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Post by topbilled on Mar 25, 2024 14:55:04 GMT
This neglected film is from 1948.
Boxing melodrama
I read somewhere that after the success of HUMORESQUE, Warner Brothers bosses were keen on the idea of putting Joan Crawford and John Garfield into a follow-up. They would have used a similar dramatic blueprint with Crawford once again playing a hardened dame who is slowly brought around by love, while Garfield played another artistic minded soul under her spell. WHIPLASH has just such a plot.
Guessing this was a script Crawford passed on, because she was off at Fox on a loan out making DAISY KENYON. We can assume that Alexis Smith, one of the studio’s “backup” actresses, was then assigned to take over. Smith does a decent enough job conveying the icy aspects of the character, something she perfected in a previous role she had in THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS (made in 1945 but not released until 1947 when WHIPLASH was in production).
As for the male protagonist, Dane Clark often filled in when Garfield wasn’t available. Clark portrays an artist (which he had already done in A STOLEN LIFE), who finds himself involved in the world of boxing (which Garfield did in BODY AND SOUL). In real life Clark had been a semi-pro boxer during his salad days as an actor on the east coast. As a result, I think his performance in the workout scenes and ring scenes is probably a bit more realistic than other stars pretending to play pugs on the big screen.
The storyline involves Clark working at a seaside tavern on the west coast owned by S.Z. Sakall (who was always cast as restauranteurs in WB flicks). Clark has a chance meeting with a vacationing Smith who buys one of his paintings. They get to know each other and a romance quickly ensues. But she is running from a hoodlum husband back east, and when one of her hubby’s goons shows up, she must go back. She just vanishes one day, with Clark not knowing of her troubled marital status until Sakall gives Clark a loan to follow Smith back to New York.
The New York scenes bustle with more energy. We see Clark still working as a struggling painter, behind on the rent, befriended by humorous neighbor Eve Arden and her stereotypical beau from Texas. Arden and the Texan take Clark to a swank nightclub, since that is what any normal person who’s behind on the rent should do. While eating dinner Clark glimpses Smith during a floor show. He has finally caught up with the gal who stole his heart.
The club is owned by Smith’s husband (Zachary Scott in a menacing performance). There’s a skirmish between Clark and some thugs, which impresses Scott who decides he’s going to make Clark a boxer. Clark is more interested in art, but this is a chance to stay close to Smith so he agrees. From here a few more characters are added, such as Alan Hale Sr. in a good bit as a trainer; and Jeffrey Lynn, who is especially good as Smith’s brother— a doctor who is psychologically tormented.
The main reason for Lynn’s torment is because he unsuccessfully operated on Scott’s legs several years earlier. Yes, Scott is paralyzed, running his underworld environment from a wheelchair; his crippling is what keeps Smith beholden to her since she was in the car fighting with him the day he had his terrible accident.
We see Smith and Lynn suffer a lot in this story, both under Scott’s thumb anxious to break free from their bondage.
I won’t spoil the ending. But there is a Faustian bargain of sorts that occurs between Scott and Clark, with Clark trying to obtain Smith’s freedom. This, of course, is complicated by Lynn’s own plans to off Scott.
Despite the contrivances, the screenwriters manage to provide a satisfying conclusion to all the angst that has gone before. Yes, Smith and Clark are no Crawford and Garfield, but they render strong enough performances to make this watchable.
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Post by topbilled on Apr 8, 2024 15:13:39 GMT
This neglected film is from 1936.
Do you work without living, or do you live without working?
Barry Conners’ play ran on Broadway in the mid-1920s and finally transferred to celluloid when Warner Brothers made this charming romcom a decade later. Originally titled ‘Applesauce,’ it’s about a young man (Ross Alexander) who is related to an independent orchard owner (Joseph Cawthorn) but doesn’t seem to want to do any work. He is known for his flattery and blarney, which people sarcastically refer to as applesauce.
Alexander’s character pours on the charm with women, which goes over well for him. Especially with regards to a young gal (Anita Louise) he loves, who coincidentally is engaged to someone else (Dick Purcell). But Alexander’s uncle (Cawthorn) and Louise’s put-upon father (Gene Lockhart) take different views and consider him fairly worthless. As a result Louise is pressured to remain engaged to Purcell, even when Purcell becomes too controlling and business-minded about the planned marriage.
This is basically a filmed play that contains some good dialogue and rather thoughtful characterizations, which the competent cast is able to capitalize on with its sharp performances. Only two main sets are used. One is the interior of Lockhart’s home where Louise lives before she decides to dump Purcell and impulsively wed Alexander. Another is the apartment where the newlyweds live above a drug store.
