John DiLeo's Blog, page 7

The Life of Vergie Winters (1934)

Among countless so-called “women’s pictures” of the 1930s—those soap operas about unwed mothers, back-street lovers, sacrificial mothers, and women who descend into prostitution—The Life of Vergie Winters, delicately directed by Alfred Santell, is one of the better examples of the genre and also among the lesser-known.  Its obscurity can be partially attributed to its forgotten leading lady, Ann Harding, whose stardom faded away, gone by the decade’s end.  She would return in the ’40s and ’50s in wife-and-mother character roles in films such as Mission to Moscow (1943) and Two Weeks with Love (1950), far removed from her peak in the early ’30s when she rivaled Norma Shearer as the screen’s sophisticated woman of the world.  As with Shearer, most of Harding’s film acting hasn’t aged too well:  both ladies had a fashionable penchant for hands-on-hips stances when delivering their lines.  Very glamorous, very artificial.

Harding is surprisingly fresh and charming in the first version of Holiday (1930), for which she received her sole Oscar nomination.  In The Animal Kingdom (1932) and When Ladies Meet (1933), two of her better vehicles, she is skillful and likable, yet she’s outclassed in both films by Myrna Loy who clearly has the more intuitive feel for living and breathing on the screen.  Despite her undeniable warmth as a performer, Harding rarely let go of her staginess, her polished but somewhat mannered approach to being “real.”  She might have lasted longer as a star if she had scored in a screwball comedy, a sub-genre that reinvented several early ’30s stars (notably Irene Dunne and Carole Lombard) in the second half of the decade, though Harding always seemed more Helen Hayes than Claudette Colbert.

The Life of Vergie Winters gets points for not being too masochistic, which immediately separates it from so many similar films.  Sure, it’s contrived, but it’s restrained, too, acted with honest feeling and evolving into a genuinely affecting movie.  Harding was never better than she is here, playing a milliner in a small Midwestern town.  Her acting is simple yet full, free from her more stagy and self-conscious acting impulses.  The backstory is that she and John Boles split up when her father told Boles that she was pregnant by another man, a lie he was paid to tell by the family of Boles’ eventual bride (Helen Vinson).  After the wedding, Boles and Harding learn the truth about what happened and resume their love.  Boles becomes a congressman.  Harding leaves town for a while to give birth to their daughter (whom Boles and Vinson adopt).  Their affair continues for twenty years, guiltlessly because they know they were always supposed to be together.  Besides, Vinson doesn’t love him, only his name and position.  (Helen Vinson was one of the great bitches of ’30s movies.)  Yes, it’s a back-street affair but a surprisingly happy one.  When gossip keeps “ladies” away from Harding’s shop, the local madam and her whores keep Harding’s business thriving.

Boles, fresh from Frankenstein (1931) and Back Street (1932) itself, seems far more human than usual.  He frequently seemed to be a handsome mannequin barely keeping up his end of his romances.  This may be his finest performance, even his only performance.  (By the late ’30s and into the ’40s, George Brent got most of the Boles-type roles in female-driven melodramas, but Brent was a far better actor.)  The film also boasts some GWTW credentials, with a lovely Max Steiner theme and a beautiful job of evolving fashions (1910 to 1934) in Walter Plunkett’s designs.

The melodrama hits pretty hard with a shooting death, a false confession, even jail, but there’s a moving conclusion between Harding and Betty Furness (as the grown-up daughter), especially because it isn’t milked for tears.  It’s a gentle ending, even a subtle one, which is rather unexpected.  Soaps are, by nature, plot-driven, but through the simplicity of its effects, plus the rapport between Harding and Boles, the textured feeling of time and place, and that touching fade-out, The Life of Vergie Winters feels intimately concerned with its characters as people not pawns.  

