THE TOY WIFE (1938)

The only film with Luise Rainer solo-billed above-the-title, but hardly a promotion. Instead, near career sabotage with her misconceived character pursued by 'Featured Players' Melvyn Douglas & Robert Young rather than A-list stars, and journeyman director Richard Thorpe ill-matched to an oft-filmed French play. (FROU-FROU by CARMEN librettists Meilhac & Halévy.*) In antebellum New Orleans society, Rainer’s just returned from France with older sister Barbara O’Neil (next year’s mother to Scarlett O’Hara) to find a proper husband. Frivolous & flirtatious, more irritating than enchanting, her infantile impetuosity inexplicably tempting to Young (irresponsible; debonair) and Douglas (solid; sobersided). Guided to the safe choice by older sis O’Neil (who’d also fancied Douglas), Rainer proves too immature to raise their son or run the house leaving O’Neil to move in and take over all but the most conjugal of wifely duties. It all unravels with desertion, social disgrace, a duel, three deaths . . . and is perfectly dreadful on every level. Especially Rainer, at her most insufferable, gazing ever upward rather than catching the eye of fellow players.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The best reason to watch is to compare & contrast production standards @ lively Warner Bros. vs stodgy M-G-M in handling similar elements the same year in JEZEBEL; admittedly, with Bette Davis, Henry Fonda & director William Wyler all near the top of their game. Another Southern Plantation tale, so be advised that ‘Darkies’ are on hand to sing, dance & pray to ‘De Lord’ in regrettable period fashion. (Less 1830s than 1930s.) Though only WIFE has the gall to name one of the house slaves ‘Pickaninny.’ Yikes!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *What are the odds? Augustin Daly, who presented FROU-FROU on B’way, wrote an unrelated play titled JEZEBEL.

GUN GLORY (1957)

Standard issue mid-size Western finds gunslinger Stewart Granger going back to the farm, trying to make a go of things with the wary, resentful son he left behind and now hardly knows. They’re soon joined by Rhonda Fleming, pushed out of a job in town and glad to take on homemaking duties. It’d be idyllic, if only Granger & Son didn’t both take an interest; the conservative townsfolk weren't gossiping; and villainous cattleman James Gregory wasn't planning on running a herd 20,000 strong right thru everyone’s farmland & home. Too bad preacher Chill Wills can't convince the farmers to take a stand. Or that Granger’s the only person around with the skills to lead a resistance. It’s Cattlemen-vs-Farmers meets Stranger-Comes-To-Town; reasonably effective if without much texture, a factor rarely associated with Granger who homogenizes everything he touches. Fleming is quite good here, so too Chill Wills. But Steve Rowland in his first major role (he’s director Roy Rowland's son) is a crucial decade too old as the boy; an angry 25 when he needs to be a worshipful, but disappointed 15. (A better score might also help.) Nothing wrong with a SHANE/’53 wannabe, but this one isn’t very distinctive.

DOUBLE-BILL: Granger’s best Western is a chilly one, NORTH TO ALASKA/’60 with Henry Hathaway calling the shots for him & co-stars John Wayne & Capucine.

THE GREAT LIE (1941)

Ultra-slick soaper opens as the alcohol-fueled marriage of aviator George Brent & glamorous concert pianist Mary Astor gets nullified on a technicality. Sobered up, Brent soon realizes he’ll always be playing second-fiddle to Tchaikovsky and returns to loyal stand-by gal Bette Davis. But this happy (and legit) marriage turns tragic when Brent’s plane goes missing in the Amazon Jungle! Worse, Astor got herself pregnant on their (false) wedding night!! So, likely widow Bette offers to take the child, raise it as her own and give it Brent’s name & fortune. What could go wrong? Ah, illegitimacy, mother of a thousand & one Three-Hankie Weepers. Made during Davis’s glory decade @ Warners, this lesser-known title makes for good, not great trash. But composer Max Steiner has fun sampling Chopin & Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in his score while Astor (who worked with Davis to pump up their interplay and win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar®) had the piano-playing chops to fake her way around the keyboard. (The actual phlegmatic playing is probably by Max Rabinovitch.) And check out the neatly served Damon Runyon two-reeler, AT THE STROKE OF TWELVE, an early credit for director Jean Negulesco, included on the DVD.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Davis probably had to fight half the studio on the realistically disheveled, just-out-of-bed look she pulls off toward the end: hair a mess, no makeup, workaday pajama pants. You can bet Jack Warner raised hell when he saw the ‘dailies.’

