I've finally seen the MGM Romeo and Juliet

Pretty much everybody does Shakespeare plays in their high school English classes, although which plays depends on the teacher. In my case one year we did Romeo and Juliet, and supplemented it by watching the Franco Zeffirelli version from the late 1960s. I've known for a long time that MGM did a version in the 1930s in response to Warner Bros. making A Midsummer Night's Dream, but for various reasons I hadn't ever gotten around to seeing this 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet in its entirety. So when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar, I finally recorded it and watched it to do a post on here.

Now, with a movie like Romeo and Juliet, pretty much everybody already knows the story. Romeo Montague (played here by Leslie Howard) and Juliet Capulet (played by Norma Shearer) are adolescents (more on that later) from families where the older generation are rivals with a sort of blood-lust in the medieval Italian city of Verona. But Romeo and Juliet meet at a masquerade ball without knowing who each other is, and most definitely not knowing that the other is from that rival family who is supposed to be off limits. So they fall in love and meet each other surreptitiously, at least until Juliet's father (C. Aubrey Smith) insists on marrying Juliet off to somebody of an appropriate social standing who is not a Montague. Juliet's attempt to get out of this arranged marriage leads to tragedy.

Since the story is already known, any attempt to review a Shakespearean movie comes down to other factors. First up is the casting. I think I mentioned when I posted about A Midsummer Night's Dream ages ago that Warner Bros. was able to use mostly more classically-trained actors for the "serious" roles, while putting a lot of their contract players into Nick Bottom's acting troupe. MGM didn't quite achieve that, notably in the opening scene where hey have Edna May Oliver as Juliet's nurse and Andy Devine of all people as the nurse's assistant. Devine's character who is the Capulet who kicks off the fight in the opening scene between the Capulets and Montagues, is more of a man-child, especially in the medieval wardrobe.

Many of the main characters are way too old for the parts by cinematic standards, although back in the day it wasn't as uncommon on the live stage for people a few years older than the parts to be playing roles like Romeo and Juliet. Traveling stage companies wouldn't have had a 15-year-old girl available to play Julet. Shearer doesn't come off badly, while Howard has no difficulty with Shakespearean dialogue although he decidedly looks way too old. Ditto John Barrymore as Mercutio. Basil Rathbone as Tybalt is another one who can handle the dialog, and got an Oscar nomination for his trouble.

The production design is lovely, which is no less than can be expected from a studio like MGM. For music, much as Warner Bros. turned to Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, MGM also turned to pre-existing classical music; in this case mostly from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. Unsurprisingly the music works well.

In the final analysis, MGM did about as well as could be expected from a Hollywood studio in trying to make Shakespeare, although you can see why Hollywood studios would start staying away from Shakespeare for a while. But, it's also not quite to the standard that Warner Bros. had set with A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A Star Is Born (1954)

A Star Is Born is one of those classic Hollywood tales that's been don a bunch of times: four under that title, and some would argue that the 1932 film What Price Hollywood? is pretty much the same story. I haven't seen the most recent remake with Lady Gaga, although I think I've done posts on the 1930s and 1970s A Star is Born as well as What Price Hollywood? I saw that the 1954 version starring Judy Garland is on tonight at 8:00 PM, so I watched it off my DVR to do a sort of review on it.

Now, I call it a sort of review because this is the sort of film where I'd guess most people already know the story. Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) is struggling in her career until she's seen by Hollywood star Norman Maine (James Mason) who is painting the town red for the umpteenth time. Maine gets Esther a screen test, and she eventually changes her name to Vicki Lester, becomes a star, and marries Norman. But as Vicki's career rises, Norman drinks more, until the tragic ending.

So, in discussing this version, I think it's a bit better to talk about some of the things that distinguish it from previous versions. The first one is that as the movie opens, Esther is already a singer in a big band, with a maybe-boyfriend in Danny McGuire (Tommy Noonan). Esther having to suffer in the Dakotas during the Depression but with a grandmother with a heart of gold who helps Esther get to Hollywood isn't here at all. (Indeed, the May Robson character is totally written out.) I think that having Esther already have at least a halfway successful career isn't such a good choice. I couldn't help but think of her traveling singer in comparison to the one her real-life daughter Liza Minnelli goes on to play in New York, New York, where it doesn't seem to be that bad a career.

