It Happened on 5th Avenue (Roy Del Ruth, 1947) – A truly sweet natured holiday film about an eccentric old squatter (Victor Moore), who commandeers the home of a joyless millionaire (Charlie Ruggles), and invites other unsheltered souls to spend Christmas there – including, unwittingly, Ruggles, his daughter and his ex-wife (Ann Harding, in fine form). It’s leisurely, funny and sometimes moving, with a very special cast and a great closing gag. (3.5)
***
A Bill of Divorcement (George Cukor, 1932) – A stunning drama about mental illness, with John Barrymore as a war veteran who leaves a sanitarium after 15 years and tries to reconnect with the wife (Billie Burke) and daughter (Katharine Hepburn) he left behind after “God turned his face away”. People talk a lot of nonsense about “brave” performances, but this one really was – Barrymore’s father had died in an asylum and he lived his whole life in fear of losing his mind. The film is very much of its time, subscribing to the notion that those with mental illness shouldn’t have children, but it’s compassionate and superbly scripted, with Barrymore at his considerable best and Hepburn close to hers in a winning and naturalistic debut performance. Their first scene together is a towering achievement. (4)
***
Arthur Christmas (Sarah Smith and Barry Cook, 2011) – I enjoyed this at the cinema and it’s just as good second time around. There’s the odd lull, McAvoy was a curious choice for Arthur and I wonder if the film’s cleverly thought-out mythology might confuse children, but it’s often hilarious (the hand of Peter Baynham is much in evidence), the high-tech present drop is very cool and Grandsanta is a great character. Each of Aardman's features has been better than the last, so while this was the best upon release, it's now been surpassed by The Pirates! The Biebster’s song over the credits sounds like it was cobbled together from 300 takes and fed through autotune. He’s clearly very talented. (3.5)
***
Princess O’Rourke (Norman Krasna, 1943) – A European princess (Olivia De Havilland), looking for excitement, gets all sleepy, meets a charming American (Robert Cummings) and wakes up in his bed, wearing his pyjamas. From there, love blossoms, but will her royal duty stand in the way of their happiness? This prototype Roman Holiday isn’t as transcendent (or realistic), and the demands of the period make it a bit too propagandist, but it’s still great fun, with a good Krasna script and lovely De Havilland. She was at war with Warner, battling illness and had taken to strolling onto set an hour late – if at all – but you wouldn’t know it from her effortlessly charming characterisation. (3)
***
Errol Flynn is doing this expression for most of the film.
Footsteps in the Dark (Lloyd Bacon, 1941) – Investment adviser Errol Flynn launches a second career as a writer of scandalous mysteries, then gets plunged into a case of his own in this daft but diverting detective yarn. The script could be better, but the film’s buoyed by Flynn’s lively comic turn, a strong supporting cast and a rather cool art deco train station. (2.5)
***
Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) – This is pretty much my favourite movie ever: a perfectly conceived and masterfully executed romantic comedy in which gangster’s moll Barbara Stanwyck hides out from the cops with an unsuspecting professor (Gary Cooper) and the seven affectionate, ineffectual old men helping him to compile an encyclopaedia. The script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett is utterly superb, but so much of the magic lies in the performances, since such a lot of what Cooper and particularly Stanwyck have to play is complex and unspoken. For most of the film she’s neither as smitten as she tells the professor, nor as heartless as she tells her boyfriend (Dana Andrews, in an atypically ruthless characterisation), and she walks that line beautifully, always staying sympathetic and beguiling us, as she does the loveable old fuddy duddies. There’s no denying that elsewhere Stanwyck could be a bit annoying, but she had a certain something that no other actress has ever possessed, an ability to – with just a single expression or line reading – bypass your critical faculties and get you right in the tearducts. The film is a wonderful mix of comedy and sentiment; the leads prove masters at both (how about that "Richard Ill" scene?), and they’re ably supported by the likes of Henry Travers, Allen Jenkins and Richard Haydn, whose bachelor dinner speech is an absolute knockout. The gag count is off the scale (personal favourites are: “I’ve always thought of you as something of a… WOOOH!” and “I don’t know. Where do you live?”), allied to a lush romanticism unlike almost anything else I’ve encountered. It looks sumptuous too, thanks to the talents of the legendary Gregg Toland. To get that startling effect of Stanwyck’s welling eyes shining out from the dark, he blacked up her face, like an outrageous bloody genius. (4)
And for no other reason than that I found it the other day, here's the full-length review I wrote for MovieMail a while back (a shortened version appears on their site here):
There are a handful of romantic comedies so inspired, so deft in their balance of heart and hilarity, that they seem to touch perfection. Joyous on first discovery, revisiting them only serves to show their depth, their invention and their ability to grab a willing participant by the heartstrings – whilst adding a few favourite phrases to the viewer’s vernacular. Ball of Fire is one such movie.
