The Grant Mystique: Dream Wife (1953)

Some years ago I complained that once World War II ended, Cary Grant was content to settle into inane sitcoms rather than the kind of sparkling entertainments he made during his first golden era (roughly 1937 to 1942). Whatever their virtues, films like The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House domesticated the Grant persona for a post war audience of war veterans moving to the new suburbs on the GI bill. I use the word "sitcom" with malice aforethought. Grant had become conservative with his choices. He would stretch his persona only very occasionally. One of his co-stars during this period described Grant as "the most nervous actor I ever worked with." It seems that the shadow of Archie Leach, the nobody, dogged Grant to the end of his days. The nadir of Grant's post-war artistic conservatism is Dream Wife (1953, directed by Sidney Sheldon). Sidney Sheldon is a name that should be familiar to audiences of a certain age. He is best known as the creator of the television sitcoms, The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie. Certain elements of Dream Wife show up in I Dream of Jeannie, as it happens. Its conception of the Princess Tarji (Betta St. John) in particular is the template for Barbara Eden's Jeannie. Sheldon was very successful as screenwriter, as a television writer, and as a producer. He was even more successful later in his career as the writer of trashy romantic suspense novels with titles like Rage of Angels and The Other Side of Midnight. Sheldon had been successful working with Cary Grant before, having written the screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. That script won him an Oscar. Dream Wife, alas, was NOT a success for Sheldon and it nearly ended the career of its star. After the film failed to recoup its costs--a rarity for any film starring Grant during his major stardom--the actor considered retirement. He went so far as announcing his retirement in the press. He wouldn't make another film for two years. Dream Wife was a disaster for everyone involved. It's also a dreadful film.

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The Grant Mystique: She Done Him Wrong (1933)

Mae West claimed all her life that she had discovered Cary Grant. "He had only done a few screen tests" before she plucked him from obscurity, according to her. This is untrue, of course. She Done Him Wrong (1932, directed by Lowell Sherman) was Grant's eighth feature film. Grant was second billed in She Done Him Wrong after West herself, though even that wasn't his highest billing to that date (Grant had been top billed in Hot Saturday, the film that immediately precedes She Done Him Wrong in Grant's filmography). She may not have discovered him, but West sure knew a star in the making when she saw one. A diamond in the rough, as it were, and if Mae West knew one thing, it was diamonds. She Done Him Wrong was West's own first film, but she was already notorious for her plays in New York, some of which had been shut down by the blue noses for obscenity and race mixing. She Done Him Wrong was based on West's Diamond Lil, a play so infamous that the minders of the production code insisted that the title couldn't be used or even referred to by incorporating the word "diamond." Although She Done Him Wrong is a pre-Code film, it highlights the inaccuracy of that category. There already WAS a production code, signed onto by all of the major studios, enacted in 1930, on top of a list of "dos and don'ts and be carefuls" formulated in 1927. Although the code was widely ignored by the studios from 1930 to 1934, the arbiters of the code could and did occasionally flex enough muscle to get their way. She Done Him Wrong wasn't the only film to change its title and other elements due to the strictures of the Code pre-1934. William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary, was so notorious that film productions were barred from using that title, too, and discouraged from adapting the book at all. Hence, the 1933 film version became The Story of Temple Drake and many of the details of the story were judiciously changed as a means of filing off the serial numbers. She Done Him Wrong follows a similar strategy. "Diamond Lil" becomes "Lady Lou," but they weren't fooling anyone.

What this film meant for Grant was a high profile role in a film that would be talked about by everyone. Indeed, the film was a gigantic hit and was nominated for the "Best Production" Oscar (aka: Best Picture), which it lost to Cavalcade, a film you've probably never seen if you've heard of it at all. It was Grant's first brush with the kind of success that would become customary for productions in which he starred. Although he would labor in thankless roles for Paramount for another three years, this film undoubtedly gave him a leg up for when he decided to forge his own path to stardom. It was a hint that he might be bankable, though no one should mistake this movie as a "Cary Grant" movie. West brooked no rivals for the spotlight.

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The Grant Mystique: Suzy (1936)

During the years-long production of Howard Hughes's World War I epic, Hell's Angels, Hughes shot 250 feet of aviation footage for every foot of that footage used in the finished film. His aerial unit shot a LOT of aviation footage. Hughes's particular genius was finding ways to make money--a skill that eventually made him the richest man in the world. It should come as no surprise, then, that the extra footage he shot became a lucrative side-hustle. The World War I dogfights filmed for Hell's Angels show up in dozens of films throughout the 1930s without ever duplicating the footage Hughes actually used. Suzy (1936, directed by George Fitzmaurice), a spy drama set in the early part of the war, is one of the films that makes use of this largess. It also makes use of one of Hell's Angels's major stars in leading lady Jean Harlow, whose time on the stage would run out of road only a short time afterward. If given the choice between Harlow in this film and Harlow in Hell's Angels, an interested viewer should definitely choose the latter. That's none of my concern here, though. She's fine in Suzy, a film built specifically for her, but it's not a film with the same ambition. Her performance was influenced by her declining health--partially the result of multiple studio-enforced abortions--that limited her endurance on set and resulted in a longer than usual production schedule.

