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A LADY TO LOVE – Edward G. Robinson, Vilma Banky

A Lady to Love (1930)
Direction: Victor Sjöström
Screenplay: Sidney Howard; based on his play They Knew What They Wanted
Cast: Vilma Banky, Edward G. Robinson, Robert Ames, Richard Carle, Lloyd Ingraham, Anderson Lawler
 

Edward G. Robinson, Robert Ames, Vilma Banky in A Lady to Love
 

Edward G. Robinson was only 37 years old when he gave this hammy, scene-stealing, over-the-top performance as Tony, a middle-aged Italian grape grower in Napa Valley, California, in Victor Sjöström’s A Lady to Love. Robinson is loud, peripatetic, hyperkinetic, and his accent sometimes sounds a bit too much like Chico Marx’s. But it all works. It’s believable and true, even if not always sympathetic.
When Tony notices a pretty blonde waitress, Lena (Vilma Banky), at a [...]

Miriam Hopkins: Allan Ellenberger Interview I

Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins in All of Me

Miriam Hopkins: Allan Ellenberger Interview Intro
First of all, why Miriam Hopkins?
The films she made with Bette Davis — The Old Maid (1939) and Old Acquaintance (1943) — first attracted me to Miriam Hopkins. Also, the stories of their purported feud and Davis’ virulent comments that she spouted forth during her last days piqued my interest. Davis has always been a favorite of mine, so anyone who could incur this diva’s wrath must have something going on. I also felt that Hopkins is one of the most underrated actresses from Hollywood’s golden era. Regardless of the quality of her vehicles, she always gave an interesting performance.
 
When people think of the major [...]

Ann Dvorak: Q&A with Biographer/Collector Christina Rice

The name Ann Dvorak wouldn’t ring even a faint bell for most people around at the beginning of the 21st century. Most people, I said — but definitely not everyone.
A few days ago, author James Robert Parish heard a loud gong when I told him during lunch at a West Hollywood restaurant that I was working on a q&a with collector-turned-biographer Christina Rice, who’s currently writing Ann Dvorak’s life story.
"I love Ann Dvorak! I still remember her in I Was an American Spy, when the Japanese villains stick a hose down her throat. I never forgot that!"
I haven’t watched I Was an American Spy (see q&a below for more info on that little-seen film), but I remember being impressed by [...]

Barbara Stanwyck on Turner Classic Movies

Summer Under the Stars
Barbara Stanwyck
 
Tuesday, August 19, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
My understanding is that there have been precious few transformations more radical than that of Ruby Stevens of Brooklyn into Barbara Stanwyck of Hollywood — the highest-paid woman in the United States in 1944.
In my view, Barbara Stanwyck is one of the greatest film actresses ever; a performer nearly incapable of a phony moment on screen. Strangely, considering the kind of roles she took — sometimes sexy, sometimes malevolent, sometimes androgynous, sometimes all three (and more) — I’ve always found it curious that actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Katharine Hepburn could have large followings today while Stanwyck remains well-known mostly among Old Hollywood lovers.
Now, which [...]

Mick LaSalle Discusses Miriam Hopkins, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ruth Chatterton

Mick LaSalle, the author of Complicated Women and Dangerous Men, on Pre-Code actresses Norma Shearer, Miriam Hopkins, Ruth Chatterton, and Barbara Stanwyck.
The clip is described as "raw interview footage" for the 2003 Turner Classic Movies documentary Complicated Women.
Clip posted by LaSalle himself as Precodehollywood.
 