Gary Cooper plays Prof. Bertram Potts, one of eight academics living in a musty townhouse, working on a new encyclopaedia. They’re partway through ‘s’ when an encounter with lingo-heavy binman Allen Jenkins flags up a serious shortcoming: their entry on slang is farcically outdated. So Potts ventures into the real world to brush up on his street talk, and encounters nightclub singer and gangster’s moll Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). Forced to lie low after a mob hit orchestrated by lover Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), she figures the professors’ house was made to fit – zoning in on Potts to seal the deal.
The script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, loosely based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is simply glorious – and this cast makes the most of it. Barely a minute passes without a big laugh from a great one-liner, sight gag or bit of character comedy. There’s Cooper accidentally flirting with his benefactor’s daughter, criminal Benny the Creep telling the cops he’s the owner of improbably large pyjamas inscribed with Lilac’s initials and Stanwyck turning up at the professors’ home, expecting room and board. “OK, where do I sleep?” she asks. “I don’t know,” replies Cooper. “Where do you live?”
Such comic brilliance is punctuated by sequences of uncommon emotional clarity, anchored by the beguiling Stanwyck. As in Remember the Night – the transcendent Preston Sturges-scripted romantic comedy that marks perhaps the apex of the genre – she plays a hard-boiled dame transformed in the face of love, and the results are truly unforgettable. Cooper is similarly effective, touching and amusing as a smitten bookworm with the soul of a poet but the naïvety of a child, while the seven ‘dwarfs’ add to both the gag count and the winsome, sometimes wistful atmosphere. It’s a wonderful film.
***
Searching for Sonny (Andrew Disney, 2011) – An entertaining black-comedy-noir, in which aimless 28-year-old Jason Dohring (Logan in Veronica Mars) attends his high school reunion, notices that his best pal has gone missing and winds up neck-deep in conspiracy. I got this low-budget indie to see what Dohring had been up to and – despite the odd bum note (like a running joke about hating the Irish) – it was good all round, with some enjoyably offbeat dialogue (much of it ad-libbed), interesting direction (well, apart for the circling shot near the close, which was like being on the teacups at Alton Towers) and solid performances – particularly from Nick Kocher as Dohring’s loose cannon of a brother. “Coinky-dink? I think ninky-dink.” (3)
***
5th Ave Girl (Gregory La Cava, 1939) – An unhappy industrialist (Walter Connolly) tires of his wife’s infidelity, and hires a working girl (Ginger Rogers) to pose as his mistress. La Cava made perhaps the best social comedy of all time, My Man Godfrey, and while this one can’t compete, it has a few good jokes and observations, Connolly’s as good value as ever and Rogers is unusually – and admirably – restrained. Her two modes of comic playing were “appealingly deadpan” and “unforgivably broad” (see Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business for one such chilling example) – the former serves her well here. Tim Holt, whose whole career was basically just really weird, appears as Connolly’s polo-playing son. (2.5)
***
The Case of the Howling Dog (Alan Crosland, 1934) – Perry Mason’s first screen appearance is a densely plotted, sometimes confusing mystery given a shot in the arm by star Warren William. Some of the supporting cast are a bit wooden, though curiously this B production managed to attract Mary Astor too. She’s always worth a watch, even when not playing as eye-wateringly horny as usual. (2.5)
***
Paradise for Three (Edward Buzzell, 1938) – A competition winner (Robert Young) and a multi-millionaire (Frank Morgan) pitch up at a mountain hotel, where their identities are confused, leading to various romantic complications. The film’s Depression-era ruminations on the incompatibility of the rich and the poor are never quite sorted out, but it’s amusing – when not resorting to slapstick – and the cast is fantastic, a virtual who’s who of ‘30s character comedians, including not only Morgan but also Edna May Oliver, Reginald Owen, Herman Bing and Sig Ruman. Mary Astor dresses as a schoolgirl whilst trying to entrap Morgan. Well of course she does. (2.5)
