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.

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.

Free Old Hollywood Cinema Online

I got in a mood for really old cinema last week, and I've been watching a lot of movies from the years 1927 to 1935. Many of these films are available on YouTube or somewhere else, and there are some great old films with excellent performances among this group. All of the ones I watched were nominated for Oscars, and sometimes I was baffled by the nominations (as indeed I often am now), but there were some very good movies, nonetheless.

Condemned! is a 1929 melodrama about a French thief, played by Ronald Colman, who is shipped off to a prison colony in an Africa jungle. He gets put to work as the warden's butler, however, and he and the warden's wife fall in love. So, naturally, he plans an escape. Ronald Colman is a great deal of fun in this, and he was nominated for Best Actor. This category, let me just say, from 1927 to 1935 at least was a bunch of nonsense. Not always, of course, but frequently. Some of the actors getting nominated for performances are doing fun work, but they're not really having to do much acting. Many of them aren't even carrying their films. What it looks like to me is that the studios wanted to push particular actors as important, as talented, as sexy, and so they put their weight behind particular performances.

In any case, Condemned! has its good elements. There is a pretty great swamp chase sequence and I really liked the stuff on the boat in the first five minutes of the movie. But the second act is all love and nonsense, and it doesn't focus nearly enough on the wife's terror and anguish to be actually affecting. The point of this movie, however, was to sell Colman as a leading man, and this works marvelously.

* * *

The Affairs of Cellini is, if possible, an even sillier Best Actor nomination. Not that this film isn't delightful. It is! It is a farce set in the Cinquecento in Florence. In this fun film, Fredric March plays Benevenuto Cellini, the great Florentine goldsmith, as a kind of hot-tempered Casanova who is killing men who fight with him and seducing women whenever he can. The other main characters are the Duke and Duchess of Florence (Frank Morgan and Constance Bennett), who are both hilarious and delightful. The Duke and Duchess are each attempting to have affairs with different people (the Duchess with Cellini, of course), and so they try to trick and confuse one another by playing various pranks and making ridiculous decisions. It might seem crazy for a studio to spend all the money one needs for a 16th century set, costumes, and props just to do a film version of what is obviously a stage farce, but the whole thing worked splendidly.

What is sort of crazy is that when it was over, I thought: they nominated Fredric March for Best Actor for this!? But then I checked and they hadn't nominated March; they nominated Frank Morgan! Even crazier. Morgan was an excellent actor, but almost always worked as a supporting comedian. In 1933 and 1934, however, Morgan was playing leading men, and so perhaps the studio was interested in pushing him as a romantic lead at this point in his career. This is a nomination that honestly makes no sense without studio politics, but I am glad it happened, because The Affairs of Cellini is really fun stuff. Constance Bennett is perfect in this, and I've always thought of Fredric March as a very serious actor, but he is excellent in this farce and funny as hell.

 * * *

Combining my astonishment at both Fredric March and undeserved Best Actor nominations, March's first Best Actor nomination is for a film version of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's The Royal Family re-titled as The Royal Family of Broadway. I saw this play many many years ago with Kate Mulgrew and the great Marian Seldes. It was a delight. There were live dogs onstage and the comedy was absurd and delightful. The part played by Fredric March is definitely a supporting part (this was before Best Supporting Actor existed as a category). March is fun, and he once again acquits himself well as a comedian in a great part, but his nomination really does surprise me.

It is even more surprising since The Royal Family of Broadway is not very funny. Ina Claire, who play's the film's lead, is far too serious in her part, and so the film feels far more sober than it is supposed to be, perhaps even tragic. This was probably what the filmmakers (George Cukor and Cyril Gardner) wanted, but it was not what I wanted from this old gem of a farce.

Fredric March is wondering why everyone else in the movie is so serious.

* * *

Alfred Werker's The House of Rothschild is a very interesting document from 1934. It stars George Arliss, whom I've really begun to love, and the film is about the rise of the Rothschild family of bankers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. What is most fascinating about the movie is that it is clearly a bit of pro-Jewish propaganda designed to combat 1930s anti-Semitism. This is explicitly its subject matter. It is also about the way that the Rothschilds helped England by funding its wars in Europe. In other words, the film is a kind of The London Merchant 200 years later.

I will confess to enjoying this film rather thoroughly. The final sequence of the movie is in color, which was a wonderful surprise, and as I say George Arliss is an actor whom I have begun to love. I had thought this movie was impossible to find for many years, so watching it recently was a real treat for me.