Did they even make movies before I was born? They did, and I’ve watched some of them!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to watch movies, but recently, I was able to catch some from the pre-1971 era. Let’s check them out!

Night Nurse (1931). Barbara Stanwyck plays a nurse who is employed in a rich woman’s house, taking care of her two young kids. It turns out there’s a plot against them! Their father is dead, and he left them a trust fund, and nefarious elements are out to steal it. Oh dear. This is, unfortunately, a fairly dull movie, as it’s only a bit over 70 minutes and therefore there’s just not a lot of time for anything to develop. Stanwyck and Joan Blondell, her sort-of mentor at the hospital where Stanwyck learns how to be a nurse, try their best, but there’s not much for them to do. We get some stuff at the hospital, where Stanwyck patches up a bootlegger (Ben Lyon) with a gunshot wound, and when she doesn’t report it, he decides she’s swell and spends the rest of the movie looking out for her (with the ultimate goal of scoring with her, presumably, but it’s a very chaste relationship). Stanwyck looked after the kids in the hospital, which is how she gets the job as their nurse, but they’re now under the care of a shady doctor and Blondell actually notices that they seem to be getting worse instead of better, but she doesn’t want to get involved. Stanwyck does, however, and she runs afoul of the chauffeur, Nick, played with pretty good menace by Clark Gable (this was, I guess, the last time Gable played a “bad guy,” as he was becoming too popular to do so)(this is also one of the 13 (!!!) movies he acted in that came out in 1931 – they worked them hard in those days!). Stanwyck never actually uncovers any proof of the scheme to kill the children so that Nick and the shady doctor can get the trust fund, but she doesn’t need it, because her heart is pure! This also ends very oddly, with a murder that is basically played for laughs. It’s just not a very good movie, unfortunately. But it’s fun to see Stanwyck and Blondell and Gable doing their thing, so there’s that. (I could only find one clip – the movie is on-line, if you’re interested – but it shows some pre-Code naughtiness!)

Grand Hotel (1932). Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and two Barrymores converge at the Grand Hotel in Berlin in this classic melodrama. It’s a good movie, although it does suffer a bit from “early 1930s-itis,” in that everyone is really emoting because they can’t believe their voices can be heard because they’re used to silent pictures. Garbo is a ballerina who never wants to perform (she wants to be alone, as she says in this movie); Barrymore (the John variant) is an impoverished baron who puts the moves on both Crawford and then Garbo, falling hard for Garbo even though he’s trying to rob her; Barrymore (the Lionel variant) is an employee of a textile company who finds out he has only a few weeks to live so he decides to live like a lord until then; Beery is L. Barrymore’s employer, in Berlin to work out a merger with a bigger company which, if it doesn’t go through, will leave him destitute; Crawford is a stenographer hired by Beery who turns out to be quite an adept gold-digger. Everyone has problems, but it also feels like it’s going to work out until the end, which gets a bit bleak. Garbo is Garbo, Crawford is quite good, Barrymore (John) alternates between creepy (according to my daughter), sympathetic, and pathetic, and Lionel is hamming it up quite well. It won Best Picture (it’s the only movie ever to win that prize without being nominated for any other Academy Awards), which does make sense because it’s the kind of movie that Hollywood likes to crown Best Picture. It is, after all, quite good.

Lost Horizon (1937). I’m pretty sure I’ve read this book, but it’s one of those things that’s such in the zeitgeist that even you haven’t read it or seen the movie, you know the deal. It’s a pretty good movie, too – it was the most expensive Columbia movie ever at the time, costing $2 million, but it looks very keen. It was nominated for 7 Oscars (including Best Picture) and won 2, for Art Direction and Editing, which are both excellent, so I guess it deserved them. The story of the movie post-filming is interesting, too – Frank Capra delivered a 6-hour cut which was edited down to 3, but it was eventually released as slightly over 2. Subsequent edits left it at 90 minutes, and in 1973, the American Film Institute started to restore it, but a lot had been lost. Eventually, they found a soundtrack for the 132-minute version, so that’s what they used, but about 6 minutes of it was never found, so they cleverly used still photography from the movie or publicity stills to bridge the gaps. It works pretty well, and the missing scenes give us decent information without us needing to see the characters moving around too much, so it’s fine.

