The Raven
Directed by Lou Landers
David Boehm “based on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe”
1935/US
Universal Pictures
IMDb page
First viewing/Criterion Channel

Dr. Richard Vollin: Torture waiting… waiting. It will be sweet, Judge Thatcher!

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff team up for an enjoyable entry in the Universal horror pictures of this era.

Lugosi plays evil doctor Richard Vollin who is obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe, torture and death. Edmund Bateman (Karloff) who doesn’t appear until midway through, is a murderer who wants Vollin to give him a new face but becomes his unwilling dupe. When Lugosi becomes obsessed with a judge’s young daughter, things get really complicated.

Universal followed its successful pairing of Lugosi and Karloff in The Black Cat (1934) with this film. Karloff is very good as always and Lugosi hams it up until his character is scarier than Dracula’s. Always fun to see these two icons play off each other.

Like in Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) this film doesn’t have anything to do with Poe’s poem other than that a character recites a stanza or two once in awhile. This version with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre is also a lot of fun.

Fan trailer

The Gay Deception
Directed by William Wyler
Written by Stephen Morehouse Avery and Don Hartman
1935/US
Fox Film Corporation
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Sandro: All right, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I promise to change everything about myself, if you’ll promise to stay exactly as you are.

William Wyler directs a frothy romantic comedy.  He really could do anything.

Mirabel (Frances Dee), a humble clerk, wins $5,000 in the lottery. Instead of taking the sound financial advice cautioning her to make her money last, Mirabel decides to splurge on a luxurious month in New York City. Sandro (Francis Lederer) is a bellboy at the fancy hotel where she is staying. He keeps hanging around making suggestions on improving her taste in hats and food. She resents this mightily.

Mirabe; rapidly finds out that her wealth does not impress the snobs in the society crowd she aspires to join. She buys tickets to a grand charity ball and then is roundly snubbed by the organizers. It is Sandro to the rescue. He steals the proper clothes and poses as a prince. I won’t go farther. With Alan Mowbray and Benita Hume as snobs and Akim Tamiroff as a kind of shady government official.

This is a well-made romcom. It’s leads are charming. Oh, how, I envy Francis Dee. She is beautiful, funny, and had the good fortune to be married to my heartthrob Joel McCrea for 57 years.

Toni
Directed by Jean Renoir
Written by Jean Renoir from material compiled by Jacques Levert
1935/France
Les Films Marcel Pagnol
IMDb page
First viewing/Criterion Channel

Narrator: (First lines)The action takes place in the south of France, a Latin region where, destroying the spirit of Babel, nature knows full well how to achieve the fusion of the races.

This is a well-made and acted film but I expected something more from Renoir.

As the film begins we see immigrants from many European nations arriving in France to seek work. Our hero is Antonio “Toni” Canova an Italian. He seeks lodging at a boarding house and soon is having an affair with its French proprietress Marie. He gets work in the local rock quarry. Time passes and Toni tires of the extremely jealous and possessive Marie. He has fallen in love with Josefa who lives with her Spanish peasant father and her scheming cousin. Finally, Toni decides to ask Josefa to marry him. Her father approves. But Toni’s horrible foreman gets in first. The father thinks a marriage with Albert will be financially advantageous. But as time passes it becomes clear that the only advantage will be to Albert. None of this is going to end well. As the film ends, another large group of foreigners enters France looking for work.

Wow, I had not expected anything so tragic! Everything about the film making and cinematography is great. I thought it would be another exploration of the brotherhood of workers. Given the number of truly evil people in this I came out only with the message that life sucks. It was one Renoir that I had never seen before and for that alone it was worth watching.

Clip – Spoiler

Romance in Manhattan
Directed by Stephen Roberts
Written by Jane Murfin and Edward Kaufman from a story by Norman Krasna and Don Hartman
1935/US
RKO Radio Pictures
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Karel Novak: Everybody looks so happy here. They all smile and look so rich and busy.
Sylvia Dennis: We all try look rich and busy whether we are or not.

