Director: Roy Del Ruth
That this Hollywood musical took its name from the famed cabaret music hall in Paris suggested to audiences that they were about to see something unusually risqué. After all, Hollywood films often portrayed Parisians as both sophisticated and over-sexed, with Maurice Chevalier serving as the prime example of a French womanizer throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s for directors like Ernst Lubitsch. The picture doesn’t take as many risks as one would like, nor does it pack quite the same caliber of innuendo as a Lubitsch picture, but the mistaken identity plot allows for some playful dalliances with the topic of affairs. If the romantic comedy elements are fairly typical for the time, the musical numbers are unusually terrific–rivaling the best of Busby Berkeley with the ambitious geometric patterns and the increasingly surreal sets (culminating in a dance number wrought around enormous versions of Chevalier’s famed straw hat). The early “Rhythm in the Rain” number is a predecessor of Gene Kelly splashing around in street puddles, and director Roy Del Ruth and choreographer Dave Gould use an unusual split screen device that sees one half of the frame in thunderstorm, the other bathed in sunshine. These early numbers cleverly drift between various modes of address–shots of a theater audience are intercut with shots of Chevalier addressing them, and meanwhile there is a play with more “cinematic” images in which the scale far exceeds what could be performed on a typical stage. This is not so much a problem with continuity as it is a celebration of how intoxicating the art of theater is, where the limited scale of the stage gives way into a boundless world of imagination.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1947, it happened on fifth avenue, roy del ruth
Director: Roy Del Ruth
It comes as no surprise that It Happened on Fifth Avenue was initially optioned for Frank Capra’s Liberty Films. Set in an empty mansion where a homeless man (Victor Moore) is squatting for the holidays, the film culminates with an inevitable sermon about where real riches are found (hint: not in dollars and cents). Yet even Capra rarely produced something so saccharine, this playing more like the toothless You Can’t Take It With You than It’s a Wonderful Life. Overlong and overwrought, the film indulges the occasional lightweight charms–a tangential setpiece involving a waiter and a wobbly table is an effectively performed slapstick routine–but it doesn’t quite earn its sentimentality. As the young couple, Gale Storm and Don DeFore are miscast. When DeFore helps Storm wield a shotgun and its accidental blast results in ecstasy, one wishes the scene involved actors more inclined to play up the sexuality of the situation. Ann Harding and Charles Ruggles, on the other hand, bring a satisfying heft and understatement to their respective roles–one sequence involves them witnessing a conversation about what happens to failed marriages, and they are both required to play out the drama of regret and self-loathing using only small gestures and facial ticks. In the end, however, director Roy Del Ruth doesn’t bring any sense of urgency to the screwball antics, and as such the inherent humor of the situation, much like the relationship between the young couple, just kind of lays there until it fizzles out.
Director: Roy Del Ruth
Appearing in a total of seven films together, James Cagney and Joan Blondell were a perfect match for each other. Blondell played the most savvy of characters–whether she was operating outside the law or on the level, she wasn’t the type of woman to sit around and wait for something to come to her. Similarly, Cagney was the depression’s new figure of immoral entrepreneurship. Just after breaking out big with The Public Enemy, audiences were now treated to Cagney’s take on the conman in Blonde Crazy. As with most stories about grifters, the tables get turned around on the culprits by the final reel, but Cagney and Blondell have a lot of fun together on screen before the mechanics of the plot begin to seem all too familiar. This was Blondell’s first major leading role (she had only been in the business for just over a year and this was already her twelfth picture), and she’s terrific–a total firecracker, not the kind of gal that Cagney could simply throw away with a grapefruit to the face. The picture is also among the most shamelessly racy of the period–as Blondell is bathing in the nude, Cagney goes sniffing around in her underwear. As with many Warner Brothers pre-Code entertainments, there’s a carefree tone of young, reckless abandon, punctuated with titilating scenes of sexuality and otherwise naughty behavior.
Director: Roy Del Ruth
It seems like every other shot is at a canted angle in The Mind Reader and the reasoning for it seems to be the most literal one–the man is crooked, so the film is crooked! Warren William plays The Great Chandra, a former carnival barker who learns what great money there is to be made in the business of crystal ball reading. This is William at his cynical best, paired nicely with the similarly sardonic character actor Allen Jenkins. Only when Chandra falls in love with a naive girl who believes his powers to be true (Constance Cummings) does he start to go straight, but audiences won’t be fooled into thinking that he’ll be stuck on the honest path for long. The dialogue–much of it involving a complete derision of the “common” people–is consistently witty, all culminating in one of the funniest final lines in a movie from the pre-Code era. William’s cool, acerbic deliveries are pleasing, but perhaps his best scene is when, in a drunken fury, he breaks down on stage and bluntly tells the audience what fools they are for believing him. It’s the first scene in which his hatred for the public seems married to his own self-loathing, and for a largely unpleasant protagonist the scene packs a surprising emotional wallop.
