Down Argentine Way

The 1940 musical Down Argentine Way is really only notable for its great Carmen Miranda numbers and for the appearance of the Nicholas Brothers, both of whom are featured in diegetic numbers as the characters visit Argentine night life. There are also non-diegetic numbers in this musical, but I can't say I had any interest in them. The title song "Down Argentine Way" was nominated for an Oscar for reasons I could not explain if I tried.

Charlotte Greenwood is a strange performer. In Down Argentine Way she plays the comic sidekick/Ado Annie part. I can't say I laughed at many of her jokes, but she has some interesting dance moves and a serviceable voice.

The entire enterprise of Down Argentine Way is that trying on of other bodies, especially those deemed ethnic by Hollywood or "America" at large. Grable sings about Argentina and Ameche speaks Spanish-inflected English (if not Argentinian Spanish-inflected English).

In any case, the whole thing is pleasant enough, Don Ameche is handsome and has a great smile (as always), and the Nicholas Brothers and Miranda are excellent.

The Mark of Zorro (1940)

I love Tyrone Power so much. The Mark of Zorro is delightful from start to finish, and Power is as fun as ever. There's some excellent swashbuckling, too. An excellent film.

I watched The Mark of Zorro on the Criterion Channel.

Arise, My Love (1940)

You probably know that I am kind of obsessed with contemporary WWII movies, the ones made in the 1940s during the war, I mean. Well, Mitchell Leisen's Arise, My Love is one of the best I've seen. The script is superb, and this is a hilarious movie as well as being a good romance and a good propaganda vehicle. Oh, and it's also exciting and action-filled, with two daring escapes. This whole thing is aces. Ray Milland and Claudette Colbert are fantastic. And Walter Abel is hilarious.

Mitchell Leisen is having a bit of a renaissance at the moment, and perhaps a critical reassessment of his work. There is a series of his films on the Criterion Channel right now... but Arise, My Love is not one of them. Now, I do not know why this is, but this movie has got to be one of his best. It's great. 

You can watch Arise, My Love in some random spots on the internet just by googling it. 

The title, incidentally, comes up several times in the film, and it's from the English Standard Version of Song of Solomon 2.10-13:

Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away, for behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree ripens its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away.

Strike Up the Band

This is so cute and so much fun. It doesn't feel like a Busby Berkeley movie for most of the running time, and then there is the film's final, glorious sequence; it's Berkeley all over.

Fun fact, when Rooney and Garland produce a show in act two, at the end of it the curtain comes down and it says Next Week: East Lynne. This was a common thing producers put at the end of a bad show; East Lynne could always be counted on, and audiences loved the show. This is a kind of theatre joke in Strike Up the Band that most people would understand. Anyway, it reminded me that I had never seen East Lynne, so I finally decided to watch it.

I watched Strike Up the Band on DVD.

Pride and Prejudice (1940)

This version of Pride and Prejudice is completely charming, and I feel surprised to find myself saying so, because I've always thought both Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson to be very stuffy. 

They're both delightful here. This whole thing is sweet and very funny, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Edna May Oliver's appearance in act two as Olivier's aunt is, of course, perfect. And the costume design is truly exquisite. In fact, those two words don't really do enough. The costume design is revelatory. Really. Even if Garson, Olivier, and Oliver weren't all wonderful, the costume design would seriously be enough of a reason to watch this film.

Arizona (1940)

Wesley Ruggles' Arizona is a typical Hollywood colonialist Western epic that thinks "taming Indian territory" is something to celebrate. Jean Arthur is the central figure in this plot, and she is intent on settling in Arizona and intent on Arizona itself becoming settled. Arthur is a kind of figure for Arizona itself as she settles down with a man and exchanges her jeans for dresses and gets married. Ok, so much for themes.

In the plot, Arthur plays a young capitalist wants to get the biggest ranch in Arizona. For a while she is swindled and outwitted by another capitalist (Warren William), but she meets William Holden – who was dreamily cute in 1940 – and settles down with him, after getting the biggest ranch in Arizona. There is lots of shooting (mostly off-screen or in longshot because of the PCA) and there are cattle drives and explosions and big crowd scenes. Ruggles handles all of this well, but the tone of the film is entirely off. Victor Young's score constantly tells us we're watching a comedy. So even when Arthur kidnaps her rival and brings him to her house and holds him at gunpoint – a moment when one might suppose we were supposed to be taking her seriously – we're given lighthearted comic music to tell us not to worry at all. This is all in good fun.

Numerous people are murdered by the film's villain, and in one of the film's final lines we are told that Arthur's character is steel from her topknot to her toes or some such drivel, but there's never really any danger here at all, and Ruggles reminds us that throughout the film so much that I never believed there were any stakes in this little colonialist fantasy at all. As for Arthur, who is perhaps the great comic actress, she's totally miscast as a serious action heroine here, and this makes the whole thing even more comic. She squeaks her way through the script's dangerous sequences, and only really lights up when she's playing romance or at the film's very end when she's called upon to be a strong wife/potential widow.

In any case, Arizona didn't work for me at all.

Second Chorus (1940)

Burgess Meredith and Fred Astaire play swindling trumpet players in Second Chorus, as they try to get Artie Shaw to hire them while they both attempt to romance Paulette Goddard. The trouble is that they fuck up so much and care so little about helping Goddard and so much about themselves and about competing with one another, that I found this film awkward in the extreme and not very much fun as a consequence.

There are lots of fun '40s Fred Astaire musicals. This ain't one of 'em.

The Westerner (1940)

I saw The Westerner as a part of a series of Gary Cooper films they were showing on the Criterion Channel. I sort of hated it. Its chief redeeming quality is supposed to be Walter Brennan's third Oscar-winning performance in five years (he won in '37, '39, and in '41) as Judge Roy Bean. But Brennan pretty much does his usual shtick here. Nothing is of much interest in this early William Wyler western. There are some cool sequences – the entire prairie catches on fire at one point, and the whole thing is shot gorgeously – but mostly I thought The Westerner was really boring.

Music in My Heart (1940)

Both Music in My Heart and Rita Hayworth are very cute, and Tony Martin has a gorgeous voice. The main song of the film – "Punchinello" – is not the song that was nominated for an Academy Award. "Punchinello" is sung to a small monkey at a street fair. It's delightful.