Judy Garland being a singer, there are a lot of musical numbers for her to perform, as that's a talent she definitely had as opposed to Janet Gaynor. Fans of Judy Garland's singing will obviously love the plethora of musical numbers. I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of Garland's singing. The songs help push the movie out to a shade under three hours, which includes a few minutes here and there of production stills with the dialogue track. This last conceit, however, is not like the "restored" version of Greed which added on a good 100 minutes of production stills.

On the plus side is the casting of Charles Bickford in the role of studio boss Oliver Niles, a character played by Adolphe Menjou and done reasonably well. Bickford doesn't have quite the elegance that Menjou always did, although I think that for the dark story line that's something that works even better. Bickford has a sort of bitter elder statesman dignity that I don't think Menjou did. Jack Carson gets a beefed-up role as the publicity agent and is good, although there's that one scene where he's gratuitously nasty to Norman Maine. A reading of the 1937 synopsis points out that the scene is in that movie too, although I didn't remember it, probably because the publicity agent there was played by Lionel Stander who is much lower down the status list than Jack Carson was.

Personally, I prefer the 1937 A Star is Born, but I'm sure many people will greatly enjoy tonight's showing of the 1954 version.

Gene Kelly does Rashomon

One of those movies that shows up often enough on TCM because it's an MGM picture, but that I never actually watched before, is Les Girls. With that in mind, I recorded it the last time it was on. It's getting another airing tomorrow (Feb. 21) at 10:15 AM, so now is a good time to watch the movie and do the post on it here.

The movie opens up in London, as a Lady Wren (Kay Kendall) is on trial for libel. She's written her memoirs, and one of the people she discusses in those memoirs, Angèle Ducros (Taina Elg) is none too pleased about what the good Lady wrote. Hence the lawsuit, which is making big news. Now, somewhat oddly to me although I don't know the finer points of British civil law in this regard, it's the defendant who's on the stand first.

Flash back several years to Paris (this being a civil trial it's happening in London because presumably the book was published there with with Lady Wren being British). Lady Wren is not yet Lady Wren, but a young woman with the given name Sybil who is a dancer and singer in a follies-type show that Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly) has been putting on called Les Girls. Also in the show is Barry himself, as well as American Joy Henderson (Mitzi Gaynor). They need a third woman, and Barry eventually picks Angèle. Now, one of Barry's rules is that the women are going to have to leave the show if they get married, since he understands that juggling marriage and being on the road just isn't going to work. Despite the fact that Sybil is already being pursued by Sir Gerald Wren, it's Angèle who is currently closest to getting married, to Pierre Ducros (Jacques Bergerac). There's also the question of Barry, as Sybil claims Barry is a playboy and that Angèle is interested in him. Angèle can't have Barry, of course, and in Sybil's telling of the story, the somewhat flighty Angèle eventually tries to commit suicide by turning on the gas as a result.

Now, of course, we know that the suicide attempt didn't succeed, and that both Sybil and Angèle will wind up married to the men who were pursuing them at the beginning of the movie, since everything is told in flashback. But, in any case, Sybil having put forward her story in evidence, it's time for Angèle to take the stand. She unsurprisingly has a somewhat different story. Sybil liked to drink, and despite having to keep Sir Gerald a secret, she's also trying to go after Barry. She's not, but that's a little white lie Joy and Angèle cooked up to keep Gerald from seeing his fiancée drunk. That lie causes other problems, of course. The troupe tries to fix things by taking a sojourn to Spain, but Sybil's drinking is enough of a problem that Barry is going to have to let her go, which leads Sybil, not Angèle, to try to commit suicide.

As you can see, these two stories are diametrically opposed, so to try to solve the case, the judge brings in someone more or less neutral in all this: Barry Nichols himself, who's flown in from America. We get the impression that if he's interested in any of Les Girls, it's Joy, since he's got pictures of her in his apartment. When he learns that both Sybil and Angèle have suitors, and the suitors approach him to try to come up with a way to solve the problem without hurting the women, Barry does something that reveals what really happened in Paris, and in a way that all of the principals are more or less happy in the end.

