Tag: old movies

Classic Movie Impressions: It’s Love I’m After (Spring of Bette)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musings5 Comments

An arrogant, self-absorbed, womanizing stage actor and the actress who keeps putting up with him are the main characters in It’s Love I’m After, a 1937 romantic comedy starring Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, and Olivia De Havilland.

I stumbled on this one by accident while looking for Bette Davis movies to add to my Spring of Bette Davis feature and ended up absolutely loving it.

I didn’t even know it was a comedy when I started it, but when the pair started insulting each other in loud whispers during a scene from Romeo and Juliet, I knew this movie was going to be very entertaining.

And it was very entertaining, very funny, and a very nice surprise.

Leslie Howard plays the part of Basil Underwood, a famous stage actor who women fall all over.

Bette plays his co-star and on-again-off-again girlfriend, Joyce Arden, who joins Leslie’s drama with her own drama. In the beginning, we see the two sniping at each other right after their performance, going back to the hotel and continuing their arguing through the door separating their rooms.

It is at the hotel where we meet Basil’s valet Digges played by Eric Blore. Their interaction reminded me so much of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster in the Jeeves books by P.G. Wodehouse. I absolutely loved their bantering, bickering, and joking.

They have this whole routine where Digges either gives or takes away points from Basil based on his behavior, and Basil’s behavior is often not good because he is frequently running off with married women or breaking hearts, all while in a relationship with Joyce.

Leslie Howard and Eric Blore

Joyce and Basil have decided they are going to get married early on in the movie, but there is one problem. After their performance at the beginning of the movie, a young woman named Marcia West (De Havilland) comes to visit Basil and tells him she is in love with him. This is very exciting for him because, you know, he loves women and the attention of women. Marcia leaves without telling him her name, and Basil is left with a well-stroked ego.

Once he and Joyce have decided to marry, and Joyce has closed herself in her room to get ready to leave for the wedding at a justice of the peace, Marcia’s fiancé,  Henry Grant Jr. (Patrick Knowles) shows up and tells Basil he’s angry at him because Marica is in love with him.

Leslie Howard and Bette Davis

There is this whole hilarious scene where Basil says the situation reminds him of a play he was once in and he and Digges act it out for Henry, who is bewildered and annoyed.

The play they act out is about a woman who is in love with a man, but the man wants to shake the woman, so he acts like a cad to get rid of her.

Henry is delighted and says that is what he wants Basil to do — come to Marcia’s family’s house that weekend and be an absolute jerk so she will be fall out of love with him.

What follows is an absolutely hilarious second act that had me in stitches. Olivia was absolutely perfect as a celebrity-obsessed woman, and Leslie was perfect as the arrogant, self-absorbed star.

The cast was just so perfect together.

There is one line that isn’t really a spoiler, so I just have to share it — at one point Olivia says that she was obsessed with Clark Gable for a month and Leslie says, “Who’s Clark Gable?”

I felt like such a nerd when I said, to myself because my daughter was not listening, “Do you know why that’s so funny? It’s so funny because Leslie, Olivia, and Clark were all in Gone with the Wind together and in that movie Olivia’s character was in love with Leslie’s character and Clark was in a relationship with Vivien Leigh.” Then I snorted a laugh.

Gone With the Wind was released two years after this movie. I thought it would have been funny if It’s Love I’m After had been made after Gone with The Wind.

Leslie Howard wanted the movie made to give himself a break after appearing in mostly heavy dramatic roles like The Petrified Forest (1936) and Romeo and Juliet (1936), according to TCM. The screenplay was based on the story Gentlemen After Midnight by Maurice Hanlin.

Producer Hal Willis wasn’t sure about Leslie’s ability to pull of comedy, but did accept the suggestion for the film. Casey Robinson wrote the screenplay, and Archie Mayo directed.

Leslie originally wanted a comedic actress from the stage, like Gertrude Lawrence or Ina Claire to play opposite him but after a few failed attempts, the picture began production without a leading lady.

Finally, Wallis decided that Bette Davis could use a change of pace after intensely dramatic roles in Marked Woman, Kid Galahad and That Certain Woman (all 1937).

