There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)

In Douglas Sirk’s 1956 soaper There’s Always Tomorrow, Fred MacMurray’s perfect family learns the hard way that fathers need attention too. MacMurray plays Los Angeles toy manufacturer Clifford Groves, father of three and married these twenty years to his high school sweetheart, Marion (Joan Bennett, lovely once again after the disaster of Highway Dragnet).  As the movie unfolds, we meet a man who is taken utterly for granted by his wife and children. The kids treat him as little more than a cash machine, without pausing to consider where the money actually comes from and what their father has to put up with to earn it, while his wife is so wrapped up in the comings and goings of the kids that she’s often too busy or too tired to spend time alone with her spouse.

The Groves seem to be comfortable in their familial rut until Clifford chances into a former employee while at a business meeting in Palm Springs. Barbara Stanwyck plays Norma Vale, once a toy company employee before unrequited love forced her to flee the west coast for Manhattan and a wildly successful career as a fashion designer. She’s been carrying a torch for Clifford ever since, and the pair spend the balance of their time at the desert resort innocently reminiscing. Things go wrong when Clifford’s son Vinnie (Bill Reynolds) spies the pair having a good time and assumes the worst. Before long, the other Groves children are suspicious of their father, who moment by moment seems at risk of tipping for his old flame. So in the end it is left to Stanwyck, one of filmdom’s greatest martyrs, to do the right thing and save the Grove family from certain disaster.

It almost goes without saying that There’s Always Tomorrow props up the postwar notion of the perfect, patriarchal family unit, and that the dramatic tension (of this and countless other films just like it) springs from an external threat to the harmony of that unit. And while the outcome here is predictable, the film is interesting in the sense that it makes only the children aware of the peril to their family — the wife and mother carries on blissfully unaware. Certainly one might suggest that Joan Bennett’s Marion couldn’t be that naïve, but the movie makes no overt suggestion that anyone other than Grove children are aware that their father’s eyes are wandering. In this way the picture utilizes the vagaries of the ersatz affair to focus on the various wrong interpretations of the situation the Norma, Clifford, and most importantly, the children themselves. In this way There’s Always Tomorrow is quite successful.

In their fourth and final film together, Stanwyck and MacMurray impress — though she has the better role and does a little more with it. MacMurray’s chief task is to play a robotic family man (there’s a great piece of Sirkian symbolism for this in the film) brought back to human emotion through contact with another woman, while Stanwyck gets to sacrifice love for likely spinsterhood in an effort to save him — in exchange Sirk famously gives her the tears through the rainy window treatment. While this isn’t as soapy and outrageous as some of Sirk’s technicolor melodramas (this one is black and white) it instead favors believable scenarios and underplayed performances. At 84 minutes it is over much too quickly, but it remains a solid, entertaining, and even thoughtful outing from Sirk and company.

A note about the poster: Poor Joan, relegated to a black and white tip-in, which seems ironic in that it its placement is indicative of her standing not only in this picture, but in the business as well. In the wake of her 1951 scandal, this seems about as much as she could manage; set apart, looking longingly up at her peers. 

There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)

Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Joan Bennett

Directed by Douglas Sirk

Released by Universal International

Running time: 84 minutes

Availability: widely on DVD, airs on TCM.

Grade: B+

The House of the Seven Gables (1940)

It’s Vincent Price versus George Sanders in Universal’s seldom-seen 1940 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early American gothic, The House of the Seven Gables. The two actors play bickering brothers who grapple over the fate of the family’s ancestral home. The titular house, located in that literary haven of ill-fortune: Salem, Massachusetts, comes with plenty of baggage though, including creditors and a centuries-old curse — not to mention a curmudgeonly father who isn’t quite ready for the grave.

Hang on a second, “what’s a gable?” you say? A gable is the triangular end of a building. Look below for a small illustration of a home with three gables. Got it? Back to the film.

