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About 4 Star Films

I am a film critic and historian preserving a love of good movies. Check out my blog, 4 Star Films, and follow me on Twitter @FourStarFilmFan or Letterboxd. Thank you for reading!

A Guy Named Joe (1943)

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Although I would probably choose 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, a movie also penned by Dalton Trumbo and featuring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson, there are numerous reasons to search out A Guy Named Joe.

This was Van Johnson’s first starring role, allowing him to craft a stage presence that would only become more self-assured with time. It nearly got derailed by a gruesome car accident that purportedly left him with a plate in his forehead. And yet out of this came one of the most popular young stars of his day.

Also, Irene Dunne, one of the often unsung comediennes and finest dramatic actresses of the 30s and 40s, gets the opportunity to show her stuff opposite Tracy. I will never miss an opportunity to see her because she’s easy to rate next to other luminaries like Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck.

Some well-informed viewers might also be aware that Steven Spielberg transposed the action to the 1980s with his light remake, Always, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, and a cameo by Audrey Hepburn. It’s easy to surmise the later film misses out on the historical context, making A Guy Named Joe about something immediate.

Pete Sandidge (Tracy) is your stereotypical loose cannon, hotshot who’s always receiving the ire of his superior (James Gleason). Nevertheless, the two of them maintain a playful game of cat and mouse because deep down, they both know they’re invested in the same cause.

Pete’s also reunited with his effervescent girlfriend, the alliterative Dorinda Durston (Dunne). She also flies planes, albeit not in combat. All the lovey-dovey grousing and such isn’t new, but between Tracy and Dunne with Ward Bond as the third wheel, it’s inherently watchable. They channel a love-hate relationship: getting sore at each other and making up in a passionate reverie.

Tracy and Dunne aren’t normally associated, and yet watching them together is an immeasurable pleasure because they have a grand capacity for bits of sly humor and shared humanity, elevating the material above mediocre fare.

The movie also boasts some impressive and truly immersive aerial sequences as Pete leads his men on one of their perilous bombing raids against the enemy. This latest mission also signals a shift in the story; a fatal crash occurs, and Pete’s last gasp of heroism means he’s good and dead.

He’ll spend the rest of the movie as a guardian angel, though he’s more like a ghost. So A Guy Named Joe quickly shifts from a purely WWII picture to another film in the cinematic angel canon (It should come as no surprise that producer Everett Riskin also worked on Here Comes Mr. Jordan).

Pete walks through the clouds of the afterlife not with a harp but a decidedly more militaristic objective. There’s a pointed weightiness in casting by making Lionel Barrymore the CO of the heavenly realms. He passes down to the newly deceased his marching orders: He will be serving as an unseen co-pilot to some new recruits.

Again, the movie shifts to focus on Don DeFore and Van Johnson as two problem flyers still wet behind the ears. Johnson plays a wealthy, if diffident, young man named Ted Randall who can barely keep his plane airborne. Tracy shudders at the future of the war in the hands of such callow talent, but he tries to get them up to speed anyway, albeit subconsciously.

These sequences are rather mundane because, unlike other stories in the angel canon, Tracy’s connection to the real world is very thin compared to Claude Rains, Cary Grant, or even Henry Travers in It’s a Wonderful Life.

The movie picks up again when Van Johnson is on the ground and progressing in confidence. We see an early pairing of Johnson and a nearly unrecognizable Esther Williams, perhaps because she’s not robed in Technicolor and a swimsuit. They share a dance, and he extends an act of kindness to a homesick soldier.

Tracy is forced into being an observer in the physical sense, and somehow, the passivity doesn’t suit him. It’s good for a few gags and dress downs of former friends and colleagues who can’t hear him, but it becomes a bit of a gimmick.

And after waving a movie about Tracy and Dunne in front of us, it tries its best to stitch together something between Dunne and Johnson that just feels a bit disjointed and forced.

Still, A Guy Named Joe has these compartmentalized moments of human connection, laughter, and tears, making it more than worthwhile. You get the sense of the war years, the transience that these young men and women felt on so many accounts. Be it the death of friends and comrades, or even the distance of loved ones so far away. Everything spells heightened emotions.

To its credit, I never thought I would see a movie with Irene Dunne breaking ranks to fly a bombing raid solo and drop a payload on a Japanese target. There’s something both ludicrous and oddly progressive about it, never mind how it seems to muddle the collectivist themes the movie seems to be aiming for.

However, the fact that there can be no catharsis for Tracy and his lost love might be a final lesson about the war years. It is a dream and a desire that cannot be fulfilled. In its wake, Johnson and Dunne must chase after each other instead in a swelling romantic ending without any earthly consequences as Spence disappears into the distance. It’s a pale imitation, but it will have to do.

3/5 Stars

Keeper of The Flame (1942)

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Keeper of The Flame strikes me as good ol’ fashioned Hollywood storytelling. It’s conveyed through a fatal opening car crash and a flashing montage of newspapers spelling the death of that great American institution, Robert Forrest. We’re hooked immediately as the story keeps on rolling.

The world itself in the formerly sleepy town has the definitive consciousness of Home Front America, full of interiors and then exterior-looking interiors, all on the studio lot. Moreover, there’s a frantic industry and a general chaos in the face of shortages, bringing out American know-how and good humor in the face of everyday adversity.

Namely, a bevy of journalists and well-wishers descending on the place not fit to handle such an overflow, especially during wartime. A harried Donald Meek monitors the telephone line and does his best to get the flood of people in front of him booked in any vacant rooms still available.

Steven O’Malley (Spencer Tracy) wanders in unannounced and mostly unseen. He pays respects to an old friend who barely recognizes him. It’s the eyes. He gives Janey (Audrey Christie) that quiet congenial Spencer Tracy look, and she asks quizzically if it hurt much when Hitler gave him the boot.

We glean he must have been a war correspondent, either based in a concentration camp or the Berlin press bureau. Their jokes are casual. You know they must do this in their line of work and in 1942, we can hazard a guess they don’t know the full extent of what they’re saying.

Christie has the whip smart repartee of a journalistic working woman a la Rosalind Russell. Since the house is packed, she coyly registers him as her “husband,” though there’s another colleague up for her affections (a young Stephen McNally).

O’Malley has an aspiration to get into the grieving Mrs. Forrest so he might share her husband’s story with the people. Riffing off of It Happened One Night, his pals quip that she’s the Queen of Jericho and he’s no Joshua. The walls of her castle won’t come down for just anybody. Though Tracy always had a certain dogged tenacity about him, and that’s what makes him a compelling, active hero.

