John DiLeo's Blog, page 4

Easter Parade (1948)

How strange that Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, arguably the two greatest performing artists of the Hollywood musical, both died on June 22nd:  Astaire, at 88, in 1987;  Garland, at 47, in 1969.  Their one-and-only pairing, a monumental moment for the genre, is Easter Parade, released 65 years ago yesterday.  (MGM clearly felt no compulsion to open the film at Eastertime.)  It’s no surprise that the film was a smash hit, an old-timey 1912-set charmer, mixing some fondly recalled standards (like the title tune) with some excellent new songs, all of them by Irving Berlin.  The movie was not especially innovative like Garland’s recent box-office disappointment The Pirate (which is the superior movie), but Easter Parade made a lot of people very happy, something it has been doing for all of its 65 years.

This was Astaire’s comeback after having announced his retirement from the screen following Paramount’s Blue Skies (1946) with Bing Crosby, another big hit with a Berlin score.  Astaire joined Easter Parade to replace an injured Gene Kelly, and you can still tell that the role wasn’t conceived with Astaire in mind.  His character is more surly and irritable than the usual Astaire fellow, seeming, well, like Gene Kelly (in For Me and My Gal or especially Cover Girl).  More familiar for Astaire was the fact that he’d playing half of a noted ballroom dance team, alongside Ann Miller.  Like Astaire, Miller seems not quite “herself,” cast against type as a cool bitch.  Well, she, too, was replacing an injured performer, Cyd Charisse, a dancer whose screen persona had a natural aloofness.  So, nudged somewhat outside their comfort zones, Astaire and Miller do some of the best acting of their careers.  She’s even able to glide along a dance floor in an evening gown (without concealed tap shoes).  The plot hinges on Miller’s quest for solo stardom, which forces Astaire on a Henry Higgins-like mission to turn some poor girl into a dancer as fine and graceful as Miller, specifically an unknown songstress (picked out of a random chorus line) played by Garland.  Miller, in fact, had told him, ”You can dance with anyone,” which is something Astaire had been proving in film after film, sometimes with actresses who really couldn’t dance at all.

Astaire and Garland are beyond wonderful in this movie, together and separately, and not just in the musical numbers.  They are both funny and touching as they come together, dealing with assorted insecurities and, of course, unrequited love.  You see, Judy loves Fred who loves Ann who loves Peter Lawford who loves Judy.  Got that?  A quadrangle!  Lawford plays a rich-boy pal of Astaire’s.  Here arises something interesting about screen chemistry.  Sensational as Astaire and Garland are, I wouldn’t say that they have chemistry.  What they have in this movie is a friendly and respectful meeting of colossal talents.  Garland had more of an unmistakable and intimate rapport with Gene Kelly in their three films together, and so I don’t really mourn the promised but foiled attempts at reteaming Fred and Judy in The Barkleys of Broadway or Royal Wedding, both of which Astaire did with other ladies (respectively, Ginger Rogers and Jane Powell).  This notion of chemistry pops up in Easter Parade when Lawford meets Garland, and they immediately connect in a naturally charming and utterly pleasing manner.  It’s chemical, in spades!  True, Astaire and Garland aren’t meant to get along for much of the picture, but that means they could be simmering with opposites-attract sparks, something which doesn’t quite happen.  The lightly comic duet, “A Fella with an Umbrella,” so engagingly performed by Lawford and Garland, may have you wishing that they get together at the end.  Garland spends much of the film in her self-deprecating ugly-duckling mode, waiting patiently for Astaire to recognize her beauty, both inner and outer, while Lawford genuinely recognizes it on sight.

Easter Parade is a brisk, impeccably crafted, smartly assembled, top-of-the-line musical product in which the songs and dances just keep on comin’.  And they don’t disappoint.  But there’s also a real story here.  As Astaire tries hopelessly to turn Garland into Miller, they finally hit the jackpot when he allows her own talents to inform their partnership.  Easter Parade becomes a movie about being yourself, about using your unique talents and never trying to be an imitation of anyone else.  As they fumble their way to this blissful conclusion, there are some lovely comic moments, notably when Judy can’t quite carry off a Ginger Rogers-style gown of molting feathers.  But when she starts to bloom, Astaire changes too, moving from tuxedoed ballroom dancer to a more casual and razzmatazzy hoofer.  For both stars, it feels like a buoyant return to their real-life vaudeville roots.

Call it a light, slight musical comedy, but Easter Parade is still a major delight.  This was dancer Charles Walters’ second film as a director, his first being Good News (1947), which starred Lawford and June Allyson.  Both films showed a talent for smooth filmmaking, crackerjack pacing, and zesty personality-driven musical numbers.  Astaire has two great dance numbers without Garland, the intimate store-set “Drum Crazy,” in which he displays his staggering rhythmic gifts, and the lavish “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” featuring three female partners and a slow-motion solo that’s an absolute knockout.  When he and Judy do their Ziegfeld audition, accompanying their infectious vocal (“When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’”) with some truly fancy footwork, it feels like the quintessence of American showbiz, two legends effortlessly reveling in what they do best.  The most famous of their duets is their classic hobo number, “A Couple of Swells,” with Judy seeming to give elegant Fred a lesson in how to be a little more low-down.

Maybe Astaire’s immaculate artistry doesn’t quite jibe with Garland’s jangled emotional spontaneity, and perhaps you could say that their strengths are actually at odds, but who would complain about this opportunity to watch two musical icons working together in a worthwhile vehicle?  Musical lovers are left wondering about what a Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra movie musical would have been like, so be grateful that we don’t have to wonder about the prospect of Garland and Astaire together.  Easter Parade gave top-billed Judy one of her biggest hits, and it launched Fred’s second great period of musicals, which would peak with The Band Wagon (1953).  Charles Walters would become, like Bob Fosse and Rob Marshall after him, a dancer turned director who would gain Oscar recognition, scoring his directing nomination for his lovely work on Lili (1953).  Easter Parade may not be a great movie musical, or the finest work of anybody involved, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

When Ladies Meet (1933 and 1941)

Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of the release of When Ladies Meet, MGM’s 1933 adaptation of Rachel Crothers’ 1932 play, one of Broadway’s “sophisticated” explorations of the so-called modern woman.  MGM had such a good time with the material that they brought it back eight years later for a second go-round, with two different “ladies.”  The 1933 version, made in the pre-Code era and only one year after the play’s debut, is the better of the two, still rather good though “talky” in a manner that can’t help but announce its stage origins.  Its modernism is obviously dated, but the material nonetheless remains adult, absorbing, and amusing.

