What we get is an ending that provides false hope by withholding what came next. It manages to reverse the small amount of good work the preceding film had done in about ten minutes, busting an OK, if largely unpleasurable, film down to the level of a bad one.
58. MAMMY
Al Jolson is a curious figure in the history of cinema. Often billed as the world’s greatest entertainer, Jolson built his fame as a stage performer and was a huge star already by the time he reached the big screen. His first film, The Jazz Singer, made an enormous splash as the first full-length sound film, an achievement for which it retains great renown and significance. As a performer, however, Jolson’s act quickly felt more like a repetitive novelty to cinemagoers, with the advent of sound causing an oversaturation of Musicals that saw the genre’s popularity dip significantly for a time. In 1930, the year of Mammy’s release, more than 100 Hollywood Musicals were made. By the following year this was down to just 14. Consequently, Jolson’s popularity as a screen presence waned quickly, although the fact that his stage routine translated rather flatly to movies was also a factor. Mammy is Jolson’s fourth film and it is very much still coasting on his magnetism as a musical performer. The plot is a paper-thin interruption and Jolson’s acting is nowhere near the level of his singing. One excruciatingly protracted drunk routine is one of the worst pieces of acting by a major star that I’ve ever seen.
What Mammy does have going for it is its songs. Across 84 minutes we get twelve songs and a couple of reprises (a further two songs appeared in the original cut but are missing from surviving prints. The songs were written by Irving Berlin who is also credited with the original story, which may explain how they are woven so well into the story. Rather than huge showstoppers, the majority of Mammy’s numbers are fleet little punctuations, keeping the energy up even as the plot meanders. If you don’t like one of the songs, it’s usually over within a couple of minutes and we’re zipping towards the next one. Director Michael Curtiz was already displaying his versatility and the hefty melodramatic seriousness he brought to Noah’s Ark is traded here for a lively, happy-go-lucky joie de vivre, albeit broken up by thuddingly maudlin moments of sentimentality. With the romance of the central love triangle proving something of a nonstarter, Mammy throws all of its emotional weight behind Jolson’s famous routines about his adoration for his mother. Jolson and Louise Dresser have strong chemistry as mother and son, although the strangely romantic techniques used to portray the relationship may nauseate some. There are soft-focus closeups of them gazing lovingly at each other and the two exchange more kisses on the lips than they do lines of dialogue. There’s a moment in one of Jolson’s minstrel routines in which he comically wrings out a handkerchief into which he has been weeping, with an exaggerated amount of teardrops dribbling out of it. It’s a handy visual metaphor for how the mother/son storyline is approached.
About those minstrel routines… There’s no getting round the fact that Jolson’s reputation is tied up with his penchant for blackface and, given that it focuses on a travelling minstrel show, Mammy is absolutely packed with it. You can read a lot about how Jolson was actually a champion of black performers, that his blackface was meant as a loving tribute and that he was considered a hero to many black audience members. You’ll read less about how many of the black audience objected to blackface because desperate attempts to justify its prevalence in classic cinema do not benefit from this reality. It’s fair to say that it was a different time and that it’s completely unfair to put performers of a bygone age on trial by modern standards, but it doesn’t make the grotesquerie of white performers caked in hideously exaggerated makeup and talking in mocking drawls any less excruciating to watch. A key plot point hinges on a spoken comedy routine in which Jolson lays on the “oh me, oh my” stereotype extra thick, so we have to watch the damn thing through twice despite it being as unfunny as it is offensive. Frustratingly, some of the best musical routines are also performed in full blackface. Jolson tears through the lively Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle? with feisty aplomb and a routine based around Frank Silver and Irving Cohn’s popular novelty song Yes, We Have No Bananas is great fun but both are suffocated under layer upon layer of boot polish. I’m glad we still have access to this footage but it’s important that films like Mammy, or even former afternoon staples like Swing Time and Show Boat, are kept in places where they can be sought out by cineastes armed with contextual information, rather than appearing in TV schedules where they normalise retrograde attitudes to an army of susceptible channel-flippers.
For all its ideological offences and narrative shortcomings, Mammy does feel like an essentially good-natured film that aims to entertain above all. Its uplifting theme song, Let Me Sing and I’m Happy, appears three times throughout the film and essentially sums up its surprisingly infectious energy. While I wouldn’t necessarily jump at the chance of a rewatch, Mammy feels like a comparatively strong Musical in an era when The Broadway Melody was being heralded by the Academy as the best the genre had to offer. The 30s would see the rise of films choreographed by Busby Berkeley or starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers which would thoroughly trounce these early Musicals in terms of quality but Mammy feels like an important stepping stone towards better things.
57. STOLEN HOLIDAY
By 1937, Michael Curtiz had become associated with more ambitious projects like Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade but these films were still interspersed with more modest projects like Horror film The Walking Dead and Stolen Holiday, the fourth of his collaborations with popular actress Kay Francis. Stolen Holiday follows a similar melodramatic template to Curtiz’s previous Francis films. It has a strangely inert story of a fashion designer whose path to true love is blocked by her indebtedness to a manipulative imposter. Once again, the plot is upstaged by Orry-Kelly’s array of gowns and the way they look on Francis, a consistent feature of her films that unfairly got her labelled as a clotheshorse. Francis had begun to resent this reputation and her reaction against it would lead Warner Bros. to spitefully demote her to even more inconsequential pictures and finally to terminate her contract. Consequently, Stolen Holiday was Francis’s final Curtiz collaboration.
On a more positive note, Stolen Holiday was also the first Curtiz film to feature Claude Rains, who would go on to become a key Curtiz collaborator and one of the handful of actors who Curtiz would eventually direct to an Oscar nomination. Rains has always been one of my favourite Golden Age actors, rarely playing the lead but frequently stealing the show. As suspicious crook Stefan Orloff, Rains is suitably oily and duplicitous but his storyline becomes so marginalised by the ho-hum romantic scenes with the weirdly avuncular Ian Hunter that he doesn’t quite manage to pull focus from Francis. Coming much closer to pulling off that feat is Alison Skipworth as the wearied assistant who despises Orloff pretty much on sight. She provides a nice line in comic relief with hints of pathos.
Unlike The Walking Dead, Stolen Holiday doesn’t feel like a film Curtiz is rushing through. He takes the requisite time and care to establish an air of glamour on what appears to be a minimal budget. Captain Blood writer Casey Robinson also turns in an intermittently witty and eloquent screenplay but he can’t quite compensate for the weak story supplied by Warren Duff and Virginia Kellogg. The result is not a chore to sit through but neither is it a pleasure. Stolen Holiday feels very much like a transitional film as Curtiz pulled away from his Pre-Code programmers and towards more ambitious works.
56. CAPTAINS OF THE CLOUDS
Michael Curtiz had an amazing 1942 with three big hit films in a row. Two of them, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca, are still widely revered as classics to this day. But his first film of that year, Captains of the Clouds, has disappeared into obscurity. There are reasons for this that go beyond quality. When Captains of the Clouds was made it was designed to increase American support for the war effort but by the time it was released the US were at war already. Far from hurting the film’s chances, this made it a surefire hit with audiences in the first flush of patriotic fervour. Unusually, Captains of the Clouds focuses on the Canadian Air Force and was the first Hollywood feature to be shot entirely in Canada. It also marked the first appearance in Technicolor by star James Cagney. Like Curtiz’s previous Dive Bomber before it, Captains of the Clouds was designed to relate directly to its era so barring a phenomenal or timelessly resonant screenplay (which it does not have) it was always likely to diminish in popularity. The film features some great aerial footage but falls down on plot. The characters here promise to be more interesting in the excellent early stages but their story quickly devolves into a strangely mean, deeply sexist love triangle and then segues awkwardly into a frustratingly bumpy War film with a decent last scene but a preponderance of tedious filler.
