Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Tarzan Finds a Son!
Directed by Richard Thorpe
Written by Cyril Hume based on the characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
1939/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Jane: What’s the matter?

Tarzan: People![/box]

This is tolerable but a big step down from the previous film in the series, Tarzan and His Mate.

A plane mysteriously crashes in a special corner of the African jungle.  All aboard are killed but a baby, who is miraculously uninjured.  Cheeta finds the boy and takes him home to Tarzan and Jane.  At Tarzan’s suggestion, they name him Boy.  Several years later, an expedition arrives searching for the wreckage and any trace of the passengers.  It turns out Boy stood to inherit a large fortune.  They figure out the identity of Tarzan and Jane’s child quickly but most of the party stand to profit from Boy’s demise.  The rest of the story is a good guys v. bad guys adventure.

This is not terrible but it does lack a lot of the charm of the earlier film.  There are some nice jungle conveniences a la Gilligan’s Island.  Otherwise, it is a routine action film with elephants saving the day.

Trailer

Intermezzo: A Love Story
Directed by Gregory Ratoff
Written by George O’Neill, Gösta Stevens and Gustaf Molander
1939/USA
Selznick International Pictures
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Anita Hoffman: I have been an intermezzo in his life.[/box]

This little melodrama of adulterous love introduced the utterly radiant Ingrid Bergman to America.

Violin virtuoso Holger (Leslie Howard) comes home to his loving family after a world tour culminating in the retirement of his accompanist.  He soon meets brilliant and beautiful young pianist Anita (Ingrid Bergman) who is giving his eight-year-old daughter lessons. Holger is captivated first by Anita’s playing and then by her person and they fall in love.  Anita is plagued with moral scruples but cannot resist the attraction.

Well, one can immediately see why Bergman became a great big star!  She is fabulous. The movie is ok but why oh why do they always have to toss a child under a car to bring a man to his senses?

Clip – first encounter

Golden Boy
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian
Written by Lewis Meltzer, Daniel Taradash, Sara Y. Mason and Victor Heerman from a play by Clifford Odets
1939/USA
Columbia Pictures Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Joe Bonaparte: [Last Lines] Poppa, I’ve come home.[/box]

This is worth seeing if only for the very young William Holden and an amazing performance by Lee J. Cobb — oh, wait!  there’s Barbara Stanwyck too.

Joe Bonaparte (Holden) is the light of his father’s (Cobb) life.  Joe is a fine violinist and Poppa has bought him a rare Italian violin for his 21st birthday.  But Joe is sick of the ribbing he takes from the guys and anxious to make money.  It turns out that he is also a fabulous boxer.  He seeks out manager Tom Moody and Moody reluctantly substitutes Joe for an ailing fighter.  He wins the fight and Moody takes over his management.  But Joe still has ties to home and his music.  Moody sends out his girlfriend Lorna (Stanwyck) to seduce him back into training.  She is more successful than Moody intended, hooking Joe into the bargain.  When gangster Eddie Fuseli (Joseph Calleia) tries to buy Joe, Moody resists but Joe, thinking he has been spurned by Lorna, goes along for the opportunity for a championship fight.  Has Joe sold his soul into the bargain?

When you are dealing with a Clifford Odets screenplay you know you are in for some very literate dialogue and heaping helpings of social consciousness.  Other than that, this is a fairly predictable boxing movie.   But the acting pulls this above the ordinary.  Lee J. Cobb, only seven years older than Holden, absolutely disappears into the character of his just-off-the-boat Italian father.  It is truly wonderful to behold.  And then Holden is extraordinarily gorgeous with his mop of curly hair and Stanwyck is her very able self.  I enjoyed it.

Victor Young received an Academy Award nomination for his beautiful original score.

For TCM clip from movie go here:  http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/221247/Golden-Boy-Movie-Clip-You-Better-Than-That-.html

TCM Intro by Robert Osborne

Jesse James
Directed by Henry King
Written by Nunnally Johnson
1939/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Engineer: What you aimin’ to do, pardner?

Jesse Woodson James: I ain’t aimin’ to do nuthin’. I’m doin’ it. I’m holdin’ up this train.

Engineer: The whole train?[/box]

I didn’t know what to expect but I found this to be a solid and enjoyable western.

This is a highly fictionalized account of the criminal career of Jesse James (Tyrone Power) and his brother Frank (Henry Fonda).  As such it emphasizes the folk hero aspect of their exploits.  The story takes place in the aftermath of the Civil War.  Rapacious railroad companies have hired armed thugs to bilk farmers out of their land at unconscionable prices.  Jesse and Frank fight with the men who try to take their mother’s farm.  The railroad agents organize a posse to arrest the brothers for attempted murder and frighten the mother (Jane Darwell) into a premature death.

