Daily Archives: May 24, 2014

Comrade X
Directed by King Vidor
Written by Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, and Walter Reisch
1940/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Warner Archive DVD

[box] Vanya: Well, there’s some good news and some bad news. Last week all the towels were stolen. But on the other hand the water wasn’t running so nobody needed the towels. Everything balances.[/box]

This is a pretty good screwball rip-off of Ninotchka though it bogs down a bit toward the end.

McKinley B. Thomson (Clark Gable) is Comrade X, an American reporter who has been smuggling coded stories past the censors in Moscow.  His valet Vanya (Felix Bessart) is determined to get his daughter Theodore (Hedy Lamarr) out to America because he fears that she is too opinionated for the powers that be.  He blackmails Thomson into doing this by threatening to reveal his identity.  The idealistic Theodore is a committed communist but consents to accompany Thomson as his wife because he convinces her he is also a true believer and they are going to enlighten the masses.  But the authorities are on Thomson’s trail and father, daughter, and Thomson end up in a jail cell.  How will they escape?  With Oscar Homolka as a Commissar and Eve Arden as a wise-cracking reporter.

This starts out well with good chemistry between Gable and Lamarr and some snappy dialogue satirizing the USSR.  The whole farce ends in a massive tank chase, which goes on way too long for my taste and weakens the film.  Lamarr looks even more beautiful here than she did in Algiers.

Comrade X was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Story.

Trailer

 Santa Fe Trail
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Written by Robert Buckner
1940/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Caption: Leavenworth, Kansas: Where the railroad and civilization ended, the Santa Fe Trail began. The old Spanish road from Mexico, now lusty with new life and a new motto – “God gets off at Leavenworth and Cyrus Holliday drives you from there to the Devil.”[/box]

This is an OK Western with an excellent supporting performance by Raymond Massey.

The main setting for the story is in “Bloody” Kansas just prior to the Civil War when settlers were fighting about whether the territory would enter the Union as a Slave or Free State.  We begin at West Point where J.E.B. Stuart (Errol Flynn), George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan), James Longstreet and other officers that would be prominent on both sides of the Civil War are cadets under Superintendent Robert E. Lee.  Stuart and a cadet named Rader (Van Heflin) get into a violent argument over abolition. Politics have no place in the Army and Lee punishes Stuart and Custer by sending them to the 2nd Cavalry, the “Suicide Regiment” trying to keep order in Kansas.  Rader, on the other hand, is booted out of the service.

When our heroes arrive in Kansas they soon meet pretty Kit Carson Holliday (Olivia de Havilland), daughter of a local freight handler and prospective railroad mogul..  Both fall for her but her heart soon belongs to Stuart.  There is little peace before the regiment is called on to combat abolitionist fanatic John Brown (Raymond Massey) and his followers, which now include Rader, who are rampaging through the countryside.  With Alan Hale and Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams as comic relief.

This is a perfectly satisfactory action-filled Western/Civil War drama.  I thought Raymond Massey was wonderful as the fiery, half-mad John Brown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlGLD95V64c

Trailer