Die Austernprinzessin

Another of the silent films that's been sitting on my DVR until close to the time that it was going to expire is one that comes from Germany: The Oyster Princess.

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, an early intertitle (the print TCM ran had intertitles in English only, although a few things like a calling card were still in German with an English subtitle) informs us that this is a grotesque comedy in four acts. The first act is set at the mansion of Mr. Quaker (Victor Janson). He's an American "Oyster King" having made a fortune in oysters, and for whatever reason having brought hs daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda) over to Germany, which to me presented a bit of a problem. The movie was released in June 1919, which is only seven months after the end of the Great War, making me wonder about the timeline of everything here. But put that aside. Ossi is a spoiled brat, who is willing to break everything in the mansion she and her father live in if that will help her get her way. She's having another of her tantrums because she just learned that one of her fellow socialites has just gotten married to a count. If a count is good enough for that young lady, then certainly somebody of a similar social standing, or higher, is needed for Ossi. And get her one now! Or even yesterday, if not sooner.

Cut to a matchmaker, the early 20th century equivalent of a dating service, never mind apps like Tindr (somebody should have directed Ossi to Farmers Only). The matchmaker has lots of contacts, but all of them have one flaw or another or else they wouldn't need such a service. An example is Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke), who is heavily in debt and disinclined to marry. We then see he apartment, where he lives with Josef, whose real relationship to the Prince is never quite explained. In any case, a representative from the matchmaker shows up, and the Prince decides to send Josef over as a sort of go-between. But there's a mix-up when it turns out that the only calling card Josef has is one from Prince Nucki himself, leading Ossi and her dad to think this is the actual prince.

Ossi, being an impetuous young woman, decides to run off and elope with the man she thinks is Prince Nucki, returning home to a huge reception that you wonder how her dad could arrange on such short notice. But since this isn't designed to be a realistic movie, don't worry about things like that. Meanwhile, the real prince is visited by several of his friends, who suggest they the all go out on a "spree", which means painting the town red. As they walk through a park the next morning, one by one the friends pass out on the park benches, leaving only the prince himself, who drunkenly ends up in a carriage and winds up at...

A meeting of the women's temperance association. The association is staffed by all the daughters of the business magnates, with Ossi heading this morning's meeting. They basically sober up the drunks, who look for the most part like you'd expect chronic drunks to look. Until, of course, the much more handsome prince shows up. The two start to fall in love, Ossi not realizing this is Prince Nucki, while the prince, thinking he's supposed to be engaged to somebody, not knowing this is the woman he's engaged to.

Jacqueline Stewart, in her wraparounds, mentioned how The Oyster Princess was one of the earliest movies to display the "Lubitsch touch". Lubitsch at this early date is already in fine form, with the sort of movie that I think would have been easy for audiences around the world to follow, with none of the arthouse stuff that foreign films of a later era would get a reputation for. The comedy works, plot holes aside. It is, however, still a silent film from 1919, so there's going to be a fair bit that might seem a bit old-fashioned to people who aren't that used to watching silent cinema.

A Royal Scandal

I mentioned last week that A Royal Scandal is one of the movies that recently got added to the FXM rotation and that a search of this blog claims I haven't done a post on before. So I recorded it and recently watched it, since it's going to be on FXM tomorrow (Nov. 25) at 8:05 AM.

The royalty in question is Catherine II, better known as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (played by Tallulah Bankhead). Catherine is, or desires to be, an absolute ruler, mostly because of the situation in Russia that got her onto the throne in the first place. Her husband Peter III had been an unpopular emperor, and their marriage was not a happy one, with both partners taking multiple lovers and Catherine keeping up that process after Peter was overthrown and killed in a coup. But the action in the movie takes place some time after that.

Catherine is worried about the people around her plotting possible coups, such as Gen. Ronsky (Sig Ruman); about the only person she trusts is her chancellor, Nicolai Illytch (Charles Coburn). She's also known for her violent temper, and for treating her ex-lovers at least a little bit better than Elizabeth I of England did in that she lets them live, if at least a retirement in internal exile. She's also so dictatorial that she has no problem making people wait interminably to get an audience with her, such as the French ambassador (Vincent Price essaying a ridiculous accent; if you don't recognize him by sight with the wig you'll still recognize the voice even with the accent).

