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.

Vol de nuit

A movie that airs fairly rarely on TCM despite being an MGM movie is Night Flight. The movie is based on a novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is better remembered for The Little Prince but, having been a pilot himself, wrote books about aviation. Part of the reason for the movie' infrequency on TCM is that for decades it was in rights limbo. I only got to see part of it when it first aired a dozen years or so ago, so was thrilled to see it show up again on TCM to be able to record it and do a post here.

The theme, as you can guess, if flying at night, which is commonplace enough today but in the early days of aviation when instruments weren't so good was a much more risky proposition. MGM got the rights to the book and immediately set about coming up with an all-star cast to fill the roles. The beginning of the movie, however, seemingly has nothing to do with aviation as a mother is worried sick at a hospital in Rio de Janerio in Brazil where her kid is sick with a case of infantile paralysis (polio). However, the doctors find out that there's no serum anywhere in Rio, or in fact anywhere this side of the Andes, which means that the serum is going to have to be flown in special delivery from Santiago. And as luck would have it, the Trans-Andean European Air Mail company, run by Rivière (John Barrymore) is just about to institute flights by night to get mail -- and small packages like polio serum -- out faster. Tasked with flying from Santiago over the Andes to Buenos Aires, where another plain picks up everything from points west and south, is Pellerin (Robert Mongtomery).

Rivière is, unsurprisingly, a strict taskmaster. In his defense, that's in part because he has an exceedingly tight schedule to meet. Everything has to get in to Buenos Aires in time for the plane to Recife in northeastern Brazil to take off and meet a French cargo ship there, as that's the closest main port in South America to Africa, from where planes take off to Africa toward Europe. Although Rivière runs the company, he's not the President, and is up against the President and others who don't want to take the risk that planes might not be able to make it through the night to Buenos Aires.

Pellerin isn't the only pilot whose flight is chronicled. There's also Fabian (Clark Gable), who is flying out of Punta Arenas in the south of Chile together with a radio operator. Their flight takes them over the southernmost part of the Andes before getting to the ports on the Atlantic side of Argentina and making their way up the coast. However, this flight finds itself getting into weather issues that push them off course and threaten the make the flight too long for how much fuel they have on board. And, in addition to having to contend with the company president, Rivière also has to deal with Fabian's terrified wife (Helen Hayes), who just knows something is wrong.

Since the beginning of the movie dealt with a sick child in Rio de Janeiro, and all the planes land in Buenos Aires, there's also going to be a flight from Buenos Aires to Rio. That pilot is a Brazilian, played by William Gargan, and like Fabian, he's got a worried wife (played by Myrna Loy). Rounding out the cast is Robineau (Lionel Barrymore), a former police inspector now dishing out discipline for Rivière.

All of the subplots in Night Flight are reasonably well handled, and yet for some reason the movie feels a bit less than the sum of its parts. I guess that's in part because there are so many stars and a relatively brief running time of under 90 minutes. There's not quite enough time for the characters to be well-developed, particularly Robert Montgomery's pilot. Still, Night Flight is a worthwhile watch with MGM bringing all the production values it could to what for the viewing public of 1933 would have been a novel topic.

Don't forget the 1920 version

One of the TCM programming features this month that I didn't discuss before was one looking at the way Hollywood treated themes before and after the introduction of the Production Code in July 1934. Every Monday evening they've been having blocks of movies with pairs of thematically similar films. Tonight (July 22), that includes the two famous sound versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: first, the 1932 Fredric March version at 11:30 PM, followed at 1:15 AM by the 1941 Spencer Tracy version. Not airing, as it doesn't fit the programming theme, is the 1920 silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring John Barrymore as Robert Louis Stevenson's doomed scientist/doctor. But I had that one on my DVR, so I watched it to be able to review it in conjunction with the airing of the other two versions.

The only bad thing about trying to do a synopsis of a movie like this is that it's based on a work where pretty much everybody knows the basic story, or at least thinks they know the basic story. (I've seen the two sound versions before, but it's been years.) One thing I didn't know is that the movies are actually generally based on a stage adaptation, which has some significant differences from Stevenson's original book. But the basic plot is there.

