Category Archives: 1943

The Constant Nymph
Directed by Edmund Goulding
Written by Kathryn Scola from a novel and play by Margaret Kennedy and Basil Dean
1943/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Amazon Instant Video

[box] “Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it’s more like love’s shady second cousin who’s always borrowing money and can’t hold down a job.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage[/box]

Despite Joan Fontaine’s excellent performance, the overwrought melodrama lost me by the end.

The premier of the last opus of composer Lewis Dodd (Charles Boyer) was a big flop.  It seems critics just don’t appreciate his dissonance.  He is only really happy in the home of oft-married fellow composer Albert Sanger.  Albert informs Lewis that he will not be great until he has been able to cry.  Albert’s fourteen-year-old daughter Tessa (Joan Fontaine) inspires Albert to write a piece with melody and even provides the words.  The ethereal girl is also madly in love with the composer.

When Tessa’s father dies, Albert calls on her immensely wealthy Uncle Charles (Charles Coburn) to come and rescue Tessa and the other children from London.  During the uncle’s visit, Albert falls in love with Charles’s daughter Florence (Alexis Smith). After they marry, Florence can’t wait to pack the children off to boarding school.

Some time passes and Albert and Florence are constantly bickering.  He refuses to live up to her high-society expectations.  The free-spirited girls run away from boarding school and show up at the house.  Charles is delighted to see them but Florence is intensely jealous of Tessa, with whom Charles clearly has a special bond.  Finally, Charles realizes that this bond is romantic love for his muse.  Will he and Tessa find happiness?  Not while the Hayes Code is in effect.  With Peter Lorre and Dame May Whitty as friends of the family.

I’m just not crazy about the whole premise that if we have an adult playing a young teenager it is some how OK to explore these March-September romances.  Joan Fontaine gives the part just the right other-worldly quality to make this work, however.  Her Tessa’s fundamental innocence keeps the ick factor down to a minimum.  The biggest problem I have with the film is Alexis Smith’s overacting.  She ramps up the jealousy and drama up past the point of endurance.  Her self-realization is unbelievable as well.  I saw the ending coming.

Joan Fontaine was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Constant Nymph.

Trailer

Princess O’Rourke
Directed by Norman Krasna
Written by Norman Krasna
1943/USA
Warner Bros
First viewing/Warner Archive DVD

[box] Eddie O’Rourke: [the princess is asleep in his arms] Boy, are you lucky I was raised right. Or was I? Yeah, I guess I was.[/box]

Princess O’Rourke is an entertaining light romantic comedy.

Princess Maria (Oliva De Havilland) is a member of the royal family of an unnamed European country, now in exile due to Nazi occupation.  The monarch is in London but Maria has taken up quarters in New York.  The fondest desire of her uncle Holman (Charles Coburn) is to marry her off so she can produce lots of male heirs.  But Maria is holding out for love or at least attraction.

Holman sends her off on a trip to San Francisco under the pseudonym “Mary Williams”in hopes that the rest will do her good.  She is afraid of flying and is told to take a sleeping pill to make the hours pass by.  She gets into bed in her private berth (!) on the commercial flight but still can’t sleep.  Various attendants pass out sleeping pills like candy (!), each not knowing the total. The plane is unable to take off because of weather but Maria is too zonked out to move without help.  So pilot Eddie O’Rourke (Robert Cummings) takes pity on her and puts her up at his place. When she comes to, she tells him she is a political refugee.  His heart goes out to her and before we know it he falls in love.  The fact that he is about to be inducted into the Air Force as a combat pilot hurries things along.  Maria loves him too but knows an alliance could never be.

When Holman finds out that Eddie comes from a family of nine sons, he is not exactly opposed to the match.  But could Eddie ever resign himself to the job of Prince Consort? With Jack Carson, fine as usual as Eddie’s co-pilot and buddy and Jane Wyman as his wife.

This has some obvious parallels to Roman Holiday (1953) and I must say that De Havilland gives Audrey Hepburn a run for her money in charm and allure.  She is very funny here. There’s a lot of silliness as well but, within the fairy tale world Krasna has created, it seems delicious rather than ridiculous.  If you like this kind of thing, go for it.