After the young couple is wed, the story focuses on whether or not they will be happy. Will Alexander make good and take up a career, or will Louise will have to return home and admit she made a mistake? In contrast to the impulsive qualities of the newlyweds’ union, we see Louise’s parents struggling to keep their own marriage fresh and spontaneous. The mother is played by Kathleen Lockhart, who in real life was married to Gene Lockhart. BRIDES LIKE THAT was the Lockharts’ first Hollywood film together.
One thing I rather enjoyed, besides Ross Alexander’s excellent acting, is how the character he plays is not meant to be pitied or frowned upon. Yes, he goes through periods where he’s unable to maintain employment; but he has a dream he eventually makes good on; and his character is deeply in love with the woman he married. It’s refreshing to see such a flawed man on screen who is not an outright villain; just someone who needs a bit more time to hit his stride. It’s easy to root for the twosome as they get started.
It’s also nice to glimpse what a real marriage looks like on screen, in the form of the Lockharts’ sparring and loving reconciliations. One thing the casual viewer will learn is that in a good marriage, the wife remains the apple of her husband’s eye. That’s no lie; I mean, that’s no applesauce.
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Post by topbilled on Apr 16, 2024 10:35:47 GMT
This film is from 1950.
If they don’t cry, then what is it they do?
It had been several years since I’d watched this one, which I don’t exactly consider noir as much as it’s a classic gangster crime drama. Warner Brothers started making these types of stories with great frequency in the early 1930s. By this point, twenty years later, they have crystallized the formula; invested money in better sets and lighting techniques; and rounded up the best director and cast on the studio payroll.
It might be argued that Crawford, at age 45, is a bit too old to play this role…particularly scenes at the beginning when she is a young married woman with a young son. But she’s developed such a hardboiled style by this point and knows how to tilt her head at just the precise angles so the tears will cascade down her face the exact moment she is photographed from that side, it’s like a masterclass in gritty yet melodramatic acting.
In some scenes, I felt the script was actually too easy for her, so to get enjoyment from it, she vamps it up almost as if she’s spoofing rival Bette Davis’s performance methods. Indeed, these were probably scripts leftover from when Davis had recently left the studio; so I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Crawford is playing Davis playing the character in the script.
One thing that helps the film is having more ‘innocent’ costars alongside her. Kent Smith is perfect as the naive accountant who falls under her spell and saves her life at the end. David Brian, as a powerful mobster, is almost too altruistic despite the more villainous aspects of his storyline; even when he’s “investing” in Crawford as his mistress and using her for his own purposes, there is sincerity on his part. And Steve Cochran as a rival mob boss who romances Crawford in the second half of the picture seems like putty in her hands. She’s the real boss of these men.
One irony that doesn’t escape me is that in a way the story is about people who leave poverty behind and create new lives for themselves. This involves a fair bit of name changing and impersonation, which is what most of these Hollywood movie stars did in real-life. Joan Crawford as a stage name is as synthetic as they come; she was born Lucille LeSueur (pronounced La Sir). David Brian was really Brian Davis; Steve Cochran’s first name was Robert. These personalities on screen were invented from the raw materials of their backgrounds and revised considerably when necessary. If we factor in my theory of Crawford impersonating Davis in her role, then there is an extra layer of postmodernism and pastiche.
The best scene, which puts this film into Crawford’s top five for me, is the scene near the end where David Brian’s mob character shows up at Crawford’s place with Smith and beats her, before Cochran arrives and shoots it out with him. This is where we get Crawford transferring on to the screen what she knows about abuse. It’s so precisely choreographed the way she allows herself to be throw into a table, the way she uses her hands and arms to knock over the props on the desk at the right moments.
But at the same time she’s taken her mind into the real horror of such moments, where women become punching bags. This is a gutsy performance, that despite all its prefabricated artifice still strikes an honest note.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 16, 2024 11:03:44 GMT
The Damned Don't Cry from 1950 with Joan Crawford, David Brian, Kent Smith and Steve Cochran
"Don't talk to me about self respect, that's something you tell yourself you got when you got nothing else...The only thing that counts is that stuff you take to the bank, that filthy buck that everybody sneers at but slugs to get." - Joan Crawford as Ethel Whitehead looking to become Lorna Hansen Forbes
The Damned Don't Cry is one of the better post-war Joan Crawford vehicles that sees Crawford, once again, willing to do almost anything to get out of poverty. Without marketable skills, but plenty of looks and ruthless feminine wiles, "almost anything" usually means sleeping with the right men.
Brought up in poverty and after tragedy ends her first marriage to a struggling oil-field worker, Crawford's character, Ethel Whitehead, heads to a big city to "get ahead." She quickly ends up in the only job she's qualified for, a fashion model, back when the pay for that work was low and "entertaining the customers," was part of the job.
Bitter and ruthless at this point in her life, Crawford first hooks up with a smart but unambitious accountant, played by Kent Smith. After promoting his talents to the mob, which is looking to turn its violent rackets into a professionally run business, Crawford jumps from Smith to the big mob boss played by David Brian.