This was a consequential film for co-star Cary Grant, who was loaned to MGM for this film against his will to replace Clark Gable. This is absolutely a Gable part, but not a Cary Grant part. Grant came away from the experience hating his part even after it had been extensively rewritten for him at his own request and with his own participation. He hated the lack of control he had over his own career, a lack that had landed him in this particular film in the first place. He hated the finished product. He hated that he was still third-billed after making twenty-five previous films and climbing the cast list to the brink of superstardom. His contract with Paramount, who had loaned him out as a punishment, would run out at the end of 1936. Paramount would loan him out again for his next film after Suzy and then he made one further film for Paramount after that. Then Grant vowed never to sign another exclusive contract again. He would choose his own roles. He would choose his own collaborators. He would have the power to say "no" to projects he didn't like. He also resolved to develop his own brand as a movie star, partly as a defense against more roles like the one he plays in Suzy. He would develop a "persona," if you will, and with that persona, he became the very model of a Hollywood movie star. This is one of the last films in the actor's portfolio in which the persona of "Cary Grant" is mostly still in its infancy. Grant's role here is the most unlikable character he ever played and Grant was absolutely correct when he complained that he had been miscast. But then, he's not the lead, which is a gross waste of available resources. I wonder how this film would have played if Grant and Franchot Tone--who was billed over Grant as the romantic lead--had switched roles. A big "if."

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The Grant Mystique: In Name Only (1939)

If Cary Grant was the king of the screwball comedy, then the queen was Carole Lombard. Grant and Lombard appeared in the same film three times before Lombard's untimely death in 1942, but none of those films was a comedy. In Sinners in the Sun, Grant had no more than five or six minutes of screen time in total opposite Lombard. In The Eagle and the Hawk, they never shared the screen at all. The only true co-starring vehicle they made together was In Name Only (1939, directed by John Cromwell), a romantic drama. It is ironic that Grant's most famous comedy co-stars--Irene Dunne and Katherine Hepburn--were primarily known as dramatic actresses, while the greatest female comedienne of the age made only dramas with him. This teaming of Lombard and Grant might not have happened at all if Katherine Hepburn hadn't been tagged as "box office poison" in the press after the failures of Bringing Up Baby and Holiday (among other films). Hepburn had subsequently been released from her contract with RKO. It is conceivable that his trio of early films with Hepburn delayed or inhibited Grant's ascent to superstardom. None of them was a financial success in spite of the classic status accorded them years after the fact. In any event, Hepburn was out and Lombard was in. Lombard herself was taking a break from comedies. Her other film from 1939 was Made for Each Other opposite James Stewart, another weepie directed by John Cromwell. It had been a financial disaster. Lombard's life at the time paralleled the plot of In Name Only. She was biding her time until Clark Gable could divorce his wife and she could marry him. Gable, for his part, was off making Gone With the Wind. Her career at the time was also eerily similar to Grant's. Like Grant, she had been contracted to Paramount during her early career, a contract that she finished in 1938. Like Grant, she had chosen to become a free agent when that contract expired. Like Grant, she wasn't starring in comedies in 1939 (Grant's other two films that year, Only Angels Have Wings and Gunga Din, were nominally adventure stories). For both actors, In Name Only was something of a crossroads. Grant had already had a couple of big hits after he left Paramount, though he had had some disappointments, too. He hadn't had a major hit in a serious drama, though. Lombard hadn't yet had her own hit after leaving Paramount and it remained to be seen if she could carry a serious drama. In Name Only turned out to be a film both of them needed. It was moderately successful.

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The Grant Mystique: Thirty-Day Princess (1934)

Thirty-Day Princess (1934, directed by Marion Gering) finds Cary Grant fading into the scenery a bit. This isn't the only case of this in his early films, but it's one of the most conspicuous. Grant was wholly unsatisfied with his part in this film and complained about it, prompting Paramount to loan him out to United Artists as punishment. Grant never forgot this. When his contract with Paramount was finished in 1937, he went freelance rather than re-up or sign with another studio. He wouldn't make another film for Paramount for a couple of decades. He held a grudge. Grant wasn't the only contributor unsatisfied with his work, either. This film credits Preston Sturges as one of its writers and, like Grant, he was unhappy with how little of his work ended up on screen. This is the only film on which Sturges and Grant both worked, so it's a missed opportunity.