Into all of this walks Lt. Alexei Chernoff (William Eythe, whom Fox was obviously trying to groom for stardom but for reasons that should be obvious on watching this movie didn't quite make it). He's got information about the parlous state of the Russian army and how there are people plotting against Catherine; to that end he has to sneak into the palace to see the Empress which is dangerous since the Chancellor and Catherine are liable to see him as an intruder which he technically is. It turns out that the information Alexei has is the stuff about Ronsky that Catherine already knows. But Catherine finds Alexei handsome, so she lets him stay, even promoting him because she wants him around as her latest lover.

But there are any number of complications. One of the big ones is that Alexei is already engaged to be married. And, the fiancée is one Anna (Anne Baxter), who just happens to be a lady-in-waiting to Catherine. Meanwhile, there's enough palace intrigue that being the new guy in the place, suddenly elevated above one's station, is going to be dangerous for anybody. Alexei doesn't help matters by letting power go to his head and coming up with all sorts of reform plans. The Chancellor doesn't like the proposals and wants to resign, but Catherine doesn't let him. And if Nicolai has made a minor miscalculation in the palace intrigue, Alexei makes major mistakes.

The opening credits list Ernst Lubitsch as a producer, with directing credits going to Otto Preminger. Therein lies what I think is the big problem with the movie. Lubitsch presumably was going to direct, but he fell ill and couldn't do so after rehearsals. It's the same sort of thing that happened with That Lady in Ermine, except that in the latter case Lubitsch actually died. Still, one gets the sense that Lubitsch would have liked this material to be a lighter comedy, and that this is a genre to which Otto Preminger is wholly unsuited. So the final result is a mismatch of styles and an overall mess.

Having said that, I also think that with the movie having been released toward the end of World War II, it was also a victim of changing societal tastes. The "Lubitsch touch" worked well in the 1930s, but I think it was always going to grow old eventually, with World War II hastening that, much as it hastened the retirements of certain stars (Norma Shearer and especially Greta Garbo come to mind). And then there's Eythe, who I think is too lightweight to fit in this role. I'm not certain what actor would have been best for the role; probably the best person I can think of who would have been contemporary was Gregory Peck fresh off of Fox's Keys of the Kingdom.

A Royal Scandal is, however, still an interesting misfire, if in part just to see how it misfires.

Angel of no particular color

I bought a four-film box set of Marlene Dietrich movies some time back, which I mentioned when I reviewed Seven Sinners a year ago. I recently watched another movie off of it, Angel.

Dietrich unsurprisingly plays the angel, although that's not her real name of course. She's first seen checking into a Paris hotel under an assumed name, which is for a good reason. She's in Paris looking up a friend, a Russian émigrée the Grand Duchess Anna Dmitrievna (Laura Hope Crews) so that she can commiserate about her personal problems.

To be honest, her personal problems could be a lot worse. Her real name is Lady Maria Barker, and she's married to a prominent British diplomat Sir Frederick (Herbert Marshall) who is prominent with the League of Nations in Geneva and is constantly going there because of all the important international political events going on (the movie was released in 1937, so things could still heat up more). Because Sir Frederick is away all the time, Lady Maria feels a bit neglected.

The Grand Duchess runs a salon of sorts where fashionable people meet. One man who goes to the salon is Anthony Halton (Melvyn Douglas), and when he sees Lady Maria, he's immediately taken by her beauty. So he takes her out for a night on the town, although she doesn't say anything about what her identity is, or the fact that she's married. Anthony like her so much that he refers to her as the titular Angel. She likes him too, but isn't certain whether she's ready to be unfaithful to her husband. So she says if she wants to continue the relationship, she'll meet him same place, same time next week.

Lady Maria returns home to Sir Frederick, who has some time off from his business in Geneva. But what Lady Maria doesn't know is that Anthony served in World War I with Sir Frederick and know each other as a result. (Frederick obviously doesn't know anything about what happened in Paris.) And Anthony decides to show up that the Barker estate, not realizing that Angel is his old friend's wife. You can imagine the dilemma for Lady Maria.

Angel is an odd little movie. It was directed by Ernst Lubitsch and has an impressive cast, and yet it feels like something is missing. Maybe it's the script, but everything felt a little flat, as though it was hard to care about any of the characters or their personal problems. There's some comic relief from Edward Everett Horton, but even that doesn't come to as much as it should.

