Tag Archives: Grant Mitchell

An Offer You Can’t Refuse: The Last Gangster (dir by Edward Ludwig)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1937’s The Last Gangster, Edward G. Robinson plays Al Capone.

Well, actually, that’s not technically true.  The character he’s playing is named Joe Krozac.  However, Joe is a ruthless killer and gangster.  He’s made his fortune through smuggling alcohol during prohibition.  Despite his fearsome reputation, Joe is a family man who loves his wife Tayla (Rose Stradner) and who is overjoyed when he learns that she’s pregnant.  To top it all off, Joe is eventually arrested for and convicted of tax evasion.  He gets sent to Alcatraz, where he finds himself being bullied by another inmate (John Carradine) and waiting for his chance to regain his freedom.

In other words, Edward G. Robinson is playing Al Capone.

Krozac does eventually get out of prison but, by that point, Tayla has moved on.  She’s married Paul North (James Stewart), a former tabloid reporter who was so outraged by how his newspaper exploited Tayla’s grief that he resigned his position.  Joe Krozac’s son has grown up with the name Paul North, Jr. and he has no idea that his father is actually a notorious gangster.

Krozac wants to get his son back but his gang, now led by Curly (Lionel Stander), has other ideas.  They want Krozac to reveal where he hid the money that he made during his gangster days.  As well, an old rival (Alan Bazter) not only wants to get revenge on Krovac but also on Krovac’s son.  Joe Krovac, fresh out of prison, finds himself torn between getting his revenge on his wife and protecting his son.  This being a 30s gangster film, it leads to shoot-outs, car chases, and plenty of hardboiled dialogue.

Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Stewart in the same movie, how could I n0t watch this!?  I was actually a bit disappointed to discover that, even though both Robinson and Stewart give their customarily fine performances, they don’t spend much time acting opposite each other.  Indeed, it sometimes seem like the two men are appearing in different pictures.

Robinson is appearing in one of the gangster films that made him famous.  (Indeed, the film’s opening credits feature footage that was lifted from some of Robinson’s previous films.)  He gives a tough and snarling performance but also one that suggests that, as bad as he is, he’s nowhere near as bad as the other gangsters that are working against him.  His gangster is ultimately redeemed by his love for his son, though the Production Code still insists that Joe Krozac has to pay for his life of crime.

Stewart, meanwhile, plays his typical romantic part, portraying Paul as being an incurable optimist, a happy go-getter who still has a sense of right-and-wrong and a conscience.  Stewart isn’t in much of the film.  This is definitely Robinson’s movie.  But still, there’s a genuine charm to the scenes in which Paul romances the distrustful Tayla.  Not even being forced to wear a silly mustache (which is the film’s way of letting us know that time has passed) can diminish Stewart’s natural charm.

If you like 30s gangster films, like I do, you should enjoy The Last Gangster.  I would have liked it a bit more if Robinson and Stewart had shared more scenes but regardless, this film features these two men doing what they did best.  This is an offer that you can’t refuse.

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Winner: The Life of Emile Zola (dir by William Dieterle)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Life of Emile Zola, the winner of the 1936 Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, opens with two French artists living in a drafty apartment.

Emile Zola (Paul Muni) is destined to become one of France’s most popular and important writers.  Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff) will eventually become one of the most important artists of the post-impressionist movement.  But for now, they’re just two struggling artists who have sworn that they will never sell out their principles.  They are poor but they’re happy.  That changes for Zola after he meets a prostitute named Nana (Erin O’Brien-Moore) and he uses her life story as the inspiration for a novel.  The book is controversial and its frank content scandalizes France.  The public censor comes close to banning it.  But it also becomes a best seller.  It’s the book everyone secretly owns but claims to have never read.

Zola writes several more books, all about the conditions of the working class in France.  Eventually, he becomes what he claimed he would never be, a wealthy man living in a mansion and having little contact with the poor and oppressed.  Cezanne sees Zola one last time, calling him out for having sold his talent for money.  Cezanne explains that, on general principle, he can no longer be Zola’s friend.

