1001 To Do

Though Alfred Hitchcock laid down many of the themes he would return to throughout his career and staked his claim as master of the suspense genre with the silent The Lodger (1927), this 1929 picture really sealed his reputation and set him on the road to a remarkable career. Blackmail went into production as a silent movie but was rethought in midshoot as Britain’s first all-talkie; that this decision was made shows how ambitious Hitchcock was even at this stage of his career, but also that his talents were obvious enough for paymaster producers to fund technical innovations. One of Hitchcock’s greatest tricks was to be both avant-garde and commercial at the same time: here he uses newfangled technology of the sort many still suspected would be short-lived in the service of a melodrama that may be psychologically acute but still succeeds in delivering thrills (and titillation). Alice White (Anny Ondra) quarrels with her policeman boyfriend Frank (John Longden) and impulsively accompanies a lecherous artist (Cyril Ritchard) to his apartment. When the heel tries to rape her, she stabs him in self-defense and gets away, though a breakfast-table conversation with her family becomes a reminder of the trauma as the word “knife” keeps stabbing at her and the sight of a bread knife nearly sends her into hysterics. Whereas other directors converting to talkies were working hard to ensure that every line of dialogue was recorded as if for an elocution demonstration, Hitchcock monkeys around with the soundtrack in this scene so that most of the conversation becomes an inaudible babble—the better to highlight the crystal-clear key word. This may be the moment when the talkies stopped just talking and singing and the real potential of sound as an addition to the director’s arsenal became apparent. Stuck with an already-cast Czech actress whose English wasn’t up to standard, Hitchcock also experimented with dubbing, having Joan Barry off-camera reading the lines as Ondra mouthed them, an unusual (and rarely repeated) approach that allows for a successful synthesis of performance. Ondra, among the first of Hitchcock’s bedeviled blondes, is a remarkably fresh, engaging presence and turns the trick of making her innocent killer sympathetic while the slimy creep who blackmails her is painted as the real villain. KN

How appropriate that the film that launched Marlene Dietrich’s stardom (although it was far from her first role) should begin with a woman cleaning a window behind which is Dietrich’s poster as Lola Lola—and then measuring herself up against this idealized image. In this equation, it is the unglamorous reality of the street (or later, the stage) that is more on the mind of director Josef von Sternberg than that illusory ideal—setting the pattern for the pitiless logic of The Blue Angel. The films Sternberg would go on to make with Dietrich in Hollywood are lush, baroque, often camp affairs. The Blue Angel—filmed simultaneously in somewhat different English- and German-language versions—shows the director still in his Expressionist phase, tailoring a dark, heavy style to emphasize Emil Jannings’s powerful histrionics. Jannings plays Professor Immanuel Rath, a respected schoolteacher who falls under the spell of Lola after he goes into the den of iniquity known as “The Blue Angel” to investigate the unhealthy obsession of his male students. Taken from Heinrich Mann’s novel, it is a tale of decline, of downward mobility. In the course of the story, Rath will be reduced to a barely human clown—echoing the previous clown who functions as one of several ironic doubles for the doomed hero. Sternberg stresses, with exemplary and systematic rigor, the verticality of the film’s spatial relations: Rath is always in a low position looking up at the image of Lola (as when she throws her underpants down on his head), unless—in a parody of his authoritative position—he is put on display in the highest, cheapest seats by the theater’s sinister manager. Lola is a classic femme fatale in so far as she lures men and then moves on when she tires of them—and, along the way, enjoys treating them like slaves. Yet there is also, for a time, a tender, loyal side in her relationship with Rath; when she reprises the famous “Falling in Love Again” we can almost accept her passive acceptance of her vagabond romantic destiny (“I know I’m not to blame”). AM

Two conmen, Louis (Raymond Cordy) and Emile (Henri Marchand), plan their escape from prison. Upon breaking out, Emile is recaptured but Louis runs free and builds an empire on the assembly-line principle. Eventually Emile is paroled and heads to Louis’s factory. Within its walls he becomes smitten with a secretary named Jeanne (Rolla France) and asks his old friend for help. According to the rules of comeuppance, Louis is then threatened with discovery as an escaped felon, after which the two men earn lasting freedom as hobos on the road. Unlike Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, a film later sued for plagiarism by Tobis, the production company of À Nous la Liberté, Rene Clair’s film is an exaltation of industrial society. Opening on an assembly line and closing in a mechanized factory, the fears often associated with modernization are wholly absent here. Instead these are substituted with values of loyalty and the comedy of circumstance. Interestingly, much of the humor in À Nous la Liberté stems from carefully manipulated screen space and sequence. First the assembly line hiccups. Then a worker forgets his place, disrupts another worker, angers his boss, and so on. It’s a formula freed from dialogue and adopted directly from the silent cinema as a transitional vehicle into the talkies. GC-Q

René Clair’s The Million opens on a Parisian rooftop. Two lovers flirt and retire to their respective apartments, after which the camera dollies along the skyline in a one-shot sequence using forced perspective, miniatures, and matte paintings. Such a tricky sequence demonstrates a profoundly advanced cinematic style while also revealing how Clair’s film is no throwaway musical comedy. A poor artist named Michel (René Lefèvre) owes money to various creditors. Engaged to the pure-hearted Beatrice (Annabella), he disregards her to chase after the floozy Wanda (Vanda Gréville) and otherwise keeps up with his friend Prosper (Louis Allibert). When the gangster Grandpa Tulip (Paul Ollivier) races into the apartment building to avoid the police, Beatrice gives him an old jacket of Michel’s out of spite. Afterwards, Michel and Prosper realize that a lottery ticket they purchased is a millionaire’s prize—but the ticket is in the jacket Beatrice gave Grandpa Tulip, who in turn pawned it to the tenor Sopranelli (Constantin Siroesco), who will soon travel to America. Thus the caper comedy of The Million is set in motion. Mix-ups, misidentification, disguises, upsets, reconciliation, and musical numbers follow, all of it to bring Michel and Beatrice together and restore the lottery ticket to its rightful owner. Along the way a thug in tuxedo tails cries for a love song, a race for the jacket is scored to the sounds of a rugby match, and the opportunistic demands of Michel’s creditors and neighbors weigh in on his perceived riches. Perhaps most remarkable among its virtues is the film’s integration of synch-sound recording. Expository dialogue is offered to still camera setups whereas lesser remarks, often viewed as whispers between characters, are left in silence. To cover these gaps in the spoken record, ambient music stitches together each set piece with occasional bursts of song. More fluid and visually dynamic than many early sound films, The Million is also more entertaining than many subsequent talkies. In large part this is a credit to Clair’s screenplay and deft direction, but it is also due to a willing cast carrying through the demands of a gentle fantasy. GC-Q