Brian has "reinvented" himself from a rough mobster into a cultured man and, effectively, helps Crawford, now his mistress, do the same with money, travel and a social-registry woman to educate her in the ways of the wealthy and refined. Crawford's Ethel Whitehead chooses the wonderfully insane name of Lorna Hansen Forbes to complete her transformation into a society woman.
Having achieved everything she wants, it's time for Crawford, dripping in jewels, fur and refinement, to pay the piper. Brian needs her to go out West and "ingratiate" herself to his key lieutenant out there, who Brian believes is plotting a coup.
It's palliated only a bit for the Motion Picture Production Code, but the assignment is really to sleep with the guy and find out what he's up to. Crawford's Lorna Hansen Forbes, now believing her own press a bit too much, is affronted by this. Brian, though, reminds her that this is what she's been all along, so he tells her, effectively, get to it.
From here, The Damned Don't Cry goes all in on its mobster-soap-opera story as Crawford begins to fall for the West Coast mobster, smoothly played by Steve Cochran, which brings Brian and his now invaluable business manager, Smith, out West for the big climatic showdown.
Crawford is outstanding playing ruthlessly ambitious characters; characters so obsessed with getting rich they never really seem to enjoy their temporary success as there's not much humanity left in them by the time they achieve their goal. It's a common lesson in many of her post war morality-tale movies: blind ruthless ambition leads to empty soulless victories.
The Damned Don't Cry is fun post-war Crawford melodrama with a touch of mob noir tossed in. Yes, it's over the top; yes, the plot has a bunch of holes; yes, the dialogue can sometimes be cringeworthy and, yes, some scenery gets chewed up, but isn't that the way of all enjoyable cheesy entertainment?. Plus, it's fun time travel to just-post-war America.
N.B. #1 For all the male actors who played roles too old for them, the female answer is half the movies Joan Crawford made after the war. By force of personality or screen presence or something, Crawford regularly played characters ten or more years younger than she was, but despite not looking the part, which often called for her to be prepossessingly beautiful, she pulled them off.
N.B. #2 You have to appreciate the way actor Kent Smith accepted his Hollywood fate of, often, having to be the man who doesn't get the girl. It's not a fun role, but someone has to be the milquetoast who loses the good-looking girl to the handsome leading man.
N.B. #3 The "flashback" style of telling a story was big in the late 1940s and could, sometimes, frame a picture well as you keep the outcome of the story in mind when you are seeing the events that lead up to that outcome unfold. But often, as in The Damned Don't Cry, it is a contrivance that undermines the tension of the picture as you know the conclusion of the story all along. |
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Post by jamesjazzguitar on Apr 16, 2024 15:23:03 GMT
The Dammed Don't Cry is my favorite Joan Crawford Warner Bros film. Joan is at her best, but I also find the secondary leading man (non-major-stars), giving first rate performances; Kent Smith, David Brian and Steve Cochran. All stay fairly true to their typical screen persona, but they each add something that goes beyond that; Smith - yea, still wimpy but he does wise-up and learns how to play the patsy with a sense of style (instead of just being clueless and taking the fall). Brian and Cochran have their gangster \ tough guy persona, but both add a degree of warmth as it relates to Joan, which makes them more well-rounded characters in this perverted noir universe.
PS: TB comments about Joan and her age in this film is spot-on. Yea, she is too old for the part, but she pulls it off with that Crawford style and wit.
I find her very sexy in certain scenes; E.g. when they are out at the pool in Palm Springs. I never get the feeling that a man like Brian or Cochran would have preferred a younger woman.
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Post by topbilled on Apr 22, 2024 14:39:18 GMT
This film is from 1950.
The curtain— close the curtain
At the beginning of this Alfred Hitchcock film Marlene Dietrich’s character, a glamorous stage actress, tells Richard Todd to close the curtain as she enters a room with him. Later, a heavy stage curtain falls on him and kills him, after he’s revealed to be a killer fleeing a detective (Michael Wilding) and the police. But we spend much of the film not knowing he’s the culprit, because Hitchcock pulls a fast one which some contemporary critics did not like.
Hitchcock starts the film by having Todd’s character on the run after the killing of Dietrich’s husband. But he proclaims his innocence to a girl friend (Jane Wyman). The first section of the film is his narration and flashback, which like Wyman’s character we take at face value as the truth. Only it’s not the truth. When he does turn out to be guilty later, we’ve been misled. I suppose this makes sense because most killers wouldn’t tell the truth, and it would help to dupe an impressionable friend to help facilitate a plan to hide from the authorities.
However, Hitchcock and his cinematographer (Wilkie Cooper) might have done something different with the camera or the lighting during the false flashback to imply the feeling something’s off. Another thing regarding the flashback, these events are told to Wyman...but in the flashback there is a passage of time, and Todd recounts some events to Dietrich within the flashback. It’s as if Hitchcock and his writers got a little too clever for their own good and then couldn’t quite keep it all linear.