Director: Roy Del Ruth
James Cagney was catapulted to stardom when he smashed a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy. Clarke had it easy–when she shows up unwanted in Cagney’s bed in Lady Killer, he literally drags her across the floor by her hair and throws her out the door. The picture involves a number of similar actions that capitalize on Cagney’s firecracker tough guy persona, creating an image of a star who was both cool and horrifying in his unpredictability. Even if Cagney was disappointed to continue to be cast in tough guy roles, this particular role involved participating in several genres at once–what starts as a familiar crime film turns into a sort of satire about Hollywood itself, with Cagney rocketing to stardom as an extra. The most appealing tangents are those that take place on Hollywood sets, where Cagney plays everything from a Native American in a western to a European romantic lead. As Warner Brothers could reliably produce, Lady Killer is fast-moving and well-cast, even if the whole does not quite live up to the sum of its memorable parts.
Director: Roy Del Ruth
The sixth of the Maisie films reliably opens with a sequence that involves the titular sassy blonde finding herself out of work. This time, she’s performing on stage alongside a misogynistic showman who becomes blinded with woman-hating rage after he finds that his sweetheart has left him. During a knife-throwing act, he misses several marks and almost severely injures Maisie (Ann Sothern) before chasing her away in a murderous rampage. As with the prologue of Maisie Was a Lady, it’s a fascinating, deliriously macabre sequence that considers the role of the female performer in a world in which women are merely objectified or, worse, held with utter contempt (in the earlier film, Maisie appears as a “headless woman” in a traveling act). After narrowly escaping her former partner, she finds herself at a talent agency where she is introduced to a lame comic, ‘Hap’ Hixby (Red Skelton), whose obnoxious brand of comedy is well met by her smart-mouthing. It comes as little surprise that Maisie warms up to the loudmouth, but the impressive cast makes the routine fare a worthy, if minor installment in the series. Allen Jenkins is particularly good as the building manager who gives Maisie a job–he’s a kind, well-liked sap that seems perpetually depressed (particularly when the subject of his wife is brought up). A subplot involving a con artist (Lloyd Corrigan) is an unnecessary contrivance, but Sothern is memorable in a late scene in which she needs to distract him until his eventual arrest.
Director: Roy Del Ruth
With the arrival of sound, a new genre of film could flourish: the musical. The market had become so saturated with them in the early thirties, however, that it wasn’t long before the audiences needed a break. Winnie Lightner, whose temporary fame came as a result of her role in Gold Diggers of Broadway in 1929, was a casualty of the growing apathy towards the musical – several of her pictures had their songs removed, and Warner Brothers eventually transitioned her to non-singing parts without much success. Side Show, made during this awkward phase (affording her only one song-and-dance number), is a decent showcase for Lightner’s unique on-screen persona, however its jokes too often fall flat. Guy Kibbee plays the alcoholic owner of a traveling circus whose daughter, Lightner, fills in for the disgruntled acts once they quit. Things become complicated when her boyfriend, a barker played by Donald Cook, falls for her visiting younger sister. While the love-triangle is mishandled and the potentially biting confrontations disappoint, the picture does, with a fair amount of understatement, point to the anxieties of being an older sibling. The sister, played by the luminous ingenue Evalyn Knapp, is prettier than she and fends off attention regularly, whereas Lightner finds herself mocked when she must pose as the world’s most beautiful living painting.
Director: Roy Del Ruth
Warren William charms as a despicable banking baron in Roy Del Ruth’s Beauty and the Boss, one of the earliest examples of the “boss falls for secretary” sub-genre. Women, claims the baron, have no business in the workplace because they distract men and threaten productivity. Enter Marian Marsh’s Susie Sachs, who, plainly dressed and poor, seems to pose him no threat in a secretarial position. In Cinderella fashion, however, Sachs undergoes a makeover and the baron is smitten. Short and fast-paced, the film is a breezy distraction, albeit one that doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression. The ending is a disappointment in that it all but reaffirms that attractive women have no place in a working environment. Neglecting the inherent chauvinism of the premise (it would be tiresome to impose 21st century moral standards on any piece of history), the third act cheapens Marsh’s character, whose transformation had turned her into a woman who the audience might expect would “tame” the baron, though she never quite gets the opportunity to. Nonetheless, William is a joy to watch, and Marsh, prior to her change, carries a sardonic bite that was absent entirely from her performance in the picture that she had previously starred in alongside William, Under 18.
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