 
William Holden Homage Clip
Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING Set Recreated by Channel 4
SHOESHINE Clip
AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE Clip
CAIRO STATION Clip
BEN-HUR Chariot Race Clip
 

THE MISLEADING LADY – Claudette Colbert, Edmund Lowe

The Misleading Lady (1932)
Direction: Stuart Walker. Screenplay: Adelaide Heilbron and Caroline Francke; from Charles W. Goddard and Paul Dickey’s play. Cast: Claudette Colbert, Edmund Lowe, Stuart Erwin, Robert Strange, George Meeker, Selena Royle, Curtis Cooksey, William Gargan, Nina Walker
 
While hardly a cinematic masterpiece, Paramount’s 1932 romantic comedy The Misleading Lady (filmed at New York’s Astoria studios) is an amusing romp that makes no special demands on its audience and has no pretensions about having something "profound" to say. Although the premise — taken from Charles W. Goddard and Paul Dickey’s 1913 Broadway play — is fairly predictable about ten minutes into the film, The Misleading Lady still offered enough wit to keep this viewer interested. At a brisk 67 minutes, [...]

RAIN – Joan Crawford, Walter Huston

Rain (1932)
Direction: Lewis Milestone. Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson; from John Colton and Clemence Randolph’s play, adapted from W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “Miss Thompson.” Cast: Joan Crawford, Walter Huston, William Gargan, Beulah Bondi, Guy Kibbee, Matt Moore, Walter Catlett
 

 
The first thing you notice in the credits of the 1932 United Artists version of Rain is that Joan Crawford’s name is above the title (by courtesy of MGM). Then there’s that moody score by Alfred Newman. A perfect beginning for a perfect movie.
As W. Somerset Maugham’s short-story heroine Sadie Thompson, Crawford makes her grand entrance eight minutes into the picture. She emerges from behind a beaded curtain, one limb at a time, all tarted up in cheap costume jewelry, a cigarette dangling [...]

WAY OUT WEST – William Haines

Way Out West (1930)
Direction: Fred Niblo. Screenplay: Byron Morgan and Alfred Block; dialogue by Alfred Block, Joe Farnham, Ralph Spence, and Henry Sharp. Cast: William Haines, Leila Hyams, Cliff Edwards, Polly Moran, Francis X. Bushman Jr. (aka Ralph Bushman), Charles Middleton, Vera Marsh
 
When a crooked carnival barker cheats a gang of tough cowboys in a roulette game, he is forced to work off the money by becoming a personal slave on their ranch. The joke is that the dandy city slicker, Windy (short for Windermere — as in "Fan"?), is played by William Haines.
Out of all Haines’ talkies, Way Out West is the one that allows him to camp up to the highest degree his screen persona as an effete, [...]

THE GREAT GABBO – Erich von Stroheim, Betty Compson

The Great Gabbo (1929)
Direction: James Cruze. Screenplay: Story by Ben Hecht; Continuity and Dialogue by Hugh Herbert. Cast: Erich von Stroheim, Betty Compson, Donald Douglas, Marjorie Kane
 
The Great Gabbo is one terrific early talkie. Sure, the film is old and creaky, while its technical aspects are cheap and primitive. But the story, the music, and the performances always keep me hooked.
Directed by James Cruze, a top name in the silent era, from a story by Ben Hecht (continuity and dialogue by Hugh Herbert), The Great Gabbo follows an arrogant ventriloquist, that’s the Gabbo of the title (Erich von Stroheim), who abuses his girlfriend-cum-assistant (Cruze’s then wife, Betty Compson) one too many times. After his beloved finally walks out on him, [...]

DOWNSTAIRS – John Gilbert

Downstairs (1932)
Direction: Monta Bell. Screenplay: Lenore Coffee and Melville Baker; from a story by John Gilbert. Cast: John Gilbert, Virginia Bruce, Paul Lukas, Olga Baclanova, Reginald Owen, Hedda Hopper, Bodil Rosing, Otto Hoffman, Karen Morley
 

 
Monta Bell’s seldom-seen drama Downstairs proves not only what a great actor John Gilbert was, but, quite contrary to legend, how competent his voice sounded.
All seems joyful in the house of the Baron and Baroness von Burgen (Reginald Owen and Freaks‘ Olga Baclanova). A symbiotic relationship exists between the servants downstairs and the masters above. So much so that the Baron celebrates the wedding of his head-butler (Paul Lukas) to the lady’s maid (Virginia Bruce) in opulent fashion, even bequeathing the butler with a box that [...]