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The Grant Mystique: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, directed by Frank Capra) is probably the most divisive film in Cary Grant's filmography. It is perennially popular among fans of old movies, among fans of Cary Grant, and among fans of what I can only describe as "cozy horror." Many other viewers, including the actor himself, don't much like it. Grant thought his performance was among his worst. Some viewers don't care for Frank Capra's brand of corny, though I would argue that this is a different kind of corn than the director usually served up. There is a category of viewer who dislikes the film not for what it contains, but for what it left out. Let me explain: Arsenic and Old Lace was a huge success on Broadway. Most of the Broadway cast reprised their roles in the movie version, with the conspicuous exception of Boris Karloff. Karloff played the criminal, Jonathan Brewster, the film's villain. The script mentions Karloff by name in describing Jonathan Brewster. That the role was played by Karloff himself is one of the play's best jokes. Karloff had a financial stake in the play, so rather than abandon the production for a piecework paycheck in the film version, he remained in New York for a more lucrative and extended paycheck. His part in the film was filled with Raymond Massey, but the Boris Karloff joke remains, with Karloff's blessing. The film was shot in 1941 with the stipulation that it couldn't be released until the play closed. The play ran for three years, much to the consternation of Warner Brothers. Karloff backed the right horse.*

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The Grant Mystique: Operation Petticoat (1959)

If you were to name Cary Grant's most influential movies, you might name films like North by Northwest, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, or The Philadelphia Story, which are all bona fide Hollywood classics. You might not get around to Operation Petticoat (1959, directed by Blake Edwards), and you would be wrong to omit it. In its way, it is among the most influential of all of Grant's films, and not just because it was Grant's biggest box-office hit (spoiler: it was). My own relationship with the film might be instructive. I originally saw the film when I was a kid. I saw it on television with my dad on a Saturday afternoon. It was very much a "dad" kind of movie: a comedy about the experiences of a military unit in the war. This was familiar territory because service comedies were a staple of the television of my youth. Hogan's Heroes, McHale's Navy, Gomer Pyle, F-Troop, M*A*S*H, all of these were everywhere back then, playing endlessly in the vampiric half-life of syndication. All of them trace a lineage to Operation Petticoat, either directly or in passing. Because, as I've said, Operation Petticoat was an absolutely gigantic hit. Hollywood follows the money. The downside of its influence is that Operation Petticoat sometimes feels like a TV sitcom. Many of its supporting actors--particularly Dick Sargent and Gavin McLeod--went on to long television careers. The film begat a TV spinoff in 1977 unto itself, which I may have seen before I saw the film proper (this happened with M*A*S*H, too). Its director, Blake Edwards, was at that time primarily known as a television writer and director, whose work on Peter Gunn was contemporary with Operation Petticoat. Operation Petticoat would launch him into the big time, and his films over the next decade would include the Pink Panther movies, Breakfast at Tiffanys, Days of Wine and Roses, and Experiment in Terror, among others. For all that, the presence of Cary Grant and, to a lesser extent, Tony Curtis removes the film from being merely an elaborate TV sitcom. The film persona of Cary Grant guarantees this. Grant was well rewarded for his service here, too. The film netted him three million 1959 dollars, which is about thirty-one million in 2023 dollars. It's not for nothing that Grant was among the wealthiest movie stars who ever lived.

The film itself? It has its pleasures.

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The Grant Mystique: Charade (1963)

Cary Grant made three films with director Stanley Donen between 1958 and 1963. Those three films arguably define the sunset of his acting career. The last of the three, Charade (1963), is Grant's last legitimately great film. He made two more films afterward and then retired from acting in 1966. Charade is also a transitional film for American cinema generally, perched as it is between the last gasps of big studio filmmaking in the 1950s and the first rumblings of the American New Wave. Stanley Donen was the ideal director for such a film, given that his filmmaking style already resembled various New Waves before any of them even began to swell on the cinematic horizon. Donen was flexible and creative, able to slot right into whatever genre to which he was assigned (maybe not science fiction, but that may not have been his fault). Even though Donen was primarily known for making musicals in the 1950s including arguably the greatest musical ever made, Charade demonstrates a surprising--and surprisingly brutal--facility for thrillers in the mode of Alfred Hitchcock. Charade is sometimes described as the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made, though that might be hyperbole.

