Category: Movie Impresssions

A little about Bette Davis and her connection to the small, rural area I live in (as I start my Spring of Bette)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions6 Comments

This spring, I am watching and writing about Bette Davis movies, and I thought I’d kick it off with a post about Bette herself.

I don’t know why it has taken me so long to watch Bette Davis movies, considering her connection to the area I live in.

Bette Davis’s daughter, B.D. (Barbara Davis) Sherry Hyman used to own and live on a farm about 30 minutes from where I live now. Sadly, Bette did not have a good relationship with her daughter after the daughter wrote two scathing books about Bette.

If you are of a certain age, you may remember the books and the fallout from them in the 1980s.

I personally didn’t pay attention to celebrity drama when I was a child, so I didn’t know about it until recently.

I’ll get to that a little further in the post, but for now, let’s start at the beginning of Bette’s life.

Hadley Hall Meares wrote this for Vanity Affair in 2020, “Opinions? Bette Davis had a few. Born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in 1908, the legendary movie star was a tireless perfectionist and workaholic with little patience for those who did not share her vision. Consequently, her 1962 autobiography The Lonely Life and its 1987 follow-up, This ‘N That, are not short of opinions—many hard-edged, but a few remarkably tender. As her autobiographies prove, there was so much more to Davis’s wild life even than what we saw in 2017’s Feud, which charted her fabled dispute with co-star Joan Crawford.”

Bette was born to Ruth (Favor) and Harlow Morrell Davis. When she was seven years old, her father divorced her mother, and her mother raised Bette and her younger daughter Barbara on her own.

Bette began acting in school productions at the Cushing Academy in Massachusetts in her teens. She then did a summer in a small theater in Rochester, New York, before moving to New York City, where she attended the John Murray Anderson/Robert Milton School of Theatre and Dance. In 1929, she made her stage debut at Greenwich Village’s Provincetown Playhouse in The Earth Between.

Her first Broadway appearance was at the age of 21 in the comedy Broken Dishes. Her first movie appearance was a very small role in 1931’s Bad Sister with Hollywood’s Universal Pictures. In 1932, though she landed a deal with Warner Brothers and her career took off, with her breakout film being The Man Who Played God. After that she filmed 14 films over the next three years! They sure turned them out back then!

Bette was blonde when she first started out, by the way. Her hair was naturally a honey blonde but studio executives made it very blonde in the early 30s, which she didn’t like. Gradually, her hair darkened, or she darkened it to become the familiar brunette we saw later in her career.

In 1934, Bette was loaned to RKO Pictures for Of Human Bondage, a drama based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham and co-starring British actor Leslie Howard. This movie brought Davis her first Oscar nomination.

Bette’s performance in the movie as “the vulgar, cold-hearted waitress Mildred” would kick off many roles in her career as strong-willed, sometimes unlikable women. Many people interpreted who Bette was in real life based on the roles she played.

Over a career that spanned 60 years Bette made a long list of well-acclaimed films, including All About Eve, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, and Dark Victory.

She won her first Academy Award in 1935 for playing a troubled actress in Dangerous. Her second was for Jezebel in 1938. She was nominated eight more times but never won another one.

Bette was high praised by many of her peers with exception to one — her nemesis and co-star from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Joan Crawford — who said these following things about her:

“I’m the quiet one and Bette’s explosive. I have discipline, she doesn’t.”

“She has a cult, and what the hell is a cult except a gang of rebels without a cause. I have fans. There’s a big difference.”

“Sure, she stole some of my big scenes, but the funny thing is, when I see the movie again, she stole them because she looked like a parody of herself, and I still looked like something of a star.”

The pair had a hate/hate relationship for years with Bette saying this about Joan when she died: “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

Bette certainly acted confident, bold, and mouthy most of the time, but even she had doubts at times.

According to the site Golden Derby, Bette was once so worried about her career she took an ad out in Variety magazine: “Mother of three 10, 11 and 15-Divorcee. American. Thirty years’ experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. Has had Broadway. References upon request.”

Bette was married four times. She married Harmon Nelson in 1932 and they divorced in 1938. She married Arthur Farnsworth in 1940 and that marriage lasted three years before Farnsworth tragically died in a freak accident.

Her next marriage was to William Grant Sherry, and was for five years. Her last was to Gary Merrill, which lasted the longest but was also said to be violent, bitter, and full of domestic violence.

She had Barbara “B.D.”, with Sherry and adopted two children, Michael and Margot, with Merrill. Margot was discovered to be brain damaged at 3 and Bette put her in a special home, but still supported her financially, and often brought her home for long periods for visits with family.

With Bette’s permission, B.D. married Jeremy Hyman when B.D. was only 16 and Jeremy was 29. The  marriage lasted for more than 50 years but many say it was the husband who turned B.D. against her mother. Jeremy died in 2017.

What I feel bad about is that Barbara, B.D., she calls herself a pastor but still publicly shredded Bette in two different books. Maybe Bette was a narcissist and crazy, but the best thing might have been not to write a book about it all, and instead given all that hatred and bitterness to God. That’s just my opinion, of course.

Bette and B.D. during better days.

Before writing the books, Barbara commended her mother for how she raised her when she was younger and in a 60-Minute  interview said she’d adopted some of those principals for raising her own son. After the first book came out, she tried to explain in interviews that her relationship with her mother was difficult and that was what the books were about, but she also went on talk shows and just verbally eviscerated her mother’s reputation.

I watched one where she even pulled her oldest son into the action, and he described things he said Bette had done to him when he was visiting her.

B.D. received a lot of condemnation about the timing of the release of the first book because Bette had had a mastectomy and suffered a stroke not long before. Shortly after that she broke her hip. Bette’s assistant later wrote a book where she said she and Bette’s lawyers tried to keep the news of the book from her because she was still trying to heal from surgery.

Bette with B.D.

When she did find out, she was shocked, devastated, and felt deeply betrayed by the book.

“Nothing,” Bette’s assistant, Kathyrn Sermak told Vanity Fair in 2017 when her book Miss D and Me came out, “nothing compared to the betrayal of B.D.’s book. That broke her heart.”

Sermak said cinematic portrayals of Bette are inaccurate.

“I will always be grateful to Ryan Murphy for introducing [Davis and Crawford] to a new generation,” Sermak told Vanity Fair about the movie about Bette’s relationship with Joan Crawford. But that Davis is “not the woman I was on 10 years of film sets with. Miss Davis never behaved on film sets like that. She never yelled, she never screamed—at least not around me.”

Bette felt so deeply betrayed by B.D.’s book that she disinherited her from her will. I also can’t imagine why Barbara felt she needed to write another one after writing one already. More money I supposed.

Bette  divided her estate between her adopted son Michael Merrill and Sermak, with stipulations that her son take care of her adopted daughter Margo.

Bette also wrote a message to B.D. in her autobiography, written two years before she died, and in part of it she stated:

“As you ended your letter in My Mother’s Keeper – it’s up to you now, Ruth Elizabeth – I am ending my letter to you the same way: It’s up to you now, Hyman.

Ruth Elizabeth

P.S. I hope someday I will understand the title My Mother’s Keeper. If it refers to money, if my memory serves me right, I’ve been your keeper all these many years. I am continuing to do so, as my name has made your book about me a success.”

B.D. once said she wrote the book to get her mother’s attention so they would talk things out. Trust me, there are better ways to do that, and it didn’t work. The two never spoke again.

Before their relationship took a nosedive, Bette frequently visited B.D. and her sons in our tiny, rural area. There are old newspaper articles quoting people from the community I went to high school in who met her when she either visited their store or their motel. She rarely stayed with B.D. because of the friction between them.

“She looked and acted in real life like she did in the movies,” the owner of a local market told a local newspaper. “She was very straightforward, and there was no doubt that when  she said something, it was what she meant.”

