Four Daughters (1938)

Posted on July 22, 2018 by 4 Star Films

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The entire packaging of this Warner Bros. film includes director Michael Curtiz, screenwriter Julius Epstein, composer Max Steiner, and Claude Rains all who (not unsurprisingly) would have their hand in that revered classic Casablanca (1942).

Here the Lane Sisters are joined in their quartet by Gale Page with Claude Rains playing the musical patriarch of his family who has trained his daughters up to be an orchestra right in his living room. He’s a belligerent but good-willed father with all his show of bluster merely a facade to hide a heart of pure gold. The role slightly subverts many of Rains’ typically even-keeled gentlemen.

Most of these opening sequences draw up just how quaint and delightful they all are together and what a perfect little life they share as the men begin to show up in their lives to call on them. Isn’t love grand? That’s what we might be prompted to surmise is the film’s main theme.

Four Daughters teeters perilously on the edge of being insufferably schmaltzy to its core and yet it seems that the arrival of John Garfield and the insertion of his character into this idyllic world of giggling girls and small-town romance is just enough to save this story and make into something worth remembering.

Mickey Boyd (Garfield) walks into their home as an acerbic outsider who thrums his nose at the picture-perfect American family in their quintessential American home but he also has a gift for the piano and as musicians themselves, that’s an instant point of connection. Furthermore, he’s come into town as a favor to his old colleague Felix Deitz (Jeffrey Lynn) who happens to be a close family friend and maybe one of the nicest guys you’ve ever met, either onscreen or off.

Still, Mickey is a tough one to crack but that doesn’t keep the maternal Aunt Etta (May Robson) or vivacious young Ann (Priscilla Lane) from trying their best to figure him out. In fact, Mickey becomes a bit of a pet project for Ann as she looks to slowly transform him into an honest to goodness genial human being. She does a fairly good job at it too as he is brought into the fold of the family for every subsequent round of holiday festivities.

The second act proves to be the most potent and whether or not the turn of events are truly probable does not detract from how affecting these sequences turn out to be. And ironically, at the center of it all are Mickey and Ann. The man who has always been the outsider looking in and the youngest sister full of playful precociousness. He is the one who helps her see things as they actually are and she, in turn, continually spruces up his life and to use an inane phrase, she “turns his frown upside down.”

But I think that’s the key to the final act of Four Daughters. It’s dramatic but it loses that almost sickening layer of sugarcoating and shocks everyone within the frame of the film back to the reality of the world with one tragic event or two events depending on what you deem the tragedy to be. This doesn’t simply feel like a mere play for our emotions — though it might be partially this — but it’s really a bit of a representation of what life actually throws our way.

That’s why Mickey is by far the most important character in this picture and he’s so necessary for it to be anything more than typical Hollywood fare because in some sense John Garfield makes that man into a real person. He’s not necessarily a bad fellow. In fact, we kind of like him because he seems a bit sardonic, frank, and he’s not going out trying to be something that he’s not.

True, the Hollywood happy ending is tacked on as we come to expect but perhaps in the closing moments, as the sisters look through the drawing room window and Ann is back to her gate-swinging ways with her beau as before, we can gain some satisfaction in the moment. Not simply because all is right in this little universe but the family went through trials and now are better for it — more attuned to the world. They are no longer simply four daughters or soon to be four wives. They are four women.

The film was dressed up in Technicolor in Young at Heart (1954) with Doris Day and Frank Sinatra and Sinatra elevated that film much as Garfield does here. His tune “All the Way” while having no bearing on the plot is nevertheless a memorable number. I have nothing against Mr. Lemp’s taste in music nor his disdain for the contemporary bilge of his day but I rather like the crooners myself.

3.5/5 Stars

Saboteur (1942)

Posted on May 2, 2018 by 4 Star Films

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“It’s my duty as an American citizen to believe a man innocent until he is proven guilty.”

I stand corrected. Maybe Foreign Correspondent (1940) is not Alfred Hitchcock’s most patriotic movie. Maybe it’s Saboteur, made two years later. Or maybe they are both made by the fact that they are more than mere propaganda and that’s what makes them still worthwhile today. This is, above all, another thriller by the same man who continually tinkered with the genre in the subsequent years.

The narrative starts with wartime industry which has hit its boon since there are Nazis and Japanese to fight. Defense Plants have become a crucial part of the war and also part of everyday life for the average American. Robert Cummings is the epitome of one, a fresh-faced lad who all of the sudden finds himself wanted for the murder of his best friend which happened after a ruthless act of sabotage. In this respect, Saboteur is a more elegant version of Hitchcock’s predecessor Sabotage (1936).

There’s a wonderful sequence where our protagonist has hitched a ride with a gabby truck driver who consequently looks a bit like James Cagney. Every subsequent thread of conversation and even the passing billboard, all points back to everything that’s gone down so far. The man’s trying to run away but he can’t. Fugitives never have been able to as far back as Jonah. They always have to face the music.

