Let Yourself Go ... To Old Hollywood

2019 Year-in-review

Time for another year-in-review post. It appears my movie watching in 2019 broke the record I had set in 2018. I watched 261 films, 233 of which were new to me. This compares to 2018's number of 226 films total and 202 new to me.

The decadal breakdown of the new-to-me viewings:

• 1910s: 1
• 1920s: 8
• 1930s: 88
• 1940s: 80
• 1950s: 47
• 1960s: 6
• 1970s: 1
• 1980s-present: 2

The 1930s still won, but were substantially less dominant than in 2018, with the 1940s and expesially the 1950s making gains relative to last year.

And once again, my rate of watching modern films has fallen to virtually nothing. The only film from the 2010s I watched this past year was a great documentary on the classic Hollywood actress Marsha Hunt: "Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity". The only other post-1980 film was the 1994 documentary "George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin". So even when I watch relatively modern movies, they are still about the 1930s-to-1950s.

Favorite new-to-me movies in August

Let's try something fairly straightforward to get this blog back on track. What were my favorite movies that I watched in August that were new to me?

Of the 21 new watches, 6 made the finals, with at least 4 stars in my Letterboxd rating. In the order I watched them:

• Craig's Wife (1936)
• It Should Happen To You (1954)
• In the Heat of the Night (1967)
• Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
• Gold Rush Maisie (1940)
• Woman in Hiding (1949)

The bottom of these is It Should Happen to You, which was fabulous for 80% of the film. Alas, it suffers from a very weak denouement, with Judy Holliday's character suddenly throwing away her ambition and uniqueness to fall into a routine romantic ending.

Moving up, next is Craig's Wife, starring Rosalind Russell and directed by Dorothy Arzner. This is an excellent film, but does have some relatively small flaws, including a slow opening and a heavy-handed message.

Sherlock, Jr and In the Heat of the Night are next. Both are great watches, albeit extremely different from each other. Neither film entirely suits my tastes, which may explain why I do not rate them even higher.

Woman in Hiding is my second favorite new watch of last month. It is a suspenseful, engaging thriller from the opening. And it has the wonderful Ida Lupino in the lead role, which is another huge plus for me.

Finally, my absolute favorite new watch in August was the third film in the Maisie series Gold Rush Maisie. I had watched the first two Maisie movies back-to-back well over a year ago. The original, Maisie, was fabulous. The second, Congo Maisie, was entertaining, but didn't inspire me to move on to the others. That was a mistake, as the third film is the best yet and hooked me on Ann Sothern's "Maisie" character and how good-hearted and empathetic she is---a super-hero without super-powers. It was heart-breaking to see her drive off alone at the end of the movie, leaving her new friends, setting off on her next adventure.

2018 year-in-review: a record!

2018 was a record year for movie watching for me: I watched 226 films over the course of the calendar year, starting with The Man Who Came To Dinner (1942) and finishing with The Man I Love (1947). The similarity of those titles is purely coincidence, I'm sure.

Of those 226 viewings , 202 were new-to-me. The corresponding numbers for 2017 are 145 total film viewings, 125 new-to-me.

I've only been tracking my movie watching since 2015, so my data does not go back too far. Yet I'm confident those 202 new-to-me films for 2018 are a record for a single year in my life. The largest factor leading to this high number of viewings is our subscription to TCM (via the Sling streaming service). I started that service in August 2017 to be able to see a rare Ginger Rogers film, "Twenty Million Sweethearts", with the idea that it would be temporary. But I discovered that there are so many good films available on TCM that I've never stopped the subscription.

Other streaming services available in 2018 also made viewing classic Hollywood films very convenient: Warner Archive Instant and FilmStruck. Sadly, as 2019 begins both of those services are defunct. WAI merged into FilmStruck early in 2018. And FilmStruck shut down late in the year, due to a notorious decision by Warner Media after the merger with AT&T.

Breaking the 202 new-to-me films from 2018 down by decade clearly shows my preference for the golden era of Hollywood:

• 1910s: 2
• 1920s: 4
• 1930s: 104
• 1940s: 62
• 1950s: 23
• 1960s: 5
• 1970s: 1
• 1980s-present: 1

Breaking all 226 viewings down by how I had access to the films shows the dominance of TCM:

• TCM (via Sling): 120
• FilmStruck (defunct after Nov 2018): 44
• Purchased DVDs and Blu-rays: 39
• Warner Archive Instant (defunct after Apr 2018): 10
• iTunes: 7
• Netflix DVD: 2
• Amazon Prime: 2
• YouTube: 2

A subsequent post will contain my favorite and least favorite movie discoveries from 2018.

Ida Lupino posts in The Vintage Classics

In October, Ida Lupino was voted as "Star of the Month" in Facebook group, "The Vintage Classics". As I had been the one to add her to the poll and the first to vote for her, I felt a certain degree of ownership, and pride, in that result. So over the course of that month, I put together a couple dozen very short posts related to Lupino's acting and directing career in Hollywood. I'd like to re-post those here so I have that material preserved on my own blog. So posts here in the category "Ida Lupino Vintage Classics series" will contain what originally was posted there.

