Christopher Strong (1933)

Directed by Dorothy Arzner
Starring Katharine Hepburn, Colin Cive and Billie Burke
Produced by RKO Radio Pictures

Let me get this out of the way: Christopher Strong takes the oddest approach to gender politics one could imagine.

On the one hand, we have Lady Cynthia (Katherine Hepburn), who may be the world’s most interesting woman.  She does what she wants.  She dresses how she wants.  She flies all over the world and, if she can’t set an altitude record right this moment, she will settle for a distance record.

However, she falls for Christopher Strong (Colin Clive), a member of Parliament who is interesting because…he gives good speeches? I don’t know. They don’t really tell us much about him other than he is a buzz kill in every way.

Strong’s daughter is seeing a married man and he and his wife just cannot have that.  Until of course, he falls for Cynthia and starts understanding why adultery might be an attractive option.

There’s an interesting tension in Christopher and Cynthia’s romance, but I’m not sure I ever bought that after rejecting every other man in the world, this is the guy to catch the independent aviator’s attention.  He’s just so milquetoast as to almost not exist.

**SPOILER**

It’s hard to talk about the movie without getting into its ending.  Christopher and Cynthia have separated, but he regrets it.  She meanwhile decides to try for that altitude record she’d been putting off since she met him.  As she climbs toward the ceiling, she rips off her oxygen mask.  It’s unclear whether she is attempting suicide in spectacular fashion or simply feeling claustrophobia because of her mental state and removes it in a moment of passion.  After a few moments reflection, she struggles to replace the mask, but fails.  Her plane plummets to the earth, killing her instantly.  We follow this with the odd coda that Christopher and his wife are headed to America via a newspaper headline.

The ending is certainly tense, but it also feels like it undermines Cynthia’s character.  She’s been strong and independent.  Killing herself seems an overreaction based on what we know of her.  The movie presents the record attempt as dangerous, but they also present her as an incredibly competentent pilot.  The cockpit is one place she is in total control.  None of the end feels authentic. 

Couple this with everything seemingly turning out fine for Christopher and we learn what? That adultery works out?  That someone else’s death might solve your problems?  It’s just an odd place to leave a film, particularly one that is at least as much about Christopher as it is Cynthia.

It’s an interesting early effort from Hepburn and Clive turns in a great performance playing against type. Still, the overall point of the movie seems confused. 

Final Grade:

C+

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Baby Face (1933)

Directed by Alfred E. Green

Starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent and Donald Cook

Produced by Warner Bros.

For many of us, our job (or lack of one) comes to define us.  We are bankers or lawyers or writers or contractors.  Other things certainly define us as well, but one of the first questions inevitably asked and answered in any new encounter is “So what do you do?”

If you ask Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck), the lead character of Baby Face, that question, she may say she works at a speakeasy or at a bank.  But that’s not her real job.  The professional occupation she has chosen is dream girl and concubine. 

Throughout Baby Face, Lily uses her feminine wiles to seduce men only to discard them when the next social and class climbing opportunity presents itself.  After watching her father (who basically pimped his daughter to his customers) die in a speakeasy fire without a shred of regret, Lily’s climb through the offices of a bank becomes literal.  With each sexual conquest, the camera pans up yet another floor in the bank building to show us Lily’s ascent right up to the bank president’s office.

Once there, she has achieved everything she’s dreamed of.  She has money and cars and jewels.  The only problem is one of the people she left behind was the bank president’s almost son-in-law (he broke off the engagement after falling under Lily’s spell).  He tries to move on, but can’t which leads to murder/suicide that leaves Lily covered in scandal. 

To this point, Baby Face is all campy fun with Stanwyck as a very believable seductress.  However, Lily meets her match in the new bank president, Courtland Trenholm (George Brent).  When she tries to blackmail the bank’s board by selling her diary to the highest bidder, she casts herself as a victim who has no choice but to use the scandal to pay her bills.  Trenholm sees right through and offers that, if she just wants to move on with her life, he can get her a nice position with their branch in Paris.  Lily needs to stay in her role as victim and reluctantly agrees.