Algonquin Round Table alum Donald Ogden Stewart builds out his screenplay in the opening act with all these intriguing nooks and crannies and characters who seem capable of existing of their own accord with intricate backstories.

Howard Da Silva is a guarded vet of the Argonne and de facto groundskeeper of the Forrest estate. A little boy (Darryl Hickman) grieving the wake of this great man from a lamppost; we learn he too has an intimate connection to the deceased.

There’s another relation to Mrs. Forrest who’s equally distrustful of the press and drinks his sorrows away with ginger ale. The dead man’s bespectacled press secretary (Richard Whorf) chooses a different approach: He’s highly elegiac and accommodating because his job requires levels of PR, though there’s plenty he’s not letting on about.

Beyond Christie, a personal favorite is the peculiar old cabbie (Percy Kilbride), laconic and chewing his cud while offering up homespun wisdom. He provides O’Malley transportation to and fro as the journalist pokes around for his story.

We know from a fair distance Keeper of The Flame is a kind of grade-A American propaganda piece, and it finally becomes most explicit when Tracy gives a little soft-spoken speech to Daryll Hickman about not letting the unseen enemy make them slaves and kick them around by putting chains on their minds and tongues.

In its defense, it’s mostly soft-pedaled moralizing because Tracy’s soapbox is small and he has a way of making the serum of slightly hokey words tolerable thanks to his usual candor.

However, the local doctor (Frank Craven) provides one of the most telling remarks after paying a house call to the imposing estate: “Ever since we’ve been falling out of touch with God, we’ve become pushovers for hero fever.” When he speaks of a young woman who was sent away, he surmises,  “You don’t fall in love with a god, you just worship him.” He’s a sympathetic fellow and in making his opinion of Forrest quite clear, it’s one of the first dubious signs we have to go on.

These ideas are thematically rich with potential, not to mention controversy. The movie becomes less so with the tinges of forested and thunderous gothic melodrama. Coincidentally, it’s not material I would immediately attribute to George Cukor although the 1940s were replete with such fare.

And it’s true there is a vague Citizen Kane-like bend to the story of a prominent man now dead. Although I also think of Welles’s other great figurehead Harry Lime for casting a shadow over the film, which is not too dissimilar to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, albeit gender swapped. These are mostly uncharitable comparisons and few can argue the point.

Katharine Hepburn might seem uncharacteristic in something so grim and restrained, but she proves her capacity for it. While I always am skeptical of her as a shy wallflower in a picture like Undercurrent, she handles this tormented role with a certain inscrutability. Although I don’t know if even she can manage keeping the story from getting out of hand.

There’s something in it on the tip of my tongue tying into almost John Fordesque mythmaking, whether it be Fort Apache or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Sometimes you print the legend to protect people because the truth is too destructive to reveal. Except Tracy isn’t squeamish about giving the electorate a sober reality check.

In this regard, it feels like a daring sort of picture and you wonder if this was the saving grace, making it a draw for audiences beyond the conspicuous nature of the romance and brooding genre elements.

Still, the initial propaganda moments burn off only to come back like a raging conflagration. Hepburn brings them back again and she drops them right in our laps when she mentions fascism as embodied by her late husband. In one sense, it’s an impressive rallying cry and also an utter disappointment given the film’s best parts.

The finale of literal fire and water is all things histrionic and ham-fisted. Hardly the film’s finest achievement. All of this comes with a convenient ending, but I suppose in wartime you give the people what they want — assuming this was it.

Even with the underlying sentiment, Keeper of The Flame still has its moments that feel downright groundbreaking, and better yet, the wit of the supporting characters lives on in the mind’s eye. Alas, this was not meant to be.

Most of all, I regretted characters like Audrey Christie and Percy Kilbride fading away without consideration; I suppose they were sacrificed on the altar of a greater cause. I understand the sentiment and still, it feels like a waste of a stellar set-up for such conventional ends — even if it was for the sake of galvanizing wartime propaganda.

Perhaps this is all the more reason to want more out of the film. This is a good impulse because it means there are more than a few things worthy of praise.

I’ve only one final thought. In many ways the movie presages what Jacqueline Kennedy chose to do in the wake of her husband’s tragic death. More than once in the movie, an allusion is made to Abraham Lincoln, and Jackie made sure her husband had a funeral evoking that of the nation’s first slain president.

Then, at his final resting place in Arlington Cemetery, there burns an eternal flame. She was the keeper of that flame — solidifying his stature for generations of Americans. I won’t get into conjecture about her husband’s legacy, but it does play as an intriguing counterpoint to this film’s central figure.

3.5/5 Stars

Safety Last! (1923)

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The great thing about The Big Three — Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd — and all the great silent clowns, is how they engender a kind of audience identification with profoundly comic results. Because each had their own unique persona that remained constant throughout all the trials and tribulations they went through.

The enduring charm of the Harold Lloyd character is his nebbish yet indefatigable spirit. He’s bespectacled, always smiling, and there’s a bit of a hapless daredevil in him. He doesn’t always do so purposefully, but he’s accustomed to ticking clocks — racing against time against the odds — and of course Safety Last famously put him in contact with another literal ticking clock. More on that later.

At only 73 minutes, it’s easy to place a silent comedy like Safety Last with other rudimentary forms of movies from the nascent film industry. The two reelers and other silent fare which might seem like a dime a dozen and disposable. We might mistakenly think we have nothing to learn from them because they are over a century old and we’ve already grown beyond what they have to offer.

And yet the very first shot belies any erroneous impressions. There’s the shadow of what looks to be a hangman’s noose. Our hero, Harold, looks to be behind bars saying a last adieu to the love of his life. Then, the perspective shifts and we realize not a man shuffling off to jail but one waiting at the train station to head to the city to make good. Eventually, his girl Mildred can come out to him and they can get married!

There’s not a specific utility to the gag and if you’re not thrown off by it tonally, it shows a sense of visual invention that easily transfers from early shorts and reel comedies. It shows these early movies were not made by a bunch of hacks but technicians with a great deal of ingenuity and knowhow. The proof is in what they left us.

The first half of the picture is most defined by its bits. There’s a gag to avoid the rent collector where Harold and his roomie hide under their hanging coats with their legs pulled up.

In another vignette Lloyd is stuck in the back of a laundry truck baking like a sauna with a driver who is deaf; it leads into his extended attempt to get back to his work in time by any means necessary so he can clock in. It’s to no avail so he sneaks in under the guise of a mannequin, as one does. No one can say he’s not plucky.

