Author: Melanie Novak

Christmas in Connecticut: “The Things a Girl Will Do for a Mink Coat”

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#26 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

When I found a battered DVD copy of Christmas in Connecticut in a secondhand bookstore, the clerk told me it was his mother’s favorite Christmas movie.

I can see why.

Elizabeth Lane is the ultimate wife and mother.  In her popular columns for Smart Housekeeping, she writes of her bucolic life on a farm in Connecticut with her husband and baby.  She spends evenings beside a crackling fire in her stone hearth.  She uses a spinning wheel and scours the local antique shops for the perfect rocking chair.

But mostly, she cooks.

Her recipes have sent Smart Housekeeping’s circulation soaring, and sailor Jefferson Jones salivates over them while slurping tasteless broth in a hospital while recovering from war wounds.  He dreams of an old-fashioned Christmas dinner with all the trimmings at Mrs. Lane’s table.

Through the magic of movies, his nurse just happens to know the head of publishing at Smart Housekeeping, and she’s soon arranged for Jefferson to spend his first Christmas out of the hospital at the Lane Farm in Connecticut.

So far, so good.

Then we get our first look at the Martha Stewart of 1945.

Barbara Stanwyck is dressed in a sleek white blouse, picking at a breakfast of sardines on a coffee saucer and pounding away at a typewriter.  The radiator hisses, and her undergarments are hanging on a line on her balcony that overlooks the heart of New York City.

Last time I checked farm wives didn’t run around in wardrobes designed by Edith Head.

Her panicked editor arrives with the news that their boss invited a sailor to her home for Christmas.

The problem, of course, is obvious:  Though her publisher doesn’t know it, Elizabeth Lane is a fraud.

She has no farm, no husband, no baby.

And she can’t cook.

But she just bought a gorgeous mink coat that’ll cost her six month’s salary, and she’s willing to do anything to keep it and her job.

Which means this bachelor girl needs a farm, a husband, and a baby pronto.

Christmas in Connecticut is a frothy, fun Christmas romantic comedy.  The best scenes of the movie are when Stanwyck, the career girl, has to pretend to be the perfect farm wife and mother despite the fact that she can’t cook, doesn’t know how to change a diaper, and is completely bewildered when a cow shows up in the kitchen.

Dennis Morgan plays the charming sailor who finds himself falling in love with the hostess he believes is married.  Stanwyck’s character heartily reciprocates the sentiment, and the plot thickens before resolving itself quite happily.

Stanwyck is as charming and convincing as ever in the role.  

Good Christmas movies hold a special place in our heart, because we watch them over and over during the holiday season.  They are meant to be watched with out of town family members, or as a rest from a day shopping at the mall.  They reinforce—either with heavy sentiment, or, as in Christmas in Connecticut—with a light touch—the importance of love and family.  They can make you nostalgic for the Christmases and family you never had.

So this December, take a break from the Hallmark Movies.  For one night, put aside Die Hard, Home Alone, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, It’s A Wonderful Life, and White Christmas.

Pop some popcorn, put on your fuzziest socks and warmest pajamas, and curl up with Stanwyck and Christmas in Connecticut.

You’ll be glad you did.

Double Indemnity: The Crown Jewel of Film Noir

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#25 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in a scene from Double Indemnity.

If you’re a baby boomer, when you think of Barbara Stanwyck, you think of The Big Valley, which ran for four seasons in the late sixties.  Stanwyck played Victoria Barkley, the tough matriarch who ruled the Barkley family in the wilds of 1870’s California.

But if you’re a film buff, you think of a cheap blonde wig and an ankle bracelet that seduced Fred MacMurray into murder.

You think of Double Indemnity.

Stanwyck plays Phyllis Dietrichson, the fatalist femme in film noir.  

Stanwyck had made her career playing hard-boiled dames with soft centers, and Fred MacMurray was the affable everyman who ceded the spotlight to his female co-stars.  

Neither Stanwyck nor MacMurray had ever played characters as rotten as Phyllis Dietrichson and Walter Neff, the lethal housewife and willing insurance salesman who plot to murder Phyllis’ husband and abscond with the insurance money.

The results are electric.

Walter burns for Phyllis with a combustible mix of lust and greed that ultimately sours to revulsion.

And Phyllis?  She’s one cold fish from wire to wire. 

To satisfy the production code, Walter Neff murders Mr. Dietrichson off-screen.  Instead we see only a close up of Stanwyck as Phyllis.  She doesn’t watch the murder of her husband inches away, but stares straight ahead with a look of almost sexual satisfaction that will make your blood run cold.

Phyllis drives while Walter breaks her husband’s neck

Things go wrong, of course.  Walter’s murder isn’t as perfect as he believes, and he’s dogged by his conscience and a suspicious insurance claims man.  

Phyllis and Walter soon wish to be rid of one another, but the murder between them binds them tighter than lust or money.

Events spiral out of control with consequences lethal to more than just Mr. Dietrichson.

Double Indemnity is number 38 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Movies.  It’s on every list of the greatest film noirs, often in the top spot.

It’s a classic about the rotten core of humanity, and the whole film orbits around Stanwyck’s performance.

