1940 - DOWN ARGENTINA WAY, musical in blazing 40's technicolor

If the dreary Broadway Melody of 1940 was almost redeemed by the final dance number with Astaire and Powell, Daryl F. Zanuck's production completely exceeds expectations in the entertainment genre.  Down Argentina Way shows Fox Studios delivering a highly entertaining musical without lingering over any thing so mindless and boring as a plot.

And speaking of the plot here we go.  Don Ameche sporting a rather shaky South American accent is a horse breeder in Argentina.  On a trip to the United States he falls in love with a horse breeder played by Betty Grable.  It's the usual light weight love story that's frequently found in light weight musicals.  But the writers and producer Zanuck made sure to stay focused on the good looking leads and add enough entertaining subplots to keep things moving along at a rapid pace.

This was a big breakout film for blonde Betty Grable who would go on to be one of Fox's biggest stars surpassing Alice Faye who was the big blonde big deal prior to Grable's ascent.  Grable had actually been in the entertainment business for 11 years before finally hitting the big time.  She was one of those Hollywood stars who apparently everyone could get along with.

Don Ameche's career started in radio and he had a long one working into the early 1990's.  Also featured in Down Argentina Way were the Nicholas Brothers an amazing dancing specialty act who Fred Astaire commented were the best tap dancers he had ever seen.  Mention should also be made of Carmen Miranda who was probably the only actual Hispanic in the cast.  She's in a couple of specialty numbers which for once don't bring the film to a halt.

 Down Argentina Way moves at a quick pace,  Zanuck liked his films to move.  The film is literally bathed in early bright and stunning technicolor which is really something to see.  This film cries out for a 4K remaster as it is it's really a visual treat.  This 1940's musical is over 80 years old and is still highly entertaining.

The film was written by Karl Tunberg and Darrell Ware and probably with some input from Daryl F. Zanuck, the running time is 89 minutes  

1940 - BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940, yet another innocous MGM musical

The biggest studio in 1940's Hollywood MGM was also the biggest at putting out really bland films only made watchable by the talented performers and technicians who worked on them.  Broadway Melody of 1940 has some amazing dancing by two of the best hoofers in Hollywood, Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire.  It also has one of the most tedious plots to sit through.  This is the usual hooey of a story of mistaken identities with at times gratingly low humor.

To be really brief, Astaire and his partner played by future Senator George Murphy end up getting involved with a Broadway star as she auditions for a new stage partner.  There's lots of tiresome confusion as she mixes up the identities of Astaire and his partner which just seems unending.  Throw in Frank Morgan, (the Wizard of Oz) for some really dumb humor about his being pursued by a beautiful woman for some reason.  Because the plot is so paper thin there are also specialty acts throughout the film.  A female juggler show up and, a guy on a unicycle bikes around for some reason.  All this just adds to the running time of the film and drags things out until the final musical number.  But frankly without these stupid specialty acts this film probably would have run less than an hour.  

 

However everything leads up to the splashy Begin the Beguine production number towards the end of the film.  Here is where MGM's production technicians really excel.  The film is expertly staged and photographed in dazzling black and white.  Most impressive in this number is the dancing of Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire at the top of their abilities.  Just watching them execute this number you can't help but think about the amount of time they rehearsed it to get it just perfect.

 

In fact the Begin the Beguine number has been excerpted a few times particularity in the MGM clip compendium That's Entertainment, it's really about the only reason to sit through this film.  You can see them perform this number on YouTube which will save you the time of sitting through this film.

This film was written by Leon Gordon and George Oppenheimer, the running time is 102 minutes.  

1940 - PINOCCHIO, on the big screen

Three years in production this is the followup to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  Pinocchio shows the very talented team of Walt Disney's artists and technicians really on top of their creative game.  A very good digital print of Pinocchio screened at our local revival theater and it is quite an impressive artistic achievement.

If you spend a little time on the internet, you can find a decent synopsis of Carlo Collodi 's original story which was serialized for 30 chapters in a weekly magazine.  The Disney storyboard artists did a brilliant job revising and condensing Pinocchio's story into a 90 minute film with no slow moments.  The Disney artists also elevated and developed the minor character of Jiminy Cricket as Pinocchio's conscience who  in reality is the narrator of the film.