The local motel where Bette stayed when she visited her daughter. The motel is no longer there.

He remembered Bette being driven around the area in a chauffeured limousine and that she once came into the sporting goods store he used to own to buy a .22-caliber rifle. He said he heard a woman say her mother would be paying for the gun and when he looked up, Bette Davis was standing there.

The owner of a local hotel called Bette “pushy and possessive.” He said she and her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson came in for dinner one night and the grandson sat on his dad’s cowboy hat. The owner’s dad scolded the child, and Bette told the owner off.

“Bette told him to shut up.”

So, maybe the real Bette was a little bit like her on-screen characters after all.

There are a ton of great movies of Bette’s to watch, but for this particular series, I have chosen the following movies:

It’s Love I’m After (April 15th)

A Working Man (April 17th)

Another Man’s Poison (April 23th)

Dark Victory (April 30rd)

Jezebel (May 1)

Dangerous (May 7)

The Letter (May 12)

Of Human Bondage (May 21)

Now, Voyager (May 28)

These are subject to change depending on what life events pop up between now and the end of May.

I’ve already watched The Bride Came C.O.D. and All About Eve and written about them on the blog.

Have you ever watched Bette Davis? Which movies did you see her in?

______

Sources and additional resources:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/11/bette-davis-autobiography-feud#:~:text=Davis%20could%20be%20equally%20complementary,recalls%20in%20This%20’N%20That:

https://www.biography.com/actors/bette-davis

https://www.goldderby.com/gallery/best-bette-davis-movies-ranked/bette-davis-movies-ranked-the-private-lives-of-elixabeth-and-essex/

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/joan-crawford-bette-davis-baby-jane-biography

This post includes affiliate links, which I will make a small commission on if you purchase from that link. You will not be charged more, but I will receive a very small amount of the purchase price.

Classic Movie Impressions: The Third Man (1949)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, Movie Impresssions7 Comments

The cinematography in The Third Man (1949 ) is outstanding. The play of light with shadows, figures stepping in and out of light and dark both visually and metaphorically, makes this a movie you can’t look away from. If you do, you might miss a subtle exchange of looks, a quick smirk, someone moving in the shadows. You have to be on high alert while also relaxing into the story. You’re on the edge of your seat but also have plenty of moments to sit back and admire the superb acting of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton.

The movie is set in post-World War II Vienna, Austria at a time when four political powers ­ America, Russia, England, and France ­ were overseeing a corrupt post-war environment.

 Cotton plays Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, who arrives without any money as the guest of his childhood friend Harry Lime (Welles). The problem is, when Martins arrives, he finds out Lime has been killed, hit by a car.

Martins wants to know how his friend died and why, and learns there was a “third man” who was present during the accident. This leads him down a path that gets him mixed up with Lime’s girlfriend and British intelligence and knocks him right into the middle of complicated moral and ethical issues.

A British noir film, The Third Man was directed by Carol Reed and produced by Reed, David Selznick, and Alexander Korda. The cinematographer was Robert Krasker, who won an Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Cinematography for his work on it.

It was written by Graham Greene for the screen, and later a novella was released.

According to information online, Korda was someone who repeatedly told Welles he would fund his projects, but at the last minute, would pull out.

“My whole time with Alex was things like that,” Welles once said. “I kept doing projects for him which I did not abandon, but which he did.”

When it came to casting for the film, everyone knew Welles fit the part  (with Greene essentially describing Welles when he described Lime) so Korda asked him. Welles agreed but then, as revenge for Korda’s past behavior, proceeded to tour Europe to film scenes for Othello (1952).

Korda wanted the contract signed and Welles locked in, so he sent his brother, Vincent, after Welles. Over the next week, Vincent had to chase Welles to Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and Capri because Wels would make sure they picked up and move to a new location each time Vincent was almost to them.

“I knew I was going to do it,” Welles later said, “but I was going to make it just as unpleasant as possible.”
I loved this part of the story shared by TCM.com:


“On the way back to London via a privately chartered plane, Welles played one final, brilliant prank on Alexander Korda. Vincent asked him to hold a basket of fruit that he had gathered for his brother during the pursuit. This was post-war Europe, so fresh fruit was an exceedingly rare item. “It was going to be offered as a great present,” Welles said. “He’d gone and picked each piece of fruit. It was too good to be true! I knew Alex wouldn’t touch any of it if it had been bitten into.” So, when Vincent was asleep, Welles carefully took a bite out of each piece.”

Yes, Welles was literally chased down for this role, and it paid off because the character he played became known as one of the most iconic villains in cinema history.

I can’t say enough about the brilliant imagery in this film. Maybe it is my photography background/experience and my absolutely obsession with black and white photography that had me gawking in amazement and visually enamored with so many of this movie’s scenes.

Here is a still from a scene in the cemetery.

Anna is standing in the middle of the shot, the focal point of the photo, and on either side of her are rows of naked trees, forcing the viewer’s eyes to follow the trees down to Anna and only then wander slowly to Holly, watching her walk away. There is a barren feeling to the scene — the nakedness of the trees, the pale white of the sky showing it’s an overcast day, Anna with her head down, clearly in thought as she’s walking away, Holly watching her with a hint of sadness in his gaze.

Then there is this still from one of the most famous scenes in the movie.

Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN (1949). Courtesy: Rialto Pictures / Studiocanal

There’s a chase through the sewers going on, Welles’ character is on the run and what is so incredible about this entire scene is how the tunnel forms a tunnel for our eyes, once again bringing our focus right to the man running in the middle of the scene, toward the light, toward freedom that he may or may not ever reach.

It was hard for me to take my eyes off this film, not only because of the story but because of the visual smorgasboard.

There are quite a few reviews of the movie online, with many of them agreeing that The Third Man is one of, if not the, greatest noir film ever made.

Tom Spoors from Loud and Clear Reviews writes: “Almost every frame of The Third Man is a visual marvel, employing all kinds of cinematic techniques. There’s plenty of dutch angles, sure, but what I found even more interesting is the way that Reed uses shadows. He puts his main character in a situation and a location that is brand new to him, and builds this world to be one constantly cloaked in mystery. Reed places silhouettes around every corner, plasters every wall with them, creating a city that almost doesn’t feel real. It’s an atmosphere that I don’t think has ever been captured again to this extent, and perhaps the biggest reason why the moviehas gone on to be one of the most critically acclaimed noirs of all time. Simply put, no other film in its genre looks or feels quite like it.”

Philip French of The Guardian wrote about the movie: “From the moment the first audiences saw the opening image of Anton Karas’s zither filling the screen with the nerve-jangling Harry Lime Theme (before, indeed, they had heard the word “zither”), they knew that with the second collaboration between director Carol Reed and author Graham Greene they were in for something special. At its end they recognised (British spelling) they’d seen a near-perfect work, what we now call a noir classic.”

It’s become a tradition for me to share and then disagree with the late film critic Roger Ebert’s reviews on here but this time I can’t.

“Of all the movies I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies. I saw it first on a rainy day in a tiny, smoke-filled cinema on the Left Bank in Paris. It told a story of existential loss and betrayal. It was weary and knowing, and its glorious style was an act of defiance against the corrupt world it pictured. Seeing it, I realized how many Hollywood movies were like the pulp Westerns that Holly Martins wrote: naive formulas supplying happy endings for passive consumption.”

If you haven’t seen the movie, you really need to and find out if this scene below is a flashback or … what’s really going on….

Sources:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/82839/the-third-man

https://loudandclearreviews.com/the-third-man-review/https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-third-man-1949

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/

Classic Movie Impressions: Another Thin Man (1939)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, Movie Impresssions, The Thin Man Movies, The Thin Man Movies8 Comments

I’ve been watching and writing about what are known as The Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

I’ve already written about the first two movies, and you can find those recaps/reviews/thoughts here and here.