In Our Time (1944): Undeservedly obscure

In Our Time (1944) is a film not well known these days. Even amongst Ida Lupino films, it seems obscure, despite being a major production by Warner Bros. at the height of her acting career and directed by a well-regarded director, Vincent Sherman.

Fortunately In Our Time is now available on DVD thanks to Warner Archive--released in mid-2016. Before that, as I learned from re-listening to the Warner Archive podcast episode from its DVD release, it had never been available on home video. This film's availability is welcome news because In Our Time does not deserve to be obscure.

Ida Lupino plays a young Englishwoman employed by a wealthy antique dealer, portrayed by Mary Boland. They are traveling to Warsaw in early 1939 in pursuit of Polish antiques. While there she meets a Polish aristocrat, played by Paul Henreid. The story of their courtship, her travails in meeting his tradition-bound family, and her uncertainty about her decision to marry him, is compelling and very charmingly performed.

Lately, I cannot get enough of Ida Lupino's acting. Her character here is very different from the intense, troubled characters for which she is best known. Rather, here she plays a reserved, thoughtful, and psychologically well-grounded woman. This is not something I even realized until afterwards, as she fit into the role so naturally.

The explicit mention of the early 1939 date lends an ominous underpinning to the romance between Lupino and Henreid, as the 1944 audience knew what lay ahead for Poland in just a few months. These days fewer may understand the timing: Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, triggering World War II.

In Our Time was filmed in mid-1943 and released in early 1944, during the height of World War II. This story about a few people caught up at the very beginning of the war was thus only a few years old, with an outcome still uncertain. Knowing this lends extra poignancy to the final scenes, which may otherwise come across as heavy-handed propaganda.

My impression after watching In Our Time for the first time over the last couple nights is that it is an excellent character-driven romance for the first two-thirds; then in the last third, the characters are swamped by the larger forces at work. This may well have been how it felt to be alive during this period, when personal concerns could be rendered moot due to the necessity felt by many to fight in the service of a larger cause. I grew to care about Lupino and Henreid's characters, and would have liked to have seen how their story could have played out without Nazi interference. Alas, the war interfered in countless people's lives in horrific ways and cannot be wished away.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939): Basil Rathbone on the moor

So in my current project to watch as many of Ida Lupino's films, as actress and as director, as I can get my hands on, I realized that I would need to watch The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)---the first of the Sherlock Holmes series starring Basil Rathbone as the legendary detective.

Ida Lupino is not in this film as actress, and certainly not as director, so why did this film become a priority? Because Ida is in the second film of this series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, also from 1939, and I am strangely insistent on watching serials in the proper order if I can. That may be a bit over-the-top since most of these old serials don't have an ongoing story line between films, but I still prefer it that way.

Anyway, this film has Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson, so it can't be bad, can it? Indeed, it was quite enjoyable.

Particularly stunning was the dark, misty, expansive set of the foreboding moor terrain, where much of the action is set. The lack of any background music was also particularly noticeable, and I think, made the scenes of the moor all the more effective.

Ida Lupino's lost film

Recently, I was putting together a detailed inventory of Ida Lupino's filmography, so I can plot out how to obtain her films for viewing. In so doing, I was dismayed to discover that one of her early films is considered to be lost.

The unobtainable film is called "High Finance". It was made in 1933 while Ida was still in England--one of seven such films. She was second billed after the "immortal" Gibb McLaughlin. (Ok, maybe he really is immortal, but I've never heard of him before.)

The only other performers for whom I've made a project of viewing their entire filmography are Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Neither of those have any "lost" films, fortunately, so discovering Ida had one was a reminder that there are indeed a substantial number of films from pre-1940, even talking pictures, that have not survived to the present.

I haven't been able to find any stills or posters from "High Finance", so I have illustrated this post with a still from another 1933 Ida film made in England, "Ghost Camera".

Ida Lupino's NYFCC award and lack of Oscar nomination

The great actress and director Ida Lupino never won an Academy Award for her work. The Academy also never gave her an honorary career award for her work later. And most jarring of all, she was never even nominated for an Oscar.

But she did get at least one prestigious acting award. The New York Film Critics Circle awarded her Best Actress of 1943 for her work in the Warner Bros. drama "The Hard Way". This organization describes their awards this way:

The Circle’s awards are often viewed as harbingers of the Oscar nominations, which are announced each February. The Circle’s awards are also viewed, perhaps more accurately, as a principled alternative to the Oscars, honoring aesthetic merit in a forum that is immune to commercial and political pressures.

