Category Archives: 1938

Pygmalion
Directed by Anthony Asquith
Written by George Bernard Shaw
1938/UK
Gabriel Pascal Productions
Repeat viewing

[box] Prof. Henry Higgins: Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba![/box]

This may be the best adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play.  I love this film!

Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) bets that he can pass Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) off as a duchess with six months of training in phonetics. With Wilfred Larson as Alfred P. Doolittle and Esme Percy as Count Aristid Kaparthy.

Leslie Howard makes a splendid Henry Higgins but the real revelation is Wendy Hiller in her second film.  With Hiller, Eliza is keeping her Cockney soul under check at all times whereas Audrey Hepburn always seems to me as a born princess struggling to escape her flower girl disguise.  The other performances are of a very high standard.  Asquith does an excellent job of opening up the story so it does not seem unnecessarily stagey.  I had a smile on my face throughout.  Very warmly recommended.

George Bernard Shaw and the adaptors of his play won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, making Shaw the only Nobel Prize winner to also have an Oscar.  Shaw said “It’s an insult for them to offer me any honour, as if they had never heard of me before – and it’s very likely they never have. They might as well send some honour to George for being King of England.”  Pygmalion also received nominations in the categories of Best Picture, Best Actor (Howard) and Best Actress (Hiller).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EADz07k_wXU

“Trailer” – Professor Higgins makes Eliza an offer she can’t refuse

Vivacious Lady
Directed by George Stevens
Written by P.J. Wolfson and Ernest Pagano based on a story by I.A.R. Wylie
1938/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing

[box] Helen: I’m going to give you a piece of my mind…

Francey: Oh, I couldn’t take the last piece![/box]

If it weren’t for the preposterous story, this could have been one of the most delightful romantic comedies of the 1930’s.  It has everything else going for it.

Professor Peter Morgan (James Stewart) travels to New York to bring his cousin Keith back to the university town they live in.  He finds Keith waiting in the nightclub for a girl he lusts after to come out.  Peter waits while Keith gets his coat and, when he spots nightclub singer Francey (Ginger Rogers), it is love at first sight.  Sans Keith, he takes Francey on the town and they are married by the time the train leaves the next day.

Peter plans to introduce Francey to his parents right away but his father, the stuffy president of the university (Charles Coburn), meets them at the station with Peter’s fiancée in tow.  Dad assumes Francey is Keith’s girl and immediately labels her a hussy. For various reasons – his mother (Beulah Bondi) has a weak heart, Francey slugs the father accidentally during a cat fight with the fiancée – Peter delays revealing his marriage.

Ginger Rogers is adorable and Jimmy Stewart is almost sexy in this movie.  My favorite from the film was Beulah Bondi, who is very funny as the seemingly frail mother with a wicked streak.  This was one of Charles Coburn’s earliest films after a very successful stage career and he is good as always.  As always, George Stevens gets the best out of his actors and the story.  Even the dialogue has its high points.  But it is one of the stories that would have been over in a minute if anyone acted like an ordinary person and my eye-rolling got in the way a bit.

Vivacious Lady was nominated for Oscars for its cinematography and sound recording.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG4IRC8MgiA

Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-I7DkDuiu0

Teaching Beulah Bondi “The Big Apple” — love this!

Boys Town
Directed by Norman Taurog
Written by John Meehan and Dore Shary from a story by Shary and Eleanore Griffin
1938/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Repeat viewing

[box] Father Edward J. Flanagan: I know that a mother can take a whip to the toughest boy in the world, and he forgets it because he knows that she loves him.[/box]

More evidence of what a great screen actor Spencer Tracy was.

This is an MGM dramatization of the life and work of Father Flanagan, the priest who founded Boys Town, a community for underprivileged and delinquent boys in Nebraska.

Flanagan (Tracy) receives his calling to help boys when he counsels a convict just before his execution and learns of his childhood as a homeless orphan on the city streets.  The priest proves to be a mastermind at raising money from reluctant donors and goes from a small home for boys in the city to a large farm in the country.  There the boys have their own town government with a youth mayor, council, and court.   These prove to be at least as stringent as the priest would have been.

Flanagan faces his biggest challenge when a convict asks him to take charge of his younger brother, Whitey Moran (Mickey Rooney).  Whitey is cocky in the extreme and resists all efforts to civilize him.  Finally, Whitey’s behavior threatens to ruin Boys Town’s perfect record and turn the public and financiers against it.

The plot sounds a bit maudlin but Tracy invests Flanagan with so much humor and grace that the movie is irresistible.  To see him discourage the condemned man from taking a drink with just the slightest cock of his head was worth the price of admission to me. Tracy’s priest is light years away from Pat O’Brien’s pontificating prelate in Angels with Dirty Faces.  You can see why the boys would follow him anywhere.  This may also be Mickey Rooney’s best work.  It is too bad he did not do more drama in his youth.

One of my very earliest film-watching memories is sobbing near the end of this picture and my mother telling me that if I was going to get so upset I would have to stop watching movies.  Obviously, that didn’t happen!

Spencer Tracy won his second consecutive Best Actor Oscar for Boys Town and Griffin and Shary won an award for their original story.  The film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay.

Trailer (spoilers)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Directed by Norman Taurog
Written by John V.A. Weaver based on the novel by Mark Twain
1938/USA
Selznick International Pictures
First viewing

[box] Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” ― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer[/box]

I had no idea what to expect from this and was very pleased with a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Twain’s novel.

Tom Sawyer (Tommy Kelly) is an imaginative scamp who lives in pre-Civil War Missouri with his perpetually exasperated Aunt Polly (May Robson) and his priggish half-brother Sid and sister Mary.  Tom gets into many scrapes with local pals Huckleberry Finn and Joe Harper.  Finally, he has a scary time lost in a cave with “girlfriend” Becky Thatcher (the fantastic Ann Gillis).  With Victor Jory as Injun Joe, Walter Brennan as Muff Porter, and Margaret Hamilton as Mrs. Harper.

I thought everybody was right on the money in capturing the characters I had envisioned when reading the book.  The kids were all great!  I wonder if Taurog, who had been a child actor, had a special gift for working with them.  The color isn’t anything to write home about but the screenwriters adapted the novel wonderfully.  Recommended.

Lyle R. Wheeler was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for his work on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  William Cameron Menzies designed the creepy cave.

Trailer