We can all commiserate with him as he deals with time wasters on the department store floor and then the hordes of blue-blooded ladies who come for a sale prepared to pull the clothes off his back; some things haven’t changed. There’s another scene where he combs his hair in the shine of a bald man’s pate. Again, it’s yet another whimsical example of ways to stretch the form for the sake of a visual gag.

Then, Harold tries to put on airs for his girl masquerading as the general manager, though he’s only a mere grunt who’s easily discarded. Like us all he wants to be important and appreciated; he doesn’t want to let his loved ones down or be seen as a failure.

The final act of climbing all 12 floors of the department store feels like the birth of the high-wire thriller genre before our eyes. After all, he’s as much of a free climber as you or me. Still, he has that smiling girl in the back of his mind and the prize money if he reaches the top.

There’s some visual trickery but the cutaways and overhead shots give us a sense of scale all in service of the movie. The fact we can’t make out all the fault lines and there is still this harrowing sense of unassailable danger is a credit to the picture a century on. Both as a physical feat and a technical marvel of early Hollywood.

Harold’s conspiring with his acrobatic friend to get up the building devolves into a charade with cops and a drunk, a bit like a Keystone Kop reel with chases and “Kick Me” signs. It might be the lowest common denominator of comedy, but that’s hardly a bad word.

Lloyd has a myriad of gags at his disposal as he begins his ascent. They are play things that complicate what already feels like a daunting task: pigeons, scurrying mice, rope, a spring, and of course that famed clock face.

Lloyd clinging for his life has become one of the most iconic images in cinema history, and that’s across the board regardless if people have ever seen the movie or not. His exploits live on in the ubiquity of the public consciousness.

My final observation is noting how the movie ends with a gag just as it came in. His shoes get stuck in the tar on the rooftop as he walks off with his girl, the always and forever irrepressible hero Harold Lloyd.

There’s an added layer to the silent movie romance when you realize Lloyd would actually marry his leading lady Mildred and they would be together for the rest of their lives. It’s a stretch but it’s hard not to see how this big smash of a movie was to the actor Harold as climbing the department store was to his alter ego. They came out on the other side larger than life and beloved by the public. Most importantly, they got the girl. It’s the stuff of Hollywood.

4.5/5 Stars

The Gold Rush (1925) at 100

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It feels necessary to begin with a prelude to The Gold Rush. I came to a realization I’ve only ever seen Charlie Chaplin’s updated version from 1942 with a new sound introduction and soundtrack. In some ways, watching the original feels like seeing a new film.

It was the first Chaplin feature I watched, and I’m pretty sure I liked every subsequent one more. I’m recognizing now, perhaps it was the Tramp character who grew on me. Because so much of his appeal is not only the audience identification, but also this sense of continuity over all his shorts and features. The more and more you watch, the more you love him.

Chaplin understood how powerful this could be, and it’s made his alter ego the most visible figure the cinema has ever known. Out of Chaplin’s films of the ’20s and ’30s, I think I still like his other ones more, but why does this matter? It’s all a collective body of work centered on the Little Tramp who could.

The movie itself opens during The Great Gold Rush of Alaska. The opening shot showcases a line of miners snaking their way through the desolate mountain landscape, and there’s a scope to it that has a definitive cinematic eye. Chaplin, as both actor and director, is on full display as he sets the stage for his protagonist.

The first act feels like a traditional Chaplin two-reeler. It’s scenario-based. The characters are larger than life, with a wanted fugitive (Tom Murray) and Big Jim McLain (Mack Swain), who strikes it rich only to be stricken with memory loss.

It’s also a comedy of errors involving snow flurries, gales of wind that would make Keaton proud, and surreal gags with an overgrown Chaplin chicken. They also go through the bizarre ordeal of systematically eating one of the Tramp’s shoes. Hunger will do that to you.

At the end of it all, the killer’s gone and the gold’s still hidden away; it’s sitting there for the rest of the movie just waiting to be dug up. We know intuitively we will return to the spot.

The Gold Rush truly hits its stride when introducing a romantic element, and it’s because of what it means to our lead character. There’s something transcendent in it that I can’t help but express. He’s so pure and honest in love. It’s comprehensible to anyone who’s admired, even loved, someone from afar.

Maybe a crush in high school, a Juliet who runs in different social circles than you, or a long shot who has someone else already that you could never compare to. It’s a tale as old as time, though so is The Gold Rush. The Tramp makes it universal.

The girl in question, Georgia (Georgia Hale), is a vivacious woman who frequents the local dance hall. She seems to wave to him, except there’s another man just behind him. In a subsequent moment, he thinks they might strike up a conversation as she comes near, only to look right through him. It discourages him, but he’s not daunted.

Later, he finds a discarded picture of her and picks it up, looking sheepishly at the old man standing nearby. He’s seen what the Tramp has done, and our bedraggled hero tries to play it off like he’ll throw it away. But of course he doesn’t.

We eventually find out that he keeps it under his pillow with his most prized possessions. The reason we find out is that Georgia pays him a visit with some of her friends; they think it will be a lark to see him. It’s nothing to them, and it’s everything to him just to speak with her and be in her presence.

At the hall, he finally gets the opportunity to dance with her, and it has nothing to do with him. It’s part of her scorning of another man, but in his little universe, it means something — it means the world to him — and our hearts beam and simultaneously break. She’s not going to want him, and yet in the same breath, we want the fairy tale for him, or at the very least, someone who would love him for who he is.

Chaplin’s character reaps the benefit of her coquettish game only to have his pants come loose, and he ties them back on with the leash of a nearby dog. It’s The Tramp’s inadvertent comedy on full display — comedy that just kind of happens to him out of his own wealth of eccentricity.

He rides the wave of the evening, however, with the elation at the prospects of guests for New Year’s. It’s so earnest watching him positively trashing his cabin with feathers out of pure jubilation, only to be left heartbroken.

The communal singing of “Auld Lang Syne” cross-cut with the Tramp all alone is an implicit reminder: every year, there are the lonely people who must make a go at life by themselves, forgotten again. The despondency spawns fitful dreams, including Chaplin’s iconic gag with dancing bread feet. If it sounds mystifying, then watch it for yourself.