Meanwhile, a quiet and rather meek family man named Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut) has been arrested and accused of being a spy for Germany.  There’s little evidence that Dreyfus is a spy.  Indeed, most of the evidence seems to point to a Major Walsin-Esterhazy (Robert Barrat).  But, because Dreyfus is considered to be an outsider, he is convicted in a show trial and exiled to Devil’s Island.

(In real life, it’s generally agreed that Dreyfus was a victim of anti-Semitism.  As the only Jewish member of the army’s General Staff, Dreyfus was viewed with suspicion by his colleagues even before anyone knew that there was a German spy.  The Life of Emile Zola doesn’t specifically state that Dreyfus was a victim of anti-Semitism, with the exception of a brief moment when one of his accusers looks at his personnel file and says, “He’s not one of us,” while pointing at the word “Jew.”  Otherwise, the fact that Dreyfuss was Jewish is never mentioned in the film.  It’s as if the film is going out of its way to avoid offending the very people that the movie is criticizing.)

After speaking to Dreyfus’s wife (played by Gale Sondergaard, who would later become the victim of a show trial herself when she was blacklisted as a suspected communist), Zola decides to take up Dreyfus’s case.  He publishes an open letter — J’Accuse — in which he states that Dreyfus was not given a fair trial and that Dreyfus is innocent of the charges against him.  Zola finds himself in court, accused of libel.  Zola uses his trial to give Dreyfus the hearing that he never received.  While the army boos his every utterance, the people of France rally to his side.

The Life of Emile Zola is an early example of the type of prestige production that today is often referred to as being an “Oscar picture.”  It tells a true story.  As a film that condemns the treatment of Alfred Dreyfus but avoids stating the obvious reason why Dreyfus was targeted in the first place, it’s political without being radical.  And it features a performance from the most acclaimed actor of the era, Paul Muni.  Muni gives a powerful performance as Zola, holding the viewer’s attention even during the lengthy trial scenes that take up most the second half of the film.  That said, the true star of the film is Joseph Schildkraut, who plays Dreyfus as being a kind and trusting soul who finds himself caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare.  At one point, Dreyfus is given a gun and told that there’s one way that he can avoid being put on trial for treason.  Schildkraut played the scene so well that I wanted to cheer when he refused to surrender.

The Life of Emile Zola is a big and, at times, self-consciously important production.  It was clearly designed to win a bunch of Oscars and it certainly managed to do that.  Compared to some of the other films nominated that year — The Awful Truth, Dead End, A Star is Born, Lost Horizon, Stage Door, In Old Chicago — The Life of Emile Zola can seem a bit stodgy.  However,  the performances of Muni and Schildkraut continue to make the film worth watching.

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: One Foot In Heaven (dir by Irving Rapper)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have to admit that One Foot In Heaven is a film that I probably never would have watched if not for the fact that it received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

This film from 1941 tells what I presume to be a true — or, at the very least, a true-ish — story.  Fredric March plays William Spence.  The film opens in 1904 with Spence explaining to his future in-laws that he’s spontaneously decided to drop out of medical school because he feels that he’s been called to become a Methodist minister.  Though no one is happy or particularly encouraging about William’s decision to abandon the financial security of medicine to work as a minister, William feels that it’s what he was meant to do.

We follow William and his wife, Hope (Martha Scott), as they move from town to town, living in dingy parsonages and barely paying the bills by doing weddings.  Though Hope is frustrated by the constant moving and the less-than-ideal living conditions, she remains supportive of William.  They start a family and William goes from being a stern and somewhat judgmental man to becoming an inspiring minister.  He even changes his opinion about the sinfulness of going to the movies.  (All things considered, that’s probably for the best.)  Eventually, William, Hope, and the family end up ministering to a congregation in Colorado.  Determined to finally give his wife the home that she deserves, William tries to rebuild both the church and the parsonage.  It turns out to be more difficult than he was expecting.