Although Bram Stoker’s seminal 1897 vampire novel had been filmed by F.W. Murnau in 1922 as Nosferatu and director Tod Browning had cast Lon Chaney as a bogus vampire in the silent London After Midnight, this early talkie—shot in late 1930 and released on Valentine’s Day 1931—was the true beginning of the horror film as a distinct genre and the vampire movie as its most popular subgenre. Cinematographer Karl Freund had a solid grounding in German Expressionist shadowmaking whereas Browning was the carnival barker king of American grotesquerie, so the film represents a synthesis of the two major strains of silent chills. Like such major American horror properties as The Cat and the Canary and The Bat, this Dracula comes to the screen not from the pages of classic gothic literature but direct from the stage: the primary sources of the screenplay are a pair of theatrical takes on Stoker’s novel, from Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. The break-out star of the new genre is Bela Lugosi, who had played Dracula on Broadway and was finally cast in the film after the early death of Browning’s favored star, Chaney. It may be that the loss of Chaney took some of the spark out of Browning’s direction, which is actually less inspired than George Melford’s work on the simultaneously-shot (on the same sets, no less) Spanish version—though the latter suffers from the lack of an iconic Dracula and the fact that it represents exactly the shooting script, whereas the English-language Dracula was considerably tightened by an edit that took out twenty minutes of flab. Prehistoric in cinema technique and stuck with a drawing-room-centered script, Browning’s film nevertheless retains much of its creaky, sinister power, spotlighting (literally, via tiny pinlights aimed at his evil eyes) Lugosi’s star-making turn as the vampire, squeezing Hungarian menace out of every syllable of phrases such as “Cheeldren of the naight, leesten to thaim” or “I nevair dreenk vine!” The film opens magnificently, with a snatch of Swan Lake and a rickety stagecoach taking us and estate agent Renfield (Dwight Frye) to Lugosi’s cobwebbed and vermin-haunted castle (an armadillo nestles in a Transylvanian crypt). Dracula strides through a curtain of cobwebs, the vampire twitching with bloodlust as his guest cuts his finger while carving bread, and three soulless vampire brides descend upon the unwary visitor. Once the story hops disappointingly over a dangerous sea voyage (snippets of stock footage) and the Count relocates to London, Lugosi calms down. But Edward Van Sloan is staunch as the vampire-killing Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the forgotten Helen Chandler is frailly charming as the bled-dry and semivampirized heroine Mina, and Frye steals every scene that isn’t nailed down when Renfield transforms into a fly-eating, giggling maniac. Castle Dracula, with its five-story Gothic windows, is the art direction highlight, but the London scenes offer an impressive staircase and catacombs for Dracula’s English lair. Browning falters at the last, however, with a weak climax in which the Count is defeated far too easily, his death conveyed by an offscreen groan as he is impaled. KN

The first significant film of Jean Renoir’s career, La Chienne inaugurated the run of masterpieces he directed in the 1930s, his finest decade. It also gave that most gloriously idiosyncratic of all French actors, Michel Simon, his first major role. Adapted from a novel by Georges de la Fouchardière, the film would later be remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street (1945). But where Lang’s film is mesmerizing for its aloof detachment and laid-out tensions of a psychological case study, Renoir plunges us into the gamy tumult and vitality of his native Montmartre. Simon plays a middle-aged bank clerk, Maurice Legrand, despised at work and oppressed by a shrewish wife, who finds solace in his amateur passion for painting. Along the way he becomes obsessed with a young prostitute, Lulu (Janie Marèze), who exploits him at the urging of her pimp Dédé (Georges Flamant). Lulu milks him for cash and passes off his paintings as her own. But when Legrand catches her with Dédé and murders her in a jealous rage, the pimp is executed for the crime. Legrand becomes a tramp, his stolen paintings selling for large sums. Shrugging off the limitations of early sound techniques, Renoir shot his exteriors on location in Montmartre, lending the film a rich visual and aural texture. As always with Renoir at his best, we get a powerful sense of off-screen space—of life going on, complex and abundant, around and between the events of the story. As Lulu, Marèze gives a performance of unabashed sensuality, feral and languid, that makes her early death all the more regrettable—she died in a car crash two weeks after shooting was completed. Still, it is Michel Simon, avidly seizing his opportunity, who walks off with the film. Hankering after Lulu, his jowls quivering with resignation, Legrand is at once ludicrous and pitiable. Yet he brings to his scenes with Lulu the animal urgency of a man grasping a late, unlooked-for chance at sexual abandon. The pathos of his performance, and the warmth of Renoir’s sympathetic gaze, lifts La Chienne out of the realm of petty melodrama, turning the banal story into something moving and universal. PK

As with so many of this sadly underrated director’s finest films, the delightful thing about this masterly variation on the romantic Ruritanian musical is the way Rouben Mamoulian manages to debunk, through an idiosyncratic combination of irreverent humor and technical innovation, the traditions of the very genre he is simultaneously helping to establish and expand. Here he contrives to outstrip the achievements of the then-widely-acclaimed masters of the form—Ernst Lubitsch and René Clair—without even seeming to make an effort; he makes the whole thing feel so wonderfully relaxed, good-natured, and somehow perfect. True, he is helped no end by having Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s supremely witty yet hummably melodious songs to work with; but it’s the unforced sense of sophisticated fun coexisting with real cinematic invention that reveal the Mamoulian touch, considerably lighter than that in most Lubitsch movies. Jeannette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier must also take credit for playing their respective romantic leads—the haughty but bored (and, let it be said, sexually frustrated) princess holed up in a fusty chateau, and the visiting tailor (“the best in Paris”) sufficiently aroused by her to forget his lowly status—with emotional commitment and an engagingly delicate parodic irony. The supporting cast is top-notch, too: Myrna Loy, Charles Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, and the inimitable Sir C. Aubrey Smith (the last three especially delightful when improbably enlisted to sing, solo, verses of “Mimi”) are merely the most memorable. But what is really impressive about Love Me Tonight is how music, dance, dialogue, performance, decor, lighting, camera work, editing, and special effects are all combined to create a cogent comic/dramatic whole in which each element serves narrative, characterization, and theme. The “Isn’t It Romantic?” sequence, for example, which starts with Chevalier and a client in Paris, and proceeds with the song being passed via various minor characters (including, at one point, a whole platoon of soldiers!) to arrive finally at the lonely MacDonald’s boudoir—the first link between the future lovers, who have yet to meet—is impressive; so, too, is the final, climactic chase sequence (as exhilaratingly constructed as anything by the Soviets and with far more wit). In short, an enormously entertaining masterpiece. GA