For the final act, the Tramp is reunited with the prospector, who promises him a piece of his stake if they can track down the cabin. Instantly, the Little Man’s outlook changes, and he scales the balcony of the dance hall just to profess his love to Georgia and let her know he will come back a millionaire…

The best bit follows the two men as they hunker down for the night, only for the blizzard to displace their cabin to the cliffside so they’re jutting out on a perilous cantilever. “Flight of the Bumble Bee” perfectly captures the frantic nature of the moment without totally counteracting the comedy of it all as they slide this way and that, trying to escape to safety.

The two hapless prospectors succeed in their quest to get rich. The Tramp gets a lavish makeover so he looks like a Saks Fifth Avenue multimillionaire, catching an ocean liner home. Some photographers want some shots in his mining clothes, and somehow, all is right in the movie again when he’s back to looking like The Tramp. What would we call him otherwise? By this point, it feels like his proper uniform.

And yet there’s also a poetic reason for this development. It’s easy to read what will happen and what the film is building to. He must see Georgia again. Circumstances have changed, but for all intents and purposes, he looks like the same down-and-out Tramp, at least to her. It’s the exquisite irony underpinning their glorious reunion. Dreams really do come true.

In a cinematic sense, Chaplin effectively took a character who could easily be a bit part or a stereotype in any type of picture and proceeded to give him the level of depth and feeling that enraptured the world over.

I never said this out loud because I’m only formulating it now. Percolating under the surface, there is some dissonance within the Tramp persona because here you have this impoverished, chaste character played by a man who at least had the reputation of a womanizer and was wealthy the world over. This is only a perception. And yet I settled on this: The Tramp is a romantic and personal ideal for Chaplin and for all of us.

He bears all the difficulties of the world with heart, unassuming grace, and a healthy dose of laughter. As long as there is hardship, poverty, and romance in the world, The Tramp will be relevant because he makes us laugh, but most importantly, he makes us love him.

Because he is one of us, or maybe we are him as we traverse our own journeys. That’s what we’d like to believe anyway, and Chaplin allows us to. He also gives us a hopeful ending. It’s what makes him, even to this day, the fitting archetype of Classical Hollywood storytelling. He is the standard by which all others are judged.

4.5/5 Stars

Jerry Schatzberg Films (1970-73)

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Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970)

Jerry Schatzberg took his career as a fashion photographer and integrated it into a splintering portrait of a model based partially on his experiences with real-life inspiration Anne St. Marie. Like Blow-Up it is a film about the image, but in this case the visuals often play against disembodied voices obscured from view. The camera also seems to have a general infatuation with lips and speaking voices.

Out of these inspirations, the film becomes a stellar showcase for Faye Dunaway at the height of her powers, giving a scintillating performance — striking and yet perilously fragile. Her very diction fascinates, how it’s stunted — rising and falling — in a very particular cadence, attempting to modulate. It’s just precisely false enough to suggest instability and the film is built on this theme. She is the cypher — the puzzle to be put back together.

As she confides in friends, the picture charts this fractious course of Lou’s career, personal relationships, and insecurities. She slaloms through her memories, past and present, stitching together her life into a disordered patchwork. It becomes a perplexing ever more morose portrait of a woman in need of comfort and support in her vulnerable mental state. But the film really functions best as form over content.

The intrigue comes not in any manner of narrative cohesion but precisely because of the dissolution, a woman becoming more and more fragmented with time. It’s not an altogether original concept. Many great actresses have tried their hand with much success. Still, Carole Eastman’s spin on the dimensions of a gorgeous woman with faltering psychology feels like a nexus in the tradition. It’s also an unjustifiably underseen showing by one of the ’70s biggest attractions. Faye Dunaway admirers take note.

3.5/5 Stars

Panic in Needle Park (1971)

“Needle Park” is a nod to the shorthand of heroin addicts and it totally throws itself in their world and subsequently became one of the most harrowing depictions of drug use in the ’70s. The screenplay was written by none other than Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne from a novel by James Mills.

We get the opportunity to watch an up-and-coming stage actor, Al Pacino, submerging himself in a role and showcasing a depth that would become the bedrock of all his successes throughout the 1970s. He would join a group of actors, the De Niros, Nicholsons, and Hoffmans, who would help come to define the New Hollywood as it was being formed on the spot.

From the outset, it’s easy to be a bit wary of his mannerisms, the lip-smacking, and the sense of bravado. Then, he proceeds to go for the jugular.  It’s an ugly, tawdry sort of world dictated by sex, drugs, and theft. This is how people subsist if you can call it a living at all. Where everyone’s brother is a two-bit crook and everyone else has done a stretch of time.

It’s a film that has very much a Midnight Cowboy milieu. We have the walk and talks down the streets of New York, but like Schatzberg’s next film, Scarecrow, it’s also fundamentally a film founded on a relationship of two.

If they have so many demons, the one thing they have is their tight-knit community. However, they are personally crippled by relational turbulence, always desperate to find their latest fix. It drives their desires and turns them into momentary ghosts of human beings, self-serving and a shell of their best selves.

Kitty Winn is naturally beautiful like audiences grew accustomed to seeing in the ’70s with actresses like Ali McGraw and Katherine Ross.  However, her particular meekness plays well with the raw ferocity of Al Pacino, and they remain the nucleus of the drama. It doesn’t have to be about much. It simply needs to keep them at its core.

Pacino would get The Godfather next partially on the shoulders of this performance and it’s almost inconceivable to think of Michael Corleone without those deep, searching eyes of his. It’s so easy to look in their eyes — Winn’s too — and see an inkling of who they are. You can condemn their self-destructive tendencies and then turn right around and pity them.

3.5/5 Stars

Scarecrow (1973)

With Schatzberg, the salient features connecting his movies isn’t overtly apparent, but it does feel like the material really guides the output. So much relies upon and flows out of the sense of performance whether Dunaway, Pacino, or Hackman and Pacino here in Scarecrow. But first, can we take a moment to acknowledge what a stroke of luck it is: Pacino and Hackman in a movie together, a movie predicated on character, and they could not be two more disparate personalities.

Because this was on the other side of The French Connection and The Godfather, two of the biggest hits of the ’70s so far, and yet our two stars find it within themselves to do a picture like this. It’s not big budget, with a lot of thrills or prestige, but they more than make it something worth watching regardless of scale.

It feels a bit like Waiting for Godot with tumbleweeds rolling by as photographed by Vilmos Zsigod . Finally, they trade words and make their way to a diner. Their odd brand of friendship is born.

