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.

Man Wanted

I'm always up for watching another Kay Francis movie. One that I hadn't seen before and showed up on TCM a little while back was a pre-Code film called Man Wanted, so I made a point of recording it and watching it.

Francis obviously doesn't play the man, but the woman who more or less winds up wanting the man. She plays Lois Ames, a woman who is actually in the world of business, editing a high society magazine called The 400. Perhaps more surprisingly is that she's married, although her huband Fred (Kenneth Thomson) seems more interested in living the good life and being a bit of a playboy, including stepping out on his wife. Lois, for her part, seems more married to her job, but that's probably as much Hollywood making a moral judgment about women that high up in the working world as it is the truth. It's to the part that her long-suffering secretary is sick of having to work nights.

Enter Tommy Sherman (David Manners). He's a salesman working for an exercise equipment company in the days when exercise equipment was quite expensive. He actually goes off to clients' homes and offices to demonstrate the equipment, which is how he's about to meet Lois. Tommy, meanwhile, has a best friend in Andy (Andy Devine), and is engaged to Ruthie (Una Merkel), the perfect working-to-middle-class couple. At least, until Tommy meets Lois. It just happens to be on the very same day when Lois' secretary has finally gotten fed up with all those nights working, and quits right then and there. Tommy decides to offer himself up for the job, at least on an emergency basis.

Surprisingly, Tommy shows himself to be adept at the job of executive assistant, quickly making himself indispensible to Lois. This, as you can guess, causes all sorts of problems. Lois, after all, still has a husband, even if he is cheating on her and she's about to find that out once and for all. And now Ruthie is about to become similarly suffering. Worse for Tommy is that when Andy consoles Ruthie, he starts to fall in love with Ruthie and thinks about putting the moves on Ruthie himself!

Man Wanted is a movie that has a lot of potential, but one that I felt unfortunately couldn't figure out a good way to resolve all the plot developments it had built up. It's a pre-Code, so it doesn't have to adhere to the strictures that a post-1934 movie would, but the ending still seemed a bit anodyne to me. Worse is that it all comes across as so old hat and not particularly memorable compared to other pre-Codes, and I don't mean old-hat and dated simply because it's from over 90 years ago.

Still, fans of any of the principal stars here will probably find something to like about Man Wanted.

Never Say Die

Since I'm not certain how many movies I'm going to be able to watch off my DVR before the big move, I also put in a DVD to watch, and selected from my big Bob Hope box set a film called Never Say Die.

Hope plays John Kidley, who's at one of those Swiss mountain resorts because he thinks he's quite sick. Indeed, he's a hyopchondriac, and while me may or may not really be sick, he's actually going to have good reason to believe he's sick. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Kidley also came to this resort to get away from a woman he'd met earlier on his travels to Switzerland, Juno Marko (Gale Sondergaard). She's a widow, and has decided she's fallen in love with Kidley and thinks that he loves her, too. And she's not going to take no for an answer.

Meanwhile, at the resort, another patron isn't sick himself, but has a dog who is sick. The guy being rich, he's getting all sorts of lab tests performed on the dog, which will eventually indicate that the dog is in perfectly normal health for a dog. The problem is that what's normal for a dog is not normal for a human. And somehow, the lab report on the dog doesn't seem to indicate that it's for a dog, or even the name of the patient in an obvious enough place to obviate the next part of the story. As you might be able to guess from what I've written, Kidley's doctor winds up with the report for the dog thinking that it's actually for Kidley, which leads him to believe that Kidley has some sort of acid condition that's basically going to eat away Kidley's body and kill him within a month or so.

Meanwhile, at the resort but apparently not sick is Texan Mickey Hawkins (Martha Raye, who worked with Hope on several films early in his career). She's here trying to get away from Prince Smirnov (Alan Mowbray), a Russian émigré who has fallen in love with Mickey and is fully expecting her to marry him, even though she doesn't want that at all. And he's been hunting her to the ends of the earth. So since she's about to get trapped into a marriage she doesn't want, and Kidley is trying to avoid a marriage he doesn't want, he comes up with a brilliant idea. As he has good reason to believe he's terminally ill, why not have a quickie marriage between him and Mickey which will obviously dissolve, pun fully intended, when he dies.

Of course, we know that Kidley isn't really sick. And further messing things up is the entry of an old flame of Mickey's from back in Texas, Henry Munch (Andy Devine). He's hoping Mickey can marry him, and is understandably miffed to find that Mickey's gone and gotten herself married to someone else. Also, Juno and Smirnov are still around, with Smirnov trying to hasten Kidley's death by challenging him to a duel, leading up to the inevitably conclusion....

The more I get to watch Paramount programmers, which isn't as often as I'd like since TCM doesn't get to show as many of them thanks to Universal holding the rights, the more I find how much I tend to enjoy them. Bob Hope isn't always my cup of tea, but he works well with Martha Raye and the script is fairly good. (I wasn't paying attention and missed Preston Sturges' name as one of the co-writers.) They've also got good production values for the sorts of programmers they were making, without looking inappropriately polished the way certain MGM films do.

In short, Never Say Die is the sort of movie that's great to have on a box set and one that probably deserves more attention, both for Hope, and for Raye when she was younger before she really became known as the "big mouth".