GOLDEN DAWN – Vivienne Segal

Golden Dawn (1930)
Direction: Ray Enright. Screenplay: Walter Anthony; from Otto A. Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II’s operetta. Cast: Walter Woolf, Vivienne Segal, Noah Beery, Alice Gentle, Dick Henderson, Lupino Lane, Edward Martindel, Marion Byron, Nina Quartero, Sojin, Otto Matieson, Julanne Johnston
 
Ray Enright’s early musical Golden Dawn should be filed under the "What Were They Thinking" department. Warner Bros. certainly wasn’t expecting commercial or popular success with this demented story set in darkest East Africa during World War I.
The plot goes as follows: the Germans are holding British prisoners. The "natives" are preparing for a marriage between the incredibly light-skinned Dawn (Vivienne Segal) to a religious statue of Mulungu. The white occupiers frown on such heathen practices, especially if it [...]

BLONDE VENUS – Mae West, Cary Grant

Blonde Venus (1932)
Direction: Josef von Sternberg. Screenplay: Jules Furthman and S. K. Lauren. Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant, Dickie Moore, Gene Morgan, Rita La Roy, Sidney Toler, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Hattie McDaniel
 
Blonde Venus is my favorite of the Marlene Dietrich-Josef von Sternberg collaborations. This melodrama simply has it all.
The film begins with the ever-dull and wooden Herbert Marshall as an American soldier in Germany during World War I. At one point, he and his troops come upon a group of lovely Fräulein bathing nude in a secluded lake.
Now, I must stop the plot description to comment on this sequence, which I find humorous because one of the soldiers is played by Sterling Holloway — the voice of [...]

APPLAUSE – Helen Morgan – d: Rouben Mamoulian

Applause (1929)
Direction: Rouben Mamoulian. Screenplay: Garrett Fort; from Beth Brown’s novel. Cast: Helen Morgan, Joan Peers, Fuller Mellish Jr., Jack Cameron, Henry Wadsworth, Roy Hargrave
 

 
Rouben Mamoulian was one of the most talented directors of all time. His early musical Applause proves it.
Applause stars stage legend Helen Morgan (above) as Kitty Darling, a chubby burlesque dancer who can do a high-kick number onstage, then proceed directly to her dressing room and have a baby. Talk about being an accomplished multi-tasker…
Kitty’s taste in men, however, is horrible. The baby’s father is on death row and her current boyfriend convinces her to put the kid away in a convent. Years later, Kitty’s new man forces her to bring the daughter to [...]

Forbidden Hollywood: Pre-Code Movies on TCM

The new documentary Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood and five Pre-Code films will be shown on Turner Classic Movies on Monday, March 3 (more details below).
The five racy Pre-Coders are: The Divorcee (1930), A Free Soul (1931), Night Nurse (right, 1931), Three on a Match (1932), and Female (1933). Those are films made before religious zealots, abetted by frightened studio heads (it was the Depression, after all), put Hollywood movies in a chastity straitjacket that would last about three decades. (See also Pre-Code Paramount and Pre-Code Fox.)
The following day, Warner Video will release the three-disc set TCM Archives: Forbidden Hollywood Volume 2, featuring the five films and the documentary (more details below).
I couldn’t find [...]

Gloria Swanson in THE TRESPASSER: Academy Screening

Mother love and melodrama in The Trespasser: Purnell Pratt, Gloria Swanson, and Robert Ames, who would die two years after this film was made.
 
Academy film scholar Cari Beauchamp will talk about the convoluted personal and professional relationship between actress Gloria Swanson and producer Joseph P. Kennedy (right) in a program featuring highlights from her upcoming book, Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, on Thursday, November 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood.
A rare screening of Edmund Goulding’s The Trespasser, a 1929 melodrama produced by Kennedy (uncredited) and starring Swanson in her first talkie, will follow Beauchamp’s presentation. Admission is free.
According to the Academy’s press release, Joseph P. Kennedy Presents "offers [...]