I've said before that I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, although when it comes to those that I prefer it tends to be the backstage musical, since at least in those cases the reasons for having the musical numbers makes more sense. Les Girls is most certainly in that vein, and coming up with a dramatic structure that's much like Rashomon is a very bright idea indeed. To be honest, the musical numbers here aren't the most memorable, with the exception of one between Kelly and Gaynor where he's parodying Marlon Brando in The Wild One. That aside, Les Girls also works as a 1950s version of the courtroom comedy, with enjoyable performances from all the main players.

Little Women (1933)

I seem to have copies of a surprising number of movies in Summer Under the Stars this year that I haven't blogged about before. Another one coming up, for Katharine Hepburn's day, is the 1933 version of Little Women, tomorrow (August 18) at 9:30 AM.

Now, I have to admit that before doing this post, I had not read the novel by Louisa May Alcott on which this and the other movie versions is based. Nor had I watched any of the movie versions all the way through, although I had seen parts of at least the 1949 version that has Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Lawford in the cast. But I did know vaguely of the plot, namely that it deals with the struggles of the four March sisters in Massachusetts during the Civil War while their father is off serving the Union Army.

The sisters are Jo (short for Josephine, played by Katharine Hepburn), Meg (Frances Dee), Beth (Jean Parker) and Amy (Joan Bennett). Meg, the eldest, is making some extra money for the family by working as a seamstress. Jo is a bit of a tomboy and dreams of becoming a professional writer. Amy is the youngest and just finishing her education, while Beth is musically inclined. They live with their mother (Spring Byington), while also having an Aunt (Edna May Oliver) who is better off and exerts a bit of control on the family although she's not the villain of the piece by any means. There's really no villain here.

The Marches live next door to Mr. Laurence (Henry Stephenson) but aren't all that close to him. The relationship is about to change, however, when his grandson Laurie (Douglass Montgomery) arrives from Europe and spends some time with grandfather. All the girls are taken by this handsome young man, but obviously, no more than one of the girls can have him. Laurie also has a tutor, John Brooke, which gives another man for the girls to go gaga over.

The war hits home for the family when news reaches them that Dad has been injured and is at an army hospital in Washington; eventually he comes home although he's never a major character. Beth has gotten sick by this time and there's some fear that she's going to die. Jo eventually goes off to New York to try to make it as a writer, where she meets German professor Baer (Paul Lukas), and those two may or may not wind up becoming romantically involved if Jo can't have Laurie.

Little Women is more episodic than having an overriding plot, and this telling of the tale really puts the emphasis on Jo since it's Katharine Hepburn in that part. Hepburn is, unsurprisingly, a force of nature here, and to me that force is not always appropriate. At times it works quite well, but sometimes it's just too much.

The movie has production values that are quite good for 1933, although this sort of period material is stuff that modern productions can do without making it look quite so backlot-bound. Still, for a 1930s literary adaptation, this version of Little Women does quite well.

Another of those "Not best suited to MGM" movies

I've mentioned before how MGM was one of the top studios in the pre-TV era of Hollywood, but also how certain types of movies didn't really work at MGM because the studio seemed incapabale of making a movie not be glossy. Another movie that I think fits into that mold is the melodrama A Life of Her Own.

The movie starts off with Lily Brannel James (Lana Turner) taking a taxi in her small city (I'd call it a small town, but the buildings are too big for that) to the train station to catch a train to New York City where she's bound to make it big, and everybody in town knows it. Or at least, that's the sort of town it is. In the next scene, Lily is already in New York, sitting in the waiting room of the modeling agency run by Tom Caraway (Tom Ewell). She has to wait a while to get Tom's attention, but he does hire. Coming into the office at the same time is veteran model Mary Ashlon (Ann Dvorak), whose career has passed its peak.

The two wind up going out on the town together that night, making it a double date with lawyer Jim (Louis Calhern) and ad exec Lee (Barry Sullivan). Mary has too much to drink and winds up back in her upper-floor apartment with Lily, chewing Lily out on the grounds that Mary thinks Lily is trying to take her boyfriend away from her. The next morning, Lily walks into the office to hear all the other models talking about the news that Mary has killed herself by jumping out of her apartment window!