***
Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961) – A lean, mean Christmas noir, in which a self-hating hitman – violence coursing through him like a virus – comes to NYC to do a job, but finds himself tempted by the lure of a real life. The acting’s not always the best, but Larry Tucker is super as a sweaty gun-dealer, the location photography is absolutely stunning and there’s a florid, doom-laden second person narration by the blacklisted Lionel Stander! (3)
***
Nothing to Declare (Dany Boon, 2010) – A French customs officer (Dany Boon) teams up with his virulently anti-French Belgian counterpart (Benoît Poelvoorde) – also the brother of his secret girlfriend – to take down some drug smugglers in this hugely enjoyable comedy. There’s a curious shift into drama at one juncture and the closing gag is a bit off, but writer, director and lead Boon – France’s biggest movie star – creates a credible, completely charming world set around the border on the eve of the Eurozone launch in 1993, and fills his film with clever sight gags, smart one-liners and funny characters. His impression of a Belgian person is also amazing waffle. (3.5)
***
I can only assume that Fred MacMurray's hair smells really nice.
Take a Letter, Darling (Mitchell Leisen, 1942) – An artist (Fred MacMurray) takes a job as a secretary to get the money he needs to go travelling. But his new boss is a woman: advertising executive Rosalind Russell, who seems to be treating him like a high-class gigolo, throwing his manhood into question (not a euphemism). This one lacks that special quality that hangs around so many of Leisen’s finest – not least Remember the Night, which also starred MacMurray – but the dialogue is zingy, the set-up is agreeably unusual and the credits sequence is awesome. (3)
***
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000) – An elegiac story of two repressed would-be lovers in '60s Hong Kong – a journalist (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and a secretary (Maggie Cheung) – who discover that their spouses are having an affair, and begin to tentatively re-enact it, while stopping short of the physical contact they say would shift it from the insightful to the tawdry (though really the reticence smells like apprehension, and the failure to act seems borne of misunderstanding). It's a romance like none other I've ever seen, directed in a more restained way than WKW's contemporary films – such as the jaw-dropping Fallen Angels, one of the best of the '90s – but blessed with his recognisable style, utilising pop music, Christopher Doyle's sumptuous cinematography and a desperately moving pay-off to stunning effect. There's also something truly daring about the bitty narrative structure, which regards only the couple's contact as being worthy of focus, reducing their spouses to off-screen voices (like something from an old sitcom) and presenting a steady succession of loosely-defined fragments in which Leung and Cheung fret, murmur and fall in love. It can be too aloof, it's sometimes a little hard to follow and don't expect much in the way of emotional release, but this is a true original, and a film that lingers long after the credits fade. (3.5)
***
Mad Dog and Glory (John McNaughton, 1993) - Genuinely unusual crime-comedy-drama-romance about an anxious cop (De Niro) who unwittingly saves the life of a mobster and stand-up comic (Bill Murray) – whilst literally wetting himself – and finds that he's repaid by having a frantic, amorous Uma Thurman installed in his flat. There are some really nice offbeat touches and self-contained scenes, as well as a smokily atmospheric (if underused) score from Elmer Bernstein, but it never really goes anywhere or amounts to anything, and ends with a grand anti-climax. For movie nerds, it's an interesting film in terms of where it finds its leads: De Niro (sporting copper-tinged hair) was three years on from his last great performance but yet to dive into mainstream comedy, Murray was entering the (relative) wasteland between Groundhog Day and his indie renaissance, and Thurman was still a year off Pulp Fiction. David Caruso, who's extremely charismatic as De Niro's macho partner, appears on the cusp of a Clooney-like transition into megastardom that never materialised. All told, Mad Dog and Glory doesn't weld absurdism and quiet emotion to the crime template nearly as successfully as something like Brick, but it remains an intriguing and sometimes satisfying watch, due to its offbeat approach and a couple of eye-catching performances, including Murray cast cleverly against type as a ruthless, supercilious gangster. (2.5)