John Barrymore, as I mentioned, plays Dr. Jekyll, who at the beginning of the movie is a paragon of virtue, working as a doctor and spending a considerable amount of time doing charitable work among the poor people of 1880s London. Jekyll has a belief that every man has within him two natures, one good and one evil. He's thinking that it would be a wonderful thing for mankind if a way could be figured out to split those two natures, such that we could cast out the evil nature and leave ourselves with the good one, although frankly to me a world in which we're incapable of having wrongthought sounds horrifying.

Dr. Lanyon, one of Jekyll's colleagues, doesn't agree with Jekyll, who decides he's going to go and do some research to come up with that way to split the natures. He also tells his friend Sir George Carewe about it. Sir George is also the father of Millicent, who is in love with Dr. Jekyll, just like in all the later versions. Like Lanyon, Sir George doesn't believe any of this is possible.

Of course, in Stevenson's world, all of this is in fact possible, as we wouldn't have a movie otherwise -- or, at least, we'd get a lot of slow space like in Madame Curie before the Curies figure out what radium is. Jekyll experiments, and eventually comes up with a potion that he tries on himself, because it would be unethical to try on anybody else. The potion actually works, turning Jekyll into what he calls Mr. Hyde, and also dramtically changing Jekyll's physical appearance. Hyde, however, keeps coming back, and Hyde's violent nature causes all sorts of problems.

This version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, being from 1920, has some advantages and disadvantages that are a result of being that old. Technically, they couldn't do as much with effects in 1920 as they'd be able to do in later decades. Barrymore has to show the transition as much if not more with acting than make up compared to the later Jekylls, and unsurprisingly, Barrymore is able to pull this off. A positive is that in 1920, and especially with a stage actor like John Barrymore, there wasn't quite as much need for the studio to protect an actor's image. So the movie can go farther with Barrymore and his descent into monstrosity, which is a big plus for a story like this.

One minor negative is the score on the print TCM ran, which to me is quite intrusive and doesn't really work. I suppose you could always turn the sound down since there's no spoken dialogue, or look for another print on your favorite video site, since the movie is in the public domain. Note, however, that various prints have had different running times.

Nothing to do with Hugh Hefner

Somehow, for two straight days I have a movie that's been sitting on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before and that is coming up soon on TCM. This time, the movie in question is one called Playmates, and will appear on TCM tomorrow (April 23) at 6:00 AM.

The movie starts off with a man renting records from a service that pipes in music for businesses sort of like a precursor to Muzak. That man, Peter Lindsay (Peter Lind Hayes) is the press agent for bandleader Kay Kyser (obviously playing himself), who at the time in addition to being a bandleader also hosted a radio show.

In one of the restaurants for which Peter ordered the music, he runs into Lulu Monahan (Patsy Kelly). She's also a press agent, but for actor John Barrymore (again playing himself, in his final film role). Lulu is talking to a local sponsor, trying to get the sponsor to sign up for Barrymore's show in part because, as we'll eventually learn, Barrymore is in serious financial trouble. The sponsor sees Kyser's press agent and realizes that Kyser now has a much bigger audience. With that in mind, Lulu comes up with an audacious idea. Barrymore is (or was) a serious Shakespearean actor, so why not have the two team up with a shtick that Barrymore is going to teach Kyser how to do Shakespeare? Kyser already had a movie or two under his belt by this time, and the way he presented his band was a bit more oriented toward theatrics.

But this being a movie, you know that the two aren't particularly interested in working with each other at first, in part because Barrymore thinks Kay isn't up to Shakespeare, while Kyser is fully willing to accept the fact, what with his North Carolina accent and all. And certainly on the side of Kay's not being suited for Shakespeare is his grandmother (May Robson, 83 years young and still going strong).

And then old flame, female bullfighter Carmen Del Toro (Lupe Velez) shows up, and this gives Barrymore an idea. He still doesn't really want to do the show, so he tries to get Carmen to go after Kay and put a monkey wrench into the works. But Kay finds out what's going on and thinks he's going to come up with a way to get Barrymore off the project. Along the way, there's a lot of music from Kay's orchestra, culminating with a swing music-inspired version of Romeo and Juliet.

