DE LUXE ANNIE. Select Pictures, 1915. Norma Talmadge, Eugene O’Brien, Frank Mills, Edna Hunter, Fred R. Stanton, Joseph Burke, David Burns. Scenario by Paul West, from a play by Edward Clark. Camera: Edward Wynard and Albert Moses. Director: Roland West. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   Roland West’s films (among them The Bat, The Bat Whispers, Alibi and The Monster) were often distinguished by fluid, striking camera work, and with only a handful of early silent films to his credit, I was looking forward to this early example of his work. The fact that it starred the beautiful and talented Norma Talmadge was an added incentive to my anticipation.

   When Julie Kendal, worried that her husband may be in danger, goes to the apartment where he is lying in wait to to capture De Luxe Annie and her partner, professional con artists, she is surprised by Annie and knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, she has lost her memory and staggers out of the building into a fog, which pretty much describes her state until the end of the film.

   The plot is based on what may have been a popular (or just a pulpish) theory of the time: that traumatic events can trigger amnesia. This is not one of Talmadge’s better performances (she seems to have only two expressions, desperation and confusion), but O’Brien, as her partner in her alter ego role as De Luxe Annie 2, proves to be a sympathetic performer, bringing a sense of authentic feeling (he falls for Julie) that is otherwise generally absent from the film.

   When Julie is captured, still unrepentant, she undergoes an operation that restores her memory (the audience greeted this with some hilarity) and there’s a fade-out scene in which Jimmy is brought in to meet her, and it’s clear she doesn’t remember him. A disappointing film but still fun to watch as it meanders towards its inevitable conclusion.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN. 20th Century-Fox, 1945. Gene Tierney, Cornell Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Darryl Hickman, Mary Phillips, Ray Collins, Chill Wills, Gene Lockhart. Screenplay by Jo Swerling, based on the novel by Ben Ames Williams. Cinematography: Leon Shamoy. Director: John M. Stahl.

   I don’t think I have ever heard anyone argue that this stunning Technicolor film — photographed in the glossiest and brightest light imaginable, with sets in New Mexico, Georgia, and Maine that look as if they were straight from the pages of House Beautiful and Architectural Digest — is anything but the darkest of film noir classics.

   That’s thanks to a stunning performance by Gene Tierney as a beautiful and soulless sociopath who doesn’t care to share her love — and will go to any length to keep her loved ones to herself — including murder.

   Tierney got an Oscar nomination and Leon Shamoy’s cinematography won the statuette for this mix of gothic and soap opera elements with one of the screen’s most beautiful monsters at its heart. ( The title comes from Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father pleading with his son not to pursue vengeance against his Mother, but rather “leave her to heaven …”)

   Richard (Cornell Wilde) is a talented artist and writer visiting in New Mexico (and it never looked better) where he meets Ellen (Tierney) who is there to scatter the ashes of her recently dead father. She is the spoiled daughter of her much loved medical researcher father and Mary Phillips, and sister of the adopted Ruth (Jeanne Crain), and brings Richard back to Maine to meet her family.

   Richard soon finds himself in Ellen’s determined sights, and it is a delight to be stalked by her, but there are small undercurrents. Ellen’s devotion to her late father is extreme — to the extent her mother adopted Ruth rather than be cut out and alone in the family. Then she breaks up with fiancee Vincent Price in a cold manner so she can have Richard, leaving Price bitter and angry.

   Watching Ellen race her sister across the pool family friend and lawyer Ray Collins observes: “Ellen always wins.” What he doesn’t add is at any price.

   But Richard and Ellen marry and seem extremely happy. He brings her back to Warm Springs Georgia with him where he lives with his brother Danny (Darryl Hickman) who has polio. Ellen befriends him and begins to help him recover in the hospital, talking about how he can attend boarding school when he is well, and meanwhile at home she wants no servants around — just she and Richard — maybe a child — in time — a long time.