If you don’t know what’s going on in the movie, Ronald Colman is a British diplomat trying to evacuate “white people” from a city in China before they get massacred by revolutionaries (they make a big deal about them being white people, which cracked me up). He’s on the last plane out, with his brother, a paleontologist, an obnoxious American, and a brassy broad. Their pilot is killed by a sinister Asian man who flies them into the Himalayas, where the plane crashes and the hijacking pilot is killed. They’re found by the Tibetans who take them to Shangri-La, a paradise on Earth. Colman digs it immediately, but the rest are a bit antsy to leave, even though it’s clear that Chang, the major domo of the place (played by “that guy’s not Chinese” H.B. Warner, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor), has very little intention of letting them go. (Wait, Warner played Jesus in 1927? When he was in his early 50s? What a wacky world.) Colman falls for Jane Wyman, playing a woman whose parents were European explorers who died in the mountains when she was a baby, therefore explaining her presence there and allowing Colman to fall in love with a good European woman instead of one of those dusky Asians. Eventually, the other three members of the party start digging Shangri-La, but Colman’s brother, John Howard, never does, so eventually he leaves with his tootsie, who’s played by the delightfully-named Maria Margarita Guadalupe Teresa Estella Castilla Bolado y O’Donnell, whose acted under the name Margo. Colman leaves with them due to his brother making him doubt the reality of Shangri-La, and things go badly, of course. Hilariously enough, Colman’s adventures after he leaves Shangri-La sound like a more fun movie, but they’re all narrated very quickly by a British lord back in London. The movie looks great – the sets are magnificent, and while the movie was filmed in Ojai and Victorville and other California locations, Capra manages to use the desert by Palm Springs really well, and the editing in a stock mountain footage is done well. Overall, it’s a pretty keen movie. It’s wildly Eurocentric, of course – the brother wants to get back to “civilization” even though, as Chang puts it, he hasn’t left one; the driving force behind the creation of Shangri-La was a “Belgian” (who arrived there in 1713, over a hundred years before Belgium existed); the Europeans in Colman’s party can’t help themselves trying to “improve” the lives of the natives even though their lives are pretty much perfect; the Asian porters do something monumentally stupid that no one who lives in the mountains would do, but they do it because they’re “uncivilized brutes” – and male-centered – when Colman asks Chang what happens if two men desire the same woman, Chang doesn’t even bring up that the woman might have a choice in the matter – but it’s still fun to watch. And read. I know I read the book, I just know it!

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). It was Barbara Stanwyck month on TCM in March, hence the Stanwyck movies in this post! This noir thriller, made when Stanwyck was 40 and Burt Lancaster was trying to break out of the “tough-guy” roles that he got after his debut in The Killers two years earlier, is a terrific movie. Stanwyck is the heiress of a pharmaceutical company run by her somewhat overbearing (but still kindly) father (Ed Begley), and she’s been stricken by a mysterious heart condition that has left her bedridden. She and Lancaster are in New York for the summer (her father and his company are in Chicago), but Lancaster doesn’t come home from work one night and he had given Stanwyck’s nurse the night off because he had promised he would be home. Stanwyck is calling his office, but when she asks the operator to connect her, she gets a crossed line on which two men are plotting a murder. I mean, because it’s a movie, we immediately think that Stanwyck is the intended target and the “client” the men speak of is Lancaster, but we don’t know for sure. Stanwyck tries to call the cops, who tell her there’s not enough evidence to do anything about it, and then she calls Lancaster’s secretary, who tells her that Lancaster left the office at midday to have lunch with a woman and she hasn’t seen him since. As Stanwyck tracks down what’s going on, director Anatole Litvak uses flashbacks (and sometimes flashbacks nested within flashbacks!) to tell the story, and it’s very cleverly done. Ann Richards, Wendell Corey, Harold Vermilyea, Leif Erickson, and an incredibly youthful-looking William Conrad (he was only 28 at the time) round out the good cast, and Stanwyck got an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (her fourth, and last – this time around, she lost to Jane Wyman for Johnny Belinda, which is a showier role and therefore more appealing to Oscar voters). She’s hysterical a lot (it was the 1940s, after all), but she really does a nice job showing how she got the way she is, which makes it all the more tragic (plus, the inherent sexism of the time period is on display, which also has something to do with what she’s going through). Lancaster does an excellent job as a guy who wants to succeed but perhaps a bit too much, and their relationship, with both of them failing the other, is done really well. There are some beautiful noir-ish shots throughout, and Litvak builds the tension wonderfully. It’s a really cool movie, so check it out!