Captains of the Clouds starts out fantastically. The Canadian landscape, all big stretches of water and towering greenery, looks amazing as lensed in sumptuous Technicolor by Sol Polito and Wilfred M. Cline. We see a string of bush pilots turning up to do jobs and discovering they have been outmanoeuvred and undercut by an infamous figure named Brian MacLean. This is Cagney, the cocky and unscrupulous pilot whose opportunistic approach sees him stealing both jobs and women from his hapless competitors. There’s a great aerial action sequence in which his angry rivals encounter him mid-flight and their three planes attempt to force him out of the sky. At this point, I was convinced Captains of the Clouds was going to be terrific but, as had been the case with Dive Bomber, at some point the planes had to land. While Dive Bomber alternated between adequate and dull when it wasn’t in the air, Captains of the Clouds actually gets quite unpleasant. MacLean begins an affair with Brenda Marshall’s Emily, the fiancé of his rival, Dennis Morgan’s Dutton. Dutton wants to start his own airline and MacLean warns him that if he marries Emily he’ll lose all his money to her womanly wiles. When Dutton refuses to listen, MacLean convinces Emily to marry him instead, then walks out on her as soon as Dutton finds out. This is painted as a noble gesture on MacLean’s part, even when he delivers his parting shot to Emily with obvious cruelty. Emily turns up only once in the narrative after this, alone in a nightclub and wearing a bright red dress, telling Dutton “don’t you see, MacLean was right, he was right. Look at my vibrant attire. It’s so obvious.” Or something to that effect. You don’t exactly go into a 1942 film expecting thoroughly progressive attitudes to women and Humphrey Bogart’s presumptuous decision-making on Ingrid Bergman’s behalf in Casablanca could potentially be painted in the same light as this, but the comparison illustrates the difference between an artfully portrayed scene and a badly written one. Bogart’s sacrifice is portrayed with a tenderness that made it instantly iconic. Captains of the Clouds, meanwhile, feels almost gleeful in its misogynistic denunciation of a woman whose supposed wickedness is very poorly defined.
The first half of Captains of the Clouds left such a bad taste for me that there was little chance of salvaging the film, but the second half in which MacLean and his pals sign up for the airforce is just a bit dull. It gets caught up in a plot about them being too old to be pilots and encouraged to train as instructors instead. The chain of tragic events this sets in motion is far more tedious than if the film had just allowed them to be pilots and opted for a more straightforward adventure. It’d certainly be more rousing for a wartime audience than the weirdly downbeat string of indignities and ill-advised retaliations that we get instead. Captains of the Clouds is dedicated to the Canadian Air Force but its greater focus on a typically flawed Cagney antihero makes for a very strange sort of tribute indeed. It’s unsurprising that this confused film didn’t weather the test of time well.
55. THIS IS THE ARMY
Michael Curtiz’s output in the 1930s was fascinatingly diverse. Watching his 30s films in chronological order, you never quite know what you’re going to get next. Melodramas, Comedies, Adventure, Horror, Westerns, Sports films, Social Issues films, Mysteries. By contrast, the early 40s saw Curtiz’s catalogue commandeered by the war effort. It’s understandable that this would be the case and Curtiz still works across different genres including Drama, Romance, Musical and Adventure, but the thematic underpinnings become somewhat repetitive in an era when cinema audiences were seeking patriotic reassurance above all. Even the Westerns and Adventure films Curtiz made just prior to the US joining the war in 1940 are infused with allegorical messages designed to unite Americans of diverse beliefs and project a pro-British sentiment. Given that most people will not watch Curtiz’s films chronologically on consecutive nights as I have been doing, the repetition is not really a problem but there is a definite sense that the necessarily heavy-handed messaging of some of these films comes at the expense of their quality. Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy show this need not be the case, but Mission to Moscow and Captains of the Clouds testify that it very often is.
This is the Army feels like a misfiring attempt to recapture the rousing cornballery of Yankee Doodle Dandy but without the solid narrative backbone to support it. Yankee Doodle Dandy did an excellent job of presenting excerpts from George M. Cohan’s stage shows interpreted in a cinematic fashion but it threaded them on the sturdy string of his entertainingly fictionalised life story. This is the Army seeks instead to replicate the experience of a military revue, presenting act after act across the majority of the film’s second hour. In this respect, it feels more akin to early sound films like The Hollywood Revue of 1929 or Show of Shows, albeit more lavishly mounted. What it lacks that those films had is a real star presence. Most of the celebrities appearing as themselves, from Frances Langford to Kate Smith, probably mean little to audiences these days, and while boxing fans might get a kick out of seeing Joe Louis, he does very little of note. Certainly, This is the Army doesn’t come close to approximating Yankee Doodle Dandy’s extraordinary central turn from James Cagney. Here we get the blandly chipper George Murphy who later cedes the stage to the blandly bland Ronald Reagan. Yankee Doodle Dandy’s Joan Leslie and Rosemary DeCamp are here but they are underserved, while Curtiz regular Alan Hale gets stuck with a standard blustering Sergeant role that culminates in an embarrassing drag act. But This is the Army’s casting is partly dictated by the fact that many of its performers and crew members were real soldiers themselves, a nice touch that softens the blow of the comparatively drab ensemble in which it results.
With its barrage of Irving Berlin songs (Berlin himself makes a notable cameo), its handsome colour cinematography by Bert Glennon and Sol Polito, its spirited direction from Curtiz and its agreeably breezy patriotism, This is the Army does feel like one of the better examples of this kind of baggy artefact. The first hour follows song and dance man Jerry Jones’s establishment of an army theatre group in WWI and their experiences in the French trenches before leaping forward 25 years to WWII, where we see how the emergence of another war affects these characters and their offspring. In the case of Jerry Jones, his son Johnny is tasked with following in his father’s now-hobbled footsteps and staging a theatrical extravaganza to boost morale. This is the point at which the film segues into its revue structure but it is also where it loses steam for me. I actually quite enjoyed the first hour with its impressionistic view of two different war-torn eras. There’s an absolutely fantastic scene in which the orders for the troops to go to France arrive in the middle of a performance and they perform their closing number while marching down from the stage and out up the aisle of the theatre. Their friends and relations catch on to what is happening and several tearful farewells are exchanged as the flow of soldiers presses on like an unstoppable torrenting river. It’s beautifully staged by Curtiz and instantly memorable, the clear highlight of the film.
Unfortunately, This is the Army fails to live up to its early promise when it descends into an episodic second hour that is more miss than hit. Fans of this old music hall entertainment may find something to enjoy here and I’m not averse to it myself. Some of the comedic skits, while hardly hilarious, have a pleasing rhythm and good-natured knockabout air to them. The title number is also a very good musical set-piece, satirising the dizzying plight of new draftees adjusting to life in the army. Truth be told though, despite the talents of Berlin (who would go on to write one of my favourite musicals, Annie Get Your Gun), I can barely remember any of the other songs in the film. What I do remember, but for negative reasons, is the blackface. Given the historical context, any film from this era that depicts the music hall tradition is likely to contain an example of that then-prevalent disgrace. Unlike Yankee Doodle Dandy’s thankfully fleeting example, This is the Army has a prolonged sequence of white men caked in boot polish exaggeratedly rolling their eyes. Interestingly, This is the Army also contains a rare number given over to actual African American performers. What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear, featuring the superbly energetic James Cross on vocals, sits oddly next to the blackface sequence but it is by far the best number in the film. A large portion of the rest of the bill is taken up by drag acts. While I knew drag was a bit of a showbiz tradition, I didn’t expect it to be this prevalent in a film from this era. Sadly, it doesn’t quite have the thrilling sense of defiance and freeing permissiveness that the artform later took on.
I don’t think anyone involved in This is the Army thought they were making a timeless masterpiece. They were making a film with a very specific purpose for a very specific audience at a very specific time. If that means it has not endured in the way, say, Casablanca has, it does at least make it fascinating as a historical artefact that gives us a glimpse of an era. With Curtiz directing, This is the Army goes beyond that and is still enjoyable to an extent to modern audiences susceptible to a certain type of old-fashioned entertainment. Certainly, this is one of the better films of its kind I’ve encountered and as an item of historical interest it is worth watching. As a straight piece of entertainment, not so much.
