To Catch a Thief (1955)

If ever a movie was a surefire commercial hit it was Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, released by Paramount in 1955.

Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were huge stars at the time. Hitchcock had worked with both of them before. He knew they would have the right onscreen chemistry and that Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in love would be box-office gold. He knew the story had all the right ingredients for a lighthearted suspense movie/romance. He knew that that was the sort of thing he could do, and do very well. It could not fail. And it was indeed a major hit.

John Robie (Cary Grant) lives in the south of France. He is a retired cat burglar. Now someone has been pulling off robberies using Robie’s standard modus operandi. The police will obviously believe he is guilty. They do believe he is guilty. Even his friends assume he is guilty.

It’s obvious to Robie that his only chance of proving his innocence is to catch the real cat burglar himself.

He gets hold of a list of women who own very expensive jewels. They’re the mystery cat burglar’s obvious next targets. Robie (who is pretending to be an American lumberman from Oregon) intends to set a trap for the burglar.

One of the women on the list is Jessie Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis). She has a daughter, Francie (Grace Kelly). Francis has had the finest education money can buy. She is poised and sophisticated. She’s also a bit of a spoilt brat. She seems to have set her sights on Robie. She doesn’t believe he has ever been anywhere near Oregon. She believes he’s the cat burglar. This excites her (she’s that kind of girl).

They spend the night together. This scene is a great example of Hitchcock making it blindingly obvious that two characters have had sex whilst somehow never quite technically stepping outside the bounds of the Production Code.

While Robie hopes to trap the burglar he has a whole bunch of people out to trap him. There are the police. There are his olds friends from the Resistance. They were all criminals as well. They fear that Robie will cause them problems with the flics. And of course the real cat burglar is out to trap John Robie as well.

The identity of the actual burglar is very obvious but I won’t say any more for fear of revealing spoilers.

To be honest To Catch a Thief, apart from the obviousness of the criminal’s identity, is not a great suspense thriller. It’s more like his wonderful early film Young and Innocent - the real focus is on the romance. It’s a terrific romance movie, and manages to be rather sexy for 1955. There’s plenty of romantic and sexual tension. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly get to trade some very witty very risqué dialogue.

Grace Kelly is superbly dressed and is breathtakingly beautiful and glamorous.

This movie looks gorgeous. The colours are not just stunning, they’re used imaginatively to give a weird other-worldly feel to the strange rooftop world of the professional cat burglar. The sets and costumes are magnificent.

Hitchcock was determined to have as little as possible to do with the deplorable fad for location shooting. Despite the exotic setting the film has that classic shot-on-a-sound-stage look. There are lots of process shots. These are not flaws. Hitchcock did not make movies set in the real world. He made movies set in Hitchcock World, a much more attractive and interesting world. This movie is not supposed to look realistic.

There was one tricky element in the plot. The Production Code was still in force. The movie had to have an unequivocal crime does not pay message. On the other hand to make John Robie an entirely innocent man would be boring and would be a misuse of Cary Grant’s talents. It would be much more fun to make Robie a retired, rather than a reformed, criminal. It would also be much more fun to make him totally unapologetic about his criminal past. Cary Grant had a particular knack for playing likeable rogues and he was at his best playing a character who was a genuine rogue.

The solution was to emphasise over and over again that Robie had fought with the French Resistance during the war. He was a hero who had risked his life for freedom and democracy. As long as it was also made clear that Robie had given up his criminal career Cary Grant could get away with playing him as a man who had enjoyed every moment of his life as a cat burglar. He could also get away with playing Robie as anything but a Robin Hood figure. John Robie did not steal from the rich to give to the poor. He stole from the rich to give to John Robie.

This solution allowed Grant to have some real fun with this role. It also allowed him to be a handsome sexy bad boy.

This is Hitchcock Lite but it's a visually stunning romance movie with Grace Kelly absolutely at the top of her game. Highly recommended.

This movie looks terrific on Blu-Ray - this is one of those rare cases where it really is upgrading to Blu-Ray.