Myrna Loy plays a novelist in love with Frank Morgan, her married publisher.  (This movie is so old that Morgan, soon to be a white-haired character actor, is still plausible as a romantic interest.)  Robert Montgomery is a journalist in love with Loy, while top-billed Ann Harding, who enters at the half-hour mark, is Morgan’s wise, if somewhat long-suffering, wife, very much aware of his ongoing infidelities.  Loy wants Morgan to be hers, even suggesting that they openly live together.  She hopes they can all be grown-ups and deal with their romantic complications in an up-front, broad-minded manner.

From its swanky New York opening, the film settles down for a weekend in the country at the plush yet cozy home of a delightfully ditzy widow (Alice Brady.)  All four leads eventually make their way there for a series of confrontations.  The problem with the film, which is supposedly a movie about strong and intelligent women, is that it’s Montgomery who has all the answers, the one smugly pulling the strings and rearranging things, all in the apparent name of knowing what’s best for everyone.  Montgomery was a skillful light comedian, but that very smugness, which so often appears in his work, makes him an unlikable version of Cary Grant.  On the positive side, the two women genuinely bond, sustaining their connection even after the details of the Morgan-Loy affair are revealed.  And so this is not the bitchy comedy you expect, but, rather, a refreshing comedy-drama about women (who, yes, happen to be rivals) understanding and respecting each other.  It’s Morgan who has caused all the trouble.  Has Harding finally had enough of his shenanigans?  Has Loy at last seen that she’s just another of his flings?  Observing from the sidelines and ready to pounce, Montgomery swoops in for the too easily rendered fade-out.

Directed by Harry Beaumont (The Broadway Melody), the film offered good roles to Harding and Loy, both of whom are solid but had been even better (especially Loy) in The Animal Kingdom (1932), another literate screen adaptation of a hit play.  As for Morgan, he is low-key, smart, even attractive in his straight role, without employing a single one of his trademark comic stammers.  Put this on his exceedingly long list of impressive screen performances.  Stage star Alice Brady, in her talkie debut, set the standard for all her hilarious matrons to come, in classics like The Gay Divorcee (1934) and My Man Godfrey (1936).  She’s daffy, energized, and always welcome company.  Here she has an apparently gay companion (Marvin Burton), an escort who has designed her house, arranges her flowers, and plays her piano.

Just prior to MGM’s remake, Joan Crawford starred in the film version of another Crothers hit play, Susan and God (1940), which certainly shouldn’t have served as any encouragement for her to attempt a second.  Her 1941 When Ladies Meet is, like the original, chic and high-minded, but it’s such a yawn, feeling more like a flat-out soap than the earlier version.  And, because it had to deal with the Production Code, it is far less risque.  Gone are the lines about the novelist wanting to live unmarried with her lover.  The loss of all its tangy, suggestive pre-Code dialogue makes the remake feel even more dated, relying on glamour above all else.

Crawford is the writer, while Greer Garson is the wife.  (The off-screen arcs of the two pairs of actresses are reversed:  in ’33, Harding [wife] was in decline while Loy [author] was about to burst into stardom; in ’41, Crawford [author] was fading while Garson [wife] would soon be queen of the lot.)  The husband is Herbert Marshall, and Robert Taylor has Montgomery’s role.  If you thought it sounded hard to believe that Myrna Loy and Ann Harding could both desire Frank Morgan, well, that was a cinch compared to accepting that Crawford and Garson could both want Marshall, here at his absolute dullest and most amorphous.  (In 1933, Harding and Morgan had two children; in ’41, Garson and Marshall are childless.)  Perhaps Marshall was exhausted:  it couldn’t have been easy to co-star with Crawford and Bette Davis (The Little Foxes) in the same year.

Crawford starts off well, very relaxed and looking wonderful, but she soon grows tiresome, mired in that overaffected speech she often seemed to equate with real acting.  Her performance feels like a forerunner to Natalie Wood’s in Sex and the Single Girl (1964), another movie about a modern female author who apparently knows far less than she thinks she does about man-woman relationships.

Robert Taylor’s role closely follows Montgomery’s smug intervention, though Taylor seems less comfortable than Montgomery in this world of highbrows.  (Montgomery played a journalist, but Taylor floats through his movie without any discernible professional identity.)  There’s a terrible new scene of Taylor and Garson going sailing, providing Taylor with some unfunny slapstick (to beef up his peripheral part?).  Garson comes off best, injecting the proceedings with sparkles of wit and a touch of elegance.  The director, Robert Z. Leonard, had just directed Garson in Pride and Prejudice (1940), having showcased one of her very best performances.

In an unsual twist, it’s Spring Byington in the Alice Brady role.  Why “unusual” when Byington played even more addled ladies than Brady?  Well, it was Byington who created the role on Broadway in 1932, then lost it to Brady in 1933, and then regained it in 1941.  Now that’s unusual.  And she’s not as memorable, as funny, or, oddly enough, as theatrical as Brady.

The film makes its way to the same ending, if less plausibly.  And it does retain the core of female bonding, with Crawford and Garson liking each other and standing up for each other.  But, mostly, it just wants to be a scintillating high comedy, which is ultimately too much to ask.  Ironically, the Norma Shearer tag of ”First Lady of MGM,” so coveted by Crawford, would soon belong to Garson thanks to Mrs. Miniver (1942).  Finally, what can you say about a movie produced by someone named Orville O. Dull?

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Abbott:  “I know there’s no such a person as Dracula, you know there’s no such a person as Dracula.”

Costello:  “But does Dracula know it?”

June 15th marked the 65th anniversary of the release of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, one of the best-liked movies of all time, one with a special appeal for kids of all ages.  After all, how many films blend comedy and horror as winningly?  I remember enjoying this movie countless times in my youth, usually with my siblings and cousins, never tiring of it.  Those were the days (the 1970s) when New York’s channel 11 showed an Abbott and Costello comedy every Sunday morning.  My favorite is The Time of Their Lives (1946), a Revolutionary War-themed fantasy, but A & C Meet Frankenstein is a very close second.  (Charles T. Barton directed both pictures.)