54. THE MAN IN THE NET
The Man in the Net is a film that begins as an interesting, morally complex Noir and then somehow segues into a children’s adventure. It’s as if someone said “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could fuse Out of the Past with Hue & Cry?” As intriguingly bizarre as that might sound, it just absolutely does not work. The set up of The Man in the Net involves Alan Ladd’s painter John clashing with his alcoholic wife Linda, who is furious that he has turned down a lucrative opportunity in advertising to pursue his love of art. Though the film seems to side with Ladd, whose innate goodness has been set up by an opening scene establishing his friendship with a group of very young children he meets in the park every day (how times have changed!), there is an interesting ambiguity regarding Linda’s mental state and the effect of John’s decision on her. John claims it is to keep her away from the city because it exacerbates her alcoholism but is there a hint of domineering self-indulgence too. The film makes both characters alternately unpleasant, first when Linda turns up at a party with a black eye and fraudulently claims it was John’s doing, and then when John, in their subsequent argument, actually belts her round the face. In the murky world of 50s Noir, it’s often hard to tell if the misogyny is being decried, applauded or neither. In this case, I fear we’re being prodded to think Linda deserved her beating. Still, there’s enough doubt in this respect for The Man in the Net to still be interesting. And then the kids turn up…
It’s a shame when Linda is found dead so early in the film, partly because Carolyn Jones is so good in the role. But as The Man in the Net begins to move towards the Hitchcockian wrong man tropes, it also starts to become less interesting. I’d like to have seen more of John and Linda’s toxic relationship, the manipulations, the lack of communication, the sympathetic attitude to addiction that is vaguely flirted with but never consummated. Still, a wrongly accused man trapped by circumstance is generally quite an entertaining plot so I was still interested… and then the kids turned up! At this stage they show John a secret hiding place in a cave they know about and John gets them to conduct an investigation to clear his name. There’s a lot of cloying kiddie dialogue and children who can barely act and the whole film just derails at this point. The Man in the Net was written by Reginald Rose, who wrote one of the greatest screenplays of all time in 12 Angry Men. When he wrote The Man in the Net he was fresh off having penned the classic Man of the West, one of the darkest and most uncompromising Westerns of the Golden Age. What happened with this oddity I’m not sure. Then again, Rose, having made his name with one of the most compassionate, level-headed and humanist scripts of all time, would eventually wind up working on alarmist right wing Political Thriller Who Dares Wins so this wasn’t exactly the strangest leap in his filmography.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Alan Ladd, whose well-documented uncertainty about himself chimes with my own anxious heart and informed some great films when the casting was right. He was perfect for the laconic lead in Curtiz’s The Proud Rebel but his character here requires someone of greater passion and warmth. Ladd just seems tired and justifiably bewildered. Jones carries the film for a bit but once she’s bumped off and the spotlight shifts to Ladd and the kids, there’s really no saving The Man in the Net from becoming a misjudged curio.
53. THE KEYHOLE
While not the most well-remembered Golden Age Hollywood star these days, there was a time when Kay Francis was a major box office draw and it’s not hard to see why. Although there are those who have decried her as little more than an attractive clotheshorse, such blatant sexism is easily dispelled by watching some of her work. I was particularly taken by Francis’s treasurable comedic turn in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic Trouble in Paradise but when playing it straight, as she does in The Keyhole, she had a wonderfully expressive face and her camera-drawing emotiveness is quite something to watch. In The Keyhole she’s really working overtime, compensating not only for an underwritten character but also for being lumbered with an unappealing leading man. Francis and George Brent made several more films together after this but what chemistry they do have is carried entirely by Francis, with Brent’s character coming across more like a persistent and opportunistic creep. He plays a private investigator hired by the husband of Francis’s Anne in order to tail her on a mysterious cruise she has decided to take alone. The reason is that her smarmy ex-husband never actually granted her the divorce he said he would, inadvertently rendering her a bigamist. With him demanding a large sum of money to keep the secret, Anne intends to lure him to Cuba and then have her sister-in-law use her connections to block his re-entry to America.
It’s a smart little set-up and The Keyhole’s main strength is its twisty plot which also features a fairly ingenious ending involving a suicide note that becomes an ironic narrative bookend. The problem is that the clever plot is too short to fill even the 69 minute runtime and so some filler is required. This comes by way of a subplot involving another PI who tags along for the ride and a female con artist who meet each other and, both believing the other to be rich, set about exploiting that misconception. On the one hand, it’s great to see Glenda Farrell back after she was so thoroughly enjoyable in Curtiz’s previous Mystery of the Wax Museum. Playing a very different role, she is equally amusing here, although her scene partner Allen Jenkins is too bluntly unlikeable for this superfluous subplot to really muster any charm. In the end it just seems like a peculiar time filler, never interweaving with the main plot in any notable way and ending up feeling hopelessly adrift.
Given that it has such a brief runtime and boasts a satisfying conclusion that wraps up the plot nicely, The Keyhole is still worth seeing. Curtiz doesn’t exactly bust his ass trying to make it work as he did on Alias the Doctor, he simply relies on the decent material and the luminosity of Francis. While I’ve already disparaged the notion of Francis as a clotheshorse, it must be said that the range of gowns she wears through the film is pretty spectacular, thanks to Oscar-winning designer Orry-Kelly. Curtiz clearly knew that all he needed to do was point the camera in her direction to ensure box office returns. Still, The Keyhole remains minor Curtiz, a passable and intermittently enjoyable but severely flawed film. It would later partially inspire the Doris Day film Romance on the High Seas, also directed by Curtiz.
52. FRONT PAGE WOMAN
Before I began this journey through Michael Curtiz’s filmography, the prospect of a Screwball-adjacent Comedy starring Bette Davis would’ve practically had me foaming at the mouth in anticipation… but then I saw Jimmy the Gent. That film was bad enough to convince me that maybe Davis wasn’t especially suited to the fast-talking madcap comedic roles and it made me a little warier about the prospect of Front Page Woman. While the film didn’t ultimately prove to be as fun as I hoped, it did at least quell my erroneous assumptions about Davis’s comedic abilities. While this kind of comedy might not be amongst her greatest strengths, she proves in Front Page Woman that she can hold her own provided she’s given a reasonably decent screenplay. Her terrible performance in Jimmy the Gent was presumably a deliberate protest or else an inability to work up enough enthusiasm to try, and if you’ve seen Jimmy the Gent you can’t really blame her for that.
Every film involving warring but romantically linked male and female newspaper reporters is going to get judged in comparison with His Girl Friday, a very hard battle from which to emerge unscathed. Given that Front Page Woman predates that Howard Hawks classic, that’s probably unfair but then it doesn’t predate The Front Page, Lewis Milestone’s excellent original version of that story. In fact, given that it shares two-thirds of that film’s title, it’s likely that the comparison was being deliberately invited in this case. This notion is underlined by the fact that the film opens with a public execution, although unlike in The Front Page this one is actually carried through to its conclusion, a rather grisly beginning for a comedy. This hard-edge is one of Front Page Woman’s more notable qualities, although it sometimes manifests itself in a rather mean way. A scene in which a masculine newspaperwoman is repeatedly mocked for her appearance is fairly startling, for its willingness to portray such a figure at all in 1935 as much as for its entirely predictable inclination to show disgust towards her. The scene does tie in with the film’s interesting gender politics, with its message appearing to amount to “Women can do most jobs as well as men but that doesn’t mean that they should.”