Donen was also one of Audrey Hepburn's principal directors, having made Funny Face with her in 1957 and with Two For the Road--a New Wave film if ever there was one--ahead in 1967. The pairing of Hepburn and Cary Grant perhaps delayed Grant's retirement. Of his experience on Charade, he said, "All I want for Christmas is to make another movie with Audrey Hepburn." Alas, that never came to pass. He was lured into making Father Goose with the promise of Hepburn as a co-star, though the part ultimately went to Leslie Caron. Maybe that's just as well. Donen intended to make a further film with Grant, too, but the actor retired and the part in Arabesque went to Gregory Peck instead. For what it's worth, that's a pretty good movie, but I don't think Grant and Sophia Loren would have gotten along well. They had a history. And Grant was probably too old by then for that kind of globetrotting adventure anyway.

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The Grant Mystique: To Catch A Thief (1955)

Of the films Cary Grant made with Alfred Hitchcock, To Catch A Thief (1955) is the one that has been dismissed most often by the director's admirers and detractors as a lightweight "entertainment." A bauble, if you will. Candy. Empty calories. It is certainly a film conceived of and drenched in the glamour of classic Hollywood. It pairs the biggest star in the world opposite one of the most unattainable beauties of its era. It sets its action against a backdrop of wealth and intrigue on the French Riviera and Monaco. It hobnobs with the idle rich. It's a caper film about an international jewel thief. It's pop filmmaking at its most trivial. It's a fantasy. And sure: It lacks the sinister undertones of Suspicion, the complex psychological depth of Notorious, and the stakes and forward motion of North by Northwest. But to look only at its surface gloss is a mistake. Smuggled under the candy coating is a story about hollow men in a Europe still recovering from the calamity of the great wars, in which bad men never escape their pasts and visit their sins on the next generations. It's a significantly darker film than its reputation would have you believe. It's also a portrait of Hollywood films in transition from the studio era--whose days on the stage were numbered--into a conversation with the rest of the world. This was partially filmed in Europe, perhaps with a propagandist intent. Like many American films of its era, it's a weapon in the Cold War, when Hollywood movies that wallowed in a gaudy affluence were a bulwark against the gray economic heat death of Soviet communism. All weapons should be so brazenly sexual.

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The Grant Mystique: Suspicion (1941)

By 1941, Cary Grant was THE movie star. Grant had cultivated a screen image based on charm, charisma, impossible good looks, and a refusal to take himself seriously. He was the ideal leading man for the age of the screwball comedy. But there was always something more to the Grant persona. Something darker. You saw glimpses of it in His Girl Friday, in which Hildy Johnson laments of Grant's vile Walter Burns, "I just wish you weren't such a stinker," and tells her fiancee of Burns's charm "he comes by it naturally; his grandfather was a snake." There were glimpses of it, too, in the callousness as armor against loss in Only Angels Have Wings. Even before his major stardom, there was Grant's antagonist opposite Fredric March in The Eagle and the Hawk, in which Grant played the most brutal character he was ever asked to perform. Alfred Hitchcock spotted it right away, and exploited Grant's potential as a sinister leading man in the first two films of their collaboration. In their first film together, Suspicion (1941), Hitchcock confronts the audience directly: could this man, this polished movie star, this easy light comedian, be a murderer?

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The Grant Mystique: Penny Serenade (1941)

On the Wikipedia page for Penny Serenade (1941, directed by George Stevens), there's a short section detailing a recent "AI colorization" of the film. Curious, I took a look. It looks about the same as colorization has looked for a couple of decades, now, which is to say it doesn't look very good at all except for in fleeting moments. It's in the wrong aspect ratio, too. This particular film is a prime victim for this sort of noodling because when the copyright came up for renewal 28 years after its release, Columbia Pictures neglected to renew it. Thus, it fell into the public domain. As a result, its presentation on home video usually has been awful, with countless editions available from fly by night video companies. Public domain is invaluable and necessary, but it is often a haven for philistines and grifters. Most PD versions of Penny Serenade are short five minutes of movie in addition to the usual defects. It's a shabby fate for a film that contains Cary Grant's first Oscar-nominated performance and a performance from co-star Irene Dunne that the actress herself felt was her very best. For what it's worth, the edition from Olive Films is excellent, sourced from primary materials and restoring the entire film. My screen caps for this post come from the Olive disc.

The story one finds in Penny Serenade follows the marriage of Julie Gardiner (Dunne) and Roger Adams (Grant), from their first meeting through tragedy after tragedy in which Julie loses her unborn child in an earthquake in Tokyo and becomes unable to bear another child. They adopt an infant daughter after a close inspection by the state, only to have her die of a fever. Roger loses the newspaper he owns, and the law refuses to allow them to adopt another child due to Roger's insolvency. Pleading with the courts. The shock is too much to bear. We meet them at the very end, as they are prepared to go their separate ways. The flashbacks that tell their story are keyed to music--they first meet in a music store where Julie works--and the film's vignettes are accompanied by well-known songs of the day (hence the title of the film).