The original story upon which the screenplay is based has another lesser character as the murderer. My guess is Todd’s character was made the bad guy, so that it would be easier for Wyman to wind up with Wilding at the end. I do think Todd is excellent at playing emotionally troubled men; and I like how Dietrich supposedly goaded him into the killing, which makes her an accomplice and not in the clear.
Some parts of the story are strangely humorous. Dietrich overplays her role and is so busy vamping for the viewers that she almost verges on self-parody. Supposedly Hitchcock wanted Tallulah Bankhead for the role, whom he’d previously directed in LIFEOBAT, but Warners insisted on Dietrich. If Bankhead had been in it, then undoubtedly the camp value would have increased even more.
In addition to Dietrich’s posturing, we have some slight overplaying by Alastair Sim as Wyman’s father, a not quite reformed rascal. His heart’s in the right place where his daughter is concerned, which I think is meant to mirror Hitchcock’s own relationship with his daughter Patricia who is cast in a minor role as a friend of Wyman’s.
Wyman is truly the best thing in the movie. Unlike Dietrich who is amping up every conceivable human action (including breathing), Wyman wisely underplays her role yet stays alert and focused throughout. Wyman received top billing by the studio after her recent Oscar win for JOHNNY BELINDA, and this is truly deserved. She has a wonderful way of using her eyes to register different emotions. Whenever Hitchcock cuts to her for a reaction shot, we are given a plethora of registered responses pertaining to the action at hand. She judges and balances the whole movie.
One thing I want to add is that this story was a way for Hitchcock to delve into what actors do, how they take on certain roles and perpetuate an inordinate amount of nonsense and falsehood in order to put something across. You almost need a scorecard to keep track of what each person really knows about the other. Ironically, this gives the film some richer meanings, though untangling it all probably requires multiple viewings.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 22, 2024 15:19:44 GMT
Stage Fright from 1950 with Jane Wyman, Richard Todd, Marlene Dietrich, Alastair Sim and Michael Wilding
A not great Hitchcock movie is still a darn good picture by almost any other standard. Stage Fright only suffers by comparison to the great Hitchcock movies as, on its own, it's an intricate and engaging picture with a sharp blend of mystery, romance and humor.
The mystery is a bit convoluted as an early flashback scene has an "is this narrator trustworthy" element. The flashback's narrator and murder suspect is played by Richard Todd, who might have killed his older lover's husband or might have been set up by her.
His "older lover" is played by Marlene Dietrich, whose beauty, even as she approaches fifty here, is still captivating. Yet her chilling personality - which reportedly was her real-life one, too - would put off most normal men, although not young Mr. Todd's character.
Todd is suspected of killing Dietrich's husband, so he runs to his ex-girlfriend, played by Jane Wyman for help. He tells her, in that questionable flashback sequence, that Dietrich killed her husband, but because of a bloody dress, he went to the murder scene.
The bloody dress in question is the one that Dietrich was wearing when she showed up at Todd's apartment after, he says, she killed her husband. He says he then went to Dietrich's house to get her a clean dress, which will make it look like he was at the scene of the murder.
It's a dicey story that Todd and Wyman know won't hold up, so Wyman offers to hide Todd at her father's remote house, while she, Wyman, does some sleuthing to find exonerating evidence for Todd.
Wyman, thinking she is still madly in love with Todd, proves an intrepid detective. She convinces her father, played by Alastair Sim, to hide Todd, while she gets herself hired as Dietrich's maid. She is the world's greatest ex-girlfriend ever.
Wyman also befriends and starts a romance with the investigation's lead detective, played by Michael Wilding. Wyman is a very busy young woman in this one.
The movie from here is classic Hitchcock as Wyman digs up evidence, but also puts herself at risk, while Todd looks more suspicious as Dietrich tries to stay arrogantly above it all. Wilding starts to fall for Wyman and she for him, but then he realizes she's been using him.
The romance and mystery threads get more tangled into a climax that feels like several of Hitch's other climaxes, but it still holds your interest right to the end.
Some, including Hitchcock, have criticized Wyman as not being right for the lead. Yet Wyman's not-Hollywood beauty - she's no classic Hitchcock blonde - was perfect for the role as she has to have some insecurities to put herself so far out there for a questionable man.
She also shows a range of emotions and an ability to play both a well-bred young lady and a dowdy, uneducated maid. If the romances she has with Todd and Wilding lack spark, look equally at the men as screen chemistry requires two to work.
What does work is Sim as Wyman's quirky but smart father who steals every scene he's in. His character clearly loves his daughter and loves solving mysteries, with those underlying passions making his surface nonchalance a joy to watch. He needed more screen time.
What also works is Hitchcock's own brand of noir as the lighting, camera angles, use of shadows and general atmosphere of this beautiful black and white production are still captivating today.