As with the majority of Golden Age battle of the sexes Comedies, if you’re going to go with it you have to make a reasonable adjustment for archaic attitudes. The fact that in this case the woman gets the last laugh but the man still gets her to marry him and quit the business is still a partial feminist victory for 1935 and not nearly as repugnant as the ending of Curtiz’s Female from two years previously. The main problem with Front Page Woman is not its gender politics but the fact that it isn’t quite funny or involving enough. A quick peek at the screenplay credits reveals that it was co-written by Laird Doyle whose previous scripts include… wait for it… Jimmy the Gent! So that brings us full circle. Still, at the very least Front Page Woman is an adequate time passer rather than the taxing test of endurance that Jimmy the Gent had been. It’s an interesting pitstop on Davis’s road to stardom but I wouldn’t race out to see it.
51. MANDALAY
Michael Curtiz’s second Melodrama starring Kay Francis is a marginal improvement on The Keyhole but it still falls short of the great film it could’ve been. While The Keyhole felt like it didn’t have enough story to cover even its hour runtime, Mandalay’s plot feels like it has the potential to fill a much longer film but has to race through crucial beats in order to maintain its brevity. Mandalay is the story of Tanya Borodoff, a Russian refugee who is abandoned in Rangoon by her gunrunner boyfriend when he uses her as a bargaining chip with a sleazy nightclub owner. Tanya becomes Spot White, the legendary hostess of the brothel, but her exploits attract the attention of the local police who want her deported. Leveraging the situation to her advantage, Tanya finds herself on a river steamer headed to Mandalay and a new life… if only her old life wouldn’t keep resurfacing to scupper her plans.
As I write this synopsis, it’s easy to convince myself that I enjoyed Mandalay more than I did. It is an extremely frustrating film with so many good parts quashed by its hurried insistence on leaping over huge swathes of the story. The main character has three different identities across 65 minutes and it feels like we need to be able to spend at least half an hour with each. Alas, the most interesting, Spot White, gets the least screen time, possibly because her perceived immorality caused problems with the censors. Just two years later under the newly established Hays Code, Mandalay would find itself rejected for release on these very grounds. Yet both Francis’s acting and Austin Parker and Charles Kenyon’s screenplay are at their best when focusing on the coolly manipulative Spot White, who essentially gets one great scene and is then swept aside. Francis does a fantastic femme fatale act but we quickly learn that this was all a front to disguise the psychological damage inflicted by forced prostitution. It’s good that Mandalay doesn’t soft-pedal this side of the story but for it to be as effective as it could’ve been we would have needed to see much more of Spot White and her time at the club. That said, the one scene she does get is one of the finest, most satisfying moments I’ve seen in a Pre-Code film, as she turns the tables on a morally-superior police commissioner by evoking his own visits to the brothel.
Mandalay is an early example of the Romantic Drama named for its one-word exotic location, a subgenre that spawned films like Tangier, Algiers and Singapore and which was perfected by Curtiz himself with Casablanca. Mandalay looks set to capitalise on its Far East setting (shot in a disguised California) and the expansive nightclub feels like an ideal backdrop for a cinematic atmosphere but all too quickly we are torn away from that location and stuck on a relatively boring boat for the rest of the runtime. Here Tanya, now going by the name of Marjorie, meets Lyle Talbot’s alcoholic Dr. Burton and an unnecessary late-game romance plot develops. This is also when the old boyfriend who sold her out resurfaces and Mandalay goes to some surprisingly dark places for its denouement. Had the story leaned into this and not seen fit to include a consolation romance for its heroine the film may have been more interesting. Better still, have the boyfriend be forced to return to the nightclub and encounter the emotionally-broken but outwardly powerful Spot White. Mandalay has such tantalising potential but it emerges as merely an average B-movie with flashes of greatness. Curtiz’s strong direction just can’t compensate for a script that can’t sit still long enough to work out its own strengths.
50. THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex is another lavish Technicolor spectacle from Warner Bros., hot on the heels of Michael Curtiz’s previous masterpiece The Adventures of Robin Hood. Like Robin Hood, the film was a hit but it has not endured remotely as well for latter day audiences. Even setting aside the liberties it takes with the truth, something for which my broad historical ignorance easily allows, this is a woefully faded production that alternates between stagebound verbosity and inadequate attempts at an epic scope. While the great Anton Grot’s Art Direction received an Oscar nomination, this falls short of his best work, with the smell of matte paintings and foam rubber hanging heavy in the air. The scenes in which Errol Flynn’s Essex heads off to war in Ireland are a muddy, artificial, atmosphere-free mess that completely shatter any illusion to which the viewer may have been clinging.
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex is saved from total disaster by a handful of elements that are sure to appeal to fans of Golden Age Hollywood, which fortunately I am. Although its magnificence feels slightly mismatched with the hokey visuals, another symphonic score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold elevates the film’s aspirations of regal grandeur. Sol Polito’s Technicolor cinematography is also glorious beyond what the film really warrants. Perhaps the main draw though is the central performance. While The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex is technically one of the run of Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland collaborations, they are not the film’s focus. Flynn is out of his depth in a role that sidelines his crucial physicality, while de Havilland is painfully marginalised in a tiny supporting role as a jealous lady-in-waiting, some say as punishment for having recently appeared in Gone with the Wind for rival studio MGM. But it is Bette Davis’s all-consuming turn as Queen Elizabeth that overshadows everything else. It’s a little hard to work out if this is a great performance or just a mercilessly bombastic one but either way it is entertaining. Under tons of makeup to age her up, Davis is imposing and commanding, projecting palpable emotion from her half mast eyes that peer through her white death mask. Her romance with Flynn’s Essex, though heavily fictionalised, has a fascinating dynamic and their numerous, wordy scenes together are the best in the film. The melodramatic ending, though slightly oversold, is nevertheless a powerful depiction of a doomed romance concluding in the worst possible circumstances.
The cumbersome title The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex replaced the original title Elizabeth the Queen, taken from Maxwell Anderson’s source play, when Flynn demanded to be acknowledged in the title. The alternative The Knight and the Lady was suggested but Davis quite rightly put a stop to that, scoffing at the idea of the lesser male role being given top billing. While The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex gives Elizabeth the first mention, the complete deemphasis of Essex in the original title would’ve been preferable, acknowledging before the opening credits are over what everyone knows: this is Davis’s film through and through and without her its mediocrity would likely have dissolved into borderline unwatchability. Though her mesmerisingly odd performance was tipped for an Oscar nod, she was instead nominated for Dark Victory, allowing The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex to slip quietly into the comparative obscurity in which it probably belongs.
49. THE SCARLET HOUR
After leaving Warner Bros. in 1954, Michael Curtiz directed a handful of big budget colour films including White Christmas, the most financially successful film of his career. By contrast, his 1956 black and white Noir The Scarlet Hour feels like a B-movie. Although the lead role was originally intended for Lauren Bacall and then Barbara Stanwyck, The Scarlet Hour eventually became a film designed to build up the reputations of some of Paramount’s newly-signed talent. Although there are a few recognisable faces including Broadway star Elaine Stritch, one sixth of the cast of 12 Angry Men as a duo of police officers, and Nat King Cole (who is wheeled out for a completely incongruous musical number and then never seen again), The Scarlet Hour features no major stars. This can be a plus with Noir, lending a sense of unfamiliarity to already unsettling material, but the performances here are generally lacklustre, exacerbated by a weak screenplay and sluggish pace.
Based on a story by animation legend and Comedy director Frank Tashlin, there are clever and intriguing elements in The Scarlet Hour but it definitely feels stretched out over 95 minutes. Key twists that would stand out in a short story get lost amidst a muddy and misogynistic romantic triangle. The protagonist, Carol Ohmart’s Pauline, is pitched somewhere between victim and femme fatale, manipulating her lover into committing a criminal act in order to escape her abusive husband. There’s the potential for a really interesting character study and a refreshing moral ambiguity but the script goes ahead and introduces a “good” alternative woman in Jody Lawrance’s simpering secretary Kathy. The implication is clear, with all the sympathy being afforded the man who actually commits the crime and all the blame being aimed at the woman who convinces him to do so. Her adulterous behaviour must be punished, of course, while he gets a second chance and a new love. Pauline is by far the most interesting character and, a few moments of overwrought scenery chewing aside, Ohmart is not bad in the role. She looks strikingly similar to Barbara Stanwyck from certain angles and it’s not unthinkable that she could’ve developed a Stanwyck-esque excellence if given the right roles. Instead she quickly became a cult actress, recognisable mostly for TV roles and William Castle’s classic House on Haunted Hill. The other standout is Elaine Stritch as Pauline’s talkative friend Phyllis. Although Stritch would later decry The Scarlet Hour as her worst work, she brings much needed humour to the film and provides some human colour to offset the drab melodrama. Tom Tryon and Jody Lawrance as the somehow-hero and heroine fail to make any impact at all, deprived of any real chance at characterisation.