Renoir had already made eleven films before being selected to direct Boudu Saved from Drowning by Michel Simon, who had decided to produce this adaptation of a stage play by René Fauchois. The pair had worked together three times previously, they were both the same age as the birth of cinema, and they were both rising personalities with a sense of freedom and a desire to explore unknown territories. So, like a monstrous Aphrodite, Simon’s Boudu the tramp was reborn from the water, brought back to a life he wanted to leave by the kindness of the Lestingois family, its generosity, and its wealth. Of course, comparisons with Charlie Chaplin’s character in a similar situation come to mind here, and the two tramps do have a lot in common—the survivor’s sense of life, the amoral relationship with society’s rules, the focus on rich versus poor, and the urge for sex. But it is the differences between the two that reveal the power of the recipe above, about the film’s connection and rupture with vaudeville (the rules of bourgeois theater), and about the body and diction of Simon. In the character of Boudu, Simon’s voice and physical presence work together as an eruption of carnality, a dissonant yet mesmerizing cello disturbing the happy quartet of the nice home filled with nice people wishing for the world to keep spinning round. Boudu’s ultimate return to the archaic spring is not only the smiling twist of an epicurean tale but also a troubling assessment of the hypothesis of a continuity between the oldest past and a future toward which the river flows. J-MF

In the seven films he made with her, Josef von Sternberg took his obsession with Marlene Dietrich to ever more extreme lengths of intensity and stylization, until both star and story were all but subsumed in a welter of spectacle and design. Coming at the midpoint of the cycle, Shanghai Express holds the elements in near-perfect balance. Sternberg loved to treat his films as controlled experiments in the play of light and shadow, so a plot whose action is largely confined to the eponymous train suited him perfectly. The story, such as it is, concerns a train journey from Peking to Shanghai, interrupted by a bandit attack. But the subject of the film is Dietrich’s face, on which it plays an endless series of variations: veiled, shadowed, wreathed with smoke, nestling in furs or feathers, framed in intricate patterns of black on white. Dietrich herself, as the “notorious China coaster,” Shanghai Lily, remains enigmatic, her eyes hooded and watchful, as Sternberg—and his regular cinematographer, Lee Garmes—use her face as an exquisite screen on which to project the appropriate emotions. The setting of Shanghai Express, constructed in the studio artifice that Sternberg always preferred, is an elaborately conceived and utterly fictitious China, embodied in the film’s opening sequence: a huge, dazzlingly white locomotive steams out of Peking Station and straight down the middle of a narrow street seething with lampshade-hatted coolies, stallholders, children, and animals. Years later, Sternberg visited China for the first time and was gratified to discover that the reality differed completely. Clive Brook as Lily’s ex-lover, a British army captain, plays the kind of staunchly traditional Englishman beside whose stiff upper lip steel-reinforced concrete would seem flabby, and Anna May Wong is no less enjoyably cartoonish as the embodiment of feline Eastern guile. But the film belongs to Sternberg and Dietrich, and the strange fetishistic chemistry between them. Together they created something deliriously unique in cinema; apart they could never quite recapture the same magic. PK

Rouben Mamoulian’s re-creation of the seventeenth-century Swedish court provides Greta Garbo with a perfect vehicle to dominate the screen. The historical Christina, daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, was a reclusive aesthete who eventually abdicated in order to have a life of her own and change her Lutheranism for Catholicism. Garbo’s version, by way of contrast, is an alluring mixture of masculine and feminine qualities. Learned, resolute, she is also sexually experienced, even aggressive, yet committed to her independence. The plot (which seems to have borrowed a good deal from screen versions of England’s Elizabeth I) centers on her counselors’ demand that she marry Charles of France, which angers her and her “consort,” the burly Count Magnus (Ian Keith). Fleeing the court—and the restrictions placed on her as a woman—Christina dresses like a man and encounters, by chance, the Spanish ambassador, Antonio (John Gilbert, whom Garbo was romancing at the time). What follows are comic scenes of sexual disguise, as Christina begins to fall deeply in love with Antonio, and deep eroticism. When Antonio is killed protecting her honor, Christina abdicates, achieving the solitude that, because of her rank and personal qualities, seems her fate from the beginning. Garbo’s performance in the role is inspired, helped by the glamorizing touch of Mamoulian’s camera. Well-conceived art design, editing, and music make Queen Christina sensational viewing. RBP

Undoubtedly the finest of all W.C. Fields’s comedies, It’s a Gift may not offer the inspired insanity of such waywardly surreal gems as Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) or the unforgettable short The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), but it is certainly the most coherent and most consistently funny of his features. Despite having been cobbled together from old revue sketches and scenes from earlier movies like It’s the Old Army Game (1926), Norman Z. McLeod’s It’s a Gift actually provides something resembling a proper story. Harold Bissonette (Fields) is so tired of the constant pressures of family life and running a general store that he secretly buys, with his hard-earned savings, the Californian orange grove of his dreams, and sets off with his family (all vocally horrified by what he’s done, naturally), only to discover that their purchase is nothing like the palace pictured in the advertisement. That said, of course, this “plot” is simply an excuse for another of Fields’ marvelously misanthropic essays on the perils and pitfalls of parenthood, marriage, neighbors, and Prohibition, allowing him free rein to court our sympathy for an old curmudgeon who feels himself maltreated by virtually the entire world. It is particularly difficult to select highlights from such a supremely even series of set pieces, but the catastrophically destructive visit to Fields’s shop paid by the feeble, deaf, blind, and uncommonly belligerent Mr. Muckle (Charles Sellon) must rank as some kind of peak in politically incorrect hilarity. The protagonist’s forlorn attempt to sleep on the porch—despite noisy neighbors, a nagging wife (the inimitable Kathleen Howard), a murderous screwdriver wielded by Baby LeRoy, a rolling coconut, a broken hammock, a rifle, and a quite crazily cheery insurance salesman in search of one Karl LaFong (“Capital K, small A, small R”)—is quite simply as brilliant and nightmarish a portrait of ordinary life as deadpan Hollywood comedy ever got. Mind you, the shaving sequence is pretty great, too. Oh, and then there’s the dinner with the family. Sheer genius. GA

