Springtime in Paris: Charade

May 8, 2025May 8, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 5 Comments

Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I have been watching movies that take place in Paris for the last couple of months.

For our last week, we watched Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Directed by Stanley Donen this movie was released in 1996 and tells the story of Reggie Lambert (Hepburn) and Peter Joshua (Grant) who meet briefly on vacation in the Alps. When Reggie returns home, she finds that the husband she’d planned to divorce has been murdered, but before he was murdered, he sold the contents of their apartment, including all of her possessions.

A mystery ensues and what follows is a movie that was good but was very confused about which genre it should be in.

When Reggie returns to Paris and her empty apartment, a police officer approaches her and tells her that her husband was found in his pajamas dead by the train tracks and that he was apparently trying to leave Paris quickly.

While Reggie was discussing her husband at the beginning of the movie with a friend, and we learned he was wealthy, we learned very little about him and now it is clear that Reggie also learned very little about him. As the police show her several different passports from different countries with his face on them, she begins to realize she didn’t know the man at all.

Reggie is bewildered later when Peter Joshua shows up to her empty apartment and says he read about the murder in the newspaper and wanted to check on her.

She believes the police think she murdered him.

Peter offers to find her a hotel room until she can find a new job and apartment.

Peter asks what she’s going to do now that her husband has been murdered and she says she’s going to try to get her old job as a translator back.

At his funeral, Reggie is even more bewildered, because there aren’t any guests other than her and her friend. Three American men (James Coburn, George Kennedy, and Ned Glass) show up and either spit on him, poke his body, hold a mirror to his nose, to make sure he is dead, or say something inappropriate. James Coburn approaches her and doesn’t offer condolences. He just says, “Charlie had no reason of doing it thatta way. No siree.” and walks away.

Um..okay…poor Reggie is even more bewildered.

A large man then approaches, handing her a letter requesting she visit the American embassy the next day to discuss the death of her husband.

She shows up to meet with Walter Matthau who seems to know her husband. He informs her that her husband was wanted by the CIA and his real name was Charles Voss. He also tells her that her life might be in danger.

He suggests that she somehow has the money her husband earned from selling all their possessions. That money is the same amount he stole from the United States government during World War II, he says. He instructs Reggie that she needs to find the money and return it to him before the other, dangerous men find her. Looking for help and someone to talk to, Reggie contacts Peter, who decides one way to help is take her out for a night on the town to cheer her up. What results is a very strange game where people have to pass an apple down a line of people only using their chins and necks.

So..yeah..that was strange and uncomfortable to watch. *laugh* I am not sure how the actors did the scene without totally falling apart in laughter or embarrassment.

It was nice to see Cary’s familiar goofy expressions in this scene. I’ve noticed watching his later movies that he doesn’t loosen up the same way he did when he was younger which is natural, but also hard to watch sometimes.

The game leads Reggie and Peter in some compromising positions where they pause to look at each other for a long time and you can tell in that moment that Peter is thinking about what it would be like to kiss her and vice versa.

It’s all fun and games until all three men track Reggie down at the club and begin to threaten her for the money they think she has.

This movie is categorized as a comedy/thriller which makes it a little hard to figure out at times. I sometimes wondered if I was supposed to laugh or feel dread during certain scenes. There is a terrifying scene where one of the men (Coburn as Tex) keeps lighting matches and dropping them on her lap while she screams and cries and I couldn’t laugh at that scene so I don’t know what the director and writers were going for – maybe that was it — to have the viewer not sure what to think.

When Peter convinces Reggie to tell him what he is going on, he decides he will help her find out why she is being pursued and tells her that he will keep the men from hurting her. Now we viewers have to decide with Reggie who Peter is and if he is really a good guy or not.

I read that Cary actually didn’t want this role at first because he said he felt like a predator, going after the younger Audrey.

That’s funny since he was in many movies in his older years where he was “going after” younger women and he married a woman much younger than him, but I digress….

Cary turned 59 during filming and it was this movie that made him decide it was time to stop playing the romantic lead. The reviews focusing on the 26 year age difference between him and Audrey was one big driving factor in this decision, he later said.

He was so uncomfortable with the idea of their age gap he asked for the script to be changed so screenwriter Peter Stone made Audrey the aggressor and Cary the man trying to fight her off.

Stone said he wrote things like “Can’t you just think of me as a woman?” and have Cary say, “I’m already about to get into trouble for transporting a minor above the first floor.”

He then says, “Come on, child, let’s go.”

Stone said, “Cary made me change the dynamic of the characters and make Audrey the aggressor. She chased him, and he tried to dissuade her. She pursued him and sat in his lap. She found him irresistible, and ultimately he was worn down by her. I gave him lines like “I’m too old for you, get away from me, little girl.’ And ‘I’m old enough to be your father.’ And in the elevator: ‘I could be in trouble transporting you beyond the first floor. A minor!’ This way Cary couldn’t get in any trouble. What could he do! She was chasing him.”

When I first started the movie, I was afraid I wasn’t going to like this film at all. Cary’s acting was stilted and “off” for me right from the start.

I found some parts of the movie confusing and odd because of its identity crisis, or inability to choose between being a comedy or a thriller, but I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie by commenting on which parts.

What I will say is that it was just weird to that Audrey’s character continued to throw herself at Cary’s character even when she isn’t sure who he really was. And this is just after her husband has been murdered and she is being pursued by people who want money her husband stole.

I enjoyed the action and the movie overall but really would have liked it the movie had picked a lane and stayed in it.

This was Cary’s chance to finally work with Audrey, by the way, after turning down leading roles in at least four movies she’d been in — Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954) and Love in the Afternoon (1957). He’d turned them all down because of the quarter-century age difference between them, according to TCM.com.

The rumor at the time was that he’d also turned down the role of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady because he didn’t want to work with Audrey. This wasn’t true, but instead was a decision made out of respect of Rex Harrison who had created the role on Broadway.

The article on TCM.com reads: “In the Barry Paris biography, Donen recalled that “Cary thought he was going to do a picture with Howard Hawks called Man’s Favorite Sport? [so he] said no to Charade. Columbia said get Paul Newman. Newman said yes, but Columbia wouldn’t pay his going rate. Then they said get Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. So I got them and Columbia decided they couldn’t afford them or the picture. So I sold Charade to Universal. In the meantime, Cary had read Hawks’s script and didn’t like it. So he called me and said he would like to do Charade.”

I want to share another quote from the TCM article because it is such a funny story: “ In Audrey Hepburn: A Biography by Warren G. Harris, the director recalled: “I arranged a dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Paris. Audrey and I arrived first. Cary came in, and Audrey stood up and said, ‘I’m so nervous.’ He said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Meeting you, working with you – I’m so nervous.’ And he said, ‘Don’t be nervous, for goodness’ sake. I’m thrilled to know you. Here, sit down at the table. Put your hands on the table, palms up, put your head down and take a few deep breaths.’ We all sat down, and Audrey put her hands on the table. I had ordered a bottle of red wine. When she put her head down, she hit the bottle, and the wine went all over Cary’s cream-colored suit. Audrey was humiliated. People at other tables were looking, and everybody was buzzing. It was a horrendous moment. Cary was a half hour from his hotel, so he took off his coat and comfortably sat through the whole meal like that.”

