Love On The Shattered Lens: Hot Saturday (dir by William A. Seiter)

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1932 and featuring Cary Grant in his first leading role, Hot Saturday is a film about gossip and love.

Ruth Brock (Nancy Carroll) is a young bank teller living in a small town. It’s the type of town where everyone knows everyone else. For instance, everyone knows that every man in town wants to date Ruth but that Ruth, for her part, is not in any hurry to settle down and get married. She’s having too much fun going to dances, drinking with her friends, and enjoying life. Everyone knows that playboy Romer Sheffield (Cary Grant) is interested in Ruth but then again, Romer appears to be interested in everyone. Romer has scandalized the town by allowing a woman named Camille (Rita LaRoy) to live at his mansion.

Ruth has a date with one of her coworkers, Conny Billop (Edward Woods), but, when Conny refuses to take no for an answer, she gets away from him and ends up at Romer’s estate. Ruth and Romer spend the night together, just talking. Still, thanks to Conny and Eva (Lillian Bond), the daughter of Ruth’s boss, the whole town is soon convinced that Ruth is Romer’s lover. The town is so scandalized that Ruth even loses her job.

Fortunately, Bill Fadden (Randolph Scott) has returned to town. Bill is a geologist. He grew up in town, with Ruth. He’s spent the last seven years on a surveying expedition but now he’s back and he wants to marry Ruth. How lucky is Ruth? She not only has two good men in love with her but one of them looks like Cary Grant and the other one looks like Randolph Scott! However, when Bill hears the rumors, will he continue to love her or will he be yet another person who gives in to the curse of small town gossip?

Hot Saturday is a film that truly took me by surprise. It’s a pre-code film and it’s one that has all of the usual tropes that one usually associates with the pre-code era. Everyone’s obsessed with sex. There’s a lot of kissing. There’s a lot of drinking. There’s an emphasis on legs and lingerie. There’s even a scene where Ruth gets into a wrestling match with her younger sister when she discovers that her sister has taken her new panties. I’m one of four sisters so I could certainly relate but it’s still not the sort of thing that one necessarily expects to find in a film from the 1930s. But that’s one reason why I love the Pre-Code era. Allowed to police itself, pre-code Hollywood made films that were more realistic and open about their subject matter than the films made under the production code but which also still had their own unique innocence to them. Hot Saturday has an ending that would have never been allowed during the Code era, one that is, dare I say it, rather empowering.

But, beyond all that, Hot Saturday is an intelligently written film that strikes a good balance between drama and character-driven comedy. Nancy Carroll is beautiful and likable in the lead role. Cary Grant and Randolph Scott are both as handsome and charming as can be. Hot Saturday is both a look at the reality and dangers of small town gossip and a touching love story. I enjoyed it.

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

Posted on February 5, 2018 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.

Film Review: The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe (dir by Harry Lachman)

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have to admit that the 1942 film, The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, turned out to be far different from what I was expecting.

Just based on the title, I was expecting it would be a highly fictionalized, borderline silly film about Edgar Allan Poe defeating his romantic rivals and winning the hand of the woman he loved while still finding time to write The Raven. I figured that there would be at least a few gentlemanly fisticuffs, with Poe portrayed as a combination of Rhett Butler and Cary Grant. Looking at the title, it was easy for me to imagine the film closing with Poe kissing his future wife and then looking straight at the camera. “Quoth the Raven!” he would say and wink while romantic music swelled in the background…

But no. The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe is actually a very conventional biopic. With a running time of only 67 minutes, the movie often feels rather rushed but it still manages to include most of the better known details of Edgar Allan Poe’s short but eventful life. (An ever-present narrator is always ready to fill us in on every thing that happens off-screen.) The film doesn’t spend much time on what initially inspired Poe’s macabre imagination. There’s a scene of Poe, as a child, standing on a desolate hill and looking at a raven perched in a dead tree. With the exception of an extended section that deals with Annabel Lee, that’s about as deep as the movie is willing to get as far as Poe’s art is concerned.

When Poe grows up, he’s played by actor Sheppard Strudwick, who has a good mustache but never exactly comes across as being the type of tortured genius who would eventually end up both revolutionizing literature and drinking himself to death. The majority of the film deals with Poe’s advocacy for copyright reform, which is an important issue but not exactly the most cinematic of concerns. Poe survives college. Poe tries to sell The Raven for $25. Eventually, Poe marries Virginia Clemm (Linda Darnell) and her subsequent sickness and death leads to not only Poe’s greatest work but also his own tragic end.