And still she didn’t win the Best Actress Oscar.  Once again she competed in a stacked field and lost to Ingrid Bergman for her performance in Gaslight.

Two women at the top of their game—it’s a shame one of them had to lose.

But as we’ll see next week, Stanwyck had one more chance at the golden statuette, and it all begins with a late night phone call.

The Lady Eve: “I Need Him Like the Axe Needs the Turkey”

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#24 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

There are many good films, fewer great films, and fewer still that are masterpieces.

The Lady Eve is beyond even a masterpiece—it is a perfect film.

If I had a magic wand, I wouldn’t change a thing in writer/director Preston Sturges’ crown jewel of the screwball comedy.  I wouldn’t eliminate any of Henry Fonda’s falls, or soften Barbara Stanwyck’s revenge.  I wouldn’t add in explicit love scenes or four-letter-words forbidden by the production code.

And I’d cut off the hand of anyone who tried to change one word of Preston Sturges’ sparkling script.  It delights in making a fool of Henry Fonda and using innuendo-laced dialogue to subvert every rule of the censors.

The setup is simple enough:  Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) and her father (Charles Coburn perfect in his supporting role) are card sharps out to fleece the rich but naive Charles Pike, an absent minded scientist who studies snakes and is a reluctant brewery heir.

Charles doesn’t have a chance against Jean’s conniving, but the trick is on Jean when she falls in love with him.  

Thus far it’s a standard romantic comedy plot, though there is nothing standard in Barbara Stanwyck’s tough girl melting in the face of love performance.

Before she can confess and go straight, Charles discovers her duplicity and calls off their engagement.

And here’s where things get interesting.

Jean’s heart hardens right back up—or does it?—and she crafts a revenge plot of bold brilliance and exquisite simplicity.  She’ll don a fancy wardrobe and a British accent and convince him she’s Lady Eve Sidwich, his perfect mate.  And then once she has him on the line, she’ll dash his illusions about the lovely and virginal Lady Eve.

It’s impossible to pick the best moment in the movie.  Every scene is a present unwrapped before the audience to reveal a brilliant cut diamond of humor, wit, and star power.

The film opens with Jean bonking Charles on the head with an apple, a moment loaded with the biblical implications of temptation.

Then there’s the iconic scene of Jean scoping out Charles in her compact mirror and giving a mocking play-by-play of the fortune hunting women who strike out with the shy bookworm.  Stanwyck plays it with just the perfect dose of cynical amusement.

Charles meets Jean

There’s Jean seducing him in her cabin with the description of her ideal mate, falling in love during a moonlight walk, and Jean cheating her father at cards to keep him from cheating Charles.

Jean ends the first act crying with heartbreak and begins the second vowing her revenge with the line, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey.”

She orchestrates an invitation to the Pike mansion as Lady Eve and completely befuddles poor Charles.  Her brazen confrontation is better than the best disguise.

Charles meets the Lady Eve Sidwich

On top of that, you’ve got Charles ignoring his manservant who correctly insists, “it’s positively the same dame.”  And a wayward horse who keeps interrupting a tender moment Charles has planned with Eve.

And then there’s…oh, watch it yourself, why don’t you?

And then tell me if you find a false note.  I sure didn’t.

Writer/director Preston Sturges wrote the part specially for Stanwyck after working with her on Remember the Night.  Jean Harrington was based on the antics of his own mother, and being raised with a woman even remotely like Jean Harrington meant that Preston Sturges lived a colorful life and was full of stories.  Stanwyck, Fonda, and Sturges all reported having a blast on the set of The Lady Eve, and I think that playfulness shines through in the finished film.

Stanwyck hadn’t done comedy before.  She typically played gold diggers, or tough young girls pulling themselves up in the world by the force of their will.  The Lady Eve opened up a whole new genre for her, and she was ultimately nominated for an Oscar for her screwball comedy Ball of Fire, made the same year. 

She’s great in Ball of Fire, but The Lady Eve is in another league.  It’s a cut above the other comedies of the 1940s, and a cut above the comedies made today.  She lost the Oscar that year to Joan Fonatine in Hitchock’s Suspicion.  There’s no shame in losing to Fontaine, but I have my own suspicion that if she’d been nominated for The Lady Eve she would’ve won.

By 1941, Stanwyck was proving herself one of Hollywood’s most versatile actresses.  She’d been hard as steel as Lily Powers in the pre-code Baby Face, break-your-heart vulnerable in Stella Dallas, and laugh out loud funny in The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire.

She already had a career that would cement her place in Hollywood history.

Yet she was cruising toward her most famous role at ninety in a state with a speed limit of forty-five miles an hour.

Stella Dallas: Barbara’s Four-Hanky Smash

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#23 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

Part IV: The Case for Barbara Stanwyck

The greatest actress to never win an Oscar is Barbara Stanwyck.

You may disagree—you may think it’s Glenn Close (7 nominations), Deborah Kerr (6), Irene Dunne (5), Rosalind Russell (4), or even Greta Garbo (3).  

Hear me out.  In Part IV, I make my case.

Stanwyck’s quest should’ve been over before it began in 1937 with Stella Dallas.  