Heretical as it may be to say in these enlightened times of gender politics, but Jean Vigo’s masterpiece L’Atalante is the cinema’s greatest ode to heterosexual passion. One simply cannot enter into its rapturous poetry without surrendering to the romantic series of oppositions between the sexes, comparisons rigorously installed at every possible level—spiritual, physical, erotic, and emotional. It is only this thrill of absolute “otherness” that can allow both the agony of nonalignment between lovers and the sublimity of their eventual fusion. This is far removed from the typical romance of the time. As Vigo once memorably complained, it takes “two pairs of lips and three thousand meters of film to come together, and almost as many to come unstuck again.” Like Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), L’Atalante casts the immortal love story within an adventure tale: man (Jean Dasté as Jean) the seafaring adventurer, woman (Dita Parlo as Juliette) the city-craving settler. The seductive temptations and drifts that temporarily split them up are forecast in a charged moment of almost metaphysical agony: In thick fog, Jean stumbles blindly over the boat’s barge until he finds his bride and envelops her in an embrace at once angry and relieved, inspiring them instantly to head below deck to make love. Between these poles of man and woman, however, there is Père Jules (Michel Simon), master of the boat. It is surely the mark of Vigo’s greatness as an artist that his imagination could project itself fully into both the heterosexual ideal and the fluid identity of this inspired madman. Jules is a multiple being, man and woman, child and adult, friend and lover, without boundaries—at one point even visually doubled as he wrestles himself. He is a living text covered with extravagant tattoos; he is the cinematic apparatus itself, able to produce sound from records with his magically electrified finger. Jules is Vigo’s Surrealist sensibility incarnated by Simon, an astonishingly anarchic, instinctual performer. Vigo develops and deepens the formal explorations of his previous film Zero for Conduct (1933). From silent, burlesque cinema and René Clair he borrows a parade gag for his prologue: stuffed shirts at the couple’s funeral filing past the camera, gradually becoming faster until they are an unruly, disheveled mob. Aboard the boat, Vigo finds his beloved “aquarium spaces”: enclosed rooms filled with cats, oddities, and wonders (as in Jules’s cabin devoted to exotic bric-a-brac). On deck, he uses ghostly, nocturnal lighting. Unifying the film is a superb rhythmic and expressive tone. Vigo’s death at the age of twenty-nine was a tragic loss. But L’Atalante crowns his legacy—and is there any scene in cinema sexier than the magnificent, Eisensteinian montage of Jean’s and Juliette’s bodies, far apart, matched in postures of mutual arousal, an act of love made possible only through the soulful language of film? AM

John Ford won his first Oscar for the prestigious and ponderous The Informer (1935), but this lesser-known work, released the previous year, has dated much better, despite its rambling structure, thick sentimentality, and flagrant lack of political correctness. Billy Priest (Will Rogers), magistrate of an 1890 Kentucky town, helps his nephew marry the right girl and foils an unjust legal action against a secretive blacksmith. The plot is secondary to a series of skits (many involving the discredited but brilliant black comedian Stepin Fetchit), songs, running gags, muttered asides, and incidental characters that evoke an idealized Old South community where pomposity is deflated, intolerance is kept in check, and blacks and whites coexist in sun-dappled harmony. There are several inside references and general parallels that link Judge Priest’s director with its eponymous hero, who brings the audience to order in the precredits shot, allows digression rather than procedure to rule his courtroom, and shamelessly manipulates the spectators’ emotions by arranging for a band to play “Dixie” at a crucial point in the trial. Judge Priest is one of the loveliest visions of innocence ever put on the American screen, and Judge Ford judiciously reminds us just how much artifice is necessary to make legend prevail over fact. MR

Peter (Clark Gable) is a tough-talking journalist; Ellie (Claudette Colbert) is a “dizzy dame” on the run from home and her father. The two meet while on the road and are forced, reluctantly, to collaborate. He’s the salt of the earth, she’s a rich kid, and each exploits the other—for him, she means a big newspaper story, for her, he’s a way to help her get to New York and a forbidden fiancé. In the course of the story, they move from antagonism to love. It could be one of a hundred routine, American romantic comedies of the 1930s or 1940s. But, make no mistake, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night—the first of only three movies to win all five major Academy Awards, preceding One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Silence of the Lambs (1991)—is movie magic. This has something to do with how it conjures an entire milieu: a “people’s America” filled with unlikely rogues and soft-hearted citizens, always ready to share a story and a song, or simply exhibit their lovable eccentricities. But the film is also careful to explore exceptions to its basic rule: Ellie’s father, Andrews (Walter Connolly), turns out to be a pretty swell chap, just as the talkative bus passenger Shapeley (Roscoe Karns) ends up a weasel. Capra was expert at cleverly weaving a story from altogether familiar and ordinary motifs: eating, verbal slang (“ah, nuts”), snoring, washing, dressing and undressing. True to the romantic comedy formula, identities are momentarily dissolved whenever a masquerade is necessary or able to be exploited for secret entertainment—although, whenever Peter and Ellie pretend to be husband and wife, more serious possibilities and destinies do suggest themselves. It Happened One Night is a distant predecessor of today’s “trash comedies,” such as those by the Farrelly Brothers. Ass jokes abound and the pretensions and privileges of the wealthy are mercilessly mocked, while Colbert’s famous, bare legs stop traffic. And then there is the sexual tension angle: Working patiently through four nights of Peter and Ellie together, the entire film hinges on the symbolism of the “walls of Jericho” finally toppling—the ridding of the blanket that stands, weakly and tremblingly, as the barrier to the consummation of their growing love. Critics can't rhapsodize over Capra’s powers of montage or mise-en-scène; style was a functional, conventional matter for him. But he did have a perfect sense of script (in both overall structure and small details), and a brilliant rapport with his charismatic actors. Gable and Colbert help to truly equalize this one-upmanship battle of the sexes, diluting that ideological thrust of the script that suggests that proletarian guys should teach spoiled gals a thing or two about real life. In the infectious interplay of these stars—in their mutual willingness to play, to laugh, to be vulnerable, to take a joke as good they give it—we encounter an ideal that has been well and truly lost in contemporary, mainstream cinema: fighting reciprocity between the sexes. AM