Today I am writing about the third movie in the series, Another Thin Man.

If you have not seen the first two movies, there is a spoiler in this one, just to warn you.

You’ve been warned. Are you ready?

You sure? Time to look away if you don’t want to know….

….

….

…..

Okay. You’ll have to know now if you haven’t already left.

In this movie, we have an addition to our mystery-solving team —  Nick Jr.

That’s right. Nick and Nora Charles have had a baby since the last movie and what a cute baby he is.

He isn’t a central part of the somewhat confusing plot of this movie, but he is an adorable addition. You would actually suspect there would be a baby in this one if you saw the end of the last movie when Nora was knitting baby booties.

Somewhat convoluted plots seem to be the norm for The Thin Man movies, but let’s be honest, we aren’t just here for the mystery — we are here for the Nick and Nora banter and one-liners.

We are here for scenes like one where Nick finds Nora at a night club with men all around her, gently makes his way to her, and says, “Now, Mommy, you know you can’t be out until the doctor says it’s okay for you to leave quarantine.”

That clears the room fast, and the couple is left to compare notes with each other on their investigation.

Let’s go back a bit and give an overview of the movie.

Nick (William Powell) and Nora (Myrna Loy) accept an invitation to visit a family friend who also helps with Nora’s money (she’s an heiress if you remember from the previous movies), Col. Burr MacFay (C. Aubrey Smith – who I have been seeing in a lot of old movies I’ve been watching lately). MacFay is convinced his neighbor, Phil Church, who he worked with before, and is a known criminal, is trying to kill him.

No one else in the family is sure about this but MacFay calls Nick and Nora in the middle of the night practically begging them to help him find out.

While they are there, the dog of MacFay’s daughter is murdered brutally (that was dark) and a knife is thrown at Nick when he tries to talk to Phil Church (Sheldon Leonard).

It was also quite odd that when they were driving in to the estate, Nick saw a stabbed, “dead” body along the road, but when he stopped to investigate the body was gone and the chauffer ran off into the woods.

Skipping ahead, without spoiling too much, I can tell you that MacFay is murdered and right afterward Church disappears.

This leaves Nick and Nora to help the police investigate if Church actually murdered him or if someone else did.

Everyone else involved with the first two movies returned for this one, even the creator of Nick and Nora, noir crime writer Dashiell Hammet, who helped with the screenplay again this time, but was kicked off the last movie for drinking too much.

The two married, Oscar-winning writers who tried to kill the series by writing a baby in —  Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich —  even came back, but this was their last movie in the series, which Myrna Loy said negatively affected the last three movies.

“Do you know I never saw them at Metro?” she wrote in her autobiography. “It’s terrible, really, but unless they sent for the writers to get us out of a hole, we seldom saw them on the set….I didn’t meet the Hacketts until I moved to New York in the fifties. We became friends, I’m happy to say, and Albert facetiously explained one day why they didn’t write the last three Thin Man pictures: ‘Finally I just threw up on my typewriter. I couldn’t do it again; I couldn’t write another one.’ Perhaps we all should have concurred; those last three never really touched the previous ones.”

Director Woody VanDyke returned as well.

The movie almost wasn’t made, however, due to a health scare with its leading man, William Powell, as well as the sudden, unexpected death of his fiancé, Jean Harlow, right before filming.

William Powell and Jean Harlow

Powell was treated for cancer in 1938. Jean passed away in 1937. It was a more tired and depressed Powell who returned for the movie, even though his cancer treatments were successful. According to TCM.com, the cast and crew did their best to lift his spirits.

“Powell was given a standing ovation by the cast and crew on his first day on the set of Another Thin Man,” an article by Lang Thompson shares. “According to author Charles Francisco in the biography, Gentleman: The William Powell Story, “Powell, looking remarkably fit and tanned, seemed embarrassed by the attention. He held up his hands and the familiar grin began to play at the corners of his mouth as he tried to think of something funny to say. The applause stopped, and Bill found that he couldn’t speak. Myrna Loy rushed over to him and gave him a kiss and a big hug.”

To help with Powell’s recovery, VanDyke, usually known as a no-nonsense guy, cut shooting hours down to six hours a day and let Powell rest whenever he needed.

Powell’s illness kept him from being able to take the role of Maxim de Winter in Hitchock’s Rebecca. The role went to Laurence Olivier instead. Personally, I believe Olivier was a better fit.

Another Thin Man ended up being one of the highest-grossing films of 1939.

Up next in our series will be Shadow of the Thin Man from 1941. We will see if Myrna was right about the last three not being as good as the first three, with Hackett and Goodrich not on board.

You can read my impressions of the other movies I have watched here.

Sources:

https://theblondeatthefilm.com/2017/08/09/another-thin-man/

https://www.tcm.com/articles/27611/another-thin-man

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/

Winter of Cagney: Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) (With A Big Spoiler)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, Movie Impresssions, Winter of Cagney5 Comments

James Cagney was only 5 foot 5 inches tall, but he commanded the attention and wielded the presence of a giant. When he walks on screen in a movie everyone focuses on him. He has that confident swagger, that “don’t mess me with me” attitude you can’t look away from.

Every movie I’ve watched this winter for my Winter of Cagney marathon/feature (whatever you want to call it) has only solidified for me what a brilliant actor Cagney was. Were there times that Cagney was Cagney no matter the role? Yeah. Sure. Happens with any actor.

But did that subtle smirk and those heavy-lidded eyes often bring a smile to my face because I knew some sharp or smart-mouth comment was about to come out and I didn’t care if he does it every movie? Absolutely.

I had to wait two months to watch Angels With Dirty Faces with him, Pat O’Brien and novice at the time, Humphrey Bogart, and had to buy it on DVD but it was worth it. The movie wasn’t what I expected and part of me wanted it to end differently but ultimately, it was a movie about loyalty and friendship between two childhood friends and how even when you think a person can’t change or do the right thing they will for those they love.

That’s why the ending had to be what it was.

It was hard, but it was necessary.

Enough about the ending for now, though, let’s talk a bit about the beginning of the movie and what it is all about overall.

Rocky Sullivan and his best friend Jerry Connelly have gotten into crime at a young age. They try to rob a railroad car and are caught. Rocky ends up getting caught and sent to reform school while Jerry escapes.

This sends the two down different paths, and 15 years later, Rocky is a hardened criminal who just got out of jail for armed robbery, and Jerry has become a priest.

Rocky comes back to the old neighborhood, but not for good reasons. He’s back for the $100,000 his crooked lawyer, Jim Frazier (Bogart), said he’d hold for him until he got out of jail, as long as he took the full blame for the robbery. Frazier helped set up the robbery and is in control of a lot of the crime world, keeps a lot of criminals out of jail, and also blackmails city officials and law enforcement.

Jerry is thrilled to see Rocky, but has no idea how deep he’s still into the crime world.

He encourages him to turn his life around and even lets Rocky get involved with mentoring a group of boys known as The Dead End gang.

Here is something interesting my husband read about the “gang.” They were actually an acting troupe who didn’t only appear in this movie, but started on Broadway in a play called Dead End in 1935. From there, producer Samuel Goldwyn brought them to Hollywood to turn the play into a film and then their popularity grew until they were making movies under various names, including the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and the Bowery Boys, until 1958.

Unfortunately, Jerry learns the hard way that Rocky has not turned his life around and begins a campaign to expose Frazier, Rocky, and everyone who is corrupt in the city.

What will result is two old friends both wanting to save each other from deadly fates.

This aspect of the film is what makes this movie more than your average gangster film. It becomes a psychological study on what two good friends will do for each other.

The film might not have become this if it weren’t for the Hays Code, which was a code set in place in …. By the film industry that required movies to not allow a variety of things to be seen, including glorification of criminals, violence, or sex.

No movie was to make the audience sympathetic to a criminal under the code.