***
Sugar & Spice (Francine McDougall, 2001) - When toothy blonde cheerleading captain Marty Shelton gets up the duff, courtesy of affably gormless quarterback James Marsden, she and her troupe decide that staging a bank robbery would ensure the baby gets the best possible start in life. This mildly diverting teen comedy lacks a coherent voice or viewpoint, oscillating between being offputtingly nasty and sickly sweet, is saddled with one of the unfunniest running gags I've ever seen (one of the group really fancies Conan O'Brien, which is about as much character development as she gets), and ends in oddly muted fashion. The one truly interesting scene in the picture, in which Mena Suvari's troubled teen visits her mum in prison, manages to morph from subtly moving to unwatchably juvenile in the blink of an eye, before McDougall attempts to drag it back, with limited success. I've seen this cited as a spiky sibling to the jaw-dropping Brick – one of the finest movies of the last decade – and the distinctive but compromised Juno. It's nothing of the sort, though it's fairly watchable, Marsden is amusing and there are a handful of good gags, especially the Lincoln mascot looming surreally over the dazed quarterback. I was surprised to see Suvari, two years on from American Beauty, way down the pecking-order in a film I only heard of this week, but her strange performance – sometimes wooden, at others intriguing, as changeable and erratic as the movie itself – went some way to explaining it. (2)
***
TV:
TVM: One Christmas (Tony Bill, 1994) – Truman Capote’s misery memoir, with moments of catharsis, gets the superior TV treatment, thanks to a wobbly-voiced Kate Hepburn (in her last film) and The Fonz. A lot of authors seem to have had feckless fathers (similar pipe dreamers turn up in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Parenthood and Imaginary Crimes), but the familiarity of the story does little to dim its resonance, and there is at least some ray-of-light reward for braving its bleakness. (3)
***
*MINOR SPOILERS*
The Snowman and the Snowdog (Hilary Audus, 2012) – It was never going to touch the original (to which it adheres too slavishly) and the sleigh race wasn’t very good, but for the most part I enjoyed this: the opening, with the dog’s death, was beautifully handled, it was all very handsome to look at and the final shot was very moving. (3)
***
Room on the Broom (Jan Lachauer and Max Lang, 2012) – OK animation: rather repetitive and Simon Pegg’s narration didn’t quite work, but the last five was really good. (2.5)
***
Downton Abbey Christmas Special 2012 (Andy Goddard, 2012) – Wow, that was the most boring episode of Downton EVER! Branson’s a good actor, though. I’m not sure what on earth Phoebe Nicholls was doing. I liked her a lot in Brideshead (the best thing ever on TV), but she really phoned in this one. Also, there was an old dude in it called "Shrimpy". Could do better. (2)
***
Homeland: Season 2 (2012) – “If you are in a minority of one,” Gandhi once opined, “the truth is still the truth.” I’m going to now completely trivialise that quote by applying it to a review of a TV show. Though the backlash has now started and we’ve all stopped watching Homeland because it’s really shit and unrealistic and like 24 or something, and the first season was well better and now it’s just embarrassing and they should have stopped it after 12 episodes rather than spinning it out and Claire Danes hasn’t taken her bra off, not even once, I actually think this second season of Homeland was probably slightly better than the first. The opening two episodes were arguably the finest so far and while Brody’s Norman Wisdom-esque escapades got a bit silly at times (particularly in episodes 3 and 10), and the hit-and-run subplot was possibly the least interesting thing that has ever happened in the world, I thought the acting from Danes, Lewis and particularly Potinkin was tremendous and the programme developed both in the ways that you wanted it to… and in ways that you’d never expect. All rather excellent. Can't wait for the next shit season that none of us are going to watch. (3.5)
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