Princess O’Rourke won the Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay.

Clip – Olivia De Havilland and Charles Coburn

The Human Comedy
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by Howard Eastabrook from the story by William Saroyan
1943/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Amazon Instant Video

Mr. Macauley: I am Matthew Macauley. I have been dead for two years. So much of me is still living that I know now the end is only the beginning. As I look down on my homeland of Ithaca, California, with its cactus, vineyards and orchards, I see that so much of me is still living there – in the places I’ve been, in the fields and streets and church and most of all in my home, where my hopes, my dreams, my ambitions still live in the daily life of my loved ones.

MGM’s faith-based, patriotic take on small-town America during World War II was not for me.

The people of Icatha, California are the kind that burst out into hymns at random intervals just to cheer themselves up.  The story is narrated from the grave by the deceased father (Ray Collins) who watches over one such family.  Homer McCauley (Mickey Rooney) is the man of the house since his father died and elder brother Marcus (Van Johnson) went off to the army.  He supports his mother (Faye Bainter), sister (Donna Reed) and little brother Ulysses by delivering telegrams.  Mrs. McCauley is handy with poetic wisdom and calls to faith at all times.  She plays the harp.

Homer idolizes his boss at the office (James Craig) and befriends the kindly old drunkard telegraph operator (Frank Morgan).  Homer witnesses much heartache and happiness delivering telegrams.

Marcus befriends fellow-soldier Tobey, an orphan.  He makes Icatha and his family sound so appealing that Tobey decides to adopt them as his own.  The story continues on, mixing triumph and tragedy.  With Robert Mitchum in a very early uncredited role as a soldier.

There is nothing really wrong with this Oscar-nominated picture.  It just has not aged at all well.  MGM decided to do Our Town one better and this was the result.  It is a motherhood and apple pie kind of movie and probably resonated with war-time audiences, although I suspect that it was old-fashioned even at the time.  Rooney does quite well. We have seen this performance before, but he plays it with some subtlety and does not succumb to the mugging which characterizes his work in comedies.

I get that this is a fable and idealized version of a small-town (witness all the references to The Odyssey) but it was all much too much for me.

William Saroyan won the Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story.  The Human Comedy was also nominated in the following categories:  Best Picture; Best Actor (Rooney); Best Director; and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (Harry Stradling, Jr.)

Collection of scenes featuring the uncredited Robert Mitchum as a GI.

Stage Door Canteen
Directed by Frank Borzage
Written by Delmer Daves
1943/USA
Sol Lesser Productions
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious. — Marcus Aurelius [/box]

This is a review of the kind of acts that played, or might have played, at the Stage Door Canteen operated by the leading lights of the Broadway theater in New York during World War II.  It is an enjoyable way to see many well-known theatrical stars that are rarely glimpsed in movies of the period, as well as some big Hollywood stars with theatrical roots.

Yes, there is a bit of a plot.  A group of soldiers who are a short leave in New York before shipping out to the front find out there is free food at the Stage Door Canteen.  The girls there ask them to dance.  A youngster gets his first kiss and one of the other men falls in love with a girl who thought she was volunteering so she could meet a producer and get work.  It’s actually not too badly handled.

However, what we are really here for is the fantastic cast, some doing cameos and some doing specialty numbers.  Among those I had never seen elsewhere on film were Katherine Cornell, Lynn Fontaine, Gracie Fields, and Gypsy Rose Lee (doing a clean version of her burlesque act).  We also get some boffo numbers by Benny Goodman, Ethel Waters with the Count Basie Band, Ray Bolger, Ethel Merman, Yehudi Mehunin and more.  Katharine Hepburn, Merle Oberon, and Paul Muni have speaking parts and Harpo Marx does his thing.  There are many more I don’t have space for.

I liked this a whole lot for what it was.  It will all depend on how much you enjoy the acts.  It’s hard to believe anybody with an open mind wouldn’t find at least something to love here.  I hadn’t heard the Oscar-nominated song before and it and its melody had me misting up as it appeared and reappeared various times.