That's not to say Angel is bad at all, just that it could be better and is a fairly minor entry in the filmographies of all the main participants.

That Uncertain Feeling

In trying to get through the backlog of movies on my DVR, I watched That Uncertain Feeling.

Merle Oberon plays Jill Baker, a woman who has been happily married to her husband Larry (Melvyn Douglas) for six years, but has one problem: she has an intractable case of the hiccups that appear every time she gets nervous. So one of her friends suggests that she see the eminent psychoanalyst Dr. Vengard (Alan Mowbray). One wonders how much the doctor can do for her, but in the waiting room one day she meets a concert pianist, Alex Sebastian (played not by Claude Rains but by Burgess Meredith).

Alexander is a strange guy, as he seems to have backwards opinions about everything just for the sake of being contrarian. But Jill finds him interesting, so the meet each other from time to time at places such as art galleries. (This is actually a chance to show Alexander's character, as there's a Daliesque painting of a clock that's supposedly a portrait of Alexander.) Jill invites Alexander over for a dinner party her husband is holding for some Hungarian-American businessmen who might be buying his insurance.

It's there that Larry realizes he's got a problem on his hands. Jill seems to have an infatuation with Alexander, while she also realizes that Larry is as much married to his business as he is with her. So Larry sets about casually suggesting that perhaps he should grant Jill a divorce, as that will get her to focus her opinion and realize she really wants to stay with Larry.

It eventually does happen, as you can guess from this sort of light comedy, but not without some complications along the way, involving Larry's lawyer Mr. Jones (Harry Davenport) and Jones' secretary Sally (Eve Arden).

That Uncertain Feeling was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, but somehow the famed "Lubitsch touch" that shows up in many of his other movies isn't quite here. I think it's mostly down to the script. The movie is based on a French play from the late 1800s, when this sort of material was probably more daring. The movie was made four years after The Awful Truth, and after any number of glittering Lubitsch movies, so it feels old hat. It also doesn't help that I didn't have much sympathy for the Alexander character. He's not really a bad guy, but he's not somebody you'd want to get close to, either. I also really didn't care for the dinner party scene, which just seemed tedious.

Still, all the actors try their best, and the movie's problems are not any of there faults. This is particularly true for Meredith, with his difficult character. It's not a terrible movie by any means; it's just rather blah. It's also available on DVD, so you're always welcome to judge for yourself.

Die Frau im Hermelin

A few weeks back FXM Retro ran That Lady in Ermine. It's available from Fox's MOD scheme both as a standalone movie, and as part of a three-movie Betty Grable box set.

Countess Angelina (Grable), is the countess leading the principality of Bergamo in 1861. (There is a real Bergamo in Italy, but I think this Bergamo is supposed to be unrelated.) One morning she gets married to Count Mario (Cesar Romero). That night, Hungarians, led by Colonel Teglas (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) invade Bergamo, and are on the verge of overrunning the palace. This causes Mario to flee, and Teglas and his men eventually occupy the palace.

The isn't the first time the Hungarians have invaded. It happened 300 years ago, when Angelina's ancestor Francesca was running the place. Francesca looks amazingly like Angelina, as we can see from a portrait in the palace's entrance hall, which contains a bunch of other portraits of similar heroes from 1561. And then all of the figures in the other portraits come to life and implore Francesca to do something to save Bergamo!

Thankfully Teglas is taken by the exotic portrait of Francesca, as she's wearing a much too modern ermine and is also barefoot. And he gets the impression that Francesca is watching him. When he sees Angelina and realizes that Angelina and Francesca are dead ringers for each other (unsurprising since Francesca is also played by Grable), Teglas falls in love with Angelina. But she still has her husband to think of. And Teglas looks surprisingly like the Hungarian duke who invaded back in 1561....

It goes on like this, with Francesca putting ideas in Teglas' head without Teglas necessarily realizing it's Francesca he's dealing with, and Angelina figuring out how to deal with Teglas without being unfaithful to Mario. Meanwhile, we know that Teglas and Angelina are right for each other, but how are they going to satisfy the Production Code?