Like any good drifter you might find in the work of John Steinbeck, Max’s idea of a slice of paradise is getting his own car wash. In truth, if the Monterey laureate had been alive and kicking in the ’70s, Scarecrow is exactly the kind of story he might write because it almost feels suspended in time. They have a friendship and camaraderie that feels deeply indebted to George and Lennie. It is almost difficult to unsee it once you’ve drawn the parallels.

Pacino’s philosophy in life is a lot more amenable if a bit eccentric. To borrow the film’s main analogy, he believes scarecrows are not frightening. They actually look so ridiculous that they got the crows laughing and they fly away. So while Max is bellicose, constantly taking umbrage with others, running off his mouth, and getting in brawls, Lion’s always there to provide some equilibrium. As performers and actors, they feel totally at odds and yet we’re ceaselessly fascinated to have them together as a creative battery.

There’s a scene where Hackman tries to chat up the bodacious Frenchy. She’s brought them beers as they move items in the junk heap. But all throughout the scene, Pacino is clunking around making a racket and getting in his way. In another moment of lunacy, he’s sprinting through a department store as a diversion that winds up leaving his accomplice flabbergasted. Max’s so hoodwinked by it all, he sets back down the purse he planned to nick.

Because Lion’s a bit of a jester, simpler in spirit, yet fiercely loyal. Even when they have a spat, he’s hesitant to leave his friend. Hackman’s performance is founded on his irascible nature. He’s loud and obnoxious, begrudging, and yet his slivers of goodness begin to show. He becomes a friend and protector to his buddy. It’s heartbreaking when he finally reveals his tender-hearted feelings. That car wash and Pittsburgh seem so far away. But then again, it was hardly a real place to begin with.

3.5/5 Stars

Jaws (1975) at 50

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I remember my dad telling a story about the first time he saw Jaws back in 1975, now 50 years ago. He was on a road trip visiting a childhood friend in the Midwest, and though he had spent all his life in California, he was grateful to be in a place that was landlocked when the movie came out. 

If my dad was representative of the general populous, this reaction was not unusual, and for any number of reasons, Jaws was a true cultural phenomenon. It changed the playbook of what a movie could be as a summer blockbuster, even as Steven Spielberg willfully built off the formula of Alfred Hitchcock while bringing his own youth and flair for storytelling to the fore.

It struck me watching the film this time how it is really split into two sections. There are the scenes in the island getaway town of Amity where Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is introduced as a New York City transplant (Coincidentally, it’s convenient to read The French Connection as a bit of backstory). We soon get a sense of his family life, his happy marriage with his better half (Lorraine Gary), and the small-time responsibilities that come with the incoming tourist trade. He also hates the water…

These are the throes of summer, on the verge of the July 4th weekend, and a town like this thrives and even relies on out-of-town business. The first inkling of a shark attack comes when the mangled body of a young woman is found washed up on the shore.

Then, there’s the moment for all time when Brody tries to relax in the arms of his wife on the seashore, only to see an ominous creature emerge from the water and confirm all his worst fears.

A friend pointed out how Spielberg pays homage to Hitchcock with the “Vertigo Effect” or dolly zoom, which gives us as an audience such a perturbing sensation as we are physically reeled into the moment. From then on, it’s not just a threat, but a battle that Brody must wage, dealing with the local repercussions, backroom politics, and general hysteria that gets dredged up in the face of such a news story. As the police chief, it feels like the weight of the whole fiasco falls on him, and what’s worse is that he has so little support.

It all comes to a head when a grieving mother (Lee Fierro) confronts him with a public slap to the face: She found out he knew about the shark threat, and he still kept the beaches open. We know what actually happened, but still, as a beacon of safety, it falls on him, and he internalizes the outrage. Because he has a conscience and a family, too. 

Then there are the later scenes where three men go out on a mission to hunt down the Great White terrorizing the town. It is an elemental story of man vs. nature. The cast thins out with the three primary stars and a big shark playing out a game of cat and mouse on a boat against a vast ocean. It’s an isolating, harrowing undertaking.

Put in these terms, and it feels like an entirely different movie, and yet there’s not a moment when they don’t feel anything but intimately related. A lesser film would have simply shot the second part — extended it — added some more sharks, guts, and explosions, and made it the movie (I haven’t seen the Jaws sequels, so I’m not sure if this formula applies). Although I’m sure this is what drew Spielberg to Peter Benchley’s source material. 

However, this movie is made better by how it builds out an entire world, and we see how it develops the context and creates the stakes and emotional resonance for the entire story.

Scheider is also the only one who can kill that shark in the end. He moved away from the urban jungle to have a quieter life. But the movie calls for him to face this threat head-on, and he does it in an extraordinary way, aided by Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw’s characters.

They both provide two sides of an ethos appeal that lend credence to the evolutionary brutality of this underwater leviathan. Because one represents youthful intellect and scientific know-how of an oceanographer, while the other is a veteran of the sea, grizzled and tenacious. But we know intuitively that the trajectory of the story revolves around Scheider coming face to face with his own fears. It’s inevitable. No one else can save him. 

These words don’t always go together, but Jaws has some delightfully effective expositional scenes. I think of the opening hook where a bunch of young people are on the beach mingling together. The eyes of a young man and woman meet. Then, the camera pulls away as they have their meet-cute. We understand everything without hearing, and the next thing we know, they’re racing off toward the water to skinnydip… 

There’s also the scene where oceanographer Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss) pays a house call. It’s been a tumultuous day, and the police chief has grown introspective, jaded by the day’s events. Hooper awkwardly has two bottles of wine, and he’s wearing a tie. It becomes a scene with the wife talking to the young man, and we learn about both of our leads with this lovely sense of organic humor. 

Then there’s Quint’s moment on the boat one evening, recounting his harrowing experience on the U.S.S. Indianapolis in 1945 on a mission related to the atomic bomb. Ultimately, they were sunk, and many of the survivors were picked off by swarms of sharks in the ensuing hours. An event like that forms a man for life. 

Moments like these are chilling and give the moments of levity even more import. It’s like an escape valve for the tension. Spielberg does an admirable job of choreographing the hubbub of the town with frantic conversations and characters speaking over one another in a manner mirroring real life.

In another scene, Brody is deep in his thoughts, obviously distressed, then, right next to him at the dinner table, his little boy mimics his every move. It’s such an endearing moment of childlike warmth and affection. Or later, a drunken Shaw and Dreyfuss partake in some one-upmanship as they trade tattoo stories gaily after being at one another’s throats for most of the journey. 