Despite that awkward first meeting, the pair apparently hit it off very well, even ad-libbing some of their lines.

Do you ever look up trivia like this for movies when you watch them or am I just the weirdo in the group?

Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it?

You can read Erin’s thoughts here: https://crackercrumblife.com/2025/05/08/springtime-in-paris-charade/

If you wrote about today’s movie, or any of the movies we watched during this movie event, you can post your links below.

Also, thank you so much for participating and I hope you all had fun taking part! Do you have an idea for a themed movie event? Let us know in the comments!

I hope you will join us for the next one, though I am not sure when we will do it. Erin and I both have a lot going on in our personal lives with family health situations so we might not hold one until autumn. Not sure yet. We will have a meeting of the minds on it at some point.

We are, however, holding Drop In Crafternoons where we meet on Zoom and do crafts of any kind while chatting.

I had planned to try one this weekend but things are a bit up in the air right now with my parents’ health and the fact my whole family came down with a cold/virus and I am waiting to see if I am next, so we are sticking with one on May 24th for now.

Springtime in Paris: Hugo

April 24, 2025April 24, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 10 Comments

Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I have been watching movies that take place in Paris this spring.

Up this week was the movie Hugo.

I had vaguely heard of this one before, but really didn’t know what it was about until Erin suggested it. I don’t know how I didn’t know more about it since it was nominated for eleven Oscars, including best director and best picture, in 2012. It won five for things like cinematography and design. (Thanks to Cat from Cat’s Wire for letting me know I looked at the nomination list instead of the win list when I originally posted this. ooops! hahaha!)

This was a magical children’s movie with beautiful imagery and cinematography. It was much different than I expected based on the movie poster and trailer. I watched it before I read any descriptions. I often don’t read detailed descriptions of movies or books before I jump into them. It can make it either a pleasant or a disturbing surprise. Ha! This was a pleasant one.

First, a quick Google description of the movie: Orphaned and alone except for an uncle, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives in the walls of a train station in 1930s Paris. Hugo’s job is to oil and maintain the station’s clocks, but to him, his more important task is to protect a broken automaton and notebook left to him by his late father (Jude Law). Accompanied by the goddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz) of an embittered toy merchant (Ben Kingsley), Hugo embarks on a quest to solve the mystery of the automaton and find a place he can call home.

This is one of those ensemble casts with several well-known actors including Ben Kingsley, Sascha Baron Cohen, Christopher Lee, Jude Law, Helen McCroy, Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Moretz, Emily Mortimer, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Richard Griffiths.

Directed by Martin Scorsese, the movie was released in 2011 and was based on the 2007 book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. The book sounds like a visual marvel. It has 284 illustrations mixed in 500 pages of a story.

Selznick once described the book “not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things.”

Though I’ve never seen the book, I did see some photos online (such as those pictured above) and Scorsese seems to have captured the magic of the illustrations almost exactly as they are in the book.

The cinematography, the costumes, and the sets in Hugo are gorgeous and magical. There are a variety of unique camera angles and filming techniques that give much of the film a soft and dreamlike feel. It is what some might call a visual smorgasbord.

Close-ups on Hugo’s (Asa Butterfield) big blue eyes are frequent, and draw the viewer into his world, making them wonder what he is thinking behind those eyes.

When the movie starts, Hugo is spying on the activity in the train station through the numbers in the clocks high up in the walls and a tower in the middle of the station.

We see that he seems to live in the walls behind these clocks, getting food from vendors he steals from throughout the day to survive.

Eventually, we learn that he’s been living in these makeshift spaces since his father died and his alcoholic uncle took him in. It appears, though, that the uncle is no longer around, and it isn’t until later in the movie, we learn why. Hugo is continuing to keep the clocks running so a new clock repairer isn’t hired and he is discovered.

Towards the beginning of the film, we meet the toy maker who accuses Hugo of stealing from his booth. Hugo is indeed stealing small pieces of machinery from the toy maker’s booth. When the toymaker catches him, he makes Hugo empty his pockets and one of those pockets includes a small notebook with drawings inside about how to repair the automaton that his father found at the museum he was working at before he died.

The drawings trigger something in the toy maker, and he takes the notebook and refuses to give it back to Hugo. This leads to Hugo chasing the toy maker home to try to convince him to give the notebook back. The toy maker refuses but Hugo sees who he thinks is the toymaker’s granddaughter and begs her to ask her grandfather for the book back. He learns that the girl is not the man’s granddaughter, but his goddaughter who was taken in after her parents died.

We are never really told what actually happened to her parents. The girl’s name is Isabelle and she and Hugo become friends. She goes to work with her godfather and encourages Hugo to stand up to him to get his notebook back. Hugo does and the godfather tells him that if he will work for him in his shop then he will give him his notebook back.

Isabelle and Hugo become friends, and eventually Hugo will tell her about the automaton and how he needs a special key to turn it on.

Isabelle takes him to the library, where the librarian gives her books. Hugo looks bewildered as she talks about books, which prompts Isabella to ask Hugo, “Don’t you like books?”

He assures her he definitely does.

Books, movies, and art in general are very important to Hugo because they were things he and his father did together before his father passed away. His father was a clockmaker and repairer and also worked at a museum and was well educated. We learn toward the beginning of the film through flashbacks that Hugo has not only lost his father, but years before he had also lost his mother.

When Hugo isn’t working at the toy shop, he is avoiding the station master (Baren Cohen) who enjoys capturing orphans he catches in the station and then sending them back to the orphanage. At first glance the station master seems like a very angry bitter person but we will later learn there is a lot more to him than we realize.

This movie could be a real downer if it weren’t for the quirky characters and the constant striving of the movie (and the viewer) to get to an ending we hope will be full of some happiness for Hugo. Had this been any other Scorsese film, we might not have gotten that (like Hugo might have ended up at the bottom of the river. Ya’ know what I’m sayin’?), but without offering too many spoilers I can assure you there is a happy ending.

I loved the scenes where Isabelle and Hugo were walking around the old library, by the way. Oh, to walk in a library with books piled up high like that.

There are several little storylines going on throughout this movie. The big one we have is with Hugo, of course, as he tries to figure out how to get the automaton to work again and then find out what message it might be sending when it does work.

(He hopes it is a message from his father or from anyone to help him not feel so alone.)

Then we have the friendship between him and Isabelle and the antagonistic relationship Hugo has with her godfather. Then there is the godfather’s story and the story of the godmother. Then there are the characters who work inside the station and their relationships.

The story from the book and the movie does feature real life characters including the real life filmmaker named Georges Méliès. To avoid spoilers, I won’t share which character portrays Georges.

Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it?

You can find Erin’s thoughts on it here.

You can learn more about Georges Melies on Cat’s blog here.

I can’t believe we are winding down with our Springtime in Paris feature!

Next week we are writing about The Intouchables, a French film with subtitles. It is rated-R for language and sexual discussions (but no on screen sex or violence…I previewed it *wink* Right now it is streaming for free if you have an Amazon Prime membership. You can also find it on DisneyPlus, Fandango, Plex, YouTubeTV, Google Play, AppleTV, and Hulu

The week after, on May 4, we are having a group watch of Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant via Zoom, and then we will share our thoughts on the movie on our blogs May 8.

If you watch any of the movies on our list for this feature at any point before May 10^th, you can find the link on this post below or at the link up in the menu at the top of the page. You don’t have to watch the movies the same weeks we do to write about them.

Other resources:

Wikipedia Georges Melies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_M%C3%A9li%C3%A8s

Wikipedia The Invention of Hugo Cabret book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Hugo_Cabret

More about Melies from Cat’s Wire: https://catswire.blogspot.com/2025/04/silent-movies-trip-to-moon.html

Springtime in Paris: How To Steal A Million

April 10, 2025April 10, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

For the months of April and May, Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching movies set in Paris and rambling about them on our blog.

This week we watched How to Steal A Million with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.

I actually think I watched this movie or part of it at some point over the last 20-some years but I couldn’t remember most of it, other than a few scenes.

The movie is about a con-man, Charles Bonnett (Hugh Griffith), who sells fake recreations of famous artist that he has painted. It isn’t something his daughter approves of so when he loans out a fake “Cellini” Venus statue to a museum in Paris she is horrified and panicked. Her father assures her that because the item is only being loaned out and not purchased, no one will inspect it and actually find out it is a fake. Unfortunately, Charles signs a loan agreement with the museum without reading it and later learns it includes an inspection clause.

On the same night the statuette goes on display, a burglar named Simon Dermott (O’Toole), breaks into their house to try to steal Charle’s recreation of a Van Gogh painting.

Terrified, Nicole sneaks downstairs and grabs a collector gun off the wall to confront whoever is in the house. After some bantering back and forth, and knowing calling the police would lead to an investigation of all her father’s paintings, Nicole agrees to let him go. When she lays the gun down, though, it fires and grazes Simon’s arm.

This leads to an entertaining exchange where he makes her drive him home using his car and then she discovers she has no way to get home. He calls her a taxi, but not before he asks her to wipe his fingerprints off the painting he tried to steal so he won’t get caught.

She asks him what else she should do for him. Did he want to kiss her goodnight?

He lets her know that he’d rather like to do that and the bold fellow kisses her passionately right there by the taxi.

Nicole is, of course, a bit enamored with him, especially after that kiss, which is clear when she later tells her father about what happened.

After she and Charles find out about the inspector who will come to look at the statuette at the museum so it can be insured for a million dollars, she worries that the inspection of the item — which her look alike grandmother posed for by the way — will lead to all of her father’s work being exposed as fakes and send him to jail. She tracks Simon down and asks him to help her steal the statuette, even though it is under very heavy security at the museum.

Much jocularity ensues.

Yes, I did just write that sentence.

But, a lot of fun does unfold at this point and the viewer already knows a bit about Simon and that he isn’t what he seems but now we want to know what else we, and Nicole, will find out. As if things couldn’t get any crazier, we also have an American dealer Davis Leland (Eli Wallach) who is trying to buy the statuette and wants to marry Nicole.

I won’t provide any other spoilers in case you haven’t seen this one and want to.

This one was a fun one for me. Lots of funny, quirky moments and beautiful views of Paris. Of course, these actors were all supposed to be in Paris but sounded British, other than Audrey.

Audrey has never been my favorite actress but I enjoyed her more in this one than I thought I would. I thought Peter O’Toole was a delight all around. He was…sigh….dreamy. Those impulsive kisses…whew!

I loved the ins and outs of the movie, the misdirection, etc.

Toward the beginning of the movie, Nicole is reading Hitchcock Magazine which made me wonder if she’d ever been in one of his films. After a quick search online, I learned that the answer is no. However, in her Oscar-winning performance as the princess in the 1953 movie Roman Holiday, Audrey is in bed reading a book about Hitchcock.

My husband says he never wanted Audrey in his movies because he liked actresses with talent. Ouch. It’s clear my husband is not an Audrey fan. He added that Hitchcock had a “type” and Audrey wasn’t it. Most of the actresses in his movies were blond. There you go.

There were rumors when the movie was made that Peter and Audrey had an affair during the filming but those were later squashed by the pair who said while that wasn’t true, it was true they became close friends after the movie.

Some trivia about the movie that I read about during my research:

After Nicole dresses up as a cleaning lady at one point in the movie, Simon Dermott says, “That does it. For one thing, it gives Givenchy a night off.” Hubert de Givenchy was Audrey Hepburn’s costume designer.

When Peter O’Toole first sets off the museum alarm, he says, “Ring out, wild bells.” This is the title of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson published in 1850, which was part of his work entitled “In Memoriam”. It was an elegy to his sister’s fiancé, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died at the age of 22.

The film was directed by William Wyler.

Have you ever seen this movie? What did you think of it?
If you wrote a blog post about it or choose to do so later, you can link up below anytime from today until May.

To read Erin’s thoughts on the movie, visit her blog here: https://crackercrumblife.com/2025/04/10/springtime-in-paris-how-to-steal-a-million/

Up next in our Springtime in Paris movie feature is Paris Blues, which you can find for free on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm8bCTSPD6U

Following that we will have:

Hugo (April 24)

The Intouchables (May 1)

Charade Group Zoom on May 4 – this is where you can all join us for a watch party! (writing about it May 8).

If you’re wondering where to find the movies streaming, for anyone who is participating in the event on where you can find the movies streaming:

Hugo: Amazon, Fandango at Home, Pluto TV, AppleTV

The Intouchables (warning that this is an R movie due to language): DisneyPlus, Amazon, Fandango, Plex, YouTubeTV, Google Play, AppleTV, and Hulu

Charade (pretty much everywhere): Crackle, Tubi, Plex, Amazon, AppleTV, GooglePlay, YouTube, YouTubeTV, The Roku Channel, Fubo.

Classic Movie Impressions: That Touch of Mink

April 1, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 7 Comments

I needed something to distract me from every day life last week so I watched That Touch of Mink with Doris Day and Cary Grant. I am very certain I’ve watched either all or part of this movie before but it has been years so I didn’t remember much about it.

This is quite a modern movie for 1962.

Cary Grant is a no nonsense, yet still kind and understanding, businessman and Doris Day is a young woman from a small town living in a big city and trying to find a job.

This movie was meant to be a comedy, so I tried not to be too uptight about how Cary Grant was essentially trying to get into Doris Day’s pants without actually committing to a relationship for the entire movie.