 

Unlike Disney's first feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio does not have kind of a 1930's feel which gives Snow White a bit of a dated look.  The careful use of color particularly the color blue is stunning.  Disney also used their famous multi dimensional camera which gave the illusion of 3-D.  

 

Incredibly this film did not make money on it's initial release despite excellent reviews at the time.  The  reissues of this film started in 1945 and the film made money.

 

The film was written by Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William, Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner and Aurelius Battaglia, the running time is 88 minutes,

1940 - FANTASIA, Disney's classic animated concert film.

Fantasia was two years in the making. Walt Disney along with conductor Leopold Stokowski decided to aim very high with an animated film that consisted of musical segments created by the Disney organization's talented artists and craftsmen.  The musical segments were to be drawn from  a selection of classical music composers.  At this point the Disney company was at the peak of it's creative powers.  Fantasia was an expensive production with perfection set as the goal.  It was a big ambitious risk for Walt Disney.  

Besides pushing animation to a high level of artistic creativity, Walt Disney also developed an early stereophonic sound system to go with the film which further drove costs  up.  A lot of money was spent on a sound system that had to be installed inside theaters showing this film.  Again, Disney wanted nothing less than perfection for the finished soundtrack in the animated segments.  The excellent live action color photography of Fantasia was photographed by one of Hollywood's top cameramen, James Wong Howe who is surprisingly not credited for his contribution to the film.

The end result was a unique film which featured visual interpretations from composers, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky and Schubert.  If not all of the musical segments come off (the Beethoven Mount Olympus segment is kind of silly), they are all  spectacular with the animation and special visual effects perfectly blended together.  

 

The plan for the release of the film was to add and replace musical segments every few years which would keep the film in circulation.  Unfortunately the film was so expensive that the initial run didn't really bring in the box office results Disney was looking for.  World War 2 didn't help things as it closed off a lot of foreign markets that would have generated revenue.

Still even with CGI and all the latest technological mumbo jumbo junk that the entertainment industry can muster today.  This film is an amazing achievement when you compare it to the current cookie cutter animated films that are released.

The story credit is given to Joe Grant and Dick Huemer although you can be sure this film is also the result of input from the creative artists and the producer Walt Disney as well.  The running time is  126 minutes.

1940 - FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT - one of Hitchcock's best films

Rebecca was Alfred Hitchcock's first American film. Hitchcock had been contacted by independent producer David Selznick the mastermind behind Gone With The Wind.  Selznick had recently purchased the novel Rebecca which had been a best seller. Hitchcock signed on with Selznick to direct the film version and the rest as they say was history.  Although Rebecca was a success, Hitchcock was under the very close supervision of Selznick who always believed the producer was the author of a film.  The resulting finished film seemed more like a high class Hollywood movie than a Hitchcock film.

Selznick loaned Hitchcock out to another independent producer Walter Wanger who turned out to be a more hands off executive than Selznick.  Wanger essentially left Hitchcock alone to make his movie.  Given more control over the script and production,  Hitchcock turned out his first real American Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent.  This was the real start of the American phase of Hitchcock's  career.

 

Foreign Correspondent bares some relation to Hitchcock's 39 Steps and the later North By Northwest with it's whirlwind plot and dazzling set pieces.  Unlike his English films he was working with a large budget and some of Hollywood's best technicians courtesy of Wanger.  In later interviews Hitchcock complained about the casting of Joel McCrea and Laraine Day but in many ways they are the prototypes for future Hitchcock protagonists and they both give charming performances.

 

This is the master director in his prime about to create some of the best pictures of his career using the superior technical resources of the Hollywood studio system while at the same time bringing his personal style to his films. 

The film was written by Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison with contributions from James Hilton and Robert Benchley.  The running time is 120 minutes.

1940 - CONTRABAND, early and good Powell and Pressburger film

 A film made early in the careers of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger soon to be known as The Archers.  As was to be the case, Powell directs while Pressburger contributes the screenplay.  Contraband is a spy thriller which reminded me of the early Hitchcock films. The film does contain the usual quirky characters that The Archers would specialize and Powell even in this early part of his career is good with his camera setups.

