Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
Directed by George B. Seitz
Written by Aurania Rouverol, Tom Seller, and Annalee Whitmore
1940/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Streaming on Amazon Instant Video

[box] Andrew ‘Andy’ Hardy: [In reference to Ulysses S. Grant] He didn’t have trouble like I got, all he had on his hands was a civil war.[/box]

I took this one out of sequence in memory of Mickey Rooney who died on April 6.  It had everything one would expect from an Andy Hardy movie with an extra dose of patriotism thrown in to reflect the war in Europe.

Andy (Rooney) has a crush on a photogenic young debutante, clipping all her photos from the gossip magazines.  He boasts to Polly that he has met her.  Then Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) decides to take his family to New York where he is going to defend the local orphanage.  Polly calls his bluff threatening to humiliate Andy in the school paper if he does not produce a picture of himself with the celebrity.  All of Andy’s efforts to actually meet the girl get him in hot water.  But Betsy Blair (Judy Garland) comes to the rescue and gets an early screen kiss.  With all the Andy Hardy regulars.

Rooney is his peppy self in this movie, lording it over others when he is not bemoaning his fate.  His complaints about lacking “class” and money earn him a long talking to from his father extolling the American Way.  The sub-plot about the orphans involves their trustee trading in U.S. bonds for European ones and then losing his shirt on them when the war starts, with resultant commentary by the Judge on the folly of deserting ones country. We get a couple of songs from Garland, neither too memorable.

Trailer

They Drive by Night 
Directed by Raoul Walsh
Screenplay by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay from a novel by A.I. Bezzerides
1940/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Joe Fabrini: Do you believe in love at first sight?

Cassie Hartley: It saves a lot of time.[/box]

I enjoyed this for its razor-sharp dialogue and outstanding cast, though I thought it fell apart a bit in the second half.

Wildcat truck-driver brothers Joe (George Raft) and Paul (Humphrey Bogart) Fabrini are struggling to make ends meet.  They spend days at a stretch on the road getting little if any sleep.  Paul also longs for his wife who would love to see him get an eight-to-five job even if it was digging ditches.  On one of their runs, Joe meets sassy waitress Cassie (and when the boys give her a lift, the two fall in love.

When it looks like the brothers have finally caught a break, tragedy strikes and their rig is totaled.  Then old friend Ed Carlsen (Alan Hale) offers Joe a job in the garage of his trucking firm.  Carlsen is a likable but garrulous drunk whose wife, Lana (Ida Lupino), clearly despises him and keeps making increasingly desperate plays for Joe.  But Joe is having none of it, citing his loyalty to Ed, and Lana begins to think that the only way to get “her” man is to get Ed out of the way.  With Roscoe Karns as a fellow truck driver.

The repartee between Ann Sheridan and the guys at the truck stop is just super and the first half or two-thirds of this film is a wonderful slice of working-class life in Depression-era America. The tone changes in the Third Act as the story becomes a love-triangle melodrama.  Ida Lupino is good as always but the plot just about forces her to go completely over the top and she starts chewing the scenery with a vengeance.  On balance, though, this is a solid film and well worth seeing.

Trailer

Forbidden Planet
Directed by Fred M. Wilcox
Written by Cyril Hume based on a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler
1956/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#320 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
IMDB users say 7.7/10; I say 8/10

[box] Dr. Edward Morbius: Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it![/box]

The granddaddy of big-budget sci-fi movies is still enjoyable after all these years.

Commander Adams (Leslie Nielson) and the crew of his spaceship are on a mission to the planet Altair to search for survivors of a scientific mission lost there 20 years before. As they approach, lone survivor Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) warns them off, assuring them everything is alright.  They ignore his advise and discover him living with nubile daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) and faithful robot Robby in a marvelous compound devoid of other life.

Morbius explains that the other members of his expedition were torn limb from limb by a mysterious force to which he and his daughter are immune.  He also shows the men a laboratory of vast sophistication in which he has discovered  the secrets of the Krell, highly evolved creatures who died out 20,000 years ago.  Before their extinction, the Krell were able to create matter with thought alone, an ability which Morbius has been able to engineer into Robby.

The Commander and Altaira fall in love but the evil secret of the Forbidden Planet threatens the lives of his crew and their future together.

The state-of-the-art special effects and art direction look a tad obvious and 50’s retro from this vantage point but they still impress by the sheer scope of their vision. The 50’s era sexual politics is too naive to be offensive and a scary monster and a unique Freudian premise do not disappoint.

Forbidden Planet was nominated for an Academy Award for its Special Effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEj8bZo9IGA

Trailer

Waterloo Bridge
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Written by S.N. Behrman, Hans Rameau, and George Froeschel from the play by Robert E. Sherwood
1940/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Warner Home Video DVD

[box] Myra Lester: I loved you, I’ve never loved anyone else. I never shall, that’s the truth Roy, I never shall.[/box]

I had been looking forward to seeing this one for years.  It did not live up to my perhaps inflated expectations from my experience of James Whale’s 1931 original but had considerable merits of its own, not the least was Vivien Leigh’s fine performance.

The story begins as Roy Cronin (Robert Taylor), now a high officer in the WWII British army, stands on Waterloo Bridge reminiscing over the lost love he met there during a bombing raid in World War I.  Segue to an extended flashback.  A group of girls flees to shelter in Waterloo Station.  One of them, Myra (Leigh), hangs behind when she drops a good luck charm from her purse.  Cronin escorts her to the shelter where he falls in love at first sight.  Myra is a dancer in the corps de ballet of a troupe under the strict tutelage of “Madame” (Maria Ouspenskaya).  She defies Madame’s ban on an outside romantic life to meet Roy for a night on the town before he leaves for the front.

He is unexpectedly given 48 hours leave and returns the next day to marry Myra.  He needs to get permission from his superiors before marrying and this delays them until so late in the afternoon that the priest refuses to marry them until the next morning.  Roy is abruptly sent to the front and they cannot complete the ceremony.  Myra is fired when she misses a performance to see him off at the station.

She rooms with another dancer who was also fired for standing up for her.  Neither girl can find work.  Just when it seems that Myra may be rescued by Roy’s mother, she reads his name among the dead in the newspaper and completely falls apart.  Both girls descend into prostitution to survive and the tragedy deepens.  Can Myra redeem herself when Roy returns?  With Lucile Watson as Roy’s mother and C. Aubrey Smith as his uncle.

The story is plagued by a few too many coincidences to move me the way it should.  No one could deny the beauty or superb acting by Leigh, however.  A character more different than Scarlett O’Hara’s would be difficult to imagine.  I think this movie is a pretty good example of the Code’s impact on Hollywood.  I would have loved to see Leigh in the original story where Myra has already been forced into prostitution when she meets a naive young soldier and longs to make a too-good-to-be-true romance work while never quite believing it will.

Waterloo Bridge was Oscar-nominated for its Black-and-White cinematography (Joseph Ruttenberg) and Original Score (Herbert Stothart).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ-ZU1QBkHY

Clip – “Auld Lang Syne”