Category Archives: 1941

The Sea Wolf
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Written by Robert Rosson from a novel by Jack London
1941/US
Warner Bros.
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

“I turned to the circle of brutal and malignant faces peering at me through the semi-darkness. A sudden and deep sympathy welled up in me. I remembered the Cockney’s way of putting it. How God must have hated them that they should be tortured so!”
― Jack London, The Sea-Wolf).

Curtiz made several iconic movies about life at sea. This is one.

This is an adaptation of the Jack London novel. The story begins in San Francisco. George Leach (John Garfield) and Ruth Brewster (Ida Lupino) are fugitives from justice. Humphrey van Weyden (Alexander Knox) is a writer and philosopher with a more mysterious reason to wander. These people wind up booking passage on a sealer “The Ghost” which is captained by the iron-willed and cruel “Wolf” Larson (Edward G. Robertson) . Leach and Brewter fall in love almost immediately.

The wanted trio try desperately to get off the ship but Wolf insists they will remain on board and the ship will not put into port until it returns to San Francisco. With Barry Fitzgerald as the ship’s cook and Gene Lockhart as its pathetic drunken doctor.

This is a solidly mounted production with a beautiful score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and atmospheric cinematography by Sol Polito. And what a cast! This was supposed to be some sort of Hitler analogy but I didn’t pick up on that.

The Little Foxes
Directed by William Wyler
Written by Lillian Hellman, additional scenes and dialogue by Arthur Kober, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell
1941/USA
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
Repeat viewing/Warner Home Video DVD

Regina Giddens: I was lonely when I was young. Not in the way people usually mean. I was lonely for all the things I wasn’t gonna get.

This is a great film that should be on everyone’s Movies I Should See Before I Die list.

The story takes place in the Deep South in the year 1900.  The Hubbards produced a litter of “little foxes”, always out for themselves.  Ben, the eldest brother, is the ring leader.  He has put together a deal with a Northern cotton mill owner to build a mill in his home town in exchange for $225,000, low wages, and abundant water provided courtesy of a bribe to the governor.  Younger brother Oscar is on board, too.  The brothers need $75,000 from their sister Regina’s husband Horace Giddens (Herbert Marshall).  Regina (Bette Davis) is perhaps the most ruthless of the bunch.  She bargains for a 40% share to be taken from Oscar’s share on the understanding that his son, the shiftless Leo (Dan Duryea), will marry their daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright).

The catch is that Regina must convince her emotionally estranged husband to invest his money and he is in a Baltimore hospital recovering from a heart attack.  She knows his weak spot and sends Alexandra to fetch him home.

Horace returns home tired and ill, unable to exert himself enough to walk.  He has no appetite whatsoever for the investment.  But the siblings all have their own wicked ways of getting what they want. With Patricia Collinge in a heartbreaking performance as Oscar’s browbeaten, gentle wife Birdie and Richard Carlson as Alexandra’s free-thinking sweetheart David.

Wyler does such a fabulous job that one would never guess the film’s stage origins.  I just love the natural but intricate way he blocks groups of people.  The film looks splendid, too, amply deserving all those Oscar nominations.  If there had been a Best Costume Design award in 1941, this film would have been a shoe-in.

But it is the acting that is the true glory of the film.  I haven’t seen all of Bette Davis’s films yet but I am confident that she was never better than in this one.  She is like a harder, older version of Jezebel who married the Henry Fonda character and set about making his life miserable.  All the other actors rise to match her fire.

The Little Foxes was nominated for nine Academy Awards: Best Picture; Best Director; Best Actress; Best Supporting Actress (Collinge); Best Supporting Actress (Wright); Best Writing, Screenplay; Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black and White; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture (Meredith Wilson) .

Trailer – cinematography by Gregg Toland

Ball of Fire 
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett from an original story by Wilder and Thomas Monroe
1941/USA
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
Repeat viewing/Warner Home Video DVD

[box] Professor Bertram Potts: Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.[/box]

I love this film.  Started smiling when I watched the trailer and didn’t stop until it was over.

The inventor of the electric toaster was miffed at his omission from the Encyclopedia Britannica so left a small fortune to a group of professors to compile a new and “improved” version.  One of the stipulations is that the professors be single.  The “leader” of the eight experts is linguist Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), who realizes he is not up with the times on American slang.  He hits the streets to learn how American English is spoken in 1941 and to put together a “round table” on the subject.  One of his star finds is nightclub entertainer Katherine “Sugarpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck).