I enjoyed this cute, if slight, romantic comedy.

Karel Novak (Francis Lederer) has saved for years in his native Czechlosavakia for the steamship fare and $50 in cash necessary to immigrate to the United States. When he arrives he finds out that the ready cash requirement has increased to $200 and he is deported. He jumps ship as it is leaving port and goes out to find work. Eventually he becomes a taxi driver. He meets and falls in love with Ginger Rogers, a chorus girl who is taking care of her younger brother.

Can their love withstand a taxi strike, Ginger’s unemployment, threats to take the brother to an orphanage, and threats to deport Francis? You only get one guess.

I have nothing more to say than that this an entertaining comedy with very appealing leads.

Dangerous
Directed by Alfred E. Green
Written by Laird Doyle
1935/US
Warner Bros.
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Joyce Heath: You with your fat little soul and your smug face – picking your way so cautiously through a pastel existence.

Don Bellows (Franchot Tone) is a successful young architect and engaged to marry Gail Armitage (Margaret Lindsay). One day, his crowd spots a derelict-looking woman walking through a hotel lobby.  She will not admit she is the formerly famous Broadway actress Joyce Heath (Bette Davis). Don and his friends discuss how wonderful she used to be. Franchot says one performance of hers so moved him that he decided to go into the creative arts.

Shortly thereafter, Dond  spots Bette getting blotto in a dive. He buys her several drinks and after she passes out he takes her home with him. Bette is far from easy to get along with but eventually Franchot dumps Margaret and he and Bette become lovers.  With A Don’s help she is given a second chance at Broadway stardom but secret from Bette’s past stands throws a spanner in the works.

Davis won her first Oscar for her performance here. Bette did not think she deserved the award which she believed was payback for not even being nominated for her star-making turn in Of Human Bondage (1934). Personally, I can’t see any other reason for the win. The script didn’t help her any.

Ah, Wilderness!
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from the play by Eugene O’Neill
1935/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime renta

Richard ‘Dick’ Miller: How are you going to punish me, Pa?
Nat: Oh, well, I… thought of telling you you couldn’t go to Yale.
Richard ‘Dick’ Miller: But, gee, that’s great! Well, then I can get a job and marry Muriel. That’s no punishment, Pa!
Nat: Well, then you’ll go to Yale and stay there until you graduate.

I was charmed by this coming-of-age  comedy and the cast really cannot be beat.

It’s an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s comedy about coming of age circa 1906. Eric Linden plays O’Neill’s alter ego Richard Miller who is just about to graduate high school and head off to Yale. He’s the kind of know-it-all show-off idealist and romantic that intelligent boys often are. He is also madly in love with Muriel MacComber (Cecilia Parker) who he has not even convinced to kiss him.  He tries to court her with love poems by Swinburne and Omar Kayam and scandalizes her parents.

When Muriel sends Richard a dear John letter, he morosely agrees to a double date with a couple of shady ladies during which he gets quite drunk.  But his large loving family have givend him a grounding that will not let him get too out of hand.

There are some memorable comic scenes – the graduation ceremony, the return of prodigal uncle Sid and his antics at the 4th of July dinner; and a bunch of little boys with big firecrackers.

The rest of the fabulous cast includes: Lionel Barrymore as the newspaper editior father; Spring Byington as the mother; Wallace Beery as Lionel’s ne’er-do-well drunken brother (hilarious), Aline MacMahon as Spring’s sister and Wallace’s long-suffering sweetheart and and Mickey Rooney as the mischievous youngest son.

I thought this was a delight. Recommended.

Anna Karenina
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by Clemence Dance and Salka Viertel from the novel by Lev Tolstoy
1935/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

“If you love me as you say you do,’ she whispered, ‘make it so that I am at peace.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This is my favorite novel.  No film could match the images in my mind or do it justice, IMO.