Stanwyck plays the title character, a woman who is pretty and poor and snags a man above her station.  Stephen Dallas marries Stella in a moment of loneliness.  He’s a kind man, but he’s quiet, reserved, and of old money.  He’s used to doing things in the proper manner.

Stella is loud and always ready for a good time.  She’s vulgar in her dress, her walk, her talk. She’s also generous, warm, and fun-loving.

And she’s an excellent mother to their daughter Laurel.

It’s not enough.  Stella, despite her early promises to change, is decidedly low class. 

Her past is in her bones.

The marriage between Stephen and Stella sours as Stephen finds he can’t remake her into the society wife he should’ve married and Stella increasingly resents his attempts to do so.

Soon enough, they are living separate lives, which suits them both.  Stella and Laurel live a charmed existence, doting on one another as Laurel grows into a lovely young woman.  She is Stella’s greatest triumph and best pal.

As Laurel grows up, she begins to understand the differences between the refined society of her father and the slapdash existence of her mother.  

Stella begins to understand that although she could never gain acceptance to the country club set, Laurel can.  

Or could—if she didn’t have a mother her peers see as a joke.

The movie gets a lot of justified praise for its final scene, when Stella makes a grand gesture of sacrifice for Laurel.

But I love the scenes of gradual awakening—Stella realizing that no one showed up at Laurel’s birthday party because she is her mother, and Laurel feeling both incredible embarrassment and overwhelming love for her ill-bred, unladylike, wonderful, gregarious mother.

There’s a scene on a train when Stella and Laurel overhear Laurel’s friends making fun of Stella.  The mutual pain is palpable as Stella protects Laurel by pretending not to hear, and Laurel crawls into bed with her mother and gives her a tender kiss.

In the end, Stanwyck’s Stella walks away heartbroken but satisfied Laurel will have everything she ever wanted.

Everything but her mother.

The film lives or dies on the portrayal of Stella—we have to love Stella despite her flaws.  There’s no easy villain to blame—not Stella or Stephen, not Stephen’s new wife, not even Laurel’s preppy boyfriend.  It’s a film about the way the world is, instead of the way we wish it to be.

Stanwyck had to age twenty years throughout the course of the film, starting out as the pretty wide-eyed social climber and ending in a frumpy, slightly overweight middle age.

Stanwyck delivers.

Stella Dallas is the first film to fully showcase Barbara Stanwyck’s natural and realistic acting.  We take it for granted today that actors want to look and feel like real people on the screen, but that wasn’t the case in the 1930s and 1940s.  Acting was still peeling away from the silent era, when big dramatic gestures ruled the day.  You didn’t actually have to believe the character Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn played was a real person.  You could almost see the actress winking at the camera, letting the audience know it was all just a bit of fun.  You could see the acting.

In this film, you can’t see Barbara Stanwyck.  You only see Stella.

Stanwyck’s films aren’t of the 1930s or 1940s.  They’re films of any time, any place.

Barbara Stanwyck was nominated for an Oscar for Stella Dallas, and widely predicted to win.  She lost to Luise Rainer in The Good Earth, perhaps a film that was better in 1937 but has not aged as well as Stella Dallas.

Stella Dallas was a commercial success as well, one of the top five box office hits of 1937.  It was so popular that Stella and Laurel’s story continued in a radio soap opera that ran for nearly twenty years.

Stanwyck would go on to receive three more Oscar nominations, and play several iconic characters, but she said late in her life that Stella Dallas was her favorite role.

It’s easy to see why. 

Stella Dallas was Stanwyck’s first tour de force.  The fact that Stella Dallas is the third or fourth best role Stanwyck played is a testament to the brilliance of her long career.  If she had won this Oscar, as she should have, I could easily be writing a blog about how Barbara Stanwyck was the greatest actress to only win one Ocsar.

She’s that good.

Next week Stanwyck trades in her frumpy dresses and weepy endings for elegant gowns and laughs in a film where she is dressed by the legendary costume designer Edith Head and directed by the inimitable Preston Sturges.

The results are biblical.

The King of Hollywood Meets the Screwball Queen

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#22 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

Clark Gable married five times and slept with every woman who would have him, regardless of his—or her—marital status.

But the only woman he ever loved was Carole Lombard.

Clark Gable made eight movies with Joan Crawford.  He made seven with Myrna Loy, six with Jean Harlow, four with Lana Turner, and two each with Marion Davies, Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert, Loretta Young, Heddy Lamarr, and Ava Gardner.

But he made just a single film with the leading lady of his heart.

They met on the set of No Man of Her Own, a rather charming Paramount picture.  Clark Gable plays Babe, a gambler and card sharp.  To avoid trouble with the police, he leaves New York City and hides out in a small town until things cool down.  He meets Lombard’s Connie Randall, a bored and beautiful librarian who is ripe for adventure.

Babe turns on the charm, and Connie is not immune.  Though inexperienced, Connie is not naive, and when Babe proposes they spend the night together, she presents a counteroffer—they flip a coin, and if she wins, they get married.

She wins the toss.