Hot Saturday (1932)

Hot Saturday is a pre-code Paramount melodrama which gave Cary Grant one of his first (if not his first) starring rôles.

The movie is set in a typical American small town. Marysville is a town in which everyone is respectable. You’d better be respectable if you know what’s good for you. If you stray even a little from the path of middle class morality you’ll be destroyed by scandal and gossip.

Ruth Brock (Nancy Carroll) works at the town’s bank. She’s pretty and she’d like to have fun, if she dared to. She already has a reputation for flirting and in Marysville that’s worse than having a reputation as an axe murderess.

Two of the young men at the bank are pursuing Ruth. One has no chance. The other, Connie (Edward Woods), fancies himself as having a good chance. He assumes that he’s irresistible to women. He’s the closest thing Marysville has to a town Lothario.

Then a major threat to Connie’s chances arrives on the scene. Romer Sheffield (Cary Grant) has everything that Connie lacks. He has class. He has genuine charm. He isn’t sleazy. He’s extremely rich. Not surprisingly Ruth is flattered when Romer takes a shine to her.

On Saturdays all the young people of the town head to Willow Springs. Willow Springs offers music and dancing. It’s the closest thing they have to a den of iniquity. Young men and women have even been known to be so carried away by the lure of sin as to kiss each other.

Romer invites the young crowd to his place on the lake on a fine Saturday afternoon. Romer and Ruth flirt. Then the crowd head for Willow Springs. Connie takes Ruth boating and gets a bit too too enthusiastic in his pursuit of her. She runs off and heads for Romer’s house.

No real actual harm has been done. Ruth’s virtue is intact. But in fact a great deal of harm has been done. Ruth was seen at Romer’s house and she was seen arriving home very late. There’s plenty of ammunition there for the town’s gossips. And there are at least three people who are jealous enough of Ruth to be willing to make her life a misery.

There may be a way out for Ruth - marriage to Bill Fadden (Randolph Scott), the young man her parents always hoped she would marry. He’s totally respectable, from a totally resectable family, and he’s well set-up financially. Which matters to Ruth’s parents - they’ve been sponging off her for years. Her salary from the bank supports them.

The question is whether Bill will marry her now that the town gossips have decided she’s the town whore.

There’s plenty of pre-code naughtiness here. Before he took a shine to Ruth Romer had a girlfriend and it’s made quite clear that she was his mistress. And of course there are the obligatory pre-code scenes of girls in their underwear. And poor Ruth gets soaking wet and Bill has to undress her (with his hands not his eyes) and put her to bed even though they’re not even married. So she’s in his bed stark naked.

Nancy Carroll was, briefly, a huge star and an Oscar-nominated one. The momentum of her career was spent by the mid-30s. She’s charming and excellent in Hot Saturday.

Cary Grant’s screen persona was already almost (but not quite) fully formed when he made this movie. Romer Sheffield is regarded by the town gossips as a monster of depravity but the audience knows he’s really a pretty nice guy and that his charm isn’t fake. Randolph Scott is rather good too.

With a pre-code movie you just never know what to expect from the ending. Sometimes you get a moral ending but sometimes the movie stays pre-code right to the end. The latter is the case with Hot Saturday. Early on the movie takes aim at narrow-minded moralising and it keeps on landing its punches and it doesn’t let up at the end.

Hot Saturday is a delightful pre-code romantic melodrama and while it outraged puritans at the time it’s very much a feelgood movie. Like so many pre-code movies it seems much more modern than Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s. Highly recommended.

Hot Saturday is one of the six movies in the Universal Backlot Pre-Code Collection DVD boxed set, a set that every pre-code fan should own.

Notorious (1946), Hitchcock Friday #8

Notorious is one of Hitchcock’s most admired movies. I have of course seen it before, more than once, but not for at least twenty years. It comes in the middle of what I personally consider to be the low point of Hitchcock’s career, his 1940s Hollywood movies.

Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is an American but her father is German and he’s a convicted Nazi spy. The US Government persuades her (by means of emotional blackmail and the implied threat of actual blackmail) to work for them to infiltrate a group of Germans in Brazil. She is recruited by an American spy, Devlin (Cary Grant).

Alicia is a Bad Girl. She is a notorious woman. She drinks and she possibly sleeps with men, which is about as wicked as anyone could imagine in the 1940s. Her job is to get herself into the good graces of a certain Alex Sebastian who is assumed to be the key figure in the evil Nazi plot. Her assignment is to become Alex’s mistress but of course the audience can’t be told anything so shocking. It is however perfectly obvious that that is the plan. That of course is exactly what female spies did - they used sex in order to gain information or to set someone up for blackmail. Female spies were used as honey traps. The US intelligence agency that came up with this particular scheme assumes that Alicia, being an immoral woman, won’t object.

Before she sets out for Brazil romance blossoms between Alicia and Devlin although it’s complicated by the fact that he has no real respect for her because she’s an immoral woman.

She has few problems getting Alex Sebastian interested in her. They knew each other several years later and he’d been in love with her then. In fact he has never really stopped loving her.

What those Nazis in Brazil are up to is of course of no importance whatsoever. There’s some secret plot but it’s just a McGuffin. Hitchcock as usual is interested in the visual possibilities offered by the thin plot, in creating effective suspense and in exploring themes that always interested him - in this case love, suspicion and betrayal. There has never been a director quite so indifferent to plot as Alfred Hitchcock.

The CIA did not exist in 1946 and we’re never told the name of the US intelligence agency for which Devlin works. For convenience I’ll refer to them as the CIA. It’s strange at first that the Nazis are the bad guys, considering that the war was over and the Nazis were totally defeated. But in 1946 the Soviets were still counted among the Good Guys. So even though it makes little sense in 1946 the Nazis still have to play the role of the Bad Guys. The idea is that there’s a circle of Nazis in Brazil and they’re up to something sinister.

In 1936 Hitchcock had made a remarkably cynical spy movie called Secret Agent. Espionage seemed to fascinate him because it is all about deception. Betrayal is the stock-in-trade of the spy. Notorious, like Secret Agent, is brutally honest about espionage. The good guys are no more trustworthy and no more moral than the bad guys. In Notorious there’s no moral difference between the Nazi conspirators and the CIA. Both treat human beings as pawns in a game, to be sacrificed when they’re no longer useful. Espionage is a dirty game no matter which side is playing it. And if you’re obsessively interested in voyeurism, as Hitchcock was, espionage offers plenty of opportunities.

This is the closest Cary Grant ever got to playing an out-and-out swine. What makes Devlin particularly contemptible is that he really has fallen for Alicia, but he’s still prepared to encourage her to take on such a grubby job, a job which will obviously damage her fragile self-resect even further. It might destroy her psychologically and emotionally. But he’s still happy for her to do the job, and he’s still happy to manipulate her into doing so.

Of course if Devlin had a shred of human decency he wouldn’t be a spy. You get to be a spy by proving that you’re perfectly comfortable with the idea of lying to people, manipulating them and using them. We get the impression that Devlin has never had any problems doing such things.

Any discussion of Hitchcock will inevitably have to deal with the appalling censorship problems he ran into especially during the 1940s. It wasn’t just the Production Code Authority. The studios routinely exercised their own unofficial censorship, vetoing anything that they thought might be even mildly controversial. In the case of Notorious much has been made of the famous love scene in which Hitchcock, being forbidden to have his characters doing anything as disgusting as having a lengthy kiss (which might have permanently scarred the minds of innocent American youth), has them engage in a process of serial kissing. But censorship in Hollywood in the 40s went far beyond such overt content. Movie-makers faced incredible restrictions on the subject matter they cold deal with and the ways in which they dealt with a variety of subjects. These were the days when the assumption was that audience members would be shocked and horrified by any suggestion that married couples had sex.