The chemistry between Myrna Loy and William Powell was so potent in the 1934 film Manhattan Melodrama that its director, W.S. Van Dyke, cast the two again in the same year. As Nick and Nora Charles, they are unique in the history of cinema. The first popular husband-and-wife detective team, they not only love each other, they like each other, too, without being insipid, disrespectful, or dull. The Thin Man’s plot is a messy one. Nick Charles is officially a retired detective but he takes a personal interest in the disappearance of a crotchety inventor—the “thin man” of the title—whose daughter (Maureen O’Sullivan) is Nick’s long-time acquaintance. The inventor’s safety is thrown into further doubt when complications arise involving his suspicious mistress, grasping ex-wife, and her money-hungry husband (Cesar Romero). With the addition of multifarious mobsters, cops, and molls, it seems the whole criminal world turns up at the Charles’s luxurious hotel suite at one time or another. Trying to make sense of the story gets in the way of what is genuinely important—the snappy banter full of covetable lines between the rich, sophisticated Nora and her sharp lush of a husband. Disarming an unwanted guest one night, the incident is reported in the morning news. “I was shot twice in the Tribune,” says Nick. “I read you were shot five times in the tabloids,” says Nora. “It’s not true. He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.” Said with cast-off ease, the lines are funny without jumping out as such. Nick may seem like an alcoholic, but he springs back and forth from relaxed giddiness to active sobriety in the wink of an eye. The couple’s prodigious boozing seems to have little effect on their actions; it’s more of an elegant prop—a vital element for a country just coming out of the Great Depression. Taken from a novel written in the same year by Dashiell Hammett, Nick and Nora were supposedly modeled on Hammett’s relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman. Shot in fourteen days, this sparkling screwball detective story earned over $2 million and was nominated for four Academy Awards. Not surprisingly, popularity spawned four more movies as well as a radio and television series, and was the inspiration behind TV shows such as McMillian & Wife and Hart to Hart. KK

Universal Studios had to wait nearly four years before James Whale finally accepted the offer to direct the follow-up to his 1931 box-office success, Frankenstein. But it turned out to be well worth the wait: under the director’s nearly complete control (the producer, Carl Laemmle Jr., was vacationing in Europe during most of the production), Bride of Frankenstein is a surprising mix of terror and comedy that turned out to be in many ways superior to the original film. Despite Boris Karloff’s reluctance, it was decided that the Monster should now be able to pronounce a few chosen words. His humanization here makes him more complete and faithful to Mary Shelley’s novel, and his desperate search for a friendly companion could hardly be more touching. Though it was of course played down at the censors’ request, the Monster is mostly depicted in Bride of Frankenstein as a Christlike figure who is led to kill because of his circumstances and the fear he inspires in society. Even the monstrous mate intended just for him is repulsed at first glance by his physical aspect. Without a doubt, Elsa Lanchester’s bride remains to this day one of the most astonishing creatures ever seen on screen: her appearance—in a sort of grotesque version of a marriage ceremony—is still a highlight of the horror genre, what with her mummified body, her swan-like hissing, and her weird black-and-white-streaked Egyptian hairdo. Bride of Frankenstein’s plot relies heavily on sharp contrasts that make the spectator jump from terror to pathos or comedy. Whale’s particular sense of humor, which has often been described as camp, is mainly brought out by Minnie (Una O’Connor), the household maid, along with the outrageously effeminate acting of Ernest Thesiger, who plays the devilish Dr. Pretorius. The immense interest in Bride of Frankenstein also stems from its portrayal of sexual relations, a portrayal that is considered by many to be at least potentially transgressive. The introduction of a second mad scientist (Pretorius) who forces Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein to give life again, emphasizes one of the fundamental and disturbing implications of Shelley’s myth: (pro)creation as something achieved by men alone. Four years later, Whale’s masterpiece itself gave birth to a “son,” but the father of the bride would have nothing to do with it. FL

There is no clear-cut classic among the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musicals of the mid-1930s—all are mostly marvelous with crucial flaws—but Top Hat probably comes the closest. Its plot follows the series’ basic formula: Fred instantly falls for Ginger, but a silly misunderstanding (here, she mistakes him for his married friend) stokes her hostility until the final moments. The director is the underrated Mark Sandrich, whose impeccably superficial touch maximizes the swanky, syncopated slickness so essential to the series. The film’s most famous number is “Top Hat,” featuring fancy canework among Fred and a chorus of top-hatted gents, but the heart of Top Hat is its two great romantic duets, “Isn’t It a Lovely Day” and “Cheek to Cheek,” the first set on a London bandstand during a thunderstorm, the second beside the sparkling canals of RKO’s goofily glossy Art Deco version of Venice. Such dances, with their progression from resistance to surrender, are Fred’s main weapon in winning over Ginger, but it would be a mistake to read this process as simple sexual conquest. As Ginger’s suppressed amusement makes clear, the two characters approach their respective roles of hot-to-trot and hard-to-get with playful irony, collaborating to prolong and intensify a deliciously elegant erotic game. MR

A song-and-dance fantasia, George Stevens’s Swing Time is an audiovisual spectacle organized around a backstage musical. Certainly a high-water mark for the mid-1930s, the film is equally a tease of things to come in the combination of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Assembled by legendary RKO producer Pandro S. Berman, Swing Time is the story of Lucky Garnett (Fred Astaire), a well-regarded hoofer engaged to the pleasant, though uninspiring, Margaret Watson (Betty Furness). When he’s forced to secure a large dowry to continue with his betrothal, their matrimonial plans are put on hold so he can seek his fortune in New York City. Once there, he meets Penny (Ginger Rogers), his true love, and thereafter the film more or less works through various disturbances before allowing them to fall into one another’s arms. Naturally, there are several scenes of mistaken intent, a few nontragic plot turns, and a happy ending, despite brief periods of sorrow and hand-wringing. Yet the purpose of the film is undeniably the presentation of its musical numbers, several of which form part of the generic canon. Jerome Kern wrote the music, while Dorothy Fields provided most of the lyrics. Their combined efforts form the soundtrack’s foundation, although the sheer energy, verve, and happy distraction of Astaire and Rogers is what makes every number shine with the addition of movement and tap shoes. Highlights include Lucky’s two solos in “The Way You Look Tonight,” a nightclub standard, and “Never Gonna Dance,” a sorrowfully ironic song given the actor’s well-recognized talent for walking on air. Two duets expand the big-screen canvas in “Waltz in Swing Time” with Astaire and Rogers and, of course, their famous performance of “A Fine Romance.” But the showstopper of the picture may well be “Bojangles of Harlem.” Here, Lucky begins his performance from within an accompanying chorus while dressed in blackface. Definitely a nod to his training and heritage, if also an antiquated, possibly offensive bit of cultural history, the number builds to a climax of Astaire dancing in triplicate with rear-projection versions of himself. GC-Q