   But Ellen’s plans backfire. When she gets Danny well enough to walk he comes with them to Richard’s writing retreat — and even worse the handyman Chill Wills, a friend from Richard’s childhood, makes them a foursome. So something must be done, and since Danny swims every day to strengthen his polio-crippled legs …

   The scene where Ellen watches as Danny drowns is one of the finest moments of noir on film, a cold-blooded murder seldom equaled for impact on screen, and done in the brightest of sunshine and the most gorgeous of Technicolor. If ever a film demonstrated noir is a mind set more than a look, it is this one.

   But like all Ellen’s plans, this one too backfires. Her family comes to cheer Richard up, with him depressed and lost since Danny’s death — and worst he is withdrawing from Ellen. So Ellen determines to get pregnant to cheer him up — but he loves the coming child too much and grows too close to Ruth. And Ellen can’t face that. She confesses to Ellen she hates the child inside of her.

   Ellen causes herself to lose the child, but by now Richard has begun to see what she is: “He loves me,” she tells Ruth, “but he never liked me.” Eventually he confronts her and she admits she killed Danny and their child — though not quite how fully she was involved. Richard leaves her.

   You don’t leave Ellen. She poisons herself and frames her sister for her death, carefully concocting her revenge and framing her sister Ruth. She even asks to be cremated so it will contradict her will that asks to be buried next to her father.

   And the frame takes. The vengeful Price first blames her sister Ruth, as Ellen intended, trying her for murder and putting Richard as much on trial as Ruth.

   Richard sacrifices himself to save Ruth, he confesses that he knew Ellen murdered Danny, and the vengeful Price sees he serves two years for withholding evidence of a crime, but he returns home to Crain’s arms.

   Granted there are some huge holes in logic here. Vincent Price would never have been allowed to prosecute a case he was so close to and Richard could not be charged as an accessory after the fact since he could not testify against Ellen anyway, not to mention Ruth would not have to testify if charged with murder.

   But never mind the lapses of logic, this, like much film noir and even many horror films, is a nightmare with its own internal logic. Accept it at that level and it ill hold you with Ellen the most fatale femme of them all.

   This film is film noir because of Tierney’s Ellen and only because of Tierney’s Ellen, but in this case that is more than enough.

   Ben Ames Williams was a best selling novelist whose work crossed over into numerous genres from historical fiction (All The Brothers Were Valiant) to mystery and suspense. He isn’t read much today, but that isn’t to say he shouldn’t be.

   Leave Her to Heaven is a fine example of Hollywood virtues, a product of studio skills and values at their best. Remade for television in 1988 as Too Good To Be True, this may be the darkest foray into bright sunshine you ever experience, a Technicolor nightmare bright and shiny as a polished stone and at its heart as cold and empty.

   Gene Tierney was never lovelier on film — and never more monstrous. I don’t know about Dracula and Frankenstein, but Ellen scares me.

CHINA SEAS. MGM, 1935. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Rosalind Russell, Dudley Digges, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Benchley, Hattie McDaniel. Director: Tay Garnett.

   The opening scenes of this film both surprised and pleased me, filled as it is with passengers boarding Captain Alan Gaskell’s South Seas freighter, heading this time out from Hong Kong to Singapore, and those seeing them off, plus a huge contingent of assorted crewmen and hordes and hordes of bustling dock workers.

   The modern touch in which each of the major players is introduced briefly but succinctly is quite a compliment to the director, Tay Garnett, whose career in movies and TV lasted over 50 years.

   Gaskell is played by Clark Gable, and there is no doubt that he is master of his ship, cheery and easy going when he can and tough as nails when he has to be. But when he comes to women, well he’s no master, and doubly so when there are two of them on board, and both with plans of marriage on their minds.

   Jean Harlow is the first of the two we meet, a brassy blonde dish named Dolly Portland (or China Doll), and she and Gaskell seem to have been a pair for quite a while, code or no code.