Stage Fright is not Hitchcock's best, but Superman can't save Planet Earth everyday, sometimes he just stops a bullet.
Stage Fright is, though, an engrossing tale of a murder, misdirection and coverup, laced with humor and populated by an impressive cast that makes it a great movie if done by anyone but Hitchcock.
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Post by topbilled on Apr 22, 2024 15:35:19 GMT
Sometimes Hitchcock was required to use 'A' list actresses on a studio's payroll that would not have been his first choice. The bosses at Warners also made him cast Ruth Roman in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, and she was not his first choice either.
But in this case, Wyman was coming off an Oscar win and she'd had a previous hit on loan to MGM (THE YEARLING) so her career was red hot...and it probably helped STAGE FRIGHT's box office having her in the starring role.
From what I read, Hitch's displeasure was not over Wyman herself but over Wyman's attempts to add extra facial makeup during the scenes where she's dressed as a maid. This was because Wyman was afraid Dietrich would look too glamorous by comparison; yet Wyman's character was undercover and was supposed to look dowdy as the maid. Despite clashing over the direction of these scenes, I am sure Hitchcock appreciated Wyman's talent as an actress.
Wyman did become friends with the director's daughter, Patricia. And one thing we should add is that after Loretta Young, Jane Wyman was Hollywood's most well-known Roman Catholic. (Years later, on the set of Falcon Crest, Wyman had a priest around so the cast could make confessions and attend mass with her.)
Incidentally, the Hitchcocks were also practicing Roman Catholics. Dietrich herself was a lapsed Catholic. So sometimes these casts and crews might have had artistic differences, but they were still bonded by things like religion and politics.
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Post by topbilled on Apr 26, 2024 7:09:43 GMT
This neglected film is from 1932.
You know it’s a precode when…
You know you’re watching a precode when someone commits murder and goes unpunished. That’s what happens to the aunt (Cecil Cunningham) of an aspiring Broadway actress (Frances Dee). Aunt Hattie has spent 19 years grooming her sweet niece for stardom and she is not going to let some two-bit hood (Lyle Talbot) gum up the works. When Talbot gloms on to the fact that Dee has been passing bad checks behind the aunt’s back, he pays the outstanding debts but expects sexual favors in return.
At the same time there’s a suave newspaper reporter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) who along with his wisecracking pal (Lee Tracy) lives paycheck to paycheck. Some of their stories involve information they get from various gangland figures. Fairbanks is mad about Dee. But he can only give her the good life one night a week, on the day he’s paid. So for the other six days, her auntie is pushing her towards a wealthy theater producer (Andre Luguet). But when Talbot interferes with everyone’s plans, he has to be eliminated. Or so the aunt thinks.
This is when she visits Talbot’s penthouse apartment one rainy night and shoots him. Fairbanks arrives on the scene just as she is hiding the gun in a potted plant and leaves. Why she didn’t take the gun with her is beyond me. Then Fairbanks goes into the apartment and rearranges the crime scene to make it seem like Talbot got drunk and fell off a ledge. But wouldn’t he still have a bullet hole in him?
At the end of the film Fairbanks sends other incriminating evidence he found at the scene to the aunt, to keep her in the clear. He does this even though Dee has dumped him and married Luguet. I guess we’re supposed to root for Fairbanks helping the women out of a jam, but of course, he’s perverting the course of justice and goes unpunished as well.
The film ends on a somewhat humorous note of Fairbanks realizing that the love women offer is a racket, though a faithful female friend (Ann Dvorak) is waiting in the wings to carry on with him. Never mind the fact that the men in this movie are the real racketeers and play just as many games with the womenfolk.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 26, 2024 8:21:10 GMT
Love Is a Racket from 1932 with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Frances Dee, Lee Tracy, Lyle Talbot and Ann Dvorak
Love is a Racket is another excellent precode that flies below the radar of even precode fans. Perhaps that's because it features four precode stars - Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Ann Dvorak, Lee Tracy and Frances Dee - who are all but forgotten today.
After the Code was enforced, heroes were never afraid of mobsters, were always romantics underneath it all and would always do the law-abiding thing in the end. This type is familiar since he or, occasionally, she populated the screen for almost four decades.
Precode land, though, had heroes with real-people characteristics and flaws. In Love is a Racket, Fairbanks plays a Broadway columnist, a Walter Winchell type. He covers the Broadway beat, an oddly mixed up world of reporters, theater people and mobsters.
Fairbanks' character is the typical cocky and cynical reporter type (almost every male star played one in the 1930s) with an Achilles heel: he's in love with a pretty Broadway actress wannabee played by Frances Dee who has a "stage mom" aunt.
Dee plays Fairbanks like a fiddle as she uses him for his connections in the theater and for dates when there aren't better career-advancing options around. Yet Fairbanks only sees true love when he looks into pretty opportunist Dee's eyes.
Dee is really more interested in men who can advance her career, like a theater producer played by Andre Luguet. Luguet is much older than Fairbanks, but he also has a much bigger checkbook and can put Dee on the stage.
Fairbank's two best friends, played by Lee Tracy, in the role of a fellow reporter who covers the crime beat, and Ann Dvorak, see through Dee, but nothing they say will change Fairbank's love-addled brain.
Despite his editor and Tracy encouraging Fairbanks to do some hard-hitting reporting on the mob's involvement in the milk racket (a real thing in the 1930s), Fairbanks doesn't want the personal danger or to take the risk that he could lose access to information for his column.
Fairbanks is on good terms with the mobsters, like the one played by Lyle Talbot who is the gangster behind the milk racket. While the Sardi's restaurant here is a set, it does capture the eclectic milieu of gangsters, theater people and reporters who oddly socialized there.
That is the setup, which is covered quickly as director William A. Wellman doesn't dilly dally in this fast-paced movie that says to its audience, "keep up, we don't have a lot of time for background stories and exposition."
The story's catalyst is, of all things, Dee's undisciplined spending. About to bounce several checks all over town for clothes and things, Dee asks Fairbanks to help. He doesn't have the funds to cover the checks, but agrees to talk to her creditors on her behalf.
With that tripwire now broken, all sorts of things happen. Fairbanks runs around trying to help, but behind the scenes, gangster Talbot steps in and pays off all the bills. Now he holds all of Dee's bad checks and, thus, her fate in his hands.
The movie from here is Fairbanks trying to free Dee from Talbot's clutches; Dee manipulating Fairbanks as she plays up to Luguet for her career and Tracy and Dvorak, the latter carrying a huge torch for Fairbanks, trying to help Fairbanks not get killed by Talbot.
In the climax, no spoilers coming, and after much running around, a sort of deus ex machina in the form of Dee's aunt, reshuffles the deck requiring an on-the-fly final fix by Fairbanks. It's all precode stuff: murder, cover-up and no punishment for the guilty.
What's shocking is how little importance is given to those events, versus the final trivial betrayal that has Fairbanks invoking the title of the movie to denounce love. Someone's dead and the killer's going free, but what's really important is that Fairbank's heart is broken.
Fairbanks can sometimes come across as almost goofy, but here, as a cynical reporter in love, he strikes a nice balance. Tracy, too, is excellent as his hyperkinetic acting style can wear on you when he's the lead, but in a supporting role, he brings a good spark.
Dee understood that her role was to be pretty and selfish and she delivered. It's Dvorak, a fine actress, who is underutilized as she never does much more than pine away for Fairbanks.
Love Is a Racket is a solid seventy-one minutes of fast-paced entertainment that today serves as a neat time capsule of early 1930s New York City where theater people, mobsters and news reporters were all at the center of an anything-goes morality.
It's a window into a world that would no longer be seen on screen once the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced after 1934. The thing that's sometimes hard to remember is that the real world stayed immoral, it was only Hollywood's portrayal of it that changed. |
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Post by topbilled on Apr 26, 2024 16:13:26 GMT
I guess I'm used to seeing Lee Tracy in the lead...or when he has a plum supporting role like he does in THE BEST MAN...so I felt he was underused here. And of course, Ann Dvorak's character is even more underused, often standing around reacting without much dialogue or direct action.
One thing Fading Fast's review touched on, which I didn't mention, was the unusual "alliance" between the reporter (Fairbanks) and the hoods (Lyle Talbot and his henchman Warren Hymer). We know when Hymer holds Fairbanks "hostage" in some Atlantic City hotel room, he won't kill Fairbanks because Fairbanks is the lead and will likely make it to the last scene of the movie. So all that goes nowhere, except to prove Fairbanks has a strange relationship with the hoods, and there is almost a 'code' of 'friendship' between them, if we can call it that.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 26, 2024 16:47:17 GMT
I guess I'm used to seeing Lee Tracy in the lead...or when he has a plum supporting role like he does in THE BEST MAN...so I felt he was underused here. And of course, Ann Dvorak's character is even more underused, often standing around reacting without much dialogue or direct action.
One thing Fading Fast's review touched on, which I didn't mention, was the unusual "alliance" between the reporter (Fairbanks) and the hoods (Lyle Talbot and his henchman Warren Hymer). We know when Hymer holds Fairbanks "hostage" in some Atlantic City hotel room, he won't kill Fairbanks because Fairbanks is the lead and will likely make it to the last scene of the movie. So all that goes nowhere, except to prove Fairbanks has a strange relationship with the hoods, and there is almost a 'code' of 'friendship' between them, if we can call it that. |
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Post by topbilled on May 1, 2024 15:12:43 GMT
This neglected film is from 1950.