Universal combined their two great franchises—monster movies and Abbott & Costello comedies—at a time when both needed a boost.  After 1945, the studio’s horror series was not just dead but altogether buried, having fallen pretty low.  Look at House of Dracula (1945) as proof, a truly terrible movie despite its inclusion of not only Dracula but the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster.  It was—forgive me—the last nail in the series’ coffin.  As for Abbott and Costello, by 1948 it seemed unlikely that they would ever again be as popular as they had been during World War II.  A film exhibitors’ poll had named them the screen’s top box-office attraction of 1942; by 1945, they were no longer in the top ten.  (Universal’s third enduring asset, soprano Deanna Durbin, made her final film in 1948.)  Hold That Ghost (1941), the “scary” Abbott and Costello comedy (and another of my favorites), had already shown that the pair could generate big laughs in spooky settings.  So, it was more than fitting to team them with the studio’s resurrected monsters.  For everyone involved, the match-up proved to be as enlivening as one of Dr. Frankenstein’s electric jolts.

In the opening credits, which include animation, you’ll notice that the film’s official title is Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein, but who would ever call it that?  Bela Lugosi is back as Dracula, and Lon Chaney Jr. (no longer billed ”Jr.”) is again Lawrence Talbot (the Wolf Man), with Glenn Strange as Frankenstein’s Monster.  Mr. Strange certainly fulfilled the role’s physical requirements but was unable to bring any personality to the part.  (Boris Karloff’s Monster resulted in one—make that two—of the genre’s all-time greatest performances.)  For anyone keeping score, this was Chaney’s fifth appearance as the Wolf Man, Strange’s third as the Monster, and only Lugosi’s second as the actual Dracula.  After the inanities and indignities of House of Dracula, all three iconic characters got a much better deal by appearing with Bud and Lou.

Chaney is called upon to be the comic straight man among the monsters, acting no differently than he does in his other Wolf Man movies.  His haunted, solemn demeanor gives the movie a satisfying core of earnestness:  he’s the only one who seems to believe that any of the plot is actually happening.  Chaney is a good sport, allowing those around him to reap all the laughs, merely cuing the punch lines.

Chaney:  “In a half an hour, the moon will rise and I’ll turn into a wolf.”

Costello:  “You and twenty million other guys.”

Lugosi, however, has permission to be amusing, particularly with regard to his thick Eastern European accent.  With Costello playing a fellow named Wilbur, try not to smile every time Lugosi calls him ”Vilbur.”  (It’s also hard to resist the moments when Costello calls the Monster “Frankie” or “Junior.”)  Lugosi’s light, self-amused performance is a treat, but he also gets to display some of his original Transylvanian oomph when hypnotizing people or taking the occasional bite out of them.  The movie probably should have been called Abbott and Costello Meet Dracula because, after all, Lugosi is the monster in charge.

The storyline has the Wolf Man chasing Dracula and the Monster from Europe to Florida.  It is Dracula’s plan to replace the Monster’s fiendish brain with a simpler, more malleable one, thus rendering the Monster easier to control.  Dr. Mornay (Lenore Aubert, a second-string Hedy Lamarr) is the beautiful surgeon who has found the perfect brain for the experiment:  Wilbur’s.  In one of the film’s funniest ongoing bits, Dr. Mornay convinces Wilbur that she’s madly in love with him, essentially wooing him right onto the operating table in the laboratory inside Dracula’s castle.  (On a tiny Florida island!)  Adding to the film’s sustained fun are a ”House of Horrors” sequence, a trick wall in the castle’s basement, and a climactic showdown between Dracula and the Wolf Man.  Once the monsters are destroyed (yet again), Bud and Lou are newly frightened by a cameo appearance from the Invisible Man (voiced by Vincent Price), the perfect capper.

Though Boris Karloff is conspicuously absent here, he wouldn’t be for long.  The film’s success launched a series of Abbott and Costello pictures in which they collided with other legends of horror:  Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), again with Karloff, and, finally, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955).  None came anywhere near the enduring pleasures of their encounter with Frankenstein, when Abbott, Lugosi, Costello, and Chaney fused so happily that their film became the kind you want to revisit time and again.

With their popularity recharged, Abbott and Costello were named the film exhibitors’ number three box-office attraction of 1948 (behind Bing Crosby and Betty Grable).

 

 

Dry, She Was a Star, Too

“Wet, she’s a star.  Dry she ain’t.”  Fanny Brice supposedly said this about swimmer Eleanor Holm, Brice’s romantic rival, but, once Holm’s name faded, the line (too good to disappear) got transferred to Esther Williams, especially because so many people thought it suited her.  The blatant implication was that swimmer Williams was an MGM musical star who couldn’t act, sing, or dance, just swim.  An unfair assessment, even though Williams certainly wouldn’t have become a star based on her triple-threat abilities.  She died last Thursday at 91, an appropriate moment to reassess her often dismissed film-star attributes.

Esther Williams was in the top-ten box-office stars of 1949 and 1950, second only to Betty Grable among females.  Her proximity to Grable makes sense because they were the same kind of movie star, loved and admired but seemingly approachable.  They were beauties without being otherworldly goddesses, such as Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth, more like the prettiest girl in your senior class, the unpretentious all-American sweetheart.  Esther had star quality, that “something” that makes audiences want to be in your company, film after film, feeling that they know, like, and care about you.  And she really had it, at home in front of a camera whether she was in the water or not (though, yes, of course, her star quality shimmered brightest when she made swimming seem like dancing).  She never was what you’d call a real actress, but within the confines of her light comedies she always seemed extremely relaxed, making you almost believe those silly romantic complications occurring between swims.

Ice skater Sonja Henie, over at Fox, had already established the formula of how to turn an athlete into a star of movie musicals.  However, Henie’s stardom hasn’t aged as well as Esther’s.  She wasn’t a beauty, nor did she have Esther’s basic on-screen comfort (to be fair, the Norwegian Henie was not acting in her native tongue).  The biggest problem with Henie’s films today is that her sport has so surpassed her skill level that you now wonder what all the fuss was about.  (Where are the triple loops?)  Williams and her films are an easier sell because—there’s never any doubt—that girl can really swim!

I want to look at two Williams musicals, one from each of her peak years (1949 and 1950), one utterly typical and the other a true change of pace.