That’s pretty much the film.  There’s not really much conflict to be found, until the final 30 minutes or so when William struggles to convince a bunch of snobs to help him achieve his dream of building a new church.  The film opens with a title card thanking the Methodists for their help in the production of the film, which should tell you everything you need to know about the film’s attitude towards Protestantism.  William does debate an agnostic at one point but it’s not much of a debate.  William, after all, is played by the authoritative Fredric March while the agnostic’s name isn’t even listed in the credits.  It’s a well-made film, in that sturdy way that many 1941 studio productions were, but — unless you’re just crazy about the history of Methodism — it’s not particularly interesting.

On the plus side, Fredric March gives a good performance as William Spence.  March was one of the best actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age and he gives a sympathetic performance as a stern but well-meaning man who respects tradition but who is still willing to admit that he has much to learn.  Probably the film’s most effective scene is when William reluctantly watches a movie with his son.  March captures William’s transformation from being a disapproving father to an entertained filmgoer.  It’s one of the few moments when the film really feels alive.

So, how did One Foot In Heaven receive a Best Picture nomination in the same year that saw nominations for films like Citizen Kane, The Little Foxes, Suspicion, and The Maltese Falcon?  One Foot In Heaven is well-made and totally uncontroversial.  It’s the type of film that, if it were made today, it would probably be directed by Ron Howard and it would star someone like James Marsden or Garrett Hedlund.  One Foot In Heaven is not particularly memorable but there’s nothing particularly terrible about it either and it probably felt like a “safe’ film to nominate.  Still, it’s probably significant that One Foot In Heaven didn’t receive any nominations other than one for Best Picture.  It lost that Oscar to another film about family, How Green Was My Valley.

Mardi Gras Film Review: Lady Behave! (dir by Lloyd Corrigan)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1938 film, Lady Behave!, begins with a woman named Clarice (Patricia Farr) getting ready to go out and celebrate Mardi Gras.  Even though Clarice invites her older sister, Paula (Sally Eilers), to come with her, Paula refuses.  Paula has work to do at home.  It’s pretty obvious that this is the way that it’s always been between the two sisters.  Clarice has fun while Paula stays home and waits for her to return.

Fortunately, Clarice does return in the morning.  As she tells Paula, she had a great time during Mardi Gras.  In fact, she had such a great time that she ended up getting married!  She married a wealthy northerner named Stephen Cormack (Neil Hamilton).  The only problem is that Clarice is already married!  She’s totally forgotten that she only recently became the wife of a dissolute playboy named Michael Andrews (Joseph Schildkraut).  By getting married a second time, Clarice has committed bigamy!  She could go to prison for 10 years!

Whatever is Paula to do?

Well, what if she arranges for Clarice to leave the country?

What if she tries to bribe Michael into accepting an annulment?

What if Paula goes up to New York and pretends to be Clarice (because, after all, Stephen was pretty drunk when he married her)?

What is she does all three!?

Of course, when Paula goes up to New York, she discovers that Stephen is out of the country.  She moves into his mansion, where she discovers that his two children — Patricia (Marcia Mae Jones) and Hank (George Ernest) — are convinced that she’s just a gold digger who only wants to steal their father’s money (and, it should be noted, also their inheritance).  When Michael shows up at Stephen’s mansion, he explains to Paula that he needs $10,000 for a horse and he’ll only agree to an annulment if he gets the money.  However, when he meets Patricia and Hank, he tells them that if they pay him $30,000, he’ll help to break up the marriage between Stephen and Paula (who, of course, everyone but Michael thinks is actually Clarice).

Eventually, Stephen shows up and he assumes that Paula actually is Clarice.  Paula and Stephen quickly fall in love and it turns out that Stephen is very serious about his new marriage.  He even wants to take Paula on a honeymoon.  Of course, he thinks Paula is Clarice and Paula is freaking out because they’re not actually married but she wishes that they were.  But, if they did actually get married, Stephen would be guilty of bigamy and then he’d have to leave the country like Clarice and….

Yes, this is one of those somewhat busy screwball comedies where almost every action is motivated by a misunderstanding and where all of the dialogue is extremely snappy.  To be honest, it’s all a bit too hyper.  Though the film originally had a running time of 70 minutes, most of the existing prints are only 57 minutes long.  This film has a lot of plot for only 57 minutes and it’s often difficult to keep track of what’s happening from one scene to the next.  That wouldn’t be a problem if this film starred someone like William Powell and Carole Lombard (or, for that matter, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy) but instead, this film features Sally Eilers and Neil Hamilton, who are likable performers but not quite likable enough to carry the film over it’s rough edges.