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The Grant Mystique: The Last Outpost (1935)

I used to think that Cary Grant could do anything. Comedy? Drama? Action? There's a classic film in almost every category to make an argument. In more recent years, I've been discovering the limits of the Grant persona. Grant was not particularly suited to historical pieces like The Howards of Virginia or The Pride and the Passion (though he's not bad in the latter). Some registers of comedy don't work with the polished perfection of "Cary Grant," either. I've often thought that Grant was wasted in sitcoms in the 1950s. But the thing that Grant really couldn't pull off was facial hair. This is the problem with The Last Outpost (1935, directed by Charles Barton and Louis J. Gasner), which finds Grant sporting a 1930s-style pencil thin mustache and that mustache completely dims Grant's star power. I mean, he's barely recognizable, which is a shock given how small a change it is to his face. It's like Superman putting on a pair of glasses to become Clark Kent. It makes him ordinary.

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The Grant Mystique: The Eagle and the Hawk (1933)

In some ways, Cary Grant was a more interesting actor before he cultivated the movie star persona. There's an intensity in some of his early roles that mostly vanishes from the polished perfection of "Cary Grant." While it's true that Grant sometimes vanished behind his co-stars in his early films, struggling to find a cinematic identity, there are a handful of them where this is not the case. The Eagle and the Hawk (1933, directed by Stuart Walker and Mitchell Leisen) is one such film. The Grant one finds in this film is one that almost entirely vanishes after Grant left Paramount in 1936. Grant plays a World War I tail gunner, who is partnered with a pilot he despises. He's the film's principle antagonist, a character who is callous and unpleasant and brutal. It's one of the film's bitterest ironies that his character is the one most suited for the enterprise at hand. He doesn't buy into the romance of being a flying ace, and because of this, he's most likely to survive the war.

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The Grant Mystique: Enter, Madame!

From a perspective eighty years later, it's surprising to see Cary Grant second billed to Elissa Landi in Enter, Madame! (1935, directed by Elliot Nugent). Grant is so obviously the only bona fide movie star in the whole production that you wonder what they were thinking. Elissa Landi was only ever a minor star, even coming off successes in The Count of Monte Cristo and The Sign of the Cross (where she is completely blown off the screen by wicked, wicked Claudette Colbert). The rest of her output is mostly obscure apart from a supporting role in After the Thin Man. She retired from movies soon after. I don't know how her films did in their day; I can surmise that they were successful given the order of the billing in Enter, Madame! Charitably, Grant wasn't the supernova he would become a mere two years later and Paramount was hardly Warners or MGM. And he was second-billed behind his leading ladies in a couple of  his other 1935 films, too. In spite of all this, the billing seems weird to me.

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The Grant Mystique: Wings in the Dark

By 1935, Cary Grant was becoming a headline attraction. His signature roles were still ahead of him, but he had enough box-office appeal that he was rarely very far down the cast list when he wasn't actually top-billed. He's second-billed in Wings in the Dark (1935, directed by James Flood) behind Myrna Loy, who was coming off the success of The Thin Man. This was the first of three films Grant made with Loy, the other two being the post-war sitcoms, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Both of those films were made at the height of Grant's stardom, when he had become the archetype of the movie star. He was top-billed in both and they're both fondly remembered, but in truth, I like Wings in the Dark more than either of them. Bachelor and Mr. Blandings are both more tightly scripted, more lavishly budgeted, more concerned with realism, more conceived of as product. Don't get me wrong! I like them both. But they tend to make of Grant, the movie star, into a middle-class mediocrity. They attempt, at their peril, to make Grant relatable to the new, post-war middle class, to the average Joe who was moving to the suburbs on the GI Bill. In short, they tried to rob Grant of his movie-star mystique (and nevermind that knight in shining armor gag in Bachelor). Wings in the Dark is a much rougher film, not really more than a b-picture that would be forgotten if not for its stars. I'll agree that as a formal object, it's probably not as good as Bachelor or Mr. Blandings. In fact, it's utterly ridiculous. But unlike those films, it doesn't squander Grant's persona. Wings in the Dark lets Grant explore his role in a way that would be unthinkable once he became the archetype of the movie star. It's a film that lets Grant be an actor first.