Duchess of Idaho (1950) is a quintessential Esther Williams picture, not trying to be anything special, simply hoping to meet audience expectations for a pleasant, colorful entertainment, one that gives Esther ample opportunities to get into her swimsuit.  And, of its kind, it’s not bad at all.  The low-grade pleasures of this type of musical comedy derive from the fact that nobody is trying very hard, in the good way.  It’s a relaxed, breezily frivolous movie with forgettable songs, in no way an “integrated” musical in which the songs advance the plot.  The numbers happen solely in performing venues.  It’s a 1940s-style grade-B musical, with specialty acts, in this case including the very Grade-A participations of Lena Horne and Eleanor Powell (briefly emerging from retirement).

The typically sitcom plot has Esther helping lovesick pal Paula Raymond snag her playboy boss, John Lund, by chasing him into Raymond’s arms.  Along the way, Esther meets bandleader Van Johnson, and, well, you can guess the rest.  The main setting is Sun Valley, which is how Idaho made its way into the uninspired title.  Esther plays—you guessed it—a swimming star, and she’s starring in a Chicago extravaganza called “Melody in Swimtime” (a better title than Duchess of Idaho).  The movie has two water spectaculars, one at the opening and one near the end, the first featuring a slide and vines, the second a Grecian-looking spectacle.  Neither is among her best or most outrageous, but they get the “escapist” job done.  (Less pleasing is the movie’s hilarious decision to have its opening credits sung by a chorus!)

Why am I even bothering to talk about a movie so trivial, forgettable, and disposable?  It’s because such a throwaway movie proves the star power of Esther Williams, without benefits such as a first-rate script.  In evidence are her warm likability, her confident ease at carrying a movie, her very attractive speaking voice, her unforced approach to romantic comedy.  Then add the satisfactions of staring at a beautiful, statuesque star for ninety-eight minutes.  Designer Helen Rose made Esther’s color “red” in this movie, and she looks sensational, yet still somehow “regular,” like someone you could actually know.

Not too long before this movie, Esther got something of an MGM-musical promotion, a break from her swimming-picture formula (which began in 1944 with Bathing Beauty).  She starred with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in a top-tier Arthur Freed production:  Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949).  Much has been written about the clash between Esther and Gene, which apparently stemmed from Gene’s unhidden displeasure over her casting, a so-called musical star who didn’t really sing or dance.  (To her credit, she helped introduce the Oscar-winning “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” that same year, in Neptune’s Daughter.)  Yet wasn’t it perfectly fitting to have Esther Williams as the female star in a musical about athletes, with her playing the new owner of a baseball team?

Take Me Out to the Ball Game is a huge disappointment considering the talent involved (which also includes Busby Berkeley, Stanley Donen, and wonderful Betty Garrett).  It’s got so-so songs and inane plotting, even though the premise is highly promising:  star ballplayers Kelly and Sinatra are eager vaudevilians in the off-season.  Aside from their delightful song-and-dance to the title tune, there isn’t much to get excited about.  With its period setting, the film doesn’t have an easy time getting Esther into a pool, but she, too, has some nice moments with the title tune, swimming and singing before submerging.

If Esther was made to feel inadequate, well, she had the last laugh.  Whereas she delivers her usual easygoing likability, unwilling to push for a laugh or grab at a scene, Kelly gives what is surely his worst performance in an MGM musical, a shamelessly hammy and unfunny bit of broad comic playing.  His incessant mugging is exhausting to watch.  Talk about overestimating your appeal!  Standing on the sidelines as Kelly makes a fool of himself, Esther (who could never in her wildest dreams compete with Kelly as a talent) maintains her dignity, in no way seeming “not good enough” for this venture.

Esther Williams could sing a little, move well, speak lines naturally, get a laugh or two, and heat up with some of her leading men.  There was never any doubt about her beauty or her prowess in the pool (in terms of both athleticism and grace).  Add it all up and you have a singular and genuine movie star, the likes of which could not possibly come again.

The 1943 Pair of Female War Movies

Call this Part Two of my Memorial Day at the Movies, which began last week with high praise for Twelve O’Clock High (1949).  Today I want to look at two WWII movies made during the war, two female-driven works coincidentally released in the fall of 1943.  Their impressive casts might be confused with the ensembles of Stage Door or The Women (but without the costume changes).  So Proudly We Hail! and Cry “Havoc” both focus on our brave nurses toiling in the South Pacific.  The shared turf in these films is close enough to make you wonder why the two groups don’t join forces or at least run into each other.

Director Mark Sandrich’s So Proudly We Hail!, Paramount’s tribute to American women in harm’s way, is the more famous, popular, and acclaimed of the two films.  Though it’s an overlong and somewhat clumsy blend of action, romance, and even comedy, you can still understand why it was so effective at rousing and inspiring moviegoers.  After all, despite the soapiness, this is an increasingly sobering portrait of the nurses’ physically and emotionally grueling experiences on Bataan and Corregidor.  It’s an admirable work, with very well-staged action scenes, and it manages to remain absorbing despite the heavy-handed touch that was prevalent in the era’s morale-boosting war movies.

Told in flashback, the film focuses on Lieutenant Claudette Colbert, the senior officer among the nurses.  (Once Colbert was done in the Pacific, she’d do a complete reversal and represent the perfect wife of the home front in 1944′s Since You Went Away, playing America’s answer to Mrs. Miniver.)  Paulette Goddard, another lieutenant, won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination as the film’s sassy comic relief, attached to her black silk nightgown as her chief morale booster.  The film features two romances amid the warfare:  the serious-minded one between Colbert and Lt. George Reeves, and the lighthearted antics of Goddard and Sonny Tufts (as a goofily nonchalant marine).

Colbert is not at her best here, occasionally resorting to actressy short-cut histrionics, while Goddard’s self-consciously amusing nature can grow tiresome in such defiantly unamusing situations.  This leaves Veronica Lake to walk off with the movie.  She is clearly the most striking and original element in the picture (and it was she, not “fun” Goddard, who merited Oscar’s attention).  As the new addition to Colbert’s crew, Lake is immediately intriguing, even unsettling, because she is so unfriendly and foul-tempered.  Finally letting down her guard, she tells Colbert how she witnessed her fiance’s death at Pearl Harbor.  It’s a touching breakdown, but also startling in its thirst for revenge:  “I’m going to kill Japs, every blood-stained one I can get my hands on!”  This is especially chilling coming from a nurse.