Since Lana Turner is the star of the movie, we know that she's going to make it as a model; as she starts to climb the ladder of success, she's accompanied by Jim, who sort of takes Lily under his wing. Meanwhile, he has a client, Steve Harleigh (Ray Milland), who is a copper miner from Montana and visiting New York on business reasons. Steve and Lily spend time together on a purely platonic basis since he's already married and realize that they can never have a real relationship even though they do start developing feelings for each other. So they part as friend when Steve goes back home.

Except that business is going to bring Steve back to New York, and this time he's even unhappier than he was the first time he was in New York. Steve may have fallen out of love with his wife Nora (Margaret Phillips), but then we learn what really happened between Steve and Nora: the two of them got in a car accident that was Steve's fault but it was Nora who wound up an invalid. To make matters worse, Nora decides to come out to New York since she hasn't seen him in a while and his birthday is coming up. Lily is the one who's going to be left out. Or will she make Steve and Nora confront the truth?

Part of the problem with A Life of Her Own is that it's the sort of melodrama that would have been better suited to Warner Bros. instead of MGM, where everyone can't help but be a bit too high-class for the material. But another part of the problem with the movie is that it was made while the Production Code was still utterly in effect. The material here really needed to be handled differently, but any of the ways to make it work better would have run up against the Code Office. (Indeed, reading up on the movie, the Office had issues with earlier drafts of the screenplay.) The cast tries hard, and it's not as if the movie is bad by any means. It's more that it's not quite right.

Still, A Life of Her Own probably deserves being seen in part to see how the Production Code could screw up a movie and in part for the professionalism of all involved.

Bhowani Junction

I mentioned recently that MGM was good at literary adaptations, especially when the studio got the chance to be glossy. As the 1950s and Cinemascope came around, they also weren't bad at location shooting. A film that fits into the latter category is Bhowani Junction.

The opening titles inform us that MGM would like to thank the government of Pakistan for allowing the studio to use one of Pakistan's railway lines as well as a regiment of the Pakistani army. The movie was made a bit less than a decade after India gained its independence from the UK and was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Since the region in the 1950s wasn't that cinematically interesting, we go back to 1947, or just before independence. Stewart Granger plays Rodney Savage, a colonel in the British Army who has just been called back to the UK. He's trying to get a mixed-race woman, Victoria Jones (Ava Gardner), to go back to the UK with him, and as he steps onto the train, cue up the flashback as to why he wants to take her back to the UK....

Britain had always used locals to help run their colonies, and with the sheer number of political subdivisions in India, this made things fractious. Things became even tougher for the Brits once they were sucked into World War II, and the Indians, under Gandhi, took their opportunity to step up the pressure on the British. Col. Savage is stationed at Bhowani, site of an important railway junction. This is where he meets Victoria, who's father is a British railway engineer who married a local woman and had a mixed-race child.

Victoria meets one of the superintendents at the railway station, Patrick Taylor (Bill Travers), who like her is mixed-race. Both of them realize the problems this presents for them, as they get the sense that they won't fit in to the new India once it becomes independent, while at the same time they know that the upper-class British represented by people like Col. Savage will look down upon them should she go to England after Indian independence. And especially so in Patrick's case there's the dilemma of whether to be faithful to his employer in the railroad, or to throw his lot in with the independence activists who are trying to disrupt the railroad. Savage has a lot fewer qualms about who to treat those who would disrupt the railroad.

And then one of Savage's men, Capt. McDaniel, runs into Victoria one night. He too is taken with her beauty, and tries to force himself on her. Victoria tries to defend herself, but winds up killing McDaniel in the process and finding herself in need of protection by the other Indians. The independence campaign grows more violent, and now they have a pawn in Victoria....

Bhowani Junction is a movie that's beautifully filmed, although one wonders how much resemblance it bears to the real situation in India just before independence. There's also the question of casting Ava Gardner as a mixed-race Anglo-Indian. Some people hew to the idea that a mixed-race character can only really be played by someone of the non-white half of the race. I'm not really one of those people, but at the same time I recognize that some stars would be much less plausible than others trying to play mixed-race. (Imagine if MGM had tried to cast Debbie Reynolds as Victoria.)