Playmates is an absolute mess, in part because of Barrymore's condition at the time he made this very near the end of his life. However, it's also one of those movies where it's easy to see why RKO would take a chance on the material. Kay Kyser was a popular bandleader at the time, and spoof material like this seems like it would work well. Kyser, however, is even less charismatic than Glenn Miller, and the plot is really too unbelievable.

But as always, you should judge for yourself, and there are a few glimpses of the old John Barrymore. That, and May Robson elevates pretty much anything she's in, even in those cases where she was miscast.

Midnight (1939)

A search of the blog reveals that I've never blogged about the Claudette Colbert film Midnight before. It was on TCM not too long ago, so I recorded it in order that I could do a review of it, not having seen it in ages.

Colbert plays Eve Peabody, who at the start of the movie shows up in Paris on a train from Monte Carlo and Nice. She's asleep in third class when the train stops, and the railyard worker who checks to make certain all the passengers have gotten off has to roust her to get her off the train. She also doesn't have any luggage with her, just the very fine gown on her back. Eve, you see, is a chorus girl who likes to gamble, and lost everything she had in Monte Carlo, to the point that she had to pawn her belongings to get to Paris.

Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) is a Hungarian émigré living in Paris and working as a taxi driver. Eve sees him, and makes him an offer. He'll drive her around to all the nightclubs listed in the want ads as looking for singers, and if she gets a job, she'll pay him double the fare; otherwise, he'll have to eat the fare since she doesn't have any money. We get a montage of nighclub neon signs, as Eve finds herself unable to procure employment. But Tibor is already smitten with her, as he buys her dinner and offers her a place to crash for the night as he works the night shift.

Eve has other plans. She escapes to a hoity-toity classical music recital that's by invitation only. Well, she escapes to the outside of it, as she doesn't have an invitation, of course. So when she gets in line to enter, she presents her ticket from the pawn shop, since the guy handling admittance isn't checking the invitations so quickly. They check after everybody is in, and Stephanie, the woman running the concert (Hedda Hopper in a small role) spots the deception, asking if anybody is Eve Peabody, or knows her. The real Eve, of course, says nothing, but another man spots her trying to leave, and takes her into another room.

These are actually several people who would prefer to play bridge than listen to this classical music, among them Marcel, who brought Eve into the room; Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore); Georges' husband Helene (Mary Astor); and Helene's lover Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer). George knows fully well that Helene and Jacques are lovers, but he's not going to grant his wife a divorce, instead looking for a way to break up the relationship. Meanwhile, Eve loses 4000 francs playing bridge, money she doesn't have. Eve, of course, hasn't told these people she's Eve Peabody; instead she claims to be the Baroness Czerny, taking Tibor's name.

Georges, however, does have many, and slips some into Eve's pocketbook. He even books a suite for her at the Ritz so that Jacques won't discover the deception. Of course, he's got a plan for her, and my synopsis giving a bit too much away, you might have figured it out, which is that Georges wants Eve to get Jacques to fall in love with her so that Georges will be able to get Helene back for himself. Eve accepts the offer, because she doesn't really have much choice.

Complicating things is that Tibor would like to find Eve. And he's got the power of thousands of Parisian taxicab drivers on his side, having put up a pool wherein everybody who antes up can get the whole pool by finding Eve. Eventually, he learns that Eve has gone to the Flammarion place out in the country for one of those weekend-long parties in a movie like Gosford Park. And when he goes out there, and finds that Eve is using his name....

If Midnight suffers from one problem, it's one that's not of its own making, but of having been released in 1939. Old movie buffs tend to consider 1939 Hollywood's greatest year, and there are a lot of movies from that year that are better remembered than Midnight, with probably the most notable one for the purposes of this blog post being another Paris-set movie, Ninotchka. It's a bit of a shame, because Midnight is generally a fine movie, although at times the production values feel just slightly less glittering than Ninotchka.

But, in general, the actors all do quite well for themselves, including Monty Woolley as a judge in a divorce-court finale, and the script is excellent too. This later even though the screenwriters, the pair of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, apparently had some problems with Mitchell Leisen's direction -- not that I found anyhing notably wrong with it.

In short, Midnight is one of the underrated films of 1939, and if you haven't seen it, definitely do yourself a favor and watch it.

The Great Man Votes

Another recent movie watch for me was one of John Barrymore's final films, The Great Man Votes.

