Eternally Yours (1939)

For my first illusion this evening I intend to create a woman. Socialite Anita Halstead (Loretta Young) is engaged to be married and goes with all her galpals to see a magic act performed by Tony (David Niven), known as The Great Arturo after her bridal shower for her forthcoming wedding to Don Burns (Broderick Crawford). Anita and Tony are immediately attracted to each other and get married. She becomes his assistant in the act. One night, Tony becomes drunk in the company of a woman reporter Gloria (Eve Arden) and boasts he will jump out of an aircraft at 15,000 feet with his hands handcuffed behind his back. When she prints his claim, he first tries to get out of it with a fake cast on his arm, but when he sees the thousands of fans, he goes through with it, freeing himself in mid-air and parachuting safely to the ground. He promises Anita that he will not attempt the dangerous stunt again but breaks his word and performs it repeatedly all over the world. Anita becomes weary of the constant travel and longs to settle down and start a family. Secretly, she sells her jewellery and has a house built in the Connecticut countryside. When it is completed, she shows Tony a picture of it but his uninterested reaction stops her from telling him it is theirs. When he signs up for a two-year, round-the-world tour rather than take the vacation he had promised, she finally gives up. She leaves him and gets a divorce in Reno. Anita’s grandfather, Gramps aka Bishop Peabody (C. Aubrey Smith) breaks the news to a distraught Tony who has taken a clipper back to the US from his South American tour. On an ocean cruise with her Aunt Abby (Billie Burke), Anita is surprised to run into Don. She gets the ship’s captain (Granville Bates) to marry them. However, she spends their honeymoon night with her grandfather. The next night, Don insists on introducing her to his boss, Harley Bingham (Raymond Walburn), at a nightclub. The entertainment is none other than the Great Arturo, with his old assistant Lola De Vere (Virginia Field). He persuades Bingham to let him perform at Bingham’s company retreat at a resort, much to Anita’s discomfort. Mrs. Bingham (ZaSu Pitts) has a dilemma, though. They have not booked enough rooms to provide separate bedrooms for the unmarried Tony and Lola. Tony suggests he and Don share one room, while Anita and Lola take the other. During his stay, Tony tries unsuccessfully to persuade Anita to take him back. If the cold didn’t get him the water will. Meanwhile, the hapless Don becomes sick so the doctor prescribes no physical activity of any sort for a month. Bishop Peabody is told by his lawyer that Anita’s divorce is not legal. Later, he informs his granddaughter that Tony will be doing his parachute stunt that day. She attends … No woman likes a fake and everything about you is fake. The pairing of playful Niven with the luminously beautiful Young was a good idea – they would wind up doing a handful of films together including The Perfect Marriage (1946) and The Bishop’s Wife (1947). This is the first collaboration, based on a screenplay by C. Graham Baker and Gene Towne that was so loosely based on Sacha Guitry’s 1917 play L’Illusioniste it became original. This was tinkered with by others who are uncredited – including Garnett but also Peter Godfrey (who would direct our favourite Christmas movie, Christmas in Connecticut), Mack Sennett, Ben Hect and Charles Lederer. Whew. It’s not quite a romcom – it starts out like one – until Crawford’s overbearing presence and poor directing and timing from Tay Garnett (with Assistant Director Charles Kerr) unpick the performances which then find themselves in something of a melodrama despite the ripe screwball-style scenario and dialogue. The uneven tone is matched scene for scene with an inappropriately overwrought score from Werner Janssen which merely abets the situation heightening the drama and echoing Tony’s dilemma, time after time hoping the parachute will open – it’s not just a metaphor but the audience shares his shredded nerves when he’s doing his Houdini-like stunts. The central dramatic joke – life with a magician is anything but magic/an illusionist causes a woman to disappear – twice! – is well worked out despite the strange atmosphere. And there are some zingers: to compensate There you stand dripping in chinchilla and wishing it was a bungalow apron. And were it Don Ameche or Ralph Bellamy instead of the hunk of dead lead that was Crawford (mostly), Young’s marvellous befuddlement when she tries to explain what has happened with Tony – an act – a performance! – has some of the sexy Pre-Code echoing that dogged the original writing but is wasted on her unresponsive opposite number and it lands with a thud. If she’s lost on Crawford just look at her fabulous fashion by Travis Banton. There is a sterling supporting cast but Burke and Pitts don’t have enough to do while Aubrey Smith at least gets to perform with his colleague from the Hollywood Raj, that elite gathering of ex-pat British actors who liked to spend Sundays playing cricket. F. Hugh Herbert plays down his sardonic butler role. It was a banner year for Niven cast as a lead here and also performing in Wuthering Heights and Bachelor Mother. Not a bad 1939. Produced by Walter Wanger, this was in development so long that he and Garnett made another film, Trade Winds and footage from that and the 1939 New York’s World Fair is included here. I swear, I’m the only woman in the world who could live with you

