Category Archives: 1933

The Sin of Nora Moran

True love is selfless. It is prepared to sacrifice. — Sadhu Vaswani

Getting back in the saddle with some brief reviews of films I’ve watched since last time.

I had been looking forward to this one  because of its iconic poster. Zita Johann (The Mummy) plays the titular character. I love her exotic looks. Otherwise it’s kind of a meh “Back Street”-type melodrama where a girl sacrifices all to save her married politician lover.

The Mayor of Hell

Lawyer: Tell us what you know, I said! Never mind what you think!
Mr. Hemingway: Excuse me, boss. I ain’t no lawyer. I can’t talk without thinkin’.

 

I loved all three James Cagney movies I watched for 1933 and this one was my favorite.

Cagney plays a ward heeler and gang leader who gets paid off for gathering votes with an appointment as Deputy Commissioner responsible for juvenile detention centers. This is not to take up too much of his time and attention.  But when he arrives to see the reform school, he develops sympathy for the juvenile delinquents suffering therein from hunger and forced labor.

He falls for idealistic nurse Madge Evans who has a plan for reforming this hellhole. This involves improving conditions and creating a kind of Boy’s Town where the inmates form their own government and enforce the rules there own way.  This works out splendidly but only while Cagney is actually present.

Cagney is great as is Frankie Darro, who plays the boys’ gang leader and title character. Dudley Diggs is excellent as the corrupt, evil, sniveling warden of the reformatory. Despite a quite incredible ending the whole thing works beautifully. Recommended.

Cavalcade

Opening title card: This is the story of a home and a family… history seen through the eyes of a wife and mother whose love tempers both fortune and disaster… As 1899 ends, England is at war with the Boers in South Africa, but the tide of battle is against her… It is a national emergency… New Year’s Eve… our London family, sheltered through two generations of Victorian prosperity, awaits the headlong cavalcade of the Twentieth Century…

I enjoyed this upstairs/downstairs history of a London family and its servants as they navigate the turmoil of the period from 1899-1933.

I liked this better the second time around.  Last time I watched  in parts on YouTube with a less than wonderful print. Dana Wynyard, who played the matriarch, was truly wonderful in the role — very understated yet full of feeling. With Clive Brooke as her husband and Una O’Connor as their housemaid and Herbert Mundin as their butler, later turned pubkeepers. It’s kind of sad to think that by the time this was made another war and more sadness were already on the horizon.

The story’s anti-war message must have resonated with the Academy as the film won Oscars in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director and Best Art Direction. Wynyard was nominated for her performance.

NIght Flight

This all-star MGM extravaganza could have used a little more oomph and character development.

The story is based on an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novel recounting experiences he had as a pilot in South America. A french airmail company is headquartered in Buenos Aires.  Its manager (John Barrymore) is an SOB that is determined that the introduction of night mail will succeed in spite of all obstacles.  The weather is his main enemy.  We are drawn into the story by a small polio patient in Rio de Janeiro who must receive life-saving serum from Santiago within 24 hours or die.  All the characters are ignorant of this of course.  They are just carrying the mail.  Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery and William Gargan play the brave pilots.  Helen Hayes and Myrna Loy are the pilots’ terrified wives.  Lionel Barrymore plays a downtrodden flight inspector who suffers mightly from eczema and scratches throughout.This is the story of the inauguration of the first night air mail service and the dangers those early pilots faced. Night flight in an era without radar must have seemed to people in the 30’s like space travel did to folks in the 50’s and 60’s. I was able to watch this in HD this time around and it helped the film enormously. Gable has hardly a line in the movie though he does have a key part.

This was the last picture the Barrymore Brothers appeared in together.

Dancing Lady

Janie ‘Duchess’ Barlow: I’m like the guy throwing quarters in the slot machine. I keep on trying.

Joan Crawford plays the title character and gets to show off her dance moves in this all-star MGM musical extravaganza.

Janie Barlow (Crawford) lives to dance but is currently stuck in a burlesque show. Tod Newton (Franchot Tone) and some of his high class friends attend the show as a bit of slumming. Tod immediately has the hots for Janie and bails her out when she is arrested in a raid of the burlesque house. Since she can’t be bought for money or fancy presents, he tries to get next to her by helping to fulfill her dreams of dancing on Broadway.