That’s why this movie ended the way that it did and because I wasn’t sure if some of you would want to watch this film, I wasn’t going to show how it ended, but I feel like I have to talk with someone about this ending so this is your WARNING! that I am going to discuss the ending.

Skip this section if you don’t want to know what happens!

Are you ready?


Okay….

Here goes…

Rocky honestly might have been able to go straight or only serve a little time for one of his crimes after he got out of jail but when he overhears Frazier and another criminal say they are going to gun Jerry down to stop him from trying to expose them, Rocky takes matters into his own hands.

He guns them both down, runs off, and is cornered by the police in a warehouse.

Long story short, Jerry convinces him to come out, and Rocky goes to jail for murder.

He doesn’t receive a pardon from the governor, so he has to go to the electric chair. Jerry sees that the boys from The Dead End gang see Rocky as a hero, and he knows that the media is going to be there for the execution (what a different time) so he asks Rocky not to be strong at the end. He asks him to, instead, going yellow — act like a coward. He wants Rocky to look weak at the end so the boys say, “Aw man. That guy was a loser. Being tough didn’t get him anywhere. He died a criminal and a coward. I don’t want to be that way.”

Rocky refuses. He isn’t going out that way and he tells Jerry that.

There is this long walk down a dimly lit hallway (the cinematography is just great here by the way) and we viewers are wondering the whole time what choice Rocky is going to make. As he walks into the room with the electric chair he breaks the fourth wall a bit by staring us down.

Then in the end, right before he’s tied into the chair, he cracks. He begs for mercy, says he doesn’t want to die. All we see his shadow on the wall and Jerry’s face, tears in his eyes. He isn’t praying out loud. Rocky didn’t want him to.

“If you’re going to pray, do it silently, okay?”

I actually teared up at the end and again when I was telling my son about the ending because the Hays Code may have forced an ending where Cagney’s character couldn’t look like a good guy but ultimately he still looked good.

It forced an ending where we saw Cagney’s sacrificial love for his friend. He gave up looking like a tough guy with his dying breath because he knew looking like a coward would make his friend happy, make him feel like he was helping those young men.

I do, however, wonder how the movie would have ended if it hadn’t been for the Hays Code. Would Cagney have done the same thing or would he have essentially flipped his friend off (without the actual gesture) and died the way he wanted to? I’m not sure… I think either ending would have made the movie intriguing and thought provoking.

I really like the thoughts of Joseph D’Onfrio in his article for TCM on this:

“Whether the Hays Office was satisfied with the results of Angels with Dirty Faces now means very little. The fact is that audiences have debated the final climactic scenes of the movie for generations. In those scenes, Pat O’Brien, the former child-thief turned priest, asks his old pal Cagney to perform an act of cowardice so The Dead End Kids would not follow in his footsteps. The ending seems to indicate that Cagney finally sees the light and redeems himself by playing role model to the nth degree. Or does he? Are the actions of Cagney only a feeble attempt at mock-redemption? Are the pronouncements given by Pat O’Brien at the picture’s end merely pious bromides? Cagney said he wanted to leave it up to the audience to judge if Rocky Sullivan does what he does at the end to help the Kids or whether he does it simply out of fear and despair.”

Cagney was highly praised for his performance in this film and won his first Oscar for his portrayal of Rocky, which, he wrote in his autobiography Cagney on Cagney, was actually him imitating someone he’d seen on the streets of New York City when he was growing up.

“Rocky Sullivan, was in part modeled on a fella I used to see when I was a kid,” Cagney wrote. “He was a hophead and a pimp…He worked out of a Hungarian rathskeller on First Avenue between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth Streets…All day he would stand on that corner, hitch up his trousers, twist his neck and move his necktie, lift his shoulders, snap his fingers, then bring his hands together in a soft smack. His invariable greeting was “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?” The capacity for observation is something every actor must have to some degree, so I recalled this fella and his mannerisms, and gave them to Rocky Sullivan just to bring some modicum of difference to this roughneck. I did that gesturing maybe six times in the picture – that was over thirty years ago – and the impressionists are still doing me doing him.”

Like other movies Cagney was in, there was some shooting going on and like movies back then, real bullets were used in at least one scene. Cagney had learned his lesson after he was almost gunned down during the filming of The Public Enemy in 1931.

This time he told the director, Michael Curtiz, that he wouldn’t stand in front of a window as ordered and let a machine-gun expert fire away at him, which worked out well since a hail of live bullets shattered a window pane where Cagney’s head was supposed to be.

This would be Cagney and Bogart’s first, but not last time, working together. They appeared together in two more movies  in 1939: The Roaring Twenties (1939) and The Oklahoma Kid (1939). In each of the three movies they portrayed rivals.

A little trivia:

Here is a funny tidbit pulled right from an article by  D’Onfrio on TCM.com: “The genuine article, the Dead End Kids were hard nosed guys from the slums, who enjoyed being pranksters, and gave everyone a playful hard time while making Angels With Dirty Faces. Rumor had it that on a previous film with Bogart, the Kids poked fun of Bogie’s tough guy movie image and even tore the actor’s pants off in an off-the-set incident, which encouraged him to steer clear of the Kids thereafter. Only Cagney, with a similar background to the Kids, would stand up to them. One day the Dead End ringleader, Leo Gorcey, decided to play around and ad-lib a scene with Cagney. In his autobiography, the actor wrote, “I gave Leo Gorcey a stiff arm right above the nose – bang! His head went back, hitting the kid behind him, stunning them both momentarily. Then I said, “Now listen here, we’ve got some work to do, so let’s have none of this ******* nonsense….Understood?” “Yeah,” they said. One of the kids turned to Gorcey and said, “Who the hell you think you got there – Bogart?”

***

Pat O’Brien and James Cagney were good friends in real life and made several movies together, including a screwball comedy about Hollywood producers called Boy Meets Girl.

***

The original previews for the movie included a newsreel that featured the signing of the Munich Peace Pact and a speech by FDR about peace at the  World Fair.

I often forget to share where I found a movie, but I will tell you that this time I could not find this movie streaming anywhere. I had to buy a Blu-Ray of it off of Amazon but it was worth it. There are extras on the Blu-Ray that I watched last night.   

The original trailer and the cartoon that was shown at the beginning in theaters were on there, along with the trailer for Boy Meets Girl, the newsreel, a musical short, “Out Where The Stars Begin”, a looney toons feature called Porky & Daffy, commentary by Dana Polan, and the Lux Radio Theater Broadcast of the movie from 1939.

My husband said we should buy more Blu-Ray’s and DVDs so we can get the extras and I agree. We decided we will be buying one or a set once a month.

So this is the end of my Winter of Cagney. I didn’t get to watch Man of Many Faces since I couldn’t find it streaming but I hope to buy the Blu-Ray of it soon.

Up next I’ll be watching some Bette Davis movies but I won’t be starting them until April.

If you would like to read about the other movies I watched, you can see them here: https://lisahoweler.com/winter-of-cagney/

Sources:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/18627/angels-with-dirty-faces

https://bestmoviesbyfarr.com/actors/tough-guy-the-versatile-appeal-of-james-cagney/#:~:text=As%20for%20his%20distinctive%20acting,spring%20like%20a%20bantam%20rooster

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/

Winter of Cagney: The Bride Came C.O.D.

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, Movie Impresssions, Winter of Cagney5 Comments

This Winter I’ve been watching James Cagney movies.

I’ve switched the movie I was going to write about last week with the one I was going to write this week because I was going to watch the DVD of Angels With Dirty Faces I picked up, but I’ve been waiting for a night to watch it with The Husband, and that hasn’t come.

In the end, I decided to wait to watch that movie with him because he would like to see it as well, and it will be fun to watch together.

Angels with Dirty Faces stars Cagney with Humphrey Bogart, and Bogie is one of my husband’s favorite actors.