Set in "An American City, 1923", the movie stars Barrymore as Gregory Vance, who has a job as a night watchman at a factory of some sort. He's also got a drinking problem (surprise, surprise), as Manos (a man with a Greek surname, called Macedonian, and played by Catalonian-born actor Luis Alberni; gotta love Hollywood!), a milkman, is able to supply him with booze, this being Prohibition. Vance gets home to his two children, Joan (Virginia Weidler) and Donald (Peter Holden) who are clearly quite independent since they can take care of themselves overnight, their mother having died.

Before sending the kids off to a public school for which Vance has no respect, he asks his kids about Caesar's adventures in England. Apparently Vance was a professor at Harvard back in the day, and presumably lost his job because of the drinking problem, although I don't think that was mentioned. The other kids at school don't like Joan and Donald, especially Davy McCarthy (Benny Bartlett), who is the son of the local ward-heeler Iron Hat McCarthy (Donald McBride).

Davy tells Dad about what Vance's kids did to him, so Iron Hat responds by getting Vance fired. The kids, meanwhile, worried about getting in trouble, go looking for their mother's family the Ainslees out in the country. They find a well-to-do family that provides the milk for the city, and the Ainslees (Brandon Tynan and Elisabeth Risdon) decide that Vance should give up custody of the kids.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is Election Day. The political bosses have this bizarre belief that the 13th precinct is a bellwether, and if they can deliver that precinct to their candidate, the rest of the city will follow. However, in recent years, the growth of factories has led to the loss of residents from the precinct, to the point that there's only one registered voter left in the precinct -- Gregory Vance. Iron Hat has to go hat in hand to Vance to try to get him to vote for Iron Hat's preferred candidate.

The Great Man Votes is a mish-mash that goes all over the place in terms of plot, with the result being a movie that goes all over the place in terms of quality. Barrymore does quite good, with his overacting being put to good use when he's called on to recite stuff. You get the impression of a slightly pompous man who still means well. But there are plot holes galore. Why the bosses didn't know about the 13th precinct until the night before the election, for example, makes no sense. Vance's character engages in shamless influence peddling for which he should probably go to prison. And on, and on.

I'd seen The Great Man Votes show up on the TCM schedule several times, and always thought it was going to be one of those MGM B movies, which are always competently made if boring because they're just too neat. But it's an RKO, and an interesting if very uneven movie. It's availalbe on DVD from the Warner Archive, although I wish it were a little less expensive.

True Confession

I wanted to watch a relatively short movie the other night so that I could get to bed at a reasonable time, and decided to finish up the movies on the Carole Lombard box set I have by watching True Confession.

Lombard plays Helen Bartlett, a struggling writer married to equally struggling lawyer Kenneth (Fred MacMurray, with an odd mustache here). In the opening scene, we see that Helen is less than fully truthful, as she recommend her husband take up the defense of someone who is guilty as sin. Then she calls up her friend Daisy (Una Merkel) and gives her every lie in the book to blow off work and come visit her.

Helen decides to help make ends meet by taking a job as a secretary for the wealthy Krayler, even though she doesn't know how to take dictation and only hunts and pecks to type. It's obvious Krayler has other things in mind for her, but she takes the job anyway.

When she realizes what's up, she leaves and gets Daisy to go back to the apartment with her to get her purse and coat, but when they get back, they find that Krayler has been murdered! Even though we know Helen didn't do it, and she'd have an alibi in Daisy once the police and coroner determined Krayler's time of death, Helen decides she's going to confess to the crime so that her husband can defend her and get her off on a self-defense argument. (If the real truth came out, Helen could face perjury charges.) Once her husband wins the case, he'll be a successful lawyer and the money will come flowing in.

Sure enough, Helen is found not guilty, Kenneth becomes a successful lawyer, and Helen actually becomes a successful writer by writing about the case. But there's one small catch. A drunk turned self-styled "criminologist", Charley (John Barrymore), has a piece of evidence that would prove conclusively that Helen didn't kill Krayler. He's willing to blackmail the Bartletts to get a bunch of money so he can live high off the hog.