That Lady in Ermine is a mess for a whole bunch of reasons. The plot is muddled in no small part because of the Production Code. But the far bigger problem is with the direction. Fox hired Ernst Lubitsch to direct, and Lubitsch had the unmitigated chutzpah to suffer a fatal heart attack eight days into production. So Fox did the best the could and brought in the one director who could imitate the "Lubitsch touch": Otto Preminger. (Quentin Tarantino had not yet been born, so he was clearly unavailable.) You'd think they would have learned their lesson when Preminger had already been brought in to replace Lubitsch on A Royal Scandal after Lubitsch fell ill. That's another movie that's a mess because of the direction. The result is a movie that feels like it's had all the fun sucked out of it.

Interestingly, this is one of the rare occasions when a lot of the reviews I've read agree with my finding the movie a mess. But still, you should always judge for yourself. I don't think it's coming up on FXM in the next couple of weeks, but as I said it is available and in print on DVD.

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife

I recently watched Bluebeard's Eighth Wife off my DVR, and with it being available on DVD courtesy of Universal's MOD scheme, I'm also comfortable doing a full-length post on it.

Gary Cooper plays Michael Brandon, a wealthy American businessman currently working on the French Riviera, for reasons that are never really explained. He goes in to one of those old-time department stores where you have to deal with the clerks, wanting to buy some pajamas. Well, he only wants to buy the pajama tops, since he uses those as a sort of night shirt and doesn't wear the pajama bottoms. The store only wants to sell them as a set. Into all this walks Nicole (Claudette Colbert). She solves everybody's problems by offering to buy the pants.

Michael immediately falls in love with Nicole, and starts pursuing her. Nicole, meanwhile, has a father who is a Marquis (Edward Everett Horton), although French titles of nobility no longer meant anything. That lack of meaning probably has a lot to do with why the Marquis is heavily in debt. He's been trying to do a business deal with Brandon, and then when he finds that Brandon has been pursuing Nicole, he gets dollar signs (or probably franc symbols) in his eyes. After an on-again, off-again thing, Nicole finally decides to marry Michael.

And then she finds out about Michael's past. Michael has been married seven times (who wants to deal with that many mothers-in-law?), and always winds up divorcing, leaving his ex-wives with a substantial settlement as he's agreed with them before the marriage. Nicole, for her part, decides that she wants to wangle more money out of him.

As you can guess, the kicker is that the two are going to wind up falling in love, although neither of them wants to admit it. They lead separate lives, with each becoming jealous of the other, leading to the predictable divorce and then a reuniting.

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is a movie that I found to be a lesser one in the careers of all the major people involved with it. Colbert and Cooper both made much better movies. So did the director, Ernst Lubitsch, and the screenwriters, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. I think it has a lot to do with the plot that seems all over the place. It's not really Wilder and Brackett's fault, since they were adapting a French stage play. Still, the characters aren't particularly likable and a lot of their actions make no sense.

Some of the supporting players do well in their smaller parts. David Niven, early in his career, plays Albert, a friend of Nicole's and one of Brandon's employees, and gets a good scene as the wrong man. Horton is quite good, as are Herman Bing as a private eye and Elizabeth Patterson as Nicole's "aunt".

If you want a good movie of any of the main people involved, you can do better than Bluebeard's Eighth Wife. But if you want a comedy from the 30s you might not have seen before, you could do a lot worse.

Desire

So I DVRed Desire when TCM ran it back in June as part of a night of Marlene Dietrich movies. It turns out that the movie is available on DVD as part of Universal's MOD scheme, so I can be comfortable blogging about it and anybody who wants to see it being able to.

Gary Cooper plays Tom Bradley, an American automotive engineer who has been doing some work in Paris, and who wants to go vacation in Spain for a bit before heading back to America. (The movie was released a few months before the start of the Spanish Civil War, for those paying attention.) The only thing is, he's going to have to drive there because of his employer's desire to have him do some PR work. On the way out of Paris, he has a bumper-to-bumper collision with Madeleine de Beaupre (Marlene Dietrich).

Madeleine goes to Duvalle, a fine jeweler, and decides to buy one of the finest strings of pearls in the shop. She tells the jeweler that she's the wife of Dr. Pauquet (Alan Mowbray), one of the most renowned neurologists in France even if they didn't use that term back in the day. When Madeleine goes to see Dr. Pauquet that she's Mme. Duvalle and that she's worried about her husband, who is going to try to bring a bill to Dr. Pauquet. Madeleine walks out of the doctor's office, basically having Pauquet, but especially Duvalle.

