Category Archives: 1935

Toby Walker: Well dog my cats!

This well-made romantic biopic exceeded my expectations.   Annie Oakley (Barbara Stanwyck) hunts quail to support her family.  She is famous for being able to kill them with one shot to the head.  When the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show hires world champion sharpshooter Toby Walker (Preston Foster), Toby bets he can beat any comer.  Hotel management, which has been buying Annie’s quail, calls on Annie to challenge him. Buffalo Bill talent scout Jeff Hogarth (Melvyn Douglas) is impressed with Annie’s shooting  and with Annie and hires her for the show.   Annie and Toby become close but an accident enables Jeff to part them.  The movie also features several sequences of acts from the show.  With Moroni Olsen as Buffalo Bill and Chief Thunderbird as Sitting Bull.

The more movies I see that are directed by George Stevens the more taken with him I am.  He seems to bring something to all his films that makes me care about the characters.  Barbara Stanwyck’s Annie is far softer and more feminine than the character portrayed in Annie Get Your Gun but still quite believable as a sharpshooter.  There is a nice helping of humor thrown in with the romance.

Trailer

 Puck: Lord, what fools these mortals be!

This big-screen adaptation of the popular Shakespearean comedy has its plusses and minuses.  The story takes place on the eve of the marriage of the Duke of Athens to the Queen of the Amazons.  Four young lovers congregate in a wood on the same night some rustics are rehearsing for a performance at the wedding feast.  The king and queen of the fairies and their minions amuse themselves by playing tricks on the mortals and each other.  With an all-star cast, including Olivia de Havilland in her stage debut as Hermia, Dick Powell as Lysander, James Cagney as Bottom, Joe E. Brown as Flute, Mickey Rooney as Puck, and Anita Louise as Titania, Queen of the Fairies.

This film was not a box-office success and I can see why.  It takes some getting used to.   The production is absolutely beautiful and brilliantly conveys the enchanted world of the fairies.  The film is gloriously scored to Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play, as orchestrated by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.   The cinematography by Hal Mohr and art direction by Anton Grot are spectacular.

In my opinion, the performances are much less successful.  This film was based on a Max Reinhardt production at the Hollywood Bowl and I attribute some of the truly weird acting choices to Reinhardt.  For example, the fairy characters, and especially Puck, shriek, laugh, and make strange noises to convey their other-worldliness.   It is very odd.  Mickey Rooney’s performance was downright irritating, almost embarrassing, for me.  Cagney and the other rustics are pretty good.  Of the lovers, de Havilland is the standout.

The film won Oscars for editing and cinematography.  Hal Mohr had not been nominated and was the first and only recipient to win an award based on a write-in vote.  It was also nominated for Best Picture.

General Release Trailer

Walker: Looks like this old house ain’t gonna be lonesome no more.

This Shirley Temple film is memorable for a couple of fantastic tap dance sequences with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and a choral number at an African-American baptism.

It is 1870’s Kentucky.  When Elizabeth Lloyd elopes with a Northerner, her proud rebel father (Lionel Barrymore), Colonel Lloyd, disowns her.  Six years later Elizabeth and her husband Jack Sherman go out West to make their fortune and their daughter Lloyd (Shirley Temple) Sherman is made an honorary colonel by an adoring outpost regiment.  Mother and daughter return to Kentucky while father searches for a property to invest in.  Although  the Colonel is still not speaking to his daughter, little Lloyd rapidly wins the old man’s heart.  Can she bring her mother and grandfather together?  With Bill Robinson as Walker, the Colonel’s servant, and Hattie McDaniel as Mom Beck, Elizabeth’s nursemaid and cook.

The Colonel is portrayed as a cranky, angry old man and he frequently denigrates Walker, who fortunately responds with perfect dignity.  The general portrayal of African-Americans in the film is of its time.  That said, Hattie McDaniel and especially Bill Robinson are the standouts in the picture, which is worth seeing just to see Robinson dance.  The film ends with a brief Technicolor sequence.

Shirley and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tap up the stairs