Hitchcock loathed censorship and usually ended up trying to subvert it by dealing with sexual matters by means of subtle hints. In this case the problem was Alicia’s past. She may have been promiscuous and may even have been a courtesan (we do get the vague impression that the Commodore may be a client rather than an old friend). Hints are dropped about Alicia’s sex life but the hints are too vague. Apparently in the original version of the script she was indeed a prostitute. Obviously that had to be changed in the final version. In the version as filmed it appears that she may have had love affairs.

This was Hollywood in the 40s. You come up with a script that works and makes perfect sense. The Production Code Authority forces you to make drastic changes. You come up with a second version which makes less sense and works less well. The studio forces you to make more drastic changes. You end up with a final script that makes no sense, but the moral watchdogs are happy. In the case of Notorious the end result is that the Devlin-Alicia relationship makes no sense. Had she been a prostitute or a kept woman then we could have bought the idea that Devlin might well feel a mixture of attraction and repulsion towards her. In the movie he does feel a mixture of attraction and repulsion towards her, but his attitude is incomprehensible. The man is a spy, not a Sunday School teacher. He has undoubtedly sexually manipulated plenty of women. That’s what spies do. He’s not the type to be shocked and dismayed that his new lady love is not a virgin. But that’s what we’e expected to believe. In fact, as presented in the final film, Alicia may even be a virgin. Instead of being a man suffering from emotional turmoil he just comes across as unbelievable and nasty.

The Production Code Authority also insisted on the removal of an early scene which made it clear that Alicia was a kept woman. The Production Code Authority didn’t quite succeed in wrecking Notorious but they come very close to it. The emotional dynamic between Alicia and Devlin, which is the core of the film, is fatally weakened and seems phoney.

There’s a scene in which (very daringly for a 1946 Hollywood movie), Alicia tells Devlin that she’s now Alex’s mistress. Even though Devlin knows quite well that this was the entire plan all along he reacts like a spoilt child who’s had a candy bar taken away from him. If he’s in love with her it’s understandable that he’d be upset but he behaves as if Alicia is just a whore. He makes sure she knows how much he despises her. Again it makes no sense. The only people in the movie who are actually trying to make a whore of Alicia are the US Government, and Devlin as their agent.

As a result of the moralistic meddling Alex becomes the only sympathetic male character in the movie. Alicia would be better off with Alex, who treats her with respect and gentleness, rather than Devlin for (for no plausible reason) treats her like dirt.

I don’t think Hitchcock had any interest in the political dimensions of the story. Whether Devlin is on the side of the Good Guys and Alex on the side of the Bad Guys doesn’t matter. It’s the suspicions and the betrayals within the romantic triangle that count. The espionage plot is one of the thinnest and weakest in cinema history. Which suited Hitchcock perfectly. Nobody who has ever watched Notorious has cared about the spy plot.

Hitchcock had little or no interest in politics. If he had had any political agenda then you would expect to see it in his spy films, but his spy films are entirely lacking in political content. Hitchcock was fascinated by the world of espionage because it was all about deception and betrayal. And if you throw a woman into such a world, a world in which lies and betrayal are taken for granted, you have a great opportunity to explore themes of love, loyalty, betrayal, suspicion and deceit. But Hitchcock was interested in these themes at a personal rather than a political level. We certainly get the impression that the US Government agency for which Devlin works has chosen Alicia for this job because they consider her to be a bad woman which means they’re not obliged to bother themselves about her feelings or her safety.

Ingrid Bergman is excellent. Cary Grant’s performance is good but fatally weakened by the script changes which make him appear to be merely a bully and a prig rather than a man grappling with emotional turmoil.

Notorious is another typical 1940s Hitchcock movie, a potentially very great movie sabotaged by the censors. It’s still a very very good movie, but again instead of the raw Scotch that it should have been we get the Scotch heavily watered down. It’s still a great movie but, thanks to the Production Code Authority, it’s a flawed one. When you find yourself hoping that the hero will get killed at the end but that the villain will survive you have a serious problem. Notorious approaches greatness but doesn’t quite achieve it. It’s still highly recommended.