 As a romantic lead The Archers cast of all people Conrad Veidt, a German actor who usually played villains in his English language films.  Veidt was the sorcerer Jaffar in The Thief Of Bagdad, and was memorable as Major Strasser in Casablanca. Veidt played Nazi bad guys during World War II, which is sort of amusing as he was a fervent anti Nazi German.

 Here Veidt is the Captain of a Danish ship who is in pursuit of Valerie Hobson who may or may not be a spy. Veidt is one suave leading man.  Hobson definitely has her mysterious and alluring woman thing going in this film.  Their romantic flirting is very fun to watch.  

 

In a way the film is better than a lot of Hitchcock's early films, Powell and Pressburger always payed careful attention to the characters in their films something Hitchcock would not always do if it got in the way of one of his famous suspense set pieces.  The picture is also greatly aided by the photography of F.A. Young a cinematographer who would later shoot David Lean's super epics.

The running time is a very entertaining 92 minutes

1940 - THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES, the sequel to Jesse James

 The followup to Jesse James with Henry Fonda back as Jesse's brother Frank out to avenge the death of Jesse who died at the hands of Bob Ford.

 

The film starred Henry Fonda and in her first role Gene Tierney.  It was directed by Fritz Lang, and anyone looking for some touches of Lang's themes in this film will have to look very hard.  This in many ways a strictly by the numbers western with some beautiful technicolor photography.

Lang to put it mildly was not a director that Fonda liked working with, he was very much the European bully on the set.  

 

Still for what it is the film is fairly entertaining, it moves along and is only 90 minutes long.

The film was written by Sam Hellman.

1940 - THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER - excellent Lubitsch romance

A classic romance from Ernest Lubitsch, James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan are employees at a shop in Budapest.  They can't stand each other at work but unbeknownst to them they are secret pen pals carrying on a romance by mail.  That's pretty much the plot of this incredibly charming film.

 

If you are interested in the famous "Lubitsch Touch" it's usually in reference to his sly way of conveying sex on screen during the 1940's.  However Lubitsch was equally good at coaxing fine performances out of his cast.  In this case he managed to keep James Stewart's shtick under control and actually got a warm and affecting performance out of him. The rest of the cast is equally good, Frank Morgan usually remembered as the Wizard from the Wizard of Oz film gives a very touching performance as the owner of the shop.

 The film was made at MGM studios but many critics have pointed out that it has a real European flavor to it.

 

Lubitsch always closely supervised his writers, in this case his long time collaborator Samson Raphaelson. The film runs 99 minutes.  A real winner of a film.

1940 - THE MARK OF ZORRO - excellent period costume adventure

A remake of the Douglas Fairbanks silent film and every bit as good.  Tyrone Power is the Robin Hood of old Los Angeles Zorro.  The film is basically a rob from the rich and give to the poor tale but it is made with a lot of skill. 

 

Rouben Mamoulian directed and Daryl F. Zanuck produced this picture, two Hollywood legends who at this point in their career couldn't do a whole lot wrong.

The film had one of Fox's biggest stars in Tyrone Power.  The love interest was played by Linda Darnell and Basil Rathbone played the villain.  In real life Rathbone was apparently an expert fencer and it shows,  the sword fighting scenes are very exciting.

 

The cinematography was by one of Hollywood's best cameramen Arthur Miller.  John Taintor Foote wrote the screenplay.  The film runs 94 minutes.

1940 - THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, typical Warner studios movie

This film about independent truck drivers is actually half of a really good action drama and half a ridiculously turgid soap opera plot towards the end.  George Raft and fourth billed Humphrey Bogart are brothers who are trying to establish themselves as independent trucks.

The first half of the movie has all of the good stuff, lots of snappy dialog as Raft flirts with Ann Sheridan and some good driving stuff courtesy of director Raoul Walsh.  Unfortunately things come to a grinding halt when Raft gets involved with Ida Lupino the wife of The trucking line they eventually end up working for.

Lupino has the hots for Raft and she is so in love with him that it drives her to insanity in an incredibly improbable but entertaining way.  In fact Lupino is so nuts that it almost redeems the last half of the film.