I have to say that I didn’t really like Cary for most of this movie and my husband said it is probably because of the fact Cary really didn’t want to make the movie, according to articles he has read about it. While I didn’t find articles online specifically saying he didn’t like the film, I did find information that Doris Day wrote in her autobiography that Cary was polite and professional on set but that there was really no “give and take” between them.

First a little summary:

This movie takes place in 1962 starts with Doris Day walking down the street and getting splashed by a car that Cary’s character (Philip Shayne) is riding in. He feels bad but he can’t stop because he is on his way to a very important meeting. We find out later that Doris’s character (Cathy Timberlake) is looking for a job and Philip is a shrewd but also generous businessman with a friend, Roger, (played by Gig Young) who is a bit of a leach. Philip does actually feel awful about splashing Cathy and tells Roger he’d love to find the woman and apologize.

Luckily they are looking out the office window not long afterward and see Cathy walking into a diner across the street.

He orders Roger to take her some money to apologize. Roger is hoping the woman will want to tell Phillip off. He’s sick of Phillip getting all the women despite his flippant attitude. Cathy does want to tell Phillip off so Roger takes her to Phillip immediately.

Unfortunately for Roger, Cathy falls for Phillip immediately. Phillip sees this as a chance to sweep another woman off her feet by taking her on trips around the world.

He starts to do just that and Cathy wants him to like her so she goes along with him — flying to Baltimore for a speech he’s giving, then to Philadelphia for a quick dinner. One night he even takes her to a New York Yankees game, into the dugout where we meet the real Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra.

Soon though, Phillip wants her to go on vacation with him to Bermuda and she’s not sure if she means he wants her to stay in the same room with him or if they will have separate rooms. He definitely wants her to stay in the room with him, which causes her to breakout in a full body rash and skuttles his plans.

She’s a good girl from Sandusky, Ohio after all. Girls from Sandusky don’t go running off with men on vacation and sleep with them unless they have a ring on their finger and have said “I do” to marriage vows.

Cathy returns home disappointed in herself because she didn’t sleep with Phillip but also fairly annoyed at him for thinking she would after they’ve known each other for only a short time.

She wants to break out of her boring girl mold, though, and decides to try again — telling Phillip she’ll go with him again to Bermuda and she will give him what he wants. She doesn’t say exactly that but the viewer gets her drift.

Sadly, things don’t work out this time either but you will have to watch the movie to find out why.

The movie is a series of miscommunications, silly tropes, and goofy interactions. One of those miscommunications is between Roger and his therapist. Roger is sharing the story about Cathy and Phillip but the therapist walks out of the room and only hears part of the story, leading him to believe that Roger is becoming involved with another man, which I thought was a very progressive (for lack of a better word) joke for the early 1960s. That joke carries on throughout the movie with Roger continually trying to update the therapist on Phillip and Cathy but the therapist instead believing that Phillip has been trying to woo Roger instead.

I found it interesting that this movie was one of the last ones where Cary was a leading man.

It was his 69^th movie and he was in his 50s. An article on TCM.com states that he must have known his time for playing leading men was waning.

“He made one more picture in which he was the dashing leading man, Charade (1963), opposite Audrey Hepburn,” the article reads. “After that, he appeared as a grizzled old beachcomber in Father Goose (1964), then as a British gentleman who plays Cupid for the young romantic leads in Walk Don’t Run (1966), his last film before retiring from the screen.

The article goes on: “Doris Day’s string of box office hits continued though with somewhat diminishing returns over the next six years in ten more films. After With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), the actress retired from the big screen. Her hit TV sitcom, The Doris Day Show, ran from 1968 to 1973, changing formats and storylines almost very season.”

As for my feelings on the film, I liked it overall but didn’t like the message that women should just go sleep with men they are not married to. The end of the movie would have feminists of today growling in anger but it was most likely what made most every day movie goers happy at the time.

I couldn’t figure out while I watched it if Cary was bored during the movie or if it was how he was playing Phillip Shayne. Maybe he wanted Phillip to have no real personality beyond seeming bored and like he expected women to fall in bed with him. The man didn’t even seem excited by the prospect of sex. He just seemed to expect that it would happen, and he would move on to the next woman.

Years ago, I was reading about Cary and his use of LSD as an attempt to help him with his depression and other mental issues. Many psychiatrists at the time prescribed LSD as part of psychological therapy. It wasn’t yet a recreational drug.

Both Gig Young and Cary used the therapy and as I researched for this film I read that Gig sadly killed his 31-year-old wife and then himself in 1978 when he was 64. I wonder how much the drug affected his brain at the time and left him worse off than he had been. He was also an alcoholic, though, so that most likely played an even larger role than the LSD. Either way it is sad.

I also sometimes wonder if the drug was why Cary seemed so blasé and uninterested in his movies during this particular time period.

I don’t think this is a movie I would watch again but it was a fun escape.

I should also mention the other star of the movie: The Automat.

The Automat was an automatic-type diner where restaurant goers could go in and choose what they wanted by pushing a button on what looked like post office boxes and then could open a door and the food would be slid to them through the tiny hole. I had never seen anything like it before this movie. Cathy’s friend Connie worked at one and delivered the food. That’s where Cathy would go to talk to her. It seemed like a very busy job since Connie and only one or two other co-workers would have to slide the food into the little box for the people to retrieve.

Have you ever seen this movie? What did you think of it?

Winter of Fairbanks Jr.: The Sun Never Sets (1939)

March 6, 2025March 6, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 5 Comments

This winter I watched Douglas Fairbanks Jr. movies for fun.

This week for the last movie of the series, I watched The Sun Never Sets (1939) starring Douglas, Basil Rathbone, Barbara O’Neil and Virginia Fields.

It was directed by Rowland Lee.

Before I launch into my feelings about the movie, here is the plot, without spoilers, copied from Google:

Two British brothers (Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Basil Rathbone) squelch a radio-made dictator on the Gold Coast of Africa.

Oh. Well, that wasn’t much of a description.

A little more for you: This movie is about a brother (Douglas) who doesn’t want to go into the miliary like the rest of his family but is shamed into it by his grandfather who says what an honor it is to fight for the empire and by his brother who says there is no greater love than to leave ones family to fight for the empire.

Even his fiancé (Virginia Fields) begins to feel like her future brother and sister-in-law’s love is enviable because their relationship was strengthened during their time together on the Gold Coast.

So poor John Randolph (Douglas) is broken down and signs up for the military to take his brother, Clive Randolph’s (Basil Rathbone) place in Africa, which Clive’s wife hated. Once John agrees to capitulate and follow in the footsteps of all his family members, risking himself for the Empire, Clive is then called up for a secret mission and also has to return to the Golf Coast. He tells his wife she can’t come because she’s pregnant but she loves him and is determined to be with him.

Her pregnancy becomes a source of stress for poor ole Clive who must choose between being there for his wife when she gets sick from walking in the rain (because everyone knows that walking in the rain automatically means you get sick) and capturing a bad guy who wants to (I kid you not) take over the world.