The story in Bhowani Junction is absorbing enough for what it is, although again I have a feeling some people are going to have a decided problem with the way it tackles (or sidesteps; this is MGM, after all) difficult issues. At the same time, Hollywood of the mid-1950s was probably never going to come up with something truly authentic. In that light, Bhowani Junction definitely succeeds within its genre. Whether that genre is to your particular case is another issue.

Rockabye

Back in August, Constance Bennett was selected for Summer Under the Stars, and I pointed out that I had watched one of her movies scheduled that day, Rockabye, some time back, with the plan of watching it again for the next time it showed up on TCM. Well, it's on again tomorrow (Feb. 6) at 9:00 AM as part of a day of Joel McCrea's movies, so now is a good time to do a longer post on it.

Constance Bennett is clearly the star here, not McCrea. She plays Judy Carroll, a stage actress with a complicated personal life. She's hoping to adopt a child, but she's made the mistake of having an affair with a corrupt politician, Al Howard (Walter Pidgeon in an early role). He's now on trial, and her testifying against him causes her to lose custody of the child she was hoping to adopt. Her manager, Antonie (Paul Lukas, also in an early role), suggests that she go off to Europe for a while until the scandal dies down. She's got a public that will forgive her, an dafter a suitable absence she can go back on the stage. Another of the complications in Judy's personal life is that Antoine has always held a flame for Judy, even though Judy has apparently seen the relationship as professional, not personal.

While in Europe, Judy reads a play called Rockabye, and thinks it would be perfect for her, although Antoine doesn't really hold the same opinion. Judy gets the reasonable idea of contacting the playwright, Jacob van Riker Pell (Joel McCrea); perhaps he can help convince Antoine that Judy is right for the part. Jacob is hesitant at first, although as more of Judy's back story is revealed, he begins to realize that perhaps Judy might be right for the part after all.

But we need some more personal complications for Judy, and the obvious one is that Judy is going to begin to fall in love with Jacob, and this time, the feeling is mutual. Here, though, there's another catch. Jacob is married, although it's a loveless marriage, and Jacob is trying to get a divorce. Perhaps once the divorce is final, Judy and Jacob can get married, and then they'll have a nice respectable relationship.

In any case, rehearsals for the play Rockabye go on, and eventually the play has its premiere on Broadway, even though Jacob doesn't show up for the after-show party. That's because there are yet more complications in Jacob's relationship....

Rockabye the movie is one of those movies that to me feels like a decided product of its time. Not so much 1932 as part of the pre-Code era, but 1932 as before even World War II started liberating women, never mind the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The film's central conceit, that Judy's personal life is somehow career-ending scandalous, seems a bit quaint 90 years on. Nowadays, I don't think people would care that much if a Judy-like actress had a complicated personal life and then fell in love with a married playwright.

Having said that, however, the performances are adequate, and Rockabye is certainly an interesting look at a time that was completely different. As they like to say, the past is like a different country.

Toxic femininity

Hollywood made a lot of movies with idle rich women in the 1930s. How grounded in reality the are or aren't is an interesting topic for discussion, but in any case the genre probably reached its peak with the 1939 movie The Women.

Norma Shearer is the innocent little deer in the headlights, playing Mary Haines, a woman happily married to Steven, who is unseen because the movie's gimmick is that every part in the movie is played by a woman, even the animals as studio publicity back in 1939 would have had you believe. Not even Grant Mitchell, who was in seemingly every other movie Hollywood made in the 1930s, shows up here. But we don't see Mary first. Instead, we see a high-end beauty salon where women go with their little murse dogs and get everything from haircuts to mud baths to exercise on 1930s equipment. They also gossip incessantly, and the latest bit of gossip is that Stephen Haines is seeing a shop girl, Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford).

Mary's cousin Sylvia (Rosalind Russell), also married, is catty, and decides to make certain the gossip spreads in a way that Mary is bound to hear it, ultimately getting Mary to go to the same salon and see the same manicurist from whom Sylvia heard the juicy gossip. Wow what a piece of work. Mary's mom (Lucile Watson), the one sensible woman in the movie, advises Mary to do nothing but wait and eventually Stephen will stop straying. If he really is, I don't know that that would be the best advice, but I'm not the person to ask for advice on matters of romance anyway. In any case, the two go to Bermuda for a vacation.