The Scarlet Hour does show some early promise. The notion of trysting adulterers stumbling on a gang of crooks planning a heist is a good starting point for a story and Pauline’s tense scenes with monstrous husband Ralph (James Gregory – adequate) are effectively brutal, with Curtiz utilising his trademark shadows to depict a vicious beating. Pauline convincing her lover Marsh to rob the robbers in order to obtain money for them to start a new life together sets up a potentially delicious premise but the events that then unfold are underwhelming and there follows a long stretch of hand-wringing and tedious investigation before a nice twist and a surprisingly moving final scene save The Scarlet Hour from becoming the complete disaster as which it is sometimes pegged. Ultimately, this is a frustrating film. In trying to add too judgmental a moral strand, it scuppers its own Noir credentials. The removal of Lawrance’s completely unnecessary character would’ve made the film a more streamlined, interesting proposition, with no convenient eleventh hour redemption or implied moral condemnation. Even with these changes, The Scarlet Hour would need to lose at least twenty minutes of runtime, bringing it closer to its titular timeframe by jettisoning the considerable padding. It’s not a disaster but The Scarlet Hour has the ingredients for a terrific Noir and the filmmakers added too much sugar and took it out of the oven too early.
48. YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN
I’ve spoken elsewhere, not least in my destruction of Michael Curtiz’s previous film Night and Day, about how I’m not really a fan of Biopics. It’s foolhardy to write off entire genres and there are undoubtedly some great Biopics out there, but generally speaking I find the framework into which so many examples of the genre seem determined to hammer their stories is a tedious and repetitive one. There is, of course, also the thorny issue of entertainment vs. reality and the Biopic tradition of taking liberties with life stories for dramatic purposes is one which must be judged on a case by case basis, a process that itself becomes tedious and repetitive. In the case of Young Man with a Horn (no giggling at the back there!), we can at least dispense with the latter question to some extent. While Dorothy Baker’s novel on which the film was based was inspired by the life of Bix Beiderbecke, the use of the name Rick Martin for the lead character distinguishes both works as fictionalised variations. While some Beiderbecke fans still complained, Young Man a Horn never once claims to be the actual story of Bix Beiderbecke, merely a fictional tale inspired by it. But while this wrinkle helps Young Man with a Horn sidestep issues of authenticity and ethical obligation, it doesn’t prevent it meandering down the same predictable alleyways trodden by the average Biopic. I could really do without seeing another tale of a promising young talent disturbing the establishment before spiralling into alcoholism, especially when the dramatic licence a film has granted itself through fictionalisation would allow it to explore other avenues instead.
It’s a shame Young Man with a Horn drizzles its way down such a predictable path because it is a beautiful film to look at. Ted D. McCord’s ravishing black and white cinematography and Curtiz’s wonderfully unfussy compositions combine with Ray Heindorf’s jazzy score to create a deeply evocative atmosphere. There are also several strong performances. Though Kirk Douglas feels vaguely miscast and Doris Day is wasted in a bland supporting role, Lauren Bacall is arrestingly enigmatic as aspiring psychiatrist Amy North. The character’s lesbianism is depicted in about as overt a manner as was possible in 1950, although it is difficult to tell just how sympathetic the film is to her sexuality. Musician Hoagy Carmichael is also very good as a down-to-earth pianist, although he gets lumbered with a frankly terrible fourth-wall-breaking narration that awkwardly frames the film. But the acting honours belong to a very moving Juano Hernández as Rick’s caring but downtrodden mentor Art Hazzard. While his story arc is probably the most emotionally manipulative, it is also a welcome piece of feelings-rich melodrama in an increasingly grainy tale. Conversely, the final nail in the coffin for Young Man with a Horn is its refusal to follow through on that downbeat trajectory, instead inserting an unconvincing and disastrously hurried eleventh hour redemption that is not remotely satisfying. Like many of the films that have ended up at around the same place in my ranking, Young Man with a Horn is a very well directed piece that suffers from weak material that it can’t quite transcend.
47. LIFE WITH FATHER
There exists a certain group of people (I hesitate to say idiots, but if the big pointy cap fits…) who are not only willing but enthusiastic in their determination to write off, sight unseen, every film made before a certain era (usually, somewhat conveniently, the era that coincided with the terrible event of their birth). I’m not talking about those who have watched older films and found they are not to their taste. That’s fine. I’m not even taking about those who have never seen an older film but assume they will not enjoy them based on what they know about their own tastes. Again, fine. I’m talking about those who actually presume to have an opinion on something they know nothing about and have no intention of learning anything more about. This kind of bigotry infects the world of amateur film criticism as much as it does the world of politics. I mention these persistent, vapid irritants because I suspect they uphold their reductive assumptions by consolidating almost an entire century of filmmaking into one image of what an “old film” is like and I’m pretty sure that image is somewhere close to being the film that Life with Father actually is. This stuffy, verbose, quaintly nostalgic Comedy set mainly in the house of an 1880s stockbroker and his family is the sort of film that inspires midnight sweats in those who confidently assert that films got better in accordance with their rising price tags. I’m convinced every film from Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Factory to Citizen Kane to The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is Life with Father in the minds of these people.
That may have seemed like a disconcertingly mean-spirited opening paragraph but my intention was mainly to illustrate that Life with Father is such a thoroughly crusty production that it could plausibly define the entire notion of cinematic antiquity in the mind of the more frivolous youth (I just turned 42. Allow me this momentary curmudgeonly indulgence). It is perhaps the quintessential one-they-don’t-make-‘em-like-anymore, to the point that you almost expect to have to wind up your TV before putting it on. In fact, though it drapes itself in the attire of the past, there’s a modern satirical twinkle in Life with Father’s examination of an iron-fisted patriarch who is repeatedly manipulated by his wife’s covert running of the household. The problem is that the impact gets blunted by an uncertainty that few effective satires can survive.
About 45 minutes into Life with Father’s taxing two-hour runtime, it shifts focus to the fact that William Powell’s nominal head of the household Clarence Day is not baptised. This news comes as a shock to his wife Vinnie (well played by Irene Dunne, despite the fact that she hated the role), who then spends the majority of the rest of the film trying to cajole and emotionally blackmail her unwilling husband into having his forehead splashed. It’s a potentially effective setup if only it were clear with whom, if anyone, we’re supposed to sympathise. The play from which the film was adapted was able to be a bit bolder. Clarence, a believer in God with a deep aversion to organised religion, was regularly heard declaring “Oh God!”, a catchphrase which the film waters down to “Oh gad!” This was not the filmmakers fault, given that the Hay’s Code forbade blasphemy, but it undermines a pointed juxtaposition that set up the play’s final line, “I’m going to be baptised, damn it!” The film version retains this ending but drops the “damn it” which completely destroys the point of the line. What we get is a beaten down man showing contrition, rather than a hard-headed sourpuss compromising under protest. It’s a fizzle where a bang should be. Life with Father is often compared to a sitcom and the original ending gives us a satisfying development combined with that medium’s standard return to the status quo. The film version, with the deletion of just two words, renders the implication quite different and less comfortingly amusing.
