1936 - LIBELED LADY, a big MGM all star comedy

This is a big and very popular comedy from MGM.  It's got four top stars, Jean Harlow, William Powell, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy.  Since it's an MGM production the sets are elaborate and the fashions particularly the women's clothes are really glamorous.  MGM wasn't the number one studio in the 1930's for nothing.  If the film has a drawback it's with the screenplay that sets up a wacky situation and then doesn't seem to know how to resolve it.

Lets go to the videotape as they used to say.  Myrna Loy is a heiress who has been wrongly slandered by managing editor Spencer Tracy's newspaper.  Loy decides to sue the paper for five million dollars.  Tracy gets the big idea to hire William Powell to set her up in an actual scandal.  Throw in Tracy's fiancee played by Jean Harlow and you have lots of running around and lots of misunderstandings.  Libeled Lady is a screwball comedy since these top performers were put through some really silly situations.

This film has a real 1930's cast.  Myrna Loy was a good looking performer who as it turned out was also a very good comedian.  Spencer Tracy was one of MGM's top stars and was considered an actor's actor.  Then there was the interesting case of William Powell and Jean Harlow.  At the time of this film Powell and Jean Harlow were romantically involved.  The romance didn't have a happy ending when Harlow died in 1937. 

Watching Libeled Lady today I was struck by the professionalism of the cast.  Talk about squeezing blood out of a rock.  This is not what I would call a film with a real clever and funny screenplay.  However the actors milk every bit of humor out of the story that they can find.   A measure of the unsatisfactory nature of the film is that the film literally just stops and fades to black without an ending.

The film was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George S. Oppenheimer.  

The running time is 98 minutes.   

1936 - WIFE VS. SECRETARY, a typical 1930's MGM drama

In many ways this is a typical MGM drama from "the good old days," sometimes called a "women's picture."  Wife Vs. Secretary is the kind of undemanding stuff MGM regularly pumped out for the movie going public.  For the most part a high class soap opera with top production values, big stars and a really trite plot.

 

Here we go.  Clark Gable is a high powered magazine editor who is married to his wife played by a glamorous Myrna Loy.  Clark is a wheeler dealer who has a devoted secretary played by MGM's resident 1930's sex bomb Jean Harlow.  Through lots of plot contrivances people suspect that Gable is having an affair with Harlow.  But Clark is devoted to his wife.  How do we know this?  Well Clark sticks jewelry in her food which she fishes out which apparently demonstrates his love for her.

 

Also showing up in this film is a young James Stewart in a supporting role playing Harlow's fiance. He gets real jealous over the amount of time Jean is spending with Clark.  Well one thing leads to another and lots of misunderstandings later Myrna thinks Clark is having an affair and is ready to leave him by taking a boat cruise to Cuba or somewhere in the Caribbean. 

 

It all works out in the end because it's an MGM picture made for the middle class.  Clearly the plot should have been that Clark has an affair with Jean and then has to work out his issues with Myrna to fix his marriage.  But this is an MGM picture and they are not about to endorse infidelity and bad mouth marriage. The film is kind of silly stuff.  Clarence Brown was one of MGM's best studio directors so the film is at the very least well made.

The talented writers involved in this film were John Lee Mahin, Norman Krasna and Alice Duer Miller. The running time is 88 minutes and fortunately not a minute longer.

1935 - THE WALKING DEAD, modest but entertaining horror/crime film

Boris Karloff is a man framed for the murder of a judge.  After being sentenced to death in the electric chair he is brought back to life by sort of mad scientist played by "Santa Claus" himself Edmund Gwenn.  As is the way with a 1930's Karloff film he lumbers around seeking revenge sort of like Frankenstein looking for the people who set him up for murder.  Karloff is a very good lumberer.

This is a Karloff horror film not produced by Universal for a change.  Warner Brothers probably offered Karloff more money than he was getting at Universal to play yet another sort of monster.  One thing you have to say Karloff was very good at playing the sympathetic monster.  You actually feel sorry for the guy by the inevitable climax.

The film was directed by one of Hollywood's greatest studio directors, Michael Curtiz.  If any director knew how to move a story along it was Curtiz, this film races along at top speed.  Curtiz had an amazing career starting in the silent era and finishing in the early 1960's.

 

The Walking Dead was the usual good Warner Brothers production with an interesting mix of Warner's character actors.  Hal Mohr was the cinematographer his chief claim to fame was as the cameraman who filmed the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer.

The film was written by Ewart Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews and Lillie Hayward.  The running time is a brisk 66 minutes.

1936 - AFTER THE THIN MAN, the 2nd in the series

This is the second in the The Thin Man series or make that the first sequel.  The Thin Man had much to the surprise of MGM studios been a big hit.  The series combined comedy with a mystery and had the advantage of two MGM stars who were extremely proficient at the sophisticated comedy business, William Powell and Myrna Loy playing Nick and Nora Charles.  That film made a lot of money for MGM so the original writers, director and stars were back with Another Thin Man two years later.