Things haven't changed much when Mary gets back, and at a fashion show, she finally meets Crystal and finds out that the rumors of Crystal and Stephen's seeing each other are true. It winds up in the gossip columns (although the one scene where it's on the front page seems thoroughly unrealistic). This is what finally gets Mary to decide she's going to go to Reno and get a divorce, much to the sorrow of her daughter also named Mary (Virginia Weidler).

Mary goes to a place in Reno that's specifically set up for women looking to get a divorce, letting them stay there until the divorce goes through, and run by straight-talking Lucy (Marjorie Main). Also there are Countess (Mary Boland), who goes through one husband after another; a chorus girl Miriam (Paulette Goddard); and, surprisingly, Mary's good friend Peggy (Joan Fontaine). Even more surprising is that Sylvia eventually shows up, and it turns out that Sylvia's husband is planning to get married to a chorus girl... who just happens to be Miriam.

Eventually Mary's divorce goes through and she seems to be reasonably happy living the single life with her mom and daughter. Crystal seems happy too, but daughter Mary is mighty unhappy and passive-aggressive toward her step-mother. Clearly she's learned from all the other adult women in her life.

There's a lot to like about The Women, but there are also things that aren't going to appeal to everybody. Anybody who's had to put up with other people's gossip in real life knows that it's exhausting, and do you really want to spend 130 minutes watching a fictionalized version of it? There's certainly quite a few moments of comedy here, and the performances are all well done, but part of me wanted to shake these women the way Bette Davis does to Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance and tell them to shut up already. They're not nearly as clever as they think they are.

Still, because of the movie's reputation, The Women is a movie that definitely ought to be watched by anybody who's a fan of old movies.

Our Worses

Some time back, TCM ran the film adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham play Our Betters. Not having seen it before, I decided to record it and eventually watch it to do a review on here.

Constance Bennett plays Pearl Saunders, an American heiress who marries Lord Grayston (Alan Mowbray, seen only at the beginning of the movie), in part for his title; he's married her for her money because he's one of those British nobles who have lost most of their money (see Gosford Park for an example). Pearl, now Lady Grayston, decides that she's going to shake up the joint, so to speak, by doing her own thing and causing a general scandal among the members of Britain's smart set nobility

Some years later, Lady Grayston is in the same position as her husband as he's spent most of the money. She's also taken on a paramour in the form of Arthur Fenwick (Minor Watson). She decides to introduce her kid sister Bessie (Anita Louise), who's come over from America, to her new social circle and possibly marry Bessie off into the circle. Bessie, for her part, had a fiancé back in America in the form of Fleming Harvey (Charles Starrett).

So Lady Grayston hosts one of those weekend-long parties (again, see Gosford Park) for a couple of her friends and the men in their lives. The Duchess Minnie (Violet Kemble-Cooper) is being pursued by Pepi (a very young Gilbert Roland); Lord Harry (Hugh Sinclair) is there for Lady Grayston to introduce to Bessie; there's a princess (Phoebe Foster) and an American businessman Thornton Clay (Grant Mitchell).

Pepi winds up wooing Lady Grayston and the two go off for a tryst in the teahouse; Minnie is unsurprisingly pissed and sends Bessie to go off and find her sister with Pepi, which understandably pisses off Bessie, who no longer wants any part of this lifestyle. Lady Grayston and Minnie are generally bitches to each other for reasons that I couldn't quite fathom.

The big problem that I had with Our Betters is that it's way too talky, and complicated enough that it could use a second viewing to figure out everything that's going on. The fact that few of the characters are very sympathetic doesn't help either. One high spot is the final scene, with the dance instructor brought from London, who is played as the sort of incredibly stereotypical gay that you wonder how it could have gotten done even in the pre-Code days of 1933.

Our Betters is another of those movies that would probably benefit from being on a box set; I think there are enough adaptations of Maugham's work in the Turner Library (after all, they have The Letter from Warner Bros. and The Painted Veil from MGM) to pull it off. Instead, I could only find it on a standalone DVD from the Warner Archive.

Let's talk about sex during the Production Code!