It so happens that her gangster boyfriend Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) has been picked up for murder and the police are looking for her.  She parlays Pott’s invitation to participate in the round table into a place to take cover for a few days.  All the old professors are gaga for her and Potts falls in love.  But Joe has decided that the best way to deal with his problem is to marry her so she cannot testify against him … With Oskar Homolka, Henry Travers, S.Z. Sakall, and Leonid Kinsky as a few of the professors and Dan Duryea as Duke Pastrami, Joe’s henchman.

Based loosely on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, Wilder and Brackett’s screenplay is a hoot.  Stanwyck and Cooper carry over their great chemistry from Meet John Doe and the cast of sterling character actors is superb.  This is just a whole lot of fun and quite romantic to boot.  Hawks keeps the zingers flying.

Ball of Fire was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Actress; Best Writing, Original Story; Best Sound, Recording and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture (Alfred Newman).

Trailer – cinematography by Gregg Toland

Charley’s Aunt
Directed by Archie Mayo
Written by George Seaton from a play by Brandon Thomas
1941/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing?/Netflix rental

[box] Babbs Babberley: I’m Charley’s nut from Brazil where the aunts come from.[/box]

Jack Benny’s English accent is ludicrous but that doesn’t stop him from being funny in this take on the old stage play.

The setting is 19th Century Oxford.  Charley Wickham and Jack Chesney are in love and need a chaperon for meeting their beloveds.  They had been counting on Charley’s aunt Donna Lucia from Brazil to do this duty.  When Lucia doesn’t show up, they blackmail Babbs Babberly (Benny), who already has the clothes from his role in a campus play, to take over.  Jack’s father Sir Francis (Laird Cregar) is broke and starts courting the “lady”, who is said to be worth millions.  Old Stephen Spettigue (Edmund Gwenn) isn’t far behind. Finally a client of Babbs’s father (Kay Francis) appears, and it looks like the jig is up.  With Anne Baxter as one of the young ladies.

This isn’t hilarious or anything but it is amusing and a pleasant way to spend 80 minutes. Jack Benny does quite well at a role that is outside his general miserly persona.

Promo – Jack Benny talking about Charley’s Aunt with Tyrone Power and Randolph Scott, who briefly plug their parts in A Yank in the RAF and Belle Starr

Rage in Heaven
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke
Written by Christopher Isherwood and Robert Thoeren from a novel by James Hilton
1941/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Amazon Instant Video

Title card: “Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned.” – Milton

Rage in Heaven is kind of a mess, but an interesting one.

The story begins in Paris where psychiatrist Dr. Rameau (Oscar Homolka) has called the British Consul into his asylum to help learn the identity of a paranoiac patient known as “Ward Andrews”.  By the time Rameau can introduce his patient, he has escaped.

Segue to London, where Ward Andrews is being paged at his hotel.  The phone is delivered to Ward Andrews (George Sanders).  Having heard the page, his friend Philip Monrell (Robert Montgomery) goes to him. Coincidentally, both have just returned from Paris.  Andrews has a couple of days before starting a job in Scotland and Philip invites him up to his family’s country estate.  There they meet Philip’s mother’s new companion the lovely Stella (Ingrid Bergman).  Both men promptly fall in love with her but Philip pushes her toward Ward.  However, it is Philip Stella loves and they marry shortly after Ward’s departure.

It is not long before we learn that Philip has serious problems.  He admits that he posed as Ward in Paris to feel more confident.  Despite Stella’s evident loyalty and love, he has also become convinced that she actually loves Ward.  He invites Ward back to their home and gives him a job.  After that, he repeatedly concocts ever more devious “tests” of Stella’s devotion.  In his mind, she fails every one of them and he begins to plot an elaborate revenge.

One of the reasons I watched this was because it was billed as a film noir in Keaney’s Film Noir Guide.  I think that’s stretching a point – the film is strictly a Freudian melodrama with a Gothic slant.  It went through three directors before being finished by Woody Van Dyke while he was on a 14-day leave from the Marines and the pacing suffers.  The first part drags a bit and the third act is badly rushed.

Still, I thought all the principals were good, though Bergman is still finding her way as an actress.  It is always nice seeing George Sanders play outside his cynical “type” as the decent friend of the family.  I don’t know how accurate the psychology was but I thought Philip’s machinations were pretty scary.

Re-release trailer