Love On The Shattered Lens: Dangerous Curves (dir by Lothar Mendes)

Posted on February 14, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1929 film, Dangerous Curves, takes place at the circus.

Larry Lee (Richard Arlen) is a tightrope walker and, when we first meet him, he’s a bit of a cad. He knows he’s the best and he knows that the crowds are specifically showing up to watch him risk his life on a nightly basis. Every woman at the circus is crushing on him but Larry hardly notices because he’s used to being desired. He’s in love with his tightrope-walking partner, Zara (Kay Francis). Everyone can tell that Zara is manipulative and not even loyal to her relationship with Larry. She wastes his money and Larry sometimes spends so much time thinking about her that it breaks his concentration on the tight rope.

Eventually, Larry discovers that Zara has been cheating on him! When Larry finds out about Zara and Tony (David Newell), he cannot get the image of them kissing out of his head. When he tries to walk across the tight rope, he loses his focus and, as the audience gasps, Larry falls to the ground below. (In an impressively-edited sequence, we see Larry falling from about five different angles before we finally see him hitting the ground.) Larry recovers but his confidence has been broken. Instead of returning to the circus, he just wants to drink and obsess on Zara and Tony.

Can bareback rider Patricia Delaney (Clara Bow) convince him to return to the circus? Can she give him the confidence to once again walk across the tightrope? Will Larry then teach Pat how do the tightrope act herself? Will Larry finally realize that Pat loves him and that he loves her? And how will Pat react when, after all she’s done for Larry, he suddenly decides that he wants to bring Zara back into the act?

Dangerous Curves is a mix of melodrama and romance, all taking place at the circus. It’s also a pre-code film, which means it’s a bit more honest about the relationships between the characters and Larry’s subsequent drinking problem than it would have been if the film had been made just a few years later. As a result, this is a melodrama with an edge. The members of the circus community are living on the fringes of polite society and they’ve built their own community, one that is based on their unique talents. Larry’s sin isn’t so much that he’s arrogant and tempermental. It’s that he doesn’t properly respect the community of which he’s a part. He thinks he’s above the rest of the circus. His fall from the high wire humbles him. His relationship with Patricia eventually redeems him.

That said, the main appeal of this film is that it features Clara Bow in one of her early sound-era performances. Bow became a star during the silent era but, unlike many of her contemporaries, she was able to make the transition to sound. I absolutely love Clara Bow and this film features one of her best performances. She’s determined and energetic and she plays the stereotypical “good” girl with just enough of a mischievous glint in her eye to make her compelling. She may be willing to help Larry get back on the tightrope and then subsequently learn how to walk the tightrope herself but she also shows that she’s not going to put up with him taking her for granted. As well, both Clara and Kay Francis get to wear a lot of cute outfits, which is always one of the pleasures of a pre-code film.

Dangerous Curves is worth watching for the chance to see Clara Bow at her best.

Horror on TV: Thriller 1.8 “The Watcher” (dir by John Brahm)

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For tonight’s televised horror, we have another episode of the Boris Karloff-hosted anthology series, Thriller!

In this episode, a religious fanatic in a named Freitag (Martin Gabel) lives in a resort community and targets young people who he believes have failed to live up to his standards. His latest targets are played by Olive Sturgess and Richard Chamberlain. This is actually a rather grisly little episode. With its theme of religious hypocrisy, I can only imagine how people reacted when it was first aired on November 1st, 1960.

Enjoy!

Lisa Reviews an Oscar Nominee: Our Town (dir by Sam Wood)

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(SPOILERS BELOW! THE END OF THIS FILM WILL BE REVEALED! I will also be revealing who played George Gibbs but that’s probably not as big a spoiler. It depends how you look at it.)

I was only 15 years old when I first read Our Town. Because I was a theater nerd, I knew a little about the play. For instance, I knew it took place in a small town. I knew that it was narrated by a character known as the Stage Manager. I knew that the play was meant to be performed on a bare stage, with no sets or props. What I did not know, as I innocently opened up that booklet, is that Our Town is probably one of the most traumatically depressing plays ever written.

When the stage manager appears at the start of the play and talks about the town of Grover’s Corner, he lulls you into believing that you’re about to see a sentimental, comedic, and old-fashioned celebration of small town life. We meet the characters and they all seem to be quirky in a properly non-threatening way. Joe Crowell shows up delivers a newspaper to Doc Gibbs. The stage manager mentions that Joe will eventually grow up to attend to M.I.T.

“Awwwww! Good for Joe!” the audience says.

And, the Stage Manager goes on to inform us, as soon as Joe graduates, he will be killed in World War I, his expensive education wasted.

Okay, the audience thinks, that was a dark moment but this play was written at a time when World War I was still fresh on everyone’s mind. Surely the rest of the play will not be quite as dark…

And fortunately, George Gibbs and Emily Webb show up. They’re young, they’re likable, and they’re in love! George and Emily get married and they’re prepared to live a long and happy life in our town! Good for them! YAY!

And then Act III begins…

Oh my God, Act III. Act III begins with almost everyone dead. Emily died in child birth so she hangs out at the local cemetery and talks to all the other dead people, the majority of whom only have vague memories of their former lives. Emily relives the day of her 12th birthday and discovers that it’s too painful to remember what it was like to once be alive. Emily asks the Stage Manager if anyone truly appreciates life. The Stage Manager replies, “No.” In the world of the living, George Gibbs sobs over his wife’s grave….

And the play ends!

OH MY GOD!

Seriously, reading Our Town was probably one of the most traumatic experiences of my life!

The 1940 film version of Our Town is a little less traumatic because it changes the ending. In the film version, Emily doesn’t die. She nearly dies while giving birth to her second child and the entire third act of the play is basically portrayed as being a near-death hallucination. But, in the end, she survives and she comes through the experience with a new found appreciation for life.

And it’s certainly the type of happy ending that I was hoping for when I first read the play but, as much as I hate to admit it, the story works better with Emily dying than with Emily surviving. The play presents death as being as inevitable as life and love and it makes the point that there’s nothing we can do to truly prepare for it. By allowing Emily to live, the film gives us a ray of hope that wasn’t present anywhere else in Our Town. The happy ending feels inauthentic. If Emily could live then why couldn’t Joe Crowell? For that matter, why did Emily’s younger brother have to die of a burst appendix on a camping trip?

But, other than the changed ending, Our Town is a pretty good adaptation of the stage play. While the film features an actual set (as opposed to the bare stage on which theatrical versions of Our Town are meant to be performed), director Sam Wood does a good job of retaining the play’s surreal, metatheatrical style. Making good use of shadow and darkness, Wood and cinematographer Bert Glennon made Grover’s Corner seem like a half-remembered memory or a fragment of a barely cohesive dream.

Frank Craven, who originated the role on Broadway, is properly dry as the Stage Manager and, in the role of Doc Gibbs, Thomas Mitchell is so sober and respectable that it’s hard to believe that, in just 6 years, the same actor would play the delightfully irresponsible Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life. Emily and George are played by Martha Scott and an impossibly young William Holden, both of whom give wonderfully appealing performances.

With the exception of that changed ending, Our Town is a worthy adaptation of a classic play. It was nominated for Best Picture but lost to another literary adaptation, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.