Along the way, Poe meets both Thomas Jefferson and Charles Dickens. Jefferson shows up long enough to tell a young Poe that he’s a good writer and that he needs to stop gambling. Dickens meets Poe and encourages him to continue to advocate for better copyright laws.

It is known that Poe and Dickens actually did meet but did Poe also meet Thomas Jefferson? Legend says that he did but no one knows for sure. Here’s what we do know:

Poe attended the University of Virginia in 1826. The University’s founder, former President Thomas Jefferson, was still alive in 1826 and would often invite promising students to Monticello. Whether Jefferson was still doing that when Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia is questionable. Jefferson died five months after Poe started his studies.

As for Dickens, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe admired each other’s writing and they met in Philadelphia during Dickens’s 1842 tour of North America. No record has been kept of what they discussed, though some think that Dickens told Poe about his pet raven and perhaps inspired Poe’s best-remembered poem. In the movie, they discuss copyright laws, which is nowhere near as much fun.

(When it comes to Poe’s meetings with both Jefferson and Dickens, it is perhaps best to remember the lesson of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and print the legend.)

The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe is a very short film and an obviously low-budget one as well. When the presence of that somewhat pedantic narrator, The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe feels more like an educational special than a real movie. It’s an okay introduction to Poe’s life but, ultimately, the best way to get to know Edgar Allan Poe is to sit down and start reading.

Shattered Politics #14: The Last Hurrah (dir by John Ford)

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Down here in Dallas, we have a county commissioner named John Wiley Price. Even if you don’t live in Texas, you might have heard about him. A few years ago, Price stormed out of a commissioners meeting while shouting, “All of you are white! Go the Hell!” It was a popular YouTube video for a while and attracted all of the usual type of comments that you see online. It even made the national news.

Nobody down here in Dallas was surprised by Price’s outburst. To us, that was just John Wiley being John Wiley. For that matter, nobody was particularly surprised when it was reported that he was being investigated by the FBI. Everyone always took it for granted that John Wiley Price was taking bribes and receiving kickbacks. That’s just the way that things are done down here in Dallas, by politicians both white and black. (Of course, most of the white politicians who do it don’t get publicly investigated by the FBI.)

Now, if you ask the majority of people in Dallas county what they think about John Wiley Price and they’ll probably say something negative. I’ll admit that I would probably be among them. But the thing is — John Wiley Price’s constituents love him. John Wiley Price was first elected to the commissioner’s court before I was even born and, as long as he’s on the ballot, he will be reelected. Even if Price is convicted on corruption charges, he will still be reelected.

I can still remember the night that it was announced that John Wiley Price was on the verge of being arrested by the FBI. All across his district, emergency meetings were held in churches and ministers stood behind the pulpit and, while the TV cameras rolled, they called upon everyone to pray for John Wiley Price. In Price’s district, he’s known as “our man downtown,” the idea being that John Wiley Price is standing up to the rich and white Dallas establishment and, if he makes some money for himself in the process, so be it. As long as he’s doing right for the people who elected him, who cares how he does it?

And, as much as we may want to judge the John Wiley Prices of the world, the fact that of the matter is that he’s a part of a long American political tradition. That political tradition is also the driving force behind today’s final entry in Shattered Politics.

First released in 1958 and directed by John Ford, The Last Hurrah tells the story of Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy), the mayor of an unnamed city in New England that’s obviously meant to be Boston. Skeffington is the flamboyant head of a large and powerful (but, as the film makes clear, aging) Irish-American political machine. He’s preparing to run for his fifth term for mayor, a campaign that he says will be his last.

Whether Frank Skeffington is a good mayor or not depends on who you ask. The poor and the disenfranchised love him. Skeffington, after all, is the son of Irish immigrants. He was born poor. His mother worked as a maid and was even fired by a member of the wealthy and influential Force family. They know that Skeffington has had to cut corners and that he’s gone out of his way to reward his cronies but they also know that Skeffington is on their side. Though the phrase is never used in the film, Skeffington is “their man downtown.”