DOUBLE-BILL: Two years before, in THE OLD MAID, Bette had the illegitimate kid, still with Brent, director Edmund Goulding, lenser Tony Gaudio & composer Max Steiner. Plus, twice the tears and double the masochism.

SALAAM BOMBAY! (1988)

One of the great feature debuts, Mira Nair’s plunge into the world of Bombay’s street boys brings Dickensian overtones & texture, with echoes of OLIVER TWIST both broad & intimate, to its very different world. Startling right from the top, where, in a switch, a young boy finds the circus has run away from him, he hies himself off to the nearest big city (Bombay) in hopes of making enough money to get back to home & mother. Settled in as go-fer to pimps, madames, hookers & addicts in a poor neighborhood where’s he’s also ‘tea delivery-boy,’ he hardly has time to come up for air. With professional actors in the adult roles, and amateurs street kids as juveniles, Nair consistently lands in the sweet spot, molding a true ensemble team. And what a world of color, delight, terror & heartbreak she finds on the street and in the crowded tenement apartments where everything plays out. A few melodramatic episodes feel a bit pushed, but the whiplash sentiments are both painfully believable and crushing to onscreen characters & viewer alike. Nair never made anything finer.

DOUBLE-BILL: A documentary from Calcutta, BORN INTO BROTHELS/’04, is both similar & compelling.

SCHATTEN / WARNING SHADOWS (1923)

Subtitled ‘A Nocturnal Hallucination,’ this extreme, if soggy, silent film example of German Expressionism is more cited than seen. As with Robert Weine's THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI/’19, writer/director Arthur Robinson tends more to his art design & trick effects than to plot, but with less successful integration of story, acting, mood & look. It’s also frankly hard to follow with Robinson largely going without explanatory surtitles. (There are introductory titles and, apparently, more narrative titles added for foreign release.) The basic idea comes thru as we join a wealthy court audience at a puppet show to watch a sort of Francesca da Rimini tale of infidelity. The visual gimmick is in how Robinson variously hides, reveals or misreads story points thru shadow, reflection or silhouette. But with a lack of surtitles to help clarify plot & relationships, along with the blasted condition of the surviving source material, our confusion makes it seem to move at a snail’s pace, while the ultra-stylized acting is off-putting & silly. (Where’s Conrad Veidt when you need him?) The cinematographer was Fritz Arno Wagner, so this must have originally been something to see, but so dramatically inert it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm watching this print.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Two very strange phallic elements in here: the hair styling of the errant wife looks like an erection on the back of her head; and, on her lover, what may be film’s most revealing pants with material so clingy you could measure the circumference of his testicles.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Lotte Eisner is far more enthusiastic in her classic look at German Expressionism, THE HAUNTED SCREEN. And while the book doesn’t have the cachet it once had, it's still worth a look if only for the well-reproduced stills. Judging by her comments, she saw a far better, more detailed print than what's now available.

IT (2017)

The Pied Piper meets the gang from STAND BY ME (plus token girl) in last summer’s big, family-friendly horror hit. Surprisingly shy on the scare factor, like much Stephen King, the pay-off fails an elaborate set-up, IT plops a devilish child-snatching clown in a small town once every 27 years for a spate of deadly havoc. Heck, the town’s rotten enough without him! What with lean, mean older teens getting their jollies terrorizing outlier pubescents like Fat Boy, Asthmatic Wimp; Cautious Jew; Girl with a bad rep & a molesting dad; a token Black*; Kid with Glasses (really, his handicap is glasses?); and likable stutterer whose kid brother got ‘clowned.’ (Note change: the STAND BY ME lead lost an older brother.) There’s some nice late-‘80s detail, and a few deft gross-outs, but who approved a script that only moves forward by dropping things? Fine to drop a clue now & then, but here, every story beat is nudged into place with something dropped: knife, booklet, packet of capsules, flashlight, bullets, rope. Not that audiences minded. (Or noticed?) Like having the girl crop her hair in anger and suddenly turn into Kristy McNichol. It’s an ‘80s thing.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Like STAND BY ME, the kids are all junior psychologists. So much positive feedback! Maybe that’s what they’ve all become in the PART TWO 27-yr reunion pic.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The Black Kid gets a PC handle: Home Schooled Kid! Really! Then they let him be the guy who brings a gun to the final showdown. An abattoir gun, but still.