Since this is a Warner Brother's film the production values are good and the film does move along at a fast clip  the film is a brisk hour and a half.

95 minutes, written by Jerry Wald and  Richard Macaulay.

1940 - THE LETTER, classic 40's Hollywood at it's best.

Bette Davis is the British wife of a planter played by the great Herbert Marshall.  The film opens will Davis emptying a revolver into a man she claims was trying to rape her.  As the plot proceeds Davis's lawyer realizes that the dead man was actually her lover who had planned to break it off with her.

This is classic Hollywood film studio stuff.  The director was William Wyler.  The writer Howard Koch adapted the Somerset Maugham play based on a real incident.  But towering over everyone is Warner Brother's diva star Bette Davis who expertly inhabits her leading role.

Apparently the strong willed Davis, who could be a terror on a set. However she  worked well with the equally tough minded Wyler, a professional who always insisted on doing it his way. These two personalities made three good pictures together. 

Finally, you have to give a lot of credit to the studio technicians who made it happen, The Letter was filmed completely in the studio, the film's technical aspects are at a very high level.

95 minutes.

1940 - FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE, third in the trilogy.

Watched the 90 minute edited version of this over 3 hour serial and I doubt I could have lasted much past 92 minutes if this was any longer.  It seems that the evil Emperor Ming is spraying earth with a purple mist that causes people to drop dead in the middle of the street.  To the rescue are Flash Gordon, Dale Arden and Professor Zarkov flying off to the planet Mongo in their phallic spaceship. At the planet Mongo the ruler,  Emperor Ming, an oriental looking villain with a very western accent is behind this evil scheme.  I think it goes without saying that this Ming character is one of the most offensively racist characters in 1940's films.

For an action serial primarily aimed at the 1940's Saturday kiddie crowd these Flash Gordon stories have always had a very strange lack of action.  The spaceships fly around in circles held up by wires while the backdrop whizzes by.  The fights are more like two guys duking it out in a poor man's professional wrestling contest.  Finally the acting to put it mildly is poor.  I get that this is a low budget production and that the intended audience of kids probably aren't interested in subtle acting but come on.

I suppose in some way you can argue that Flash Gordon is the very poor relation to the Star Wars films.  Certainly all of the troupes of the genre are present, the evil empire, the evil emperor and the colorful worlds just ripe for the marketing of a line of toys for the kiddies.

Still, even for a serial this is mighty weak storytelling.

87 minutes.

1940 - NO NO NANETTE, or who in the world is Anna Neagle?

Anna Neagle is the woman in the middle of the picture.  She was a very popular star in England during the 1930's and 40's.  She came over to America and appeared in crap like No No Nanette and a few other minor films.  She returned to England around 1942 and continued to have a successful career.

 

The audience attraction for Anna Neagle was as one of those "sunny" personalities in probably what were fairly light weight films.  In No No Nanette Neagle is a "goody toe shoes,"meddling in everyone's life.   A Mary Poppins fixer upper with a perennial cheery disposition, which becomes very grating after a while.

This film is based on a famous Broadway musical from the 1920's.  I am guessing that the plot of this version of No No Nanette has been considerably altered from the old Broadway play since the ending involves one of those whose on the sleek 1940's airplane farcical moments with the cast running all over the plane.  Not a whole lot of large sleeper planes were flying around during the 1920's.

No No Nanette has a few decent songs in it, such as "Tea for Two."  However you would hardly know it since the songs are sung almost as a throw a way for the most part.   Anna Neagle was a trained dancer early in her career and performs the title song in some sort of strange dream sequence  dressed up in a "Little Lord Fauntleroy" outfit while surrounded by a bunch of chorus girls, clearly her costume was meant to preserve her innocent but perky girl image in the film.

The film was originally two hours in length but cut by thirty minutes, no surprise there.

96 minutes, screenplay by Ken Englund.

1940 - THE POWER AND THE LAND, 1933 - INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN, a couple of short "classic" documentaries.

