Monthly Archives: September 2013

A Day at the Races
Directed by Sam Wood
Written by Robert Pirosh, George Seton, and George Oppenheimer
1937/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Repeat viewing

[box] Tony: Have you got a woman in here? Dr. Hackenbush: If I haven’t, I’ve wasted thirty minutes of valuable time.[/box]

Although I thought a lot of the many, many musical sequences dragged down the pace of this, the Marx Brothers continued to score with me in the comedy department.

Judy (Maureen O’Sullivan) runs a health sanitarium she has inherited from her father.  She is deeply in debt and stands to lose the place if she cannot pay off evil developer Morgan (Douglas Dumbrille) pronto.  Judy and her pals Tony (Chico) and Stuffy (Harpo) enlist the help of Dr. Hackenbush (Groucho) to persuade wealthy hypochondriac patient Mrs. Upjohn (Margaret Dumont) to front the money.  Unbeknownst to Mrs. Upjohn, Hackenbush is actually a veterinarian.

In the meantime, Judy’s singer boyfriend Gil (Allan Jones) buys a racehorse which he hopes will bring in money.  But Gil can’t pay the horse’s feed or stable bills and the sheriff is constantly on his trail.

 This is the one with the “get your tootsy frootsy ice cream” sketch at the race track. There are some other great gags and Groucho continues to get in some good zingers, but the rough edges have been knocked off a bit too much by MGM.  Of course, Margaret Dumont continues to be perfection in my book.

Dave Gould was nominated for an Academy Award for Dance Direction for the number “All God’s Children Got Rhythm”, making this the only Marx Brothers film to be recognized by the Academy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCDIRGouIV4

Trailer

Nothing Sacred
Directed by William A. Wellman
Written by Ben Hecht suggested by a story by James H. Street
1937/USA
Selznick International Pictures
Repeat viewing?

[box] Oliver Stone: Before I finish with that female Dracula, she’ll know one thing: that Oliver Stone is worse than radium poisoning four ways from the jack![/box]

This has all the elements of a very funny movie.

In New York City, reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) is in disgrace for allowing a Harlem shoeshine man appear as a wealthy sultan for a charity campaign (and for getting found out). In Warsaw, Vermont,  Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) has been diagnosed with terminal radium poisoning.  Wally sees a small item about Hazel in the paper and persuades his editor (Walter Connelly) to let him go to Warsaw to do a human interest story on Hazel.  On the day Wally arrives, her doctor (Charles Winniger) tells Hazel that his diagnosis was wrong and she is perfectly healthy.  Hazel is heartbroken that she will no longer get her dying wish to go to New York.  So when Wally offers to take her there she doesn’t enlighten him.  Hazel is feted everywhere in New York and Wally falls in love with the brave doomed victim.   Hazel’s guilt is getting the better of her but a surprising number of people want to leave well enough alone.

Nothing Sacred  is a combination of a screwball comedy and a cynical satire on media hype.  Carole Lombard is at her most charming and the picture is filled with nice character performances.  I don’t want to discourage anyone from seeing this movie.

However, for some reason it just all fell a bit flat for me.   Part of the problem may have been March and another part may have been Wellman – neither of whom are associated with comedy.   Also, a laundry list of uncredited writers had to work on the script after Ben Hecht walked off when Selznick refused to hire John Barrymore to play a part Hecht wrote for him.

Nothing Sacred contains the first use in a color film of process effects, montage and rear screen projection.  The film fell into the public domain in 1965 and the DVD I rented was a faded unrestored print released by public domain specialist Westlake Video.  A restored Blu-Ray edition has been released by Kino, although reviews of the restoration are not enthusiastic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbV83kwJZ68

Trailer

True Confession
Directed by Wesley Ruggles
Written by Claude Binyon from the play “Mon crime” by Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr
1937/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing

This is a pleasant enough light comedy.