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The Grant Mystique: This is the Night

There are more films starring Cary Grant in my movie collection than films starring any other actor. No small feat given how many films I have with John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, and Christopher Lee, respectively. I think John Wayne may have been in the lead until this Christmas, when my main Christmas gift was the Universal Vault Collection of Grant's early films, most of them from the pre-1950 Paramount library that Universal owns. They've been stingy with that library over the years. Many of the films in this set have never seen a commercial release for home video. In any event, this set has eighteen films, all made before 1937, before Grant was "Cary Grant," before he had fully developed the Grant persona (stolen from Leo McCarey on the set of The Awful Truth, if you believe McCarey on the matter). Grant's star became a supernova after 1937, when he began appearing in some of his best-loved films, including Topper and the aforementioned The Awful Truth. The films in The Vault Collection are not so well-known as a rule. Oh, it has the two films Grant made for Mae West, sure, and Blonde Venus with Marlene Dietrich and Joseph Von Sternberg, but those aren't really "Cary Grant" films, even if Mae West recognized a diamond in the rough when she saw one. West had an eye for diamonds.

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Games, Must We?

One of the first movies my partner and I ever went to as a couple was Rear Window, which was playing as a fundraiser for our local art house. This was shown at the historic Missouri Theater in Columbia, Missouri, and its ostensible purpose was to buy the Ragtag Film people a 35mm film projector. This was fourteen years ago. Things come full circle. Last Friday night, fourteen years to the very day, the Ragtag bid a fond farewell to 35mm as their primary means of projection in that self-same Missouri Theater, which has since been wonderfully restored thanks to a central role in the cultural life of the city (and, not coincidentally, the True/False film festival). The film with which they chose to send 35mm into its great hereafter was, fittingly, another Hitchcock film. It was North by Northwest (1959), one of the movie-est movies ever made.

North by Northwest is, I think, the eighth Hitchock film I've seen in a theater. I never pass up the chance to see Hitchcock with an audience. There's an ineffable something about seeing a film with an audience that changes the way I perceive film. Hitchcock, for his part, was a master manipulator of crowds. Some of the director's films that lay flat on a TV screen come to miraculous life when you see them in a communal setting. If other people are having fun, you'll likely have fun, too. It's infectious. North by Northwest is one of the best crowd-pleasers ever made, stocked with just about everything that people go to movies for: action, romance, suspense, movie stars, sex.

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Belatedly...

I was on vacation for a week, and I'm only now getting caught up. Here's what I watched before embarking on the annual October Horror Challenge:

268. Underworld Beauty (1958, directed by Seijun Suzuki) Suzuki at his most generic, but an entertaining genre piece none the less, involving a recently released yakuza who has the diamonds from the heist for which he went to prison. Mix in guilt over the loss of his partner's leg (and later life), his partner's straying younger sister, and the treacherous boss who covets the diamonds, and you have a pretty good blend of elements. Suzuki was pretty good with black and white, in spite of his later color experiments.

269. Transsiberian (2008, directed by Brad Anderson)
270. Tell No One (2006, directed by Guillaume Canet)

The difference between a good thriller and a bad thriller: one goes through the motion of a plot without any real meaning to its characters; one uses plot to dig into the moral and psychological states of its characters. Transsiberian is riveting. Tell No One is exhausting. Transsiberian unfolds without leading the audience by the nose. Tell No One requires a 25 minute exegesis to unravel its story. Tell No One is French, but it seems like a generic Hollywood thriller (it was written by Harlan Coben). The plot hook is pretty good: a man whose wife was murdered seven years ago gets an email indicating that she may, in fact, still be alive, but from there it piles on the twists and turns until it resembles the Gordian knot. It's so busy with plot that it has no time to examine the moral or psychological dimensions of it's lead character. To its credit, it does shed some light on his professional life, in which he seems particularly affable (he's a pediatrician). But the movie never really engages. Transsiberian, on the other hand, is a big ole truckload of menace, emotional and moral conflict, and dark secrets. It's an interesting conflation of Hitchcockian thriller (it occasionally references and resembles The Lady Vanishes), while turning many of the conventions of film noir on their heads. The story follows a missionary couple from China to Moscow on the eponymous train trip. They meet another couple with suspicious circumstances. Characters vanish and reappear, and all the while, there is the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. Emily Mortimer is superb in the lead, who is led astray by homme fatale Eduardo Noriega. Her character bears a crushing weight of guilt through the movie, and Mortimer makes us feel every ounce of it. Ben Kingsley adds another ethnic character to his portfolio as the cop on the case, who has secrets all his own. It's a superior film.