However, she has to get the pearls out of the country. At the border of France and Spain, who should she meet but good old Tom Bradley? She's able to slip him the pearls without his knowledge, and the pearls make it safely into Spain. However, Madeleine has car troubles and hitches a ride with Tom before ultimately stealing and crashing his car!

Of course, Tom is going to find out where Madeleine is staying in San Sebastian, in order to look her up to be reimbursed for the car. Tom, of course, knows nothing about the pearls. But Tom also knows he's beginning to fall in love with Madeleine. Madeleine, for her part, finds herself falling in love with Tom, too, which presents a bigger problem. Madeleine didn't steal those pearls herself; she's part of a gang with Margoli (John Halliday), who is posing in San Sebastian as her uncle. The last half (at least) of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game among the three involving both romance and the attempt to get those pearls.

Desire is another of those very well-made movies, down in no small part to Ernst Lubitsch being on board as the producer (not the director; that was Frank Borzage who was also pretty darn good). It helps to have Dietrich and Cooper, as well as the higher-end production values that Paramount was always able to bring.

As for the story, I have to admit that it fell slightly short of expectations for me. That's probably more because the drawing-room style of comedy that had been a bigger thing in the early 1930s when the camera was more static has never been my thing. Too much of the second half is stuck in that hotel room, and why is Tom staying with them anyway once they get the pearls off him? There's also the problem that, since Madeleine is after all a thief, the Production Code is going to have a problem with resolving the story in the way you'd expect of Tom and Madeleine ending up together. That's a minor quibble, however, and as more my slightly bigger problem, anybody who likes this style of comedy is absolutely going to love the movie.

Das Weib des Pharao

Tonight's Silent Sunday Night selection on TCM is an interesting one, as it's one of Ernst Lubitsch's German silents: The Loves of Pharaoh (the German title, Das Weib des Pharao, literally translates to The Pharaoh's Wife), tonight at midnight.

The story is a fairly standard story of forbidden love being tragic, this time set against the backdrop of ancient Egypt. Emil Jannings plays Egyptian Pharaoh Amenes. One day he's approached by a delegation led by Samlak (Paul Wegener), the king of Ethiopia. King Samlak has a proposal for the Pharaoh: the hand of Samlak's daughter Makeda (Lyda Salmonova) in marriage. It should be a win-win proposition for both sides, as the Ethiopian King can marry off his daughter; the Pharaoh can get a wife; and both sides should be at peace what with their royal houses now being brought closer by marriage. Who needs love in an era of arranged marriages, anyway? Well, this is a 20th century movie and not the era of arranged marriages, so our Pharaoh would like love. And he has his eye on Theonis (Dagny Servaes), who is Makeda's slave-girl. So Amenes takes Theonis for a wife.

This certainly complicates things, in a whole bunch of ways. Unsurprisingly, King Samlak is none too happy about having his daughter rejected for -- a slave girl! How could the Pharaoh disrespect him like this? Well, there's only one thing that will make the Pharaoh respect the king, and that's a nice little conquering. So Samlak prepares his troops to fight a war against Egypt. Oh, but that's not the only complication. While Amenes is in love with Theonis, she's not really in love with him. She's fallen in love with Ramphis (Harry Liedtke), the son of Sothis, one of the king's advisors (Albert Bassermann). Ramphis, unsurprisingly, has fallen in love with Theonis, and those two decide to start carrying on an illicit relationship. The Pharaoh finds out, and sentences Ramphis to hard labor, while locking Theonis away in one of his palaces.

The war comes, and Samlak's men kill Amenes. Technically, this makes Theonis the leader, since the Pharaoh doesn't have any heirs. She selects Ramphis, and presumably everybody who's alive gets to live happily ever after. Oh, no, that's not the way the movie ends. Amenes was only presumed dead; actually, he didn't die of his injuries. And he shows up again. That really complicates matters....

As I said at the beginning, the love triangle story certainly isn't anything new, at least not looking back 90 years. What really makes the movie worth watching is the visuals. Those visuals are, in fact, spectacular, and on a par with any of the grandiose spectacles Hollywood was putting on in the silent era. The Loves of Pharaoh was restored a few years back from what surviving elements could be found, with some production stills filling in for the few lost scenes. The result is a movie that's gorgeous and impressive to look at, regardless of whether the story is trite.

As part of the restoration, The Loves of Pharaoh has been made available on both DVD and Blu-ray, but apparently you have to buy it directly from the people who did the restoration.