   The aristocratic Rosalind Russell’s history with ship’s captain goes back many years before and England, where she married someone else — a wedding soon followed by Gaskell’s departure for the Far East. But that someone else has since died, and the new widow has headed straight for the China Seas with but two objectives in mind: to reclaim her former love and bring him back home.

   Do sparks fly? Boy, do they. Add in a slippery character named Jamesy MacArdle (Wallace Beery) who’s also around to comfort Dolly when she gets the blues, which is precisely the same time that Lady Sybil seems to be gaining the upper hand, which is very quickly.

   Rosalind Russell, by the way, could easily be mistaken for Myrna Loy in this movie, and her far too cool beauty is never going to win the day, or so the viewer knows for sure, deep down inside, and from the very first time she appears on the screen.

   Add in some ferocious pirates with a eye on a small fortune in gold hidden somewhere on board, preceded by a typhoon which causes havoc to everyone and everything on board — and all of a sudden the viewer mentioned above has to swallow his or her first inclinations that this movie is little more a mild romantic romp in the park.

   Even so, Robert Benchley as a drunken American author continually supplying wryly appropriate but still nonsensical non sequiturs at every odd moment, certainly does his funny man best, no matter what. (I am a long time Robert Benchley fan.)

   It’s strictly star power that carries the day, as Jean Harlow shows once again that she could hold her own with any actor, even one with the screen presence as large as Clark Gable’s, in a role that’s absolutely perfect for her — and was probably designed that way from the start.

SUZY. MGM, 1936. Jean Harlow, Franchot Tone, Cary Grant, Lewis Stone, Benita Hume, Reginald Mason, Inez Courtney. Co-screenwriter: Dorothy Parker (one of four). Director: George Fitzmaurice.

   So far as I can tell, and I may very well be wrong about this, here’s a movie with both Cary Grant and Jean Harlow in it, and it’s not available on DVD. It was released at one time on VHS, and I recently taped a copy from TCM, but there’s no other commercial release that I’m aware of.

   And why, you might ask, might that be? I wonder if it’s because Cary Grant’s image takes a beating in this movie. He probably played cads in movies other than in this one, but I hope I won’t be giving too much away to say that in the second half of this historical adventure drama he’s about as despicable as he can get.

   As a down-and-out American showgirl in England, though, circa 1914, it’s really Jean Harlow’s film, all the way.

   Franchot Tone is her lover and husband in the first half, the latter for less than an hour, a carefree inventor of airplane motors who whisks Suzy Trent (that’s Jean Harlow) off her feet before being killed by a gang of spies, or so Suzy believes.

   And thinking she’ll be accused of the crime, Suzy heads off for France, which is where Cary Grant comes in. As a French war ace, he sweeps Suzy off her feet again, only to dump her in his father’s mansion while he heads off for the just declared war. And immediately returns to his carefree womanizing ways, the bounder.

   I promised myself that I would refrain from telling you the complete story, and I haven’t, not yet, at least. I suppose I can safely add that the first half of the story eventually meets up with the second half, which is a lot more somber.

   Wars have a way of doing that with stories, and the mood certainly changes once the Andre leaves Suzy and heads off for the front.

   I’ve never been overly impressed with Jean Harlow’s acting ability, but as a screen personality, she was second to almost none, and that holds true for Suzy as well, especially in the first half of this film — but in the second half as well, where she wins over disapproving Andre’s father (Lewis Stone) in her own charming way, as only someone exactly like Jean Harlow could.

   What part of the story Dorothy Parker wrote I don’t know, but I have to think she had something to do with the first half, which remains cheerful and light, in spite of the protagonists’ mutual lack of funds.

   Living in poverty, if it can be refused to be taken seriously, sometimes does that to a tale, if it’s a Hollywood one, and this one definitely is.

PostScript: I found on YouTube a clip of the scene in which Suzy first meets Andre. Her singing voice, I’m told, is not Jean Harlow’s, but Cary Grant’s? Yes, that’s definitely his. A highlight of the movie. Watch it!