Hitchcock Friday #1: Suspicion (1941)

The first thing that needs to be said about Suspicion is that it’s a very difficult movie to discuss without revealing spoilers. Most online reviews of the film are loaded with spoilers. I’ve tried to give spoiler warnings where they’re strictly necessary but any discussion of the film is likely to offer hints about the ending. Ideally it’s a movie to watch before you read anything at all about it.

Suspicion is an Alfred Hitchcock movie that produces strongly polarised reactions in people and among more serious cinephiles it has to be said that the negative reactions outweigh the positive.

There are a number of reasons for this. This film is one of the more notorious examples of the combination of the Production Code and studio timidity forcing a film-maker to make a movie that was radically different from the one he wanted to make. Hitchcock himself was extremely frustrated by studio interference in the making of the film, and that in itself causes many Hitchcock fans to judge it harshly. It’s also a movie that differs in very significant ways from the novel on which it was based (Before the Fact by Anthony Berkeley writing under the name Francis Iles) and that’s something of which many movie fans strongly disapprove.

It’s possible that some of the negative feelings towards this movie stem from the fact that not only does it differ from the source novel, it belongs to an entirely different genre. The novel is both an inverted mystery and psychological crime novel. The movie is a romantic melodrama with suspense elements. It’s very much what was known at the time as a women’s picture.

It is always a mistake to judge a movie based on its fidelity to the source novel. The novel and the film are such radically different art forms. I personally think that the secret to appreciating Suspicion is to forget the source novel completely. Before the Fact and Suspicion tell totally different stories. Suspicion needs to be judged as an entirely separate work of art. It’s also worth pointing out that Before the Fact is not the brilliant book that some critics of the film would have us believe. It’s a deeply flawed book.

I think we also need to judge the movie as it exists. Hitchcock wanted a completely different ending that would have made Suspicion a completely different film. Perhaps that film would have been a better film, perhaps not. What matters is whether the film as it exists works, and whether the ending that was finally chosen works.

Before the Fact who focused on a planned murder - a man is very definitely planning to kill his wife. Suspicion is focused on a woman who thinks that her husband may be planning to kill her but she cannot be sure, and the viewer cannot be sure. It is only a suspicion. It is as its title suggests a film all about suspicion. It is about the effect that suspicion has on a marriage and most of all it is about the effect of her suspicions on the woman.

The woman is Lina, played by Joan Fontaine. And that brings us to another controversial aspect of the film. A lot of people don’t like Joan Fontaine. In her two best-known films (this one and Rebecca) she plays a mousy vulnerable female at the mercy of a possibly murderous husband. There are those who find Miss Fontaine’s performances insipid. Personally I just think that she was very very good at playing these sorts of rôles and that she played them with skill and finesse.

Lina has just met Johnnie (Cary Grant). Johnnie is handsome, debonair, charming and funny but he is also very definitely masculine. And he has a reputation as a bad boy. No woman could resist him and Lina certainly has no chance at all of resisting him. Especially when she has just discovered that her own parents think of her as spinsterish and have resigned themselves to the fact that she will never find a man. There is no way now that she’s going to let Johnnie go - whatever people think of her she has the handsomest most virile most charming man in the district pursuing her, and if he doesn’t pursue her hard enough then she’ll pursue him.

Lina isn’t just trying to prove that she’s not the eternal spinster. Johnnie excites her as no man has ever excited her. It’s an excitement both sexual and romantic.

The first part of the movie is wildly romantic. Johnnie sweeps Lina off her feet and she loves it and we share her joy. Then the movie switches gears as Lina discovers that Johnnie is irresponsible, unreliable, untruthful and not very honest. But he’s still charming and funny and a jot to be around and this section of the movie is essentially romantic comedy, and it’s delightfully amusing. This is where Beaky (Nigel Bruce) enters the picture and adds even more touches of comedy.

Lina has Johnnie that Johnnie is a scoundrel but he’s a loveable scoundrel and we understand why she can’t stop loving him.