At this point, Stanwyck stops being a fun villainess and the movie tries to cast her in the role of heroine as it rounds its final turns.  Trenholm falls for her during a visit to Paris, but instead of redeeming her, it makes him appear dumb and naïve. 

Baby Face is ultimately two-thirds a great movie with a phenomenal lead performance. Lily constantly teeters on the edge of losing the audience but always manages to make us want more.  Like her many suitors in the film, we just can’t stop falling for Lily and that’s in large part thanks to Stanwyck.

Final Grade:

B

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The Fault in My Stars: Why I Moved to Letter Grades

Long time readers will notice I have moved from a five star grading system for movies to a letter grading system.  There is a reason.  And frankly I probably have given this more thought than it deserves.

The fundamental question is what grade makes something a “good” movie in my opinion.  Five stars? Awesome.  Four stars? Really good.

The trouble comes when you move lower than that.  How good is three stars?  If 2-1/2 is average, than it’s above average, right? 

But if I’m giving a letter grade in school to someone who scored a three out of five, that’s a 60 and they failed.  Hell, if I give someone four out of five in that scenario, it’s an 80 which is like a B-.

Beyond that, the 2-1/2 stars started becoming such a non-committal grade that I stopped giving it entirely.  In a world of binary grades (Ebert’s thumbs or a Rotten versus Fresh rating), it felt to me like the worst kind of fence sitting.

However, if I give a movie an A or C or F, you have in your mind what I thought of that movie in much clearer terms.  You know what a B student looks like and you know what a D student looks like.  It’s cleaner to me as an explanation.

So that’s why I’ve changed.  I’m genuinely curious what other bloggers think about their scoring systems.  Please share your thoughts below.

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A Study in Scarlet (1933)

Directed by Edwin L. Marin

Starring Reginald Owen, Anna May Wong and June Clyde

Produced by KBS Productions Inc.

People love their police procedurals.  The traditional whodunit is amongst the sturdiest movie foundations you can build a movie on.  It’s got good guys. It’s got bad guys. It has tension as you are never 100 percent sure who the good guys or bad guys are.

Tales involving Sherlock Holmes (when they are good) traditionally ratchet these movies up a notch.  Holmes is a superhero, except instead of flying (Superman) or looking impressive in wifebeaters (Wolverine), Sherlock notices the clues that no one else does.  And he has Watson as his overmatched partner who serves as the audience stand-in so Holmes can explain the crime and the culprit in ways that make you want to go back and see what you missed.

A Study in Scarlet is a procedural.  And it features a guy named Sherlock Holmes.  And it’s pretty terrible.

The set up here is widow comes to the detective explaining that her husband was murdered and he was part of a secret society whose members pooled their resources.  The problem for Mrs. Murphy is that when a member dies, the spoils get divvied up by the other society members so she gets nothing.

Now, we embark on the whodunit.  Except we don’t.  Because Holmes learns that Merrydew is a member of the underground group.  And Holmes has been trying to catch him for a while so now we can move on because it must be him.

The film never really stops to lay out clues and show us Holmes’ deductive process.  Indeed, Watson is barely around for Holmes to explain much to anyway.  A Study in Scarlet’s depiction of Holmes treats him more like Batman solving one of Joker’s riddles from the 60s TV show: “These numbers are big so they must be page numbers from a large book everyone has… just because.

Reginald Owen’s depiction of Holmes is unmemorable.  He doesn’t look much like the character as he is traditionally portrayed which would be fine if he did anything to make the role his own and distinguish himself.  He does not and so we get a guy playing a detective whose name happens to be Sherlock Holmes instead of anything close to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation.

By the time we get to the end of A Study in Scarlet, things just get silly in terms of the leaps in logic Holmes must make.  But more importantly, I don’t care about the outcome.  The stakes are trifling and the explanation is more like a Law & Order twist than anything the audience could follow from the story.  As a detective story, this is bad.  As a Sherlock Holmes mystery? It’s terrible.