Shelley Winters was TCM's Star of the Month a few months back. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before is The Chapman Report, so I recorded that and recently sat down to watch it.

Dr. George Chapman (Andrew Duggan) and his assistant Paul Radford (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) are flying from the east coast out to Los Angeles in order to continue their scientific research, which is on the subject of human sexuality. Specifically, they want to do research into the sex lives of women, somthing which would have been a fairly controversial subject back in the early 1960s (and, you'd think -- rightly, in my view -- difficult to discuss with the Production Code still in effect).

Cut to a series of suburban women, all of whom plan to go to a lecture Chapman is giving about his research. This lecture is also a forum to call for volunteers, who are being handled in a very discreet way, or at least that's the intention. They'll all get ID numbers that aren't tied to their names in any way (indeed, they're not supposed to sign the cards they fill out); they'll do the interviews behind screens so that the researchers interviewing them won't be able to see them, and the like. The four women who form the main part of the movie are:

Kathleen Barclay (Jane Fonda). She was married to a test pilot who unfortunately died in an accident, leaving her a widow for the past three years. She's moved back in with Dad, and the two are busy editing her late husband's memoir, trying to turn it into a book in some way that might possibly sell. She's frigid because she was a virgin when she got married, and then when she didn't perform well for her husband, he treated her less than admirably.

Sarah Garnell (Shelley Winters). She's in a conventional marriage to Frank (Harold Stone) with two children, but one that's hit a rut with her being bored by the relative lack of sex. So she's started getting romantically involved with Fred (Ray Danton), a director who works at the community theater that middle-aged housewives like Sarah were wont to take part in.

Naomi Shields (Claire Bloom). She's a divorcée, who suffers from an extremely high libido. As such, she started having sex at a relatively young age, and having it with a succession of guys. She got married (we never see her ex-husband), and had a series of affairs. Indeed, one of the first times we see her, she meets the bottled-water man (a young Chad Everett) delivering to her house; not long after that, a musician brings her some mail that was mistakenly delivered to him; this starts a disastrous relationship.

Teresa Harnish (Glynis Johns). She's happily married to Geoffrey (John Dehner), working with him to put out an audiobook of recorded poetry or somesuch. She starts recording her interview, which seems like a huge no-no, and gets the distinct impression that, while she's happily married as far as she knows, the interviewers are going to find it boring. So when a group of football players led by Ed Kraski (Ty Hardin) accidentally cross her path at the beach, she decides to start pursuing Ed, although things don't wind up the way she imagines.

While Naomi's story winds up in melodramatic disaster, as though she could have been one of the characters in a movie like The Best of Everything; Teresa's goes more humorously wrong. And frankly, this dichotomy is part of the problem with the movie. If everything had been handled as more of a light drama or a comedy in the sense that the later Sex and the Single Girl was, the movie might not be such a mess. However, director George Cukor and the writers wanted this to be a serious drama.

As I mentioned, back in the early 1960s you still couldn't really talk that openly about sex. So trying to talk about the serious issues that the Bloom and Fonda characters have is very difficult if not impossible. Well, maybe only impossible to make something good out of the material. In Fonda's case, it doesn't help that there's a serious violation of scientific research ethics that drives the plot. What works better is Winters' storyline, and even more so the more comic Johns storyline. She comes off as the best of the bunch.

I suppose, not having even been born back when The Chapman Report was made, that it should be viewed as a product of its time. It's just a product that's doomed by the constraints of the time.

The Lady of the Camellias

Where yesterday's selection Our Time showed a young, naïve love, today's selection shows a rather more craven kind of love: the 1936 version of Camille.

Greta Garbo plays the lady of the camellias, named not Camille but Marguerite. She lives in the Paris of 1847 (just before the revolution of 1848 that brought Napoleon III to power but which isn't mentioned here; I couldn't do a good enough calculation of how long the events in the movie are spaced out to determine when it ended), where women of her sort woo wealthy men. Her matchmaker -- to use a polite term -- Prudence (Laura Hope Crews) is taking her to a theater where it's hoped she'll meet the wealthy Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell).

Unfortunately, she mistakes another man, Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), for de Varville. The two like each other, but he's only a diplomat's son and so of just moderate wealth. Armand falls in love with Marguerite, but he's not going to be able to support her in the manner to which she is accustomed.