They proceed from lust to marriage to love.  Babe hides his criminal enterprise from Connie, but eventually gives it up and goes straight to be worthy of her.  Yet in the end Connie proves an able match for Babe, for she has known of his gambling and stealing all along and loves him anyway.  

No Man of Her Own is a good but not great movie, forgettable but for the fact that Gable and Lombard eventually became Hollywood’s real-life power couple.

There’s chemistry between them on the screen.

On the set, however, there was nothing doing.

Lombard was still happily married to her first husband William Powell, and Clark Gable thought Lombard swore far too much for a lady.

Four years later, they met up again at a party and this time Gable fell in love with her, even if she did swear like a drunken soldier.

But in her profanity, as in so many other things, Carole Lombard was crazy like a fox.  It started as self-defense.  As a young, beautiful blonde in Hollywood, the men she worked with both on and off camera were constantly pawing at her.  Lombard delivered her profanity in a breezy, devil-may-care attitude that usually turned their minds from seeing her as a romantic object, to one-of-the-guys, a pal.  Thus she got the men to keep their hands to themselves without alienating those who could help advance her career.

She played pranks, threw parties, went hunting and fishing with Clark and his friends.

And fell for him just as hard as he fell for her.

They married in 1939 during a break in filming Gone With the Wind.  It was a private ceremony with only a few attendants, as neither wanted the media to turn it into a circus.

Because she was as savvy with her business dealings as she was with her swearing, she made more money than Clark, despite him starring in the most commercially successful movie of all time.

She could convince anyone to do anything.  She talked Alfred Hitchcock into directing her in  a screwball comedy.  He did it because he loved her.  Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a good film, starring Lombard and Robert Montgomery as a couple who find out four years after their wedding that due to a technicality their marriage license isn’t valid, and that they’re not legally married.  It was Hitchcock’s only comedy in his long career.

When World War II broke out, Carole Lombard wanted to help.  She wrapped filming on her film To Be Or Not To Be with Jack Benny and signed on to sell war bonds.  She took her mother on a cross-country trip and due to her tireless efforts, sold a record-breaking two million dollars of war bonds in a single day.

While on that trip, she pondered the next phase of her life and her career.  

Trying to win an Oscar, she’d dipped her toes into some films with more serious subjects.  Maybe she could do another one of those.  Or maybe she’d keep making comedies—she was already signed on to star in They All Kissed the Bride with Melvyn Douglas.

Maybe she’d take an extended leave from Hollywood—throw herself into the war effort.  Convince Clark to enlist in the war, then start a family when it was over.  She knew a lot about the movie business—maybe when she returned to work she’d direct a film herself.

But for now, all she wanted was to finish the war bond tour and return home to Clark.

If they made a movie of the story of Carole Lombard’s life, I’d tell you to turn it off right now. 

You don’t want to know how this story ends.

She didn’t make They All Kissed the Bride, or start a family.  She didn’t direct.  

On January 16, 1942, the plane she was taking back to Hollywood and Clark and her future crashed in the mountains outside Las Vegas.

There were no survivors.

Carole Lombard was dead at thirty-three.

Because she was flying back from her war bond tour, President Franklin Roosevelt declared her the first woman killed in the war.  In June the United States christened a war ship the S.S. Lombard, and it served in the Pacific theater throughout the war.

Clark Gable fulfilled her dying wish and enlisted in the United States Army Air Force.

Joan Crawford filled her role in They All Kissed The Bride, and donated her salary to the Red Cross that had helped search for the bodies in the Nevada mountains.

Though she’s left us with a stack of wonderful films, Carole Lombard’s death at thirty-three cut her down in her prime.  Hollywood is haunted by the films she never made.

If she’d lived, she’d almost certainly have eventually won an Oscar.  She had the looks of a quintessential Hitchcock blonde, and the director loved her.  She likely would’ve starred in one of his thrillers and perhaps opened up a whole new chapter in her career.

Thirty-three.

At thirty-three, Katharine Hepburn had never even met Spencer Tracy, much less made a picture with him.  She scored ten of her twelve Oscar nominations and three of her four Oscar wins after age thirty-three.

At thirty-three, Bette Davis had not yet made All About Eve, Barbara Stanwyck had not made Double Indemnity, and Joan Crawford had not made Mildred Pierce.

Undoubtedly, the best was yet to come for Carole Lombard. 

Her death ripped the guts out of Hollywood, and out of Clark Gable.

Hollywood recovered, of course.  Hollywood is bigger than any one star, even one as bright as Lombard.

Gable never did.  Despite living eighteen more years and marrying two more times, upon his death Clark Gable was buried next to Carole Lombard Gable.

Carole Lombard: One In A Million

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#21 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

Though she ultimately reached meteoric heights, Carole Lombard was not an overnight success.  

She started on the fast track, appearing in her first film at thirteen and signing a contract with Fox, who recognized the potential in a blonde beauty.  She was playing small parts and learning the ropes of the moving-making industry.  But at sixteen, she was in a devastating car crash.  While otherwise unharmed, the windshield shattered and cut her beautiful face to pieces.  She endured a risky surgery and painful recovery, but there was still a scar on her left cheek and around her left eye.  In later years, camera men and makeup artists were good at camouflage, but you can still see the minor scars in some of her films if you know where to look.