Many local men are in the same boat and Jesse and Frank easily organize a gang to take revenge by holding up trains.  The communities believe that this is simple justice and support the boys.  But as Jesse’s wife (Nancy Kelly) predicts, he soon descends into common criminality.  With Brian Donlevy as a particularly evil railroad man, Donald Meek as the railroad president, Randolph Scott as a local lawman, Henry Hull as Jesse’s father-in-law and crusading editor, and John Carradine as the coward Robert Ford.

This kept my interest throughout despite the seemingly obligatory love triangle sub-plot. This features one of Tyrone Powers’ better performances and all the character actors are first-rate.  It was interesting to see Henry Fonda be a robber after his more noble 1939 performances.  He steals all the scenes he is in.

Two horses were actually blindfolded and forced to go over a cliff during an escape scene. The incident led the American Humane Association to begin overseeing the use of animals in films and eventually to its certification: “No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture.”

Clips – Confronation between Frank and Jesse James – comparison of scenes between this film and The True Story of Jesse James (1957, dir. Nicholas Ray)

The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
Directed by H.C. Potter
Written by Richard Sherman, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Dorothy Yost
1939/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box]Opening credits: In a fabulous and beloved era, near enough to be warmly remembered, two bright and shining stars, VERNON and IRENE CASTLE, whirled across the horizon with the hearts of all who loved to dance. This is their story.[/box]

Given my lukewarm reaction to some of the later Astaire-Rogers films, I was very pleasantly surprised with this one.

This is a biopic on which Irene Castle was a consultant and a kind of tribute to her late husband Vernon.  At the start, Vernon Castle (Fred Astaire)  is a slapstick comedian on the vaudeville circuit.  He meets Irene (Ginger Rogers) when they both attempt to rescue the same stray dog from drowning.  Irene takes Vernon home to dry off and then “entertains”  him with a very bad comedy song of her own.  Vernon hightails it out of there as fast as possible, but not before revealing that he is a superb dancer.

When she sees Vernon on stage, Irene is appalled and tells him so.  That is enough to hook Vernon.  He starts rehearsing a ballroom dance act with Irene and they rapidly fall in love and marry.  But vaudeville producers believe that no one will pay to see a man dance with his wife.  With the help of manager Maggie Sutton (the wonderful Edna May Oliver) the Castles get work in Paris where they introduce Europe to American ragtime and become major pop culture icons.   Their married bliss is interrupted when the accentless British Vernon feels compelled to enlist in the Canadian Flying Corps at the outbreak of World War I.  Walter Brennan plays a sort of nanny and constant companion to Irene.

The story is sweet and sentimental, without the snappy dialogue usual to Astaire-Rogers films.  It is nonetheless absolutely charming. What hooked me, though, was the beautiful dancing.  The score is made up of old-fashioned tunes and Astaire and Rogers are just divine with this more sedate material.

This was Astaire and Rogers last film together at RKO.  They would not be paired again until ten years later in The Barkeleys of Broadway when Rogers stepped in to replace an ailing Judy Garland..

Clip – Fred and Ginger waltzing

Drums Along the Mohawk
Directed by John Ford
Written by Lamar Trotti and Sonya Levien based on the novel by Walter D. Edmonds
1939/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Films Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

Reverend Rosenkrantz: Any man failing to report to duty will be promptly hanged. Amen.

John Ford was on quite a roll in 1939.

During the Revolutionary War, Gil Martin (Henry Fonda) takes his bride Lana (Claudette Colbert) from her comfortable home in Albany to his farm in the wilderness in the Mohawk valley of Upstate New York. The couple struggles to survive amid attacks by Tories and their Indian allies.  After they are initially burned out of their homestead, they take shelter as the hired help of a gruff but kindly widow (Edna May Oliver).  The surrounding community is a comfort to both when Gil and Lena are separated in the fighting.  With John Carradine as a one-eyed Tory, Ward Bond as a fellow patriot, Arthur Shields as a preacher, Francis Ford as a drunk, and Jessie Ralph as a neighbor.

I liked the slow pace of this which created a real feeling for the challenges of Colonial living.  All the performances are good, though some of the minor roles tend to stray into farce.  Oliver is especially wonderful.  Once again, the stars are Ford and his camera. Many of the scenes, both outdoor and indoor, are framed and lit like paintings.  This was Ford’s first color film and he adapts magnificently.  One can sense the approach of a new War in the patriotic tone of the piece.

Drums Along the Mohawk was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Supporting Actress (Oliver) and Best Color Cinematography.

Trailer (Black and White)