I found True Confession to be the weakest of the movies on the box set. The problem is in Lombard's character, who as one of those chronic liars who just keeps piling one lie on top of another, she's obnoxious and someone I wanted to see get her comeuppance. This is supposed to be a comedy, and that sort of obnoxiousness didn't really work here. Barrymore is also overacting shamelessly, and relatively irritating too. The deus ex machina that solves Helen and Kenneth's problems doesn't really work for me, either.

Still, I always like to suggest people just for themselves, and since this was on a very low-price box set, getting one dud in the set isn't that big a deal.

Hold That Co-Ed

I was stuck inside this morning waiting for that blizzard that never really hit the Catskills, and so had the chance to watch Hold That Co-Ed on FXM Retro. It's a charmingly stupid little movie, and is on FXM Retro again early tomorrow morning (January 28) at 4:35 AM if you want to watch it for yourself.

George Murphy (later host of the MGM Parade that shows up on TCM from time to time) plays Rusty, a college football star, although we only know that from a montage of newspaper headlines pointing out his derring-do on the field. Now he's going to be a coach at one of those big midwestern state schools, and shows up to find a beautiful campus with a well-funded football team. The only thing is, he's at the wrong school, Clayton University; the State school is just down the road. When Coach Rusty gets there, he finds that college President Fletcher (Donald Meek) has decided to cancel the football season because they're not getting any funding for a football team from the Governor. Indeed, there's only one football, and no money for equipment.

This being one of those silly college movies from the 1930s, the coach does what any good coach would do: he gets the team to march on the Governor's mansion. Not just the team, but it seems the entire student body, which is entirely too small for a state school, but this is the sort of the movie where you don't worry about minor things like continuity or even a sensible plot. Governor Gaby Harrigan (John Barrymore) stopped funding football because he's on a money-saving drive, trying to show the electorate he's fiscally prudent since he's running for the US Senate. Of course, he's also fiscally imprudent in that one of his campaign planks is to give everybody over 60 free sh*t in the form of a $400 a month pension, but as I said don't expect plot coherence. The college is able to convince the governor to start funding football again on the grounds that he'll lose votes otherwise, and he can speak to captive audiences at each game at the big stadium.

Of course, that big stadium hasn't been built yet, but with the Governor's help, they're able to build a 100,000 seat stadium in three weeks! And Harrigan is able to pull in some political favors (call it corruption if you'd like) to get the big schools to schedule games against State. Meanwhile, Coach Rusty has fallen in love with the governor's secretary Marjorie (Marjorie Weaver). While the stadium is being built, the governor gets hit in the head with a football. That ball was kicked by Lizzie Olsen (Joan Davis), the daughter of a famous college football star of days gone by. But she can kick the ball, so they put her on the team, along with a pair of wrestler ringers.

Ultimately, the team's season comes down to a big game against the aforemnetioned Clayton, which was obviously only mentioned at the beginning so that we could have this dramatic climax. Making matters more dramatic is tht Harrigan's opponent in the Senate race, Breckenridge (George Barbier), is a regent at Clayton, and the two make a wager that the one whose team loses has to drop out of the Senate race. Really.

There's a lot of dumbness to Hold That Co-Ed. Football fans will cringe at how little of the football resembles anything real, even by 1930s standards. The game has changed a lot in 75 years, but if you score a touchdown, you don't have your opponents kick off an onside kick at you! All the tropes about college life in the 1930s are here as well, with the student body performing a musical number on the way to the Governor's mansion, or every single member of the student body getting the school spirit for the game, yelling "Block that kick!" in a way that sounds exactly the same whether it's the State students or the Clayton students doing it.

John Barrymore was an alcoholic and the booze took a toll on his career and ultimately his life, resulting in his early death a few years after this movie was made. He comes across as a buffoon at times, but that's actually in keeping with the charactre. (His hair, on the other hand, looks terrible.) Overall, though, he winds up more memorable than Murphy. The one other memorable character is the lady place kicker, who incongruously doesn't wear a helmet when she kicks and does this bizarre dance when she comes on the field. They say kickers are squirrely, and Lizzie is too, albeit in a different way.

Overall, Hold That Co-Ed is by no means an award-winner. But if you like vintage movies and don't mind an out-of-place musical number or two, Hold That Co-Ed is also a suitably brief (about 80 minutes) time-passer. As far as I know it's not available on DVD, so you'll have to catch the infrequent FXM showing.