Bette wasn’t so sure, though. She’d turned out a lot of films in a short time and actually wanted a break. This would be her third film with Leslie, and she liked working with him but didn’t like that he was going to receive top billing above her. The two had had a strained relationship during the filming of Of Human Bondage when Leslie was cold and dismissive and said to resent the fact an American had been cast in a very British story. He’d also run hot and cold during the filming of The Petrified Forest, sometimes ignoring her, and also, she said, coming on to her “rather crudely.”

In It’s Love I’m After he turned his attention to Olivia, reportedly driving her nuts with his persistence in trying to woo her.

Olivia De Havilland and Leslie Howard

If it sounds like his character wasn’t too far off from the real Leslie, then you’d be right. He was known to be a womanizer, despite being married, and had many affairs.

Bette finally agreed to accept the role, but did ask for a cinematographer she liked to be hired to help her look good on screen.

Audiences proved that the producer had no reason to be worried about Leslie not doing well in a comedy, with over $1 million being brought in during its initial release.

Leslie followed this movie up by directing himself in George Bernard Shaw’s classic movie, Pygmalion (1938)

Up next for Spring of Bette, I will be writing about another one of her less-familiar movies, A Working Man, where she was in full blonde mode.

Here is the complete list of movies I will be watching during this feature:

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)

Additional sources and resources

https://www.tcm.com/articles/92525/its-love-im-after

https://www.goldderby.com/gallery/best-bette-davis-movies-ranked/bette-davis-movies-ranked-all-about-eve/

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

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

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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/

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

Winter of Cagney: Mister Roberts

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musings, Movie Impresssions, Winter of Cagney10 Comments

This winter I am watching James Cagney movies for a “Winter of Cagney” marathon through the months of January and February.

Up this week is Mister Roberts, a 1955 film that couldn’t see to figure out its’ identity. I was told it was supposed to be a comedy/drama ,but I felt a lot of it was more of a drama with a few comedic moments tossed in.

I also wasn’t bowled  over by Cagney’s presence in this one. He seemed more like a caricature of himself or his previous characters and that may be because of the fraught relationship he and much of the cast had with the director, John Ford. More on that later.

Just because I wasn’t overly impressed with the movie, doesn’t mean I hated it or it was all bad. Not at all. In fact, it had some nice messages along the way and it was mildly entertaining. It simply wasn’t my favorite Cagney movie of the few I have watched so far.

The movie was based on the Broadway play which was based on a novel by Thomas Heggen.

Heggen and Joshua Logan wrote the stage play, which debuted in 1948 and was very successful with Henry Fonda in the role of Mister Roberts, which he also played in the movie.

This was a movie where Cagney was a secondary character with Fonda as the main star.

William Powell and Jack Lemon rounded out the cast.

This movie takes place toward the end of World War II on a United States Navy cargo ship called the Reluctant that is stationed in the backwater areas of the Pacific Ocean. The ship is affectionately and not-so-affectionately also called The Bucket by the crew.

The ship has not seen any military or war action and this is infuriating to the executive officer/cargo chief, Lieutenant (junior grade) Douglas A. “Doug” Roberts (Henry Fonda).

He spends most of his time trying to shield the depressed crew from the unpopular and task master captain, Lieutenant Commander Morton, played by Cagney while also filing transfers to get him off the ship and into the war.

He hates the idea that he and the men of the ship are sitting in the middle of the ocean, not seeing any action while Morton simply shouts orders and waters his ridiculous palm tree that he keeps in a small pot on a balcony near his office. Morton refers the transfers to higher ups because regulations require him to but he always advises the transfer requests to be ignored so they are.

Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver spends most of his time on ship hiding in his bunk to avoid the captain but repeatedly says he will one day light a fire cracker “under the old man’s bunk” to get back at him for always being mean to the crew. Instead of ever doing anything bold, though, Pulver wilts under Morton’s shouts.

William Powell appears in his last feature film as the doctor on board the ship and spends much of his time dealing with crew members who make up illnesses so they don’t have to keep working under Morton’s rule.

Roberts feels the men need some rest and relaxation and leave but Morton always refuses to give it to them.

