The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

What a delightful swashbuckling adventure! Ronald Colman is good in this, and it's a well plotted, beautifully designed, pleasurable romp no matter how you swing your sword – especially for 1937 – but the real takeaway here was Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He's incredible! Insouciant, wild, unpredictable: he's a movie star through and through. He makes this part into a character any star would want to play. It's really masterful. I have never paid too much attention to the younger Fairbanks (the Academy never did either), but I will now. Mary Astor is also fabulous in this.

Souls at Sea (1937)

Souls at Sea is an intriguing 1930s film by Henry Hathaway about a man working as a kind of one-man army against the African slave trade in the 1840s. What's sort of weird about this – aside from Gary Cooper's more-than-a-little-wooden performance – is that the main import of the film is an explosion and shipwreck that have nothing at all to do with the slave trade. Cooper's character is on an anti-slavery mission, sure, but the boat that sinks is not a slave ship at all, and so the main thrust of the drama is about something else entirely. 

The film's script seems designed to avoid Black actors. We get a few images of enslaved Africans killing a slaver, but although we know that the two heroes of the film disobey orders and unlock everyone enslaved aboard the ship, Souls at Sea doesn't show us any scenes of Black freedom, preferring to jump ahead in time to the men explaining what they've done to the enforcers of maritime law. 

It's a strange movie – probably because it is produced for a segregated film industry that will distribute the film to segregated theatres during Jim Crow. 

Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers 1937

Well, it was time for another Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers film. They're all being kicked off of HBOmax at the end of the month, and I hadn't seen very many of them, so here we are. Tonight it was their 1937 offering, Shall We Dance. This film is definitely better than Swing Time (1936) and Carefree (1938), the two films that sandwich it, but, like both of those films, Shall We Dance is preciously short on musical numbers. This is the thing that I really do not understand about these Astaire–Rogers movies. Why is there so much plot and why is there so little song and dance? They are singer-dancers. Why aren't they doing that for most of the movie?

What makes Shall We Dance much better than the others is that this film stars the brilliant comedians Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore in supporting roles, and they're both absolutely hilarious. But Rogers – as she does in the other two films – sort of glowers her way through the movie. I know that she really wanted to be acting in more serious roles instead of doing this kind of hoofing, but making these parts more dramatic makes them much less entertaining. 

Shall We Dance's music is by the Gershwins and it's excellent, of course. Shall We Dance introduced the world to "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", and if that weren't enough, it also introduced the world to "They Can't Take That Away from Me". Both songs are obviously now standards, although "They Can't Take That Away from Me" somehow lost the Oscar to "Sweet Leilani" from Waikiki Wedding (a song to which I couldn't sing you a single note).

Anyway, I think these films all have the same problems, honestly. They're weirdly directed. Their timing is off. And more importantly, they just don't have enough music in them. The Astaire–Rogers films behave as if the plot is important, when it doesn't matter one bit. I know this is not a popular opinion, but I'd opt for an Astaire–Hayworth picture or an Astaire–Charisse picture over an Astaire–Rogers picture any day of the week.

Two with Sonja Henie & Tyrone Power

Thin Ice is a totally absurd Sonja Henie picture with Tyrone Power as her love interest. He's some Swiss prince or somesuch nonsense. This whole thing is stupidly absurd and delightful, and I enjoyed myself. Both this film and Second Fiddle (two years later) were directed by Sidney Lanfield.

Second Fiddle is a truly charming little Irving Berlin musical. This is fundamentally a much better musical than Thin Ice. All of the songs are diegetic, and of course Tyrone Power does not sing – although he writes a song and croaks out a few lovesick bars while writing it. I have to say that I don't think Sonja Henie is that interesting, but she's pleasant enough, and this film has Edna May Oliver doing tons of great comic shtick, and of course Tyrone Power. He's quite funny in this, and just as handsome as ever. This is a nice little riff on the formula established with Thin Ice, and Second Fiddle has great Irving Berlin tunes.

A Day at the Races (1937)

A Day at the Races had me laughing out loud, especially Groucho's level of insanity. But the whole crew is funny. Allan Jones has a lovely singing voice, and the musical numbers are... well they're very different from one another, but none of it matters. This is classic musical comedy. Hilarious nonsense and lots of musical numbers. I enjoyed this a lot. 

There is a totally unnecessary bit of blackface. 1937. I honestly can't believe this kind of thing still worked in the late 1930s, but this is also very much a legacy of musical theatre in the U.S. Minstrelsy always ends up rearing its head. There was also a totally unnecessary blackface joke in a Deanna Durbin movie I watched last week.

I watched A Day at the Races on the Criterion Channel.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

In Make Way for Tomorrow, a septuagenarian couple loses their house and – without any warning at all – asks their fortysomething kids to take them in. But the old folks refuse to lie low and stay out of their kids' hair, complaining and otherwise making nuisances of themselves. The film obviously sympathizes with these two old people, but I was not having a moment of it. They intrude on their kids' lives, cause a ton of trouble, and then have the gall to blame their kids and make them feel awful for not financially supporting them. The whole thing is so morally backward. And the film actually believes that these kids are terrible people and that the old folks are lovable and pitiable. Not for me. These two old people were assholes.

I think this is so noticeable to me because I do not feel the same way about Ozu's Tokyo Story, which is based on Make Way for Tomorrow. The old folks in Ozu's film are lovable, and their kids really are the jerks. The kids are not jerks in Make Way for Tomorrow. I also remember liking Randolph Edmonds' 1934 play Old Man Pete, which has a similar conceit: an old couple from Virginia moves to Harlem to visit their children and stay with them. 

It's the two characters in Make Way for Tomorrow. They just don't seem to understand that they're in the way, and they have no ability at all to read the room. They're awful people.

Something to Sing About (1937)

I like Cagney as a gangster. I have a tougher time buying him as a song-and-dance man, even if he is a good dancer. In this picture, though, he barely even does that. He doesn't really even have a single number all to himself, despite being billed above the title. In fact, this film is pretty far up Cagney's ass, I have to say. This film thinks Cagney is amazing in a way that began to leave a bad taste in my mouth. The music is pretty good, but there isn't much comedy. The highlights of this film were the obviously gay makeup man (who of course was the butt of many jokes and insulted by Cagney's character) and Philip Ahn who has has a supporting part as Cagney's manservant – he has a thick accent that he can shed whenever he wants and he tells Cagney that his previous employers liked it better when he spoke bad English and bowed too much. It's a fascinating bit of racial performance.

Manhattan Merry-Go-Round

Manhattan Merry-Go-Round is one of the typical musicals from this mid-1930s period where all the musical numbers are diegetic. Gangsters are running a music studio in this film, and so we get cameos from Cab Calloway and Kay Thompson (her stuff is weird) and Gene Autry (also weird). There is also a plot with an opera diva. Tamara Geva, who plays said diva, is this film's most outstanding feature. She's by turns adorable and terrible; she's smashing vases one minute and begging for love the next. It's an excellent performance, but the film she's in is pretty dumb.

Wings over Honolulu (1937)

Wings over Honolulu doesn't have much to recommend it. A socialite young lady learns to be a good wife and sacrifice her own selfish desires. This was hard to enjoy.