James V. Monaco and Al Dubin were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song for “We Mustn’t Say Goodbye.  Freddie Rich was nominated for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

Clip – Peggy Lee singing “Why Don’t You Do Right” with Benny Goodman and His Orchestra. – the picture quality isn’t much, but the audio, Wow!

The Gang’s All Here
Directed by Busby Berkeley
Written by Walter Bullock, Story by Nancy Wintner et al
1943/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] I wonder why does ev’rybody look at me/ And then begin to talk about a Christmas tree?/ I hope that means that ev’ryone is glad to see/ The lady in the tutti-frutti hat. — “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat”, lyrics by Leo Robin[/box]

Forget the plot, the production numbers in this film transcend high camp and move into the realm of the psychedelic!

Alice Faye plays Edie, a chorus girl in the world’s most elaborate nightclub show starring Carmen Miranda.  Andy Mason (James Ellison), son of millionaire Andrew Mason (Eugene Pallette) spots Edie in the line and chats her up at a canteen for servicemen next door to the club, where Benny Goodman and his Orchestra entertain.  They fall in love on the Staten Island ferry that night.  After their kiss on her doorstep, she promises to write him every single day overseas.  Unbeknownst to her, he is expected to marry his childhood sweetheart, the daughter of the Mason’s stockbroker next-door neighbor Peyton Potter (Edward Everett Horton) and his wife (Charlotte Greenwood).

Andy covers himself in glory in his three months in the South Pacific.  The Masons and Potters plan a huge benefit for War Bonds  on the Potters’ palatial estate to welcome him home.  This will be provided by the cast of the nightclub’s next extravaganza, in which Edie is a headliner.  Numerous hijinx and heartbreaks follow.  But they are mostly there to provide a backdrop for the amazing finale.

After the series of Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musicals he helmed, Busby Berkeley is back in his most outrageous form for this one.  And he has glorious Technicolor on his side!  This really must be seen to be believed.  The girls, the costumes, the weirdness!  I had a hell of a good time. Recommended for its intended audience – you know who you are.

The Gang’s All Here was nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Color.

Clip – “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” – Enjoy!!!!

Lumiere d’ete
Directed by Jean Grémillion
Written by Pierre LaRoche and Jacques Prévert
1943/France
Films André Paulvé
First viewing/Hulu Plus

This love pentangle has some interesting social commentary between the lines.

The entire story is punctuated with blasting nearby for a new dam.  Michele has a long walk between the station and the mountain hotel where she is to rendezvous with her artist lover.  The aristocrat Patrice gives her a lift to the hotel.  The artist has not yet arrived and the hotel’s owner Cricri has lunch with her before she goes to her room to wait for him.  It develops that Michele is madly in love with her artist and Cricri is passionate for Patrice, for whom she moved to the country,.

In a case of mistaken identies, a young dam worker named Julien is sent up to Michele’s room. Before she is fully awake, she kisses him, thinking him to be her lover.  This one kiss is all it takes to hook Julien.  Michele must wait in the hotel for several days and Patrice falls for her too, making Cricri almost pathetically jealous.

When Roland (Pierre Brasseur – Children of Paradise), Michele’s artist, finally shows up, he proves to be much different than we could have imagined.  In fact, he is apparently in the last stages of alcoholism and has a really wicked tongue to boot.  He does everything in his power to hurt her, partly to get her to drop him.

Patrice, seeing an opportunity, lures the Roland to his chateau with Christine in tow.  He claims to be helping Roland to dry out but is actually practically forcing liquor upon him.  Cricri sends Julien to try to extricate Michele from the situation.  Julien fails and so does a visit from Cricri.  When Patrice finally makes his intentions clear, Michele decides to leave for Paris with a loan from CriCri.

Patrice’s last gambit is throwing a lavish costume party, a la The Rules of the Game.  There the lovers play a kind of romantic game of musical chairs, with tragic consequences to almost everybody concerned.

This is a beautifully staged film.  I particularly liked the dam construction sequences but it’s all handsome.  I think the background of explosions, so reminiscent of war time bombing, is no accident nor is the essential depravity of the monied characters.  The acting is all wonderful.  Brasseur might seem over the top if he were not so damn good.  The score and sound effects contribute a lot.

Clip – work on the dam