A pretty young blond with a scarred face was no use to Fox.

They fired her without a second thought.  Hollywood giveth, Hollywood taketh away.

For just about any one of the other millions of pretty young blondes who flock to Hollywood to find fame and fortune, that would’ve been the end of their acting career.

But Carole Lombard was not just one of the millions.

She was off the fast track.  No matter— she would start at the bottom.

A year after the accident, she signed on to make short films with Mack Sennett at Pathé on Poverty Row.  Sennett didn’t care about her scar because he wanted her to dance in his chorus, and take pies to the face.  He didn’t take many close-ups anyway.

Poverty Row wasn’t the breeding ground for major stars.  The goal was quantity, not quality, and the short silent films were a dying art as the talkies came to town.

But Carole Lombard threw herself into the roles, and she learned slapstick comedy.  

Scar or no scar, she was too pretty and too talented to go unnoticed for long.  She worked her way up into feature roles at Pathé and eventually signed a contract with Paramount.

As a legitimitate Hollywood leading lady, she was no longer one of the millions.  But she was still just one of hundreds of actresses playing glamorous ingenues.  

But Carole Lombard was not just one of the hundreds.

In Twentieth Century, she finally got the chance to prove it.

She got the part of Lily Garland opposite John Barrymore.

In 1934 when Twentieth Century came out, John Barrymore was the most respected actor in Hollywood.  He was a king among royalty.  He’d started his career on the stage, and brought that air of east coast respectability that insecure Los Angelans craved.  He also drank too much, could be difficult to work with, and at times put his hands on his leading ladies in places where they shouldn’t be.

He played Oscar Jaffe, a theater director who plucks a plain, boring young woman off the street and makes her a theater star.  For a time, they are partners on and off the stage.  But he is so overbearing that she leaves him for fame and fortune in Hollywood.  A few years later, they find themselves traveling together on the famous Twentieth Century train and Jaffe tries to lure her back to his theater and his bed.

The film is a farce.  Jaffe and Garland are ridiculous egomaniacs, obsessed with their careers and the minutiae of the theater world.  They’re always acting, alway overly dramatic.

The film is quite unapologetically mocking the narcissism and shallowness of actors.

Twentieth Century was a film tailor-made for John Barrymore.  It was a chance for him to chew up some scenery, act the ham, and play an exaggerated version of his reputation on the screen.

Carole Lombard was just supposed to be the blonde at his side.

But she stole the movie from him.

She met him step for step.  When he yelled, she yelled louder.  When he flailed about, she reached back to her Mack Sennet days and pulled out all the outrageous slapstick and comedic timing she’d honed in Hollywood’s gutter.

She went for it.  It’s meant to be ridiculous, and it is.

Though the movie wasn’t a huge success with the public—a lot of its humor were Hollywood inside jokes about the industry and the people in it—audiences took note of Carole Lombard’s performance.

She wasn’t just a pretty face.  She was funny.   

Audiences called her an overnight success.  It only took her thirteen years and thirty-eight prior films (not including the Sennett shorts) to get there.

She’d found her superpower and begun her climb to the top.  

Twentieth Century invented the screwball comedy, and Carole Lombard became the genre’s undisputed queen.  She would make dozens, My Man Godfrey the greatest among them.  The term “screwball” came from a Godfrey review in Variety magazine article that said, “Lombard has played screwball dames before, but none so screwy as this one.”

(For the record, Lily Garland is every bit as screwy as Irene Bullock.)

By the time she reached her zenith, Carole Lombard was American’s finest comedienne, half of Hollywood’s biggest power couple, and the highest paid and most beloved woman in Hollywood.  

She was Melissa McCarthy, Beyonce, and Sandra Bullock all in one package.

Not one of the hundreds.

One in a million.

The Good Life

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#20 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

James Stewart, Jean Arthur, and Director Frank Capra on the set of You Can’t Take It With You

Frank Capra was on a roll.  Starting in 1934 with It Happened One Night, he won the Best Director Oscar in three out of the next five years.  In 1938, he won his third and final Oscar with the ensemble comedy You Can’t Take It With You.  He also began to cement his legacy as a director who perfected a tone in his films that celebrated the best parts of the American dream and gave audiences wholesome and upbeat films to take their minds off their Depression troubles.

Capra was still working under Harry Cohn at Columbia, turning out critical and commercial successes without the benefit of the huge budgets and roster of stars his competition enjoyed over at Paramount and MGM.  In You Can’t Take It With You, Capra managed this by pulling sparkling performances by both young and up-and-coming actors and old favorites.

You Can’t Take It With You started out as a 1936 play by George Kaufmann and Moss Hart.  Capra and writer Robert Riskin expanded the play for the screen.

The film’s initial setup is simple enough—ruthless, greedy banker Anthony Kirby is planning to buy up all the real estate around a competitor’s factory to prevent expansion and put his competition out of business.  It’s an underhanded plan, but it is spoiled by the one eccentric old man who refuses to sell his family home.