Lake’s final scene—after she has bonded with Colbert and learned that she is unable to kill any Japanese prisoners—is unforgettable.  She makes the ultimate sacrifice, saving her fellow nurses from rape and death.  With a grenade hidden in her shirt, she approaches the advancing enemy.  What makes the scene especially noteworthy is that Lake, up till now fairly deglamorized, enhances the moment’s power by letting her hair down, unleashing the full force of her famous “peek-a-boo bang.”  She’s a star burning so brightly that she literally explodes.  Though there’s an hour left to the movie, nothing that follows can equal Lake’s relatively brief contribution.  She was a major new star of the war years, both lovely and talented, but Lake would sadly be finished in Hollywood in less than a decade, coincidentally during America’s next war.

Director Richard Thorpe’s Cry “Havoc,” another film about nurses in Bataan, was essentially MGM’s So Proudly We Hail!  It, too, was a pretty good female-centric war movie, another story about incredible courage.  Neither movie can match the weight of its subject, but the freshness of the focus (on women) allows for our considerable good will, even when the films opt for romantic soap-opera complications.  This time, instead of Colbert, we have Margaret Sullavan as a lieutenant.  She is a mostly unpleasant, all-business type of character who happens to be secretly suffering from malignant malaria.  (Did anyone have more fatal movie diseases than Sullavan?)  Splitting what might be called the Paulette Goddard role, you’ve got two of the most likable screen actresses of all time:  Ann Sothern and Joan Blondell.  Sothern is a tough girl and, therefore, an ace wisecracker, while Blondell is a former burlesque queen.  Also on hand are Captain Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt (wonderful, as usual), Ella Raines, and Heather Angel.  Hunt and Angel are about as far away as you can get from their time together as sisters in Pride and Prejudice (1940).

As in So Proudly We Hail! we get cliches, predictability, and speechifying, yet both films respectfully manage to give harrowing situations their due.  Robert Mitchum has one line (“I’m all right”) before expiring in Raines’ arms.  Sullavan does her customary fine job, even though her role is a drag.  Overall, it’s a more downbeat movie than So Proudly We Hail! which is probably why it is less remembered.  Cry “Havoc” is also the stagier of the two, based on a flop Broadway play, Proof Through the Night, which featured Carol Channing among its cast members.

In addition to Paulette Goddard’s Oscar nod, So Proudly We Hail! was nominated for black-and-white cinematography, original screenplay, and special effects.  Cry “Havoc” received no nominations.  But, again, the most vital takeaway from this pair of films is Veronica Lake, a Hollywood casualty who nows seems to be having the last laugh.

 

Twelve O’Clock High (1949)

On this Memorial Day, consider one of the best WWII movies of the late 1940s, the years in which Hollywood began examining the war with a new objectivity and increased depth, free from its wartime obligation as stalwart morale booster.  With the war over in 1945, and with The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) dealing so eloquently with the returning servicemen and their transition into civilian life, it was soon the right time for a movie like Twelve O’Clock High, directed by Henry King and starring Gregory Peck, a significant step forward in Hollywood’s burgeoning maturity on the subject of the Second World War.

Twelve O’Clock High holds up extremely well, partially because it’s not really about WWII but war in general, specifically the psychological toll of command.  The setting is England during 1942 and 1943, with the focus on an American “daylight precision bombing” unit whose mission is to target German industry.  Though it’s a taut and tense film, it’s unlike most war pictures because it stresses talk over action.  The screenplay deftly dramatizes opposing leadership techniques from the two men who hold the position of group commander.  First there’s Gary Merrill as a colonel who is sensitive to his men’s needs, a beloved figure but unsuccessful at whipping the unit into shape.  His successor, the general played by Peck, is unlikable, demanding, and soon feared, but he’s the one who gets excellent results.  Despite resistance to his managerial style (“Consider yourselves already dead”) and his personal unpopularity, Peck and his exacting methods increase the men’s pride in their work, allowing them to expect more from themselves.

The movie may appear to be endorsing Peck’s tactics, but it’s ultimately about the impossibility of not becoming emotionally involved, whether you’re empathetic Col. Merrill or no-nonsense Gen. Peck.  Keeping his emotions in check finally proves to be as difficult for Peck as being openly nurturing was inadvertently damaging for Merrill.  Twelve O’Clock High depicts war as a mental game, not between enemies but within each individual, trying whatever it takes to do your job as effectively as possible, to sustain the state of mind that gets you through the day.  How much stress and fear can reasonably be withstood by any man?  The story has no interest in the men’s pasts or futures, just their wartime usefulness.  There is no outside world beyond the bombing raids.  Peck’s stiff-backed attitude and core of strength are finally unable to shield him from impending exhaustion and collapse, of both the physical and mental varieties.

Surpassing all his previous work, Peck plays a man who forces a persona upon himself.  Deciding in advance what’s best for his men, he enacts the role of formidable boss, knowing he will be despised in the process.  (He isn’t named Frank Savage for nothing.)  There’s a great moment when Peck, about to assume his new post, smokes a cigarette outside his car, absorbing his final moments of freedom before becoming the seemingly unfeeling fellow he needs to be.  He’s like a stage actor in the wings, waiting for his first entrance.  Fine as Peck is, in a performance that nabbed him his fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination in five years, Gen. Savage is a role with the potential for a greatness that Peck can’t quite attain.  Though unerringly intelligent and intensely committed, Peck’s acting is more often sturdy and admirable than complex and fascinating.

As group adjutant (a desk job), Dean Jagger won the year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar.  It’s not the usual type of Oscar performance, far subtler and less showy, though he does have two (admittedly restrained) drunk scenes.  It’s an honest, warm performance, though an Oscar seems excessive appreciation of good, solid work.  (How could anyone not have voted for Ralph Richardson in The Heiress?  An equally good, if not better, choice was unnominated Paul Douglas for A Letter to Three Wives.)  Jagger is the focus of the film’s 1949 framing story, when he revisits the airfield in which the bulk of the film takes place, flashing back to 1942.  (So, Jagger is the only character we know for sure has survived the war.)  Gary Merrill is such a limited, obvious actor, hardly inhabiting his role as the colonel, while Hugh Marlowe fares better as a particular Peck target who becomes a fine soldier.  (Merrill and Marlowe played major roles in the following year’s All About Eve.)