I doubt The Power and the Land would even be produced today by the United States Government since it glorifies rural electric cooperatives and the government's involvement in bringing power to the rural areas of the country in the late 1930's, this stuff is way to socialist for the present mood of the country.

The real life farm family in The Power and the Land.

The Power and the Land has some nice photography but not unexpectedly looks hopelessly dated, with the narration glorifying the "simple people" working the land.  Television has completely killed this kind of informational film.

38 minutes.

Industrial Britain is just hopeless.  The film was started by Robert Flaherty for the Grierson film unit and then taken out of his hands and reedited.  The stereotypical British narrator intones about the merits of industrialization across the British empire.  The word "stogy" comes to mind.  This is the kind of short film that played before before the main feature in theaters during the 1930's and 40's.  It's primary function was to torture the audience by boring them to death.

22 minutes

1940 - THE MUMMY'S HAND, how to reboot a franchise in 1940

When the stars and director of a successful film franchise get very expensive the studio reboots the whole franchise.  Case in point the Batman series, the James Bond series and the soon to be new Spider man series.  The studios spend lots of money on new actors, directors and writers in the hope of wringing every last dollar out of their tapped out gold mines.

In 1940, Universal Studios decided to reboot their 1932 Mummy film.  In this case they recognized it as a quick way to make a buck.  They spent a budget of about $1.25 to get The Mummy's Hand made. 

This is a fast paced and I do mean fast paced film that runs only 65 minutes.  They packed a lot of stuff into this film, comedy, a bar fight, a little romance and a scary mummy.  They also made sure to throw in about  5 minutes of footage from the original  Mummy film which  brings the film to about 60 minutes of actual new footage. 

A perennial favorite of mine in my younger days.  The film always amused me for all the outrageous plot turns and coincidences that occur throughout the film.  When you have only 60 minutes to tell a story, you kind of don't have much time to mess around with careful story construction.

The film has a lot of comic relief in it.  This appears to be intentional, but when the mummy starts crawling around killing people the film does get pretty serious. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein gets most of the credit for mixing comedy and horror, but it seems to me that The Mummy's Hand did this about 8 years earlier.

The Mummy's Hand still played pretty well for me this weekend.  The mummy makeup looked good and there was never a dull moment.  Frankly the whole idea of some monster who can barely walk actually being able to catch people and kill them is a little ridiculous. 

When was the last time you watched a decent little B film than ran 65 minutes? Screenplay by Griffin Jay and Maxwell Shane.

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1940, NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH, not a sequel to THE LADY VANISHES

Carol Reed directed this comedy thriller, which used the same leading lady and the same two supporting British boob characters Charters and Caldicott from The Lady Vanishes.  But the film was not a sequel to the Hitchcock film.  Carol Reed was about four years away from hitting his peak period as a filmmaker, the real auteur's of this film were the writers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder who had written The Lady Vanishes and were none to happy that Hitchcock got most of the credit for that film.

This is a very 1930's film with a lot of plot.  The basic story is about the Nazi's capturing an important scientist and his daughter from the British, and a British spy's attempts to get them back.  It is a pretty dated but clever story, with the writers mixing in comedy and suspense.  The film uses a lot of model and miniature work which gives  the whole thing a kind of quaint charm.

The acting is very good with a young Rex Harrison standing out as the British master spy trying to save the scientist and his daughter.  Harrison gets to sing a couple of music hall songs and really hams it up in disguise as a Nazi officer, in a lot of ways he's the whole show.  Margaret Lockwood gets the very thankless role of the daughter of the scientist but she looks pretty good in that English actress kind of way.

The finale features a shoot out on a cable car between Harrison and the Nazis which is a combination of more miniatures and rear projection, yeah it looks pretty phony but it's a lot of silly fun. 

Carol Reed was a very talented director but at this stage in his career he was no Hitchcock, he just didn't seem to be able to stage this spy stuff the way "The Master of Suspense" could.  Reed always liked working with actors and he did get pretty good performances out of the cast but visually the film is pretty dull for the most part. In 1944, Carol Reed kicks it into gear and has a very impressive run of films for the next 10 years. 

An entertaining if rather unmemorable film, proabably best to stick with Hitchcock's British thrillers instead.  The running time is 95 minutes.