On the plus side, Joseph Schildkraut has some very funny scenes as the flamboyant Michael.  And Marcia Mae Jones and George Ernest both do a great work as Stephen’s paranoid children.  They consistently made me laugh.  Otherwise, Lady Behave! is a bit too frantic for its own good.

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Grapes of Wrath (dir by John Ford)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(With the Oscars scheduled to be awarded on March 4th, I have decided to review at least one Oscar-nominated film a day.  These films could be nominees or they could be winners.  They could be from this year’s Oscars or they could be a previous year’s nominee!  We’ll see how things play out.  Today, I take a look at the 1940 best picture nominee, The Grapes of Wrath!)

How dark can one mainstream Hollywood film from 1940 possibly be?

Watch The Grapes of Wrath to find out.

Based on the novel by John Steinbeck and directed by John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of the Joad family and their efforts to neither get sent to prison nor starve to death during the Great Depression.  When they lose their farm in Oklahoma, they head for California.  Pa Joad (Russell Simpson) has a flyer that says someone is looking for men and women to work as pickers out west.  The 12 members of the Joad Family load all of their possessions into a dilapidated old truck and they hit the road.  It quickly becomes apparent that they’re not the only family basing all of their hopes on the vague promises offered up by that flyer.  No matter how much Pa may claim different, it’s obvious that California is not going to be the promised land and that not all the members of the family are going to survive the trip.

Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is the oldest of the Joad sons.  He’s just been released from prison and he’s killed in the past.  Having been in prison during the start of the Great Depression, Tom doesn’t realize how bad things truly are until he arrives home and sees someone he grew up with using a tractor to knock down a house.  (It’s just business, of course.  The owners of the house can’t pay their bills so the house gets destroyed.)  The film’s story is largely told through Tom’s eyes and Henry Fonda gives a sympathetic performance, one the gets the audience to empathize with and relate to a character who is a total outsider.

As for the rest of the Joad Family, Ma (Jane Darwell) is the glue who holds them together and who refuses to allow them to surrender to despair.  (And yet even Ma is forced to make some tough choices when the starving children of one work camp ask her to share her family’s meal with them.)  Rosasharan (Dorris Bowdon) is pregnant while Grandpa (Charley Grapewin) is too sickly for the trip but doesn’t have anywhere else to go.  And then there’s Casy (John Carradine), the former preacher turned labor organizer.  Casy is not blood-related but he soon becomes a member of the family.

The Joads have a healthy distrust of the police and other authority figures and that turns out to be a good thing because there aren’t many good cops to be found between Oklahoma and California.  Instead, the police merely serve to protect the rich from the poor.  Whenever the workers talk about forming a union and demanding more than 5 cents per box for their hard work, the police are there to break heads and arrest any troublemakers on trumped up charges.  Whenever a town decides that they don’t want any “Okies” entering the town and “stealing” jobs, the police are there to block the roads.

The Grapes of Wrath provides a portrait of the rough edges of America, the places and the people who were being ignored in 1940 and who are still too often ignored today.  John Ford may not be the first director that comes to mind when you think of “film noir” but that’s exactly what The Grapes of Wrath feels like.  During the night scenes, desperate faces emerge from the darkness while menacing figures lurk in the shadows.  When the sun does rise, the black-and-white images are so harsh that you almost wish the moon would return.  The same western landscape that Ford celebrated in his westerns emerges as a wasteland in The Grapes of Wrath.  The American frontier is full of distrust, anger, greed, and ultimately starvation.  (Reportedly, the film was often shown in the Soviet Union as a portrait of the failure of America and capitalism.  However, it was discovered that Soviet citizens were amazed that, in America, even a family as poor as the Joads could still afford a car.  The Grapes of Wrath was promptly banned after that.)  John Ford is often thought of as being a sentimental director but there’s little beauty or hope to be found in the images of The Grapes of Wrath.  (Just compare the way The Grapes of Wrath treats poverty to the way Ford portrayed it in How Green Was My Valley.)  Instead, the film’s only hint of optimism comes from the unbreakable familial bond that holds the Joads together.