The Green Cockatoo (1937)

A small town is the nation’s greatest tragedy. Eileen (Rene Ray) is an innocent young woman from a small town in Devon who arrives in London looking for work and after disembarking from her train walks into an ambush, in which a couple of gangsters (Bruce Seton and Julian Vedey) knife an accomplice Dave Connor (Robert Newton) who has cheated them. The wounded man staggers with her to a cheap hotel, where he dies after begging her to tell his brother at The Green Cockatoo club. Going there, she is followed by police and hides in an upstairs room. It is that of Jim Connor (John Mills), the brother of the dead man but he does not identify himself to the girl. When the police leave he escorts her out but is followed by the gangsters. In another knife fight he gets away and takes her to a safe house. The police turn up, this time to take him to the morgue to identify his brother. When they leave, the gangsters led by Dave’s nemesis Terrell (Charles Oliver) abduct the girl … There’s lots of different ways of putting things. With a screenplay by Ted Berkman from an original story and scenario by Graham Greene (with an uncredited contribution by Arthur Wimperis) this British pre-war noir boasts quirk, visual verve and not a little wit. From Eileen’s meet-cute on the train with a philosopher who warns her of looming disaster in London, to Jim’s way with words in an overwrought Yankee accent, this conventional genre outing strains to make an impression along the lines of the poetic realist work coming out of France at the time and then reverts to humour. The Sex Life of a Newt. I thought if he was a newt he wouldn’t have one. Maybe I was thinking of a neutral. Eileen’s putative involvement in Dave’s demise isn’t revealed until late in the day by which time Jim is hooked. I always thought London would be beautiful. There are a few intriguing shot setups, a funny cab driver and a decidedly low-minded butler Provero (Frank Atkinson) but it’s a little short on plot. Mills of course is always worth watching particularly as this low-rent British Cagney parlays his way through a song (Smoky Joe by William Kernell) while Ray is a decidedly odd duck to be framed as the Wrong Girl and Newton bows out too soon but anything with Greene is of interest to see how his screenwriting improved over the years from this first feature credit. Shot at Denham Studios, this was partly re-shot and re-edited and not released until 1940. There’s an exquisitely exciting score by Miklos Rozsa compensating for any gaps in the story. Directed by famed production designer William Cameron Menzies. This is where we stop. And this is where we start MM#4444

Rich and Strange (1931)