For me this is a British propaganda movie similar to the American propaganda movies that actors like Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart were in around World War II.

My overall view on the movie: It is about restoring ones reputation for the sake of the Empire when you choose to help your family instead of completing your mission for the British Army and furthering their take over of African nations.

The movie does touch on the difficulties of serving one’s country while also being there for their family but by the end we are reminded how important it is for a British man to have a reputation as a fine soldier even more so than having a reputation as a weak man who cares about his pregnant wife.

There is forgiveness between the brothers for the failings of one brother that cost Clive being able to capture a criminal and that was nice. Not sure if the forgiveness had been there if he had failed yet again though.

“Failing the empire twice?! My God, John! Once I can understand but twice! You’ll have to work as a dirty businessman and get rich and stand on the heads of poor people in another way now!”

One review online said this movie was more focused on family relationships than anything else and I suppose that is true. But it was also wrapped up in making sure the men were loyal to the Empire, the King, etc. while also having a family.

I was absolutely baffled by the one part where a brother chooses to bring the other brother back from a mission because his wife is dying and then the first brother is ostracized by the sister-in-law he saves. Apparently, she’d rather be dead than go back to England with a husband shamed for failing his military assignment. Just … what?!

So, this movie really wasn’t my favorite of those I have watched as part of the Fairbanks Jr. marathon, though I didn’t hate it as much as I hated Gunga Din. This movie still made sure to remind us that the British were all-knowing and that the natives of the land wouldn’t have survived without them (har. Har.) but at least refrained from calling them all savages like they did in Gunga Din.

There are a couple of movies of Douglas’s that I wish I had chosen instead of this one but I’ve seen Rathbone in Sherlock Holmes movies so figured it wouldn’t hurt to see him in something else. He is a very good actor so saying I don’t like this movie is not a slight on him or any of the actors. They did a nice job. I just didn’t enjoy the movie overall. It was somewhat like an infomercial for British military recruitment.

The author of Basilrathbone.net enjoyed the movie and was able to overlook the flaws.

“While I can point out several flaws with the film, the fine performances by the cast brought the characters to life, making them very real. I really cared about what happened to the characters and I was so caught up in the drama, that I hardly noticed or cared that the plot was rather contrived. Rathbone and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. have some great scenes together.”

This was essentially a military recruitment film, though, the writer admits.

“Universal had high hopes for this story of the British Colonial Service. In 1939, when this film was made, the British civil services administered to more than 500 million people over territory that covered 13 million square miles all over the world.”

Time Magazine did not like the film at all based on this review:

“Only slightly more agonizing than young Mr. Fairbanks’ throes in putting this subversive two & two together is the sight of middle-aged Mr. Rathbone, as a sort of Imperial Rover Boy, lashing about the jungle in bush jacket and shorts, caught barekneed between Love & Duty.” —Time magazine, June 19, 1939

Ouch.

They weren’t alone in their dislike of the film based on the reviews posted on this article on Basilrathbone.net.

By the way, I enjoyed reading the article about this movie on this site. There is a ton of information about Basil and his other movies there as well so I will be exploring it more.

This ends my Douglas Fairbanks Jr. marathon. If you want to read my impressions of the other movies I watched you can find them here:

https://lisahoweler.com/movie-reviews-impressions/

Up next in April, Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I will be watching movies set in Paris. We will be announcing our movie list at a later date. Stay tuned!

Winter of Fairbanks Jr.: The Rise of Catherine The Great (1934)

February 27, 2025February 26, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 4 Comments

This winter I am watching movies starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

This week I watched The Rise of Catherine The Great from 1934. The movie was also just called Catherine The Great at one point.

I watched it on YouTube and the reproduction of it wasn’t really very good at some points.

This movie, which takes place in 1745, was not a happy one for sure. I mean how could it be when it was about Catherine The Great Empress of all of Russia.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was definitely not a nice man in this movie. He portrayed Peter III or Duke Peter, who Catherine the Great historically overthrew to become queen. This movie, like most history books, portrays Peter III as a bad guy, but in the 1990s questions about him really being that bad were raised, especially considering he attempted to make peace with many countries Russia was once at war with.

From what I have learned about royals over the years and during this marathon, many are degenerates who thrive on doing what they want no matter who it hurts, sleeping around, and having power, fame, and riches. This movie further sealed that opinion for me as I felt like I couldn’t sympathize with any of the characters.

They were all simply awful or broken people.

In this movie we are given the popular idea that Peter is the bad guy, and Catherine is the poor misunderstood young queen who feels she has to take over the kingdom after repeatedly being rejected by a mentally ill Peter. Peter has mistresses and loves to flaunt them in front of his wife and anyone else who will listen.

At the beginning of the movie we have a young German princess named Princess Sophie Auguste Frederika (portrayed by Elisabeth Bergner), arriving at the castle as the woman who will marry Grand Duke Peter, at the order of Peter’s aunt, Empress Elizabeth (Flora Robson).

The Grand Duke throws a fit about marrying her because he doesn’t want to be told what to do. The Empress wants him to marry her so the family line will continue since she didn’t have any children herself, or even a husband. Instead, she has many lovers.

Princess Frederika, soon to be Catherine (a name given to her by Empress Elizabeth who doesn’t like the name Frederika) is crushed by the Duke’s rejections and tries to flee the palace but gets lost and ends up telling who she thinks is a guard about her displeasure at being rejected by the Duke.

She says she has loved the Duke for years since she was told about him when she was a child. The man is, of course, actually the Duke and her saying she has loved him for years, even though they never met, impresses him and he decides to marry her.

Right before the wedding, though, a servant suggests that the future queen simply said she wanted to love him and not to have power over Russia, Peter’s heart hardens again, and he spends their wedding night with a mistress. What a catch. Har. Har.

Having mistresses and lovers one isn’t married to isn’t unusual in the family since his aunt has had many lovers over the years. In fact, when she demands Peter marry Catherine she says if he won’t marry and father an heir then she will have to have a child. He laughs and asks which lover she’s going to make “an honest man.”

This movie shows Catherine doing all she can possibly do to win the love of Peter, even pretending she has many lovers after they are married to attempt to make him jealous, but later telling him she really had none. He apologizes for all the lovers he’s had, they fall into each other’s arms, and the camera pans away to an empty bed being prepared by the footman.

Hubba. Hubba.

This is a movie where there are all kinds of innuendo and hints toward what people are doing in their bedrooms.

It’s like, “Tell me you’re talking about sex the whole time without telling me you’re talking about sex.”

At one point Peter asks Catherine what she and her lover did together and she says they went for walks and then curled up in front of a fire to read together.

“Then what?” Peter asks.

Catherine giggles and says, “Well, eventually one does get bored of reading.”

At this point she’s making it all up, but it infuriates Peter. It’s fine for him to have lovers, but not for his wife to have them and make him look less of a man, I guess.

