SWEET ADELINE (1934)

Unfortunate. Two years after ‘torch singer’ Helen Morgan went legit on B’way, breaking out as ‘Julie,’ her featured role in the 1927 musical SHOW BOAT, Oscar Hammerstein & Jerome Kern gave her the lead in a sweetly sentimental turn-of-the-last-century pageant that took her, and three suitors, from German Beer Garden singer to stardom. It’s now forgotten, partly due to this unhappy film adaptation that loses two-thirds of the score while adding risible melodrama, presumably by movie scripter Erwin Gelsey, involving stage sabotage & international espionage by a jealous singer. Yikes! Fortunately, the first half of the film hews closer to the stage show and we get to hear Irene Dunne (Kern’s favorite interpreter) sing the three American Songbook Standards Kern & Hammerstein wrote for the original production: Why Was I Born?; Don’t Ever Leave Me; Here Am I. Sharp eared listeners will also note a brief background music cue to the heavenly ensemble number Some Girl Is On My Mind.* Director Mervyn LeRoy is out of his element on this one, but does let Dance Director Bobby Connolly, fresh from the ZIEGFELD FOLLIES Revival on B’way, make like Busby Berkeley in a big ‘numbo’ near the end. Note that Dunne sings Why Was I Born live, not to a synch track; and that even given woeful material, deadpan comedian Ned Sparks manages to get his laughs.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: In 1936, Morgan joined members of the original or touring companies of SHOW BOAT for a near definitive film adaptation with Dunne playing Magnolia as she had on tour.

LINK: *Conductor John McGlinn chose four numbers from ADELINE for SHOWSTOPPERS, his fine album of B’way rediscoveries. Here’s the original arrangement of ‘Some Girl Is On Your Mind’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8S_1_MPRo4
And here’s Helen Morgan’s 1929 recording of Why Was I Born: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99wYcVEPqW0

STAGE FRIGHT (1950)

Mediocre Alfred Hitchcock, yet quite the contentious film. (A problem only explained with SPOILERS; so, consider yourself warned.) As a story, STAGE FRIGHT is like someone’s idea of a Hitchcock film*, just not Hitchcock’s. Think THE PRIZE/’63 rather than NORTH BY NORTHWEST/’59; the ingredients all there, but the measurements off. The basic idea sounds like classic Hitchcock: Innocent Man on the run; Girl Sidekick as helper & love interest; but twisted with the man’s innocence in question and the sidekick’s affections unstable, moving from the panicky suspect & toward the dapper police investigator tracking him. And that polarizing contentious factor? It comes right at the start with a long explanatory flashback as Richard Todd’s man-on-the-run misleads button-nosed Jane Wyman about a murder he’s accused of. In his visualization, inamorata Marlene Dietrich is the guilty party, killing her husband and letting him take the fall. So, is a false flashback a sin against film etiquette? A breach of audience trust? Here it’s the cleverest thing in the pic. (And note how Dietrich's acting goes subtly ‘off’ in these brief scenes.) No, the real problem is sloppy plotting, easy connect-the-dots deduction, and a general lack of suspense. Jane Wyman, a little slow on the uptake, is the acting student who finagles her way into Dietrich’s employ as assistant, hoping to tease out a breakdown or confession. Michael Wilding is amused & amusing as the charming detective, his best scenes with Wyman’s eccentric parents, Sybil Thorndike & Alastair Sim, both fun if hardly passable as Wyman’s parents. Maybe she was adopted. Maybe the film was adopted.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Among mature Hitchcock projects, only TOPAZ /’69 equals this in coming across as somebody else’s idea of echt Hitchcock. That one was largely made as a personal favor by Hitch to Universal honcho Lew Wasserman who’d spent a boodle on the Leon Uris bestseller. And Hitch was in a bad position, hard up for a project after MARNIE thunderously tanked and TORN CURTAIN disappointed. No such explanation for STAGE FRIGHT. Perhaps a simple loss of confidence, with Hitch keeping his head above water after PARADINE CASE, ROPE and UNDER CAPRICORN all underperformed. This made it four in a row.