Based on the fact that that the battle of the baptismal is its central concern, you can probably draw conclusions about Life with Father’s slow pace and low stakes for which I promise not to chastise you. However, if these things don’t bother you or even seem inviting, there are positive things about Life with Father too. Robert M. Haas and George James Hopkins’ handsome art direction makes a virtue of the potentially stagey setting, with the townhouse and its surroundings looking chocolate-box pretty in William V. Skall and J. Peverell Marley’s subtlety restrained Technicolor cinematography. Donald Ogden Stewart’s screenplay, though repetitive and compromised, hits upon a certain comedic rhythm which is emphasised by the agreeably theatrical lead performances. The younger actors, including a fifteen year old Elizabeth Taylor, are amusingly, if also somewhat gratingly, over the top and they also get some of the more interesting subplots, including one involving an accidental poisoning and another focusing on the anxieties of a son who seems to have become possessed by his father’s suit. These diversions help to prevent the attention from waning completely but I can’t pretend I wasn’t quite desperate for Life with Father to end a good twenty minutes before it did me that courtesy. A curious film then, and not without a certain perplexing charm, but what was once a solid hit with audiences now seems more like a dangerous piece of confirmation bias waiting to fall into the hands of naysaying modernists.
46. VIRGINIA CITY
Virginia City was intended to capitalise on the success of Michael Curtiz’s Western Dodge City. In the same way that Daughters Courageous had deployed the same cast as Four Daughters in different roles, so Virginia City was supposed to reunite the Dodge City cast. Several of them are here, including Errol Flynn, Alan Hale, Guinn Williams and Frank McHugh, but intended leading lady Olivia de Havilland dropped out and was replaced by Miriam Hopkins while Victor Jory, so effective in a secondary villain role in Dodge City, was meant to play the Mexican bandit Murrell but a scheduling conflict meant the role went to Humphrey Bogart. While Flynn, Hale and Williams do a good job recreating their leading man/comic relief chemistry from the previous film, both Hopkins and Bogart feel miscast. Hopkins’ tentative shot at playing a dance hall girl and Confederate spy is too one note to support even one of those personas and her chemistry with Flynn is practically non-existent which scuppers the central romance. Bogart, meanwhile, seems mildly embarrassed by his ill-suited moustache and on-and-off cartoon accent. He was right on the cusp of becoming one of Hollywood’s most recognisable and celebrated leading men, so in retrospect the performance looks even sillier. That iconic voice keeps breaking through his half hearted attempt at a Mexican accent, until all you can hear is “Here’s loooking at you, keeeeeeeed.”
Virginia City’s casting problems are not the main issue with the film though. At over two hours in length, it feels stretched beyond its natural lifespan by at least half an hour. With a better screenplay, the length wouldn’t have been a problem, and the plot about a Southerner’s attempts to smuggle $5 million in gold out of the titular town and a Union officer’s attempts to prevent it reaching the Confederacy is ripe with possibility. Randolph Scott gives one of his best performances as the Confederate Captain and his rivalry with Flynn is set up well, infused with personal vendettas and exacerbated by romantic complications. Bogart is dropped into the plot nicely too in an action sequence on a moving stagecoach which constitutes the only real burst of activity in a dull opening 75 minutes. Things come alive a bit more in the final stretch as the transportation of the gold gets underway and we leave Virginia City for the wide open plains, but it all feels a bit sluggishly staged. A mawkish vein of sentimentality mars the central rivalry and the syrupy patriotic ending involving a silhouetted Abraham Lincoln is just awful, tangling the plot up in legal red tape when it should be riding high in the saddle.
Virginia City is a frustrating film as it is apparent that Flynn, Scott and Curtiz were up to the challenge of making this the spectacular Western Thriller it could’ve been. Unfortunately, the epic sweep of Sol Polito’s lovely black and white cinematography is not matched by Robert Buckner’s turgid screenplay and Curtiz struggles to infuse the lumbering story with his usual energetic style.
45. NOAH’S ARK
Michael Curtiz’s first big Hollywood Epic is a film that will probably be of greater interest to those fascinated by the development of early cinema than it will to anyone seeking a straightforward evening’s entertainment. Certainly, the spectacle of this humongous film is impressive and that was enough to keep me riveted, which is lucky because in terms of narrative the film is utterly preposterous. Even the spectacle is tainted by the knowledge that the climactic flood sequence, so effective onscreen, was so carelessly mounted that it cost the lives of three extras and resulted in a fourth having to have their leg amputated. Like John Landis’s negligence on Twilight Zone: The Movie (which also cost three lives), this sours the whole viewing experience as we wonder just how real each reaction to the torrenting water really is. But Landis flouted all sorts of safety regulations, whereas Curtiz was working in an industry with few safeguards. The Noah’s Ark tragedies would lead to stunt safety regulations being written and implemented the following year. None of this absolves Curtiz completely, of course, and his later negligence with animal welfare on 1936’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, which cost the lives of twenty-five horses, seems to confirm a troubling level of callous disregard for anything but the finished product. It’s a somewhat guilty admission then that the flood scenes are the most entertaining thing in Noah’s Ark but, human nature being what it is, reports of the fatalities ended up helping the box office, a curious result for such a pious and preachy film.
It’s probably redundant to refer to a Biblical Epic as “preachy” but man, is this thing preachy! The screenplay is credited to Darryl F. Zanuck who proves over the course of one hundred minutes that he was a far better producer than he was a writer. Taking its cue from D.W. Griffith’s multiple-time-period Epic Intolerance, Noah’s Ark switches between biblical times and World War I in an attempt to equate God’s destruction of the world by flood with the war-torn world of then-recent history. It’s a laboured comparison that the film struggles to draw convincingly, which ultimately means we’re presented with two different stories that are practically unlinked by anything other than the cast, who plays the leads in both sections. Zanuck’s favoured brand of religion here is very much fire, brimstone and unjustifiable divine cruelty, to the extent that he depicts God causing a horrific train crash because one passenger openly doubts his existence (don’t worry, we later see that passenger die in the wreckage. Hooray!… right?…). The passengers on that train include a minister who kicks off the religious debate with his pious warnings to other passengers. When several of them declare that they don’t believe in God and state their own particular allegiances, the implication that we should side with the minister is clear. And yet in far more secular times this scene plays differently, with the minister just seeming like one more loudmouth publicly offering unsolicited opinions. When another passenger’s question “If God exists, why doesn’t he show himself?” results in a bolt of lightning destroying the bridge for which the train is headed, there’s a feeling that Curtiz may as well have dubbed in a booming voice yelling “Sucks to be you!” Certainly, he later has apparently sympathetic mortal characters displaying such inappropriate glee at the fate of those who happened to choose the wrong religion. Them and their crazy pagan gods, they should’ve put their faith in the perfectly sane one that is currently destroying almost all life on Earth! In its opening scenes, Noah’s Ark eludes to God’s covenant, as symbolised by a rainbow, to never invoke such widespread destruction again, yet the film then goes to great pains to suggest that World War I was just such a vicious divine intervention. This God’s covenants aren’t worth the sky they’re written on!
Of course, the hardline religious traditionalism of Noah’s Ark was hardly going to sit well with an old agnostic like myself, but from the point of view of cinematic history I found the film surprisingly enjoyable. Although its insistent piety suggests it was conceived as something more, Curtiz seems to know that what he has on his hands is essentially an enormous sideshow. The awkward non-blending of the modern and biblical storylines is mirrored in the decision to supplement the dominant silent footage with occasional bursts of spoken dialogue. They come and go without rhyme or reason, beyond the fact that The Jazz Singer had been a recent hit and that talking pictures were now as big a box office draw as three fatalities and an amputated limb. So Noah’s Ark is notable as a very early partial-talkie. Curtiz also seems to be borrowing from some of the most respected filmmakers of the era in his impressive direction: Griffith in his switching between eras, Cecil B. DeMille in his sweeping biblical grandeur, Sergei Eisenstein in his Battleship Potemkin-esque montages, King Vidor in his The Big Parade-style war scenes. If these emulations speak of Curtiz having not quite found a distinct voice of his own, his ability to recreate the work of his contemporaries so effectively also showcases an up-and-coming talent who Hollywood would entrust time and again to helm big pictures.
