 Married people slept in separate beds and only the wicked had sex outside of marriage in old Hollywood, right? Wrong! There was plenty sex both inside and outside of marriage on screen before the Production Code came into full force in mid-1934, and good and bad people getting away with murder as well. Having hit pay dirt with last year’s release of Forbidden Hollywood Collection – Volume 1, Warner Bros. has released Forbidden Hollywood Collection – Volume 2 under the TCM Archives banner. Where Volume One gave us three examples of movies not possible to make in the Hollywood of the mid 1930s to the mid 1960s, Volume Two generously gives us five plus an astute documentary, Thous Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood. Volume One gave us Waterloo Bridge (1931), Red-Headed Woman (1932) and Baby Face (1933). Volume Two gives us The Divorcee (1930), A Free Soul (1931), Night Nurse (1931), Three on a Match (1932) and Female (1933). The Production Code had already been in existence in 1930, but it was winked at, rather than rigorously enforced. Both MGM and Warner Bros., whose films are represented here, flaunted sex and murder as easily as they did glamorous gowns and spiffy new cars. MGM, already building its reputation for gloss and high style concentrated on the rich, while gritty Warner Bros. gleefully mixed rich and poor in prosaic fashion. Norma Shearer slithered her way to an Oscar in Robert Z. Leonard’s The Divorcee playing the high stepping wife of Chester Morris who, tired of the double standard, openly sleeps with his best friend, Robert Montgomery, leading to divorce and eventual reconciliation. Conrad Nagel and Florence Eldredge co-star. Shearer goes even further in Clarence Brown’s A Free Soul, leaving effete polo playing fiancé Leslie Howard to become the mistress of notorious gangster Clark Gable, lounging wantonly on his bed in a slinky nightgown as her drunken father is dragged into their den of iniquity. She got another Oscar nomination for that, but the one who took home the little gold man that year was Lionel Barrymore in a shameless piece of over-acting as her lawyer father. What’s shocking about this film is not the sex, which is extremely tame by modern standards, but the notion that it’s OK to kill in cold blood if you’re high minded and the person you’re killing is a lowlife. Gable was even more reprehensible in William A. Wellman’s Night Nurse in which he plays a chauffer intent on murdering two children under the care of nurse Barbara Stanwyck. He’s thwarted by Stanwyck, but not before she and Joan Blondell are in and out of their clothes too many times to count. The film contains some of the funniest risqué dialogue ever written for the screen. Blondell is back, co-starring with Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak, in Merrvyn LeRoy’s Three on a Match with Humphrey Bogart in one of his early villain roles. Clocking in at a fast 63 minutes, this is easily the most absorbing film of the group. Dvorak delivers a really terrific performance as an alcoholic, drug-addicted mother of a six-year-old. The least remembered film of the lot is Michael Curtiz’s Female, which clocks in at an even brisker 59 minutes. Ruth Chatterton is the auto company chief executive who has her way with a number of boy toys until the “right man” comes along. He’s played by George Brent, Chatterton’s then-real life husband. The supporting cast includes Johnny Mack Brown, Phillip Reed, Ruth Donnelly and Ferdinand Gottschalk. Having released most of their better known films of the 1930s in Warner Gangsters Collection – Volume 1 and Warner Gangsters Collection – Volume 2, Warner Bros. digs deeper to come up with six lesser known titles in Warner Gangsters Collection – Volume 3, the first three of which also happen to be pre-Code films. The films are Smart Money (1931), Picture Snatcher (1933), The Mayor of Hell (1933), Lady Killer (1933), Black Legion (1937) and Brother Orchid (1940). All include commentaries and various other extras. The only film in which Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney appeared together, Alfred E. Green’s Smart Money was filmed concurrently with William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy but released after that film made Cagney a star. Conceived as a showcase for Robinson in the wake of his success in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar, he plays a barber-turned-gambler who runs afoul of both the mob and the law. Cagney plays Robinson’s live-in sidekick with obvious homoerotic overtones. He hates women, a euphemism for being gay in old Hollywood, especially the blondes Robinson keeps falling for. Margaret Livingston, who plays the last of the blondes, was the mistress of Thomas Ince at the time of his murder aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht as depicted in Peter Bogdanovich’s 2001 film, The Cat’s Meow. She is best known on screen as the Woman From the City in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise. She became bandleader Paul Whiteman’s fourth wife in 1931. They remained happily married until his death in 1967. Cagney is the whole show in Lloyd Bacon’s Picture Snatcher, playing a tabloid photographer in this ripped-from-the-headlines comic melodrama. The plot centers around Cagney’s character getting several famous photographs of the day, the most notorious being the one of the woman being executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing. Ralph Bellamy, in one of his earliest roles, plays his editor. Cagney has one of his best early roles in Archie Mayo’s The Mayor of Hell,but he is only in about a third of the film, which is nicely carried by fifteen-year-old Frankie Darro in the title role. Set primarily in a reform school run by nasty Dudley Digges, Cagney plays the deputy commissioner working in concert with saintly nurse Madge Evans to bring innovative changes to the establishment. The film is sort of a