The Bride Came C.O.D. with Cagney and Bette Davis was a perfect substitute for this week, though.

It was a delightfully fun movie, and I needed it this week, so I’m glad I made the trade.

I will be watching this movie again with him soon, though, because it was just too much fun and should be watched with others.

This is a slapstick comedy where Cagney and Davis were both trying their acting talents at something a little different.

First, the premise: Davis is playing Joan Winfield, an heiress who makes impulsive decisions, and her latest impulsive decision is marrying Alan Brice (Jack Carson), a famous singer and band leader. The marriage announcement comes at just the right time for gossip and entertainment broadcaster named Hinkle who needs a big story.

He talks Brice into marrying Joan right away because it will make a great story for his broadcast.

The only issue is that Joan is on the phone with her father when Alan announces his engagement to Joan to the audience at the club and she is trying to work up the courage to tell her father she’s engaged.

Their call is cut short and she never tells him, but Hinkle arranges for her and Alan to go to a small airport to be flown by a private plane to Las Vegas where they can be married.

Steve Collins, a notorious womanizer who pretends  he is married with children so he doesn’t get roped into marriage by women who like to date married men,  owns the airport and the main plane. He’s never paid for the plane though and the finance company now wants it back.  Steve’s handy man, Pee Wee (George Tobias) tells him that Hinkle has arranged for their plane to take a famous couple to Las Vegas and Steve wonders if they will even have a plane to take them in.

Collins tries to think of a way to get the money and has no ideas until Joan’s father, oil tycoon Lucius K. Winfield (Eugene Pallette) calls the airport to try to reach his daughter and Collins strikes up a plan with Winfield to make sure his daughter doesn’t make it to Las Vegas to marry Alan Brice.

If Collins pulls off the delay, meeting Winfield with his daughter in tow in Texas instead, Winfield will pay Collins the money he needs to pay off the plane and keep the airport in business.

The first task at hand is to get rid of Hinkle and Alan which PeeWee helps Collins with. With them out of the way, Collins jumps in the plane and takes off with Joan, his plan to fly her to Texas. Unfortunately, Joan isn’t too happy with this arrangement and tries to escape, causing the plane to crash in the desert.

Here we will be introduced to Pop Tolliver (Harry Davenport), who I just loved.

I loved a lot about this movie.

It was very witty and fun, with some great lines.

Bette Davis was supposed to be 23 in the film which I found a little unbelievable but then again, Bette always looked older to me than she was.

She was actually 33 when this movie was made.

According to Frank Miller from TCM (yes, my go-to-source), Cagney made the movie on the heels of Strawberry Blonde because he wanted to break out of gangster roles.

Ann Sheridan, Ginger Rogers, and Rosalind Russell were considered for Davis’s role but when she expressed interest in trying out, Hal Willis, the producer of the movie, went to bat for her.

“In addition, she was eager to re-team with Cagney, who like her had a history of battles with the Warner Bros. management,” Miller wrote. “They had not worked together since 1934, when they teamed for the minor comedy Jimmy the Gent. Some biographers have suggested that the studio was punishing her with the film because of her notorious temperament, while others have suggested she may have wanted to emulate Katharine Hepburn, who had been equally successful in serious and comic roles. Also possible is that she was drawn to the film’s obvious similarities to It Happened One Night (1934), another tale of a runaway heiress saved from a bad marriage by the love of a simple working guy.”

There was a lot of trouble with the movie, including the writing and the fact Cagney wasn’t a fan of the sweltering heat at the shooting location of Death Valley.

Davis also wasn’t happy because while a stunt double was supposed to take the fall into a cactus for her, she had a fall of her own and ended up with 45 cactus quills having to be removed from her behind.

Neither actor was very fond of the movie years down the road and even critics bashed it with one saying, “Okay, Jimmie and Bette. You’ve had your fling. Now go back to work.” 

As for me, I found the film a lot of fun and ended up snickering at the silliness and the exchanges between our main characters.

And as I said above, Harry Davenport really added some charm to the film for me.

Have you ever seen this one?

I found it for rent on Amazon Prime but it is also available on HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube, and AppleTV.

Next week I’ll wrap up my Winter of Cagney with Angels With Dirty Faces and two weeks after that I’ll start a bi-weekly movie watch of Bette Davis films.

If you want to catch up on the other Cagney films I’ve watched this winter you can do so here:

Yankee Doodle Dandy

Taxi

The Strawberry Blonde

Mister Roberts

The Public Enemy

Love Me or Leave Me

White Heat

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/

Winter of Cagney: White Heat (with some spoilers)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, Movie Impresssions7 Comments

I’m watching James Cagney movies this winter and last week I watched one of his most acclaimed movies — White Heat (1949).

The movie is considered by film critics to be one of the best gangster films of all time.

As I often do, I’ll start this post with an online description of the movie:

“Gang leader Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) lives for his mother, planning heists between horrible headaches. During a train robbery that goes wrong, Cody shoots an investigator. Realizing Cody will never be stopped if he knows he’s being pursued, authorities plant undercover agent Hank (Edmond O’Brien) in Cody’s cell.”

This description is wrong, though, because the investigator is shot after the robbery. But the conductor is shot by Cody.

All that aside, the robbery does go wrong, partially because a member of the gang is horribly burned. The gang has to hide out and we learn that Cody is very close to his mother, who helps him plan crimes. Closer than he is to his wife who is very lazy and sleeps a lot.

This isn’t an inappropriate relationship like Hamlet or Macbeth or whichever play that was, but Cody relies on Ma for a lot — including helping him when raging headaches hit him and practically debilitate him. The gang believes his headaches are the same mental illness his father had.

His mother doesn’t want him to let the gang see him that way because he will look weak.

It doesn’t matter if he looks week because his gang is ready to turn on him and take the money they stole from the train and cut him out of the deal no  matter what.

He doesn’t know this, but he does know they have to split so the police don’t find them.

They have an injured gang member whom Cody orders one of his men to shoot. The man can’t do it, though, and leaves the burned man. The man still dies, and when he is found it is reported to the police, who eventually connect him to the gang.

A police officer sees Cody’s mom out by chance and they try to follow her back to the motel Cody, his mom and wife are staying at. She loses them but the police eventually find her car and corner Cody who shoots the investigator in the arm.

Cody is able to escape with his mom and wife, but finally decides if he really wants to shake the police, he will have to give himself up. He’s not going to admit to the big crime, though. He’s going to say he committed another crime that another criminal he knows pulled. He’ll only get about two years for that crime and it will be his alibi for the other crime. He couldn’t have robbed the train if he was committing a less serious robbery in another state, he says.

His wife and mom don’t like the idea, for different reasons.

His wife likes the idea a lot more when she realizes that her husband being in jail in another state will give her time with her husband’s second hand man, who she’s been having an affair with.

Cody’s plan works — sort of. The police figure out what he is trying to do, though, and still want to pin the first crime on him so they send an undercover cop into jail with him to try to make friends with him and find out where he hid the money from the train heist.

I’ll leave it there, so I don’t spoil what happens, but I am going to have to give a big spoiler here to discuss in the paragraph following this next one so if you don’t want to know, you need to stop here.

This movie was dark, intense, and while Cody Jarrett was a horrible man and easy to hate, I also couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him because he felt crime was the only way to make a living.

SPOILER ALERT!!


Also, the one person who loved him and he loved dies halfway through the movie. I won’t say how his mom dies but it is her death that leads to a much-talked-about scene where Cody absolutely flips out after he finds out she’s gone.

What is interesting about this scene is a couple hundred extras were used as the inmates inside the cafeteria and none of them were told what Cagney was going to do. Most of the shocked faces focused on during that scene were authentic because they were kept in the dark about Cagney’s plans. Some of them really thought Cagney had flipped out.