LOVER COME BACK. Columbia, 1931. Constance Cummings, Jack Mulhall, Betty Bronson, Jameson Thomas, Katherine Givney. Screenplay by Dorothy Howell and Robert Shannon, from a story by Helen Topping Miller; photography: Joseph Walker. Director: Erie C. Kenton, director. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   There were films with the same title released in 1946 (with Lucille Ball and George Brent) and in 1961 (with Doris Day and Rock Hudson).

   I’ve not seen the two later films, but none of the IMDB postings suggests any connection between the three except the title. In any case, the situation as it developed in the 1931 film would never have made it to the screen in the later periods in anything resembling its treatment of sexual relationships.

   Constance Cummings is a secretary who’s had an affair with Jack Mulhall, general manager of the firm for which she works. When he breaks off their relationship and marries Betty Bronson (groomed by her mother, Katherine Givney, for a suitable marriage) Cummings accepts the longstanding offer of her boss, Jameson Thomas, and moves into a Park Avenue apartment he’s set up for her.

   She continues to work at the firm as the organizer and hostess of parties entertaining out-of-town clients. When Bronson begins an affair with Thomas, Cummings attempts to protect Mulhall from the knowledge of his wife’s indiscretions, but eventually Bronson’s blatant cheating precipitates the film’s not-too-surprising climax.

   Beautiful Constance Cummings may be the victim of a blind lover and a scheming rival, but she has a strong will and an intelligence that make it clear who’s going to carry the day.

   She gives a commanding performance in a frank treatment of sexual relationships that may seem astonishing to someone who’s not familiar with Hollywood’s license for sinning in the pre-code era.

JUKE GIRL. Warner Brothers, 1942. Ann Sheridan, Ronald Reagan, Richard Whorf, George Tobias, Gene Lockhart, Alan Hale, Howard da Silva, Donald McBride, Faye Emerson, Fuzzy Knight, Willie Best. Screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides, based on a story by Theodore Pratt, adapted by Kenneth Gamet. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt.

   History adds a touch of irony to this Warners social drama since in it Conservative icon and Republican President Ronald Reagan plays a radical left wing itinerant farm organizer, sort of an Anglo Cesar Chavez.

   It’s the depths of the Depression and Reagan and pal Whorf have just wandered into the farming town of Cat Tail, California (“population 3,000 nine months a year, 30,000 the other three”) where shipper Gene Lockhart and his tough manager Howard da Silva are using their monopoly to break the farmers, like Greek George Tobias.

   Whorf takes a job with Lockhart, but Reagan sticks up for Tobias and thus is set up a classic rivalry between buddies — pal against pal.

   Enter Ann Sheridan, the dance hall girl of the title (a ‘Juke Girl’), a tough brassy broad who is no better than she has to be and not as bad as her face is painted — a typical Sheridan role, and a typical Warners leading lady — smart, self sufficient, tough, but with a heart of gold, and more morals than she lets on.

   She and Reagan only need one look and the sparks fly (“You been burnin’ to get out of everywhere you ever been,” Reagan tells her). They teamed again more effectively in the classic King’s Row, but this one is closer to B territory, and they have more fun with it.

   Reagan takes up with trucker Alan Hale, a two-fisted fellow also battling Lockhart and da Silva to help get Tobias and the other farmers in the cooperative’s crops to market — I told you this was an ironic role for Reagan — but Lockhart murders Tobias and frames Reagan and Sheridan for it.

   As the lynch mob marches on the jail to take the lovers, Whorf and Hale coerce a confession from Lockhart, and save the lovers. Reagan and Sheridan end up with their own farm, Lockhart goes to jail, Hale is now in charge of helping the farmers, and Whorf hits the road again — but he’ll see them in nine months when the crops come in.

   Reagan’s “Maybe I just don’t like to see a man kicked around,” is no Tom Joad’s speech from The Grapes of Wrath, but Sheridan has ‘oomph’ to spare, and if she is a thousand times better looking than the best looking dance hall girl who ever went to bed complaining about her aching feet, she had real skill at playing the kind of tough, human, and believable women Hollywood films too often turned into cliches.