The Gable-Turner Quartet

By 1941, Clark Gable had appeared in eight movies with Joan Crawford, in six with both Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow, and in three opposite Norma Shearer.  Harlow had died in 1937, and the others would soon be done with MGM, leaving the studio during World War II.  But Gable was in full post-Rhett Butler glory, still the uncontested King of the Movies.  Of the new crop of MGM leading ladies, it was Lana Turner, twenty years Gable’s junior, who would be his latest multi-picture teammate.  After three years of studio grooming, Turner had recently shot to stardom earlier in 1941 in Ziegfeld Girl (opposite James Stewart) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (opposite Spencer Tracy).  She had proved herself ready for Gable himself.  They would make four mediocre films together between 1941 and 1954, and their joint success shows that sometimes genuine chemistry and potent sex appeal are enough to overcome lousy material indifferently executed.

Honky Tonk (1941) - How could MGM put Gable, their greatest asset, fresh from GWTW, into such a lackluster, routine picture?  Utterly disposable, it has Gable out in Nevada, moving from con man to saloon owner to corrupt town leader, with Turner as the daughter of Frank Morgan, an ex-con man and the town’s justice of the peace.  (Morgan gives the best, most honest performance, as usual.)  Add Claire Trevor as, you guessed it, the whore with a heart of gold.  Gable looks spiffy in his Rhett Butler suits, and petite Turner is a luscious blonde.  Their sexual sizzle is the only reason to keep watching.  Borrowing from the GWTW playbook, the film has Gable breaking down Turner’s door, and it even gives her some Scarlett-style morning-after bliss.  Honky Tonk presents a familiar Gable, a sexy and competent new star in Turner, and a happy ending.  Big hit, bad movie.

Somewhere I’ll Find You (1942) – It begins in October of 1941 and goes past Pearl Harbor, but recent history is reduced to an excuse for a typical love triangle.  Cynical bad-boy Gable and bland nice-guy Robert Sterling are brothers, both war correspondents, and Turner is a reporter, though she seems more comfortable as the sex kitten caught between the brothers.  Imagine sending glamour-drenched Lana Turner to cover a story in Indochina!  She soon goes missing, but the brothers find her bravely rescuing children.  It’s MGM gloss with the slightest veneer of “importance.”  Another sub-par Gable vehicle, and another hit.  (His wife, Carole Lombard, died during its making.)  This was his last film before leaving the screen for three years to participate in the war effort.  In this movie, after hearing about Gable’s on/off romance with Turner, Patricia Dane suggestively tells him, ”I’ll take a whack at blowing out that torch.”

Homecoming (1948) – The best of the Gable-Turner movies, though it’s not very good.  It’s MGM’s idea of a post-war message picture, their simplistic and heavy-handed answer to The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).  Mervyn LeRoy’s direction veers from the plastic to the stodgy, while unable to resist any of the soapy tendencies in the writing.  It’s got a variation of the old Citadel plot, with surgeon Gable learning what it means to truly care about people.  And he brings considerable intelligence, dignity, and much-needed restraint to the film, becoming its chief asset.  Turner gives a confident performance (she had The Postman Always Rings Twice under her belt by now), easily the best of her performances in her Gable pictures.  Anne Baxter is Gable’s wife, and they share a perfect, successful, selfish life together.  The good and the unselfish are represented by John Hodiak, Gable’s college pal and fellow doctor, and Ms. Turner, Gable’s nurse during the war, a widow with a little boy.  Told as a post-war flashback, the Gable-Turner romance is chaste for a while, but it’s consummated in a bombed-out building while the war rages nearby.  Through loving her, Gable finds a new, more compassionate outlook.

Betrayed (1954) - The third WWII film for the team, it’s an okay spy picture, watchable if not plausible.  It has the superficiality of many of the war pictures made during the war but without the requisite snap and energy.  Gable, Turner, and Victor Mature are all Dutch:  Gable is an officer and an agent; Turner is a notorious woman whose husband was shot; Mature is a famed resistance fighter.  Turner wants to turn her life around by becoming an agent, which she does, but then she’s suspected of being a traitor.  She’s also a brunette here, looking rather fetching, while Gable and Mature look positively ragged.  Gone is the sexual heat between Gable and Turner, and maybe that’s why we don’t accept or care about their love.  Good color and locations help, but not enough to disguise an underwhelming venture.  This was Gable’s final film on his MGM contract, not a terrible farewell, just a disappointing end to an extraordinarily successful partnership.  The previous year’s Mogambo would have been a more fitting and satisfying finish to Gable’s tenure at Metro.