Lionel Barrymore plays Grandpa Vanderhof, the lone holdout and benevolent patriarch of the eccentric Vanderhof family, a group of misfits that eschew convention in favor of spending their days—and thus their lives—doing exactly as they choose.  This includes daughter Penny Sycamore writing bad plays all day just because someone once left a typewriter at their house, her husband setting off fireworks in the basement, and granddaughter Essie dancing ballet in the living room, despite her teacher’s continued assertions that, “Confidentially, she stinks!”

Kirby’s dilemma is simple, and unsolvable:  He is a man who throws money at every problem, and the Vanderhofs can’t be bought.

Grandpa Vanderhof refuses to sell for the simple reason that he doesn’t want to leave the home filled with happy memories, and his refusal to sell protects the rest of the neighborhood from being evicted from their homes.

This clash of ideas about what makes a good life—Kirby has more money than he could ever spend but lacks fulfilling relationships with his wife and son, and treats his employees like dirt, while Grandpa Vanderhof lacks wealth and status but has the love and respect of family and friends—is the heart of the film.

Lionel Barrymore as patriarch Grandpa Vanderhof

Capra thickens the plot, of course.  The life philosophies of two old men might be interesting, but a Hollywood film needs youth, beauty, and romance.

In his first starring role James Stewart plays Anthony’s son Tony, the reluctant vice president and heir apparent in his father’s company.  Jean Arthur, also in an early starring role, plays Grandpa Vanderhof’s loving and slightly less crazy granddaughter Alice, who is a stenographer at the Kirby’s bank.

Unbeknownst to both old men, Tony and Alice are in love. 

And we’re off.

There is an inevitable clash of cultures when the Kirbys and Vanderhofs meet, a plot twist where Grandpa Vanderhof nearly loses the house but is saved by the senior Kirby’s dawning realization that Grandpa Vanderhof is the richer man, surrounded by people who love and respect him.  And of course, Tony temporarily loses Alice.

Don’t worry, he gets her back again.

It’s amazing to me that this film was nominated for seven Oscars and won Best Picture and Best Director.  Not because I think it’s undeserving—it certainly is (and a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Barrymore wouldn’t have been out of line)—but a picture like this wouldn’t even have been considered for a nomination today.  It’s a comedy with a message so pure and positive it borders on corny.

Its complete lack of cynicism would invalidate its legitimacy in the minds of today’s Oscar voters.  As a critique, it says more about the trend of the Oscars than it does about Capra’s film.

You Can’t Take It With You also serves as a changing of the guard in terms of Hollywood’s leading men.  Though he would act for fifteen more years, at sixty Lionel Barrymore’s best years and films are behind him.  He’s on crutches throughout the film, and this is explained by an accident, but the truth is in real life he was plagued by painful arthritis that would increasingly trouble him the rest of his life.

Barrymore is the heart of the film, and he gets all the best lines.  Yet he’s clearly passing the torch—however reluctantly—to James Stewart.  

Only three years into his nearly sixty year career, James Stewart is already oozing charisma and speaking in his inimitable stutter-step accent.  His wide-eyed Tony is head over heels in love with Alice and her crazy family.  Alice knows it is a bad idea to fall in love with someone whose family will never accept her, but really, what woman could resist Jimmy Stewart when he turns up the charm?

You Can’t Take It With You isn’t a perfect film.  It’s a little too long, and sometimes the antics of the Vanderhof family become irritating.

But honestly, let’s not quibble.  This is a movie made to distract you from your troubles.  You munch on popcorn while watching young people fall in love and old people coming around to the idea that love triumphs over money, and that the American Dream is alive and well.

What could be better than that?

The Walls of Jericho

/ Melanie Novak / Leave a comment

#19 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

In his unparalleled thirty-year career, Clark Gable starred in 66 films.

Though nominated three times, he won only one Best Actor Oscar.

Can you guess the film?

If you’re like most people, you are certain he won the Oscar for his legendary performance as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind.

You’re wrong.

The King of Hollywood won his lone Oscar for a little film called It Happened One Night.

One of the first screwballs ever made, this little gem shows that the cream does indeed rise to the top.

Columbia started out as a B-movie studio on what was then un-affectionately called poverty row.  Unlike the Big Five, Columbia didn’t own any theaters, and they couldn’t afford to keep big stars on the payroll.  

Upstart director Frank Capra (who would eventually go on to make It’s A Wonderful Life) convinced the notoriously cheap,crude, and hard-nosed studio head Harry Cohn to get some A-list stars on loan to make a funny little escapist road trip that Capra was sure would cheer up Depression audiences.

It’s a simple setup—Claudette Colbert plays Ellie Andrews, a spoiled rich heiress who runs off (again) when her father wants to annul her marriage to a gold digger.  To elude her father’s detectives, she hops on a bus and finds herself sitting next to Gable’s Peter Warne, a newspaper reporter who recognizes her and smells a great story.

He agrees to help her find her husband in exchange for an exclusive.  With no money and no street smarts, Ellie has no choice but to reluctantly agree. 

