Wed 22 Jul 2020
A Fantasy Movie Review: EARTHBOUND (1940).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[3] Comments
EARTHBOUND. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Warner Baxter, Andrea Leeds, Lynn Bari, Charley Grapewin, Henry Wilcoxon, Elizabeth Patterson. Director: Irving Pichel.
This is one of those films in which after a person’s death, his ghost is forced to remain on earth until he somehow rights the wrongs committed by his murderer. The ghost this time around is that of Nick Desborough, Warner Baxter’s character, whose one offense he’s done on the earth is to have ab affair with Lynn Bari’s character while married to Adrea Leeds, who plays his wife.
And he’s broken off the affair. Lynn Bari doesn’t take this lightly and pulls a gun on him. In the ensuing struggle, the gun goes off, and Baxter is dead. Bari’s husband (and Baxter’s business partner, played by Henry Wilcoxon) takes the blame, and according the one of the rules that ghosts have to play by, it is up to Baxter to exonerate him, even as the case goes to court.
Charley Grapewin plays Baxter’s elderly and somewhat whimsical Bible-wielding mentor in this land of limbo he is in, but no matter much running around and talking to people that Baxter does, no one can hear him. One should think he would figure this out long before he does, but he perseveres, the real killer is determined, and eventually all is right in the world and beyond.
I don’t know what you might think, but none of this made a lot of sense to me. The special effects are more than OK, however, making Warner Baxter quite transparent after his character dies and he must carry on in his new ghostly realm.
July 22nd, 2020 at 9:34 am
Not only does this thing not make sense, although lack of clarity is forgivable, Warner Baxter is an unforgivable bore, No one is, for me, less appealing; at least from the first twenty years of the sound era.
July 22nd, 2020 at 7:54 pm
I am tempted to say Baxter would have been better if he had been transparent in the whole film, the plot certainly was.
This kind of plot worked often enough in better films but then better films tended to star people like Robert Montgomery and Paul Muni with Claude Rains rather than Charley Grapewin and Baxter.
Pichel was usually good with this sort of thing so I am guessing there was little room to maneuver between the script, the budget, and the by then wooden Baxter, who was at least tolerable as the Cisco Kid in the early sound era, but other than that exactly the bore Barry describes.
Frankly, after a Baxter movie if I see George Brent in something my first thought is “thank God someone with charisma.”*
*No knock on Brent who did what he did as well as it could be done and was the solid backbone to some of the biggest scene stealers in the business without getting completely obliterated on screen — no easy task either. But compared to Baxter Brent was Errol Flynn.
July 23rd, 2020 at 7:35 am
“You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a STAR!”