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

Since You Went Away (1944)

Jane, dear, I’m terribly proud of the way you’ve grown up. I’m sorry Pop missed it. When her husband  Tim leaves to fight in World War II, housewife Anne Hilton (Claudette Colbert) must struggle on alone to raise their two daughters, Jane (Jennifer Jones) and Bridget (Shirley Temple) in their midwestern town. With a tight budget, Anne is forced to take in two lodgers, elderly ex-soldier Col. William G. Smollett (Monty Woolley) and handsome Lt. Tony Willet (Joseph Cotten), a friend of Tim’s. However, loyal maid Fidelia (Hattie McDaniel) stays on unpaid and the makeshift household pulls together through home front hardships. Jane falls for Tony who is smitten with Anne, but when Smollett’s son Bill (Robert Walker) shows up, despite disappointing his father after failing West Point, Jane transfers her affections to him … If only he could have been with me the day I went, all by myself, to the Statue of Liberty and read what it says there for the whole world to see. Do you know it? Anne Hilton, did you ever read it? Adapted by producer David O. Selznick from Margaret Buell Wilder’s eponymous novel, this is a super smooth and overlong helping of Americana from the home front, drenched in detail and emotion and amplified by the luxe shooting style of cinematographers Lee Garmes and Stanley Cortez.  It’s funny and sweet and heartwarming and touches on issues of post-combat injury with its depiction of military casualties. It’s a sweeping portrait of anxiety and unease at a troubling time when everyone is playing the same game of waiting to see if and when men will come home. Colbert does a fine job as the harried mother trying to make ends meet and dealing with the vagaries of fussy Smollett while Tony clearly wants more than friendship from her. Agnes Moorehead is superb as a catty, conscience-free neighbour. Temple is a revelation as the teenager while Jones is the romantic, wavering between crushes and finally falling for someone of her own age, with tragic consequences. Everyone is searching for a meaningful role. Directed by John Cromwell, who would later suffer under the HUAC blacklist, with uncredited work by Edward F. Cline, Tay Garnett and the ubiquitous Mr Selznick, who was also sleeping with Jones whom he later married when she and then-husband Walker divorced. Don’t you want to say good-bye?

Thunder On The Hill (1951)

You did not come here. You were led here by Our Lord. Sanctimonious Sister Mary Bonaventure (Claudette Colbert) is leading the team at the convent/hospital of Our Lady of Rheims, a hillside refuge for a community in Norfolk during a terrible flood. Her colleagues dislike her intensely – but Mother Superior (Gladys Cooper) knows that she is motivated by guilt over the death by suicide of her sister. When Valerie Cairns (Ann Blyth, the wicked daughter from Mildred Pierce) arrives accompanied by the police it takes a while for the penny to drop as to why she’s rejecting Sister Mary’s kindness:  she’s a murderess en route to the gallows at prison in Norwich. She’s due to be hanged the following morning but the breaking of the dyke and the downing of telephone lines now mean her execution is delayed. She insists on her innocence and Mary believes her – because she knows what guilt really is. There are a number of people at the convent who are hiding guilt relating to the death by overdose of Valerie’s crippled composer brother including the wife (Anne Crawford) of the doctor on duty (Robert Douglas) who reacts with shock to a photograph of the murdered man. Her husband promptly sedates her.  As Sr Mary researches the newspapers and is given an unsigned letter by slow-witted handyman Willie (Michael Pate) that implicates a third party in the murder, Sr Mary determines to bring Valerie’s fiance Sidney (Philip Friend) from Norwich by boat with Willie.  The handyman destroys the boat so that Valerie cannot be taken to be hanged. The police sergeant is now going to charge Sr Mary with interfering in the course of justice and the guilty party is closing in on her while she is reprimanded by Mother Superior … Slickly told, atmospheric thriller directed by Douglas Sirk with an unexpected take on the melodrama combined with an Agatha Christie group of conventional characters hiding something nasty all gathered in the one building.  There’s a marvellous scene in a belltower when the murderer reveals themselves. The contrasting figures of the desperate and hysterical Blyth and calm but determined Colbert make this a fascinating spin on a crime thriller with a play on the concept of divine intervention which would also be pivotal in Sirk’s later Magnificent Obsession. An engaging, stylish tale adapted by Oscar Saul and Andrew Solt from Charlotte Hastings’ play Bonaventure, enhanced by some very fine performances and sharp dialogue particularly when it’s delivered by Connie Gilchrist as the acerbic cook Sister Josephine whose insistence on saving newspapers (preferably The Sunday Times) saves the day.

The Planter’s Wife (1952)