Eleanor Powell: Born to Dance

Sorry, Ann Miller, but Eleanor Powell was the Hollywood musical’s greatest female tap dancer.  Ms. Powell, who died at 69 in 1982, would have turned 100 this November 21st.  I’ll never forget seeing her for the first time, when That’s Entertainment! (1974) spotlighted her in two breathtaking dances from Rosalie (1937) and Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940).  She, more than anyone else, was the revelation of this tribute to the MGM musical, the forgotten performer who knocked everyone’s socks off more than thirty years past her heyday.  It’s probably her trio of Broadway Melody pictures for which she is now best remembered.

Powell became a star in 1935 with the release of Broadway Melody of 1936, which somehow got a Best Picture Oscar nomination despite being an ordinary and rather silly backstage musical.  MGM musicals had no real identity at this point, and so the studio apparently was looking at Warner Brothers and Busby Berkeley for inspiration, with Powell on board as MGM’s answer to Warners’ Ruby Keeler.  (Powell was both prettier and more talented than Keeler.)  With her healthy wholesomeness and all-American high spirits, Powell was a natural for movie musicals.  Noted for her acrobatic back-bending moves, extremely high kicks, and top-speed spins, she displayed footwork so dazzling and powerful that it never really mattered that she couldn’t act much or generate a presence beyond an appealing blandness.  In this picture she dances on toe shoes in a dream ballet, does a mean a cappella tap routine on a bare stage, and a climactic “Broadway Rhythm” in a spangled top hat and tails.  Robert Taylor is the handsome producer, Jack Benny a gossip columnist, with Una Merkel nailing the wisecracks.

Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) managed to meld the backstage musical with the horseracing picture, meaning that it delivers not just an opening night but the big race!  Robert Taylor is back as a producer (and songwriter), and Powell again taps brilliantly.  George Murphy partners her and even manages to keep up with her.  Two scenes will remind you of Singin’ in the Rain, which came fifteen years later:  Powell, Murphy, and Buddy Ebsen in a “Good Morning” kind of trio to “If You Want to Learn to Dance,” and a rain-soaked Powell-Murphy park-set number, “Feelin’ Like a Million,” also featuring an umbrella and much splashing around in puddles.  The overall movie is a stinker with bright spots, with even Powell running out of new things to show us.  It’s 7th-billed Judy Garland who walks off with the movie, singing her classic “Dear Mr. Gable/You Made Me Love You” in a clear, open, strong voice, then hoofing delightfully with Mr. Ebsen.  She’s terrific.

Broadway Melody of 1940 is the best of the three.  Though it’s more of the usual backstage nonsense, the black and white is glorious, the sets impossibly shiny.  And it’s got the exquisite “Begin the Beguine” tap duet between Powell and Fred Astaire, hands down (or is it feet?) the greatest tap dance in movie history.  For Powell and Astaire, it was a meeting of the masters, with all their romantic chemistry below their necks, in movements that speak a language mere mortals observe with open-mouthed wonder and bliss.  Their bodies are inspired by each other, challenged by each other, turned on by each other, and we’re grateful that they’re letting us watch!  And their “Juke Box Dance” is perhaps the second greatest of movie tap routines.  They even dare an admirable but failed attempt at something modern and balletic (with masks) to the tune of “I Concentrate on You.”  The movie is more Astaire’s than Powell’s.  He’s the bona fide superstar, while Powell is in that category only when dancing and smiling, when she’s so obviously thrilled to be sharing her extraordinary gifts with appreciative audiences.