As dark as it may be, the film is nowhere near as pessimistic as the original novel.  The novel ends with a stillborn baby and a stranger starving to death in a barn.  The film doesn’t go quite that far and, in fact, offers up some deus ex machina in the form of a sympathetic government bureaucrat.  (Apparently, authority figures weren’t bad as long as they worked for the federal government.)  That the book is darker than the movie is not surprising.  John Steinbeck was a socialist while John Ford was a Republican with a weakness for FDR.  That said, even though the film does end on a more hopeful note than the novel, you still never quite buy that things are ever going to get better for anyone in the movie.  You want things to get better but, deep down, you know it’s not going to happen.  Tom says that he’s going to fight for a better world and Fonda’s delivers the line with such passion that you want him to succeed even if you know he probably won’t.  Ma Joad says the people will never be defeated and, again, you briefly believe her even if there’s not much evidence to back her up.

Even when viewed today, The Grapes of Wrath is still a powerful film and I can only guess what it must have been like to see the film in 1940, when the Great Depression was still going on and people like the Joads were still making the journey to California.  Not surprisingly, it was nominated for best picture of 1940, though it lost to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

Shattered Politics #4: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (dir by Frank Capra)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

mr-smith-goes-to-washington

So, when you read that I was going to be reviewing 94 political films here at the Shattered Lens, you probably knew that one of them would have to be the 1939 best picture nominee, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

So, we all know that story right?  The senator from an unnamed state dies.  The weak-willed Governor (Guy Kibbee) has to appoint a new senator.  Political boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) demands that the governor appoint one of his cronies.  The state’s reformers demand that the Governor appoint a never-seen crusader named Henry Hill (who, whenever I hear his name, makes me think of Ray Liotta snorting cocaine in Goodfellas).  The Governor’s children demand that he appoint Jefferson Smith (James Stewart, of course!), who is the head of something called the Boy Rangers.  The Governor flips a coin.  The coin lands on its edge but it also lands next to a newspaper story about Jeff Smith.

So, of course, Mr. Smith goes to Washington.

Now, as the movie quickly makes clear, Jeff Smith is immediately out-of-place in Washington.  For one thing, he’s actually excited to be there.  He’s convinced that he’s there to make America a better place.  When a bunch of drunken reporters (led by the great Thomas Mitchell) make Smith look foolish, Smith responds by running around Washington and punching them out.  (That whole sequence probably serves as wish fulfilment for a lot of politicians.)  When his cynical legislative aide Saunders (Jean Arthur) tells him that he’s too naive to survive in Washington, he wins her over with the purity of his idealism.  When his mentor, Senator Paine (Claude Rains), is revealed to be a part of Washington’s corrupt culture, Smith is stunned.  When Taylor tries to destroy his political career, Smith responds by giving the filibuster to end all filibusters.  He’s one man standing up against a culture of corruption and…

And there’s a reason why, 76 years later, aspiring political candidates still attempt to portray themselves as being a real-life, modern Jefferson Smith.

This is one of those films that everyone seems to agree is great and, of course, there’s many reasons to love Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.  There’s the lead performance of Jimmy Stewart, of course.  While this may not be his best performance (I prefer the more layered characterization that he brought to It’s A Wonderful Life and Anatomy of a Murder), it is Stewart at his most likable and, most importantly, he makes you feel Jeff Smith’s pain as he discovers that Washington is not the great place that he originally assumed it to be.  Claude Rains was always great when it came to playing good men gone wrong and he’s perfect as Sen. Paine.  Thomas Mitchell and Jean Arthur are perfectly cast and I always enjoy seeing the bemused smile on the face of Vice President Harry Carey as Smith conducts his filibuster.

But I think the best thing about Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is that it actually makes you believe that there are Jeff Smiths out there who actually could make a difference.  And, until Judd Apatow gets around to remaking the film with Adam Sandler, audiences will continue to believe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm9qaEJ3MBc