The Baron, of course, could, but he's not going to marry her, especially when he knows what kind of woman she really is. In addition to being in love with another man, she's also a spendthrift, constantly owing money because she wants to spend on herself and even more so help others when possible. Armand's father (Lionel Barrymore) knows that Marguerite is financial bad news for Armand, but when he meets Marguerite he realizes that the two are in real, if doomed, love.

That doom isn't just because of Marguerite's profligate ways, but also because she has consumption, which in those days mean an early death, especially if Marguerite is living it up as she is. Armand and the Baron come in and out of Marguerite's life, until the three legs of the love triangle all meet at the opening of a new gambling club in Paris. Armand wins the money to pay Marguerite's debts off of the Baron in a game of baccarat, but it leads to a duel between Armand and the Baron which ultimately forces Armand to leave France. Will he be able to return before the consumption takes Marguerite?

Well, you can probably guess that the answer to that last question is yes, but that Armand sure won't be able to save Marguerite. Camille is the sort of movie that MGM was really good at making during Irving Thalberg's lifetime. It's got excellent production values, and a story and performances that I'm sure audiences of the 1930s loved.

However, watching it 80-plus years later, I realize that it's not exactly my cup of tea, as I felt like a whole lot of nothing was happening. Still, it's easy to see the quality of the movie, so I have no qualms about recommending it for people who know what they're getting into. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, should you wish to watch for yourself.

A Double Life

I had always wanted to see A Double Life ever since I saw it on those lists of Oscar-winners, this one for Ronald Colman as Best Actor. TCM ran it back in July when they had Colman as their Star of the Month, and I DVRed it and finally got around to watching it since it's available on DVD.

Colman plays Anthony John, a stage actor who's popular with the audiences as his current comedy, The Gentleman's Gentleman, is a big hit. But we learn already in the opening scenes through whisperings from people who know him that he can be a difficult person to be with as he's very intense and has a tendency to get too much into his characters. Indeed, part of this is why his ex-wife Brita (Signe Hasso) divorced him, even though the two remain good friends.

Anyhow, the current play is going to be closing, as Anthony's producer Max Lasker (Philip Loeb) has a brilliant idea to have Anthony do Shakespeare's Othello. Those whisperings about Anthony's becoming too much like his characters is an issue, but everybody blithely ignores it. Except for Anthony himself, who can't ignore it because he finds that acting and the characters he plays constantly intrude on real life to the point that you'd have to question his sanity. Somebody get this guy a shrink. Anthony even goes off with another women, waitress Pat (Shelley Winters), who notices right away that Anthony is f***ing nuts. It would have been simple enough for him to say that he's an actor to gets a little too much into his characters, but nooooo, he couldn't do that.

Anyhow, Othello becomes a stage hit, held over for months and months, even though Anthony already starts having more issues at the party after opening night. And then during one performance of the climactic scene, one which requires Othello to strangle Desdemona (played by Brita) before killing her with a kiss, Anthony throttles Brita to the point that she fears for her health and a doctor is called in. At this point, the film starts to go a bit off the rails, about which I can't really explain more without giving away major plot points.

It's easy to see why, on watching A Double Life, why Colman was awarded the Best Actor Oscar. Colman is really good, not just at Shakespeare, for which he's got a great appearance and voice; he's great at playing the guy losing his sanity if he ever had any to lose in the first place. But I found the final third of the movie to be fraught with plot holes. If Anthony is going nuts already on opening night, wouldn't it be far worse as the play goes on and on and on? And Shakespeare revivals get that long of a run? Also, a journalist and Anthony's press agent Bill (Edmond O'Brien) both get make ridiculous leaps of logic that are needed to advance the plot. Speaking of Bill, Brita mentions him as her new partner during one of his rages; or, at least, she gives this name to Anthony and a couple of scenes imply Brita and Bill are more than just friends. But when Brita mentions Bill to Anthony in that scene, he acts as though he has no idea who this Bill is!

Overall, A Double Life is one of those movies I'm really glad I finally got around to seeing. Fans of good acting will love Colman's performance, and I'd bet fans of the stage will probably enjoy it too. But it's one of those I won't be going out of my way to watch a second time.