Meanwhile, the wealthy and the upper class see Frank Skeffington as being a crook, a man who has run a corrupt administration and who uses class warfare to keep the city divided against itself and to make himself and his cronies rich. Newspaper editor Amos Force (John Carradine) has thrown his considerable influence between Skeffington’s opponent, a wealthy but dull man named Kevin McCluskey.

Reporter Adam Caulfield (Jeffrey Hunter) is in an interesting position. On the one hand, he is Skeffington’s nephew. On the other hand, as a journalist, he works for Amos Force. Skeffington invites Adam to follow and record his final campaign for posterity.

It’s interesting to compare The Last Hurrah to films like The Boss or All The King’s Men. Whereas those two films came down squarely on the sides of the reformers, The Last Hurrah is firmly on the side of Frank Skeffington. It presents Skeffington as being a sentimental figure, the type of old-fashioned, populist politician who won office by going out and meeting the people face-to-face and personally giving them a reason to vote for him. As Skeffington himself points out, he’s the type of politician that will soon be made obsolete by television and modern campaigning.

And it’s impossible not to enjoy The Last Hurrah‘s refusal to pass judgment on its lead character. It helps, of course, that Spencer Tracy plays Skeffington with a twinkle in his eye while all of his opponents are played by villainous and aristocratic character actors like John Carradine and Basil Rathbone. Yes, the film says, Skeffington may have been corrupt but at least he wasn’t boring!

Finally, I enjoyed the film because all of the “good” guys were Irish Catholic and all of the bad guys most definitely were not.

So, with that last hurrah, we conclude Shattered Politics for today. We’ll be back tomorrow, when we’ll start to get into the 1960s.

Sláinte!

A Quickie With Lisa Marie: The Ox-Bow Incident (directed by William A. Wellman)

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As part of my continuing mission of see every single movie ever nominated for best picture, I’ve been watching a lot of TCM this month. Last week, I caught the 1943 best picture nominee, The Ox-Bow Incident.

Taking place in Nevada in the 1880s, The Ox-Bow Incident is a western that examines both the mob mentality and takes on the issue of lynching. (It should be remembered that when the Ox-Bow Incident was first released, lynchings were still a regular occurrence.) Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan play two prospectors who ride into town one day and discover that everyone is on edge because there are apparently cattle rustlers about. When it’s reported that a rancher has been murdered, the townspeople form a posse and go searching for the rustlers. Realizing that until the real rustlers are caught they’ll be considered prime suspects, Fonda and Morgan join the posse. Led by Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), who falsely claims to be a Confederate veteran, the posse comes across a camp with three men. Though it quickly becomes obvious that the three men are probably innocent, the posse immediately makes plans to lynch the men. Fonda and Morgan find themselves forced to either side with the bloodthirsty posse or to stand up to the mob.

To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of Westerns. On a personal note, Some of that is because whenever anyone from up north finds out that I’m from Texas, they always ask me if I’ve ever ridden a horse. (For the record, I do not own a horse, I do not ride horses, and I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to them.) On another note, Westerns often strike me as being predictable. All of the dark strangers and the old maid school teachers and the tight-lipped gunslingers spitting tobacco all over the place — it all just makes me want to go, “Bleh!”

However, I was surprised to discover that I really enjoyed The Ox-Bow Incident. While the film’s well-intentioned message was a bit heavy-handed, director William Wellman emphasizes the psychological aspects of the story and the movie itself was well-acted by a large cast who brought a surprising amount of depth to characters who, in lesser hands, could have easily just been stereotypes. Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan were both excellent and sympathetic leads while Jane Darwell dominated the film as one of the more bloodthirsty members of the lynching party. A very young and very suave Anthony Quinn also shows up as one of the accused men. Five decades before either Quentin Tarantino or the Coen Brothers, Wellman and his cast use the standard tropes of the western genre to comment on some very real issues and the end result is a fast-paced film that succeeds in making a moral debate just as exciting as any gunfight or stampede.

Released in 1943, The Ox-Bow Incident was nominated for best picture but, ultimately, it lost to Casablanca. It’s hard to complain about any film losing to Casablanca but taken on its own terms, the Ox-Bow Incident remains an entertaining and intelligent film and one that I’m thankful that TCM gave me a chance to discover.