As one of the masters of sophisticated salon comedies, Gregory La Cava might not have had the most aching social consciousness in 1930s Hollywood. But he had a knack for satire with a social and political edge that is clearly visible in films such as Gabriel over the White House (1933), She Married Her Boss (1935), and especially My Man Godfrey, his most memorable work. Made at the end of the Depression era, this screwball classic deals with poor bum Godfrey (William Powell) being hired as a butler as part of a high-society party game on Park Avenue. Some hundred snappy lines later he has taken complete control over the rich people’s house, charmed the beautiful Irene (Carole Lombard), exposed her birdbrained mother’s boy toy (well, he is called “protégé” because of the Production Code) as a con man, and helped her grumpy father avoid bankruptcy and prison for fraud. Not surprisingly, it is revealed that Godfrey himself had only been slumming as a hobo when the rich party found him, and so he can marry the socialite of his dreams. However, by then the upper class have been paraded in front of the camera as a bunch of narcissistic, infantile idiots. No doubt this was one reason for the film’s great success with a mass audience in those days. My Man Godfrey loses some of its bite in the second half, when the fairy-tale ingredient takes over and ends the film on a silly note: that money is not everything! But even then it manages to captivate its audience by the sheer intelligence of its witty screenplay penned by novelist Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind. It has the true mark of a great film by not having a single bad line or weak character. La Cava’s pacing is sometimes strikingly fast, delivering machine-gun tongue dueling in virtually every scene and applying a narrative economy so effortless that the film could serve as a prototype for classic Hollywood cinema. Though it premiered nearly seventy years ago, My Man Godfrey still holds up in a remarkable way and could easily be remade for any audience. MT

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is the film that invented the screwball comedy and solidified director Frank Capra’s vision of American life, with a support of small-town, traditional values against self-serving city sophistication. Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) is a poet from rural Vermont whose life changes, and not for the better, when he suddenly inherits the estate of his multimillionaire uncle, whose New York lawyers (used to skimming funds for their own use) try to convince him to keep them on the payroll. But after several misadventures and a trip to Manhattan, Deeds is convinced that the money will do him no good and tries to give it away, intending to endow a rural commune for displaced farmers. The lawyers immediately take him to court, claiming he is insane, for no one in their right mind would give away so much money. Crucial to Deeds’s eventual deliverance is Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur), a wisecracking reporter who first exploits the hick’s naïveté in order to write scathing exclusives about the “Cinderella Man.” Babe is transformed by Deeds’s idealism, however, and her testimony sways the court in the poor man’s favor. Filled with bright comic moments (Deeds playing the tuba to clear his mind, feeding donuts to horses), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a hymn to antimaterialism and the simple country life in the best manner of Henry David Thoreau. RBP

George Cukor’s Camille is one of the triumphs of early sound cinema, a showcase of superb acting from principals Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor, with able support from studio stalwarts Lionel Barrymore and Henry Daniell. Cukor evokes just enough of mid-nineteenth-century Paris to render affecting the melodramatic stylization of what is perhaps the most famous popular play ever written, adapted for the stage by Alexandre Dumas, fils, from his sensational novel. With its witty and suggestive dialogue, the script makes the novelist’s characters come alive for an American audience of another era. Marguerite Gautier (Garbo), called Camille because of her love for the camellia, is a “courtesan” who falls in love with her “companion,” Armand Duval (Taylor), scion of an influential family. Their relationship, which can never be legitimized because of her dubious background, must come to an end and does so in two famous scenes that actresses have always relished. First, Armand’s father persuades Camille that she must give him up so that he can pursue a diplomatic career. Heartbroken, she dismisses Armand with the lie that he no longer interests her. Armand returns later to find her on her deathbed, where she expires while he weeps uncontrollably. The Breen Office, charged with the task of enforcing the industry’s then-reactionary Production Code, must also have been moved by this story of prohibited and tragic love, requiring only a scene in which the romantic pair, technically “illicit,” vow their undying love to one another. RBP

Alfred Hitchcock had just made a film entitled Secret Agent, based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham, and so his next project, based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, had to be retitled Sabotage. Oscar Homulka is Mr. Verloc, a sinister agent for a shadowy foreign power who carries out acts of sabotage. In a departure from the original novel, Verloc and his wife (Sylvia Sydney) manage a small cinema, which allows Hitchcock to have fun connecting events in the narrative to the films playing on the screen. Sabotage has two memorable set pieces. In the first, Stevie (Desmond Tester), the young brother of Mrs. Verloc, is sent by her husband to deliver a can of film. Unknown to Stevie, it contains a bomb timed to go off at 1:45 P.M. As we track Stevie across London he is delayed by a series of holdups, and eventually the bomb explodes while he is sitting on a bus. Hitchcock later regretted this, judging that it violated the director’s contract with the audience, not to harm someone they had been encouraged to sympathize with—though he wound up doing exactly the same in Psycho (1960). In any case, the death of Stevie sets up the second bravura scene, the revengeful murder of Verloc by his wife. EB

William Wyler’s compelling adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s novel about the dissolution of a wealthy American couple’s marriage represents the height of intelligent Hollywood filmmaking. Walter Huston plays the title character, an automobile mogul, who, after selling his business, must face the challenges of an opulent retirement and decides to take a grand tour of Europe with his wife, Fran (Ruth Chatterton). They leave the United States to discover continental culture and refinement. In Europe, the couple discovers that each wants something different from life, though in their own ways both want to stave off old age. Fran becomes involved in flirtations with playboys who roam the periphery of the rich and fashionable set. She becomes increasingly impatient with Dodsworth’s stubbornly American, provincial ways. Dodsworth cannot reconcile with Fran and desperately fears becoming useless. On the journey they meet Edith Cortright (Mary Astor), an American expatriate who has found a new way to live and remain vibrant, and who can offer Dodsworth a solution. The most remarkable aspects of the film are its moral complexity and its bittersweet tone. Wyler takes care not to portray Fran wholly as the villain; we are made to understand and sympathize with both husband and wife. Some of the most poignant moments of Dodsworth take place when Fran sees the illusory life that she has been trying to create fall apart around her. Huston, who was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, is pitch perfect in this wide-ranging role. His character transforms from a confident self-made tycoon to a dejected, more thoughtful, older man. Huston registers these changes in an introspective, heart-wrenching performance. Astor, an extremely young and dashing David Niven, and Maria Ouspenskaya are all marvelous in supporting roles. At a time when mainstream American filmmaking all seems to be aimed at the tastes of fourteen-year-old boys, Dodsworth is a welcome reminder that Hollywood once made films for adults. RH