Aka East of Shanghai. The best place for us is the gas oven. London couple, Fred Hill (Henry Kendall) and his wife Emily aka Em (Joan Barry), live a mundane middle-class existence. But that changes upon receipt of a letter informing them an uncle will advance them as much money as they need to enjoy themselves now rather than after his passing. So Fred quits his job and they both travel across the  English Channel to France. I couldn’t wear this – people will think we’re not married! After sampling Paris’s hot spots, they book passage on an ocean liner bound from Marseilles to the Far East. Fred gets seasick, leaving Em alone on board. To soak up time, she becomes acquainted with Commander Gordon (Percy Marmont), a dapper, popular bachelor. Later, upon his recovery, Fred is taken with a German princess (Betty Amann). As the voyage progresses, Fred and Em each spend more and more time with their new paramours, to the virtual exclusion of each other. By the time they arrive in Singapore, Fred and Em’s marriage is in a shambles. Em prepares to leave with Gordon for his home in Kuala Lumpur. However, before boarding the train, Gordon reveals that Fred’s princess is in fact a sham – a con artist who’s using him until his money runs out. Em now realises she can’t allow Fred to fall into this trap so she abandons Gordon to warn her husband. But it is too late. Fred discovers his ‘princess’ has just left for Rangoon, with £1000 of his money. Fred and Emily have only enough left to book passage home to England on a tramp steamer. Later, the ship is abandoned after a collision in the fog … Love is a very difficult thing. It makes everything very dangerous. Adapted by director Alfred Hitchcock’s wife and collaborator Alma Reville with Val Valentine from the novel Rich and Strange by Dale Collins, who apparently wrote a series of ‘sea romances’, this belongs firmly in middle of the British phase of the legendary filmmaker’s career before he made his sound breakthrough proper. The story might owe more to the fact that the Hitchcocks travelled to Paris for ‘essential research’ and fetched up in a brothel something that has never really been probed. Roughly one quarter of this comedy of marriage has dialogue so it’s still in the transition from the silent era replete with heavily made up performers and overacting. However there are some masterful shots by cinematographers Jack E. Cox and Charles Martin, particularly at the beginning, aside from the water tank situation and the ship’s set which was constructed in studio. There’s a deal of stock footage dressing up certain sequences and along with the lurches from drama, to melodrama, to comedy and back again, this is an uneven viewing experience. The travelogue aspect which incorporates fascinating footage from the Folies Bergeres (Em thinks they’ve pulled the curtain up before the performers got their clothes on), includes Paris, Port Said, the Suez Canal, Columbo and Singapore and inspires some fruitily amusing sub-titles in the silent fashion. The score by Adolph Hallis does a lot of heavy lifting and he would work again with Hitchcock on Number Seventeen the following year. Stage star Kendall makes for an adequate hero: his seasick scenes would make any bored wife run to the arms of Marmont, a star from the earlier era who would also appear for Hitchcock in Young and Innocent and The Secret Agent. Barry is strikingly beautiful, a beestung blonde teeming with sweetness and light. She had dubbed Anny Ondra in the earlier Hitchcock film Blackmail. She would make influential train thriller Rome Express the following year and sadly retired from films after 1933’s Mrs Dane’s Defence. She is now Henrietta, Dowager Duchess of Bedford. Elsie Randolph as the ‘spinster,’ a cruise ship cliche, is a hoot, particularly in the Egyptian market scenes. A regular stage partner of Jack Buchanan, she has the distinction of having acted twice for Hitchcock, forty years apart, since he hired her to play Gladys in Frenzy, the film that marked his return to British cinema, released in 1972! Kendall as the frustrated City office worker finally out of the ‘burbs gets some good scenes with Amann, especially when he’s trying to seduce her and they’re both in fancy dress – it really is a giggle watching him try to get to the bottom of her veils. She never really understood me. I was a bit too much for her. The German-American actress is exceptionally well cast as the femme fatale. The conclusion of course owes a lot to the play that inspired the title – The Tempest. Students of Hitchcock will have a hard time detecting the signature here as he grapples with the form of sound directing but the difficulties illustrate the issues arising from a setbound production (despite some clever production design) and the gap between those limitation and the freer comedy thriller which would become his metier in just a short while with his breakthrough, The Man Who Knew Too Much. The material and the performers for a great screwball comedy were here but it’s just not in the writing. Fascinating not least because it is judged Hitchcock’s great failure and marked the end of his dealings with British International Pictures. There’s only ever been you

Made For Each Other (1939)