Aka Outpost in Malaya. Colonial pictures can present problems nowadays for the kind of people who wouldn’t dream of exiting their own parish for a pint of milk. But if you know anyone who settled anywhere more than a day’s travel away, you’ll know it’s never easy and it’s often done for reasons that are simply not relevant these days:  duty, opportunity, adventure, a desire for the exotic. Not a gap year, more a life choice. This was originally going to be called White Blood (a reference to liquid rubber) but that title was rejected by the Colonial Office (it was a thing – until 1966) on the basis that it could incite racial problems. It’s not often we see one of these stories set in the Malay peninsula and this is set in the Emergency that started in 1948 between the Commonwealth forces and the terrorist wing of the local Communist Party. Claudette Colbert and Jack Hawkins are under pressure with the local bandits threatening their livelihood – and lives – as rubber planters. Parents to a small boy, Mike (Peter Asher of Peter & Gordon fame), it’s time for him to go back to England to boarding school and Colbert thinks she’ll go with him and leave her husband for good. A local policeman (Anthony Steel) urges her not to bring Hawkins with her or her marriage will really be dead in the water. They give a sympathetic Malay a lift to town and he’s murdered after the Brits arm him;  then the plantation comes under sustained attack, Colbert uses a gun and the tension is non-stop until a lot of people are killed as the family are under siege. A neighbour/rival reluctantly calls for help but it takes a long time to come … A surprisingly violent and engrossing outing with some very exciting scenes, one of the best involving a cobra and Mr Mangles, Mike’s mongoose;  and Colbert using a Bren gun. (A sight I never thought I’d see. She was delighted to get the opportunity, and allegedly became very useful with small arms.) Based on the novel by Sidney Charles George which was adapted by Guy Elmes and Peter Proud and directed by Ken Annakin. It’s well edited by Alfred Roome and the cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth camouflages the fact that it was most of it was made at Pinewood with a second unit shooting in Malaya, Malacca, Singapore and Ceylon. Bill Travers and Don Sharp, who would become a noted writer and director, have uncredited roles as soldiers.

 

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)

What an astonishing year for Hollywood was 1939. And John Ford alone made Young Mr Lincoln, Stagecoach, and this, his first attempt at directing a Technicolor production at Darryl F. Zanuck’s Twentieth Century-Fox. The novel about the Revolutionary Wars in central New York by Walter D. Edmonds was adapted by Sonya Levien and Lamar Trotti, two of the finest screenwriters at the time. Being Fox, DFZ made sure everything moved at a gallop. Claudette Colbert joins new husband Henry Fonda at his frontier home to start married life and he joins the local militia since there is war in the air. Their home is attacked and destroyed, she miscarries and they accept work at the home of the redoubtable Edna May Oliver, a prosperous widow.  All is peaceable until the British approach with a party of Indians and Fonda is injured in the affray. After their son is born, the raids on the settlements recommence …  This is rousing, exciting, funny and sweet in equal measure. Ford’s shot composition is magnificent even if the historians take issue with the overall accuracy of the story’s detail. Oliver – if you haven’t checked out her Hildegarde Withers movies, do – is brilliant and got an Academy Award nomination. (She died just 3 years later but what antecedents – John Quincy Adams and John Adams!) The cinematography by Ray Rennahan and Bert Glennon is exquisite. Happy Independence Day!

Without Reservations (1946)

Claudette Colbert is the famous author of a political allegory that’s been snapped up by Hollywood. On the train while travelling to the studios she meets a Marine (John Wayne) who could play her hero now that Cary Grant’s dropped out but she conceals her identity – Wayne doesn’t like the book – and an array of misadventures ensue. He’s accompanied by best bud Don DeFore (two DeFore movies in one day, howzaboutthat?!) and they are both charmed by the cute little lady whose antics are clearly inspired by two of her previous train and road movies – The Palm Beach Story and It Happened One Night. They are both classic comedies. This is not, even if it is based on a novel written by two smart women, Jane Allen and Mae Livingston: I am presuming the acclaimed novel Colbert has written is Ayn Rand-lite.  They detour to New Mexico where their host advises her to write based on her experiences before chasing them off his property with a shotgun. In the end they take 80 minutes to get to LA by which time I was gnawing at my own arm in frustration. Louella Parsons issues some of her radio gossip and Cary Grant turns up but it’s not enough to save this, even with Colbert being her customarily lustrous self. Interestingly, however, given that this is a romantic comedy, it ends on a shot of a bed, with Colbert and Wayne being joyously reunited just offscreen … daring!

Imitation of Life (1959)

This is a stunning film about American women, race, sexism, work, performance, relationships, family, mothers and daughters. It stars Lana Turner, lately the star of a huge scandal in which her lover, a gangster named Johnny Stompanato, was allegedly stabbed to death by her 14-year old daughter Cheryl (was it really her?!) and needing another big role to sustain a career that had begun in classic Hollywood style at Schwabs’ Drug Store, or so the myth would have it. The novel by Fannie Hurst was a bestseller that had already been adapted in 1934 and directed by John Stahl, starring Claudette Colbert. The role of Lora Meredith, the widowed (maybe) actress trying to make it in a coldwater flat with a tiny daughter, was perfectly inhabited by Turner. Her brassy look was hardening into something darker and the grasping ambitious matriarch that she becomes is not a huge leap for an empathetic audience. Two screenwriters were involved in the adaptation:  Eleanore Griffin, who had a long career, principally in originating screen stories. She would go on to adapt Hurst’s Back Street in a few years. Allan Scott had written some of the great musicals in the 30s – Follow the Fleet, Top Hat, Swing Time, Carefree, Shall We Dance… Their combined interpretations work amazingly well here. Both of them would die in 1995. The director was German emigre Douglas Sirk. He was reappraised as an auteur in the late 60s and his kitschy melodramas of the 50s were interpreted as analyses of society in the United States, distinguished by garish colours, stunning production design and coded drama. There are so many dramatic high points here it seems useless to enumerate them, but the performance by the great Mahalia Jackson is a personal favourite and Susan Kohner’s uneasy presence as the half-caste girl is perfectly matched by Sandra Dee’s sweetness. Juanita Moore is an ocean of decency as the help. It is too easy to put this down as a melodrama, but it really is one, in the original, political sense. Classic.