Spielberg, at such a young age, already feels adept at creating a total immersive experience in film (You only have to look at his work on Columbo and Duel to see the work he put in before Jaws).

The underwater POV shots from below as human bodies tread above the waterline draw us in, and the notes of John Williams’ score never cease to cause my feet to tense up in my shoes. There are even jump scares I had forgotten about. The cumulative effect is still overwhelming. 

There’s an extraordinary blending of visual compositions that tell us the story succinctly, sprinkled with the kind of humor, exposition, and personal conflict that give the broader drama of Jaws a genuine meaning. Because we are not animals; we are not evolutionary machines. We are embodied creatures. We have hearts, limbs, eyes, voices, and feelings that make us who we are. It’s difficult to extricate ourselves from these realities, and what kind of unfeeling Social Darwinism would that leave us with? 

The Mayor (Murray Hamilton) is a character who is easy to dislike. He does come off as a kind of irrefutable sleaze, and yet when he visits the hospital to give his condolences and reluctantly sign off on Quint’s hunt, he finally makes an admission. His kids were on the beach too, where the attacks happened. For a moment, he is as human as anyone else. 

Because he’s emblematic of a story about locals trying to protect a way of life, and outsiders trying to maintain their own lives somewhere new. It’s a pleasure to watch Jaws and see it not simply as a historical lodestar in the blockbuster age, but 50 years on, it still remains a captivating saltwater thriller showing a young up-and-coming filmmaker on the ascendancy. 

I’ve rarely seen my dad set foot in the ocean during my lifetime. It’s probably coincidental, although Steven Spielberg (and John Williams) might have something to do with this, too. 

5/5 Stars

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

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“The Cast and Crew of Star Trek wish to dedicate this film to the men and women of the spaceship Challenger whose courageous spirit shall live to the 23rd century and beyond…”

The opening remarks of The Voyage Home honoring the “courageous spirit” of those lost on The Challenger is a perfect encapsulation of the ethos of Star Trek.

Because it was always very much a franchise that was a social allegory for our world and by taking place in a sci-fi future, it was able to champion all that was good and valorous of people living through a space age even as they tried to reconcile with living with one another on earth with fraternity.

As a kid, Voyage Home was always my favorite Star Trek movie, and probably still remains so now. I’m not quite sure what it was exactly, though I do have some ideas. It’s important to acknowledge it right out front. Voyage Home has a wild and wonky premise full of a certain incredulity, but it’s also a good deal of fun.

Spock is back after Star Trek III, but now there is a new problem: Not only is Kirk a wanted man, but a frequency of humpback whale calls is causing chaos to reverberate all throughout the galaxy. Yes, you heard that right.

Kirk leads his fugitive compatriots on a Klingon ship with cloaking capabilities to time travel to the past — that is, the contemporary moment the film came out — 1986. The wheels start turning.

I’m no Star Trek savant, but it didn’t evade me that this is a subtle twist on the notable “City On The Edge of Forever” episode that sent Kirk and Spock (with his ear-concealing bandana) back in time to the soup lines of the Great Depression.

Voyage Home mines most of its comedy from your typical fish out of water premise, in this case pitting the Enterprise Crew of highly intelligent and advanced space cadets against a world that feels so analog and decidedly archaic to their sensibilities. Meanwhile, to the average guy on the street they look like helpless weirdoes.

A particularly memorable vignette involves a spiky-haired punk rocker on the bus with his blaring boombox. He does look rather like an alien to anyone left unawares from a different century. A little Vulcan nerve pinch gets the whole bus clapping with appreciation for curbing the noise.

Pairing Bones and McCoy off together is a pleasure in its own right, though it need not be expounded upon in depth here. The rest of the crew is entrusted to build a tank to carry the whales across the galaxy and also locate a nuclear reactor to help power their ship home.

Spock’s coming up to speed with the modern vernacular offers its own hilarity as does his commune with the whales in their enclosure at a Sausalito aquarium. It’s in plain view of everyone and another breach of societal norms. This just isn’t done in the 20th century. Spock has greater concerns as Kirk tries to guide him through this strange world like a blind man leading a blind Vulcan.

The resident biologist Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) is incensed. She cares about these animals’ well-being deeply. Later, she offers a ride our two lovable nut jobs up in her pickup because she has a penchant for hard-luck cases.

The addition of Hicks in a fairly substantial role begins as a screwball comedy with her skeptical incredulousness around Kirk and Spock. It then builds into a kind of swelling romantic comedy served with a side of pizza pie. Somehow it plays as the less tragic inverse to Joan Collins turn in “City on The Edge of Forever.”

Because they push the boundaries of her belief and still, if she doesn’t quite have faith in their clear-eyed tall tales, she recognizes their shared mission to protect the whales. If it’s not quite faith, then her trust in them is rewarded in an extraordinary way as an unimaginable world of the 23rd century opens up before her eyes.

She always feels a bit out of step with the world around her, and then she finds these like-minded people, a little eccentric, and yet they suggest to her that she was made for so much more. It’s an extraordinary development.

Chekhov gets captured in a restricted area and is shipped off to a hospital in the city after he suffers an injury. Kirk and Bones lead a search and rescue mission masquerading in scrubs, then Gillian finds out the whales were shipped off early. They have to intercept them en route if they ever hope to save the whales and thereby the galaxy. No big deal.

Hanging out with the crew of the Enterprise in San Francisco sounds like a good time, and it’s a pleasure to assure everyone that it is. For such gargantuan stakes, Voyage Home feels surprisingly lightweight, lithe, and generally fun because we rarely feel burdened by them. It’s not bogged down by a lot of self-importance and this is to its credit. So it worked then, in my childhood, and it still holds up now eliciting the same kind of stirring reactions.

3.5/5 Stars

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

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If I had to take a stab at the age-old distinction, I would differentiate Star Trek and Star Wars like so.  Star Wars was a sci-fi Fairy tale and became something more. Star Trek began as a sci-fi allegory on TV and became something more. In a word: beloved.

The Wrath of Khan opens with a scenario involving the usual suspects on the USS Enterprise, except standing in for Kirk is a  Vulcan named Saavik; they must rescue the crew of the Kobayashi Maru, and it all goes terribly wrong.

Moments later we learn that the entire escapade was a simulation.  Kirk (William Shatner), now an admiral, was watching from the wings. It turns out the Kobayashi Maru is a “No-win scenario” elucidating the character of the ship’s commander. You can probably imagine how Kirk handled it in his day, very unconventionally.