Another scene we need to talk about happens at the end. Throughout the movie Cody’s mom always ends their conversations by saying, “Top of the world, son! Top of the world!”

This is a line that has been used in pop culture references and parodies for years and I never knew what it was. Now I do and it’s honestly quite heartbreaking. There is so much Cody could have done with his life and not only did he choose crime but his own mother encouraged him to do so.

Cagney came back to Warner Brothers for this film after leaving for several years to start his own movie-making business with his brother. When that failed, he accepted an offer from Warner Brothers, even though Jack Warner really didn’t want him back — mainly because he needed the money.

Warner famously called Cagney, “that little b******.”

Cagney famously said of Warner in Rolling Stone Magazine, “I used to like to walk out on him, frankly, whenever my contract didn’t suit me. I’d cuss him out in Yiddish, which I had learned from Jewish friends in my days at Studyvesant High School. Drove him wild. ‘What’d he say?!’ he’d yell. ‘What’d he just call me?!’”

Their arguments mainly started over Cagney’s contracts in the 30s.

Rob Nixon wrote for TCM.com that White Heat is considered Cagney’s last good gangster film.

“An exciting, dynamic film in its own right, White Heat also stands out as the flaming finale to the era of stark, fast-paced crime films made famous by Warner Brothers and James Cagney (among other stars) from the 1930s on ­ films in which the focus was on the often violent but charismatic gangster rather than the law enforcement officials who hunt him,” Nixon wrote. “It was also the apotheosis of Cagney’s brilliant career, a kind of summing up of the memorable outlaw characters he had created. His projects that followed in the 1950s were mostly lackluster affairs, and the cocky, pugnacious star audiences had come to love was glimpsed infrequently in such films as Love Me or Leave Me and Mister Roberts (both 1955).”

The film was directed by Raoul Walsh and in addition to Cagney it starred Virginia Mayo, Edmond O’Brien, and Margaret Wycherly as Ma.

Many scenes, such as the one mentioned above were adlibbed by Cagney or Walsh.

One of those was when he got annoyed at Mayo (his wife) and he was supposed to just glare at her but instead Walsh told Cagney to kick her off the chair she was standing on. For me, this showed how nasty and heartless Cody really was  – as if the opening scenes hadn’t already shown that.

The story for the movie was written by Virginia Kellogg and she was nominated for an Oscar for it, but didn’t win and no one else was nominated. Over the years, though, the film has been praised and named as the fourth best gangster movie by the American Film Institute, has been quoted or parodied too many times to count and in  2003, the American Film Institute named Cody Jarrett in its list of the best heroes and villains of the past 100 years.

I have to be honest and say that the end of the movie annoyed me. I don’t want to give it away but it was a typical movie from the 40s and 50s with the whole idea of the bad guy suffering and the “good guys/cops” being the heroes was very cliché.

In many ways there was nothing good that was going to come for Cagney’s character, though, so things ending badly for him was probably the only way for things to go.

Next week I will be watching Angels With Dirty Faces with Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. To end the event I will be watching The Bride Came C.O.D. (which will move me into my Spring of Bette Davis).

You can read about the other movies I watched by clicking the links below:


 Yankee Doodle Dandy

Taxi

The Strawberry Blonde

Mister Roberts

The Public Enemy

Love Me or Leave Me

Sources:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/89404/the-essentials-white-heat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Heat

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/

Winter of Cagney: Love Me Or Leave Me

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, everyday musings, Winter of Cagney9 Comments

I’m watching James Cagney movies this winter.

This week, my pick was Love Me or Leave Me (1955).

This was a hard one to watch because Cagney was such a jerk in it. I started it not knowing a thing about the true story, so I kept hoping he would transform and become a nicer person before the end of the film.

That certainly did not happen, even though the makers of this movie tried to make things seem nice and tied up at the end.

First, an online description:

During the 1920s, a small-time Chicago criminal, Martin Snyder (James Cagney), discovers a beautiful dancer, Ruth Etting (Doris Day), after she’s fired from her job at a nightclub. Under Martin’s management, Ruth works her way to the top of the entertainment industry, eventually becoming a famous jazz singer and Broadway actress. But as Ruth’s popularity grows, Martin’s obsessive and controlling behavior begins to threaten her success and happiness.

This movie was shot in technicolor so don’t let any black and white photos I share here fool you. It was directed by Charles Vidor.

This movie starts with something that was in another movie I just watched this week — men at clubs paying to dance with girls. They were called taxi dancers or dancehall dancers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_dancer

It doesn’t go beyond dancing, that I know of, but I had no idea this was a thing in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s or, well, ever. There were girls who were hired as dancers and were employed by clubs. Men would pay to dance with a woman for a dance or a few or the night.

Lucille Ball apparently did this before she went into acting and it is the job her character has in the movie   from 1946. I’ll be sharing about this movie at some point here on the blog.

In this movie, Doris Day is a taxi dancer who is fired after the man who pays to dance with her gets a little too handsy…if you catch my drift.

Cagney sees her firing and her and he’s immediately hooked.

Cagney is playing Martin “Marty” Snyder, a small time Chicago gangster who also dabbled in the entertainment business.

He is definitely physically attracted to Ruth, and at first, all he wants to do is get her a new job at one of his places as a dancer so he can make her one of his girls. He wants to take her to Florida with him. To stay with him. Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge.

Ruth doesn’t want to be a dancer or his lover, though. She wants to be a singer, and when she tells him this, he finds a way to make her a singer. One way he does that is by hiring a piano player named Johnny Alderman, who works at his club as her singing coach.

Of course, she and Johnny start to fall in love, but Marty is oblivious to this and keeps finding ways to boost Ruth’s career.

He seems to think that if he does that, she’ll eventually want to thank him and sleep with him. This movie was released in 1955, so none of these things about sleeping with him are said directly, but they are implied.

There are a lot of singing sequences in this movie, but I have to agree with Roger Fristoe who wrote an article for TCM.com, and said the movie isn’t really considered a musical despite the singing. It is, instead, a dramatic biography of Ruth Etting.

Cagney and Doris Day were in a previous musical together in 1950 —The West Point Story.

 I’ve never been a huge fan of Doris Day or her singing, and I do NOT know why! There is something about her that just rubs me wrong. My previous impression of her was changed while watching this movie because she really does an amazing job as Ruth in this movie, or at least as far as I know, since I’ve never seen footage of Ruth Etting.

Doris made me feel so horrible for Ruth that I had to look for the real story of her.

Ruth Etting

It was depressing to find out that her experience with Martin, whose real name was Moe Snyder, was even worse, darker, and more complex than this movie portrayed.

In the movie, there is a culminating event that shows us even more of the true character of Marty and in real life there was one as well. I won’t tell you what happens in the movie but in real life Moe held Ruth, his adult daughter, and Ruth’s boyfriend hostage. Eventually, his daughter was able to get ahold of a gun, shot at the floor in front of her father, and then held the gun on him until the police arrived. It’s a little less dramatic in the movie.

You can read the full account here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Etting

Ruth Etting lived into her 80s and would have been in her 60s when the movie came out. She reportedly said she felt that Doris played her a little harder and tougher than she really was and she said she never worked as a dancehall girl, suggesting the wrote that into the movie simply so they could use one of Etting’s songs, “10 Cents A Dance” in the movie.

“They took a lot of liberties with my life, but I guess they usually do that kind of thing,” Etting said.

There is a violent scene between Doris and Cagney at one point in the movie that was shocking, but, according to Doris, would have been more shocking if they had kept what Doris and Cagney actually filmed.

“He attacks me savagely, and the way Cagney played it, believe me, it was savage,” she was quoted as saying in her biography. “He slammed me against the wall, ripped off my dress, my beads flying, and after a tempestuous struggle, in which I tried to fight him off with every realistic ounce of strength I had, he threw me on the bed and raped me. It was a scene that took a lot out of me but it was one of the most fully realized physical scenes I have ever played…it wasn’t until I saw the movie in its release that I became aware that most of the scene had been cut.”