Price’s Clifford Pyncheon is the good guy here, while Sanders barely stretches to bring snide older brother Jaffrey to life. Margaret Lindsay, who you’ll likely remember as Amy from Bette Davis’s Jezebel, is along for the ride in a featured role as cousin Hepzibah, Clifford’s devoted fiancé. The story sets up like this, I promise not to give anything away: The lion’s share of the action stems from a boisterous confrontation between Clifford and his father regarding the fate of the house. At the peak of his ire, the old fellow suffers from some sort of bizarre throat contraction and topples to the floor dead. For good measure bangs his head on the corner of a desk on the way down, drawing a bead of fresh blood and causing an exotic paperweight to fall and settle conveniently beside his fresh corpse. It seems that the whole town is listening to the fray out on the street, and Jaffrey rushes into the room just in time to accuse the innocent Clifford of murder by bludgeoning. In Hawthorne’s world, where women are either gossips or saints and men saints or rascals, it doesn’t take long to pack Clifford off to the state prison for a life sentence. Jaffrey triumph is short-lived though, he fails to inherit the coveted house after all — the elder Pyncheon has surprisingly bequeathed it to Hepzibah, who tosses Jaffrey onto the street and in short order becomes the town spinster, patiently waiting two decades on a pardon for Clifford. In the meantime, Jaffrey becomes a powerful judge — also engaged in some very shady ‘shipping’ deals — while Clifford languishes in his cell, determinedly going gray and studying his Alexandre Dumas — revenge is in the works…along with a little karma.

Even at 89 minutes this is a short film, and if my tone seems a bit glib it’s because Universal cuts enough corners with the source material that it becomes difficult to take The House of the Seven Gables entirely seriously. Certainly a film can score at that rather standard running time, but this one spans more than twenty years in narrative time and a mere five or ten additional minutes of film would have gone a long way towards pushing this into classic adaptation territory. Though coming from Universal in 1940, when it was all about Deanna and Dracula, corner-cutting should be expected. Make no mistake though, this is entertaining movie in spite of its deficiencies — with these two stars, how could it not be? Price wins the battle of screen time, with Sanders, the superior actor, doing more with his moments. When Sanders committed suicide in 1972, he famously did so by telling us all that he was bored with life. It is to his credit though that as an actor he was always able to bring some verve to his performances, even though the studios constantly cast him as an urbane heel. Given his incredible gifts and perpetual typecasting, it isn’t surprising that after a lifetime of such parts Sanders would have grown weary.

If this suffers at all it’s because of Lindsay, who actually has the largest role but nonetheless gets crowded out of the screen by two charismatic male leads. Grinning Dick Foran, Nan Grey, and Cecil Kellaway round out the cast, but all three of them could have given some way in order to strengthen the central narrative. It isn’t that the secondary characters aren’t important, it’s just that in such a brief film their roles seem rather puffed-up — often at the expense of some inexplicable narrative moments that would have benefitted from a tad more fleshing-out. In the end though this is a modest thriller — competently produced, satisfyingly suspenseful, and very-well performed. Oh, and with an Oscar nominated original score. 

The House of the Seven Gables (1940)

Directed by Joe May

Starring Vincent Price and George Sanders

Released by Universal

Running time: 89 minutes

Grade: B

King of Jazz (1930)

Make way for Universal and little Carl’s 1930 musical revue, King of Jazz. The title refers to the jovial bandleader Paul Whiteman, though the film offers nothing in the way of the biography you might expect. Instead, it’s essentially just a filmed vaudeville show — though arguably (with an gigantic two million dollar budget) the best one you’ve ever seen. The show actually opens with a cartoon — by Walter Lantz of Woody Woodpecker fame no less, and the first such animation to be filmed in Technicolor. King of Jazz is historically significant for that reason alone, but it also features a surprisingly good sequence of numbers featuring the stars of the day, including a youthful Bing Crosby and the “Rhythm Boys.” The young crooner struts his stuff in four or five separate numbers, with the bouncy Happy Feet the best of the bunch. Personally, my favorite number is a clichéd dance where Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls spring to life and put on an acrobatic ballet, featuring a female dancer who is almost more contortionist than anything else. Nonetheless, there’s something for everyone here — even today’s young people: an elastic tap dancer who does the earliest moonwalk I’ve ever seen, and a row of chorus girls who put on a step show that might merit a double take from the students at Howard.

Whiteman, who for decades was a star of the first order, doesn’t overexert himself. He pops in and out, most often for the sake of comic relief, though he gets the most out of the movie’s second biggest number: an homage to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, resplendent in the film’s finest production values (and that’s saying something). King of Jazz is a visual delight, with a dog and pony show of cutting edge art direction and set design. It’s interesting that such a film would come from Carl Laemmle and Universal rather than MGM, but the “major minor” was flush from their success with Best Picture Winner All Quiet on the Western Front and Laemmle never seemed to tire of attempting make-or-break forays into A level production. There are colossal Berkeley-esque set pieces and props, along with numerous chorus lines, lavish costumes, and offbeat camera angles — you’ll even find ample use of stop-motion animation. Designer Herman Rosse won the third annual Academy Award for Art Direction for his astonishing work on the film.