1940 - SANTA FE TRAIL, very good action but a mess of a plot

Very large scale pre Civil War film that has one of the messiest points of view I have ever seen in a 40's Western.

Southerners and Yankees train together at West Point to become future military leaders, the problem of slavery becomes a hotbed issue among them.  Upon graduation two of the new officers, Jeb Stuart played by Errol Flynn and George Armstrong Custer played by Ronald Reagan, get assigned to the Kansas territories where they get involved with tea party leader abolitionist leader John Brown. As is typical for these kind of films, Flynn and Regan both have the hots for the very pretty Olivia De Havilland playing one of those girl roles she came to despise early in her career.  Reagan competing against Flynn for De Havilland never stood a chance as he was always a 2nd string actor in Hollywood.

Clearly the plan for the film was not to antagonize any Southern audiences, since about every half hour we  get a  speech from Errol Flynn as the southerner Jeb Stuart saying things like, "the south will eventually get rid of slavery in their own way" or "a soldier's job is to not get involved in politics."  Since the real Jeb Stuart ended up fighting for the confederate army and Flynn in real life was from Australia, the whole thing seems pretty suspect.

The bad guy John Brown is a more interesting character than the three leads.  Raymond Massey plays John Brown with a lot of force and compassion for the slave cause certainly more than anyone else in the cast can even pretend to muster up. 

What this film really has going for it is the outstanding direction by one of the greatest studio directors in Hollywood, Michael Curtiz.  Curtiz had a great visual sense and was a master at directing action scenes on an intimate or large scale setting. A fight in an army barracks or a large scale shoot out with the military and John Brown's abolitionists are so excitingly shot that they make up for a lot problems and shortcomings with the film.

The cast, the photography the large scale production values and especially the direction hold this film together.

1940 - Manly BOOM TOWN is very turgid stuff towards the end

  Boom Town is the kind of junk MGM would frequently dump on audiences. MGM the Cadillac of the Hollywood studio studio system during the 1940's, had the biggest stars and the best production facilities. Essentially a movie studio run as an assembly line factory. MGM would pump out films like this that had an alarming blandness. Talent in front and behind the camera were expected to breath life into this boring formula stuff.

 

MGM re teamed Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy to duplicate the success of San Francisco, as further insurance, they cast Claudette Colbert who had had a big hit with Gable in It Happened One Night. Boom Town, starts out as a good natured entertainment about oil wildcatters. Gable and Tracy are fighting, drinking and feuding buddies trying to get rich bringing in oil wells. A woman comes between them and millions of miles of plot later Gable ends up as a rich oil tycoon who is cheating on his nice all American wife with the exotic Heddy Lamarr.

A big fistfight ensues where Tracy beats Gable into insensibility so he can see the error of his ways and go back to sweet bland wife Claudette Colbert. In the meantime, to oppose a big oil consortium, Gable creates a monopoly which brings him to the attention of the US government who puts him on trial. Tracy his on again off again friend, delivers a speech to the jury basically saying Gables monopoly is good for American business and the American people (MGM was a very conservative studio) Boom Town ends with the friends reuniting to start a new business.

Of note in the movie is the ridiculous and constant use of back screen projection and studio sets anytime the stars are involved, not one bit of realism is allowed to enter into the fantasy world of MGM. To even film on location would take away a piece of control from MGM. The cast is kind of interesting.

Frank Morgan shows up from time to time, as a sort of a best friend of Gable and Tracy, it's always hard to think of him in other roles since he is most closely associated with his role as the wizard in The Wizard of Oz. Claudette Colbert a woman who had played a lot of sexy interesting parts at Paramount in the 1930's here finds herself in the thankless role of the wife of Clark Gable. In the world of MGM, American housewives are sexless and boring. European actor Heddy Lamarr gets to play the dirty woman with the sex appeal who Gable has a fling with, she's in the movie so the middle class audience can enjoy her naughtiness while being smug and superior about her loose European morals.

Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy were fine actors and one has to give them credit for being able to breath any sort of life into this film. This is the kind of film that drives a dedicated film viewer to watching European movies with subtitles.

Written by John Lee Mahin, the running time is 119 minutes.