DOUBLE-BILL: Hitch immediately returned to form (and then some!) in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’51.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND (1947)

The Oscar Wilde play most admired by G.B. Shaw gets a near ideal stage-to-screen transfer in this superbly cast Alexander Korda production. As a director, Korda was . . . a great producer. But here, it all comes together, starting with Lajos Biró’s neatly trimmed, well-spotted script. Every location a revelation. Korda, famously impatient on set (his producer was always looking over his shoulder!) revels in a cast unfazed by his clipped shooting habits. And he’s well partnered by Georges Périnal’s beautifully balanced TechniColor compositions, Vincent Korda’s decor and Cecil Beaton’s jaw-dropping costumes. As Wilde adaptations go, it’s second only to Ernst Lubitsch’s LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN/’25.* On stage in London (as was THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST) just as Wilde was being denounced as a ‘sodomite,’ the blackmail letters that figure in HUSBAND’s plot seem unusually personal for a Wilde play, striking tragic notes between the cascades of witty lines and peer-to-peer socializing. The story arrives like courses at a formal dinner; wraps off for full display before setting up relationships between Paulette Goddard’s wicked widowed adventuress and the posh London gentry she doesn’t quite belong to. Thanks to a past financial indiscretion, and a letter to prove it, Goddard holds the upper hand against Cabinet Member Hugh Williams who’s bound to be ruined if gadfly bachelor Michael Wilding (in his best role) can’t find a way to get around this dangerous lady. Meanwhile, a swirl of social & marital issues are discussed, debated, dissected and generally bandied about to general delight, with Wilde finding just the right dramatic twists to make everything come out right in the end. Something he wasn’t able to do in real life.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Lubitsch had the paradoxical advantage of making a silent film of Wilde’s aphoristic play.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: The society portrayed here can be seen in endless detail in Anthony Trollope’s PALLISER series. Especially its penultimate novel, THE PRIME MINISTER.

TWILIGHT OF HONOR (1963)

Trying to boost DR. KILDARE tv sensation Richard Chamberlain into full-fledged movie stardom on the cheap, M-G-M skimped in making this low-rent ANATOMY OF A MURDER/’59 courtroom drama ripoff. Nothing wrong using small screen pros below the line/behind the camera (lenser Philip Lathrop had largely transitioned to features), but this has the feel of secondhand goods. Nick Adams & Joey Heatherton (aping Ben Gazzara & Lee Remick in AoaM) play troubled soldier boy & slutty wife in another murder trial; Chamberlain’s the tyro lawyer assigned to defend, with ailing sly puss/mentor Claude Rains as sounding board and his daughter (low-wattage Joan Blackman) as assistant/love interest. Supposedly set in New Mexico, everyone whoops it up with Alabama accents, occasionally stopping to shock us with envelop-pushing sex references. Impotence! Orgasm! Chamberlain, who deserved better, never did breakthru as an A-list movie star, but had better luck as second lead villains, before scoring big time, again and again, in major tv mini-series.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Otto Preminger’s ANATOMY OF A MURDER, with a great star turn from James Stewart, completely outclasses this.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Infinitely better title on our French poster: MOTEL CRIME!

UMI YORI MO MADA FUKAKU / AFTER THE STORM (2016)

Typically well-observed family drama from writer/director/editor Hirokazu Kore-eda, but smaller-scaled and a bit thinner textured, without the cross-hatched storylines of some of his other projects. Working Yasujirô Ozu territory, but very much his own man, here Kore-eda highlights lost ideals & missed opportunities as once promising novelist Hiroshi Abe goes thru the motions as an investigator at a private detective agency. Research for a new novel, he tells himself. Divorced, but still fixed on his ex, behind on child support; he’s apt to visit Mom for a quick loan, but can’t ask when his disapproving sister is around. The film, made in near DOGMA conditions (and none the worse for it, Kore-eda doesn’t let æsthetic rules weigh on him), gives the situations time to naturally come to a (slow) boil while a storm threatens to blow into the city. A typhoon to clear away false hopes and misunderstandings, even if happiness remains hard to come by in the calm after the storm. Wonderful stuff, but some patience required . . . and rewarded. Special kudos to the late Kirin Kiki, a Kore-eda favorite as the commonsensical mother.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Kore-eda won last year’s Cannes Film Fest with SHOPLIFTERS/’18 (not seen here), with Kirin Kiki in one of her last roles. For now, STILL WALKING/’08 (also with Kiki) is probably the best introduction.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/04/aruitemo-aruitemo-still-walking-2008.html

