ddcamera Reviews

Private Detective 62 (1933)

When movies were...

[7/10 · 2 May 2024]

Fans of pre-Code feature films will enjoy this forgotten 1933 gem made in twenty-three days, brilliantly directed by the world's most underestimated director, Michael Curtiz, for Warner Bros when young Daryl Zanuck ran the studio and Hal Wallis assisted him. The film, lasting a little more than an hour, is packed with mystery, comedy, and romance, all thrown together helter-skelter and moved along at a rapid pace whose only purpose is to entertain. William Powell, as to be expected, is his usual impeccable self as the charming detective with integrity who ends up helping beautiful Margaret Lindsay, a society damsel in distress. As those were the days when all well-born people in films spoke with English accents, Margaret's is particularly thick. Ruth Donnelly plays the opposite: a working-class secretary who gets the laughs. There is a mystery plot, of course, that makes more sense than most. It's peopled with any number of sleazy lower-class villains, one of whom is referred to as a "snowbird" in the days before the word meant someone spending his winters in Florida or New Mexico. A most enjoyable film made when movies were movies.

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Angels Over Broadway (1940)

Not quite but almost

[7/10 · 19 April 2024]

Ben Hecht, reputedly the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood, sometimes directed. Those efforts, among them ANGELS AND SIN, SPECTRE OF THE ROSE and CRIME WITHOUT PASSION all reek of arty pretension, low-key lighting (often as here by Lee Garmes) and pages of purple-prose dialogue. It's as if occasionally Hecht said the hell with all this hack crap I do for money, now for once I'm going to create some real Art. Capitol A. One can't help but admire him for trying, for selling scripts and subjects no one else in town would have even dared peddle. Here in 1940, he even managed to convince crusty Harry Cohn at Columbia to star Rita Hayworth in what was to be her first A role. She is as ever beyond gorgeous and does her best, acting with the sort of voice Marilyn Monroe must have copied. Mitchell, as to be expected, is his usual excellent self doing a Mitchell, and the underrated John Qualen is as always superb. Unfortunately, suave leading man, the debonair Douglas Fairbanks Jr., works hard (too hard?) at doing a tough guy Jimmy Cagney/Bogie character and almost succeeds. Almost. The trouble, alas, is not in the limitations or talents of a first-rate cast, but in Hecht's writing. He attempts unconvincingly to coat his usual hard-boiled style with sudden shifts to standard Hollywood corn off the cob. Hecht, as he displayed in FRONT PAGE and many of his best plays and screenplays, was always at his best when he was a 100% cynic. Here, sadly, it is Hecht and not Fairbanks who seems out of character.

Tonight and Every Night (1945)

Tossed together wartime fare

[6/10 · 22 July 2023]

This Columbia Technicolor musical made in 1945, the last year of WWII, is one of those tossed together, anything goes product that a wartime audience desperate for entertainment accepted. It feels at times as if Columbia filmed all the musical numbers first and then had a contest at the studio to see who could come up with a plot. Any plot. The score is undistinguished, although there's lots of it. Pluses: Jack Cole exuberant choreography, helped by the very talented Marc Platt who could both dance and act, but nobody seems to have figured out how to use him properly. Neither a romantic lead or comic relief, he's wasted here. Rita, of course, does not disappoint her fans She is her usual gorgeous self, a marvelous dancer doing her best to act the predictable boy meets girl love story that comes in and out the film between numbers, almost as an afterthought. Lee Bowman is attractive as her love interest, so is Janet Blair as the co-star in a thankless role. TRIVIA: Shelly Winters, at the beginning of her career, can be spotted here and there as one of the chorus girls, but (unless I'm mistaken) she has no dialogue. This is a mess of a film, but who can resist watching Rita? She lights up the screen.

That Brennan Girl (1946)

Beyond capabilities

[5/10 · 8 July 2023]

This is an odd film, coming as it does from Republic Pictures, a studio not noted for taking chances on serious psychological subjects. The film is inhibited by the censorship of the time and lack of real courage by Republic. The studio washed over the troubled upbringing and its obvious repercussions on the character of a young woman brought up by a slatternly mother. Mona Freeman, young as she was, is the best actor here. She is quite believable (most of time) despite the erratic and often improbable plotting. Great effort is made throughout the film to make the seedy characters who inhabit such a world likable and sympathetic. James Dunne, for example, is first introduced as a cunning crooked gangster, but, as he loves his corn beef and cabbage mom, he turns out okay. After being sent to prison for crimes we never learn about, he suddenly sets out to redeem himself. Why? Many of the characters are badly written, or badly acted. English actress, June Duprez has no idea what her tough lady dialogue means and is totally miscast. William Marshall, Mona's husband, is dreadful and not particularly attractive. He, too, seems to be reading lines he doesn't understand. Director Alfred Santell does a workman like job of staging an enormity of scenes with the usual Republic shooting schedule and budget, but the complexity of the relationships is beyond his modest talents. There was the possibility of a great movie here. Look at MILDRED PIERCE in the hands of Michael Curtiz, and imagine what a better director and superior cast might have done with this interesting human story.