The same year that Ida won the NYFCC best actress award, Paul Lukas won their best actor award for "Watch on the Rhine". This is a movie I haven't yet seen, and I'm not familiar with Lukas' career. So I looked up the Academy Awards that year anticipating that he had likely been overlooked as well. To my surprise, he not only had been nominated for an Oscar, but had won it.

This got me wondering--how unusual was it to win a top acting award from the New York Film Critics Circle, but to be completely neglected by the Oscar nomination process.

To find the answer, I studied the years 1935 through 1969. 1935 was the first year the NYFCC gave awards, and 1969, somewhat arbitrarily, is associated with the end of the classic Hollywood era. In one of those years, 1962, a newspaper strike prevented any awards from being given. That leaves 34 years of Best Actress and Best Actor awards from the NYFCC to compare to Oscar nominations.

It turns out that it is quite rare, though not unprecedented, for the winner of the NYFCC acting awards to be passed over for an Oscar nomination. Of the 68 NYFCC acting winners over that time period, only six did not receive any Oscar nomination for acting in the same year. Four of those six were actresses, and two were actors.

• 1935 : Greta Garbo, Anna Karenina
• 1943 : Ida Lupino, The Hard Way
• 1944 : Tallulah Bankhead, Lifeboat
• 1947 : Deborah Kerr, Black Narcissus; I See A Dark Stranger
• 1950 : Gregory Peck, Twelve O'Clock High
• 1952 : Ralph Richardson, The Sound Barrier

Ida is obviously in very good company here. I've not actually seen any of these films other than "The Hard Way", but I am now interested in seeking them out. I also plan to dive into each of these six NYFCC award winner to find out more about them and the roles that somehow beat them out for Oscar nominations.

Slightly Dangerous (1943)

Last weekend, we were looking for some light entertainment for a rainy Sunday afternoon. We selected a 1943 Lana Turner comedy on FilmStruck, Slightly Dangerous, despite knowing absolutely nothing else about it.

This turned out to be a surprisingly excellent choice. I should not be so surprised, though, as I've enjoyed Lana Turner in other light comedy roles in her early films.

While there is a superb cast supporting her, with Robert Young, Walter Brennan, and May Whitty, Lana carries this film and does so smoothly at it that I wish she had been able to continue doing comedies longer into her career.

Spoilers below

I also applaud the writers for not taking a cheap way out that I thought they were going to take mid-way through the film, and that I've seen less sophisticated movies take.

For background, early in the film, one of Lana's character's complaints is that she has no family. Later, after she has schemed to pose as the long-lost amnesiac missing daughter of rich businessman Walter Brennan, and Brennan discovers her real name from Robert Young, Brennan suggests that just because her name had been different didn't mean she wasn't really his missing daughter.

At that point, I suspected the writers were going to make Lana turn out to be the real missing daughter in the end, as such a contrivance would diminish the impact of her deception on the well-meaning Brennan character. Certainly plenty of lesser comedies, especially more modern ones, have taken similar artificial turns to make their scheming characters more sympathetic.

Fortunately, the writers did not take that turn that they were cleverly setting up, and instead went down a far more touching and believable path, giving some genuine emotional weight to the film's finale.

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Feast of Glenda Farrell movies showing in November

A few weeks back, Turner Classic Movies came up with a pleasant surprise by announcing that Glenda Farrell would be their "Star of the Month" for November. And they are backing up that designation in force, showing 48 of her films that month!

I've already seen 28 of her films, and 27 of those are being shown. The only one I've already seen that is missing is The Talk of the Town. The schedule does include some films where Glenda barely has any screen time, such as the otherwise-excellent Three on a Match. But that seems unavoidable when showing so many films of an actress who was primarily in supporting roles.

That leaves 21 potential new films for me, and I hope I'll have enough room on my DVR service to manage them. Most of these I don't know much, or anything, about. Perhaps my top priority is We're In The Money, since that is one of her comic teamings with Joan Blondell, and not available on home video as far as I have found. I've marked that, and other, priorities, with exclamation marks below.

Nov 5:

• Kissin' Cousins (1964)
• Apache War Smoke (1952)
• !! Heat Lightning (1934)
• !! Dark Hazard (1934), which stars another of my favorites, Edward G Robinson
• !! The Secret Bride (1932), starring Barbara Stanwyck
• The Big Shakedown (1934)

Nov 12:

• !! Go Into Your Dance (1935)
• Life Begins (1932)
• !! Hi Nellie! (1934)

Nov 19:

• Central Airport (1933)
• Snowed Under (1936)
• !! We're In The Money (1935), one of her teamings with Joan Blondell

Nov 26:

• The Personality Kid (1934)

• In Caliente (1935)

• !! Girl Missing (1933)

• !! Lady For A Day (1933)
• !! Breakfast For Two (1937), starring Barbara Stanwyck

• Bureau of Missing Persons (1933)
• Little Big Shot (1935)
• !! The Merry Wives of Reno (1934)

• Grand Slam (1933)  

The full list is published in this TCM forums thread.