MURDER IN THE PRIVATE CAR (1934)

Harmless little programmer, one of those comic-laced thrillers so popular at the time, most of them now looking awfully short on laughs & mystery. The silly tale sees Mary Carlisle’s pretty switchboard operator discover she’s an heiress, the long lost daughter of a railroad tycoon. Taking a private train car to meet 'Dad,' along with office pal Una Merkel, Charles Ruggles’ nosey private investigator from the floor above, and her boyfriend, they’re soon dodging bullets, knives and dangerous runaway circus animals! Wha? Fading journeyman director Harry Beaumont follows a beat or two behind the action, while top-billed Ruggles struggles to put over bad puns & spoonerisms. Spoonerisms! (And if you think ‘Snowflake’ as the train’s black porter doesn’t get spooked by a ghostly white bed sheet, you got another think coming.) But then, suddenly, the mad avenger behind all the danger uncouples the private car, turning it into runaway death trap! This finale, a one-reel set piece, a veritable compendium of every optical & process film trick available at the time. Designed and edited for maximum effect, still packing a wallop. So, who the heck is responsible for this bit of filmic legerdemain? Surely not director Beaumont, a placid fellow at best; and the two second-unit M-G-M directors have mighty thin credits. The only possibility is uncredited set designer Fred Gabourie, famous for working with Buster Keaton on most of the great comedian’s shorts & features right up to Buster’s superb M-G-M debut with THE CAMERAMAN/’28.* If only M-G-M had kept him on Buster’s film team, those Early Talkies might have been less dire affairs.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Take a trip with Gabourie back to Buster’s independent beginnings on one of his best shorts, ONE WEEK/’20, featuring loads of Gabourie engineered stunts including a famous (uproarious) smash train finale. Though, of course, this being a Buster Keaton production, no camera fakery whatsoever.

UNDER TWO FLAGS (1936)

Director Frank Lloyd segued directly from the ocean waters of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY/’35 to the oceans of sand in this less acclaimed, but zippy French Foreign Legion nonsense. Ronald Colman (whose BEAU GESTE/’26 remains best of all Desert Fortress adventures*) once again hides an English gentry past under dashing uniform, now entangled not by brotherly love, but by an old-fashioned love rectangle. His new commander, Major Victor McLaglen, only has eyes for Claudette Colbert’s local café gal ‘Cigarette’*, but once she lays eyes on Colman, all bets are off. He likes the attention, but class will tell when he meets uppercrust Rosalind Russell back at the fort. If only he weren’t a wanted man back in England. Meanwhile, Arabs are massing for an attack, and Colman is sent to certain death by a jealous McLaglen only to survive! And just as the dust starts to settle, they’re surrounded by the enemy and nothing but spectacular heroism by Colman & Colbert can save the day . . . but at a sacrifice. Probably the biggest release on the first year schedule of the newly combined 20th/Fox, the film now survives only in a truncated re-release. But with Lloyd, who tended to land on the prestigious/stodgy side of things, a couple of lost reels maybe isn’t such a bad thing. While those big battle scenes and hordes of horsemen loom even larger, and look perfectly splendid. Along with some unusually inventive studio fakery, this is loads of fun, with star power galore from team Colbert/Colman.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Currently, no good editions of Colman’s silent BEAU GESTE available. (A real loss; Colman's personal favorite; with excellent elements for a proper restoration out there.) Bill Wellman’s 1939 BEAU GESTE remake is fine (if you haven’t seen the original), but his other 1939 film, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, which also features Colman riding into battle, is better.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Born in Paris, Colbert’s French came in handy when Simone Simon was fired from what was planned as a splashy Hollywood debut. And you can bet it cost producer Darryl F. Zanuck a pretty penny to borrow Paramount’s top star for the part as a last minute replacement.