Rouben Mamoulian Retrospective at Film Forum

"Mamoulian," a complete retrospective of Hollywood director Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987), one of cinema’s greatest stylists and innovators, will run at the Film Forum from Friday, September 7 through Tuesday, September 18.
As per the Film Forum’s press release, Mamoulian was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, to an Armenian family. He worked at the Moscow Art Theater while attending university, and, following a chance meeting with industrialist/philanthropist George Eastman (founder of the Kodak film company) he moved to Rochester, New York, to direct plays.
Shortly thereafter he was on Broadway, directing Dorothy and Dubose Heyward’s Porgy, which became the basis for George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, a musical that Mamoulian would also direct. [See Porgy and Bess screening in New York.]
That initial [...]

Fox Before the Code at Film Forum

New York City’s Film Forum, the institution that about a year ago presented the Paramount Before the Code film series, will have a Fox Before the Code (and Fox before it became 20th Century-Fox) series between Dec. 1-21.
The Pre-Code era went from about 1928, or the beginning of talking pictures, to mid-1934, before the Production Code — a series of moralistic rules and regulations — became fully implemented by the studios, so as to avoid federal censorship of motion pictures (then not considered an art form, and thus not covered by the First Amendment.)
Among the rarities to be screened during the three-week festival are Ben Stoloff’s Goldie (1931, Sun., Dec. 3), which has "cash hungry" Jean Harlow in [...]

Rudy Vallee, THE VAGABOND LOVER on Turner Classic Movies

Turner Classic Movies Alert:
For those living in the U.S., TCM will be showing three early talkies:
The musical The Vagabond Lover, starring the Elvis Presley of the late 1920s — in terms of popularity, that is — Rudy Vallee (if Elvis suffered from paralysis, he would have sung the way Vallee did). Also in the cast, future Academy Award-winning box-office superstar Marie Dressler, and Loretta Young’s sister, Sally Blane. The director, Marshall Neilan, guided Mary Pickford in numerous silent films, and was one of the top Hollywood directors of the 1910s and 1920s. Neilan’s alcoholism, short temper, and animosity toward MGM honcho Louis B. Mayer helped derail his career.
The Vagabond Lover will be followed by another early talkie directed by Neilan, [...]

San Sebastián 2006: Ernst Lubitsch Retrospective

One of the highlights of this year’s San Sebastián International Film Festival is a mouth-wateringly thorough Ernst Lubitsch Retrospective.
Besides the obligatory titles, such as the witty 1939 comedy of bright lights and Communism, Ninotchka, and the delightful 1934 version of The Merry Widow, the retrospective is also showcasing a large number of Lubitsch rarities (including a few fragments of mostly lost films), ranging from his earliest work in Germany — among them several Pola Negri vehicles and the gender-bending 1918 comedy Ich möchte kein Mann sein / I Don’t Want to Be a Man, starring the German Mary Pickford, Ossi Oswalda — to some of his little seen Hollywood films, such as the 1931 psychological drama Broken Lullaby / [...]

JEWEL ROBBERY – William Powell, Kay Francis

Jewel Robbery (1932)
Direction: William Dieterle
Screenplay: Erwin C. Gelsey, from Ladislas Fodor’s 1931 play Ekszerrablás a Váci-uccában and Bertram Bloch’s English-language adaptation, Jewel Robbery
Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright, Alan Mowbray
 

Film scholars consider the 1932 comedy Trouble in Paradise to be the best work of actress Kay Francis. I disagree. Francis was good in everything she did — and if one particular performance could be named her best, that would be found in another 1932 release, the romantic melodrama One Way Passage.
That same year — no less than seven Francis vehicles were released in 1932 — Kay Francis starred in another naughty and noteworthy comedy, Jewel Robbery. Jewel Robbery, however, is not on the same level as [...]