It had been cut because of the censors.

This was a movie that broke Doris out of her normal good-natured, bubbly roles, and the studio did worry that her fans would revolt at the idea of her in anything so gritty.

They didn’t need to worry since the movie earned six Oscar nominations, including a third Best Actor nomination for Cagney.

It ended up winning the Academy Award for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story.

Of Doris’ performance, Cagney said in a biography about him that he watched the movie again in 1980, and “Just saw something I hadn’t noticed before. There are no other women to speak of in the cast. Doris is so very much alone, which heightens the effect of the male world upon her. How many nice girls there are, and were, in this business that were just so afflicted by the presence everywhere of intimidating males.’“

My impression of Cagney’s character is that he was a sad man who didn’t know how to get what he wanted without bullying people.

He loved Ruth Etting and was so afraid of losing her that he abused her mentally, emotionally, eventually physically, and sexually.

Ruth went for it because she wanted to be famous, and he was getting her to where she wanted to go.

I found it sad that not only did Ruth have to go through an abusive relationship with a “Marty” but Doris did as well.

According to TCM.com, “A final irony about Love Me or Leave Me is the fact that the relationship between Ruth Etting and Marty Snyder had some disturbing parallels to the relationship between Doris Day and her husband Marty Melcher. Like Snyder, Melcher also controlled Day’s business affairs, made creative decisions for her even though he had no musical experience, and lived through her work. When Melcher died in 1968, Day discovered that he had mismanaged her entire life savings of $20 million dollars, leaving her completely broke.”

While this was a well-acted and written film, I can’t say it is one I would want to watch again because of the tough subject matter. I noticed in this movie, as I have in other Cagney movies, that a lot of Cagney’s acting is done with his eyes and that signature smirk.

Next up in my Winter of Cagney is White Heat. I have heard a lot about this one and am really looking forward to it.

Here is my full revised list for the Winter of Cagney (I had to move some things around when I couldn’t find two of the movies in my original list streaming, and also haven’t yet ordered the rather expensive DVDs):


 Yankee Doodle Dandy

Taxi

The Strawberry Blonde

Mister Roberts

The Public Enemy

Love Me or Leave Me

White Heat

Angels With Dirty Faces

The Bride Came C.O.D. (which will move me into my Spring of Bette Davis)

I still hope to watch Man of A Thousand Faces when I order the DVD.

Angels With Dirty Faces

Sources:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/musical/18538/love-me-or-leave-me-1955

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Me_or_Leave_Me_(film)

https://www.dorisdaymagic.com/love-me-or-leave-me.html

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

Classic Movie Impressions: After The Thin Man

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, Movie Impresssions6 Comments

Today I am continuing reviews of The Thin Man movie with Myrna Loy and William Powell.

This time around, we have the second movie,  After The Thin Man. W.S. Van Dyke returned to direct the second film.

We start this sequel right where we left off at the end of the first movie.

In that movie, we ended with Nick and Nora Charles heading back to California from New York City where Nick solved a case in his old stomping grounds.

A little recap, on who Nick and Nora are. Nick is a former private detective who married Nora, an heiress. She inherited a bunch of money from her family so he now manages that money for her and has retired from being a PI.

Nora wants Nick to get back into being a private investigator again so she pushes him into helping out the family of a former client in the first movie.

The movie opens with Nick and Nora still on the train back from New York. When they get off the train, journalists are waiting for them and want to know all about the case Nick solved. Nick and Nora are exhausted, though, so they just want to get home and take a nap.

The only problem with this is that when they get back to their house a party is going on. Their staff is holding a party to welcome them home.

Even before the party is over, they still want sleep but they aren’t going to get it because Nora’s Aunt Katherine calls and asks them to come to a New Year’s Eve party at her house that night.

We soon learn that Nora’s cousin Selma needs help finding her missing husband, who is also a philandering jerk.

In this movie, we see a lot more of Nora’s family and find out that not only are they totally crazy, but they also don’t like Nick. At all.

Nick is very “common” to them and Nora’s aunt especially looks down on him.

There is a hilarious scene toward the beginning of the movie that underscores this perfectly and even had my teenager – who only watched that scene — laughing.

Nick and Nora arrive at the aunt’s house and there are a bunch of other elderly relatives there who become horrified when Katherine says Nora is coming with her husband.

“Oh my! Not him! You said you’d never invite him again!” one woman says with a gasp.

When the butler announces their arrival, Katherine reminds everyone to be nice and one woman says, “I really feel for poor Nora.”

Outside the door, Nick is grumbling and mumbling next to Nora.

Nora asks, “What are you muttering to yourself?”

Nick replies, “I’m trying to get all the bad words out of my system.”

There are so many funny moments in this one, but there is also a very intriguing, and somewhat dark mystery. You will realize how dark the mystery is when you reach the end of the movie.

This movie is also one of Jimmy Stewart’s earliest movies. He plays a close friend of Nora’s cousin. It’s interesting to see him so young and he really stretches his skills in this one, foreshadowing his future as a leading man.

Asta, the Charles’ dog, plays a bigger role in this one. The movie starts with him finding out his dog wife has cheated on him with the neighbor dog and has puppies by him. Yes…it’s a bit of an awkward bit, but Asta chases the neighbor dog back home a couple of times during the movie.

Asta’s real name was Skippy, by the way, which I mentioned in my post about The Thin Man. The dog also appeared in Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and The Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunn.

He was sometimes called Asta instead of Skippy in public appearances and in movie credits.

Skippy, a Wire Fox Terrier, portrayed Asta for the first three movies. Other Wire Fox Terriers trained by his trainers appeared in the other three movies.

Sometimes sequels to movies aren’t as good as the first one but that’s not the case for this one.

“After the Thin Man belongs on a short list of great sequels that, while recycling elements that made the original popular and worthy of a sequel in the first place, also expands on that foundation,” said Brian Eggert from Deep Focus Reviews.

Of Myrna and William Eggert wrote: “The two exude limitless chemistry and sophistication in their sharing of countless private jokes, endearing flirtations, blissful irresponsibility, deftly comic asides, and, of course, their ever-partying lifestyle, lubricated by regular doses of alcohol.”

Dashiell Hammett, who wrote the book the first movie was based on, was asked back to help husband and wife writers Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich work on the screenplay.

Sadly, he’d started drinking in between the first and second movies and started making demands that every secondary character from the first movie be called back for the second.

That couldn’t be done since the production was moved from New York to San Francisco.

Tension then began to develop between him and the studio and he was fired.

TCM.com shares this story about Hammett and Myrna:  “In her book Being and Becoming, co-written with James Kotsilibas-Davis, Loy recalls a memorable evening with the famous detective writer: “Hammett was an attractive kind of angular man, compelling and rather like the operatives of his stories. He told me that he’d fashioned Nora after his friend Lillian Hellman, which I found interesting….As we talked that evening, Dash drank heavily and began turning a little green. He went on and on about Lillian, while aiming overt passes at me, lunging and pawing, with my lover beside us….Dash could be intransigent, but, by God, they got him downstairs and sent him home in a studio car. That was a great disappointment to me, because I really wanted to talk to the man. I never got the chance again — Metro let him go soon after that. Apparently, he couldn’t handle the job.”

I thought it was weird that despite being nominated for an Oscar for writing the first movie, Hackett and Goodrich wanted to kill Nick and Nora off at the end of After The Thin Man so they wouldn’t have to write another movie in the series.

When the studio rejected this, they did something else at the end of the movie that they thought would kill the series. I won’t share what so if you haven’t seen the movie, you will be surprised.

Suffice it to say, their attempt to sabotage the series failed. The next movie, Another Thin Man, came out in 1939.