NERUDA (2016)

Pablo Larrain’s frustratingly opaque film, from a screenplay by Guillermo Calderón, flirts with a classic Hunter & the Hunted story as renowned Chilean poet & Senator, Pablo Neruda, is faced with arrest or self-exile during a Communist crackdown by the newly installed Government. Between failed border crossings, Neruda indulges in bad behavior & bacchanals (brothels over bride), while waiting in various hiding places for the next organized attempt to sneak him out of the country makes its way down ‘the Party Line.’ Neruda, a loyal Stalinist to the end. (Ironic when you compare Right-Wing Chile’s political oppression & deadly purges to Stalin’s.) But the key to the film isn’t Luis Gnecco’s indulgent, implacable Neruda but Gael Garcia Bernal’s police inspector, obsessive & cunning in pursuit, showing the twisted principles of LES MISÉRABLES’ Inspector Jarvert and even developing some of the personality transference Hugo gave his detective, trudging ever onwards, past the limits of his own conflicted makeup. But Larrain sees that his fictionalized, compressed conceit isn’t adding up, and literally starts obfuscating; fogging up city atmosphere, pointlessly circling subjects with his camera, and only achieving visual clarity once Neruda reaches the final leg of his journey on the snowy Andes; Bernal in cold pursuit. A little bit of Neruda poetry is thrown in along the way, but not enough to hurt anyone.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Neruda seems more interesting seen from the side as a supporting character in the witty, sentimental romance of IL POSTINO/’94. With Philippe Noiret wryly turning a Nobel Prize winning poet into a self-help love guru.

HEAT LIGHTNING (1934)

Back when the E.R.A. amendment was making the rounds, and ‘Women’s Studies’ were new on campus curriculums, this sharp little programmer, a sort of proto-feminist (Not So) Grand Rural Hotel, was being rediscovered. Time to rediscover it again. Taken from a George Abbott/Leon Abrams one-month B’way flop, it’s directed by Mervyn LeRoy in his best early ‘tossaway’ style, with Aline MacMahon & kid sis Ann Dvorak running a shabby desert oasis garage/lodge/café in the middle of nowhere. MacMahon, who’s also the mechanic and dresses for the job, has ‘had it’ with men; while Dvorak, desperate for a date & a dance, is hungry for any man. Into this set up come an unmatched set of well off triple divorcées & chauffeur; local guys interested in Ann & Aline; a bickering couple with car trouble; and a pair of big time thieves on the run after a botched robbery led to murder. Those two, nervous Lyle Talbot and charmer Preston Foster, smell a quick score in those yammering rich divorcées, but any move complicated by a past association between Foster & MacMahon back in the day. He pretends to still be interested; she pretends not to be. By the third act, half the cast is shacked up with the other half; a robbery goes wrong; there’s gunplay & someone gets off scot-free. Pre-Code heaven!; with barely three months to spare before the start of strict enforcement. The cast is pretty much all supporting players, all at their best; with great comeback lines that are howling funny or gasp-worthy dramatic, between frank take-it-or-leave-it sexual attitudes. MacMahon rarely got to show her full range or her surprisingly sexy Earth Mother figure. She’d soon grow matronly, but check her out here, a big-boned beauty and a simply magnificent actress. The whole film a treat, with loads of location work for that real desert atmosphere. Heat so dry, it doesn’t even leave a sweat stain. Essential viewing, and at just over an hour.

DOUBLE-BILL: Two years on, Warners made the somewhat similar PETRIFIED FOREST/’36, far more prestigious, far more successful, far more studio-bound; this unknown gem far better. OR: Try the indifferently received remake, HIGHWAY WEST/’41 (not seen here) with Brenda Marshall & Arthur Kennedy.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Typically, in his auto-bio (TAKE ONE), the ever unreflective Mervyn LeRoy only notes the harsh shooting conditions and the film’s big commercial loss.