It all happened rather suddenly. New York City. John Mason (James Stewart) is a young up and coming attorney . He has been doing his job well, and he has a chance of being made a partner in his law firm, especially if he marries Eunice (Ruth Weston), the daughter of his employer, Judge Joseph M. Doolittle (Charles Coburn). However John meets Jane (Carole Lombard) during a business trip in Boston and they fall in love and marry immediately, returning to New York and surprising everyone, John’s mother Harriet (Lucile Watson) most of all. She cannot conceal her disappointment, particularly when she learns Jane has no interest in pursuing a career. Yes-man colleague Carter (Donald Briggs) stops John and Jane going on honeymoon to Europe when he arrives on board their ship to tell him an important trial has been brought forward and John needs to attend for the firm. He wins the case but by that time Judge Doolittle has chosen Carter as the new partner which he reveals at the dinner party from hell hosted by Joseph and Jane at their apartment with Lily the maid (Louise Beavers) finally throwing in the towel due to Harriet’s overbearing manner. Eunice eventually marries Carter. Jane encourages John to demand a raise and a promotion but with finances tightened, Doolittle requires that all employees accept pay cuts. After Jane has a baby, John becomes discouraged by his situation – all the unpaid bills and his mother, who lives with them in their small apartment seemingly bent on destroying their marriage. Because she refuses to leave and occupies the small spare room, the baby has to sleep in the dining room of the apartment. On New Year’s Eve, 1938–39, when John and Jane finally go out for an evening on the town, the baby is rushed to the hospital with pneumonia and will die within hours unless a serum is delivered by plane from Salt Lake City, Utah but there’s a storm and nobody is flying … There are some things a man just can’t do. Sometimes movie star careers take a swerve for the serious and the public is momentarily confused. Perhaps that’s what happened when this was released because nobody really expected Carole Lombard to be despairing over a car crash of a marriage to lovable Jimmy Stewart whose harridan mother is ruining their lives while running their household. It starts as a malleable comedy drama and takes a turn for the potentially tragic and even Coburn isn’t funny which probably didn’t feel right for the fans but some shrewd writing saves this tonally shifting narrative from a descent into the totally maudlin. Rose Franken’s story was adapted for the screen by Jo Swerling with ‘humorous situations’ apparently contributed by an uncredited Frank Ryan. An oddity which has the unfortunate honour of prefiguring Lombard’s own demise in a snow storm similar to the one depicted here. Produced by David O. Selznick with cinematography by Leon Shamroy, production design by William Cameron Menzies and costumes by Travis Banton. Directed by John Cromwell (actor James’ dad) who would eventually be blacklisted after HUAC hearings. Don’t you know you’d be more comfortable if you took your shoes off?

It Happened One Night (1934)