Bones (DeForest Kelley) chides his friend to get back out there. He’s not made for a desk job; he’s meant out there on the edges of the galaxy with his crew and wits about him tackling the universe’s most pressing problems. The pull of the movie means he has no choice in the matter.

Captain Clark Terrell (Paul Winfield) and Chekhov (Walter Koenig) lead the crew of the USS Reliant to an uninhabited world; it’s part of an interdisciplinary project to use the newly devised Genesis technology’s immense power to revitalize desolate planets.

There’s something ominous about it after they beam down, and it’s true they are not alone getting ambushed by the vengeful Khan (Ricardo Montalban) who still holds a vendetta for Captain Kirk leaving him to die (see “Space Seed”).

Among his entourage of scavengers he keeps some burrowing creatures as pets and they make his two hostages highly compliant. Khan’s quick to commandeer the ship, and we know what his aims are before he’s put them into action.

A trap gets set to lure Kirk. The USS Enterprise is alerted and comes face to face with The USS Reliant. Their purported friends have treacherous intentions looking to blow them out of space from close range.

There’s a robust theatricality to Montalban’s villain that feels large and provocatively cunning as he holds onto a grudge going back to Star Trek‘s TV days. It’s an inspired piece of work not only in building out the story, but in having the actor back for another installment because he already has a built-in history.

It turns it in a fine chess match and a space opera with Kirk and Khan crossing wits and playing out their old grievances in outer space. It takes this scope and the unfamiliar if appreciated world of space ships, phasers, and light speed, distilling them down into something so intimate and human.

If you’re a cynic, you could say the action mostly involves the two foes talking to each other over video screens. If memory holds, they never actually share the same frame. Still, regardless of what you think of the special effects or the sheer eightiesness of the film’s sets and wardrobe, the story is grounded in a conflict that feels so primal and compelling.

And if that is what gives us a movie, then we must also consider the other relationships. Kirk once had a romantic relationship with one of the head technicians of the Genesis project Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch); her grown son has followed in her footsteps and has a major chip on his shoulder when it comes to Kirk. His notoriety certainly precedes him.

The film is at its best when its heroes are put under duress. Echoing the film’s opening, Kirk and Spock look to rescue them from an untenable situation as they fight back against Khan’s unreasonable demands and Scottie tries to salvage what’s left of the Enterprise in the obliterated engine room. Radioactivity is contained, but with a busted engine, prospects are grim.

Like the second installment in the Star Wars franchise, Empire Strikes Back, Khan is a film about the ultimate sacrifice for the ones you love. If Han Solo did just that in the prior film, Spock does it here. It’s hard to think of two more beloved characters to watch suffer and giving them up hurts.

It’s fitting that the movie references A Tale of Two Cities with Kirk quoting Sidney Carton in the closing moments, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” This injection of classic Dickens reinforces how Star Trek is always grounded in traditional human history even if it’s pushed onward into future centuries.

Our hero is laid to rest with Scottie’s bagpipes. It always feels a bit anachronistic and then we hear the refrains of “Amazing Grace” in deep space suggesting it can touch even the far reaches of the galaxy.

Kirk eulogizes his buddy saying, “Of my friend, I can only say this: of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most… human.” That is the profound paradox of this friendship.

Spock’s a fundamentally rational character, and yet all these human impulses are pleased to dwell inside of him. It’s part of what makes him compelling because if we required a manual to read and comprehend him, it would be seem straightforward.

Kirk is the live wire, the unconventional one, who hates to lose — most of all he hates to lose his crew and the people he cares about. Yet in their camaraderie, we see something so formative, and Spock to the end is a noble, loyal friend.

It’s true he does bear the most human of traits and that’s why we hold him so dear because he knows what it is to love and care about other people. He has a heart to go along with his head, continually surprising us with the depth of his humanity despite his stoic countenance.

Like all the great adventure films, Khan has drama grounded in deep relationships, including the primary villain. In such a pressure cooker, every minute of action feels pregnant with real meaning and consequence. It also helps when characters we love and respect are at stake caught up in the middle of it all.

4/5 Stars

 

Marty (1955)

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To my mind, Marty is the only movie adapted from TV to win an Oscar and certainly to get as much publicity as it did. During the surge of the Golden Age of Television, Paddy Chayefsky was king and Marty became a pinnacle of what could be accomplished by a writer with a singular voice.

It’s a triumph of the small screen brought to the large, breaking down the boundaries and some of the prejudices that come with it thanks to the particular story it chooses to tell.

Marty is easy enough to place. He takes up residence in the territory Chayefsky would canvass in many of his stories including later efforts like The Catered Affair or Middle of The Night. There’s a “write what you know” imperative to his work. If it’s not quite realism — the words are too precise in their cadence and meter — then it certainly makes for unadorned cinema away from the normally watchful eyes of Hollywood.

Marty is a butcher and an unmarried man who lives with his mother. He’s kindly enough cutting up meat as the ladies of the neighborhood chide him that he should be getting married. All his siblings are hitched, and he’s the eldest and still alone.

It’s the earnest simplicity of the story that always appealed to me in the past. But as I grow older Marty speaks to me more and more. Because you begin to see it differently in light of new experiences and the kind of tensions that come with familial relationships and adulthood in general.

As I’ve gotten older and recall periods of singleness in my life and the lives of others, I’m all the more moved by Ernest Borgnine’s performance. He was always relegated to heavies. Like Raymond Burr, the only way to play the hero was on the small screen. Burr got Perry Mason and Borgnine got, well, McHale’s Navy. But before that, there was Marty (1955), and it was an unassuming film that proved to be a stirring success. It’s an underdog story in an industry predicated on prestige, star power, and publicity. Borgnine plays it beautifully.

On a Saturday night, he and his best bud Angie (Joe Mantell) drink beer together perusing the newspaper and quibbling over what they’ll do for the evening like a pair of vultures out of The Jungle Book.

At his mother’s behest, they make their way to the Stardust Ballroom to hopefully meet a couple of “tomatoes.” It feels a bit like a watering hole with dancing and fast music. All the various enclaves stand around looking for mates and finally stirring up the courage to meet someone. It’s a space where everyone gives everyone else the once-over before making a decision.

Social psychologists tell us that certain traits like facial symmetry, height in men, or hip-to-waist ratio in women have been the unconscious cues throughout the history of humankind. We’ve progressed toward swipes and likes and what have you, from the dance hall circuit, but it’s not too dissimilar. Just less personal and more commoditized.