The meat of the thing is really split between the Gershwin number and the finale, which is another homage of sorts, this time to all of the immigrant musical styles that have come together to for the “American Musical Melting Pot” that everyone knows as “Jazz.” Unfortunately, the contribution of black Americans is sadly left out of the stew for the sake of safer fare such as Irish, Spanish, and Russian influences. This omission is King of Jazz’s biggest disappointment. In a film that happily avoids the racial stereotyping so often found in similar movies from the time — no minstrel numbers or blackface — it’s unfortunate that the film’s only African influence is a lone rhythmic dance number that open the Gershwin sequence. Nonetheless, what’s left over is entertaining, funny, occasionally risqué, and in glorious 1930 Technicolor.

King of Jazz (1930)

Directed by John Murray Anderson

Starring Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, and other performers

Released by Universal Pictures

Running time: 98 minutes

Can’t Help Watching: Deanna Durbin and me.

I lost it, that magic. I’m not sure when, but it was a long time ago. As for why, it’s no mystery. This is a strange post for me, more personal than usual, and it’s also one of the only times haven’t essayed about a specific picture. As the title of this blog says, I consume old movies. In voluminous amounts. In the wide world of film enthusiasts, movie bloggers, and ‘regular’ people you bump into your daily life — young and old, I’m the most broadly viewed movie person (I turn that particular phrase as a literature person might employ ‘well read.’) I’ve ever come across. You name it, I’ve probably seen it. During this year’s iteration of 31 Days of Oscar, TCM failed to play a single film that was new to me. It’s embarrassing at times. I’ve begun to notice that my colleagues at school will avoid discussing movies around me because I’ve already seen everything that comes up in our lunch table conversations — and in such situations I have a pompous and silly tendency to show off. Besides, my film watching doesn’t grant me any magical powers of understanding or interpretation either. I’m often in such a rush to get to the next movie that I fail to ruminate over the last one in the way the filmmakers would want me to. In other words, unless something really stands out to me as original, entertaining, or intellectually stimulating, I fail to take the time to properly digest a film — I just hurry to the next course. I’ll often plow through many, many movies before I find one I want to write about.

In my bio blurb, there on the side, I claim to watch more than 500 pictures each year, but that’s only a vague hint at the truth. I refrain from the real number in order to avoid being thought too weird. Between you and me, I watched 114 films in May alone, and I’ll pass that figure in June and July, and I only count films that I’ve never seen. The 2002 documentary Cinemania follows five folks who do essentially nothing but go to the movies all day, seeing from 600 – 2,000 films per year for each, at the expense of normalcy in the other areas of their lives. I’m not like that — they go to the theater, I don’t. However I’m too close to them for comfort — maybe Belloq’s ‘just a nudge’ would have me wide-eyed in the sequel. While I have a great job that I love and do very well (I’m ‘off the hook,’ as the students say, on ratemyprofessor.com) and a great family, I’m a hardcore lifelong insomniac, and when everyone else is sleeping I’m watching movies, from roughly 10 PM – 4 AM every day. It’s been that way with me for the last 25 years. Two to three movies a day, every day, for 25 years. You do the math. (In case you’re wondering, I get up around nine and come home at six. I’m fortunate to live just a mile from work.)

Back to the magic. When I first began watching old films as a teenager, I was enthralled in some difficult to describe way by the images on my television screen all those late summer nights. I loved these films, loved them. That’s the magic I’m talking about. Back in those days I could fall into an old movie, be transported by it to some wonderful place — far beyond my personal experiences or memory, but one comfortable and familiar. I began to make lists of the films I’d seen or wanted to see, something I still do. I’d make charts of Joan Crawford or Carole Lombard movies, of Oscar nominees and winners, of movies with the word ‘big’ in the title, of film noir (what a revelation!) and neo-noir, and of crimes films that aren’t considered noir. I’d seek out the movies and check them off my lists. I’d make more lists to replace those I completed. I’d make copies of my lists so I’d be able to access them from home or the office, then more copies so I’d have a set in the living room and the basement. Eventually I realized it wasn’t about having lists close at hand, it was about the ritual of crossing a movie off with a sharpie, highlighting a viewed title in Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, or deleting a title from a list saved as a Word document. My current watching habits are dictated by one list in particular that I’ve been pursuing for more than a decade. I’m frantic about it these days, but thankfully, I think I’m only a year or so away. One of my best friends and colleagues has been yammering at me for years to turn the whole thing into a book project (hmm, thinking about it). That I was and continue to be an obsessive compulsive is undeniable. Movies, lists, and insomnia gave me a way to have a ritualized life that doesn’t get in the way of being ‘normal.’ There’s something wickedly Faustian about all of this, but I’ve been able to make it work for the vast majority of my adult life. Probably because I like rules and parameters and consequently I respect the lines I draw in the sand of my life. If I have to work late, I work late. When my kids are sick I sit up with them so my wife can sleep. And most importantly, movies are off limits from 6 – 10 PM every day.