THE LONG GRAY LINE (1955)

Starting as a bumbling waiter to hordes of West Point Cadets on his first day off the boat, Irish immigrant Marty Maher stays to becomes a 50-yr Non-commissioned institution in this Mr. Chips Goes to West Point saga. And if you can make it past the broad blarney & comic blather of the opening reels, the film gains interest as life’s hard knocks & war’s toll darken the landscape while director John Ford gets his footing in CinemaScope. (He hated the ultra-widescreen format and largely avoided it in the future.) Maher keeps trying to leave the place, like James Stewart in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46, but his personal story (even a lost child) never catches fire. (NOTRE DAME inventing football’s forward pass to beat ARMY the film’s big moment. Honor thru Failure, a typical Ford motif.) As an archetype with fabulous overtones, Tyrone Power makes for pleasant company, but he's short on technique & variety. Something supplied in spades by Donald Crisp as his authoritarian Old World father and Maureen O’Hara as the redheaded colleen he marries. They have a naturally stylized atmosphere about them, even in posture & musical line readings. Indulgent in sentiment & running time (2+ hours), but worth it for Ford’s coup de théâtre curtain-call: a visual paraphrase of Faulkner’s ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ To Ford, ‘The dead are never past. They’re not even dead.’

DOUBLE-BILL: The original Robert Donat/Greer Garson GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS/’39, holding up nicely.

SUSAN AND GOD (1940)

M-G-M was a sucker for the shallow sophistication of B’way playwright Rachel Crothers. Joan Crawford alone did three. (NO MORE LADIES/’35; SUSAN AND GOD; WHEN LADIES MEET/’41.) In the right role, a better actress than she often gets credit for, ‘Susan’ isn’t the right role. The required ‘tony’ performing style, something slightly less & slightly more than realistic acting, a calling card of B’way divas like ‘Kit’ Cornell, Lynn Fontanne & Gertrude Lawrence (who made this a hit on stage), is far beyond Crawford’s natural range. Instead, she forces, killing laughs & repose. Then aping Lawrence’s distinctive flutey cracked vocals when trying to sound genuine. She plays a runaway wife & mother, just back from England where she was spiritually awakened. Now in thrall to a new system of relating to God, she insists on trying it out on all her rich horsey friends. Quite a line up, too: Ruth Hussey, Rita Hayworth, Bruce Cabot, Nigel Bruce, John Carroll, Rose Hobart, even housekeeper Marjorie Main. Only alcoholic husband Fredric March (very comfortable here) is deemed unworthy. Naturally, the treatment upsets all the relationships (divorces, marriages, house-parties equally upturned), with only March & their unhappy daughter finding the underlying truth Crawford spouts but doesn’t understand. George Cukor, working from Anita Loos’s adaptation, keeps up the pace, but the basic material stays as inert as the soundstage sets. And with Crawford so fraudulent, the inevitable ‘happy’ recoupling looks like a wrong turn.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Adrian’s outfits for Crawford are the one amusing element. You could make a basketball net out of one of her face veils; and her final number makes her look like she’s been roped at a cattle show.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Does anyone work in these plays? Hayworth & Carroll are job-hunting stage actors, but no one else does anything but socialize, proselytize or ride horses.

I FIDANZATI (1963)

Ermanno Olmi’s superb follow-up to IL POSTO/’61, his Portrait of a First-Time Job-Hunter in Milan’s ‘Il Boom’ economy, shows fast developing cracks in the system. The opening is hard to beat as a lower middle-class dance hall comes to life with a couple of musicians and well-dressed locals coupling & uncoupling on the freshly dusted floor. Social dancing: the only acceptable physical contact at the time. One couple, late 20s/early 30s, shows obvious signs of tension. A coveted job promotion is sending the man off to a plant in Sicily; the woman, now worried about their future. Will the engagement keep? The rest of the film meticulously charts her sense of abandonment against his own disappointments living a lonely half-life as stranger-in-a-strange-land. Wonderfully captured by Olmi in images that are harsh, beautiful, and filled with a sense of the futility of rising expectations eased only by the couple’s shared sense of personal growth in a relationship that finds strength & maturity thru distance. The ending is a bit abrupt, a reel or two extra would help, but Olmi’s sense of craft & tact offers much.

DOUBLE-BILL: IL POSTO is even more satisfying & original. Yet, other than that and THE TREE OF THE WOODEN CLOGS/’78, little of Olmi is available Stateside.