 I want to see what love looks like when it’s triumphant. I haven’t had a good laugh in a week. Spoiled heiress Ellen ‘Ellie’ Andrews (Claudette Colbert) has eloped with pilot and fortune-hunter King Westley (Jameson Thomas) against the wishes of her extremely wealthy father, Wall Street legend Alexander Andrews (Walter Connolly), who wants to have the marriage annulled because he knows that Westley is really interested only in Ellie’s money. Jumping ship in Florida, Ellie runs away and boards a Greyhound to New York City (driven by Ward Bond) to reunite with her husband. First she has to fend off the attentions of fellow passenger Oscar Shapeley (Roscoe Karns) – Shapeley’s the name and that’s the way I like ’em! then she meets Peter Warne (Clark Gable) a renegade newspaper reporter who recently lost his job. Soon, Peter recognises her and gives her a choice. If she gives him an exclusive on her story, he will help her reunite with Westley. If not, he will tell her father where she is. Ellie agrees to help. As they go through several adventures, Ellie loses her initial disdain for Peter and they begin to fall in love. When the bus breaks down and they begin hitchhiking, they fail to secure a ride until Ellie displays a shapely leg to Danker (Alan Hale), the next driver who has a taste for singing behind the wheel. When they stop en route, Danker attempts to steal their luggage but Peter chases him down and seizes his Model T.  I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb. Near the end of their journey, Ellie confesses her love to Peter. The owners of the motel in which they stay, Zeke (Arthur Hoyt) and his wife (Blanche Friderici) notice that Peter’s car is gone and then expel Ellie. Believing Peter has deserted her, Ellie telephones her father, who agrees to let her marry Westley. Meanwhile, Peter has obtained money from his editor Joe Gordon (Charles C. Wilson) to marry Ellie but he misses her on the road … What’s holding up the annulment, you slowpoke? The walls of Jericho are toppling! A Pre-Code comedy that was sensationally rewarded with the five major Academy Awards this put Columbia Studios into the big leagues. Latterly acknowledged as one of the four foundational films of screwball, Robert Riskin’s adaptation of the 1933 short story Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams hums with good ideas and great dialogue and the casting is inspired but as is often the case the stars were effectively the last people anyone expected in the role after several actresses either rejected the script or were rejected and Colbert had not enjoyed her previous experience working with director Frank Capra when she made her first film, For the Love of Mike. She did it for $50,000 and a four-week shoot so she could go on vacation. She had to be dragged off a train to receive her Oscar when her win was announced. Gable was on loan from MGM as punishment. Neither liked the script – ironic, considering that setpieces like the hitchhiking, donut dunking, the Walls of Jericho and the trumpet (a sly nod to the new rules about sex on the screen) are now part of movie parlance. Behold the walls of Jericho! Uh, maybe not as thick as the ones that Joshua blew down with his trumpet, but a lot safer. You see, uh, I have no trumpet. Now just to show you my heart’s in the right place, I’ll give you my best pair of pyjamas. The origins of the term ‘screwball’ are often disputed but there’s a clue in one exchange between Alexander Andrews and Pete: Do you love her? /A normal human being couldn’t live under the same roof with her without going nutty! She’s my idea of nothing!/ I asked you a simple question! Do you love her? / YES! But don’t hold that against me, I’m a little screwy myself! The first run was neither a critical nor a commercial success but the second release across the country made the romantic road movie a huge hit. Its effect rippled across the culture: Gable’s stripping down to reveal a bare chest allegedly created a crisis in the garment industry because he wasn’t wearing an undershirt. With its jibes about bankers, newspapers, rich people and romance, this appealed across the board to a Depression-era audience. Macho Gable tickles in all the right places while Colbert’s stardom was also sealed with her charming portrayal of the headstrong runaway heiress. His machismo is matched by her sophistication. Connolly too is excellent as the no-flies father. It all gave director Capra a swelled head however and his future collaborations with the great screenwriter Riskin (whose signature film this surely is) were far more self-important. Riskin’s place in Hollywood  history has never been challenged, except of course by Capra, his long-term collaborator, who would call his own memoirs The Name Above the Title in a bid to resuscitate an ailing career in an era driven by auteur directors.  This publication had the unfortunate effect of casting doubt on Riskin’s huge contribution to that  Name;  Riskin was long dead by then and therefore not capable of defending his role in the consolidation of  Capra’s self-mythologising. Ironically, their collaborative ventures had always called attention to the great American theme of reinvention. The continuities and discontinuities within that director’s career are always linked to those suggested by Riskin’s screenplays, despite Capra’s cinematic achievements prior to their professional marriage;  but as Tom Stempel points out in the seminal FrameWork, “what Riskin did was develop the material, provide the frame, that Capra could use to show his talents on” (Continuum, 1988: 104). For anyone truly interested in their complex and fascinating relationship read Ian Scott’s brilliant In Capra’s Shadow, one of the best books ever about screenwriting. In the meantime, this is a sunny, funny delight from start to finish. Any guy that’d fall in love with your daughter ought to have his head examined

Twentieth Century (1934)