THE BARKER d: George Fitzmaurice

The Barker (1928)
Direction: George Fitzmaurice. Screenplay: Benjamin Glazer; dialogue by Joseph Jackson; titles by Herman J. Mankiewicz, from Kenyon Nicholson’s 1927 play. Cast: Milton Sills, Dorothy Mackaill, Betty Compson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
 

Who does your hair? Milton Sills is envious of Dorothy Mackaill’s modern chic bob.

 
FATHER KNOWS LESS
Recently restored by UCLA, The Barker is one of those strange hybrids made at the dawn of the sound era: certain sequences have dialogue, others have only a background score and intertitles. The Barker, in fact, is stranger than most for the dialogue isn’t restricted to one reel or two. Characters start talking unexpectedly, only to go silent again a few scenes later. Besides its historical importance as one of those transitional curiosities, this [...]

ONE HYSTERICAL NIGHT d: William James Craft

One Hysterical Night (1929)
Direction: William James Craft. Screenplay: Earle Snell; dialogue by Reginald Denny. Cast: Reginald Denny, Nora Lane, E.J. Ratcliffe, Fritz Feld, Slim Summerville, Joyzelle, Jules Cowles, Walter Brennan, Margaret Campbell, Rolfe Sedan
 
MAD DULL BALLROOM
If nothing else, the silly (and mistitled) One Hysterical Night — Reginald Denny’s first all-talking vehicle — serves as a good explanation as to why Denny, Universal’s top male star and one of the most popular performers of the 1920s, saw his stardom quickly fizzle when talkies appeared on the scene.
Denny’s voice is fine — even though this Surrey-born "All-American Boy" (or rather, "All-American Boy-About-Town") had a subtle English accent — and his comedy skills are passable. But instead of offering a prestige production [...]

STRANGE INTERLUDE by Robert Z. Leonard

Strange Interlude (1932)
Direction: Robert Z. Leonard. Screenplay: Bess Meredyth and C. Gardner Sullivan, from Eugene O’Neill’s play. Cast: Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Alexander Kirkland, Ralph Morgan, May Robson, Robert Young, Maureen O’Sullivan, Henry B. Walthall, Mary Alden, Tad Alexander
 
LOVE IS A MUCH-FRUSTRATING THING
By Marcus Tucker of Shadow Waltz
With the advent of new technology comes experimentation. When sound arrived in Hollywood, films became stagebound because of the crippling limitations of the primitive equipment. But by the time MGM’s film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 Pulitzer-winning play Strange Interlude was released in 1932, filmmakers had become comfortable enough with sound to experiment with it. Thus, in Strange Interlude the thoughts of the characters are vocalized — and watching this drama about [...]

Paramount Vs. Theodore Dreiser

“This region is stuffed with hard-boiled savage climbers, the lowest grade of political grafters, quacks not calculable as to number or variety … loafers, prostitutes, murderers and perverts. In the bland sunshine here they multiply like germs in the canal zone.” That’s author Theodore Dreiser referring not to Washington, D.C., or any other world capital, but to Hollywood in the early 1930s. Dreiser was then fighting with Paramount over their adaptation of his novel An American Tragedy, inspired by a real-life murder trial that had taken place in New York state in 1906.
Robert Marchand’s article “Century-old Hollywood battle retrieved from archives” in The [Westchester, N.Y.] Journal News discusses Dreiser’s feud with Paramount. (Though the “century-old” battle was actually staged about [...]

CHICAGO (1927) – Notes

© A.M.P.A.S.
 
Background:
Maurine Dallas Watkins‘ 1926 play Chicago was based on real-life murders committed by housewife Beulah Sheriff Annan and cabaret singer Belva Gaertner. In April 1924, Annan shot her lover in her own apartment. Some reports claim that while the man lay dying, Annan kept busy sipping cocktails and listening to a foxtrot recording on her victrola. The previous month, Gaertner had shot her married lover to death.
Watkins had initially written about the two women for the Chicago Tribune. For one of her "sob sister" articles, she had Annan and Gaertner photographed together, and went on to describe the story of the two murderesses in the piece "Killers of Men."
Flynn, the play’s unscrupulous attorney, was based on mob [...]

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