The story of the making of Kings Row is, I think, more interesting than the film itself. Let's just start by saying that this movie is a fairly awful melodrama, mostly because Robert Cummings and Ronald Reagan are legitimately terrible in this, especially Robert Cummings, who gives an absurdly milquetoast performance. But it's worse than that. Excellent performers like Judith Anderson and Claude Rains are also fairly bad in this.
What is interesting about the movie is that it is based on a famous mid-century potboiler novel that, apparently (though one wouldn't know it from the film) was about incest and homosexuality and all sorts of illicit eroticism and terrible sadism. Who knew? Very little of that comes across in this movie, which is only cursorily interested in Freudian psychiatry. In any case, it's shot beautifully and designed beautifully, but the acting is truly awful, and the screenplay is a hodgepodge of stuff that doesn't really work. I, for one, am getting ahold of this novel so I can see what all the fuss was about in 1940. Oh I meant to talk about the score, which is amazing and in which you can clearly hear Star Wars! John Williams obviously borrowed at least one theme from Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Give it a listen and see if you hear it.
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