Getting Myrna and William for the sequel was a bit of a challenge because Myrna’s worth was higher by then. She’d been named Queen of the Movies since the last movie and after being paid half of what William was in the first movie she asked for a salary closer to his.

Because Myrna and William had already had four previous movie successes beyond The Thin Man movie, MGM gave her what she wanted.

Sources:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/27608/after-the-thin-man

https://crimereads.com/thin-man-movies/

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2005/08/the-movie-review-the-thin-man/69449/

https://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/after-the-thin-man/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skippy_(dog)

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

Winter of Cagney: The Public Enemy (1931)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, Movie Impresssions, Winter of Cagney6 Comments

I’m watching James Cagney movies this winter and up this week is The Public Enemy (1931), which was moved up in my list because I could not find Angles with Dirty Faces streaming anywhere! I was very disappointed because I really wanted to see it. I am going to look for that and Man of Many Faces (which I also could not find streaming) on BluRay or DVD so I can watch them sometime in February.

The Public Enemy is a bit of somber movie, more so than the previous movies I watched.

It appears to be a life lesson for would-be hoodlums, based on the warning at the beginning and end of the movie. The producers wanted everyone to be sure to know they weren’t glorifying criminals by making this movie, but instead warning people of what happens when they become one.

I strive not to place spoilers in my posts about the movies I watch but I will say this movie indeed showed the rough life that criminals have, usually self-inflicted.

The movie starts when our main characters — Tommy Powers (Cagney) and his friend Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) — are young boys.

They’ve already started a life of crime by sneaking into the movies and stealing buckets of beer. They steal little items and become pickpockets, and as they grow, the crimes grow with them.

The two go from being a couple of stooges for various crime bosses to leading the way in some major criminal actions, including creating a monopoly on beer production.

This was Cagney’s fifth movie and is said by film buffs to have catapulted him into a string of gangster roles he later worked hard to get out of.

This movie included one of his most infamous scenes – shoving a grapefruit in the face of his girlfriend – to show how far he’d fallen and how unfeeling he’d become. More about that a little later.

Tommy Power is the second son in the family and lives in his older brother’s shadow.

He and his brother are raised by their mother. I don’t know if we are told what happens to his father, but his father does whip him in the beginning for stealing skates and says he doesn’t care if he goes to jail.

This movie is honestly just so well done. You really need to take your time to watch it and catch some of the subtleties in the scenes.

There is one scene where Tommy and Matt go to talk to Putty Nose, a gang leader who once convinced them to a do a job for him, promising nothing would go wrong.

I’m warning you now that there are spoilers ahead —

The job went wrong and Putty Nose disappeared. Tommy and Matt have been looking to get revenge on the guy for years and now they’re big shots in the crime world.

They track Putty Nose down and he starts begging for his life. Tommy and Matt are just standing there in nice dress clothes, fanc wool winter coats, and bowler hats, stone-faced for the most part, while Putty Nose begs the not to kill him. This is after Matt’s wedding, I should add.

The guy reminds them he knew them when they were kids and asks if they remember a song he used to play for them that they loved. He goes to the piano and starts playing, and Tommy has this friendly smile while he walks over to stand behind Putty Nose while he plays. Tommy keeps smiling and nodding and then slowly pulls a gun from the inside of his jacket while the camera pans away to Matt standing by the door.

There’s a gunshot and then —something I didn’t notice but my son did — you hear Putty Nose try to finish the song through a gurgling noise. Yikes. Then there is the sound of his body sliding across the piano keys and then to the floor.

It’s all off-camera, and it almost makes it more impactful because the camera is focused not Putty Nose dying but on how Matt’s expression changes from emotionless to ever-so-slightly dazed and horrified.

A few seconds after we hear the thud of the body hitting the floor, Tommy walks back into frame and says, “I’m going to go give Gwen a call. She’s probably home by now,” while he opens the door to leave.

He doesn’t look back, he doesn’t comment on what just happened. There is no remorse at all. It’s like he just stepped on a bug on the sidewalk while walking down the street, and he’s on to the rest of his life now.

Cagney pulls the scene off just brilliantly.

Like he pulls it off the whole movie. He makes the viewer both hate and love Tommy — feel sorry for him and not feel sorry for him at all.

Tommy makes his own bed, and he has to lie in it — literally at one point.

He is a man who wants it all and wants to be important, but, in the end, can’t hold on to anything that is important to him.

Jean Harlow is in this one as well, and I know she was supposed to be a big star back then, but my husband walked in and said, “She was so overrated,” and I based on this performance, I would have to agree.

I was not blown away by her, even though the scene with her was interesting because she sat on a settee, half on Cagney’s lap, while telling him what kind of man she thought he was and running her fingers along his neck and pressing his face into her cleavage. It was a very sensual scene for a movie made in the 1930s. From what I read, she wasn’t wearing bras under her dresses either.

According to an article written by Rob Nixon on TCM.com, Cagney once asked her, “How do you keep those things up?” in reference to her breasts.

“I ice them,” Harlow said, and then left to just what she’d said she did.

This was definitely a movie made before the strict film codes went into effect.

I was surprised to learn during my research that Cagney almost didn’t get the role of Tommy Power. Instead, he was initially cast as the quieter Matt Doyle, and Woods was cast as Tommy.

“But director William Wellman had seen Cagney’s tough performance in Doorway to Hell (1930),” Nixon wrote in his article. “And after three days of shooting – and much urging by screenwriters John Bright and Kubec Glasmon – he realized a big casting mistake had been made. Luckily, producer Darryl Zanuck allowed the two actors to switch roles, otherwise film audiences would have been robbed of one of the most ferocious and iconic performances of the decade, perhaps of all Hollywood history.”

This movie was not free of injuries for the actors.

One of the most famous scenes in the movie is where Tommy shoves a grapefruit in the face of his girlfriend when he’s mad at her. This was based on a real-life incident of a Chicago gangster named Earl Weiss who once slammed an omelet into his “jabbering” girlfriend’s face.

It was decided this was too messy, so it was suggested a grapefruit be used.

“What happened next depends on who tells the story,” Nixon wrote on TCM.com. “[Actress] Mae Clarke said Cagney was only supposed to yell at her in the scene and that the actor surprised her with his impulsive use of the breakfast food. Cagney claimed the grapefruit had been decided on beforehand but that it was supposed to brush past her at an angle that would only appear to be a bona fide attack. Whatever the truth, when the time came to get the shot, Cagney smashed the grapefruit directly (and painfully, the actress said) into her face, and Clarke’s very real look of horror and surprise was recorded for posterity.”

Cagney faced his own pain, though, when Donald Cook, who played his brother, hit him for real during one scene, knocking him across the room and causing Cagney to lose a tooth. Cagney theorized that Clarke had put him up to it as revenge but he never proved it and production moved on without any more incidents, despite the fact — I can’t even believe I’m reading this — that real bullets were used in some of the shooting scenes.

The movie was based on Bright and Glasmon’s novel Beer and Blood. Yes, I would love to find it! They were nominated for an Oscar for their screenplay for the movie.

There were some really great lines in the movie, one of them being when Tommy’s brother comes back from war and accuses Tommy of running a business of “blood and booze.”

Tommy shoots back: “Your hands ain’t so clean. You killed and liked it. You didn’t get them medals for holding hands with them Germans.”

Have you ever seen this movie? If so, what did you think of it?

Here is my revised list for the rest of the Winter of Cagney:


 Yankee Doodle Dandy

Taxi

The Strawberry Blonde

Mister Roberts

The Public Enemy

Love Me or Leave Me

White Heat

Man of A Thousand Faces

Angels With Dirty Faces

Bonus: The Seven Little Foys

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Public_Enemy

https://www.tcm.com/articles/31288/the-public-enemy

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish