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The two best films of 1933 that unfortunately are not going to win any of my self-invented Katie awards are a pair of pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck classics, as different from each other in every respect except quality as two movies can get. I highly recommend you see both.
I've mentioned the term "pre-Code" many times and written about this period in Hollywood history at length here and here. In a nutshell, in order to stave off state and federal attempts to censor movies, Hollywood's studios issued a set of guidelines of what were unacceptable topics for the big screen. Without any enforcement power, though, the guidelines were more often than not honored in the breach, and in fact, New York's National Board of Review and the Catholic League of Decency had a far greater influence on the content of films than Hollywood's own Hays Office. Not until Joseph Breen took over the office in 1934 did Hollywood studios agree to enforce the Code.
Anyone who is a fan of pre-Code movies has in mind some actor or actress who personifies the era's permiss- iveness. For some it's Joan Blondell, for others it's Jean Harlow; still others prefer Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Mae West, Clark Gable, James Cagney or even Norma Shearer. For me, though, Barbara Stanwyck more than any other performer, has come to personify in my mind the essence of the pre-Code era. Not only did she strip down to her skivvies in such films as Night Nurse, but she also displayed a fierce independence than always feels modern to me, even in the creakiest of film vehicles.
"It would be difficult to think of an actress so expressive of the early 1930s girl on the make," British film historian David Thomson has written, "as intimate, shiny, and flimsy as a discarded slip, but with eyes ever sly and alert."
Stanwyck rose quickly to stardom in the pre-Code era, primarily through the films of two great directors, William Wellman (Night Nurse, So Big and The Purchase Price) and Frank Capra, whose early films with Stanwyck included Ladies Of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, Forbidden and in the 1933 film, The Bitter Tea Of General Yen.
General Yen is the story of an American missionary (Stanwyck) who travels to China to marry her rather stuffy fiance only to wind up as the captive of a powerful warlord during the country's interminable civil war. At first, Yen (Nils Asther in the best performance of his career) holds Stanwyck in an effort to blunt the reformist zeal of Stanwyck's fiancé, but he soon finds himself falling in love with her.
Stanwyck, for her part, has a hard time reconciling her properly virginal upbringing with her growing lust for Yen, and in the process must confront for the first time in her sheltered life her own hypocrisy and prejudices. Her fevered dream in which she finds herself both menaced by and drawn to Yen is one of the most beautifully filmed sequences of Capra's illustrious career.
The film was a flop upon its initial release and Capra later dismissed it as "the only film in which I ever tried to become arty, because I was trying to win an Academy Award." The notion of a romance between a white woman and an Asian man shocked some and the picture played to protests around the country. "The women’s clubs came out very strongly against it," Stanwyck later said. "I was so shocked."
Even more shocking was Stanwyck's next film, Baby Face, one of the most notorious films of the pre-Code era. Written by Darryl F. Zanuck, who quit Warner Brothers shortly afterwards to form Twentieth Century Films, Baby Face was so racy that many scenes had to be re-shot and even then two version went out to theaters.
In Baby Face, Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, the daughter of an abusive saloon keeper who's been pimping her out since she was fourteen years old. She's inured to the humiliation—the look on her face as she realizes her father has just pimped her out is perfectly underplayed, as bored and blase as if he'd just read her the out-of-town baseball scores, but underneath seething with resentment—but she yearns for something better and is beginning to understand the power of her own sexuality.
In a key early scene that sets the tone, a powerful local politician puts his hand on Lily's knee, expecting to put his hand on a lot more than that. With barely a glance, Lily picks up a cup of coffee and casually dumps it on his hand.
"Oh, excuse me, my hand shakes so when I'm around you." When she later breaks a bottle over his head, he finally gets the message that this isn't foreplay.
With her only friend Chico (Theresa Harris), Lily leaves her father and hops a freight train—sleeping with a railroad cop to avoid arrest—and winds up in the big city where she ruthlessly sleeps her way to the top. (Among her conquests, look for a young John Wayne.)
Baby Face won no awards, but in 2005, the Library Congress included the film in the National Film Registry. If you're going to see it, make sure to track down the uncut version, which was for years thought lost then rediscovered in 2004. It's worth seeing both as a reminder that Hollywood didn't invent sex and sin in 1967, and as a pivotal moment in Stanwyck's career, being to my mind the moment she really became what we think of as "Barbara Stanwyck," with the impudence of Bette Davis, the independence of Katharine Hepburn, and the street smarts of Joan Crawford, only warmer, sexier and much less neurotic, respectively.
Within a year, the studios began to enforce the strict guidelines of the Pro- duction Code and Holly- wood wouldn't again make films with content as explicit and controversial as The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Baby Face until the 1960s. Stanwyck herself shifted gears and found popularity playing the martyred mother in such films as Stella Dallas. Not until The Lady Eve in 1941 would she figure how to sell the public on a character as brazen as Lily Powers.
Trivia: The Bitter Tea Of General Yen was the first movie ever to play Radio City Music Hall in New York. Scheduled to run for two weeks, the theaters owners yanked the film after eight days despite having made back only $80,000 of the $100,000 rental they had paid the studio.
A pre-Code classic starring Barbara Stanwyck at the precise moment she became what we think of as "Barbara Stanwyck"—a tough, sexy dame who took what she wanted and took nothing off nobody never.
Be sure to look for a young John Wayne playing one of Stanwyck's stepping stones on the way to the top.
From the TCM website:
9:00am [Drama] Baby Face (1933)
A beautiful schemer sleeps her way to the top of a banking empire.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier Dir: Alfred E. Green BW-76 mins
I grew up thinking of Robert Montgomery as a movie tough guy, but watching all these pre-Code Hollywood movies recently, I was surprised to discover that MGM largely wasted him in the 1930s by assigning him an endless series of flaccid pretty boy roles supporting Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and pretty much any other actress who needed a handsome man to gaze vacantly at her while she did her thing.
Made me wonder if the same thing would have happened to Clark Gable if he hadn't been loaned out to Warner Brothers for a particularly nasty turn in Night Nurse, and then a couple of years later to poverty row studio Columbia Pictures for a little ditty called It Happened One Night, where he got to show, respectively, his roguish menace and comedic flair and win an Oscar in the process.
Anyway, here are a few facts about Robert Montgomery, some I knew, some I didn't.
● He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth but the life of privilege didn't last—his father jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and the family lost everything.
● While working as an actor in New York, Mont- gomery met then stage director George Cukor. It was Cukor who later convinced him to give Hollywood a try. Montgomery made his debut as an uncredited extra in 1929's The Single Standard. A year later he was co-starring with Norma Shearer in The Divorcee, a role that won Shearer an Oscar. That same year, he also had an important role in The Big House, a prison drama that won Frances Marion as Oscar for screenwriting.
● Montgomery received two Oscar nominations, the first for playing a murderer in 1937's Night Must Fall, the second playing a dead boxer in search of a live body in the comedy Here Comes Mister Jordan.
● He served in combat in the Pacific during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander.
● His official directorial debut was The Lady in the Lake in 1947 (two years earlier, he had directed some scenes in They Were Expendable during John Ford's illness). Based on a Raymond Chandler mystery, The Lady in the Lake was an experimental attempt to film the entire movie from the lead character's point of view. We only catch a glimpse of Montgomery in a mirror. The film received a mixed reception critically and was not a hit. He directed four more movies between 1947 and 1960.
● Montgomery was twice the president of the Screen Actor's Guild. He was active in politics as a Republican and advised President Eisenhower on his television appearances. Ike later commented that had Richard Nixon followed Montgomery's advice before the first televised debate with John Kennedy, Nixon likely would have "won" the debate and the election.
● He was the father of actress Elizabeth Montgomery, the star of television's Bewitched.
Here are five Robert Montgomery performances I can recommend to you:
1) The Big House—he's quite convincing as a rich, sniveling weasel who doesn't cope well when he's thrown into a prison cell with murderer Wallace Beery.
2) Private Lives—in this screen adaptation of the Noel Coward comedy, he plays Elyot, a man who would rather spar with his ex-wife (Shearer) than honeymoon with his current one.
3) Night Must Fall—playing a caretaker of Dame May Whitty's cottage, Montgomery isn't quite the nice guy he seems to be, and Rosalind Russell can't decide whether to kiss him or turn him over to the police.
4) Here Comes Mister Jordan—probably his best performance, here he plays a boxer frustrated with a celestial bureaucracy that has accidentally killed him before his time and then can't make things right. And you thought the Department of Motor Vehicles was a pain! (Warren Beatty later remade this as Heaven Can Wait.)
5) They Were Expendable—John Ford's classic downbeat war movie about the ones who were left behind. Inspired by the real-life heroics of John Bulkeley, Montgomery plays an American PT boat skipper battling both the Japanese and U.S. Navy brass during Japan's invasion of the Philippines. Co-starring John Wayne, this was not only the best movie Montgomery ever starred in, it's on a short list of the best movies ever to come out of World War II.
And here's one more, a movie I haven't seen, but would like to: Ride the Pink Horse. No, it's not a porn movie, it's a film noir directed by and starring Montgomery based on a script by the legendary Ben Hecht. Co-star Thomas Gomez received his only Oscar nomination for this one.
"If you are lucky enough to be a success," Montgomery once said, "by all means enjoy the applause and the adulation of the public. But never, never believe it."
That's it. That's all I've got. It's enough, isn't it?
Although Cimarron won the Oscar for best picture of 1931, the Western that garners the most attention now was a little-seen, big-budget flop called The Big Trail. Directed by veteran Raoul Walsh and starring John Wayne, I almost nominated this one for best picture because of its historical significance as the first big budget widescreen movie. That, and because I like Westerns.
Raoul Walsh was one of the Fox Film Corporation's hardest working directors when he was tapped in 1930 to helm The Big Trail. Best known for directing the James Cagney classic White Heat (or, if you're a fan of this blog, Douglas Fairbanks's best movie, 1924's The Thief of Bagdad), Walsh worked in Hollywood for more than fifty years, racking up nearly 140 directing credits, including as an assistant director on The Birth of a Nation in 1915. He received his last film credit (as a writer) in 1970.
Walsh had also worked as an actor, appearing in forty films, and was set to star as the Cisco Kid in the Western In Old Arizona when his car struck a jackrabbit, shattering the windshield and costing Walsh his right eye. (After the accident, he opted to wear what became a trademark eye patch, reasoning that with a glass eye, "Every time I'd get in a fight, I'd have to put it in my pocket.") (Warner Baxter, incidentally, went on to win an Oscar in the role.)
Shot on location in Fox's new 70 mm Grandeur process, The Big Trail was one of the first feature-length widescreen movies and the first big budget one. Its $2 million budget was enormous at the time and represented something of a gamble for the studio during the early days of the Depression. Walsh spotted a young unknown named Marion Morrison working with director John Ford and, renaming Morrison "John Wayne," cast him in the lead.
The Big Trail is the story of a young wagon master (Wayne, just 23 at the time) who leads a band of settlers across the frontier while battling Indians, weather and a murderous gambler. It's a beautiful film to look at and if I were handing out awards for cinematography, Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front, Casablanca) would certainly have received a nomination.
That said, The Big Trail suffers from the same problem all Westerns of that era suffered from—simplistic storylines and characterizations—and it flopped at the box office. It took John Ford and his 1939 masterpiece Stagecoach to turn the Western into adult fare.
It didn't help that few theaters were able to exhibit a widescreen movie and most theaters received the inferior 35 mm print, filmed at the same time as the 70 mm version (actually, five versions were shot on location, with French, Spanish and German language editions, filmed mostly with different casts, accounting for the other three). After its premiere, a half hour was reportedly trimmed from its run time, but the changes made no difference—audiences just weren't interested in The Big Trail.
John Wayne took most of the blame for the failure and was relegated to low budget B-Westerns for the rest of the decade. Though gifted, he was raw and maybe his long exile in the cinematic wilderness was just what he needed. By the time Ford fought to cast him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, Wayne was a screen veteran with sixty movies under his belt. Though still unbelievably young, by 1939 he knew how to carry a movie—and if you think there's no skill involved in commanding the screen, that it's just a matter of a movie star with looks and charisma "playing himself," then you should compare The Big Trail to, say, The Searchers or Rio Bravo.
Widescreen movies took even longer than John Wayne to catch on. As a cost-cutting move during the Depression, studios abandoned the effort to convert movie houses to widescreen which audiences had never been much interested in anyway. It would be more than twenty years before Hollywood took another crack at a widescreen movie.
In 2006, the National Film Preservation Board included The Big Trail in the National Film Registry. If you're going to watch it, make you sure you get hold of the widescreen version. It is available as part of a two-disc set from Fox and shows up on the Fox Movie Channel from time to time.
And the current carries us farther yet from the essay for best director of 1930-31 ...
The ever reliable Wikipedia describes cognitive dissonance as that "uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously" and suggests that most people instinctively try to bring the two ideas into harmony by either changing their belief structure so the two ideas are no longer in conflict or rationalizing away one of the two ideas, again to reduce the conflict.
Yesterday's seemingly innocent picture of Errol Flynn inadvertently created a lot of cognitive dissonance when, between Douglas Fairbanks's dirty joking and my own curiosity, we discovered that Flynn's already shady past cast darker shadows than we here at the Monkey had imagined. Not just a "dashing ladies man who drank too much and tickled Basil Rathbone's ribs with the blade," as I put it on Thingy's blog, "Pondering Life," Flynn was a serial seducer of underage girls (tried in 1943 but acquitted on charges of raping two teenagers and engaged to marry a fifteen year old at the time of his death in 1959), as well as, at least on one documented occasion, an anti-Semitic blowhard.
One biographer has even charged he was a spy for Hitler's Germany (although others contend he was a leftist drinking buddy of Fidel Castro's and the British government a few years ago revealed that during the last days of World War II, Flynn was actually a spy for the British).
In any event, nasty business.
Which is a bit of a problem because I, for one, like Errol Flynn's movies, particularly The Adventures of Robin Hood. Am I required to like Errol Flynn as well or otherwise have to explain away his private behavior before I can admit to such? Or should I just stop watching his movies altogether?
The instinctive sense that I need to choose one of these options is cognitive dissonance.
There was an even bigger example of cognitive dissonance in the movie-fan blogosphere recently when Switzerland arrested Roman Polanski in advance of extraditing him to the United States to face sentencing following his 1978 guilty plea to unlawful sexual intercourse—a subject I hadn't planned to address in any fashion until my cryogenically-frozen head reaches 1974's Chinatown in this blog, sometime around the turn of the next century.
In my notes for the essay about the best director of 1974 (yes, I've made notes that far ahead— I've even written about Amy Adams's 2008 performance in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and Lord knows you'll be waiting forever before I get around to posting it), I have written: "Judgment of Polanski the man I leave to you, to God, to history, to Polanski's own withered conscience and to the appropriate legal authorities in any event. I certainly wouldn't want anything I've said about Polanski the artist to be construed as a defense of Polanski the man."
That's pretty much how I feel about Errol Flynn. And a lot of other people, too.
The farther I get into blogging about movies and their history, the clearer it becomes that the people who made great movies weren't necessarily great people, and certainly what you see on the screen doesn't reflect what you would have seen in their private lives. John Ford was an insufferable bastard, Henry Fonda was a terrible father, Woody Allen married his girlfriend's daughter. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist, Ward Bond hated Communists, Elia Kazan informed on his friends. Veronica Lake earned the nickname "the Bitch," Margaret Sullavan was a depressed alcoholic and Betty Hutton was as crazy as an outhouse rat. Clark Gable had bad breath and Joan Crawford's and Marilyn Monroe's legendary shortcomings I dare say you know about.
Renee Zellweger was reportedly so difficult on the set of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason that afterwards her co-stars Hugh Grant and Colin Firth announced their (thankfully short-lived) retirements from the movies. Jane Greer, on the other hand, was as sweet as chess pie, as loyal as a faithful dog and as brave as your average Marine, but that doesn't mean she wasn't absolutely riveting as the murderous femme fatale Kathy Moffit in the noir classic, Out of the Past.
There are any number of ways you can handle unpleasant information about the people who make movies. My father refused to watch Jane Fonda because of her politics; my mother-in-law still won't watch John Wayne because of his. Which is a pity from the point of view of the movie fan because it means you miss out on Klute and The Searchers, two great movies with two great performances that, I'll tip my hand now, will win their respective stars Katie Awards.
You can also go the other way and excuse behavior of your heroes you would never forgive of your enemies. Thus you'll find plenty of petitions seeking to free Roman Polanski despite committing a crime you'd insist your neighbor be buried for. Our brains are hard-wired that way, or so scientists tell us, something to remember the next you (or I) want to beat someone senseless for taking a position we don't agree with, but there's not much future for the republic if we're forever choosing to behave like territorial pack animals.
In writing this blog, I have opted for a third way. I have in the past and will continue in the future to distill out the professional from the personal, the on-screen persona from the private one, and though I have written about both, and will continue to do so, I've been choosing awards and reviewing movies strictly based on the former. Some of the winners have been creeps and some have been saints, but all of them have done something on screen that I think is worth your time and attention.
It's either that or stop writing about movies altogether. But then anything you write is guaranteed to offend somebody. After all, I imagine there are still some people out there who insist the world is flat. You can't please everybody.
So when 1938 rolls around, I will go ahead and lavish praise on The Adventures of Robin Hood and its star, Errol Flynn, no matter what he may or may not have done when he wasn't wearing green tights and a feather in his cap.
You're okay with that, right?
The two best films of 1933 that unfortunately are not going to win any of my self-invented Katie awards are a pair of pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck classics, as different from each other in every respect except quality as two movies can get. I highly recommend you see both.
Anyone who is a fan of pre-Code movies has in mind some actor or actress who personifies the era's permiss- iveness. For some it's Joan Blondell, for others it's Jean Harlow; still others prefer Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Mae West, Clark Gable, James Cagney or even Norma Shearer. For me, though, Barbara Stanwyck more than any other performer, has come to personify in my mind the essence of the pre-Code era. Not only did she strip down to her skivvies in such films as Night Nurse, but she also displayed a fierce independence than always feels modern to me, even in the creakiest of film vehicles.
General Yen is the story of an American missionary (Stanwyck) who travels to China to marry her rather stuffy fiance only to wind up as the captive of a powerful warlord during the country's interminable civil war. At first, Yen (Nils Asther in the best performance of his career) holds Stanwyck in an effort to blunt the reformist zeal of Stanwyck's fiancé, but he soon finds himself falling in love with her.
The film was a flop upon its initial release and Capra later dismissed it as "the only film in which I ever tried to become arty, because I was trying to win an Academy Award." The notion of a romance between a white woman and an Asian man shocked some and the picture played to protests around the country. "The women’s clubs came out very strongly against it," Stanwyck later said. "I was so shocked."
Even more shocking was Stanwyck's next film, Baby Face, one of the most notorious films of the pre-Code era. Written by Darryl F. Zanuck, who quit Warner Brothers shortly afterwards to form Twentieth Century Films, Baby Face was so racy that many scenes had to be re-shot and even then two version went out to theaters.
In a key early scene that sets the tone, a powerful local politician puts his hand on Lily's knee, expecting to put his hand on a lot more than that. With barely a glance, Lily picks up a cup of coffee and casually dumps it on his hand.
Baby Face won no awards, but in 2005, the Library Congress included the film in the National Film Registry. If you're going to see it, make sure to track down the uncut version, which was for years thought lost then rediscovered in 2004. It's worth seeing both as a reminder that Hollywood didn't invent sex and sin in 1967, and as a pivotal moment in Stanwyck's career, being to my mind the moment she really became what we think of as "Barbara Stanwyck," with the impudence of Bette Davis, the independence of Katharine Hepburn, and the street smarts of Joan Crawford, only warmer, sexier and much less neurotic, respectively.
Within a year, the studios began to enforce the strict guidelines of the Pro- duction Code and Holly- wood wouldn't again make films with content as explicit and controversial as The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Baby Face until the 1960s. Stanwyck herself shifted gears and found popularity playing the martyred mother in such films as Stella Dallas. Not until The Lady Eve in 1941 would she figure how to sell the public on a character as brazen as Lily Powers.