He finally softens her up slightly through his friend, a producer of a show directed by Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable). Patch is not about to have an untalented newcomer foisted upon him so sets up a “brush off” audition with the stage manager and his underlings (Ted Healy and the Three Stooges). But it turns out Janie is a fantastic dancer. We watch as she makes good, all the time dodging Franchot’s advances.

The stars shine but, unfortunately, I didn’t think the musical numbers were up to much. This clearly was made before the heyday of the MGM musical. With Fred Astaire (in his screen debut) playing himself; Nelson Eddy singing in one of his first roles; Robert Benchley; and the Three Stooges as stagehands. These folks deserved something more than Bavarian beer garden numbers.

What a Busby Berkeley style number looks like when you don’t have Busby Berkeley at the helm.

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I also recently rewatched “The Little Giant” (1933) which I previously reviewed here.

Morning Glory

Eva Lovelace: I hope you’re going to tell me your name. I want you for my first friend in New York. Mine’s Eva Lovelace. It’s partly made up and partly real. It was Ada Love. Love’s my family name. I added the ‘lace.’ Do you like it, or would you prefer something shorter? A shorter name would be more convenient on a sign. Still, ‘Eva Lovelace in Camille,’ for instance, or ‘Eva Lovelace in Romeo and Juliet’ sounds very distinguished, doesn’t it?

Katharine Hepburn knocks it out of the park and wins her first Oscar for only her third film.

Young Eva Lovelace (Hepburn) comes to New York City straight off the little theater stage of her native Vermont and expects to take Broadway by storm. She is naive, a bit gouche, and obsessed with the theater. Though she is loaded with talent, she finds out that it is not that easy to break into it.

She walks straight into the office of Louis Easton, one of the biggest Broadway producers. Easton has his play already cast in his head and only reluctantly gives her a few minutes of his time at the urging of playwright Joseph Sheridan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.).  She meets old trooper Robert Harley Hedges (C. Aubrey Smith) who is amused by her non-stop stage-struck prattle and agrees to give her acting lessons.  Eva’s career goes downhill rapidly from here and finally sputters to a complete halt.  She is now starving.

She runs into Harley Hedges in a coffee shop where she has ordered only coffee and he takes pity on her and brings her to a cast party hosted by Easton.  She proceeds to get really drunk on only two glasses of champagne.  She goes from stumbling all over herself to delivering marvelous impromptu renditions of the Hamlet monologue and a speech from Romeo and Juliet to the astonished guests.  Eventually she passes out and Easton takes advantage of her.  She is now madly in love with him but he views the incident as a gigantic mistake.  I will go no further.

For some reason, I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did when I first saw it and it only improved on my second viewing. I thought the film was great and that Hepburn was fantastic. She captured the foolish over-confidence and fears of the young so perfectly. Recommended.

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I also rewatched “Back Street” (1932) and was once again captivated by Irene Dunne.  I reviewed that movie here.

Sweepings

Daniel Pardway: I rattle around in that old house like a pea in a shoe box.

Lionel Barrymore arrives in town looking for opportunities just after the Great Chicago fire. He has little money but big dreams. He decides to open a kind of general store sell all the items people will need to rebuild. Over the decades the store prospers along with Lionel. By this time Lionel has four grown children: Eric Linden, William Gargan, Gloria Stuart and Alan Dinehart. He longs to leave his business to them but they are spoiled and lack either the interest or the aptitude or both.

This movie did not wow me. Barrymore is always excellent.

Blondie Johnson

Blondie Johnson: This city’s gonna pay me a livin’. A good livin’! And its gonna get back from me, just as little as I have to give.

This is a very fun movie with the ever fabulous Joan Blondell in the lead for a change.

Blondie Johnson (Blondell) begins as a downtrodden unemployed girl who is homeless along with her dying mother. She quit her last job when the boss couldn’t keep his hands off her.  She can get no assistance from the government. When mom dies, she bitterly decides that from now on she will be out for only one thing – money.

She gets a job in the chorus to afford some decent clothes and proceeds to prove herself a very competent con artist. Her first accomplice is taxi driver Sterling Holloway. Then she meets gangster Danny Jones (Chester Morris) and gets involved in progressively more elaborate and lucrative cons. Blondie is all business with Danny but he wants something more.

Joan Blondell lights up the screen in every movie she appears in and never more so than when she stars. She is pitiful, hard-bitten, and love-lorn as required by the plot. Very entertaining and recommended to Blondell fans.