At one point, they are forced to spend the night in a one-room cabin, and Peter puts a blanket over a clothesline and pronounces it the Wall of Jericho to protect his—not her—modestly.  When Ellie at first refuses to cooperate, Peter begins slowly undressing until she is forced to retreat to her side of the wall.  He’s teasing her, but there’s no malice.  We know that while Peter would like to get to know Ellie in a more biblical manner, he’s a gentleman and no threat to her reputation.

From his side of the wall, Peter watches Ellie’s shadow as she undresses, and though the scene exists to circumvent production code rules, it’s a sexier moment than if they’d torn each other’s clothes off.

Capra and the code leave something to the imagination, to great effect.

Peter and Ellie learn to appreciate one another—Peter teaches Ellie how to properly dunk a donut, and she shows him a thing or two about successfully hitching a ride.

And when her father’s detectives show up, Peter and Ellie work together seamlessly as a team to throw them off the trail.  When they laugh at their success, both Ellie and the audience have forgotten all about her soon-to-be annulled marriage.

As their madcap adventure progresses, their initial disdain slowly melts into love.

We’ve seen this plot a hundred—no, a thousand times before.

But the audiences of 1934 had never seen anything like it, and romantic comedies writers have been ripping off It Happened One Night ever since.

Clark Gable didn’t want to make the film.  He was used to the posh comforts of MGM, and he was angry at Louis B. Mayer for loaning him out to Columbia.  His co-star Claudette Colbert also wasn’t much interested in the film.  She’d been planning a vacation and was forced to cut it short when Columbia met her asking price.

And to be honest, Harry Cohn himself didn’t expect much from the film.  It had no big advertising campaign, no thought of Academy Award nominations.

No one involved, it seemed, understood what a special movie they were making.

No one but the audience.

They loved it.  Its success came from word of mouth, and the good word spread like wildfire.  People saw it, then brought their friends and saw it again.  Its initial run went on and on, far longer than anyone could’ve predicted.

And when Oscar time rolled around, this little film that no one thought was anything special became the first film to win all five major awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay.)  In all of Oscar’s history, only two other films have completed that particular quinfecta.  The other two are from the modern era:  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

It charmed audiences and critics, and if you give it a chance, it’ll charm you too.

Gable is in the type of role he was born to play—a charming rascal with a well-concealed heart of gold.  Colbert is perfect as the spoiled heiress with a lot more going on beneath the hood.  Their chemistry crackles as they practically burn up the screen with their bickering.

When I covered Possessed, I said it would be the first on a list of six essential films to understand why people still love old Hollywood films.

The second film on that list is It Happened One Night.

It’s the most charming screwball, a movie full of heart and laughs, and a great scene with Colbert and Gable in matching pajamas.

You can stream it for three bucks on Amazon.

Rent it tonight, and see for yourself what happens when the Walls of Jericho come tumbling down.

And learn how to properly dunk your donuts.

Silver Linings

/ Melanie Novak / 1 Comment

#18 Golden Age of Hollywood Series

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby

Part III: Screwin’ Around

Thus far, I’ve painted the Hollywood censors as the villains of our piece.  I’m justified, I think, in mocking their obsession with showing women’s hemlines, violence, and sex.

When the censors finally got their way in 1934, we didn’t just lose Jane’s loincloth, or steamy kisses, or gangsters riddling each other’s cars with bullets.

We lost—at least for a time—a depth in storytelling.  In making all movies suitable for everyone, producers had to put more mature themes on the shelf.  Gone were the movies questioning the nobility of war (Hell’s Angels), the double standard between men and women (The Divorcée, Anna Christie), or the limited ways in which a poor uneducated woman has to make her way in the world (Baby Face).

Movies got sillier, filled with treacle and drained of substance.

In the end, the great tragedy of the production code is that it forced movies to show the world the way it ought to be, rather than the way it is.

And yet.

The challenge of telling good stories within the constraints of the code unleashed a whirlwind of creative energy in the writers, directors, and producers of Hollywood.

The best, most enduring product of that creativity is the screwball comedy.

The screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s continue to be some of the most beloved, and most rewatched classic movies.  Most people who find their way into classic movies are hooked by a screwball.  Almost every legendary actor, actress, and director has made a screwball.

And they would’ve never happened without censorship.

The screwball comedy is the biggest, brightest silver lining of the production code.  

See, a screwball comedy is a romantic comedy that tells a love story without breaking the rules of the code—no steamy kisses, no couples shown in the same bed, no frank foreplay.

The screwballs are sex comedies without the sex.

In lieu of sex, they manipulate each other, pull each other into harebrained schemes, and almost always someone falls down or gets wet.

But most of all, they bicker.

And drive one another insane.

And thus, prove their love.

It’s the perfect mix of physical comedy and romance.

They range from wry to out-and-out and slapstick.

And today, we’re going to cover two of the most outrageous examples, with heroines who are practically deranged and the men who have the misfortune to fall in love with them.

Bringing Up Baby is the story of David Huxley (Cary Grant), a scientist trying to secure a million dollar grant for his museum, and the chance encounter with Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) that will change his life.  The flighty Susan soon charms and exasperates David into a series of misadventures revolving around her quest to deliver a pet leopard to her aunt.

David is to be married to someone else the day that Susan whisks him away, and fortunately he discovers he loves Susan before it’s too late.