Go on, Owen. Tell her I’m dying – and DON’T OVERACT! Megalomaniacal Broadway impresario Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) takes lingerie model Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard), renames her Lily Garland and makes her the star of his latest play, despite the grave misgivings of everyone else, including his two long-suffering assistants, accountant Oliver Webb (Walter Connolly) and drunken Owen O’Malley (Roscoe Karns). You squalling little amateur. On your feet! Get up! Take that hump out of your back. You’re not demonstrating underwear anymore! Through intensive training, Oscar transforms his protégée and she and the play are a resounding success.  They are the only true actors we have left. Not like our cheap Broadway hams. On opening night, after her triumph, he comes to her dressing room to apologise for his behaviour. As anticipated, she falls into his arms, begging him never to leave her and they become lovers. Three years later their partnership has spawned three more smash hits, and Lily is acknowledged as a transcendent talent. As a couple, they are famous for their spectacular battling. Then Lily tries to break off their professional and personal relationship, fed up with Oscar’s control of every aspect of her life. Oscar talks her out of it, promising to be more trusting and less controlling in the future. Instead, he secretly hires a private detective agency run by Oscar McGonigle (Edgar Kennedy) to watch her every move, even to the point of tapping her phone. It’s the last straw. She leaves for Hollywood and soon becomes a big movie star. If I’m a genius, Oliver, it’s because of my failures. Always remember that. Without her Oscar produces flop after flop. He won’t kill himself. It would please too many people. After one such disappointment, to avoid being imprisoned for his debts, he is forced to don a disguise to board the luxurious 20th Century Limited express train from Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station to New York Grand Central. Coincidentally, Lily boards at a later stop with her boyfriend George Smith (Ralph Forbes). After prevaricating, Oscar sees a chance to restore his fortunes and salvage his relationship with Lily. What is it this time – the big drama about Hairpin Annie, the pride of the gashouse? But she has plans with a rival … Listen to me. I’m going to put on the Passion Play in New York – with Lily Garland as the Magdalene. I’ve had it up my sleeve all this time, waiting for the right moment. The wickedest woman of her age:  sensual, heartless, but beautiful – running the gamut from the gutter, to glory – can you see her, Lily? – the little wanton ending up in tears at the foot of the cross. I’m going to have Judas strangle himself with her hair. A supreme screwball comedy and one of the two pre-Code films to found the genre in 1934, along with It Happened One Night. Oddly both are made by Columbia Pictures, share the same title music and are road movies. Director Howard Hawks’ handling of this particular emotional journey makes the most of both stars’ immense physicality in confined spaces. We’re only real in between curtains. The unproduced play by Charles Bruce Milholland Napoleon of Broadway forms the basis of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur Broadway play and then this screenplay which both men said was the best they ever wrote and perhaps it is: antic, frantic and supremely funny about taking egotistical actors remotely seriously. Who cares about your respect? I’m too big to be respected. The men I’ve known have understood that. Barrymore plays up to his offscreen reputation as a flamboyant ham; while Lombard (Hawks’ second cousin) also gets a chance to be herself, taunted into it by a director making a tightly focused showbiz romcom whose protagonists love and despise each other as much as any battle of the sexes screen couple remarried several times. Hawks allowed the pair to freely improvise despite the excellent satirical setup – or perhaps because of it. And he insisted on rapid-fire delivery. So that’s what it was, was it? How about your name in electric lights bigger than everybody’s, and your delusion that you were a Shakespeare and a Napoleon and a Grand Lama of Tibet all rolled into one? The snobbery of theatre types regarding cinema is nicely summarised by Oscar: Those movies you were in! It’s sacrilege throwing you away on things like that. When I left that movie house, I felt some magnificent ruby had been thrown into a platter of lard. Fast, sly and vicious, it was Barrymore’s last great role and Lombard’s first. Legendary. She loves me. I could tell it through that screaming

The Thin Man Does Christmas (1934)

Now this is how cool cocktail-drinking couples celebrate.

Sabotage (1936)

Aka A Woman Alone/I Married a Murderer. You don’t need second sight in a case like this. A ring of foreign saboteurs is causing havoc in London with a series of explosive terrorist attacks. Karl Verloc (Oscar Homolka) is part of the group, but he maintains a cover as a cinema proprietor. His wife (Sylvia Sidney) is beginning to suspect something, though, and so is Scotland Yard undercover Detective Sgt. Ted Spencer (John Loder) who has been assigned to work at the shop next door to the cinema. What neither of them knows is that Verloc uses his wife’s little brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) to deliver the bombs in film canisters… You made London laugh. When one sets out to put the fear of death into people, it’s not helpful to make them laugh. We’re not comedians. Hitchcock always regretted having something major happen in this production – something he never permitted again because he felt it was a mistake, breaking the rules of suspense he was so careful to engineer the scaffolding of his narratives. Nonetheless this impressively constructed story of terror on the streets of London between the wars is hugely atmospheric with excellent effects, a great chase and a startling conclusion. Adapted (loosely) from Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent (confusingly the title of another Hitchcock film the same year) this is updated by Charles Bennett and action takes place at Piccadilly Circus, Simpsons’ restaurant and other familiar locales including the cinema that is Verloc’s base which allows some meta comments about the viewing experience with the film within a film being Disney’s Who Killed Cock Robin? (one of the Silly Symphonies). The acting wasn’t all to Hitchcock’s taste however and he altered dialogue on set when he was forced to hire Loder instead of an ailing Robert Donat and the film probably suffers a little as a result but this is a tense, serious and exciting work. Shot by Bernard Knowles and edited by Charles Frend. Made at Gainsborough Studios and around London. They’re the people that you and I will never catch. It’s the men they employ that we’re after