Mad dog killing
I suppose with a title like this, we know going into the story, there won’t be any future for the main characters. They will all wind up in prison, the ones that aren’t already dead. They’ll be forced to kiss everything goodbye.
James Cagney, hot on the heels of his success in WHITE HEAT, plays another sadistic thug. Since Cody Jarrett died in a blaze of glory at the end of HEAT, they couldn’t very well make a sequel, so this was the next best thing…create a new character very much in the Jarrett mold, but make him even more corrupt, more vicious and load the scenes with plenty of violent action.
At this point, Cagney and his brother were making their own productions filmed in rented studios. Given his recent box office success, old home studio Warner Brothers agreed to distribute the picture. It has the WB logo at the beginning, though is not technically part of the Warners archive of classic films. Due to its status as an indy film KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE fell out of the public eye for many years until the folks at UCLA finally restored it in the early 2010s which led to a home video release.
Perhaps those waiting for a chance to see the film were disappointed. It is never going to measure up to WHITE HEAT, which at its core, is about the tragic relationship between a mother and son (Cagney and Margaret Wycherly). Here, the criminal is more of a loner, though he tries to find love with women who cross his path. One is the attractive sister (Barbara Payton) of a guy who helped him escape prison but died in the process. Payton resembles Cagney’s previous costar Virginia Mayo.
Part of the story involves Payton remaining clueless about Cagney’s killing of her brother, while she gets more romantically involved with him. As the story unspools, we learn she is just as twisted as he is. There is a shocking scene in which she is towel whipped by Cagney then falls into his arms all hot and bothered. Not your typical love story! Of course Payton will never be enough for Cagney.
He is too busy pulling scams and going up against two crooked cops (Ward Bond & Barton MacLane). Then he meets a society chick (Helena Carter). He decides to ditch Payton for Carter, and that doesn’t go over well with Payton at all. This, combined with her learning the truth about how her brother died, sends Payton into a murderous rage. She becomes a second mad dog killer, eliminating Cagney.
Audiences didn’t respond too favorably to the gruesome acts of violence depicted on screen. It all seemed a bit excessive, as if the Cagney brothers lost good sense and went over the top in this follow-up of WHITE HEAT. It’s competently acted and directed; there are some very nicely staged scenes, especially during the courtroom sequences in which Payton and the rest of the gang are on trial. As the court proceedings occur we flashback over their various crimes and the death of Cagney’s character. But it all leaves a viewer feeling a bit cold. Yes, justice will be doled out in the end, but it doesn’t quite seem enough.
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Post by topbilled on May 8, 2024 11:33:27 GMT
This neglected film is from 1937.
Far reaching swindles
This melodrama from Warner Brothers has the usual romantic angst with some financial conflicts mixed in. Based on the Stavisky Affair, an economic scandal that rocked France in the mid-1930s, we’re given a tale that puts Kay Francis in a situation that would otherwise seem contrived if it were not true.
However, I do suspect the studio writers embellished the original scenario considerably, in order to create some sort of upbeat ending. For in real life, Stavisky’s wife, the model for Francis’s character, lost her husband in a questionable suicide (or was it really murder?) and ended up on trial. Here, she doesn’t face prosecution but has to live down the shame of her husband’s crooked exploits and try to make up for it by returning money to the people he swindled. Once she has done this, then she is able to take up with another man (Ian Hunter) and get her happily ever after.
Claude Rains has been cast in the Stavisky-inspired role of Stefan Orloff. He’s a Russian conman who arrives in Paris with a plan. That plan is to bilk as many investors as he can in order to amass his own fortune. Also, he owns a string of pawn shops which are highly unethical. In order to gain financial power, he uses an ornamental fashion plate (Francis) to attract influential people and entangle them in his shady schemes.
During the first half of the film Francis doesn’t realize the level of crime she’s enabling. She has an idea that Rains’ activities are not all above board but she considers him a friend who helped her become more successful in the world of high couture. With his assistance she was able to open a prestigious firm and make a fortune of her own.
But later, when Rains’ misdeeds are exposed and he’s in need of help, Francis agrees to marry him to assure his reputation with powerful people remains intact. In some ways the story is a commentary about how commerce and politics intersect. But because Kay Francis is the star, the focus stays on the glamorous aspects of the story, without any deep examination of how Rains’ character is causing economic hardship for others.
Except for a scene that takes place after Rains’ death, where protestors trash Francis’s place of business, there is not much chaos though I would imagine there was plenty when Stavisky died and outraged citizenry demanded justice. Of course this is not a documentary, it’s a Hollywood version of the facts.
Character actress Alison Skipworth is on hand as a well-meaning advisor pal of Francis, and she gets off a few good lines here and there. Rains, who is not technically playing the romantic lead (that honor goes to Hunter) also has some good lines.
Rains' performance is the glue that keeps the film from falling apart, particularly when things get sappy during an extended middle sequence where Francis and Hunter make goo goo eyes at each other during a holiday in the countryside.