Screwballs are best when the leads are playing off one another, a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of words ping-ponging between the two.

Bringing Up Baby is a beloved screwball comedy today, but it was a flop back in it’s day.  It was one of the movies that would label Katharine Hepburn as “box office poison” and send her temporarily back east before her triumphant comeback.

Katharine Hepburn had such a persona of a strong woman both on and offscreen that audiences just couldn’t quite buy her as a ditz.  And while her Susan successfully irritated David, she also irritated the audience.

Bringing Up Baby was the first classic film I ever watched, and I remember loving it.  I was probably nine or ten at the time, and I’d never seen anything like it.  I was mesmerized by the black and white film, by Hepburn’s crazy accent, by Cary Grant’s charm.  I fell in love with old movies right then.

But I have to admit that rewatching it, I can understand why audiences turned away from it.  Katharine Hepburn will never be flighty, and she is irritating.  The shenanigans go on for a bit too long and at times the film is just too crazy.  There are so many truly outstanding screwballs that I regret to say that I can’t really recommend you start with this one.

My Man Godfrey is a much better deranged dame screwball (the dames aren’t always deranged, as we’ll see in future posts).  Carole Lombard plays Irene Bullock, a spoiled rich girl who employs William Powell’s Godfrey when she discovers he is a down-on-his-luck man living in the town dump during the Depression.

Godfrey watches the hysterics of the Bullock family with a detached amusement.  He wants to keep his job and his face straight.

Lombard and Powell are marvelous in the film.  Lombard was born to play screwball dames, the crazier, the better, and Irene Bullock was the craziest she ever played.  Powell is a screwball comedy fixture as the straight man, and he is wonderful as Godfrey.

Audiences and critics alike loved the film.  It was nominated for six Oscars, including director and screenplay.  It was the first movie to ever receive nominations in all four acting categories.  Sadly, neither Powell nor Lombard would ever win an Oscar.

We’re going to spend the next few posts exploring more films from this fascinating subgenre.

There can hardly be a better way to spend our time than screwing around with Hollywood’s greatest stars.

Tale As Old As Time Reversed

/ Melanie Novak / Leave a comment
My Dad’s board is on the left, the professional on the right.

It’s a tale as old as time:  to save money and prevent potential covid germs from entering your home, homeowner attempts a desperately needed home repair herself.  The attempt goes poorly and ends with homeowner calling a professional to clean up the mess.

This is not that story.

This is the tale as old as time reversed.

Confused? 

As long term readers of this blog know, for a horrifying six hours in late June I had zero working toilets.  I quickly got one working, but the second is still a work in progress.

To recap:  the offending toilet leaked and water rotted out the subfloor.  The subfloor needed replacing, then new flooring laid, and only then can the plumber replace the flange and toilet.

Got it?

Today is the story of replacing the subfloor.

My Dad thought we could do the job ourselves.  He’s the best handyman I know, but he’d never done a subfloor and I figured it would cost a lot of time and frustration.  To be honest, I was lazy and just wanted to throw money at the problem to have it fixed quickly and without inconvenience.

Oh, the best laid plans.

It took a lot of phone calls to find someone willing to do the job.  It’s busy season for construction and no one wanted to waste a few hours on a tiny six- by-three-foot half bath when they have a mile long list of major renovation projects. 

I finally found someone through a handyman company and made the appointment.  The guy was here for six hours and I will bullet point the key factors to speed our story along:

  1. I asked for the entire subfloor to be replaced.  He ultimately installed a 25×25 inch square board around the toilet area, only replacing the rotted piece.
  2. He went to Lowe’s—twice—to buy wood and still ended up installing a piece that was a quarter inch thinner than the rest of the floor, resulting in:
  3. The replacement square not being flush with the rest of the floor.
  4. He removed my sink—ultimately unnecessary because he didn’t replace the floor beneath it—and informed me that he couldn’t get it to stop leaking when it was reattached.

The non-flush floor is a problem because you cannot install flooring or tile overtop it.  And I don’t know about you, but “Rural Outhouse” style flooring does not match my wallpaper.

As for the sink, at least the plumber is coming back anyway. 

You know what I did next.  I called dear old Dad.

In the end, we ripped out everything and started over. 

With a board of the correct width, properly measured cuts for the toilet flange, and a single shim, we had the floor flush and even.  It took us two hours less.

The job finally looked professional.

In the end, I paid the professional for cutting a hole in the floor, possibly breaking my sink, and wood that is now scraped and in my garage.

Oh, and the screwdriver he left behind beneath the floor, like a doctor who stitches up a body with the surgical scissors still inside.

I’m keeping it.  Even with the company’s partial refund after my complaints, it’s the most expensive screwdriver I—or anyone else—will ever own.

My Dad’s impeccable work cost four hours and a half gallon of ice cream to celebrate.

I guess you don’t always get what you pay for, after all.

A coda:  I was wary of having a stranger in my home with the covid spread, so I turned off the air and had all the windows open and fans going to keep the air moving while he was here.  It was a hot day and he was sweating profusely.

At the time, I felt bad.

I don’t anymore.