The acting in this movie was really well done.

Flora Robson’s portrayal of the self-focused, master manipulator Empress Elizabeth was chilling and unnerving. I’m not sure how this queen really was in real life but how she is portrayed here is absolutely psychotic.

Bergner, as Catherine was the perfect mix of sweet, broken, and conniving. I was never sure what was real and what wasn’t about her.

Douglas pulled off his role as Peter brilliantly and I honestly think it was one of his better performances of the movies I watched so far.

This movie was banned in Germany when it was released because the director Paul Czinner and Bergner, who was also his wife, had Jewish backgrounds.

This ban prompted a discussion in the House of Parliament in Britain during which it was asked, “Is it to be understood that no British film in which there is a Jewish actor or actress will be permitted to be shown in Germany in future?”

I’m going to guess the answer to that was an emphatic yes.

Reminds me of things happening these days.

According to TCM, this movie was unfortunately released the same year a much more famous movie — Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress — was released.

“Consequently, Catherine has become somewhat lost to film history,” the article on TCM.com states.

Marlene Deitrich was in The Scarlet Empress, a very dazzling movie, so her performance pushed Bergner’s out of the limelight, but article writer Jeremy Arnold says Bergner’s performance was still very good.

I think I may have to find this The Scarlet Empress and check it out to compare the two.’

The Rise of Catherine the Great was adapted from a 1912 play, The Czarina, by Lajos Biro and Melchior Lengyel.

Douglas was 24 and virtually unknown when he landed the part.

“Now I would have a chance to show Hollywood’s producers what I could do with a real character-lead,” he later said in an autobiography. “No longer would I have to play nice young light comedies or listen to offers to ape my father’s swashbuckling fantasies.”

Although he would try his hand at swashbuckling fantasies later as we saw with The Exile and Sinbad the Sailor.

Douglas almost didn’t get the part, though. He had double pneumonia and had been forced to drop out of another movie before being offered the part. He was determined to be in the movie, even though his doctor warned he could develop tuberculosis if he took the part instead of resting.

Arnold writes in his article: “Fairbanks later wrote that the real Peter III “was stubby with a puffy, pockmarked face” and “I looked nothing at all like [him]. I wanted to create a real character in the part, but [director Paul] Czinner and Korda insisted our story was essentially romantic.” Camera tests followed with Fairbanks donning a wig, satin suits and knee britches, and wearing white makeup, lipstick and even beauty marks. “Had I not been so in love with my part and delighted with my good fortune in landing it, I might have been more stubborn, but I was afraid I would be paid off and replaced…. When Korda saw the tests, he said I looked all right, though ‘far too young and pretty.'” Fairbanks grew a mustache to counter this effect. “The result,” he wrote, “was inauthentic but apparently satisfactory.’”

There was plenty of praise for Douglas’s performance too.

“His definition of the fuming Peter is one of the best he has ever done,” Variety wrote in their review. “His appearance does much to help the authors mold the character away from repugnant and to make Catherine’s devotion to him reasonable.”

This was an interesting bit of trivia from the TCM article: Sir Gerald du Maurier, father of novelist Daphne du Maurier and a giant on the British stage, had a small part in the movie.

Douglas was reportedly so thrilled to have a chance to work with du Maurier that when he found out that the man had only been given a small dressing room he removed his name tag off his door and switched it with du Maurier’s so he would have one of the larger rooms. Du Maurier never found out and he and Douglas remained good friends until the man passed.

Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it?

Next week I’ll be writing about my last Douglas movie for the winter as we move toward Spring: The Sun Never Sets. I have no idea what to expect from this one which I could only find on an obscure website.

Winter of Fairbanks: Sinbad the Sailor. Not even my crush on Fairbanks Jr. could get me through this one.

February 20, 2025February 21, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 5 Comments

This week for Winter of Fairbanks Jr. I watched Sinbad the Sailor.

Oh my, readers.

I watched this one with a face you make after you’ve taken gross tasting medicine.

Not even my crush on Fairbanks Jr. could get me through this one.

What was I even thinking? I really should have read up on it more or watched a preview first.

Cheesy? Check.

Sort of disrespectful to other cultures? Check.

Horrid, garish colors and really bad makeup jobs complete with darkened skin and dark eyeliner? Check.

A red-haired Irish woman who is supposed to be a Middle Eastern princess? Check.

There were so many yikes with this one, I just couldn’t wait for it to end. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be in the adventure or slapstick comedy genre. I found myself singing “It’s Sinbad the Sailor man” to the tune of Popeye’s theme song throughout much of it.

We’re supposed to believe this American man wearing blue eye shadow and dark eyeliner is a Muslim from Baghdad? Oh be still my horrified heart.

There is nothing like hearing a thick Irish accent say, “I am Shireen, Princess of Baghdad” to really emerse you into a movie about a middle-eastern folklore hero. *facepalm*

That darkened skin? They apparently got bored of using it about 15 minutes in because everyone miraculously appeared white again for a scene or two. No idea what that was about because a few scenes later they were dark again. I think there might have been only two or three actors in this movie who were actually not white. Anthony Quinn was one of them but not even he was middle-eastern since he was born in Mexico.

*I just want to add a clarification here (that wasn’t in here when I originally posted this): I do not mean to imply that the people making this movie or starring in it were racist at all. I just mean that it jarred me out of the story to have them be so clearly pale, American, and Irish, or with horrible makeup. I don’t think any ill-will was meant toward any culture. It was common in the early days of movies just to want to make something fun and not really think about how they might be slighting cultures. I am not excusing that but I also don’t think that movie makers set out to be offensive.

Another thing that always puzzles me about these old movies — couples meeting each other one day and already kissing each other that same day.

What was with that anyhow?

I’ve done my share of ranting about the movie so far so how about a little plot for you as presented by an article on TCM.com:

“Surrounded by friends, charming storyteller and adventurer Sinbad (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) regales his audience with a tale of his derring-do in exotic lands. In this particular adventure, his ocean journey with sidekick Abbu (George Tobias) pauses in the remote Daibul where nefarious auctioneers commandeer his ship. A bidding war erupts between rightful owner Sinbad and the feisty Shireen (Maureen O’Hara), resolved only through a bit of Sinbadian sleight of hand.”

“Meanwhile the powerful Emir (Anthony Quinn) notices Sinbad’s attentions towards the headstrong Shireen, who saves the sailor’s life before being captured by the Emir. This time salvation arrives in the form of Eastern sailor Melik (Walter Slezak) who enlists the couple’s aid in tracking down the elusive treasure of Deryabar, located beneath the palace of Alexander the Great. Loyalties and vows shift as the trio races to the treasure with the furious Emir hot on their heels.”

The film was shot in Technicolor so it is way out there with crazy colors from the paint on the ship to Maureen’s gaudy dresses.