The original film's formula was carefully followed for the most part but this time there was even more  emphasis on the comedy elements of the plot.  Nick and Nora Charles had a dog called Asta and you have to sit through a lot of his shenanigans which sometimes stops the film cold.  The supporting cast is a list of 1930's actors, James Stewart (finally starting to get good roles). Elissa Landi, Sam Levene, Joseph Calleia and George Zucco (as usual planning a mad doctor).  All these actors are at the service of Powell and Loy.

 

The mystery plot for the most part is kind of a "who cares who killed who" story. The entertainment value in the film really belongs to William Powell and Myrna Loy, friends in real life. They play off of each other to perfection.  They are quite amusing together as a married couple who like to have fun while solving this murder mystery.

The film has the usual MGM big studio polish, none of that socially conscious stuff for this studio.  It was always about glamorous stars and glamorous settings.

The film was written by two of MGM's top writers, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich.  The director was the infamous W. S. Van Dyke.

1936 - THINGS TO COME, large scale 30's science fiction film

There hasn't been anything like this film.  Socialist writer H.G. Welles was given a lot of say in the making of this science fiction epic by the producer Alexander Korda.  Welles was primarily known for his science fiction stories, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau.  In fact much to his irritation these were the books he was remembered for.  But Welles primary interest was in being a social critic and much of his science fiction ideas contained criticisms of contemporary British society something not always recognized by his readers.  

Producer Alexander Korda was interested in making a film out of an original story written by Welles.  Welles was lured into the film production with an unprecedented amount of control on the production, something that turned out to be to the determent of the film. Korda sparred no expense on Things To Come.  This was a large scale production with a top cast and for it's time state of the art special effects.  The film's story is about the world being lured into a large scale world war.  Only after the devastation of society does a new world order arise that aims to create a utopia for mankind.  

 

The film was directed by William Cameron Menzies who had made his name as a "production designer" on such films as Gone With The Wind.   Menzies was a great visual artist but was apparently fairly deficient when it came to working with actors.  Although Welles wrote the screenplay, it's kind of a lumpy thing.  The actors are not really characters anyone can identify with.  They are essentially mouthpieces for Welles outdated ideas about society and government.  Welles clearly thought the answer to mankind's problems was an embrace of futuristic technology.  Today we can see that this is rather a naive political view. 

Still this film is really something to see, the sets have a real 30's design to them by people who were trying to imagine what the future would look like.  The visual look is impressive even if the acting isn't so hot.  I suppose you could say the film is a magnificent science fiction folly of a film. but definitely worth watching.

The running time is 108 minutes.       

1936 - THE GENERAL DIED AT DAWN, great title crummy film

Considering all of the talent involved in this film it should have been a whole lot better.  Gary Cooper is one of those "soldier of fortune" types they like in the movies.  He's supposed to deliver a bunch of money to an arms dealer in Shanghai. The people of a Chinese providence are under the thumb of an evil Chinese warlord called General Yang, played by Armenian actor Akim Tamaroff.  However the plan is to start a civil war to throw Yang out of power.

Cooper runs into trouble when he gets mixed up with the beautiful English actress Madeline Carroll and her father improbably played by comedic actor Porter Hall.  Throw in William Frawley, Fred Mertz of I Love Lucy fame, as a perennially drunk arms dealer and you have a very unusual cast to say the least.

The General Died At Dawn was directed by Lewis Milestone in his prime, photographed by one of Paramount's best cinematographers Victor Milner, who in this film shot glamorous close ups of Madeline Carroll.  The film was written by leftie playwright Clifford Odets and not very well.  The screenplay seems like a poorly written stage play with actors entering and exiting the camera frame like they were on a proscenium stage.  The stuff that comes out of the mouths of these characters almost boarders on the ridiculous.  I think Clifford Odets the noted New York playwright would have been very critical of Clifford Odets the Hollywood screenwriter.  The General Died At Dawn also has a particularly ridiculous end.

 

The running time is 98 minutes.

1936 - THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, the story of Dr. Samuel Mudd

John Ford brings his sophisticated visual skills to the true story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the man who treated John Wilkes Booth after his assassination of  President Abraham Lincoln.  The film presents Mudd as a man caught up in circumstances beyond his control a victim of a vengeful United States Government.  Mudd was sentenced to Shark Island a penitentiary in Florida where he ended up having to deal with a yellow fever epidemic in the prison.  

 

The real life story of Dr. Mudd is considerably more complicated.  He apparently did have some contact with three of the conspirators of the Lincoln assassination and didn't report John Wilkes Booth's visit for at least a day.  Never let the truth get in the way of a movie I guess.

In any case, Ford used all of his visual composition skills and along with the skill of his cinematographer Bert Glennon, the film is very impressive to look at.  Ford also got some good performances out of Warner Baxter as Dr. Mudd and in his first appearance in a John Ford film, John Carradine as a sadistic prison guard.   The film is an excellent civil war drama directed by a master director at the peak of his abilities.

 

 

The film was written by Nunnally Johnson one of Hollywood's top screenwriters who had a lot to do with the high quality of the film.  It runs 96 minutes.

1936 - SAN FRANCISCO, a big MGM film

 Ok here we go:

Clark Gable is Blackie Norton, irrepressible owner of the Paradise Club in the Barbary Coast section of San Francisco.  He is also friends with the local Catholic priest played by Spenser Tracy.  One day stumbling into the Paradise Club is Mary Blake played by Jeanette MacDonald.  Mary needs a job as she is a starving opera singer from Denver, Colorado where she learned to sing opera in the church choir back home.  Blackie gives her a job as a saloon singer where she belts out the title number, the crowd goes wild.

Mary loves Blackie, but Blackie is not the settle down and have a family kind of guy so Mary splits and takes up with Blackie's rival Nob Hill rich guy Jack Burley.  Jack Burley gets Mary a job singing opera in some San Francisco opera house.  Blackie, starting to realize that he loves Mary after all tries to get her to come back to the Paradise Club. But after hearing Mary sing opera he realizes he can't stand in the way of her opera career.

Since Blackie won't tell Mary how he feels about her she decides to marry Jack Burley instead. Lots of plot later, this whole soap opera like relationship mess is finally sorted out when the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 hits. The earthquake conveniently kills off Jack Burley so Mary and Blackie can finally get together. The film ends with Blackie, Mary and the survivors of the earthquake locking arms and marching around singing "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic" for some reason.

 

Robert Hopkins and Anita Loos wrote this film, the running time is 115 minutes.

1936 - WINTERSET a high class version of Death Wish

Supposedly a famous tragic play in free form verse by Maxwell Anderson.  By the time Winterset was turned into a film with the original Broadway cast,  RKO had dumped most of his dialog and rewrote the tragic ending to turn into a happy ending.  Really no surprise there.

Burgess Meredith looking pretty sharp in a fedora is Mio, the son of a 1930's radical unjustly convicted and executed for a crime he did not commit.  On a rainy film noirish kind of night, Mio will meet up with the judge who sentenced his father to die and the gang leader who actually committed the crime.   No outrageous plot coincidences in this film.

Winterset is incredibly stagy with it's rainy studio sets and pseudo high toned dialog mixing very  uncomfortably with the more "normal" dialog that people actually speak in real life.  Burgess Meredith is is very good as Mio straddling the line between spewing pseudo Shakespearean blather and playing an early version of Charles Bronson in Death Wish.  However the rest of the cast could have used a little more underplaying particularly those "colorful" ethnic characters.

Winterset is a very dated film.

77 minutes, screenplay by Anthony Veiller.

1936 - KING OF THE PECOS, semi early John Wayne western

The excellent DVD Savant website gave this early B-movie John Wayne western a good review, so I took a look at it.

Well it's short which is nice for a change, it comes in under an hour.  John Wayne wears a white hat and rides a white horse so you know he's the good guy.  Wayne plays a lawyer/gunfighter out for revenge against the guy who killed his father when he was a young kid for the water rights.

It's easy to see why John Wayne became a star, his easy going personality is predominant throughout the film, he certainly outshines his female lead Muriel Evans,  you probably aren't going to see a lot of blog posts about her career.

The end of the film has the standard good guys vs. bad guys fight.  It's kind of unnerving to watch these stuntmen fall off of horses and horses taking spills.  This was all done for real back in the 1930's.

 

Overall not bad, 54 minutes, written by Bernard McConville, Dorrell McGowan and Stuart E. McGowan.

1936 - THE SECRET AGENT, Hitchcock's flawed but entertaining spy thriller

Alfred Hitchcock's follow up to his masterpiece The 39 Steps, is another story about espionage but he doesn't get the balance right in the script like he did in The 39 Steps.  Hitchcock also unfortunately miscasts one of the main leads in his film.  The Secret Agent does have many good ideas and scenes such as the murder on the mountain top, the chase in the Swiss chocolate factory and the final spectacular train wreck sequence.

Hitchcock's lifelong fascination with blonds commences in this film with his closeups of the actor Madeline Carroll.  Carroll is very attractive but she isn't really very good in a typical female role with lots of whimpering and whining, a very tiresome character.  However Hitchcock cleverly casts Robert Young, who usually played nice guys in films against type as the enemy agent and Young nails it.

Where the ball really got dropped was casting John Gielgud as the writer turned spy who has been assigned to eliminate an enemy agent, sort of with a license to kind of kill.  Gielgud is very stiff in the role and as the romantic lead he can't seem to work up much interest in Madeline Carroll which is hard to believe just looking at her.

Hitchcock directs The Secret Agent

The real star of The Secret Agent is Peter Lorre.  Here is an actor totally in sync with what Hitchcock is trying to achieve in this film.  Lorre's character at first comes off as comedy relief, but it quickly becomes clear he is a very dangerous assassin and not to be screwed with.  Lorre's balancing act of a performance was clearly what Hitchcock was aiming for in this film. 

The Secret Agent is not the best of Alfred Hitchcock's British films, but it is extremely important in the development of the film thriller, particular the James Bond films.

Along with Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock is responsible for creating the thriller genre.

86 minutes.   Written by Charles Bennett, Alma Reville, Ian Hay and Jesse Lasky Jr.