William Cameron Menzies’ screen version of H.G. Wells’s speculations about the world’s future after a disastrous second World War destroys European civilization is perhaps the first true science-fiction film. Only Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) anticipates its envisioning of the future as a result of technological change and resulting political evolution, but Lang’s film doesn’t offer a similarly detailed analysis of the new course history might take. In fact, few science fiction movies are as concerned as is Things to Come with a rigorously historical approach to fictionalized prophecy, and this is perhaps because Wells himself penned the screenplay, based on ideas found in his popular tome The Outline of History. Neither Wells nor Menzies took much interest in character-driven narrative (the main characters all represent important ideas), and so the film has seemed distant and uninvolving to many, an effect exacerbated by the fact that the story covers a full century of history. The second European war lasts twenty-five years and manages to destroy most of the world, which regresses to something like the cutthroat feudalism of the early Middle Ages. But human progress is inevitable, thanks to the fact that the intellectual and rational element in man always proves superior to the innate human urge toward self-destruction. Things to Come thus offers a more optimistic twist on Freud’s understanding of the perennial conflict between Eros and Thanatos, love and death, in human affairs. Like many utopian writers, Wells sees the future as marked significantly by an increased human control over the environment. The film’s later sequences, as in Metropolis, are dominated by a vision of the city of the future. It was in his handling of these architectural and art-design aspects of the film that Menzies made his most significant and telling contribution. Despite its episodic narrative, Things to Come is visually spectacular, a predecessor of other science fiction films that imagine the urban future, including Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Despite the presence of well-known actors (including Raymond Massey, Cedric Hardwicke, and Ralph Richardson), what is most memorable about this unusual film is its engagement with a philosophy of history and of human nature. It captures the anxieties and hopes of 1930s Britain perfectly, chillingly forecasting the blitz that would descend upon London only four years after its release. RBP

Widely regarded as Sacha Guitry’s masterpiece (though it has competition in 1937’s Pearls of the Crown), this 1936 tour de force can be regarded as a kind of concerto for the writer-director-performer’s special brand of brittle cleverness. After a credits sequence that introduces us to the film’s cast and crew, The Story of a Cheat settles into a flashback account of how the title hero (played by Guitry himself) learned to benefit from cheating over the course of his life. A notoriously anticinematic moviemaker whose first love was theater, Guitry nevertheless had a flair for cinematic antics when it came to adapting his plays (or in this case his novel Memoires d’un Tricheur) to film. The Story of a Cheat registers as a rather lively and stylishly inventive silent movie, with Guitry’s character serving as offscreen lecturer. François Truffaut was sufficiently impressed to dub Guitry a French brother of Ernst Lubitsch, though Guitry clearly differs from this master of continental romance in the way his own personality invariably overwhelms that of his characters. JS

Rudyard Kipling, who died in 1936, did not live long enough to see three of his books adapted for the screen the following year, including Victor Fleming’s rousing childhood epic Captains Courageous. Freddie Bartholomew stars as Harvey Cheyne, a spoiled rich kid who, after drinking six ice cream sodas, falls off the ocean liner on which he and his father (Melvyn Douglas) are traveling. He has the good fortune to be picked up by a fishing boat out of Gloucester, whose crew, including the good-natured Manuel Fidello (Spencer Tracy), is unimpressed by his wealth and “position.” Humiliated, Harvey is left to his own resources, but under Manuel’s careful tutelage he learns the value of hard work and real accomplishment. Before they can return to port, however, Manuel dies in an accident. In port, Harvey is met by his father yet wants to stay with the fishermen, but after a moving memorial for his dead friend, father and son are reconciled. Child star Bartholomew is excellent in a role that requires him to be both obnoxious and irresistible. And Spencer Tracy, his hair curled and face brown with makeup, does an excellent imitation of a Portuguese sailor. With humor, pathos, and an interesting moral, this is one of the best children’s movies Hollywood ever produced. RBP

Gaston Leroux’s 1919 novel The Phantom of the Opera has inspired a score of films. Ma-Xu Weibang’s Midnight Song, made in Shanghai in 1936, is unarguably one of the most inspired. Ma-Xu (1905–1961) entered filmmaking as a title designer, graduating in turn to production design, acting, and direction. By the end of the silent period he had six films. Midnight Song was his second sound picture. Midnight Song establishes its dark and eerie mood from the start, with the arrival of a touring opera company at a dilapidated theater, which they learn has been empty and crumbling since the apparent death there of the great opera star Song Danping, ten years before. The company’s young star is rehearsing alone in the theater when he hears a beautiful voice, which coaches him through his song. It is, of course, the fugitive Song Danping, now dreadfully disfigured, who reveals himself and relates his tragic story, shown in flashback. His physical state was inflicted on him on the orders of an evil feudal lord, angry at Song’s love for his daughter. Since then he has hidden in the theater, awaiting a singer who can assume his mantle and perform his great operatic creation. The young singer is chosen for this role, and also made envoy to Song’s lost love, Li Xiaoxia, whose mind has broken from sorrow. The revolutionary difference from Western versions of Leroux is that the Phantom, instead of being a lurking menace, becomes a sympathetic and benevolent protagonist. In all other adaptations, the Phantom’s protégée is a female singer, and the Phantom is motivated by sexual jealousy of her fiancé. Changing the sex to a protégé, Ma-Xu develops more complex and ambiguous relationships. Song sees the young man as a surrogate for himself in the affections of Li Xiaoxia, and suffers jealousy on her behalf when he discovers the young man has himself a girlfriend. All this is staged in richly atmospheric settings, with a masterly use of light and shadow clearly inspired by German Expressionist cinema. An important element in the film’s immense popularity were the songs, which have remained popular standards in China. In 1941, Ma-Xu was obliged to make a sequel, Midnight Song II, and the film has also inspired two Hong Kong remakes, Mid-Nightmare (1962) and The Phantom Lover (1995). DR