While contemporary critics found Noah’s Ark to be a bore, it is undoubtedly awesome in scale. We see the ark, we see the floods, we see train crashes and huge, flaming tablets with the word of God etched into them. The effectiveness of the visuals is occasionally undermined, sometimes by the shortcomings of the time (the towering tablets are put into perspective by a hysterically funny puppet Noah that awkwardly raises his patently fake hands in reverence) but also by the madness of the screenplay. Whatever story this purports to be, it sure ain’t Noah’s Ark. Zanuck has instead penned an overripe romantic adventure that Curtiz has realised with unintended but seemingly gleeful vulgarity. This is by no means a classic but given the right setting it could be a camp classic. It’s easier to imagine the boos, cheers and guffaws it could elicit from a gloriously Godless midnight movie crowd than any kind of connection it might make with the resolutely religious. Its gratuitous deviations seem more likely to offend the latter audience than affirm their faith.
Noah’s Ark is by no means a good film but for those with an interest in the infancy of cinema it is an extremely interesting one and, while it is impossible to ignore the cost of the lives it took, it is also strangely entertaining. The film originally ran well over two hours but was subsequently trimmed and the excised footage lost. There’s no way a film this confused and awkwardly grotesque could sustain its perverse appeal for that runtime but the hundred minute cut that still exists actually flies by. In terms of quality it’s probably a two star film but for entertainment value it’s more like three and a half stars. I’ve landed in the middle with a three star rating and the memory of an utterly bonkers evening’s viewing.
44. ALIAS THE DOCTOR
With The Woman from Monte Carlo, Michael Curtiz had made a gallant attempt to bring moments of inspiration to a flat Melodrama but his flourishes were too few and far between. His next film, Alias the Doctor, was also a brazenly preposterous Melodrama and this time Curtiz managed to direct with such flair that it almost fools you into thinking you’re watching a good film. The truth of the matter, though a tad more backhanded, is still close to that complimentary assessment: you’re watching a not-bad film! There is plenty about Alias the Doctor that is not good: the ludicrous story, the unengaging performances, the barely adequate dialogue. But with the expressionistic style Curtiz brings to the material, he ends up making a virtue of the story’s flagrant excesses, at least for anyone willing to suspend disbelief (or perhaps expel disbelief, given that a suspension in this case doesn’t quite seem like enough).
With barely an hour’s runtime to tell its story, Alias the Doctor has to hit its plot twists with a complete lack of nuance or plausibility. So the misfortunes that befall medical student Karl Brenner mount up with overwhelming regularity. He can’t seem to go anywhere without inadvertently triggering an accident that requires surgery, in much the same way that murder seemed to follow Jessica Fletcher around. Curtiz manages to sell this premise by subtly evoking an almost supernatural atmosphere. This is most notable with the introduction of a silent, ominous autopsy doctor who stalks the hospital corridors like a ghoul, hovering over critical patients with the motives of a vulture. The role was originally played by Boris Karloff but he was replaced by Nigel De Brulier, whose grim skeletal countenance is unforgettable, especially when Curtiz shoots him like something out of a Universal Horror film. It’s a fleeting detail but it’s enough to help the audience buy the notion of so many coincidental occurrences and unlikely twists.
Aside from De Brulier’s effective silent turn, Alias the Doctor benefits from a strangely compelling central performance from Richard Barthelmess as the put-upon Karl. Barthelmess had been an acclaimed actor of the silent era, notching up two early Oscar nominations, but his modest appearance and coldly noncommittal style didn’t quite translate to Hollywood stardom in the sound era. In the case of this ambiguous character however, Barthlemess’s essential unreadability manages to increase the tension. The other standout is Lucille La Verne, soon to achieve immortality as the voice of Snow White’s Wicked Queen, whose performance as the manipulative mother just about manages to get an angle on a weakly defined character. Norman Foster is passable as the playboy brother whose negligence lands him in trouble when he performs an unsanctioned operation on his girlfriend. Changes were forced by censors when the vagueness about this operation was seen to imply that it was an illegal abortion. These moral guardians found the notion of a woman thrown down a flight of stairs much easier to digest. Even with the added dialogue though, the implication is still clear in Curtiz’s shadowy images of the not-entirely-consensual seduction and the suggestion of an argument about urgently needed money. For anyone willing to read between the lines, these details give Alias the Doctor an extra layer that enhances the moral complexity and adds a dimension of stark realism to an otherwise fanciful narrative.
Alias the Doctor reaches a peak of implausibility in its final act but by that time Curtiz has prepared us to go with the flow, culminating in a finale that is actually quite tense, unusual and interesting. It is complimented by an intriguingly ambiguous ending in which the legend “The End” is emblazoned on an image of Karl ploughing the field on his beloved farm, a place he only left to satisfy the demands of his mother. Whether it is there to show that Karl ultimately returned to his first love of farming or whether it is just a flashback invocation of simpler times before the challenging duplicities that followed, the film’s implied moral seems to be to stick to your dreams and not be steered astray by the pressure of others. Karl is repeatedly told that he has no choice, that he must use his talents as a doctor to help others, but his duty to his own happiness is routinely ignored. This final, quiet image seems to place a higher premium on his self-care than any of Karl’s acquaintances had.
Alias the Doctor could’ve been a disaster but Curtiz worked hard to make sure it exceeded its minimal potential. The result is a film that is still riddled with problems but which also provides numerous impressive visual enhancements and interesting interpretations of the somewhat elusive themes. It’s not what you’d call a hidden gem exactly but at only an hour in length it’s well worth a watch, if only as further evidence of Curtiz’s underrated abilities.
43. THE PERFECT SPECIMEN
Occasionally in Michael Curtiz films you can detect the influence of other recent hits, presumably the effect of that reductive approach of trying to reproduce success through repetition. In the case of The Perfect Specimen, It Happened One Night hangs heavy in the air. Based on Samuel Hopkins’ novel of the same name, The Perfect Specimen follows the story of Gerald Beresford Wicks, the heir to a fortune who has been kept in the seclusion of the family estate for his entire life in an attempt to create a “perfect specimen” at the behest of his overbearing grandmother. Dedicating his time to study and exercise, Gerald gets a glimpse of the outside world when curious reporter Mona Carter deliberately crashes her car through the gates of the estate. Egged on by a flirtatious disagreement, Gerald sets out on his own to find Mona and get a taste of reality. But when Gerald’s grandmother assumes he has been kidnapped, they soon find the cops on their tail.
Although the plot mirrors It Happened One Night’s notion of a mismatched couple falling in love as they travel around and evade their pursuers, The Perfect Specimen fails to capitalise on its most interesting wrinkle: the idea of Errol Flynn’s Gerald being a naive superman-in-progress. This extra detail could’ve made for some excellent vignettes along the way but after an initial one involving a boxing match, The Perfect Specimen quickly sinks into Rom-Com clichés which lean more into the oft-explored male/female relationships angle instead of exploring the more tantalising premise to which the title refers. This doesn’t mean the film isn’t entertaining and funny, but with a screenplay juggled by four writers it feels a little like it is being made up as they go along, culminating in a very sloppy conclusion that hurriedly seeks to approximate It Happened One Night’s moving climactic turnaround through less convincing Screwball double-talk.
The Perfect Specimen seeks to align itself with the emerging Screwball genre and at first it seems promising but Joan Blondell’s charismatic, witty performance as Mona is unfortunately not complimented by Flynn’s tentative shot at comedy. Gerald is meant to be an awkward, stiff character but Flynn has that down a little too well and there’s a sense that the objectifying title of the film has unfortunately identified his strengths in terms of physical attributes. The muscular, agile Flynn always seemed most natural when leaping around in tights and confidently bellowing the florid language of the Swashbuckler. In The Perfect Specimen, he spends the majority of his time in a neat suit which appears to have been pressed by someone who forgot to take him out of it first. The rhythm and energy of Screwball depends on two leads who can match each other pound for pound. Blondell’s obvious abilities unfortunately seem to be clipped early on by an indecisive screenplay and an inadequate scene partner.