It’s all still founded on the same premise of surface-level attraction. Obviously, there’s something to this. But whatever generation you hail from, it’s still a game of wooing and putting the best version of yourself out there.

Flaws and vulnerability might come but far later down the line when you know someone and can let your guard down. What makes Marty is how this butcher, who feels chewed up and spit out by the world’s mating game, finds someone to connect with on a far less superficial level. It begins with an observation.

He notices someone else’s humiliation and reaches out to her because he knows what it is to be looked down upon and disregarded. And just like that Marty and Clara (Betsy Blair) are brought together into one another’s orbits. They start to share about their livesb and we learn she’s a school teacher who still lives with her parents. Marty gets so comfortable in her presence and starts babbling incessantly — it’s over the top — but it’s also lovable.

Borgnine and Blair are cast so well together, and it’s not because ’50s Hollywood assumed them to be plain. There’s such a sincere candor about them that comes out on the screen, and the movie requires this for their chemistry to work and for the sake of the story. We like them because they feel like us.

Marty admits, “Dogs like us, we’re not really as bad as we think we are.” He’s internalized the language of the culture at-large, but in the presence of a kindred spirit, he feels happy and more like himself, totally at ease in her presence. It makes me think of the advice that you should enjoy talking with your future spouse because contrary to popular belief, that’s probably what you’ll be spending most of your life doing together. Spending mundane moments in one another’s company.

They have a bit of a bubble for themselves of near-delirious happiness; the drama comes from all the outside forces weighing on them. The guys like Angie and that crowd are gruff and crude. They try and set Marty up with other girls and tell him Clara’s not attractive. Meanwhile, their conversations are full of vulgarities involving Mickey Spillane novels and magazine centerfolds.

But this is not the only criticism. Marty also hears from his mother, a deeply devout Catholic and Italian mother who cares about her family and her boys. She does not want to be discarded as an old maid and worries her son’s new, non-Italian girl will cause a rift between them like she’s already seen in their extended family.

It’s almost too much for him. Marty lives under the lie that he must conform and listen to what others speak into his life, and certainly there is some truth in considering the counsel of those around you.

However, sometimes it can also be pernicious and he realizes amid this sea of tedium and insecurity being projected onto him, he has something worth pursuing. Why would he ever consider giving that up? And so he gives up everything miserable, lonely, and stupid in pursuit of a priceless gift. In his relationship with Clara, Marty is a richer man than most.

4/5 Stars

It Should Happen to You (1954)

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It Should Happen to You was the brainchild of screenwriter Garson Kanin and director George Cukor with Judy Holliday as their lead. As such it’s easy to cast the movie in the same lineage of Adam’s Rib (1949) and Born Yesterday (1950). Except in this movie, there’s also a featured newcomer, a young man named Jack Lemmon.

The movie opens as any respectable New York movie does in Central Park. In the outdoor reverie of men at their chess boards and kids running around, Gladys Glover causes a hullabaloo for feeding pigeons. One man takes particular umbrage at having her try to pick him up while he was minding his own business, listening to the horse races.

In the aftermath, she meets a documentarian, Pete Sheppard (Lemmon), who has his camera at the ready and an eye for people (Think a precursor to Humans of New York). He’s fascinated by this barefoot woman, and strikes up a conversation before they go their separate ways.

There’s an ethereal, fated tone I can’t quite put my finger on, but we know they will meet again and something is bound to happen. Judy Holliday perfectly exemplifies this airy bubbliness. I would never condescend to exhibit her as a dumb blonde archetype because there is far more going on here.

Gladys Glover sees an open billboard and resolves to buy up the prominent real estate on Columbus Circle. For what purpose we can’t be sure exactly. She says its personal. But she goes through the paces, speaks to the proprietor, and forks out the money that’s normally attributed to marketing corporations, not individual citizens.

Soon the words GLADYS GLOVER appear up on a street corner in lettering that looks like high rises. It’s an extravagant decision and Gladys beams with pride seeing her name like it’s never been before. But that’s not the end of it.

The rest of the movie is about the cascading effects it has since movies are meant to feed off delights of serendipity. It Should Happen to You is that kind of movie.

Peter Lawford plays a disgruntled marketing exec miffed to find out someone else has shouldered in on the billboard that has always been theirs in the past; it was an unspoken agreement between them. When he finds out about Gladys he wants to strike a deal with her. Surely a lady can be bought.

It must be said an angry Jack Lemmon is not always becoming and after moving in down the hall from Gladys, he seems to think more and more that he owns her. A more charitable reading of it is that he’s the only person who actually cares for her well-being beyond her growing reputation as a minor celebrity; he’s also falling in love.

Meanwhile Gladys strikes up an agreement to get her name put up on signage all over the city. When she’s shopping with Pete, a saleswoman helps them only for her demeanor to change instantly when she realizes who she’s helping. It’s like being queen for a day as a crowd forms around Gladys soliciting autographs from the local phenomenon.

She has effectively given them something — a nice souvenir to take with them in their day — and in this way it’s hard not to compare her to Elwood P. Dowd of Harvey. In the movie world they’re able to break into the everyday and give people some common decency and kindness.

However, we also watch from a distance as Gladys gets carried away by the mechanisms and machinery of television. She’s paraded out in front of America without much consideration of who she is as a human being. In one segment she’s even featured on a prim and proper panel show with the likes of Constance Bennett and Wendy Barrie. It feels twee by today’s standards, but the point is made.

Soon she finds herself caught between the indignant protectiveness of Lemmon and the business conferences of Peter Lawford including some extracurricular activities. His company has transformed the typical ethos marketing appeal into the Gladys Glover everywoman appeal for the average American girl. It’s a smashing success.

It Should Happen to You doesn’t feel like a groundbreaking story and part of this might be the fact we’ve seen so many analogous film’s in its wake. There’s this tension between celebrity and success and the kind of down-to-earth humanity that keeps one grounded.

I must say I was taken with the ending where Lemmon says goodbye to his girl using a film, and yet again it presages many of the meta qualities of a film within a film that have enamored writers and directors for decades.

In this particular instance, it’s in service of a romance. The happy ending is that he actually receives a reply. Gladys writes it in the sky for him with letters as big as her billboard. She hasn’t lost her knack for the spectacular, but she simultaneously recognizes someone who has her best interest in mind.

If you said you were going to make a romantic comedy with Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon, it wouldn’t immediately strike me. Still, if you have two likable performers and put them together, the results speak for themselves, even if the returns are mostly modest.

3.5/5 Stars