Henry King’s direction may seem somewhat drab, but the film is clearly aiming for a plain, stark, almost documentary look and feel.  Its long, uninterrupted dialogue scenes further add to an overall atmosphere of realism.  Certainly among the top five American films of 1949, and infinitely superior to All the King’s Men (the year’s Oscar-winning Best Picture), Twelve O’Clock High remains a challenging, riveting, and probing war movie, still fresh and adult.  It was the first of six collaborations between Peck and King.  Their second effort, The Gunfighter (1950) is, for my money, the standout, not just a magnificent western but a film with a Peck performance endowed with all the churning complexity and layered depths merely hinted at in Twelve O’Clock High. 

 

Joan Collins, Octogenarian

On this Thursday, May 23rd, Joan Collins turns eighty.  She’s been a “name” actress for six decades, thought of by some as the poor man’s Elizabeth Taylor of 1950s Hollywood.  Collins was an English beauty who seemed perennially poised on the brink of a movie stardom that never quite happened.  Her shots at becoming a major leading lady were all but over by the early 1960s.  She found subsequent employment with guest appearances on television, notably on Star Trek and Batman, occasionally turning up in a feature film that nobody saw.  Her big-screen nadir would seem to be Empire of the Ants (1977), but perhaps she’s in a few films even worse.

Collins famously rose from the ashes and became more popular than ever when she starred as Alexis Carrington on TV’s Dynasty, becoming the queen bitch of 1980s nighttime soaps.  She reveled in campy cattiness and shoulder-padded glamour, bringing some welcome old-style high-wattage glitter to a starved small screen.  It was good fun to watch her luxuriate in luxury, especially because she retained an irresistible air of self-conscious amusement, never losing her sense of humor regarding the expensively produced crap that finally put her on top.  I guess she’d been in the business too long, and had survived too many hard knocks, to take any of her newfound success very seriously.  In her fifties, she was suddenly a thirty-year overnight sensation.

Looking back on Collins’ movie career of the mid-to-late 1950s, it seems clear that she was a better actress than was acknowledged at the time.  Though she never really got the kind of breakout role that might have proved she was more than just a beautiful face, she was often good and unforced in bad, forced movies.  Her work could be simple, direct, and honest, which means it was easy to overlook, but also that it has aged well.  And she did get her share of high-profile pictures.  In 1955 alone, she appeared in Howard Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs, The Virgin Queen with Bette Davis, and The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, playing Evelyn Nesbit.  Then, in 1956, came The Opposite Sex, a semi-musical remake of The Women, in color and with the addition of men (who somehow manage to be less vivid than the men in the 1939 version, who never appear!).  Collins got the old Joan Crawford role, Crystal, the gold-digging predator.  For Crawford, the result was probably the finest performance of her career.  And Collins acquitted herself most ably, coming through with just the right combination of traits, equal parts luscious and rotten.  This time around, Crystal is a chorus girl rather than a perfume-department salesgirl.

The Oppsoite Sex is a sluggish film, effortfully directed by David Miller, severely lacking in humor or wit (even though it’s based on one of the funniest and wittiest of all Golden Age comedies).  Leslie Nielsen is June Allyson’s husband, stolen away by Collins.  Ms. Allyson is so unbearable (in her smug perfect-wife period) that you may, like me, find yourself rooting for Collins.  When Allyson slaps her during a backstage confrontation, the subtext rises to the surface:  Allyson is apparently punishing Collins for stealing the picture from her.  (Nielsen is a Broadway producer, Allyson a retired star, with Collins appearing in the latest Nielsen show.)  While Allyson is charmless and labored in her effects, Collins shows no discernible effort, instinctively and confidently wielding her seductive appeal.  She has the devastating impact of those for whom beauty and glamour merge seamlessly.

A major frustration of this movie is having to endure Allyson’s musical numbers while the great singer Dolores Gray (in the Roz Russell role) warbles only the title tune over the opening credits (a good song that she sells silkily, with her patented brand of brassy purring).  The impossibly throaty-voiced Allyson, who can barely speak, had to endure the indignity of a dubbed singing voice for her one ballad.

Joan Blondell, wasted in the ever-pregnant Phyllis Povah role, is interesting casting simply because she used to be the real-life wife of Dick Powell, who was now the real-life hubby of Allyson.  Also in the ensemble are Agnes Moorehead in the Mary Boland role and Ann Miller in the Paulette Goddard role.  Oh, it’s a knockout cast, on paper anyway.  But, aside from Collins and Gray, no one scores, no one even makes a dent of an impression.  (Similarly to Gray, why cast a musical-comedy dynamo like Ann Miller and then not have her sing and dance, especially while Allyson is working so hard in her futile attempts to wow us?)  The movie flatlines early on, but there’s never anything flat about Joan Collins.  She tackles a classic performance, meets her role’s requirements, and joins the ranks of first-rate calculating bad girls.

With Island in the Sun (1957), another all-star affair, you find yourself trapped in a travelogue soap opera.  (Its titular location is a place called Santa Marta, a British colony.)  The film’s veneer of seriousness can’t quite mask its trashy essence; it’s just a melodrama gussied up with “issues” of race and politics.  If there was anything daring about it in 1957, well, now it’s pitifully tame, mostly glossy and colorful and expensive-looking.  The film’s two interracial loves are both extremely chaste:  John Justin and Dorothy Dandridge are allowed to hug, while Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine don’t even go that far.  Meanwhile, wealthy Brits James Mason and Ms. Collins, brother and sister, learn that they are racially mixed.  It seems that it was Grandma who had some Jamaican blood.  Collins is engaged to fellow Brit Stephen Boyd who doesn’t give a damn about her racial make-up.  She becomes pregnant by him before they wed.  In an outlandish twist, the siblings’ mother, Diana Wynyard, informs Collins that she needn’t worry about race because her partly Jamaican daddy isn’t her real father!  It seems that the very grand Wynyard (star of 1933′s mostly terrible, Oscar-winning Best Picture Cavalcade) was no saint indeed.

The other, and most overheated, plot is Mr. Mason’s, concerning his jealousy over a wrongly suspected affair between his wife, Patricia Owens, and Michael Rennie.  Mason strangles Rennie to death and rapes Owens.  Policeman John Williams, back in Dial M for Murder mode, pursues Mason and, in doing so, walks off with the movie.  Only he and Ms. Collins impress with their smart, understated performances, while the usually great Mason falters in an impossibly whiny role.  He’s a bore in all his unsympathetic self-pity, behaving like a complete idiot throughout.