Anna (Greta Garbo) is married to the much-older Count Alexis Karenin (Basil Rathbone), a pedantic bureaucrat.  They have a little son Sergei (Freddie Bartholomew) who is the light of Anna’s life.  Anna’s brother Stepan has been caught in an affair by his wife Dolly.  Anna travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow to make peace.  She shares a carriage on the train with the mother of Count Alexis Vronsky (Fredric March), a young soldier who has been courting Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty. (Maureen O’Sullivan).

Anna is successful in reconciling her brother and sister-in-law.  She goes to a ball where Kitty is expecting a proposal from Vronsky .  But Vronsky wants only to dance with Anna and the die is cast.  He follows her to St. Petersburg.  Kitty, who had the same night rejected a proposal from Count Levin, grows ill from humiliation and heartbreak. The Kitty-Levin story, which makes up about half of the novel and provides a needed counterpoint to the Anna-Vronsky affair, is dropped almost entirely by the movie at this point.

The lovers cannot resist temptation.  Karenin is remarkably tolerant, seeking only to avoid scandal.  But Anna reveals the depth of her feelings in public when Vronsky is thrown from his horse and Karenin seeks a divorce.  In revenge, he also asks for sole custody of the son.  Although extramarital affairs are common in St. Petersburg high society, they are strictly recreational.  By openly defying the rules, Anna becomes an outcast.  Things go downhill from there.  Then Vronsky announces that he is going to rejoin his regiment to fight the Turks, building to the well-known climax of the novel which I will not reveal here.

The chemistry between Garbo and March isn’t great and Garbo’s acting seems particularly like posing here. Of all the adaptations I have seen, I would suggest Anna Karenina (1948) with Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson, and Kieron Moore. The Russian adaptation
Anna Karenina (1967) is lavish but I found it lackluster. This one has all those great MGM production values and Garbo would make any man lose his heart.

The Whole Town’s Talking
Directed by John Ford
Written by Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin from a story by W.R. Burnett
1935/US
Columbia Pictures
IMDb Page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Arthur Ferguson Jones: My name isn’t Jones it’s Mannion. I mean it isn’t Jannion it’s Mones. Oh, I don’t know. It’s Jones! Jones, that’s what it is!

I can’t believe I waited to see one of Edward G. Robinson’s very best performances for so long.  And the rest of the movie is wonderful as well.

Robinson plays Arthur Ferguson Jones, a meek, humble clerk at an accounting firm. In his off time, he writes love poetry to his secret crush, sassy co-worker Wilhelmina Clark (Jean Arthur). He has not been late to work once in the entire eight years he has worked for the firm.

One fateful morning his alarm clock fails him. Thus begins a very bad day. Public Enemy No. 1 “Killer” Mannion (also Robinson) escapes from jail after taking the lives of a couple of guards. A man hunt is launched and since Jones so closely resembles the killer, he is picked up and grilled to within an inch of his life despite his protests. Wilhelmina, whom he was lunching with at the time of his capture, is also grilled. When it is finally established that Jones’s fingerprints do not match Mannion’s, the cops give him a letter he can show to avoid being picked up again. When the Killer finds out, he figures that Jones’s pass can come in handy. He also starts hiding out in Jones’s apartment and otherwise terrorizing him.

Edward G. Robinson is so wonderful in this film. He gives each character a special flair and even plays Jones pretending to be Mannion at one point. His Mannion is meaner than even his Little Caesar (1931) and his Jones more humble than his character in Scarlet Street (1945). The script is sharp. And while this is not Ford at his auteur best, the story is beautifully told. Some of the scenes in which Robinson converses with himself are unbelievably seamless. It’s not as serious as I make it sound. Sort of a combo between a romcom and a gangster movie, with several inside pokes at each genre. Warmly recommended.

Fan Trailer

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This review catches me up with the movies I have watched.  I intend to mix in some movies I have not seen from later years in the 30’s with my pre-Code viewing until I start up where I left off in 1978 in a month or so.