But as I said, I’ve lost that mojo, and I ache for it — I’m nostalgic for nostalgia. It brings me some happiness to see so many young people authoring classic film blogs (I wish there were a few more guys though). I’m jealous, I can sense in their writing the presence of these same feelings that I’m missing. And I’m coming to grips with that most middle-aged of lessons: it’s awfully hard for one to go back in time, to recapture that sense of wonder — if it’s even possible at all. Every now and then I get a fleeting moment of that purple Mia Farrow-esque swept away feeling, but such moments grow rare. The problem is twofold. First, like most classic film fans I started with the greats and worked my way backwards. These days I watch B grade and obscure or forgotten films almost exclusively. I’ll toss a prestige picture into the mix in order to break the monotony, but I never include a film in my total count if I’ve seen it before — and sometimes I care about the numbers more than the monotony. Heck, one of the main reasons I began blogging in 2008 was to slow myself down a little and allow for some sort of outlet for my obsession that didn’t necessarily involve watching movies. (I also thought that as a college professor, I needed to jazz up my writing.) Second, Hollywood has always been in the formula business — find something that works and go with it. Beat the dead horse until the box office receipts tell you to put the stick away and find another horse. I’m going to start writing about Deanna Durbin in a moment or two, and let me assure you that I adore her films as much as anyone, but if you’ve seen one picture from Universal’s Durbin unit, you’ve pretty much seen them all. The irony for me is that I never seem to tire of her pictures, but such can’t be said regarding other stars. When you’ve seen as many movies as I have, even the narrative devices of first-rate movies become a little predictable. But here’s the thing: Deanna Durbin still gets me. I can still watch a Durbin movie without getting bored, staring at the little electronic counter, or feeling the urge to check my laptop for new email. It may not be that sense of wonder that I enjoyed before I stopped being a ‘movie’ guy and became a ‘film’ guy, but it comes awfully close, and it satisfies. (By the way, thank heavens I haven’t become a ‘cinema’ guy yet — or even worse, someone who refers to movies as ‘the cinema.’ To each his own, but if that ever happens and I start tossing that stuff around, I hope someone plugs me.)

So that brings me back to Durbin, who I’ve been watching a great deal of lately. I’m thinking about a scholarly article that really digs into the elements that comprised the Durbin formula, and the way they were applied throughout her years at Universal. I wrote about her once before at Where Danger Lives, and I got nostalgic in that piece too. She does that to me. My first Durbin picture was one of my first old movies, Three Smart Girls, and in all likelihood I connected with her because our ages were similar— hers on-screen, mine in real-life. And I was smitten. I still am. To me, she’s one of the most thoroughly attractive female stars ever to grace the screen. She was spectacularly and unglamorously pretty. To say she was the all-American girl next door is so droll, but there’s hardly a better way to put it. Her screen persona, in one film after the next, is reliably charming and charmingly reliable. Her handlers at Universal, producer Joe Pasternak and director Henry Koster (along with Joe Valentine, her cameraman), understood her appeal, which is more uncommon than you might imagine in the movie business — Deanna was able to transition for juvenile to adult stardom not by reinventing herself, but by staying exactly the same. Her films reinforce the power of Hollywood formula; they are all essentially alike. She never mugs for the camera, never tries to be glamorous, urbane, or chic — as a matter of fact, she convinces you on some deep down level that the girl on the screen is just being her real-life self. Effortlessly graceful, particularly when she wants you to laugh at her, and always a little self-conscious, Durbin’s screen image is either totally authentic or the best example of studio hocus pocus in movie history.