For all its flaws, The Perfect Specimen coasts by on the charm of its supporting players including Allen Jenkins doing his uncouth but soft-hearted routine, May Robson enjoying being the rigid matriarch and the always welcome Edward Everett Horton making the most of his limited screen-time with his trademark array of double takes and delightful dithering. Curtiz’s usual propulsive forward motion is in evidence but he can’t quite knit the story together as smoothly as he usually manages. It’s fortunate then that, like a Jenga tower built out of clown shoes, The Perfect Specimen is a fun thing to watch collapsing before your eyes.
42. DIVE BOMBER
Dive Bomber is the sort of film that was popping up a lot on the eve of America joining the war effort but the quality of these films tended to vary considerably and the longevity of the more obviously propagandist pieces is frequently in question for the average viewer. Though interesting from a historical point of view, fetishistic aviation adventures have rarely been my cup of engine oil and the mediocre reputation of Dive Bomber meant I went to it with a sense of duty over excitement. I was pleased to discover then that this is definitely one of the better examples of the subgenre I’ve seen. It’s fair to say that with its docudrama focus on the scientific process of preventing pilots passing out at high altitudes, Dive Bomber does get a bit wearing by the time it crosses its 2 hour+ finish line but the soapy dramatics surrounding the rivalry between Errol Flynn’s Harvard doctor Doug Lee and Fred MacMurray’s petulant flyboy Joe Blake are enjoyable enough to carry the viewer through.
And then there’s the other part of the film. Dive Bomber’s tagline was “The stunning spectacle of color rides with you into the heavens!” and damn me, if this thing doesn’t live up to that lofty promise. Aerial scenes have often been hit and miss for me given that I have no real interest in or affection for aircraft, but Dive Bomber’s flying sequences, captured by Bert Glennon and Winston C. Hoch’s stunning Technicolor cinematography, are so completely breathtaking that they alone make Dive Bomber a worthy experience. The US Navy’s full support for the project gave Curtiz unprecedented access to planes, airfields, aircraft carriers and warships and allowed him to shoot real training exercises rather than have to stage airborne derring do. Consequently, the ratio of distractingly fake model shots to real flying footage is massively reduced and Dive Bomber emerges as an astonishingly atmospheric trip into the clouds.
That Dive Bomber has to come down to earth occasionally does prove to be a problem. Certain stretches, such as Dr. Lee’s training as a naval flight surgeon, are actually very enjoyable and the predictability of certain storylines is oddly comforting if you see it as the mere padding it obviously is (example: at the beginning of the film one of the pilots talks happily about giving it all up soon for the girl he’s gonna marry. Guess what happens to him with inevitable immediacy!). But the scientific research sections get increasingly lengthy and dull as the film goes on and I was really looking forward to the ending by the final half hour. There is a bizarre attempt to add some humour with a series of completely unrelated sketches involving Alan Jenkins, Dennie Moore and Cliff Nazarro as a newly married Corpsman, his supposedly ball-busting wife and the double-talking pal who covers for him. These skits, all of which feature Jenkins hiding in sick bay to avoid his wife on payday, are typical of Dive Bomber’s few concessions to humour, all of which are lightly misogynistic. When the main characters discuss women, their jocular exchanges are always about the burden of marriage, while the only other female role of any supposed significance is Alexis Smith’s Linda who gets two very brief scenes fawning over Flynn and is essentially used as a game piece to increase the tensions between Doug and the jealous Joe. While that rivalry does give the film a lot of its dramatic drive, it eventually becomes wearing to see MacMurray’s Joe being such a persistent jerk to the squeaky clean Doug. A less one-sided face-off might’ve made things more interesting.
If none of Dive Bomber’s jokes land and its plot never really takes off, it’s fortunate that we do frequently get to see planes doing so. That’s really what this film is about and it knows it, making sure we get frequent flights throughout the 133 minutes. If it emerges as more of a curio than a great film, Dive Bomber is at least an intermittently thrilling watch and a decent ending to the six year, twelve film collaboration between Michael Curtiz and Errol Flynn.
41. FOUR’S A CROWD
With three successful collaborations under their belts already, the trio of Michael Curtiz, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland were riding high in 1938. They’d just had their biggest hit yet in the definitive Swashbuckler The Adventures of Robin Hood and Warner Bros. was eager to have them work together again. However, Flynn in particular was concerned about being typecast as an action hero and he pushed to be considered for other types of film. So the Flynn/de Havilland follow up to their most enduring Adventure film ended up being a largely forgotten Screwball comedy, the commercial failure of which only made the studio double down in its determination to push Flynn towards swordplay and swashbuckling.
Four’s a Crowd is an unusual film but not a terrible one. Flynn’s determination to try his hand at comedy resulted in a marked improvement on his previous attempt, The Perfect Specimen. Compared to the stiff performance he gave in that, in Four’s a Crowd Flynn seems to be getting to grips with the rhythms and speed of Screwball and makes for a pretty convincing leading man. de Havilland also gets to try her hand at something different, trading in her strong, gutsy persona from the Swashbucklers for a dizzy, giggling Heiress caricature that also works well. Both stars are completely eclipsed, however, by the glorious Rosalind Russell who is playing a sort of prototype version of Hildy Johnson, the role that she made completely her own in His Girl Friday. Though she is a reporter, her Four’s a Crowd character Jean Christy isn’t identical to Russell’s more famous role. She is a little less cool and commanding, if no less determined and resourceful, but Russell has clearly already mastered that fast-talking Screwball energy in which Flynn and de Havilland are still apprentices.
Comparisons to His Girl Friday highlight the major problem with Four’s a Crowd. Howard Hawks’s classic Comedy presented a complex plot at 100mph but it never left the audience behind. Due care and attention were paid to keeping the plot clear while getting the laughs. In the case of Four’s a Crowd, Casey Robinson and Sig Herzig’s screenplay loses the audience almost immediately with swathes of yammering exposition about newspaper bosses and public relations officers that is doubtless witty but far from coherent. As the various romantic entanglements begin to play out against the backdrop of this story, it’s hard to enjoy the farcical elements as much as we might when the motivation is so muddy. I actually paused Four’s a Crowd a couple of times to check an online plot synopsis and it was still hard to pinpoint why exactly each character was making the choices they were. There’s plenty of energy here, with people being chased by dogs, running around in their pants, hiding under beds and switching romantic partners. It has the ingredients to be a success but the chefs can’t quite put them together.
As its title suggests, Four’s a Crowd has four lead characters. That fourth lead is played by Patric Knowles, a fixture in the Flynn/de Havilland pictures who feels thoroughly out of his depth here. Knowles was never much of an actor, with his Will Scarlet proving to be the weakest link in the Adventures of Robin Hood cast. Fortunately, Knowles gets the least screen-time in Four’s a Crowd but he is a spanner in the works whenever he turns up, which is detrimental to Screwball, a genre which needs to run like a well-oiled machine. Knowles appears in the opening scene with Russell and it is immediately apparent that Russell is carrying the whole thing. With someone more suitable in the Knowles role, Four’s a Crowd would certainly have a better chance at working but it still feels like an overstuffed film. As is often the case with these overambitious productions, the result of trying to do too much eventually sees the whole thing collapse in a final act that switches tone into all-out silliness, involving hurried weddings, frantic chases and a car full of angry dogs! It’s not unentertaining to watch and with a bit more work they might have pulled it off, but the film does end up feeling a bit of a mess. Nevertheless, my affection for the Screwball genre, along with some enjoyable performances, did mean I quite enjoyed Four’s a Crowd despite everything it gets wrong. It may be a film that improves on subsequent watches when the viewer has got a handle on the plot and can concentrate on the content rather than flailing around in search of the flapping story threads.
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