TCM says Douglas was “famously ignored by his father as a child” but still wanted to make the movie in honor of his father’s swashbuckling movies. It was the first movie that Douglas Jr. made after returning from voluntarily serving in the United States Navy during World War II.

The writer of the article on TCM, Nathaniel Thompson, did have an “obsession” (as I’m sure many did) with what he called Maureen’s “exquisitely endowed bosom.”

He wrote, “which she was wisely but discreetly at pains to exploit and which I, ever an untiring student of such anatomical addenda, discreetly admired.”

Writing in his autobiography, A Hell of A War, Fairbanks wrote that he knew no one in a lead in the movie was Arab at all.

“After all, I was not exactly a typical Arab any more than Walter Slezak was even remotely (with his taped-up blue eyes) Oriental.”

And I guess none of them really saw a problem with that. Sigh.

Anyhow…if you want to watch this movie simply to see how much you can cringe in 1 hr and 57 min (I felt like this movie would never end and fast forwarded a couple of times to get there), I would recommend it.

I am hoping my next choice, The Rise of Catherine The Great (1934), is a bit better. It is streaming for free on YouTube. At least in the United States.

After that I am watching The Sun Never Sets (1939). It is available for free on PBS and I also found it here: https://archive.org/details/sun.-never.-sets.-1939

You can find my impressions of previous movies in the series, as well as other classic movies here: https://lisahoweler.com/movie-reviews-impressions/

Classic movie impressions: The Stranger (1946)

February 19, 2025February 17, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 9 Comments

A few weeks ago, my husband suggested we watch an Orson Welles movie. Since I’ve liked other movies by and starring Orson, I agreed to it.

The Stranger was released in 1946 and tells the story of a war crimes investigator who tracks a high-ranking Nazi fugitive to a small Connecticut town.

Welles both directed and co-wrote the film but was uncredited for the writing, which was most likely part of the many concessions he made for the opportunity to direct it. This is a movie that some call his most conventional. It’s also one he wasn’t as fond of because so many changes were made to the final cut without his consultation.

The movie stars Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and Loretta Young.

The creepy undertone throughout the entire movie left me always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Nazi fugitive, Franz Kindler (Welles), has done his best to assimilate into American society. He’s even about to marry the daughter of a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Edward G. Robinson, playing war crimes investigator Mr. Wilson, follows one of the recently released followers of Kindler to the town, hoping he’ll lead him to Kindler. The man suddenly disappears though, and Wilson is certain he’s been murdered by Kindler, but still doesn’t know who Kindler actually is. Only that he is somewhere in the town.

We the viewer, know all along what happened to the man and who made it It happens about 15 minutes into the movie, but Robinson has to spend much of the movie trying to figure it out and once he does figure it out, he spends the rest of the movie trying to make Kindler admit who he really is. The only thing Robinson’s character really knows when he comes to the town is that Kindler had an almost unhealth obsession with old clocks.

It’s a fantastic, stressful game of cat and mouse that had me literally biting my nails part of the time.

The music of the movie is very interesting – mixing in a creepy violin-based humming, with happier melodies to try to show the contrast between an innocent, happy world being infiltrated by pure evil.

It always amazes me how quickly movies were made back then. Filming for this movie took place from September to November of 1945 and was released July 2, 1946.

Originally the film was going to be directed by John Husten, but he entered the military and Welles begged producer Sam Spiegel (also called S.P. Eagle at the time) to let him direct the film. Spiegel agreed as long as Welles agreed to several concessions and to be let go as director if he stepped out of those perimeters. Welles would still have to continue on as the lead actor, even if he was let go as director, however.

Welles agreed. He needed the job if he wanted to continue in Hollywood. Five years earlier Welles had been essentially backlisted with the release of Citizen Kane, which won 9 Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Movie, and Best Actor for Welles. This should have made Welles a sought-after director and actor. Citizen Kane was based on the life of one of the most powerful men in the world at the time — William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper publisher and owner — though and Hearst wasn’t happy. In fact, he was furious. He made life very difficult for Welles and anyone else associated with the making of the movie, which is now considered the greatest movie all time thanks to its innovative filmmaking techniques, complex story, and influential impact on cinema history.

“In September 1945 Welles and his wife Rita Hayworth signed a guarantee that Welles would owe International Pictures any of his earnings, from any source, above $50,000 a year if he did not meet his contractual obligations,” an article on Wikipedia states. “He also agreed to defer to the studio in any creative dispute.”

This became a challenge when Editor Ernest J. Nims was given the power to cut any material he considered extraneous from the script before shooting began.

“He was the great supercutter,” Welles said, “who believed that nothing should be in a movie that did not advance the story. And since most of the good stuff in my movies doesn’t advance the story at all, you can imagine what a nemesis he was to me.”

Reading about all the cuts that were made from the script, and the final product helps me to understand why this movie feels so choppy at times. It feels like elements that would have helped to explain some of the plot better are missing.

What is really missing is building up Welles’ character and helping the viewer get to know who he is. As I read online, I found out that there were scenes removed from the beginning of the movie that would have given us more character development for Welles’ character.

I feel like Nims really overdid things and should probably be ashamed of chopping up Welles’ work.

I also thought that it was interesting that Welles wanted a female actress to portray the investigator.

“I thought it would be much more interesting to have a spinster lady on the heels of this Nazi,” Welles said.

Welles would later say in interviews that nothing of The Stranger was his in the end. Biographer Frank Brady disagrees, “Welles has said, since the making of The Stranger—which he completed one day before schedule and under budget—that nothing in the film was his, this despite the fact that the unmistakable Wellesian moods, shadows, acute angles, and depth-of-focus shots are pervasive. Within the film is a second film, another Wellesian touch, consisting of snatches of documentary footage showing Nazi atrocities.”

One unique aspect of The Stranger is that it was the first commercial film to use documentary footage from the Nazi concentration camps.

Welles viewed Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), a film used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials in early May 1945 as a correspondent and discussion moderator at the United Nations Conference on International Organization

One thing I didn’t remember until reading about it this week was that in the 1940s, many in the world simply couldn’t accept that the concentration camps were real.

Welles wrote about the footage in a column for the New York Post:

“No, you must not miss the newsreels. They make a point this week no man can miss: The war has strewn the world with corpses, none of them very nice to look at. The thought of death is never pretty but the newsreels testify to the fact of quite another sort of death, quite another level of decay. This is a putrefaction of the soul, a perfect spiritual garbage. For some years now we have been calling it Fascism. The stench is unendurable.”

Though the studio did not think The Stranger would be a success, it actually was and right out of the gate too. It cost $1 million to make and earned $2.25 million in U.S. rentals in its first six months. Fifteen months later had grossed $3.2 million.

I very much enjoyed the film, but I do wish that Kindler’s German accent would have come back as soon as his cover was blown. Having him keep the American accent he’s been using to keep his cover, even when under pressure, seemed unrealistic to me.

