THE BRIDE COMES HOME (1935)

After her 1934 annus mirabilis (IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT; CLEOPATRA; IMITATION OF LIFE), Claudette Colbert hit the top-ten list in 1935 & ‘36, more often than not in reliable (rather than inspired) romantic comedies like this, playing the default character home studio Paramount had developed for her: wealthy society type suddenly gone cash poor.  In those Depression days, it served as a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too persona, giving Colbert by design or accident a perfect excuse to look richly chic yet still relatable to the masses.  It could even, on occasion, rise to greatness (see Preston Sturges’s THE PALM BEACH STORY/’42).  Here, it’s pleasantly serviceable.  Waking up to a cut staff in the family manse, Claudette goes job hunting.  Clueless and skill-less about the workforce, her ace in the hole is longtime beau Robert Young.  He’s starting up a Men’s Magazine with a 3.5 mill. inheritance and current bodyguard/former journalist Fred MacMurray as editor.  (Baby boomers note: this ain’t your MY THREE SONS MacMurray, but a nearly unrecognizable stud.  Young also very fit & toned.  Colbert, of course, famously looked nearly the same - wonderful - over six decades.)  The gimmick, as if you hadn’t already guessed, is that Young has been proposing to Colbert since they were eight, but as soon as the bickering starts between MacMurray & Colbert, she only has eyes for Fred.  (And you thought Paramount would let M-G-M loan-out leading-man Young prevail over two long term contract stars?  Journeyman director Wesley Ruggles runs a smooth show, but more distinctive contributions come via cinematographer Leo Tover's dark glowing interiors and from costume designer Travis Banton.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   To see Paramount go off auto-pilot on this kind of romantic trio: Ernest Lubitsch & Ben Hecht’s reworking of Noël Coward’s DESIGN FOR LIVING/’33 with Gary Cooper, Fredric March & Miriam Hopkins.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/design-for-living-1933.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While Columbia was too cheap to splurge on Banton for Capra’s IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, Colbert did make it happen at Universal in John Stahl’s IMITATION OF LIFE.

ACT ONE (1963)

Everyone’s favorite theatrical memoir, a surprise bestseller for playwright/director Moss Hart, limps to the screen under Dore Schary’s direction.  His one attempt at megging pure self-sabotage, with his writing, casting & producing little better.  Schary, previously a major Hollywood producer who rose to M-G-M head-of-production before quickly flaming out, a lifelong friend who’d been Hart’s assistant in the ‘20s, tosses out the first half of the book, losing much of a rags-to-riches saga that goes from tenement to Tamiment (the Catskills adult camp resort/B’way incubator) that made the book so memorable.  (Streamers?  Are you listening?)  Reduced to Hart’s first B’way success on ONCE IN A LIFETIME, about Hollywood’s silent-to-sound transition, co-written with established playwright George S. Kaufman.  As Kaufman, Jason Robards Jr is a reasonable choice compared to George Hamilton’s doorstop of a Hart.  Made even worse as best pal George Segal is so obviously right for the part.  That’s the way things go here.  Only Jack Klugman, Hart’s non-pro friend, coming across as a fully lived-in character.  And with the film’s compressed grey scale and Skitch Henderson’s OTT score, things can get pretty dire.  Fortunately, the tropes of getting a play up & running nearly impossible to kill.  Other than that, screwing up nearly everything wise, warm & witty from the book.  And most likely missing your favorite moment. (For me, it’s when play producer, and general mensch, Sam Harris notices at the last minute how loud the play is.  A casual comment that helps Hart fine tune the last act and turn out a hit.)  James Lapine’s recent rewrite for B’way got closer, but still not quite there.  Maybe if Sam Harris had been around to say something sage . . . 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Lots of once well-known Algonquin Round Table celebs flit by, all unrecognizable as cast by Schary.  But look for Eli Wallach as top B’way director/producer Jed Harris, here called Warren Stone for legal reasons.  Famously awful, he’s the man Laurence Olivier modeled his Richard III on.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  A literary rite of passage for all theater nerds, ACT ONE easily lives up to its rep.  And knowing that Hart died at 57, only months after completing it (and that his last two credits were directing MY FAIR LADY and CAMELOT), makes the never written ACT TWO only more tantalizing.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Many Hart (and Hart/Kaufman) plays were adapted for film: YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38; THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER/’41; LADY IN THE DARK.’44.  But his best film work came adapting GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT/’47 and in his stunning Hollywood savvy in the rewrite of A STAR IS BORN/’54.

