CineFiled

Dick Powell is an insurance man with a secure job, a lovely wife, and a good kid but he's feeling a bit restive and dissatisfied with his routine, remembering the romantic dreams of travel and adventure he and his wife shared when they were courting.

A lead on recovering some embezzled loot leads him to the beneficiary of good purchased with those ill-gotten gains. A dame in distress (not even very much distress) and a ride in a speedboat fan the embers of his romantic dreams and weaken his commitment to fidelity. The P.I. who led him to her has his own designs on this dame, though, and doesn't take kindly to Powell horning in on his game.

It's an interesting approach to a noir, where most of the people are kind and the initial stakes aren't really that high. This noir is really about a nice guy having a midlife crisis that spins out of control.

A magnificent film of love and theater which seems much, much grander than the limited scale enforced by filming mostly indoors in Nazi occupied France. The film evinces a mastery of both pantomime and incisive clever dialogue.

A near-Shakespearean tragedy; most tragic for those left to live with the consequences of betrayal and revelation.

A silly movie, scientifically, technologically, and dramatically. Cool looking submarine. Roomy, too. There's actually very little for most of the cast to do in this disaster situation, something Irwin Allen improved on in later disaster movies.

Quite a cast, though, with Walter Pidgeon returning to film after several years on stage, a past-his-prime Peter Lorre, Joan Fontaine, the pre-I Dream of Jeannie Barbara Eden, and teen idol singer Frankie Avalon who also sang the romantic-styled theme song "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea."

It's an ambitious movie with a relatively modest budget that misses the mark in almost every regard. The submarine is the redeeming feature and went on to star in its own television series.

Automation angst is the maguffin. Poor communication, sexism, and unnecessary secrets are the fundamental sources of the problems that arise in the story.

It's nice to see a Hollywood rom-com with actors in their fifties (well, Hepburn wasn't quite 50 when making the movie, but it was released less than two weeks before she turned) that doesn't dwell on, or even mention, their age. The third leg of the romantic triangle is a youth barely into his forties.

The script isn't especially strong but Hepburn and Tracy deliver that banter with such skill that it seems smarter and wittier than it really is.

Desk Set is a slight but pleasantly diverting confection with a backdrop of early (and now perennial) concerns about computers taking jobs from people.

The first adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's play is reportedly more faithful than the 1944 movie. It's a pretty decent psychological drama but even less nuanced than the '44 version.

Anton Walbrook is a good, if unsubtle, villain. Diana Wynyard plays the victim just fine.

The piano recital scene builds nicely. The music hall Can-Can performed by  The Darmora Ballet is pretty amazing and feels like the real thing.

Skillfully walks a tight-rope of comedy and drama with an astute performance from Jack Benny as a character who is often oblivious (or only seemingly oblivious?) to expected concerns; focused instead entirely on responses to his acting. The movie is primarily a comedy but there's often a feeling of risk, dread, and danger keeping the audience on edge.

There's also a courageously long time between set-up and pay-off on some of the gags.

A glimpse inside black families and communities in Alabama in the early 60s via a narrative feature which has a bit of the look and feel of documentary. Effective at both telling a story and illuminating aspects of the black experience in America.

A rich girl sets her sights on daddy's favorite employee and nearly ruins him after she gets him. The movie is often clumsy, stiff, and awkward but the core story is reasonably good and the movie has that early-talkie charm of a toddler learning to walk. Having Ned Sparks around to mumble grumpy, cynical, often misquoted proverbs and asides add to the stiffness, the awkward, and the charm.

A young woman on the run. A young man who assists her. A grudgingly developing romance. The Romance of vagabonds and railroads. Made with some grit and gumption and lovely cinematography. 

A comedy about tough working girls training to be nurses that segues into a mystery plot about inheritance and murder by deprivation. Cary Grant shows up as a tough in a very early role originally intended for James Cagney. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell disrobe early and often. The punchline is murder.

William A. Wellman's Night Nurse and The Public Enemy (both released in 1931, and the later of which catapulted James Cagney to stardom and out of Night Nurse) are cited as being key motivators for the shift to hardline enforcement of the previously loosely enforced Hays Code.