Despite that small issue, Welles is so deliciously evil in this. His excuses for his crimes against humanity were presented with a lecherous smile that sent shivers down my spine. The tension throughout the film is extreme. I never knew when Kindler would finally snap and reveal himself or worse — kill someone to keep his identity secret.

I found this one on YouTube for free, but it is also streaming in better quality on several streaming sites, including Amazon Prime.

Have you ever watched this one? What did you think?

Classic Movie Impressions: Winter of Fairbanks Jr., Angels Over Broadway

February 13, 2025February 13, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 5 Comments

This winter I am watching movies starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

I had to switch movies for this week’s Winter of Fairbanks Jr. because I couldn’t find Chase a Crooked Shadow. Instead I chose Angels Over Broadway, which I found on YouTube.

It was a simple movie with a very sweet ending. It definitely had some plot holes and some vague back stories and some not great reviews online but I found it endearing.

Douglas (remember we are on a first-name basis now) plays a down-on-his-luck con man named Bill O’Brien who thinks he has found his way to fortune when he sees a man named Charles Engle (John Qualen) blowing cash left and right at a night club.

The issue is that Engle really isn’t loaded at all. He stole $3,000 from his business partner to make his wife happy and then his wife took the money to leave with another man.

Engle’s been confronted by his business partner and is ready to kill himself. Now he is spending one last night on the town before he ends it all.

Rita Hayworth is a lounge singer named Nina Barona who spots Engle and wonders if he might be a producer or director who can help her become famous.

O’Brien sees her and wonders if she might be someone that he can pull into one of his schemes. Also, you can tell he likes the look of her, if you know what I mean. *wink* *wink*

So, yes, we have a group of scammers ready to scam each other. O’Brien sees in Engle a quick buck because he’s going to talk him into going to an illegal poker game and throwing away some of his money and then getting a cut of whatever is taken from him. O’Brien’s main source of income is leading rich men to notorious gangster Dutch Enright (Ralph Theodore). Dutch then cheats them out of a fortune and gives Bill a cut of the profits for luring them in.

Thomas Mitchell portrays playwright Gene Gibbons (Thomas Mitchell….also known as Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life) whose last play fell on its face.

He’s intoxicated and handed the wrong coat when he goes to collect his. Its Engle’s coat and in the pocket is the suicide letter Engle has written for his partner and estranged wife to find after his death.

Gibbons reads the letter and asks who it belongs to. He doesn’t like the idea of someone killing themselves and tracks Engle down to try to talk him out of it.

Gibbons reveals himself to Engle to be a womanizer, adulterer, and a failure at success. He tells Engle he doesn’t want him to miss out on all the beautiful things in life so he decides to help Engle get the $3,000 back. His plan to do that fails so in walks O’Brien, who learns Engle doesn’t actually have any money. Nina thinks this is hilarious and blurts out the scheme O’Brien tried to pull her into.

O’Brien is a bit ticked at her move to blather about the plan but Gibbons believes they can still pull the plan off by pretending Engle is rich.

Scam a gangster? Eek. O’Brien doesn’t like the idea but if Engle can win more than $3,000 in the game then O’Brien can take whatever is left.

The bulk of the movie is watching three people try to play each other or others to benefit themselves and then later having to decide if this is the person they really want to be.

Douglas is a bit of a jerk and a softy in this one. He does, however, rescue Nina from a predatory man when she tries to use the man to get to an opportunity to make her famous. He also shows he’s not all about himself later in the movie.

I wasn’t sure what to make of his thick New York City accent in this one. All I know is that I kept talking like him for the rest of the night, including asking my kids, “Eh, you ready for dinner or what? You need me to wait to get dinner on the plates or do ya’ wants me to bring it to you while it’s still warm?”

My children didn’t find any of this amusing, by the way.

Hayworth got the role after Jean Arthur turned it down and it was her first “A” list film. As we all know, she flew to fame after this by becoming a heartthrob of the 1940s and a pin-up girl during World War II.

Before this movie she was in 35 different movies starting in 1926, but in most of those movies she portrayed secondary characters.

Angels Over Broadway was directed by Ben Hecht and co-produced by Douglas, who convinced Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, to finance the rest.

“Cohn couldn’t figure out what the picture was about but neither could we,” Fairbanks was later quoted as saying about the film.

Samantha Richards from Musings of A Classic Film Addict writes on her blog, “The plot and theme are clear to audiences today, as the screenplay, which earned iconic screenwriter Ben Hecht an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for 1940, has since been regarded as far ahead of its time by critics. I find it difficult to understand why this film isn’t universally recognized that way that I see it: as a strong and riveting drama that blends the realism of New York City life, with a touch of fantasy and the idealism that maybe good guys can sometimes win in the end. To answer my own question, Rita Hayworth is miles apart from the calculated femme fatale image that she would later be known for, with a mousey voice and a doe-eyed look that would make even diehard fans of hers puzzled.”

Richardson continues, “Each performance in Angels Over Broadway (1940) is spot on and impeccably cast, made up of wildly underappreciated actors like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Thomas Mitchell, both of whom rank highly in my book. Jean Arthur could never have portrayed a role like Nina Barona, but I also doubt that even Rita herself could have pulled this part off after being transformed by the Hollywood machine after this film’s release.”

I feel Douglas was very good in this, but in some ways Mitchell stole the show as the intoxicated, and later repentant and sober, Gibbons. He seems to play drunk fellows well. I hope that wasn’t because he knew a lot about it in real life.

It did hit me as I was watching the movie that Douglas always has a small mustache, no matter what movie he is in — other than one of his first movies, The Power of the Press.

There isn’t a ton of information about this movie online, so you won’t have to read through paragraphs of history, behind the scenes stories, or trivia today.

I do have a couple tidbits of trivia I read on Imdb, including:

“The tagline on the original movie poster – “A HECTIC ROMANCE TO BLOW THE FUSES OUT ALONG MAZDA LANE” – refers to the Broadway theater district in New York City as “Mazda Lane.” Mazda was a brand of light bulbs common in the first half of the 20th century, with a name referencing an ancient Persian god of light and good. Broadway was and is known for its brightly lit marquees, and had many nicknames in its heyday.”

And:

“The working title for this film was Before I Die.”

So, there is one line from Douglas in this movie that made me swoon a bit. I’ve gone to the trouble of clipping it for you to share here and it was a bit of an ordeal to do so I hope you appreciate it. *wink* Let me know if you figure out what the line is.

I would guess that many of you have not seen this movie but if you have, what did you think?

I found this for free one on YouTube, by the way.

Up next for me in my Winter of Fairbanks Jr. marathon is Sinbad The Sailor (1947) and I did make sure this one is streaming somewhere.

After that I am watching The Rise of Catherine the Great and writing about it February 27. It is also streaming.

My last pick, The Sun Never Sets, 1939, is available for free on PBS and I also found it here: https://archive.org/details/sun.-never.-sets.-1939

You can find my impressions of previous movies in the series, as well as other classic movies here: https://lisahoweler.com/movie-reviews-impressions/