Monthly Archives: April 2015

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
Directed by H.C. Potter
Written by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank from a novel by Eric Hodgins
1948/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
Repeat viewing/Amazon Instant Video

[box] Muriel Blandings: I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin’s egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. …  Now, the dining room. I’d like yellow. Not just yellow; a very gay yellow….  I tell you, Mr. PeDelford, if you’ll send one of your men to the grocer for a pound of their best butter, and match that exactly, you can’t go wrong! Now, this is the paper we’re going to use in the hall. …. There’s some little dots in the background, and it’s these dots I want you to match. Not the little greenish dot near the hollyhock leaf, but the little bluish dot between the rosebud and the delphinium blossom…. Now the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white. Now for the powder room – in here – I want you to match this thread, and don’t lose it….  As you can see, it’s practically an apple red. Somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened Jonathan.

Mr. PeDelford: You got that Charlie?

Charlie, Painter: Red, green, blue, yellow, white.

Mr. PeDelford: Check.[/box]

How can you go wrong with Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvyn Douglas?  If you have ever had any remodeling done, you will almost certainly relate to this very funny film.

Jim Blandings (Grant) feels that he is in a rut with his advertising job and his settled life with wife Muriel (Loy) and two kids in their Manhattan apartment.  He spots an ad for a farmhouse in Connecticut and decides this is the change they all need.  Of course, a few renovations are needed …

And naturally this means or less rebuilding the place from the ground up.  The Blandings encounter every inconvenience and expense known to anyone familiar with this game.  They are aided by their sense of humor and advice from bachelor attorney and friend Bill Cole (Douglas).  With Reginald Denny as the bemused architect.

This is funny stuff.  The gags come not only from the chicanery of the contractors but from the fanciful expectations of the clients.  Grant and Loy have terrific chemistry.  Or maybe its just that Loy makes every man she marries in the movies fall in love with her. Recommended.

Re-release trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZwOGVWqHAw

Clip – choosing paint colors

Romance on the High Seas
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Written by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein; additional dialogue by I.A.L Diamond
1948/USA
Warner Bros./Michael Curtiz Productions
First viewing/Netflix Rental

[box] Georgia Garrett: Oscar! How did you get on this boat?

Oscar Farrar: I lied about my age.[/box]

Given the pedigree of its director and writers, this is surprisingly bland.  It is most notable as the screen debut of Doris Day who is characteristically perky but would do better things later.

Michael Kent (Don DeFore) and his jealous wife Elvira (Janis Paige) have been married for several years.  The press of his business has prevented them from taking their honeymoon cruise for all that time.  Elvira is at the travel agency to get some passport photos taken when she meets Georgia Garrett (Day) who has planned many adventures but never had the money to actually take a trip.  Georgia is a nightclub singer. Pianist/MC Oscar Farrar (Oscar Levant) is in love with her in his own quirky way.

Shortly thereafter, Michael says he must postpone yet another trip.  Georgia decides to use this as an opportunity to catch him cheating with his new secretary.  She offers her ticket to Georgia so she can stay behind in New York and spy.  Georgia is to travel under Elvira’s name, send letters home periodically, and keep to herself.  But Michael unexpectedly says he will be able to travel later that week.  When Elvira insists that she must use the ticket she already has, he becomes suspicious and hires private detective Peter Virgil (Jack Carson) to tail his wife.  Once aboard, Peter, of course, believes that Georgia is the wife he is supposed to be following.

Naturally, before too long Peter and Georgia fall in love.  Georgia feels she cannot reveal her identity leading to the usual complications.  Of course, Oscar joins the cruise as well further complicating matters.  A happy ending is guaranteed.

There are zero surprises in the story.  I was pleased to see Jack Carson after an absence from my viewing for several “years” and in the lead no less.  As usual, Oscar Levant always plays himself and very good he is at it too.  But Day carries the picture.  Your reaction will inevitably depend on your tolerance for her.  Mine is relatively high.

Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn were nominated for the Best Music, Original Song Oscar for “It’s Magic” and Ray Heindorf was nominated for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxz3IejIKOY

Clip – Doris Day sings “It’s Magic”

Port of Call (Hamnstad)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Written by Ingmar Bergman; story by Olle Länsberg
1948/Sweden
Svensk Filmindustri
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] My professor told me when I started in the ’40s that a director should listen and keep his mouth shut. Took me a long time to understand I talked too much. Now I know you should listen with your ears – and your heart. — Ingmar Bergman[/box]

Bergman is still finding his way in this problem picture about troubled youth.

As the film opens, we see Berit jump into the dockside water fully-dressed.  She is promptly rescued by a good samaritan and is none too happy about it.  Now she is really in trouble.  Her mother is out of town but her social worker is immediately on her case.  Berit has already spent several years of her young life in a reformatory and is under constant threat of being sent back there.  She does not seem to have committed more serious crimes than going off with boys and talking back to her awful, domineering mother.

That night Berit meets Gösta, a recently returned sailor, at a dance.  She takes him back to the family’s empty apartment.  What starts off on his part as one-night stand turns into a love affair.  They go away for a weekend at a hotel and Berit runs into one of her dorm mates from the reformatory.  Even though Gösta says he doesn’t need to know anything about her past, she decides to spill everything about her sad life thus far.

Gösta can’t stop thinking about Birgit’s other men and rejects her.  Back home, Birgit has loaned her friend money for an illegal abortion.  The friend calls her from the abortionist’s house.  She is so ill she needs help and can’t go home.  Birgit takes her to Gösta’s apartment.  Gösta has a mighty struggle with his conscience.

There is nothing special to mark this film as a Bergman piece.  It’s not particularly psychologically astute and kind of pulls its last feeble note of optimism out of nowhere.  Not terrible by any means though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLkiVaE04gA

Clip – Opening sequence

Anna Karenina
Directed by Julien Duvivier
Written by Jean Anouilh, Guy Morgan, and Julien Duvivier
UK/1948
London Film Productions
First viewing/Hulu Plus

“I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This is an adaptation of one of my favorite novels.  Inevitably, a 110-minute movie cannot do justice to Tolstoy’s 800-page book.

Anna (Vivien Leigh) is married to the much-older Count Alexis Karenin (Ralph Richardson), a pedantic bureaucrat.  They have a little son who is the light of Anna’s life.  Anna’s brother Stepan has been caught in an affair by his wife Dolly.  Anna travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow to make peace.  She shares a carriage on the train with the mother of Count Alexis Vronsky, a young soldier who has been courting Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty. An old man falls under the train in Moscow, presaging the doom that is awaiting Anna there.

Anna is successful in reconciling her brother and sister-in-law.  She goes to a ball where Kitty is expecting a proposal from Vronsky (Kieron Moore).  But Vronsky wants only to dance with Anna and the die is cast.  He follows her to St. Petersburg.  Kitty, who had the same night rejected a proposal from Count Levin, grows ill from humiliation and heartbreak. The Kitty-Levin story, which makes up about half of the novel and provides a needed counterpoint to the Anna-Vronsky affair, is dropped almost entirely by the movie at this point.

The lovers cannot resist temptation.  Karenin is remarkably tolerant, seeking only to avoid scandal.  But Anna reveals the depth of her feelings in public when Vronsky is thrown from his horse and Karenin seeks a divorce.  In revenge, he also asks for sole custody of the son.  Although extramarital affairs are common in St. Petersburg high society, they are strictly recreational.  By openly defying the rules, Anna becomes an outcast.  Things go downhill from there.  Then Anna becomes obsessed with the idea that Vronsky is about to abandon her …

Vivien Leigh convinces as a woman who would give up everything for love.  Unfortunately, Kieron Moore makes a singularly weak and uncharismatic Vronsky.  Richardson is good as the chilly Karenin and manages to give his predicament a hint of subtle pathos.  But, although the staging is also good, the film is lacking in fire or depth.

Clips – Comparing Leigh and Garbo as Anna