Director Robert Rossen can’t seem to unearth a shred of depth from any of the intertwining storylines.  Most of the acting fades into the lush locale, with just about everyone surprisingly lifeless, aside from Mason’s overexertions and the two intelligently judged turns from Mr. Williams and Ms. Collins.

It’s not my intention to suggest that Joan Collins had the makings of a great actress, but I do think she was unfairly dismissed, showing considerable potential that went mostly unnoticed.  In The Opposite Sex and Island in the Sun, she more than holds her own opposite some major stars.  There was certainly something genuine there, something that would have us still talking about Joan Collins on the occasion of her eightieth birthday.

Three Comrades (1938)

With The Great Gatsby surprisingly raking in over fifty million dollars on its opening weekend, I guess it’s here to stay, for a little while anyway.  Which means that I may end up seeing it.  But didn’t I swear that I would never again see a Baz Luhrmann movie?  I still haven’t recovered from that sustained horror known as Moulin Rouge!  And don’t get me started on Australia.  So, if I actually plunk down money to see it (in 3-D, no less), am I more of a masochist than I ever suspected?  Maybe I’m just hungry for a big movie with big stars and a glamorous period setting, not to mention an adaptation of an American literary classic.  I seem determined to hate myself in the morning.  But, whether I end up seeing it or not, this fourth big-screen Gatsby has certainly brought F. Scott Fitzgerald’s name into the pop culture of the 21st century.  (Thank you, Leo DiCaprio.)  For me, it’s an opportunity to remind movie lovers of Fitzgerald’s only credited screenplay from his few years at MGM in the late 1930s.  (He died from a heart attack at age 44 in 1940.)

Three Comrades was certainly a prestige project:  produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz; directed by two-time Oscar winner Frank Borzage; starring the much-admired Margaret Sullavan and a top-billed post-Camille Robert Taylor; based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front); and with a script co-credited to Fitzgerald and Edward E. Paramore.  Set in Germany, it’s one of those between-the-wars dramas, a “lost generation” movie.  It may not be one of Borzage’s more distinctive movies, such as 7th Heaven (1927), A Farewell to Arms (1932), or Desire (1936), but it’s nonetheless lovingly made and occasionally rather touching.  It’s best at handling the malaise and hopelessness of its post-WWI “lost” figures, while less good at charting the rise of those brutes who would soon come to be known as Nazis.  The film’s blatant subtext is the events going on in Europe at the time the film was made, the dawn of the Nazis’ march through the continent.

The film opens on Armistice Day in 1918, as the title’s soldier buddies (Mr. Taylor, Franchot Tone, and Robert Young) begin their post-war transition.  But the action mainly takes place in 1920, with increasing rumblings of violent unrest.  The guys go into business together, owning and operating a garage, working as both mechanics and cabbies.  Young is the most politically active, the most fiercely against the new post-war bullies.  (In a real twist, Young plays a fervent Nazi in The Mortal Storm, a 1940 war-themed drama also directed by Borzage and starring Sullavan.)  The subplot, concerning Young’s activism and Tone’s subsequent involvement on Young’s behalf, is never as convincing or compelling as the main plotline (which focuses on Sullavan).  Mr. Tone is partly to blame.  He gives one of his tirelessly overemphatic performances, as if he wants to show us how hard he worked on each and every one of his line readings.

The film’s chief asset is inarguably Ms. Sullavan.  First seen wearing a beret (and looking sensational in it), Sullavan was never more attractive, despite playing a dying girl.  She’s a fallen aristocrat, once rich and now poor, half-English and half-German, and apparently being “kept” by Lionel Atwill.  She’s a defeatist not entirely without hope, unmistakably marked by a sadness with which she now drifts through life.  Call her a walking casualty of the war, seemingly without a future.  Her tuberculosis is in remission but it will return.  All this adds up to a luminous Sullavan performance, one of enormous delicacy, a kind of brave fragility.  And it’s completely unforced, enhanced by subtle shades of feeling and a heartbreaking tenderness.  Because of her charm and warmth, it’s easy to believe that all three guys quickly adore her.  But it’s she and Taylor who fall in love.  Though she confesses the truth of her condition to Tone, she marries Taylor without telling him how ill she is.  When she coughs at 44 minutes into the movie, well, you know where this is going.  (For Taylor, it’s Camille all over again.)  She doesn’t want to drag down the “comrades,” or hold Taylor back from living a full life, all of which leads to the moving sacrificial ending.

The only flaw in Sullavan’s performance has nothing to do with her acting.  It’s the overglamorization inflicted upon her by MGM.  She’s always too made up, always glossily lipsticked no matter how sick she gets.  Despite the film’s dramatic (and cosmetic) flaws, Three Comrades is an undeniably affecting movie.  Sullavan received her only Best Actress Oscar nomination for this performance (losing to Bette Davis in Jezebel), and she won the New York Film Critics Award that year.

If the latest Great Gatsby doesn’t put you in a Fitzgerald mood or state of mind, then Three Comrades and Margaret Sullavan will very likely do the trick.

 

The Other Jimmy Stewart

Born James Stewart on May 6, 1913, Stewart Granger (who died at age 80 in 1993) would have turned 100 today.  A London native, he made a solid career for himself (after the necessary name change) in the British film industry during the middle and late 1940s.  (The most notable of his English films is the 1945 Caesar and Cleopatra, in which he played Apollodorus.)  Whisked away to Hollywood, and specifically to MGM, Granger was soon the Errol Flynn of the 1950s, spearheading a resurgence of popularity for swashbuckling costume pictures, the best being his altogether wonderful Scaramouche (1952), opposite a never-better Eleanor Parker.  Meanwhile, English actress Jean Simmons, Granger’s wife between 1950 and 1960, was steadily becoming one of Hollywood’s more gifted and versatile leading ladies of the decade.  By the late ’50s, Granger’s stardom had faded considerably, but, for at least the first half of the decade, he was good box office and immensely good onscreen company.  No, he wasn’t as handsome as Errol Flynn, but he had the requisite rakish charm and self-deprecating wit to effortlessly carry Technicolor escapist adventures and send you happily to other worlds.  Besides, Flynn himself was looking haggard and bloated by 1950, meaning that Granger’s timing couldn’t have been better.  So, with the essential charisma, humor, and physicality (to look good in tights), Granger sealed his fate as a big new film star for America.