And a whole bunch of Superman cartoons from the 1940s:

271. Superman: Volcano (1942, directed by Dave Fleischer)
272. Superman: Japoteurs (1942, directed by Seymour Kneitel)
273. Superman: Destruction, Inc.(1942, directed by Izzy Sparber)
274. Superman: Terror on the Midway (1942, directed by Dave Fleischer)
275. Superman: Showdown (1942, directed by Izzy Sparber)
276. Superman: Jungle Drums (1943, directed by Dan Gordon)
277. Superman: Secret Agent (1943, directed by Seymour Kneitel)
278. Superman: Eleventh Hour (1942, directed by Dan Gordon)

I don't have much to say about these except to say that there's a noticeable jump in the quality of the shorts directed by Dave Fleischer. The huge gorilla in "Terror on the Midway" makes one of the best monster entrances in film. Perhaps the most interesting film of this bunch is "Eleventh Hour," in which Clark Kent is in wartime Japan and Superman acts as a saboteur. Most of these shorts act as wartime propaganda, but that doesn't diminish their appeal.

279. Back from Eternity (John Farrow, 1956).

Sort of an ur-version of The Flight of the Phoenix, set in a jungle rather than in a desert. Robert Ryan is good as the pilot. Anita Eckberg provides the eye candy. Rod Steiger chews the scenery. Gene Evans goes crazy. It's not a particularly great film, but it's entertaining. John Farrow was adept at these kinds of entertainments.

280. Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942)

This starts as a screwball comedy. I mean, it's directed by Leo McCarey and stars Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, so it's screwball all the way, right? But after a screwball comedy set-up, it veers into very dark territory as Grant and Rogers embark on a tour of Europe as Rogers's husband (the always nefarious Walter Slezak) undermines government after government for the Nazis. In truth, it's a mix of elements that doesn't work very well. It's not funny enough to stand as a comedy (like, say, To Be or Not To Be) and the comedy undermines the serious overtones. Still, Grant was at the height of his abilities in this movie, and he shades effortlessly from charming and goofy to dark and serious. It's a tour de force looking for a better movie.

281. Boomerang (Elia Kazan, 1947)

Excellent courtroom drama in which a prosecutor goes against the grain and attempts to prove the man in the dock innocent of shooting a priest in the back of the head. This is one of those docudrama/film noir hybrids that Fox loved so much in the late forties, but there's a guiding political principle under the film, too, provided by director Elia Kazan. Dana Andrews is good in the lead. The supporting cast is a gallery of interesting faces, including Arthur Kennedy, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, and Jane Wyatt. It's nice to see this title make it to the shelves after Fox bungled its original DVD release.

And then on to the October Horror Movie Challenge.

Something New Under the Sun

Every so often, when I think I've seen just about everything, something comes along and knocks me on my ass. This week, it's (201.) "Muto," a short Argentinian film the likes of which I've never seen before. Seriously, it's a mind-blower. I hesitate to even describe it, so I'll just refer anyone and everyone to it:


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

My significant other was seriously creeped out by it, so I guess it's a horror movie of sorts.

In more mundane pursuits, and in brief, this is what I saw last week:

202. There's nothing like a pale imitation to highlight the virtues of a terrific film. Hence, 20 Centimeters (2005, directed by Ramón Salazar) makes Hedwig and the Angry Inch seem better and better as its running time unfolds. Where Hedwig was powered by rage, and by a ferocious score, 20 Centimeters seems a bit limp (if you'll pardon the pun). Perhaps this is a result of having a central character who's a narcoleptic, which is in itself a kind of desperation. I mean, really, a transsexual narcoleptic with an eight inch cock whose roommate is a dwarf? Right. That's reaching guys. Still, it's not all bad. The opening musical number is pretty good, as is the closing number. This last is a version of Queen's "I Want to Break Free," which, like most Queen covers, only serves to highlight how dependent they were on the bombast of Freddie Mercury's voice. But I digress. This gets docked a bunch of points for having yet another transsexual prostitute as a central character, which is not a good way to kick off gay pride month (at least not for me). Feh.

203. I can only imagine the impact that King Hu's Come Drink With Me had when it was originally released in 1966, but it still holds up remarkably well today (compare it, for example, to Chang Cheh's movies from the same period and it looks downright sophisticated). Hu was a master at composing the film frame, something not always a strength in martial arts films (in which framing the action takes precedence over most other elements), and this film is well-composed in depth. The Shaws spent the next two decades copying the production design of this movie. There are several sequences in this movie that take some of the novelty out of the scrolling battle in Oldboy, because Hu and his collaborators were there forty years earlier. There's also a touch of Fritz Lang in the way scenes transition from one to the next--my favorite being the scene immediately after Golden Swallow roughs up the bad guys in the tavern, in which we see them all sitting around the dinner table swaddled in bandages and nursing their hurts. Perhaps most interesting is the treatment of Hu's heroine, Golden Swallow, played by the great Chang Pei Pei. She is every inch the kung-fu badass and never becomes a fainting violet, even after being poisoned. Compare this to Chang Cheh's treatment in the sequel (Golden Swallow), in which she is the title character, but barely registers as support. The Weinsteins are atoning for a lot of sins towards Asian cinema with their Dragon Dynasty label. This is a terrific disc, and something of a revelation for me after knowing this film only from nth-generation bootlegs.