grittier version of the later Boys Town, with generous dollops of Angels With Dirty Faces thrown in. Released late in 1933 just before the Hollywood Production Code came into full force, Roy Del Ruth’s Lady Killer is a fast-paced comedy in which Cagney plays a theatre usher-turned-movie star with a criminal past. Re-united with Mae Clarke whom he famously manhandled in The Public Enemy, there’s no grapefruit in the kisser for her this time around. Instead he drags her across the floor by her hair. Margaret Lindsay co-stars. A thinly-disguised expose of the Ku Klux Klan, Archie Mayo’s Black Legion presented Humphrey Bogart with one of his earliest starring roles as a factory worker who joins the secret organization after the foreman’s job at the factory is given to “foreigner” Henry Brandon. Erin O’Brien Moore, Dick Foran and Ann Sheridan co-star in the film singled out by the National Board of Review as one of the ten best films of its year, not the best as the commentators would have you believe. A comedy about a gangster in hiding in a monastery, Lloyd Bacon’s Brother Orchid presents Edward G. Robinson as the unlikely title character. Ann Southern, Ralph Bellamy, Donald Crisp and Cecil Kellaway co-star in this enjoyable romp. It seems hard to believe, but the first “modern” gangster movie,1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, is now more than forty years old. To commemorate the film’s 40th anniversary, Warner Bros. has issued a newly re-mastered two-disc set that includes several documentaries. The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director (Arthur Penn), Actor (Warren Beatty), Actress (Faye Dunaway) and two Supporting Actors (Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard), but won only two, for Supporting Actress Estelle Parsons and Cinematography. With baseball season almost upon us, MGM, through its distribution deal with Fox, is providing us with three spiffed-up re-issues of classic baseball films. The granddaddy of the bunch is 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees, directed by Sam Wood, with Gary Cooper in one of his best-remembered roles as Lou Gehrig and Teresa Wright as Mrs. Gehrig. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay, it won only one for Best Editing. This is the third DVD release of the title. The previous two releases were bare bones. The new release includes six featurettes including one on Lou Gehrig’s disease. Complementing that release are twentieth anniversary editions of both Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham and John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, both with director commentaries and various other extras. Ang Lee’s uncompromising look at the 1970s American suburban middle class in 1997’s The Ice Storm gets the full Criterion treatment including commentary from Lee and screenwriter James Schamus. Extras include new interviews with stars Joan Allen, Kevin Kline, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Sigourney Weaver and Elijah Wood. The film was oddly ignored by Oscar, but Weaver won both a Golden Globe and BAFTA nomination for her supporting performance and Lee, Kline, Allen and the film itself were all nominated by the London film Critics. That’s it for the classics. The best new film to be released on DVD this week is Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Oscar-winning Austrian film, The Counterfeiters, but it’s only available in Region 2. If you live in the U.S. and don’t have a region free player, for the time being you’ll have to seek it out in theatres where it’s still playing. Just when you think you’ve heard all the stories from the Nazi death camps comes another one, this one from 90-year-old author Adolph Burger’s 2007 book, The Devil’s Workshop,about his experiences among an elite group of Jewish prisoners forced to print counterfeit British and American currency. The most fascinating aspect of the entire enterprise is saved for one of the extras, an interview with Burger in which he explains how he alone could tell the forgeries from the real thing after they had fooled the world’s experts in 1945. Though Burger is the moral center of the film, August Diehl who plays him, is the film’s second lead. The starring role is played by Karl Markovics as the lead counterfeiter. It’s well worth your time. Critics weren’t kind to Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera, most of them saying it made a travesty of the novel. Never having read it, I didn’t have that problem with it. It’s the kind of film that plays better on DVD where you can stop and re-start it at your leisure rather than having to sit through it in one sitting in the theatre. Javier Bardem, splendid as always, is a heartsick telegraph operator turned shipping mogul who pines for more than fifty years for the woman whose father separated them in their youth. Award winning Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno is equally fine as the woman he waits for and the Colombian locations make for a splendid backdrop. Fernanda Montenegro as Bardem’s mother and Hector Elizondo as his uncle and benefactor are fine in support, but the rest of the cast is mostly forgettable except for John Leguizamo whose leering bug-eyed over-acting is so bad you wish you could forget him but may have nightmares instead. Whether or not you enjoy Kevin Lima’s Enchanted depends on your tolerance for bland romantic Disney fairy tales set in post-Giuliani Manhattan and whether or not you’re captivated by the charms of the film’s star, Amy Adams. Though the film contains three Oscar nominated songs, none of them are particularly distinguished. Others found it beguiling, but I must confess I found it rather insipid. Coming: separate Warner and Fox collections celebrating Bette Davis’ centenary. -Peter J. Patrick (March 25, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #47
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