Incidentally, this was the only motion picture collaboration for Francis and Rains; while this was the third of seven pictures she and Hunter made between 1935 and 1938.
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Post by jamesjazzguitar on May 8, 2024 15:57:51 GMT
Love Is a Racket from 1932 with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Frances Dee, Lee Tracy, Lyle Talbot and Ann Dvorak
Love is a Racket is another excellent precode that flies below the radar of even precode fans. Perhaps that's because it features four precode stars - Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Ann Dvorak, Lee Tracy and Frances Dee - who are all but forgotten today.
After the Code was enforced, heroes were never afraid of mobsters, were always romantics underneath it all and would always do the law-abiding thing in the end. This type is familiar since he or, occasionally, she populated the screen for almost four decades.
Precode land, though, had heroes with real-people characteristics and flaws. In Love is a Racket, Fairbanks plays a Broadway columnist, a Walter Winchell type. He covers the Broadway beat, an oddly mixed up world of reporters, theater people and mobsters.
Fairbanks' character is the typical cocky and cynical reporter type (almost every male star played one in the 1930s) with an Achilles heel: he's in love with a pretty Broadway actress wannabee played by Frances Dee who has a "stage mom" aunt.
Dee plays Fairbanks like a fiddle as she uses him for his connections in the theater and for dates when there aren't better career-advancing options around. Yet Fairbanks only sees true love when he looks into pretty opportunist Dee's eyes.
Dee is really more interested in men who can advance her career, like a theater producer played by Andre Luguet. Luguet is much older than Fairbanks, but he also has a much bigger checkbook and can put Dee on the stage.
Fairbank's two best friends, played by Lee Tracy, in the role of a fellow reporter who covers the crime beat, and Ann Dvorak, see through Dee, but nothing they say will change Fairbank's love-addled brain.
Despite his editor and Tracy encouraging Fairbanks to do some hard-hitting reporting on the mob's involvement in the milk racket (a real thing in the 1930s), Fairbanks doesn't want the personal danger or to take the risk that he could lose access to information for his column.
Fairbanks is on good terms with the mobsters, like the one played by Lyle Talbot who is the gangster behind the milk racket. While the Sardi's restaurant here is a set, it does capture the eclectic milieu of gangsters, theater people and reporters who oddly socialized there.
That is the setup, which is covered quickly as director William A. Wellman doesn't dilly dally in this fast-paced movie that says to its audience, "keep up, we don't have a lot of time for background stories and exposition."
The story's catalyst is, of all things, Dee's undisciplined spending. About to bounce several checks all over town for clothes and things, Dee asks Fairbanks to help. He doesn't have the funds to cover the checks, but agrees to talk to her creditors on her behalf.
With that tripwire now broken, all sorts of things happen. Fairbanks runs around trying to help, but behind the scenes, gangster Talbot steps in and pays off all the bills. Now he holds all of Dee's bad checks and, thus, her fate in his hands.
The movie from here is Fairbanks trying to free Dee from Talbot's clutches; Dee manipulating Fairbanks as she plays up to Luguet for her career and Tracy and Dvorak, the latter carrying a huge torch for Fairbanks, trying to help Fairbanks not get killed by Talbot.
In the climax, no spoilers coming, and after much running around, a sort of deus ex machina in the form of Dee's aunt, reshuffles the deck requiring an on-the-fly final fix by Fairbanks. It's all precode stuff: murder, cover-up and no punishment for the guilty.
What's shocking is how little importance is given to those events, versus the final trivial betrayal that has Fairbanks invoking the title of the movie to denounce love. Someone's dead and the killer's going free, but what's really important is that Fairbank's heart is broken.
Fairbanks can sometimes come across as almost goofy, but here, as a cynical reporter in love, he strikes a nice balance. Tracy, too, is excellent as his hyperkinetic acting style can wear on you when he's the lead, but in a supporting role, he brings a good spark.
Dee understood that her role was to be pretty and selfish and she delivered. It's Dvorak, a fine actress, who is underutilized as she never does much more than pine away for Fairbanks.
Love Is a Racket is a solid seventy-one minutes of fast-paced entertainment that today serves as a neat time capsule of early 1930s New York City where theater people, mobsters and news reporters were all at the center of an anything-goes morality.
It's a window into a world that would no longer be seen on screen once the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced after 1934. The thing that's sometimes hard to remember is that the real world stayed immoral, it was only Hollywood's portrayal of it that changed.Love is a Racket is one of my favorite pre-code films and both Fairbanks and Dvorak have great chemistry. I just love pre-code banter between working class folks who can't say "I love you" but it is implied. Fast-paced without missing a beat, the film is a great example of the Warner Bros studio system which was just getting on the ground with taking pictures in 1932. 72 minutes of pure entertainment! (and the film, along with Three on a Match, that made me watch anything Dvorak is in). |
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