204. Garson Kanin's My Favorite Wife (1940) finds Cary Grant being tormented by his most persistent comic foil. Though they only made three movies together, no one got the best of the Grant persona more decisively than Irene Dunne. In this movie, and in the very similar The Awful Truth, she puts the screws to Grant's unflappability like no other actress (Kate Hepburn included). Mind you, this is a comedy of manners--a marriage comedy--and as such, it's pretty much candy. But it's a rich, dark chocolate of a candy.

205. Dunne and Grant performed together on Radio in a version of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1949, directed by H. C. Potter), but Myrna Loy is fine in the movie version. The movie itself is sociologically interesting as a portrait of the aspirations of Americans with the war and the depression finally behind them, but at its core, it's a sitcom, and a fairly obvious one at that. Grant and Loy make the whole thing appealing, but it's hard to take the sophisticated Grant as the kind of guy who gets rooked and rooked and rooked again as he builds his dream home. For that matter, it's strange seeing Grant joining the bourgeoisie. But the Grant persona is durable, and it works even here.

Calamari

I've put two new reviews on my main web site. They are:

Iron Man (expanding--to put it mildly--on the comments I made here a couple of weeks ago)

and

188. The Call of Cthulhu (2005, directed by Andrew Leman), which in abstract wonders about H. P. Lovecraft's relationship with calamari and lauds the D. I. Y. aesthetic that informs this particular vanity project.

During the course of last week, I also watched:

189. The Magic Blade (1976, directed by Chor Yuen), in which Ti Lung plays a wu xia swordmaster who falls in with his rival, played by the ubiquitous Lo Lieh. Both are pursued by the agents of Mr. Yu, who seeks to assert his complete dominance over the world of martial arts by laying his hands on the fabled Peacock Dart and by eliminating his main rival. Much intrigue and swordplay ensues. This is nowhere near as accomplished a film as some of Chor Yuen's other movies, and show signs of editorial tampering by the higher-ups at Shaw, but it's still entertaining as all get-out. In addition to the feature itself, the newish Image disc is festooned with 30-plus trailers for other Shaw films and other HK actioners in general. Many of these look terrible, but they still kinda sorta stoked a dormant appetite for stupid HK action films that I didn't know I still had. We'll see what comes of it.

190. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008, directed by Steven Spielberg) doesn't change the essential calculus of the Indiana Jones movies, which is to say that the series still consists of Raiders foremost, and then the other movies in various orders of preference. Personally, I liked this new film. It may actually be the best of the not-Raiders films, but I haven't seen the other two in years, so I may be talking out of my ass. Regardless of what flaws there are--and there are many--the movie is an agreeable entertainment by a director who used to be the best entertainer in the world. There are still sparks. There's an image of Indiana Jones staring up at a mushroom cloud in this film that may be the best shot in the entire series. My main complaint with this film is with Harrison Ford, actually. Not because he's too old for the movie--he's not--but rather that he doesn't seem like the same actor. The Ford of Star Wars and the first Jones movies had an edge of anger that is absent in this movie. I suppose it's reasonable that Ford has mellowed with age, so why not grant Dr. Jones the same license? Sure, but it's still jarring. My favorite part of the movie is how it suggests the adventures we didn't get to see in the intervening years since the last film. "Colonel Jones?" "Consultant at Roswell?" "Mission to Berlin?" Suggestive and tantalizing. I like that.

191. I don't have anything to add to the dialogue about The Godfather (1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola), except to note in passing that this is the first time I've really zeroed in on the influence of Luchino Visconti on this movie.

192. It's a strange quirk of fate that placed the classic film libraries of Warner Brothers and MGM in the hands of the same corporation, because they couldn't be more politically and sociologically different. Jack Warner was a New Deal liberal, and his films reflected that. Louis B. Mayer was a conservative plutocrat, and his films reflected that. It's oil and vinegar. I don't have a point here, but it's a thought that occurred to me while watching George Cuckor's The Philadelphia Story (1940), which is firmly set amongst the rich and idle. It also occurred to me that all of my favorite Cary Grant comedies--His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, this--are marriage comedies. Again, I don't have a point, except perhaps that it's a Shakespearean tradition carried forward (all of the comedies end in marriage). This is fun and witty, and the stars (not limited to the film's troika of Grant, James Stewart, and Kate Hepburn) are all charmers.