CONTEST:  Name two connections between this film and the Marx Brothers’ A NIGHT AT THE OPERA/’35 to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

REAL GENIUS (1985)

After Val Kilmer’s recent death, it was both touching and surprising to see how many people on social media singled out his first two films as special favorites, this rude college comedy and his spy spoof debut in TOP SECRET!/’84, wacky comedy not being the first thing that comes to mind on Kilmer.  But where TOP SECRET!, while uneven as any from those AIRPLANE!/’80 guys (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker) probably looks better now than it did on release (good fun at its worst/fall on the floor hilarious at its best), REAL GENIUS looks DOA in every department.  Basically, it’s ANIMAL HOUSE meets YOUNG SHELDON as college senior Kilmer mentors 14-yr-old genius Gabriel Jarret at the lab and in the dorm, tasked by professor William Atherton to finish a Pentagon laser-from-space war weapon.  Hormones vs. hardware; and it’s tough to know what comes off worse: dialogue; characterizations & acting (Jarret & girlfriend Patti D'Arbanville wouldn’t make it on SAVED BY THE BELL); director Martha Coolidge’s lack of comic chops, the cheap/unfunny production design, or the hideous lensing.*  And Kilmer?  Working too hard to be the cool guy, the life of the campus party, the irreverent class clown with a sackful of funny faces, comic tumbles and goofy leaps of joie de vivre.  (He’s much the same, to equally bad effect, in WILLOW/’88.)  One of the Zucker brothers is quoted as saying he tried, but failed to get Kilmer to loosen up and be silly on SECRET!, when Kilmer just wanted to bring some realism to his ridiculous character; which of course made his work there all the funnier.  But then, Coolidge seems to have given everyone, cast and crew, the same bad advice: 'be funny.'*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *My advice?  Stick to TOP SECRET!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/top-secret-1984.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Hard to believe that cinematographer is the great Vilmos Zsigmond.  The last time he’d been so out of touch with his material, he manned up, accepted defeat, and ankled the project (FUNNY LADY/’75), admitting he simply didn’t know how to light the huge interior sets.  To the rescue?  James Wong Howe, coming out of retirement to shoot one last project.

ARABIAN NIGHTS (1942)

First (and best?) of three popular escapist entertainments made at Universal for that most exotic of screen trios: Sabu as the scamp, Jon Hall as the hunk and the mysterious Maria Montez for sex appeal.  (Hall may not look exotic, but Mom was a Tahitian Princess!)  Wartime anxiety no doubt helped put these things over, but this Thousand & One Nights tale has a lot going for it.  Mostly its storybook TechniColor look, courtesy of cinematographer Milton Krasner (later first choice for directors as different as Minnelli & Mankiewicz), especially in the first act where matte shots, miniatures & painted cycloramas give this Hollywood Bagdad the quality of a child’s cherished die-cut Pop-Up Illustrated volume, the kind that barely survive a kid’s heavy hand.  Now looking wonderful in restored prints, lighter, airier than the later ones shot by Krasner’s assistants.  (Like W. Howard Greene, Oscar’d next year for his glutinous 1943 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.  He did one of the two follow-ups: WHITE SAVAGE 43 or COBRA WOMAN 44.)  The plot?  Well, you see everyone is vying for the throne that rightly belongs to Jon Hall.  He’s been reported dead, but is really in disguise (thanks to clever Sabu) to see if Montez’s crown-loving Sherazade could love him for himself.  Leif Erickson’s the usurper, Billy Gilbert’s comic relief (with a bouncing stomach punch), Shemp Howard (!) a loyal follower and John Qualen a blue-eyed Alladin on the hunt for his missing magic lamp.  At 86", this one not a moment too long.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Check out all our Montez pics here.  Note, whichever one you are watching lowers your I.Q to the point where you think that’s her best!   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=montez 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Presumably, our German poster (see above) didn’t come out till after the war.

BLACK DOG / GOUZHEN (2024)

Much deserved International award winner (including Cannes’s Un Certain Regard), Guan Hu’s site specific drama, set in a near ‘ghost town,’ part of the boom-to-bust economy of 2008's Northern China, features some of the most dramatically spectacular Wide-Screen landscapes since Chuck Jones took Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner to an animated Monument Valley.*  Here, the focus is on recent parolee Lang (a very lean/very fit Eddie Peng), home after early release on a manslaughter charge where his involvement is unclear.  That makes our Road Runner figure a skinny, possibly rabid, black dog, part of the packs running wild over what’s left of the city.  But while Hu is specific in his use of location, he’s purposefully sketchy on character & narrative.  So it feels right to have Peng communicate only with gesture & whistling.  Letting us understand just enough Hu’s modus operandi here, and we pick up on Lang’s situation obliquely.  Former musician & circus acrobat; father a recluse dying of cancer; town being cleared out, especially of those roving packs of dogs, to facilitate a new industrial development program.  And 2008 has big events guiding the few still in town: an upcoming solar eclipse, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, even the circus coming to town.  This last bringing possible employment and romance to Lang.  Hu lets us put the pieces together, like one of those glueless Asian paper constructs that magically hold together on their own.  And lenser Weizhe Gao makes it happen by giving his images the participatory vibe of silent movies.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Mid-to late ‘50s Chuck Jones’ ROAD RUNNER cartoons.  *Apparently Looney Tunes were generally shot in Academy Ratio, but Jones must have designed his preferred frame projection to work best in ultra-wide ‘scope’ ratio.  (Experts in this field are welcome to tell all in the Comments.  Thanks!)   NOTE:  This is such a weird suggestion for a film match-up, I guess it also counts as a SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY.  But, in case you didn't notice, this was posted on April 1st!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  After the completion of filming, Peng adopted his Black Dog acting partner.