Roberts finally finds a way to get orders for some R&R time behind Morton’s back, but when Morton finds out what’s going on he’s furious and tells Roberts the only way they can have the leave is if Roberts agrees to stop filing transfer requests and starts doing everything Morton tells him to.

The idea behind this one is a good one, but I wasn’t really feeling Cagney in the role. It almost felt like he was relegated to this secondary part, even though some critics praised his portrayal of the mentally-off captain.

One thing that probably didn’t help this movie was the fact that the director, John Ford, started the filming out with aggression and was replaced halfway through due to an argument with Fonda where Ford punched Fonda in the face, as well as emergency gallbladder surgery for Ford.

Ford’s tension with the actors may be why there was so much underlying tension throughout the movie.

Ford couldn’t even get along with Cagney, and let him know they probably wouldn’t get along right from the beginning.

Director John Ford

When Ford met Cagney at the airport, the director told the actor they would probably “tangle asses.” Cagney said he was shocked by the comment.

“I would have kicked his brains out,” Cagney said later. “He was so g******* mean to everybody. He was truly a nasty old man.”

The next day, Cagney was slightly late on set, and Ford was furious. Cagney allegedly interrupted Ford’s ranting by saying, “When I started this picture, you said that we would tangle asses before this was over. I’m ready now – are you?”

Ford reportedly walked away and he and Cagney had no further issues. Good thing too since Cagney had once been a champion boxer in the Bronx before becoming an actor.

Ford was replaced by Mervyn Leroy.

Joshua Logan also helped to direct, bringing his experience of having directed the original production on Broadway, but was uncredited in the film.


I was not overly impressed with Lemmon in this movie, so I was really shocked to read that he won a best supporting actor Oscar for his role.

According to the Warner Bros Fandom site, Lemmon and Cagney became close friends during filming.

“During the production of the film, Lemmon began a long-term friendship with Cagney which continued until Cagney’s death in 1986,” an article on the site reads. “Prior to his appearance in his first film, years before Mister Roberts, he started in live television. In one particular performance, Lemmon decided to play his character differently. He decided to play the character left-handed, which was opposite to his own way of movement. With much practice, he pulled off the performance without anyone noticing the change. This change even fooled Lemmon’s wife at the time. A few years went by and Lemmon met Cagney on their way to Midway Island to film Mister Roberts. They introduced themselves, and Cagney chimed in, “Are you still fooling people into believing you’re left handed?” They had a great laugh and a strong friendship was born.”

I wouldn’t really say I would skip this movie when watching Cagney movies, but, for me, I’ve seen better.

This was his last movie with Warner Bros, which is the studio where he’d spent most of his career.

A bit of trivia or facts about the film:

  • Henry Fonda was not the first choice for the role of Mister Roberts, even though he had played the role on Broadway. The producers felt that  he had been away from film for too long (eight years) and wouldn’t be a box office draw, but also that he was too old for the role. The character was supposed to be in his 20s but Fonda was 55 at the time of the film.
  • Spencer Tracy turned down the role of Morton.
  • Ford used his Navy connections to find one of the old cargo scows to use for the story’s setting and boat; cast and crew were all sent to Midway Island for exterior shooting. 
  • Though Ford apologized to Fonda for swinging at him, Fonda never looked at his former friend the same way again and they never worked together again.
  • The movie was 1955’s third highest box office hit.
  • The next year Ford made what many consider his greatest movie, The Searchers.
  • The movie was remade for TV in 1984 with Kevin Bacon as Mister Roberts

Up next week I am watching Angels With Dirty Faces, one of Cagney’s early movies with Humphrey Bogart.

If you would like to follow along with my Winter of Cagney and watch some of the movies yourself, here is my schedule for the winter:

 Yankee Doodle Dandy

Taxi

The Strawberry Blonde

Mister Roberts

Angels With Dirty Faces

Public Enemy

Love Me or Leave Me

White Heat

Man of A Thousand Faces

Bonus: The Seven Little Foys






Sources:

Website: https://warnerbros.fandom.com/wiki/Mister_Roberts_(1955_film)

Website: https://www.tcm.com/articles/72472/mister-roberts-1955

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