Barry Kane follows the one wild lead he has involving a man played by Norman Lloyd (a future Hitchcock partner in Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and it lands him at a stately ranch that feels like quintessential Americana — it’s a luscious slice of West Coast leisure. But it’s another delicious instance where Hitchcock allows villains to live lives not unlike our own with families, babies toddling around, and swimming pools. Except these people also happen to be involved with conspiracies threatening national security in the wake of WWII.

After, a harrowing escape from the police with a swan dive off a bridge, Kane continues his journey. Saboteur quickly becomes another entry in Hitchcock’s innocent man-on-the-run canon and while not the tip of the spear, it’s thoroughly entertaining for the very fact that it remains on the move as it jumps from place to place. In fact, there are obvious shades of 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959) in place as it goes literally from coast (California) to coast (New York).

And in each location, we meet a row of interesting side characters whether a trucker or the sagely blind man and a band of eclectic circus vagabonds. But the most important is the stalwart Patricia Martin (Priscilla Lane), initially looking to turn in this traitorous criminal with his hands cuffed together until she realizes that’s not who he is.

The director and his writers use the whole film to tell tiny parables about America where the circus can function like our democracy or a decision to not turn in a man can merely be an exercise in basic human rights. In these moments the film evokes the kind of patriotic messages that feel unconvincing when viewed now. Even Cummings brief stint on the soapbox facing off against his sophisticated foe is an obvious call-to-action.

But for 1942 it makes complete sense and that hardly takes away from the thriller that Hitchcock still manages to spin because though war might be afoot and Film serves different purposes on the Homefront, it can still function as entertainment. Hitchcock was one of the greats in that capacity. A murderer is set loose in a movie theater during a crime picture and the action leads us most iconically atop the standard bearer of American freedom and equality, Lady Liberty herself. Once again, it’s the perfect Hitchcock ending even if that’s more in going with the style of the entire picture thus far rather than pure execution.

3.5/5 Stars

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Posted on August 24, 2014 by 4 Star Films

Here is a retrospective gangster film reminiscing about the Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties extending from the post WWI period of prohibition to the election of FDR.

Two mainstays of the genre including the original gangster James Cagney and hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart star as two men in a group of three soldiers who meet during World War I. In the ensuing years Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney) initially has difficulty getting back into society, but after meeting Speakeasy owner Panama Smith (Gladys George) he finds himself climbing the ranks in the bootlegging business. Soon through grit and a ruthless drive Eddie makes good racketeering by utilizing taxis with booze to make it big.

Through it all Eddie becomes smitten with a young singer he used to know when she was a young girl (Priscilla Lane), except she does not share his affection. Pretty soon his ol’ buddy George (Bogart) comes back into the picture, with a some shifting dealings of his own. Eddie practically runs the town now but when the Crash happens he gets pushed out by George and now Jean is off and married to her lawyer beau. Eddie is a washed-up taxi driver still hanging around Panama and he has time to do one last favor for Jean.

This is one of the last great gangster films of the 1930s following in the wake of other Cagney classics like The Public Enemy and Angel with Dirty Faces. Raoul Walsh directs this film and it develops as another dynamic, action packed film with a lot of drama and heart thanks to Cagney and George. It is however different from previous gangster flicks in that it plays out as a history although it keeps the nitty-gritty look of the previous films. Like Angel with Dirty Faces especially, there are also some sentimental moments because Cagney is not a complete scoundrel, just mostly. Not wanting to continue being typecast Cagney took a break from the genre not coming back until White Heat in 1949. He did pretty well for himself during the 1940s though with performances in The Stawberry Blonde and Yankee Doodle Dandy. There was another fellow who did not do too bad in that interim period either, new found leading man Humphrey Bogart.

“What was his business?”
“He used to be a big shot.”

4/5 Stars

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Posted on November 15, 2013 by 4 Star Films

Directed by Frank Capra and starring Cary Grant with a zany and strange supporting cast, this film adapted from a play is a farcical black comedy. Grant is a drama critic who is just recently married and he is about to go on his honeymoon. However, he is horrified to learn that his two unassuming aunts have killed hopeless, old men with arsenic-laced tea. He must also deal with one brother who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt and a recently returned brother who is wanted for murder. Add these crazy characters, a peculiar German doctor, some policemen, and you are in for a wild ride of wacky antics and mock terror. All the while Grant tries to balance his many problems which nearly go awry. Everything gets figured out in the end and Grant carries his bride away. To say the least this film is very odd and perhaps not Capra’s best. It does culminate nicely in the end however, closing the story on a high note. The cast includes Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Josephine Hull, Peter Lorre, Jean Adair, Jack Carson, and John Alexander