Then the movie switches gears yet again and we find ourselves watching a mystery suspense thriller. Lina has put certain pieces of evidence together in her mind and they add up to murder. She suspects that Johnnie is, or could be, a murderer. Perhaps he plans to murder Beaky. Perhaps he plans to murder Lina. There are pieces of evidence that support both theories.

One of the interesting things about this movie is that we see everything entirely through Lina’s eyes, but it’s Johnnie’s motivations that matter. We only know what Lina knows and we only see what Lina sees. Some of Johnnie’s actions certainly seem suspicious but that’s partly because we never see them from his point of view. If we did they might seem totally innocent. And of course Lina cannot cross-check her interpretations of events with Johnnie. She cannot come right out and ask him to explain certain actions, because Johnnie is by nature secretive and a liar and his explanations of his actions could never be entirely trusted. Johnnie is secretive about things and lies about things even when they are in fact relatively innocuous. We inevitably come to share Lina’s suspicions because we’re totally inside her head. We know that she’s right to consider Johnnie to be a scoundrel and a liar but is he a murderer?

The biggest question that needs to be raised is whether the movie cheats a little. Is Cary Grant’s performance at times deliberately misleading, making Johnnie seem either too obviously sinister or too obviously innocent and harmless? His performance just doesn’t seem consistent. OK, so Johnnie has a dark side as well as a sweet amiable side but Grant’s performance veers too sharply and wildly between the two to be totally believable. There were times when I expected him to start twirling his moustache like a Victorian melodrama villain. Cary Grant’s performance in this movie has been much praised but I’m going to be a heretic and suggest that it’s the film’s weak link. A lot of people don’t like Fontaine’s performance because Lina’s behaviour exasperates or angers them (a lot of modern critics want Lina to behave like a woman of the 21st century) but I think Fontaine is brilliant and carries the film.

The justification for all this is I suppose that we are seeing things through Lina’s eyes and by the halfway point of the story it is possible that her suspicions have made her slightly deranged, so what we’re seeing is not reality but Lina’s distorted version of reality. If we accept this interpretation then we are in fact dealing with an unreliable narrator, which means we can’t trust anything we see. Lina constantly shuttles back and forth between extreme (possibly excessive) suspicion and extreme (possibly excessive) credulity.

I imagine that everybody reading this knows how the film ends (and in what follows I’m not revealing explicit details about the ending) but just in case I’ll add a spoiler warning anyway.

*spoilers follow*

Almost everybody considers the ending to be a contrived cop-out and this is true to some extent but the ending is not necessarily as bad as some would have us believe. There are two things to bear in mind at the end. Johnnie has been caught out lying over and over again and he always comes up with another plausible lie to excuse himself. Does he do this again right at the end? And at the end we’re still seeing things through Lina’s eyes, so we may still be seeing a distorted view of reality. There is a degree of ambiguity about the ending.

*end spoilers*

Suspicion is nowhere near as bad as its detractors claim but it is a flawed film. When watching any of Hitchcock’s 1940s movies you always have to bear in mind that what you’re watching is not the movie Hitchcock wanted to make. That’s the great tragedy of Hitchcock in the 40s.

There's another interesting discussion of this film at discussions at ahsweetmysteryblog.

Holiday (1938)

I approached Holiday with some trepidation. Like The Philadelphia Story it’s based on a Philip Barry play and has a screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart. Like The Philadelphia Story it’s directed by George Cukor and stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Given that I found The Philadelphia Story to be a total bore I was understandably not terribly confident about enjoying Holiday. It turns out I was right to be worried.

Cary Grant is Johnny Case and he’s about to be married to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan). Johnny is a successful businessman. He’s not short of money, but his money is new money. The Setons are old money. Julia has quite a deal of trouble persuading her crusty and very straitlaced father (Edward Seton, played by Henry Kolker) to agree to the marriage.

