Libeled Lady (1936)

Since Thursday night's movie was from 1936, I figured I'd continue the trend and watch Jack Conway's Libeled Lady with Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, William Powell, and Myrna Loy. It's delightful: a perfect romantic comedy that is very funny and also very sweet. The script is pretty typical stuff story-wise, but the dialogue sparkles and the delivery is aces. William Powell and Jean Harlow, especially, are absolutely hilarious. Powell had me cracking up from the moment he appeared in the film.

I watched Libeled Lady on the Criterion Channel, where it's part of a series of 14 films starring Jean Harlow (including Suzy).

Of the 574 (or 571, depending on how you count) films nominated for Best Picture since the first Oscar ceremony, I have seen all but five. Libeled Lady was one of these five. It's one of the only two movies that was nominated for Best Picture but no other awards (the other is Grand Hotel). Oddly enough, the two other films that I am able to see are also from 1936 – Romeo and Juliet and Three Smart Girls. I seem to be on a 1936 kick, so perhaps I'll finally get these watched. (The final two are 1928's The Patriot and 1934's The White Parade; they're either lost or damaged.)

Lloyd's of London (1936)

With the apostrophe in the title or without, Lloyd's of London is a film about the daring, dangerous, exciting world of nineteenth-century insurance.

This is an epic, sprawling movie by Henry King, and although its plot goes in a million places, King really does nothing to communicate to the audience just how exciting this is supposed to be, so much of the film's excitement falls flat. There are some excellent spy scenes, a two-day boat ride from France to England during the Napoleonic Wars, some delightful adulterous comings and goings, and the film even begins with a fun bit in which two kids spy on a bunch of fraudulent would-be pirates.

But I'm not kidding when I say this film is about insurance, and Lloyd's of London is more interested in communicating to its audiences the virtues of the insurance trade in England – apparently keeping the British navy afloat (I'm skeptical) while making sure that trading vessels were able to come to England to provide food for people who would have starved otherwise (oh?). All of this, apparently, was made possible not by the ships themselves but by wealthy insurers at Lloyd's, risking all they have for the good of England... and only occasionally becoming obscenely wealthy. Lloyd's invents a childhood friendship between Lord Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier's character in That Hamilton Woman) and this insurance man at Lloyd's of London, a deep bond that is pure fantasy but that the film uses to illustrate how deeply intertwined the British navy is with British financiers and British merchants (although the film would like us to believe that none of these people was a colonialist).

Lloyd's of London is notable also for starring a 22-year-old Tyrone Power in his first starring role. (He is the star, even if, as you can see from the poster, he is billed fourth). This movie proved to Twentieth Century Fox that Power could carry a picture, and that he was good enough to be the amazing star he would turn out to be. The top-billed talent here is Freddie Bartholomew, who plays Power's character as a child. The movie opens with him, and he is as charming and delightful as he is in all of his movies.

I watched this sprawling epic on YouTube, where you can clearly see that the film's title is Lloyd's of London and not Lloyds of London.

Suzy (1936)

Suzy is a little clunky, but it's hard to mind. Everyone in it is fun, and Cary Grant and Franchot Tone are both doing the things that made them perfect leading men. Jean Harlow is particularly enchanting, though. I do love a war-pilot movie, although all the footage from this one was apparently cut from Hawks' Hell's Angels. Still, I have no complaints, really.

I watched this on the Criterion Channel as part of a series of films starring Jean Harlow.

Sisters of the Gion (1936)

Sisters of the Gion (祇園の姉妹) is one of Mizoguchi's early films about prostitution, and although it doesn't possess the high dramatics or suicidal tendencies of the famous bunraku plays (the songs of which one of the characters is constantly singing), Sisters of the Gion is, in many ways indebted to those stories of desperation and loneliness.

Still, I didn't love the filmmaking here – it's early Mizoguchi, and this is a film from 1936, so I shouldn't judge it the same as I would his later work, but it moves awkwardly, without really gaining a good flow – although the storytelling is excellent.

I watched this on the Criterion Channel. It's been a movie on my list to see for a very long time, since I saw my first Mizoguchi film back in the summer of 2007!

Swing Time (1936)

Barf. Swing Time is one of the least interesting Fred Astaire movies I've seen. (It was apparently Ginger Rogers' favorite of their films together. I gotta disagree, Ginger.) The fact that the songs come from out of the blue (i.e. are non-diegetic) is interesting, but the book is so long; there's so much unnecessary plot. There are four excellent Jerome Kern songs – all four are superb – but this thing is almost 100 minutes long and there are literally four songs plus two dance numbers. This is a musical? 

Also there is a blackface number in Swing Time that I found completely tedious – it also, big surprise, did not need to be in blackface.

Valiant Is the Word for Carrie (1936)

Yet another combination of the mother with the fallen woman. This is, perhaps, the most beloved plot for the Best Actress category in the 1930s.

Gladys George is good in Valiant Is the Word for Carrie, but this is nowhere near her best work, and most of this plot is insipid stuff. Jackie Moran is great as little Paul, and I thought John Howard was fine as adult Paul, but Arline Judge, who is second billed here, is fairly terrible.

Valiant Is the Word for Carrie just isn't worth Gladys George. It's nice that she got her only Oscar nomination for this movie, but one does wish it had been for something better.

And at the end of the movie, a character actually says valiant is the word for Carrie, as if we didn't know what the movie was called.

Theodora Goes Wild (1936)

Theodora Goes Wild – which was directed by Richard Boleslawski, co-founder of the American Laboratory Theatre and student of Konstantin Stanislavsky – is absolutely hilarious. I laughed so much. Irene Dunne is perfect; Spring Byington is genius in a supporting part; Thomas Mitchell and Melvyn Douglas are also excellent.

Pennies from Heaven (1936)

Pennies from Heaven is a pretty stupid film. But it was designed as a kind of pick-me-up during the Great Depression, and "Pennies from Heaven" is a gem of a song, especially sung by Bing Crosby.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Honestly, I hate stuff like Michael Curtiz's The Charge of the Light Brigade. This is one in something like a score of Errol Flynn–Olivia de Havilland pictures. He's handsome; she's boring. But none of that has any effect on this movie, which foregoes the usual swashbuckling version of Flynn in favor of a "noble" British officer fighting the Russians (apparently) in colonial India.

It's just impossible for me to be on the side of these British, who are hanging out in India and trying to protect Victorian interests on the subcontinent. I find it simply inconceivable that I am supposed to root for these men in mufti attempting to "tame" (or whatever other nonsense term they use) a country that isn't theirs in the first place. I don't care how many times the film refers to them as savages or shows them killing women and children. The British do not belong there.

This film's score (by Max Steiner) was nominated for an Oscar, but the music's insistent trumpets and constant use of martial pacing, as well as its reliance on quotation of "Rule Britannia" annoyed me just as much as the rest of Curtiz's movie.

Mostly, I must admit, I just didn't care about any of this. There is a love plot – two brothers love the same woman – but I couldn't be bothered one bit. The film quotes Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" repeatedly by substituting its words for actual action, but the whole time I was just bored. To me it all felt as tired as Tennyson does.

I guess it is also worth saying that this is one of those films that thinks waging war, dying in war, and fighting over pieces of land that the generals themselves acknowledge they think are not worth fighting about are noble, valiant acts. And in this way The Charge of the Light Brigade is truly full of shit. When the film ended, with literally hundreds of men being killed by cannon fire because of an arrogant, foolish decision on the part of Flynn's character, it was driven home again to me just how nonsensical the whole thing was. Hundreds of men dying for a frivolous act of revenge, done to avenge an act that would never have happened in the first place if the English had just stayed on their island.