Opposites attract.  Lawyer Kenneth Bartlett (Fred MacMurray) is so honest that he refuses to defend the guilty.  Naturally his law practice is going nowhere.  His wife Helen (Carole Lombard) is a novelist and comes up with the most outlandish woppers on a moment’s notice to get out of a jam.  She secretly accepts a job as a private secretary to help out with the finances but discovers the boss is looking for more than she bargained for.  After a struggle she flees his flat, leaving her purse and coat.  When she goes back to retrieve them, he has been murdered.  She tries to explain to Kenneth that she didn’t murder the man but he doesn’t believe her.  She then allows him to defend her under a plea of self-defense.  With Una Merkel as Helen’s best friend and John Barrymore as a self-styled “criminologist”.

All the actors except Lombard and Barrymore are OK in this. Lombard is better than OK and Barrymore once again demonstrated that he was coasting on fumes by the mid-30’s. The material is light and breezy but it didn’t make me laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejbaFzaLmnM

Clip – typewriter scene

The Good Earth
Directed by Sidney Franklin
Written by Talbot Jennings, Tess Slesinger, and Claudine West based upon the novel by Pearl S. Buck
1937/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Repeat viewing

[box]Wang Lung: Revolution ? What is revolution ?

Unidentified laborer: I don’t know but it has something to do with food.[/box]

Something about MGM’s worthy, big-budget adaptation of the Pearl Buck novel about Chinese peasants just rubs me the wrong way.

Peasant farmer Wang Lung’s (Paul Muni) marriage to freed slave O-Lan (Luise Ranier) gives him and his father an extra pair of willing hands and provides them with added prosperity and sons.  After several years of back-breaking labor, the family amasses enough money to acquire additional land.  But famine comes, driving them to near-starvation and forcing them to flee the countryside to seek work in the city.  As their predicament is shared by millions, there is no work.  Throughout everything, O-Lan’s many sacrifices help the family to persevere.

Finally, an army of republican revolutionaries enters the city and riots break out.  During the riots, O-Lan stumbles on a fortune and is nearly killed twice.  The family is able to return to the land.  In no time, Wang starts acting like a rich mandarin.  As he becomes estranged from the land and O-Lan, his world begins to fall apart.  A swarm of locusts threatens to finish the job.  With Charlie Grapewin as Wang’s father, Walter Connelly as his lazy, grasping Uncle, Tilly Losch as a concubine, and Keye Luke as his adult elder son.

This should have been a tear-jerker about suffering but triumphant womanhood and I am susceptible to such stories.  Yet I emerge dry-eyed from The Good Earth.  

The first problem is that, for all the money that went into creating a realistic Chinese setting, it is simply impossible to suspend my disbelief and lose myself in this movie’s China.  These actors are not only not Chinese nor Asian but are possibly the most non-Chinese Caucasian players that could have been procured.  Walter Connelly, whom I generally adore, is particularly ludicrous.  Luise Ranier’s and Tilly Losch’s Austrian accents don’t add to their believability.  (Why is it that American or British accents don’t get in the way for me?).

Muni himself said he was about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover.  Poor Anna May Wong wanted deeply to play O-Lan but that was out as soon as Muni was cast because of “miscegenation” concerns in the Hayes Code.  (Why was it OK for two white actors to produce Chinese children?!)

The second huge problem I have with the film is Luise Ranier’s Academy-Award-winning performance.  O-Lan speaks very little so much of the acting must be done with the face and eyes.  I tried to love Ranier but it was hard to credit her open-mouthed, dazed expression as acting.  I don’t know whether the director or she thought that it made her look more Chinese or that they thought that it made her look “simple” (as it did) or submissive. For me, It just did not portray the inner strength of a woman who would send her children to beg or risk a firing squad so that her family could survive.

The production values are everything that could be expected from a picture with one of the highest budgets to that time and that took three years to make.

This was the last picture Irving Thalberg produced.  The film is dedicated to his memory in the opening titles.  Luise Rainer won an Academy Award for Best Actress and Karl Freund picked up a Best Cinematography Oscar. The Good Earth was nominated for Best Director,Best Film Editing and Best Picture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEREqQjjzU

Re-release trailer