Prince of Foxes (1949). Darryl Zanuck decided to film this movie in black and white due to the other expenses of the film (including filming in Italy), and despite some very cool, almost noir-ish shots, the film suffers for it, as it’s a Renaissance movie that would have benefited greatly from the era’s Technicolor, as it features spectacular locations (mostly San Marino, which is the fictional duchy of “Citta del Monte”) and wonderful costumes. I wrote about The Flame and the Arrow from 1950 a while back, and while that movie was set 300 years earlier than this one, the principle is the same, and that movie looked great in color. Oh well – the movie was nominated for Cinematography (for black and white, which was a separate category back then) and Costume Design (again, for black and white), and maybe it would have won if it had been in color! Anyhoo, Tyrone Power, during his European exile (he spent a few years in Europe in the late 1940s/early 1950s), does his square-jawed, tousled-hair thing as an Italian peasant (without, as I love to note about Power, even attempting an accent) who’s pretending to be an Italian nobleman so he can move up in the world in the service of Cesare Borgia, played with his usual quiet menace and confidence by Orson Welles (and yes, those two starred together again the next year in The Black Rose, which also looks great in color). Of course, once he ends up in Citta del Monte and sees how groovy their ruler (Felix Aylmar) is and how sexy Aylmar’s very young wife (Wanda Hendrix) is, he betrays Borgia and throws in his lot with the town, which leads to a lot of rousing action as they fight off the indomitable forces of the Borgias. It’s a perfectly fine adventure, with some good battle scenes and a decent (if brief) sword fight at the end, and while it plays a bit fast and loose with history, that doesn’t really matter all that much. It’s an adventure picture, and we need not stick to actual history for that!

The Thing from Another World (1951). I kept DVRing this, and it kept getting deleted because I always try to DVR too much and things get deleted, but it shows up on TCM quite a lot, so this time I watched it! It’s a pretty keen movie that holds up well, despite some 1950s special effects and some lack of, you know, good horror stuff. Kenneth Tobey, an Air Force captain, is sent to a research station at the North Pole, where something has crashed into the ice. He finds Robert Cornthwaite as Dr. Carrington (who was 34 at the time but seems to be playing a dude in his 60s), who runs the thing, and a woman he tried to score with once, Nikki (played by Margaret Sheridan, who inexplicably gets top billing). He brings along a reporter played by Douglas Spencer, who is really annoying throughout the movie, as he whines the entire time about getting the story out and not being allowed to (they’re largely cut off from civilization for most of the movie, so how he’s going to get the story out is never addressed). They find the crash, blow up the spaceship (inadvertently), and bring James Arness as the Thing back to the station in a block of ice, which melts and sets Arness free. He is not pleased, to say the least. In the original story, the thing is more like the one in John Carpenter’s remake, but the special effects couldn’t deal with a shape-shifting alien, so they changed it to make Arness an intelligent vegetable, basically. He can’t be shot, of course, so they have to think of another way to kill it. Carrington, meanwhile, wants to study it, so he actively works against the soldiers even though he knows how dangerous the Thing is. It’s a good, tense movie, although it feels like it could be remade using this script rather than the original story and it would be a good movie. The Thing doesn’t kill many people, and we don’t see it when he does, which isn’t surprising as it’s 1951 and the men are killed brutally, but when we do see Arness wandering around, he doesn’t do well at the killing. It’s a bit frustrating, and if it was remade today, the body count would be higher. Similarly, it’s nice not to see Arness too close up because his Thing outfit wasn’t great, so it makes him a bit weirder and more mysterious because we never see him up close. But today we would be able to see him much more closely, which might be neat. It’s a cool movie, with some interesting subversive things (Hunky Captain and Nikki seem to have a kinkier relationship than you might expect; the soldiers seem awfully casual about criticizing their superior officers), and yes, the Communist subtext is there, certainly, but it zips along nicely and has some good action and the actors do a decent job. Carpenter’s movie is better, but this is still a pretty good time at the movies!