Julia has a brother, Ned (Lew Ayres). Ned is permanently drunk because he blames his father for stifling his creativity and preventing him from following his dreams. Julia also has a sister, Linda (Katharine Hepburn). Linda feels just as stifled as Ned although she hasn’t yet given up completely. She has however retreated into neurotic hypochondria. If you’re thinking that this sounds like a remarkably depressing setup for a romantic comedy then you’re dead right.

Given that Linda is played by the movie’s star Katharine Hepburn while Julia  is played by an actress no-one has ever heard of, we naturally never doubt that Johnny will end up marrying Linda rather than Julia.

Even though it’s painfully clear that Johnny and Julia are not only spectacularly ill-matched but actively dislike each other the movie insists on making us wait until the very end before these very obvious facts occur to the characters concerned.

This brings us to an obvious problem. Julia is such an appalling character that we cannot possibly believe that Johnny could ever have been remotely interested in her. Like Edward Seton she’s a cardboard cutout villain whose only purpose in the story is to make Johnny and Linda seem more sympathetic. To me this is lazy writing. Two-dimensional characters are fine in comedy but since the movie seems more interested in being a social satire and a psychological drama than a comedy then I think it’s a valid criticism.

I have to come clean at his point and confess to a rather considerable dislike of Katharine Hepburn. Linda as portrayed by Hepburn strikes me as being a shrill, tiresome hysteric. This dislike of Hepburn may to some extent explain why I found it impossible to like this movie, although in my view it has plenty of other problems.

Cary Grant does his best but the script just doesn’t give him enough to work with. Grant was one of the finest comic actors of all time but when the gags aren’t there in the script there’s little he can do.

The big problem is that there are very few laughs in this movie. Edward Everett Horton provides most of the movie’s very rare amusing moments. A lack of laughs is a pretty serious problem for a comedy, but Holiday is not just unfunny, it’s often perilously close to out-and-misery.

This movie also has a rather stagey feel to it at times. Some of Hepburn’s dialogue is too overwrought and too much like speechifying - you might get away with it on stage but on film it seems clumsy.

It’s worth pointing out that while Holiday is often included on lists of screwball comedies it is most emphatically not a screwball comedy. I’m not even sure it’s a comedy, but it certainly isn’t a screwball comedy. The intention seems to have been to make a romantic comedy with some social comment and some class consciousness and the two latter commodities sink the comedy (as they almost always did). There are so few laughs and there’s so much angst that I think we’re entitled to suspect that director George Cukor was not even attempting comedy in this movie.

Columbia’s Region 4 DVD release is barebones and the transfer is very grainy.

I found Holiday to be an ordeal. It isn’t funny and I didn’t like any of the characters enough to care particularly what happened to them. I can’t recommend this one, even as a rental.

Monkey Business (1952)

The screwball comedy genre was more or less played out by the early 40s but Howard Hawks never really gave up on the genre. He made two attempts to revive it, the first being Monkey Business in 1952, the second being the excellent and criminally underrated Man’s Favorite Sport? in 1964. It is with the first of these that we are concerned today. In Monkey Business brilliant but absent-minded chemist Dr Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant) is trying to find a formula that will eliminate some of the symptoms of ageing. He doesn’t succeed but one of the chimpanzees he’s using in his experiments finds the formula by accident. The chimpanzee puts the mixture into the water cooler. Barnaby drinks it and the middle-aged scientist finds himself thinking he’s thirty years younger. He buys an MG sports car and has a bit of an adventure with his boss’s luscious but ditzy secretary Miss Laurel (Marilyn Monroe). His wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers) is the next to inadvertently sample the formula. She becomes an amorous teenager and wants to relive their honeymoon, which has unfortunate results for poor Barnaby. Even more mayhem ensues when they both take a larger dose - they both think they’re ten years old! Barnaby has always suspected that their lawyer Hank had designs in Edwina, so he enlists the help of a group of children playing Cowboys and Indians, dons war-paint and decides to scalp Hank. Of course you know that eventually everybody will sample the formula and there will be a great deal of inspired craziness. Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers really let themselves go and they’re both terrific. Charles Coburn is amusing as Barnaby’s boss. Marilyn Monroe doesn’t get much to do but she’s good and she impressed Hawks enough to lead him to cast her in his next movie, the wonderful Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The movie starts a little slowly but the pace soon picks up and it becomes classic Hawks screwball comedy. It’s all good-natured fun with perhaps more sexual innuendo than you expect in a Hawks movie. The Region 4 DVD is without extras but it’s a decent transfer. The DVD cover gives the impression this is a Marilyn Monroe movie but she is strictly a minor player here. A good cast, plenty of the ludicrous situations that characterise this genre and plenty of laughs - there’s really no reason not to enjoy this movie.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Bringing Up Baby was only modestly successful on its original release in 1938 but went on to become one of the best-loved of all screwball comedies. I’ve always loved this film and it still stands up as well as ever.