Night Nurse (1931) Director: William A. Wellman

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Arson, kidnapping, and the unintended consequences of manipulative deception. Screwball comedy is not the stone-faced Gary Cooper's forte, but he gamely gives it a go. It's the sort of role the very expressive Cary Grant chewed with relish and the movie might have worked better with Grant - or someone like him - livening up the proceedings. As is, the convoluted plot, Frank Morgan in a supporting role, and some bizarre behavior (like Cooper almost always wearing a medical face-mask when caring for his baby) keep the movie interesting and entertaining enough.

Casanova Brown (1944) Director: Sam Wood

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A much leaner movie than I remembered from childhood. THE WIZARD OF OZ doesn't waste much time between highlights and that's probably why it's stood the test of time. Nearly every moment we see is "the good parts." 

A beautiful bleak study of a samurai without honor; the plot an accretion of grudges and vendettas.

Our hero's tale runs through WWI, hospitalization, morphine addiction, institutionalization, unemployment, work and business success, marriage and parenthood, arrest in "Red Riots", imprisonment, and depression-era destitution. All in 71 minutes. Without feeling rushed. And with time for moments to savor and time for our hero's stereotypical radical Marxist neighbor to transform into a stereotypical heartless capitalist after creating a successful invention (a transformation that brought to mind the findings of a 2017 Reason-Rupe poll which was often reported with headlines like "Millennials like socialism - until they get jobs"). It may go unnoticed that all the generous people in the movie are capitalist entrepreneurs.

The movie ends with our hero's son aspiring to be the hero his father is, while the hero lives a hobo's life not wishing to be a burden or benefit from wealth he doesn't feel entitled to. But he expresses hope, in a Warner Brothers studio-imposed ending, that new U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt will rescue the country and its people from hard times.

Heroes for Sale is a little heavy handed and trite at times, but it's also a heck of a lot of movie packed into a short running time.

Heroes for Sale (1933) Director: William A. Wellman

A quick-paced juvenile mystery with Nancy engaging in breaking and entering, a high speed car chase, interfering with a police investigation and various other activities of her romantic notion of a reporter's life. While Nancy seeks out danger, it's her boyfriend who suffers the injuries.

Their adventures are often impeded by her boyfriend's younger siblings; a boy with an annoying propensity to talk like Donald Duck (and a less annoying habit of planting explosives), and a young girl with a big voice which gets them out of trouble (though trouble she created) at a Chinese restaurant.

42nd Street is pretty much the template for backstage musicals from A Chorus Line to All That Jazz (hmmm ... everything from A to ... A ... but you get what I mean). The production shows some vaudeville heritage still hanging on with lots of awkward one-liners and wry comments shoehorned into the script. Some of them are funny; most aren't, at least as used. Once we get to the Busby Berkeley numbers ... wow! This was still early in his cinema career so the numbers aren't as extravagant as they later became but they already have his signature style with tracking shots, overhead shots of chorus girl geometry, and expanding beyond the limitations of the stage even during numbers that, in the story, take place on a stage.

The staging of the number 42nd Street itself is a doozy, exploring the denizens and happenings on that street as the backdrop to a Ruby Keeler song and dance number is worth the price of admission all by itself.

42nd Street was made in the "Pre-Code" era when the Production Code, while it already existed, was implemented with only 'light touch' enforcement. The censors did insisted on a change in the language of one song, which was done in such away as to make it glaringly obvious what the original lyric was and pointedly call attention to the change.

And in a change from the novel the movie is based on, the director and his right hand man were ... straightened out ... for the movie. The censors didn't have to ask for that change. The movie has some racy innuendo but the producers weren't going to limit their audience and summon censorious wrath by keeping that element intact.

Some good dialog and a great relationship of very secure and self-confident equals dragged down by a vague plot and inefficient editing. Snappier, tighter editing would have helped quite a bit. Not that it's bad, it just could have been better. I'd chalk some of this up to still being a pretty early movie barely half a decade into the sound era and the basic language of cinema was still being developed.