And in spite of the fact that she was the biggest star at Universal for nearly her entire fifteen years there, and her films were more or less all hits, it’s almost easy to understand Deanna’s reluctance to keep cranking them out as it is to understand the studio’s desire to maintain the status quo. The details of her retirement from the business have been exhaustively written about elsewhere, so I won’t rehash them here, but I’ll add that while it is easy to make Universal the bad guy when it comes to Durbin, it has to be mentioned that audiences refused to accept her in roles that didn’t involve comedy, singing, and romance — and even as far as those efforts are concerned, we have to consider Durbin as a star of both the thirties and of the forties — of the pre- and post-war periods. If her appeal declined in the years leading up to her retirement, it was because while she stayed the same, the world war had made the audiences who used to flock to her pictures a great deal less innocent. It was a paradox that couldn’t stand: ticket-buyers wanted her to forever remain that pretty little girl with the beautiful voice, yet they now needed their movies to reflect a more complicated and rapidly changing world — Lady on a Train wasn’t what they had in mind.

Durbin is still out there, living a happy and ‘secluded’ — as all the articles say — life in France. Wherever and however she is, I say thanks for the memories, and the magic.

Arabian Nights (1942)

Arabian Nights is a first-rate Saturday afternoon matinee released in 1942 by Universal. It’s one of the many recent classic DVD releases that Netflix has not chosen to add to their library. I’ve had it in my queue since the DVD debuted in 2007, and I finally gave up and requested a copy via interlibrary loan. The exclusion by Netflix is particularly disappointing considering that this is a relevant film that earned an impressive four 1942 Academy Award nominations. I’ll be the first to admit that Oscar nods don’t guarantee quality and rentals, but

Arabian Nights is a safe bet. It has top production values, including fantastic costumes and some of the most vivid Technicolor photography you’ll ever see — accentuated by the pristine DVD transfer. This is all especially surprising considering the film was made at Universal; and falls outside of the constantly struggling studio’s big four proven cornerstones: horror, Deanna Durbin, Sherlock Holmes, and Abbott and Costello. The story of how this came about is an interesting one.

Maverick producer Walter Wanger had just been released from a long-term contract with United Artists before coming to Universal in 1941. Wanger was a proven commodity in Hollywood, and his deal with UA had been a rich one that offered the filmmaker a great deal of latitude in the production of prestige products. Under the deal Wanger developed Algiers with Charles Boyer and the John Ford / John Wayne classic (6 Oscar nominations) The Long Voyage Home. The relationship with UA went sour after a few box office disappointments, including (surprisingly) Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, which led Wanger to shop his in-development projects around Hollywood — Universal took the bait. Wanger signed on to produce films for Universal on a picture-by-picture basis, the first of which was Arabian Nights. The film would be Universal's first three-color Technicolor production, and the studio was willing to risk the colossal sum (for them) of $900,000 on the budget. Although Wanger himself dismissed the film as merely an exercise in “tits and sand,” the movie paid big dividends ($4,000,000 gross) for all involved and cemented the producer-studio relationship for the next few years and six more pictures.*

The business model at Universal, more than any other studio, relied on turning successful projects into drums that could be beaten again and again, until the public grew tired of the tune. Yet during the war audiences were hungry for the most lavish and exotic escapist fare possible, and the stars of Arabian Nights caught the public interest at exactly the right moment. Jon Hall, Maria Montez, and Jungle Book star Sabu would appear together regularly in a succession of lower-and-lower budgeted features that nevertheless raked in the wartime dollars for the studio. Sabu, the unlikely teen superstar, would receive top billing in most of the features, with Hall second and Montez third. Hall was the good-looking star of numerous B projects at Universal, he enjoyed modest success in Hollywood but never achieved the big time. Much the same can be said of Montez, though in her case it’s surprising. She was truly a stunning woman — bearing a vague resemblance to Gloria Grahame, only with a better figure — it’s difficult to take your eyes off her.

On a morbid note, each of the film’s three stars died tragically: Hall, wrecked with cancer, shot himself at 64, while Sabu died of a heart attack at age 39, and Montez drowned (due to a heart attack) in her Paris bathtub at only 34.

Arabian Nights is a winner. It’s easy to see why wartime audiences responded so well — the film couldn't get much lighter. We expect these things to be special-effects bonanzas, but there’s not much too see here beyond a parade of girls and marvelous costumes. All the genies have been replaced with light comedy, and supporting characters merely named Sinbad (Shemp Howard!) and Aladdin will have to placate those looking for faithful literary adaption.

* Thanks to Thomas Schatz and his wonderfully instructive book, The Genius of the System for the assist on the facts and figures.

Arabian Nights (1942)

Directed by John Rawlins

Starring Sabu, Jon Hall, Maria Montez

Released by Universal Studios

Running time: 93 minutes

Availability: DVD, but no Netflix.