The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958). This is a goofy but harmless Western comedy (meaning, because it’s the 1950s, that there are three (3!!!!) songs that interrupt the story for no reason – see below … and that’s not Mansfield singing, but nobody seems to know who it is) in which Kenneth More, a London layabout whose uncle (played by Robert Morley in a cameo) demands he buckle down and get to work in the family business, which is selling guns. More decides that because there’s so much violence in the American West, he’ll head there to sell his guns. Makes perfect sense! While on the stagecoach to the town of Fractured Jaw, Indians attack, but More chats with the chief and the chief respects that, so later on, he’s made an honorary member of the tribe and they have his back. The movie is like that – More abhors violence, so he’s always trying to get people to talk instead of fight, while everyone around him wants to fight. In town, he gets an undeserved reputation as a quick-draw gunslinger, so the mayor makes him the sheriff to keep peace between the two warring ranches in the area. The town’s hotel owner, Jayne Mansfield, is, of course, tougher than all the dudes, and she thinks More is an idiot for eschewing violence, but, of course, they fall hard for each other fairly quickly. I’m not sure what accent Mansfield is trying here – it’s sort-of Southern – but you don’t put Mansfield in a movie for her acting ability, and she looks pretty darned good, naturally (her daughter, Mariska Hargitay, is a much better actor, of course). This actually turned out to be her last successful movie, as the 1960s were not kind to her movie career. It’s a silly movie, but it’s not terrible, and the fact that More doesn’t want to use violence is interesting, as is his interactions with the Indians. Sure, they’re portrayed a bit stereotypically, but not really badly (there are a few brief moments of “ha, ha, the savages don’t get civilized people,” but they’re only moments), and More simply treats them like people, unlike the people in town, who have a poor view of them. It’s not the greatest depiction of Indians by any means, but due to the fact that this is a comedy and they could have gone very broad with the stereotypes, it’s kind of impressive that they’re just people. Anyway, this is a fun way to kill some time. It won’t change your life, but it’s decent enough.

The Blue Max (1966). This is an interesting war movie – it’s set during World War I and focuses on German characters, so there’s that. George Peppard, hilariously not even attempting a German accent, stars as an infantry soldier who (unsurprisingly) really hates running through the mud and contracting dysentery (presumably), so he gets into pilot school and, in early 1918, joins a flying squadron. The title of the movie comes from the medal German pilots get when they reach 20 kills (the movie’s threshold is higher than it was in real life, apparently), and Peppard is determined to get it. He’s a commoner at a time when air combat was usually reserved for the nobility (at least in the German army), and that rubs him the wrong way. What’s odd about the movie is the tone. Peppard is the nominal hero, and his “low class-versus-high class” trope should resonate more, but Peppard is kind of a douchebag throughout, so the noble Germans come off looking better, which I’m not sure is what’s supposed to happen. He has a rivalry with Jeremy Kemp, the ace of the squadron, who’s high-born and also the nephew of the general in charge of the air force, played with vigorous brio by James Mason. Kemp (who my generation might know from his role in Top Secret!, the Val Kilmer spy spoof – he’s the East German general who answers the giant phone) looks down on Peppard and is a better flyer than he is, so of course they have a rivalry, and Kemp’s death late in the movie turns out to be the key to Peppard’s downfall, as well. The squadron commander, played by Karl Michael Vogler, is also from the nobility, and he clings to this outdated notion of chivalry in warfare that Peppard does not, mainly because he was in the trenches and saw what the war really is. Vogler is honorable, but he slowly realizes that no one around him really is. Peppard is also rivals with Kemp for the affections of Ursula Andress (whose voice was dubbed by the same woman who did it for Dr. No – what the heck was wrong with Andress’s voice that no one let her speak on film?!?!?), who’s married to Mason (but who doesn’t seem to care that she’s dallying with her nephew-by-marriage and then some commoner). Peppard and Andress have little chemistry, so their romance, such as it is (they meet to have sex, it seems, and little else), doesn’t really work and takes up too much time in the movie (it’s 2½ hours long but only drags a bit, when Peppard and Andress are together). Peppard was never that good an actor, so the scenes with Andress, who’s also not great, simply become two very pretty people hanging out, which can be boring. On the other hand, the fighting scenes are magnificent. Director Jack Guillermin made sure to include a lot of aerial scenes, and they’re very well done. The combat is intense, and special effects are nicely integrated into the long shots, and Guillermin doesn’t skimp on the crashes and explosions, either. There’s a scene where Peppard and the squadron attack the advancing British, and it reminded me of the Game of Thrones attack on the “loot train” (the Battle of the Goldroad) from season 7, except that the effects are all practical, so it feels more impressive. Despite Peppard’s fairly wooden performance, Andress’s irrelevance, and the weird tone of the movie, it’s still exciting and cool to watch, and even with the weird tone, Guillermin and the screenwriters do manage to convey this idea that the new warfare would be far nastier than the old. Of course, war is always nasty and Vogler is feeling nostalgic for an era that never really existed, but the idea is still done pretty well in this movie. So that’s neat.