   Claire Trevor and Barbara Stanwyck were among the rare actresses who did it as well. Their working women had a way of making you think you might actually find them in a diner or dance hall — however unlikely that might be in real life.

   Juke Girl lacks the righteous anger of Grapes of Wrath and the tragic eloquence, nor is it as emotionally tough as other Warners social drama classics such as I Was A Fugitive From a Chain Gang and Black Fury or the bright comedy/drama of films like Manpower, Slim or They Drive By Night. It’s also lacking a Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, or even George Raft, though Whorf does well in the Raft role in the film.

   Reagan is a perfectly good lead, but he lacks the passion or the conviction this one calls for, the quiet dignity of a Henry Fonda, the caged power of a Cagney, or the depth and anguish of a Paul Muni — you keep half expecting him to mount a plough horse and ride off into a Republican sunset — exit stage right, of course. (In all fairness this was probably less a stretch before we knew his politics).

   The film gets a good deal of good will though from fine contributions by Hale, Lockhart, da Silva, Tobias, Willie Best, and particularly from Sheridan’s famous ‘oomph.’ Whenever she is on screen, the film sparkles and threatens to become something more than what it is.

   Juke Girl doesn’t have the head or the heart to be what it wanted to be, though it at least has the ambition to be something more. The seeds have been sewn, but all they bear are the grapes of mild indignation. It needed John Steinbeck and John Ford to turn social injustice into an American tragedy. Here we have a western with trucks and crops substituting for horses and cattle.

  ONLY THE BRAVE. Paramount, 1930. Gary Cooper, Mary Brian, Phillips Holmes, James Neill, Morgan Farley, Guy Oliver, John Elliot, E. H. Calvert, Virginia Bruce, William LeMaire. Screenplay by Edward E. Paramore & Agnes Brand Leahy, based on a story by Keene Thompson; photography: Henry Fischbeck. Director: Frank Tuttle. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   The early ’30s Paramount films, seldom seen outside film conventions, are often among the most eagerly anticipated screenings. It was, then, something of a shock to be submitted to the inanity of this Civil War drama.

   There is an initial, somewhat promising set-up as Cooper, in disgrace after going AWOL to visit his sweetheart whom he finds with another man, accepts an undercover mission.

   He will travel behind enemy lines with false troop information that he will allow to fall into the hands of rebel forces, and which will undoubtedly result in his death.

   He “infiltrates” a gathering at a mansion where the daughter of the house (Mary Brian) is entertaining officers, among them her fiance (Phillips Holmes). Cooper flirts openly with Brian, who falls like the proverbial ton of bricks for him in a matter of a few minutes.

   After some farcical misfires, Cooper succeeds in having himself exposed and his plans confiscated. He’s locked up with a loony soldier (played by William Le Maire, a popular vaudeville comic), while he’s waiting for the firing squad, and the sentry delivers an off-the-wall monologue in black dialect that destroys any remaining credibility in the numbing plot.

   The writer of the program notes characterized the film as “weird” but “delightful.” Weird it may be, but only delightful during LeMaire’s lengthy monologue.

   ● CHARLES JACKSON – The Lost Weekend. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1944. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft, including Signet #683, pb, 1948.

   ● THE LOST WEEKEND. Paramount Pictures, 1945. Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard Da Silva, Doris Dowling, Frank Faylen. Screenplay: Charles Brackett, based on the novel by Charles R. Jackson. Director: Billy Wilder.

   Thinking of books and the films made from them, I recenly re-watched and reread The Lost Weekend. I first read Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel back in High School, five years before I took my own first serious drink. Coming back to it now, I found some bits rather labored, way too many pages of rambling introspection, and a disappointing conclusion.

   All that’s left is a gripping story that generates real suspense and painful pathos, a central character commanding the reader’s interest from the outset, and a heart-rending momentum that keeps the pages turning even through the more self-indulgent passages. That’s all.