Final Grade:

D

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The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)

Directed by Alexander Korda

Starring Charles Laughton, Robert Donat and Franklin Dyall

Produced by London Film Productions

History and culture have a way of condensing figures over time to an easy shorthand.  I say “Benedict Arnold, “ you think “traitor.” “George Washington” brings on thoughts of cherry trees and river crossings.  And if I say “Michael Bay” three times in a darkened bathroom, a helicopter somewhere explodes.

The thing about this condensation of historical fact and myth into bullet points is we end up minimizing the humanity of these figures.  We forget that they had to eat and sleep, love and hate, and deal with all manner of human emotion even as they dealt with world-shaping events.

Which brings us to the titular king as played by Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII.

You hear Henry VIII and you think about his wives.  The monarch as womanizer.  He married a lot and this fact more than any is what popular culture understands and remembers about him.

Laughton and director Alexander Korda start with that myth and systematically blow it up.

We first see Henry VII at his most familiar.  His second wife Anne Boleyn is about to be executed so he can marry Jane Seymour.  It is the most perverse of set ups: killing your wife to marry another because you need the male heir, all made perfectly lawful by the fact that you happen to be the law.  This is the king we all think we know, a ruler who leads with his loins.  And Korda gives us a remarkable juxtaposition, intercutting the wedding and the execution to show just how alike the two events may be.

But then Jane dies in childbirth.  Henry grieves, but must move on for the sake of England.  He agrees to marry Anne of Cleves in order to help cement an alliance with a German duke.  Henry is disappointed in her appearance and Anne herself is not thrilled about the match.

They marry, but never consummate the relationship.  On their wedding night, Anne plays Henry in a card game.  The stakes?  A divorce.  And Henry’s marriage for political advantage comes to a quick end.

That leaves the king free to marry Katherine, an ambitious maiden who had caught the king’s attention by speaking against his treatment of Anne Boleyn.  He becomes intrigued with her and, perhaps for the first time, starts falling in love.

For her part, Katherine had fallen for Thomas Culpeper, an advisor to the king.  After she marries Henry, she continues seeing him.  And in betraying the king, she dooms not just herself and Thomas, but Henry as well. 

See,  Henry is 100 percent in love with his latest wife.  And when he learns that she is seeing another man, he’s impotent.  The human side of him loves her and always will, but he is a king and cannot afford to be weak.  So he does what he must.  And executing the woman he loves shows him the truth of being a king: that for all his power, he is a slave to his title.

His final wife is merely what he needs to live out the remainder of his life: a nurse and a mother, but not a lover.  Not someone who stirs the king’s passions.  She’s there to roust you from your bed, not to climb into it.

Laughton inhabits the title role with all of Henry’s reputed larger than life excesses, but grounds him with insecurities.  All his bravado serves only to spackle over all his mundane humanity.  By the end of the movie you are not shocked he married six times; you understand why he did, and even the burden his nuptials sometimes required.

The Private Life of Henry VIII may lack historical accuracy, but through Laughton’s performance, it gets at more fundamental truths.  Even the most powerful man in the world can be brought low by love lost.

Final Grade:

B+

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1933: Did You Miss Me?

Well, we have reached 1933. And if it seemed like that took a while it's because...it did!

1933 saw the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his famous "nothing to fear but fear itself" speech. Prohibition is repealed. Across the globe, Adolf Hitler becomes dictator of Germany.  And Alcatraz becomes the property of the U.S. Department of Justice, paving the way for an inescapable prison that only Clint Eastwood or Sean Connery could break out of.

In film, the tragic career arc of Fatty Arbuckle comes to a close with his death.  New Jersey becomes the home of the first drive-in theater.  Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers make their film debut.  We also get the creation of Twentieth Century Pictures and the first screen appearance of Popeye.

As to what movies we are watching, the biggie (literally) is one of my all time favorites: King Kong. I've seen it countless times, but any excuse to rewatch is good enough for me.  Beyond that, more Marx Brothers (groan), Footlight Parade, and Disney's Three Little Pigs are musts.

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