The Double Man (1967). Yul Brynner plays a CIA agent who gets news that his teenage son has been killed in a skiing accident in Austria in this spy thriller. He suspects something, so he heads to Austria to figure out what’s going on. We know his son was killed, because in the prologue, we see Russians plotting something dastardly that involves Brynner, but everyone else tries to tell him it was just an accident. Brynner meets up with an old friend, Clive Revill (Revill just died this year – he was 94), who got out of the spy game and is running a school in St. Anton (the town actually exists, and I assume the movie was filmed there – IMDb only says it was filmed in the Tyrol, the state in which St. Anton is located), and he’s more of a father to Brynner’s son than Brynner is. While he’s there, he finds out the Britt Ekland, looking like a lost doe at times, was one of the last people to see his son, so he tries to insinuate himself into her life. It’s a pretty good thriller, with gorgeous cinematography of the Alps and some good action scenes up on the mountains and in the town. I don’t want to give away the Russians’ fiendish plot, but it’s not bad, and it’s fun that the resolution rests on what an utter bastard Brynner is. Lloyd Nolan, who starred as Michael Shayne back in the 1940s, is Brynner’s boss, and Anton Diffring, who I just saw in The Blue Max (see above!), is the head Russian dude. It’s a nifty thriller, if that’s your sort of thing.

Lady in Cement (1968). I haven’t seen Tony Rome, the first movie with Sinatra in the role, but, I mean, he’s a private detective in Miami who sleeps with women far too young for him. What else do you need to know? This is kind of a silly movie, in that we get a light jazz soundtrack with a lot of girls warbling “dooooo … wah!” as the action unfolds, which jars with the tone of two young women getting brutally killed during the movie. But in the 1960s, murder was just a backdrop for cool cats acting cool and scoring with the chicks, man! Sinatra (at 53) is Rome, who’s out near Key Biscayne searching for a Spanish galleon when he comes upon the titular “lady in cement,” a naked blonde woman whose feet are encased. The coroner claims she was stabbed in the chest (although there’s no visible wound on the body) and also claims they can’t identify her because she’s been in the water so long (although she hasn’t been and she looks in pristine condition when we do see her in the water). Sinatra passes her off to the cops (represented by Richard Conte, who went on to play Barzini in The Godfather), and then he gets hired by Dan Blocker to find a woman named Sondra Lomax. He ends up at Raquel Welch’s mansion, as she’s a rich heiress at whose party Lomax was last seen. Yes, Lomax is the woman in the water (it takes a long time to confirm that), and Sinatra ends up chasing down a gangster who’s gone legit, his son who doesn’t necessarily think he should, a go-go dancer (who also ends up dead), the go-go club’s manager and his boyfriend (there’s the requisite amount of gay panic for a 1960s movie, as you knew there would be), and it’s all very sordid and nasty. The movie zips along (it’s a bit over 90 minutes), and it’s really only interesting because of the “1968” of it all – the tacky decor, the big cars (this movie features perhaps the slowest “high-speed” chase in movie history), the forced hipness from people too old to be hip – and because, you know, Raquel Welch can set the screen on fire simply by showing up. It’s dumb but largely inoffensive (even the mockery of the gay couple feels somewhat half-hearted), and it’s not the worst way to spend a bit of time. Apparently Sinatra was a huge dick on set, but it seems like Sinatra was kind of a huge dick all the time, so perhaps that’s not surprising! (The trailer, hilariously, begins with the most important moment in the movie!!!!!)

Those were fun, weren’t they? It’s always interesting to check out olde-tymey movies!