Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1938, benjamin stoloff, the affairs of annabel
Director: Benjamin Stoloff
The Affairs of Annabel was the first film in which Lucille Ball made a significant impression as a lead, giving her the opportunity to both play the comic foil to Jack Oakie and to be glamorous. Running at just over an hour in length, the film (the first of an intended series) takes an episodic approach in laying out its convoluted plot, so much so that a sequence in a women’s prison is over and done with in the first reel. But screenwriters Bert Granet and Paul Yawitz (working from a story by Charles Hoffman) elevate the material above many films of its type due to how tightly scripted it is—nearly every element that is introduced is paid off, and all the major characters are given their due. It’s a deceptively simple juggling act, showing a storytelling efficiency that brings both a sophisticated and breezy telling to the satire. The highlight is a climactic shootout in which a foreign director is tricked into believing a real-life hostage situation is staged—the image of dozens of actor cops tumbling over fences as they retreat is irresistibly surreal. Ball is terrific (even when being held captive, she is constantly showing a convincing fieriness), and Oakie’s shtick wears a little thin but doesn’t overwhelm the action.
Director: Benjamin Stoloff
An unusually subversive take on the Old Dark House genre, The Hidden Hand distinguishes itself from other pictures of its kind by allowing the audience in on the devious plot early on. Cecil Cunningham plays a matriarch who enlists her brother (Milton Parsons), freshly escaped from the lunatic asylum, to assist her in dispatching her greedy heirs who are all-too-eager to collect on her will. That the screenplay goes at great lengths to explain this plot, and that the relatives are introduced with the bias of being ultimately selfish, means that the events that transpire are comprehended from the point of view of the ostensible villains. One might argue that this is an early variation on the slasher film, where the body count is especially high and the villain eats up the lion’s share of the screen time. Unfortunately, Benjamin Stoloff’s direction is neither suspenseful nor appropriately atmospheric, and the cast is uniformly poor. Cunningham, in particular, is a disappointment–Gale Sondergaard played the role on stage and likely would have better struck the paradoxical balance between aloof matron and cunning executioner.
Director: Benjamin Stoloff
How’s this for a comic situation: a heartbroken opera singer (John Boles) flirts with an attractive ventriloquist (Ida Lupino) so that her jealous lover (Erik Rhodes) will put him out of his misery. Fight for Your Lady is about as ridiculous as the plot suggests, but in moments it is hugely enjoyable. Unfortunately, however, Boles’ performance is rather awful. He’s bland, humorless, and worse, is inept at portraying his character’s arc–if the screenplay didn’t reveal that Boles has fallen in love with Lupino, one might assume he’s still the lethargic, suicidal mess he was earlier in the picture. Jack Oakie has a sizable supporting performance that livens things up a bit, but the film is almost completely salvaged by the appearance of Rhodes. He plays a similar flamboyant, aloof foreigner that he played in The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat, and he knows exactly how to generate laughs with simple inflections in his voice. Among his standout lines, there’s a scene in which he is appalled to learn that Boles does not have a mother, and in dismay he blares, “Never had a mother? He is what you call ‘incubator baby’, like a chicken?!”
Director: Benjamin Stoloff
The egotism of actors is parodied in Super-Sleuth, a comic mystery about a movie detective who has deluded himself into thinking he knows more about crime-solving than the police. Jack Oakie plays the overconfident entertainer as equal parts ignorant and cowardly–he’s a wholly unlikable blowhard and much of the film’s humor derives from his incompetence. The identity of the killer is revealed to the audience long before the characters know, and it seems to have been a decision to play up Oakie’s cluelessness all the more–when the creepy foreigner who owns a horror house of sorts shows up, anyone who has seen a mystery picture will put two and two together… well, anyone but Oakie. Ann Sothern has a supporting role as a studio publicist, but she’s largely wasted. It’s a shame as she was one of the best comic stars of her time–Oakie’s persona is obnoxious in large doses, and had Sothern been given more to do she might have balanced things out. Even if much of the film is forgettable, the slapstick finale is a spectacle worth sticking around for.
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