The movie that made him a U.S. star was King Solomon’s Mines (1950), ironically in a role reportedly turned down by Flynn himself.  It was a massive hit for MGM, and a surprising Best Picture Oscar nominee.  (Though an often exciting entertainment, its characters and situations are fairly stock.)  With two directors credited—Andrew Marton replaced an ill Compton Bennett—and boasting eventually Oscar-winning color cinematography and film editing, this was a Grade A production of B-ish material.  And it really does deliver the goods, putting on quite a show.  More than either Granger or his lovely redheaded leading lady, Deborah Kerr, the star here is the on-location footage, a dazzling assortment of images capturing the animals and tribes of Africa.  At its core, King Solomon’s Mines is a beautiful and exotic travelogue complete with virtually nonstop animal gazing.

Set in 1897, the film features Kerr (top billed) as a prim but feisty British woman who hires Granger—a fellow Brit and safari guide and big-game hunter—to take her into uncharted African territory in search of her missing husband.  Their first scene together sets up their relationship, one of antagonism and sexual attraction, always a good combo at the movies.  Granger is a widower with a 7-year-old son.  Kerr is wealthy and offers him a bundle.  Along the way, most of the animals go right for Kerr (tarantula, snake, tiger, etc.); she even steps on an alligator.  Eventually Granger and Kerr kiss; it turns out she doesn’t love her husband.  Throughout, Granger is properly roguish and appealing, but neither he nor Kerr can compete with a thrilling stampede, a desert trek, or a Watusi dance.

The climactic scene in the mines is disappointing, not at all impressive-looking and much too brief in screen time.  But all this movie really asks of you is that you have a good time.  And how could you not?  It’s got Africa, color, wildlife, not to mention thrills and romance, the entrancing Kerr, and the arrival of Stewart Granger, firmly staking his claim as a leading man both elegant and macho, funny and no-nonsense, and fully equipped to take on all kinds of adventures for the next half-decade or so.

Footnote:  Granger and Kerr were reteamed for The Prisoner of Zenda (1952) and Young Bess (1953), two costume pictures, the latter starring Jean Simmons in the title role.

 

 

 

You Were Never Lovelier (1942)

My first book, And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies!: 200 Quizzes for Golden Age Movie Lovers (1999), is making its debut as an e-book this June, and it will also be getting its second print edition.  There are some slight revisions in the text, plus a very obvious change on the outside:  a brand-new cover.  In place of the three tiny head shots of Gary Cooper, Ava Gardner, and Humphrey Bogart is a sublime still of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth dancing to “I’m Old-Fashioned” from You Were Never Lovelier.  After all, what says Hollywood escapism better than Astaire’s peerless perfection and Hayworth’s otherworldly beauty?

Though it’s a minor event in the history of the movie musical, You Were Never Lovelier is nonetheless an enchanting picture.  The direction (by William A. Seiter) is light, the script (co-written by director Delmer Daves) is fun, clever, and occasionally witty.  Unlike so many musicals of its era, it gets points simply for not being dumb.  In fact, it’s romantic-comedy situation is good enough to stand on its own, without the songs and dances (though don’t you dare try to remove them).  And the black-and-white cinematography, the sets, and Hayworth’s gowns are all splendid.  If it’s not a top-tier Astaire musical, well, then it’s near the top of his second tier, despite the fact that he’s playing one of his kind-of-a-jerk roles who also happens to be a renowned dancer, a gambler, and a guy from Omaha (just like Fred Astaire).

The movie is set in a romantic Hollywood conception of Buenos Aires.  Crusty Adolphe Menjou is a hotel owner with four daughters (Rita plays the second one).  There’s a bit of Taming of the Shrew here, with the two youngest sisters having to wait to marry until Rita first ties the knot.  But Rita has no burning inclinations to find a husband.  And so, to whet her amatory appetite, Menjou puts a secret-admirer scheme into motion.  In a typical rom-com mistaken-identity set-up, Rita wrongly believes that Fred is the guy in love with her.  And then she falls for him.  Rita may not be a marvel at light comedy, as Ginger Rogers was in plots like this, but she is clearly a mega-sized movie star (not to mention a swell dancer).

Fred and Rita aren’t exactly a plausible romantic team, yet they’re still quite pleasing together.  They have some of the Fred and Ginger chemistry, with Fred making Rita seem more sophisticated, and Rita making Fred seem like more of a catch (by chasing him).  But their 19-year age difference is apparent, and Rita’s potent sexual charisma can seem like too much for mild-mannered Fred to handle (at least when not on the dance floor).  There’s really no sexual charge between them, as there was between Fred and Ginger, and as there would be between Rita and Gene Kelly in Cover Girl (1944).  Even so, Fred and Rita are a transporting duo when they’re dancing, and, finally, what’s more important than that?

There are two great ballads in this musical, both by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer:  “Dearly Beloved,” which got a Best Song Oscar nomination (and lost to “White Christmas”), and “I’m Old-Fashioned.”  The first is sung only, not given a dance sequence, while the second is the occasion for the first great post-Ginger romantic dance of Fred’s career, proving that there was going to be life after Ginger regarding those rapturous choreographed seductions that changed the face of movie musicals in the mid-1930s.  As in the best of the Fred-Ginger love dances, the romantic fate of Fred and Rita is sealed during “I’m Old-Fashioned,” when they discover the chemistry they share in their bodies (especially their feet).  Later, in a far more playful mood, their jazzy and upbeat “Shorty George” is an exuberant, uninhibited delight.

There’s too much of Xavier Cugat and his orchestra, yet no major dance to go with the title tune.  And why must we wait 35 minutes to see Astaire dance for the first time (in Menjou’s office)?  You can spot Larry Parks as one of the sisters’ suitors, five years before he co-starred with Rita in Down to Earth (1947).  Menjou’s wife (and the girls’ mother) is played by Barbara Brown, a clone of Fay Bainter.

You Were Never Lovelier was an enormous improvement over the previous Fred and Rita picture, You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), which has none of their follow-up’s magic or charm (or great tunes).  Call me old-fashioned, but it delights me no end to see Fred and Rita, in all their glory, at their primes, newly gracing the cover of something that I wrote.