Top Hat (1935)

For the women the kiss, for the men the sword! American dancer Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) comes to London to star in a show produced by Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton). He meets and attempts to impress model Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) to win her affection, but she mistakes him for Horace. Jerry pursues her to Venice where she is promoting the work of Jerry’s love rival, fashion designer Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes) and visiting her friend Madge (Helen Broderick) who is Horace’s wife … My dear, when you’re as old as I am, you take your men as you find them – if you can find them. With a score by Max Steiner and songs by Irving Berlin, who couldn’t love this arch, witty treatise on love? And there are also all those extra tasty treats for connoisseurs of the period – particularly our favourite, Eric Blore as Bates, Hardwick’s fussy valet; incredible gowns designed by Bernard Newman; and the high Art Deco production design typical of the era’s screwball romances but specifically the Big White Set by Van Nest Polglase constructed for the Astaire/Rogers musicals. It’s probably the best loved of the duo’s ten pairings and with good reason, the combination of song and dance reaching peaks of sheer perfection in this the fourth time they co-starred. In fact, it’s Heaven. Swoonsome, amusing entertainment in the smooth classical style. Written specifically for Astaire and Rogers by Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, adapted from a stage play, this was RKO’s most profitable film of the decade. Directed by Mark Sandrich. In dealing with a girl or horse, one just lets nature take its course

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Let that be a lesson to you. Never have any children. On a family holiday in Saint Moritz, Switzerland, Bob Lawrence (Leslie Banks) and his wife, Jill (Edna Best), become friendly with Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay) who is staying in their hotel. He is assassinated in their presence, but as he is dying manages to passes along a secret to Jill, asking her to contact the British consulate. To keep the pair silent, a band of foreign assassins kidnaps their teenage daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam). Offered no help by the police, Bob and Jill hunt for their daughter back in London as they try to understand the information that they have before tracing the kidnappers and once again encountering the cunning Abbott (Peter Lorre) in very compromising circumstances while an assassination is due to take place during a concert at the Albert Hall… You must learn to control your fatherly feelings. Providing a template for much of director Alfred Hitchcock’s subsequent career, this is written by Charles Bennett and D. B. Wyndham Lewis with a scenario by Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson (and additional dialogue by Emlyn Williams) and it’s a gripping and blackly comic suspenser with a simple lesson – if a gun goes off in the first act it’s bound to go off again in the third, in order to bring things to a pleasingly grim conclusion in an extended siege and shootout. Hitchcock’s experience in German cinema is telling in terms of editing and design (for which Alfred Junge is responsible) and it moves quickly and effectively, suiting his talents far better than the slow-moving melodramas he made after the coming of sound, with nary a moment to contemplate some of the zingers which particularly work for Lorre’s sly delivery. Above all it’s a fascinating portrait of subversives in the seedier parts of London, influenced by the 1911 Sidney Street siege, a Conradian subject of anarchy to which Hitchcock would soon return. You’ll be agog at the gathering at the Tabernacle of the Sun and amused by Banks and his mate Clive (Hugh Wakefield) singing out instructions to each other to the tune of a hymn. Hitchcock’s future assistant and producer Joan Harrison has a small uncredited role as a secretary but it’s Best you’ll remember as the brilliant sharpshooting mother – you don’t want to mess with the woman. Don’t breathe a word!