The Dark Corner (1946)

Not quite. Almost.

[7/10 · 30 March 2023]

Another forgotten big studio noir made right after the Second World War. Set in New York City, but all shot on the Fox lot in Hollywood with the exception of a short second-unit car chase done in Manhattan..The mystery plot is sheer pulp fiction, full of tough guy talk and the usual plot improbability. Mark Stevens as the private eye works hard, looks and sounds good, but just doesn't have the charisma that Bogie and Ladd brought to these parts, (You wonder why Lucille Ball is so enamored of him.) On the plus side, Lucy, who'd been acting for years and could play anything, is as to be expected, terrific. Beautiful and charming. Clifford Webb as the uptown guy, wonderfully waspy and nasty, William Bendix as the downtown baddy, very believable. Cathy Downs as Webb's trophy wife is awful, miscast. Look for Donald McBride in one of his shortest parts as the befuddled cop at the art gallery, end of film, First-rate direction from Hathaway with masterful lighting and camera moves from the great Joe McDonald. No music score. Instead, creative use of overlapping piano practicing, jazz music heard through open windows, and traffic sounds off-screen used to create busy city atmosphere, rather than show it. All in all, worth watching for it's photography alone.

Prince of Foxes (1949)

What if?

[8/10 · 2 February 2023]

This 1949 Fox film, shot in Italy, is distinguished by its acting, most impressive of all the interplay between Everett Sloane as Beill and Orson Welles as Borgia. Welles, who was trying to make his film of Othello at the same time, offered Sloan's the part of Iago, which he refused. We don't know why, perhaps because (as usual) Wells had no money. What a Shakespearean team they might have made, witness how they play off one another here! Once again, Tyrone Power proves he was more than a beautiful face. Fox staff regulars, director Henry King, and cinematographer Leon Shamroy, do sterling work at what to them was just another studio assignment. There are moments of inspiration and more than conventional acting. The Greek diva, Katrina Paxinou, is superb as the mother. This is a perfect example of what the right talent gathered in the right place can do to make something more from a rather ordinary script.

Reaching for the Moon (1930)

The missing pieces?

[6/10 · 29 January 2023]

This lavish 1930 talkie was produced by United Artists, the studio cofounded by star Fairbanks, with additional financing from Joe Schenck, on his way to creating Twentieth Century Fox with Zanuck. The film brought together some of the best talents of the 1920s: among them, Wm. Cameron Menzies who did the great Art Deco sets, Irving Berlin who provided the story and wrote the songs (all but one deleted), Ray June photography, Harold Kern editing, Alfred Newman scoring, the screenplay and direction by that old reliable craftsman Edmund Goulding. Somewhere during production, however, someone, star/producer Fairbanks or Schenck perhaps decided that musicals were box office poison, and the songs should be cut. A disastrous decision. This film is Wall Street crash panicky without the much-needed breathing places that songs would have provided. Their absence make the flimsy plot ever flimsier. The result is a messy and out of balance movie. It's like what might have happened if someone decided to cut out the Marilyn Monroe scenes from SOME LIKE IT HOT or the Marx Brothers from DUCK SOUP. Fairbanks and Bebe Daniels, handsome as they are, push their theatrical charm button a bit too much; their star turns makes the artificiality of their acting cloying. They are so over-the-top that Edward Everett Horton, perfect as always as the valet, seems a Method actor. No one has yet to put together the missing pieces and restore what might make a first rate entertainment The BBC is said to have shown.some of the cut out material.

Dual Alibi (1947)

A dark post-war jewel of English filmmaking

[9/10 · 27 January 2023]

This 1947 thriller, truly a film noir, was expertly directed by Albert Trasker, who, in a long career, never did anything better than this. The background music--the first film score by Englishman Stanley Black (né Solomon Schwartz) then leader of the BBC Dance orchestra, mixes dance hall tunes, circus band music, and a beautiful waltz tune, all used to create moments of real suspense. Marius Goring, one the screen's best villains, is ideal as both twin brothers, who go from Paris to London from one cheap tour, theatre, or hall to another The sleaze of second rate English and French entertainment and the people who made it so, has never been captured with more realism.