   The film Billy Wilder made out of this in ’45 softens the ending, adds a love interest, and cuts away the fatty introspection that pervades Jackson’s book, to emerge as a typically tough, brilliant and rather showy Billy Wilder movie: fast-paced, well-developed, and fleshed out with performances — even in the bit parts — that come alive on the screen.

   Ray Milland’s break-out turn after a decade of shallow leads is the most famous, but there’s also memorable thesping from Howard DaSilva — and lovable Frank Faylen etches a part so evil it’ll make me dubious next time I see Wonderful Life.

   One other thing I noticed: the last shot in this movie is really the first shot run backwards. That means something but I don’t know what.

BROADWAY LOVE. Bluebird Photoplays, 1918. Dorothy Phillips, Juanita Hansen, William Stowell, Harry von Meter, Lon Chaney, Eve Southern, Gladys Tennyson. director and author of the screenplay: Ida May Park. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   This was an unusual screening, a silent film directed by a woman. Ida May Parks, according to Wikipedia, directed some 14 films, and wrote at least 50 screenplays, in a career that lasted from 1914 to 1930.

   The star was the then popular Dorothy Phillips, who plays Midge O’Hara, a small-town girl who goes to New York where she gets a job as a chorus girl. She is befriended by Cherry Blow (Juanita Hansen) who attempts to introduce the virtuous Midge to the incidental pleasures of her new life at a riotous party in the apartment of Cherry’s sugar daddy.

   Midge is rescued by an Arizona millionaire, only to find that his intentions are dishonorable. She flees New York, pursued by the persistent Henry, as well as by Elmer Watkins (Lon Chaney), her loutish suitor from back home.

   Parks sets up her shots for the actresses with great care, and is particularly successful with the party sequence. Relatively few Universal silent films (Bluebird Photoplays was Universal’s prestige feature unit) survived the studio’s purge, and the survivors are often in poor condition.

   However, the print shown was in excellent condition, and the film was more than competently directed, making one hope that other films directed by Parks may have survived.

THE KEYHOLE. Warner Brothers, 1933. Kay Francis, George Brent, Glenda Farrell, Allen Jenkins, Henry Kolker, Monroe Owsley, Helen Ware. Screenplay by Robert Presnell Sr., based on the story “Adventuress” by Alice D. G. Miller. Director: Michael Curtiz.

   Even though George Brent plays at being a private detective in this one, the society kind, with Allen Jenkins as his dopey partner, I’ve categorized this movie as a comedy/romance all the way. While there is a crime involved (blackmail), any detection is minimal (that is to say, none).

   It’s not even Brent’s job to nab the blackmailer, though in the end he does, in a way. He’s hired instead to keep an eye on the blackmailee (Kay Francis) on behalf of her husband (Henry Kolker), who does not know about the blackmail but thinks funny business is going on when Kay Francis (a) begins to act strangely, and (b) heads for Cuba alone, and under her maiden name.

   It’s all part of a plot on her part to rid herself of the blackmailer (Monroe Owsley) to whom she was once married and who has since reneged on following through with a divorce.

   Brent’s usual game is getting the goods on married women who want to stray (I did mention he was the society kind of PI), so he’s a little confused, but naturally, as the cruise goes on, he begins to, well, you know, fall in love with her?

   Unfortunately, as an actor, George Brent has always seemed too bland for me, so it was up to Kay Francis to make this picture work for me, and she was never lovelier.

   She has a huge wardrobe along with her aboard ship, and each is what you might call spectacular, with many of them backless (this was a pre-Code movie) and cut low in front as well, but not nearly as far as in the back.

   She makes the romance between George Brent and herself believable, and even sizzle here and there, in totally entertaining fashion.

   But Allen Jenkins I could easily have done without altogether. He plays dopey to the hilt in this movie, and does a bang up job of it. A subplot involving him in a romance with con woman Glenda Farrell doesn’t go very far (both of them believe the other to be rich), but at least Glenda Farrell is easy on the eyes. She always was.