King Vidor’s Stella Dallas offers a lively and moving portrait of a workingclass woman strong enough to sacrifice herself for the sake of her daughter’s advancement in society. Olive Higgins Prouty’s famous novel had already been filmed successfully in 1925. But unlike Henry King’s silent version, Vidor’s has the advantage of Barbara Stanwyck in the title role. Stanwyck plays Stella as a resilient, glamorous, intelligent woman. It’s easy to understand why well-to-do Stephen Dallas (John Boles) finds her attractive when he decides to abandon his family and strike out on his own. Not long after the birth of their daughter Laurel (Anne Shirley), however, Stephen wants to return to his former girlfriend. Stella raises Laurel on her own, devoting her life to the girl’s happiness, but as a teenager Laurel finds herself attracted to her father’s more affluent lifestyle and wants to live with him. Stella initially resists the move, but eventually relents, forcing her daughter to leave by pretending to be drunk and no longer interested in the young woman’s company. Laurel decamps to her father’s house and is soon married to a socialite at a huge wedding that her mother glimpses, tears streaming down her face, through a window from the street outside. Stella will continue on, but never again will she cross the social divide separating her from Laurel. A moving and heartfelt story, under Vidor’s able direction Stella Dallas never descends into mawkish sentimentality. RBP

William Dieterle’s The Life of Émile Zola was a follow-up to his highly successful biopic The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), with actor Paul Muni in another story about a Frenchman of principle and enlightenment overcoming prejudice. At the beginning Zola struggles to establish himself as a writer, until the publication of Nana, his sensational novel about a prostitute. Success follows success, and Zola is set to enjoy a prosperous old age when he is visited by the wife of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer falsely accused of spying for the Germans and sent to Devil’s Island. Zola’s conscience is pricked and, in a big set piece tailor-made for Muni, he reads out his famous article “J’Accuse” to a newspaper editor. In a typical Warner Brothers’s montage sequence, the newspaper staff gather around to listen, presses spew out the article, and people rush to buy the paper. The film won an Oscar for Best Picture and its underlying seriousness is impressive. Yet though Dreyfus was the victim of anti-Semitic prejudice, not once in The Life of Émile Zola is the word “Jew” uttered. Evidently, Warner Brothers feared that in 1937, with the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe, pictures about anti-Jewish feeling would inflame the very prejudices they were designed to expose. EB

In this one-of-a-kind masterpiece by one of the greatest American directors, Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play Bark and Lucy Cooper, an elderly couple faced with financial disaster and forced to throw themselves on the mercy of their middle-aged children. The children’s first step is to separate the two of them so that the inconvenience of hosting them can be divided. Gradually, the old people’s self-confidence and dignity are eroded, until they submit to an arrangement whereby one of them will stay in a nursing home in New York, and the other will go to California. Leo McCarey’s direction in Make Way for Tomorrow is beyond praise. All of the actors are expansive and natural, and the generosity McCarey shows toward his characters is unstinting. He demonstrates an exquisite sense of when to cut from his central couple to reveal the attitudes of others, without suggesting either that their compassion is condescending or that their indifference is wicked, and without forcing our tears or rage (which would be a way of forfeiting them). There is nothing contrived about McCarey’s handling of the story, and thus no escaping its poignancy. Two examples will suffice to indicate the film’s extraordinary discretion. During the painful sequence in which Lucy’s presence inadvertently interferes with her daughter-in-law’s attempt to host a bridge party, Lucy receives a phone call from Bark. Because she talks loudly on the phone—one of several annoying traits that McCarey and screenwriter Viña Delmar don’t hesitate to give the elderly couple—the guests pause in their games to listen. Their reactions (not emphasized, but merely shown) mix annoyance, discomfort, and sorrow. The last section of the film, dealing with the couple’s brief reuniting and impromptu last idyll in Manhattan, is sublime. McCarey keeps us aware of the sympathy of outsiders (a car salesman, a coat-check girl, a hotel manager, a bandleader), but never imposes their reactions on us through superfluous reverse shots. Meanwhile, Lucy and Bark are constantly shown together in the same compositions. In its passionate commitment to their private universe, Make Way for Tomorrow is truly, deeply moving. CFu

The legend of Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth is that it was largely improvised from day to day. This legend is perfectly in tune with the ethos of the film itself, in which spontaneity, playfulness, the ability to laugh at one’s own “act” (as well as to see it with the eye of the person who is seeing right through you at that moment) are so central to its glorious, warm sense of humor as well as its exploration of how to make marriage work. But the script structure, however it was arrived at, is satisfying. It starts with a rupture: Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne), believing they have caught each other in infidelities, lies, and—worst of all—a lack of trust, decide to divorce. It takes half the film, covering Lucy’s flirtation with Dan (Ralph Bellamy), for her to realize she still loves Jerry. But then it’s his turn to hook up with someone, a “madcap heiress.” Once all these bets are off, the story becomes a road movie leading to a cabin in the woods—with two beds, and thirty minutes left before the divorce decree becomes final. McCarey perfects every ingredient of the romantic comedy here, from the opposition of New Yorkers and Southerners, to the role of games, songs, and dances as ways of sorting out the characters’ affections and allegiances. Full of splendid minor characters and inspired bits of business, The Awful Truth also has a heartbreakingly serious moment when Jerry and Lucy remember their unofficial marriage vow (“This comes from the heart, I’ll always adore you”). Of all the great movies, this may be the one that most resists description in words. This has much to do with its small jokes of subtle verbal delivery, where ordinary phrases are transformed by timing, rhythm, and tone, from Lucy’s defensively repeated “had better go” and Jerry’s stumbling on “Tulsa” to Dan’s exasperated “Mom!” via the black servant’s reaction to Jerry’s fake tan: “You’re looking weellll.” Above all, the film is a monument to the sheer, magical lovability of its stars. AM

Pépé le Moko was the film that consolidated Jean Gabin’s stardom and defined his on-screen persona as a tough, streetwise character, outwardly cynical but with an underlying romantic streak that will cause his downfall. As Pépé, an expatriate French hood who has become top dog in the Casbah (the Arab quarter of Algiers), he relishes his power but yearns nostalgically for Paris. When a beautiful French tourist (Mireille Balin), the embodiment of his longedfor homeland, catches his eye, the temptation becomes too great. But once outside the Casbah he’s vulnerable because there a tireless policeman (Lucas Gridoux) lies in wait. Director Julien Duvivier’s skill at evoking atmosphere creates a vivid (if romanticized) vision of the Casbah, an exotic labyrinth of twisting alleyways full of pungent detail. Borrowing motifs from the classic Hollywood gangster movies but seasoning them with doomy Gallic romanticism, Pépé le Moko prefigures film noir. Images of bars, grilles, and fences recur throughout the film, underlining Pépé’s entrapment within his little fiefdom. The movie is pervaded by a mood of longing, of lost youthful dreams, and of desires that can never be fulfilled. This fatalism led to its being banned during the war by the Vichy regime, but its warm reception after this temporary absence only confirmed its status as a classic. PK