David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a palaeontologist. He needs one more bone to complete the four-year restoration of a brontosaurus. He also needs $1 million for his museum. Now the final bone has been located and it looks like a donor with the million dollars has been found as well. And he’s about to be married. Everything is going just swimmingly. All he needs to do is to play a pleasant round of golf with the lawyer representing the donor and everything should be all set. What could possibly go wrong in a game of golf?



The answer is, plenty. He encounters Susan (Katharine Hepburn) on the golf course and everything becomes a nightmare of chaos. Susan is a very nice person but chaos is her constant companion. First she wrecks his car, then he finds himself aiding and abetting her to steal another car, accompanied by Baby. Baby is her leopard. He’s a very friendly leopard but David doesn’t even cope well with housecats and small dogs, much less leopards. And Susan manages to get involved in another traffic accident and that costs him $150 for the two swans that Baby subsequently eats. And the chaos has only just started.

This was Howard Hawks’ second screwball comedy, his first being the very successful Twentieth Century in 1934. Hawks proved to be one of the masters of this genre and Bringing Up Baby sees him at the top of his game.



The pacing, as always in a Hawks comedy, is relentless. There’s plenty of snappy dialogue. Most importantly there are not just crazy situations, but crazy situations that pay off in terms of laughs.

There’s an an abundance of fine character actors in supporting roles. Cary Grant had scored a major hit the year before in The Awful Truth, establishing him in the screwball comedy genre. Bringing Up Baby sees him playing a role rather different from any he’d played before as the mild-manner bespectacled scientist.



The big surprise is Katharine Hepburn. This is her most delightful role. She’s charming and likeable and as Hawks himself explained it’s a role that could have been irritating but never is. Susan is always scheming - she took one look at David and decided he was the man for her - but she’s kind of vulnerable as well in a way you don’t expect Hepburn to be. She’s also very funny.
She also seems to be quite comfortable playing scenes with the leopard! While in some scenes it’s obvious that rear projection is being used it’s also obvious in other scenes that she’s petting and playing with an actual leopard.



Hawks demonstrates the clear superiority of directors of the classical age of Hollywood over the directors of today, with technique being used to advance the plot and establish the characters rather than to show off his cleverness.

The region 4 DVD includes a commentary track by Peter Bogdanovich. It’s typical of his commentaries - informative, amusing and affectionate and very enthusiastic. Bogdanovich knew Hawks and drew on interviews with the director for the commentary.



Enormous fun from start to finish. One of the three or four best screwball comedies ever made and Katharine Hepburn’s finest moment. At a time when she was was ironically regarded as being box-office poison (which may have accounted for the movie’s relative lack of success at the time) she was actually at the peak of her form. A must-see movie.

My Favorite Wife (1940)

My Favorite Wife is a thoroughly delightful 1940 example of the screwball comedy. With Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as the stars you’re already on a winner.

Ellen Ardin (Irene Dunne) is the wife of Nick Arden (Cary Grant) but she’s dead. Well, sort of. Several years earlier she was lost at sea. She was seen disappearing beneath the waves after her lifeboat was swamped and since a number of years have passed it seem safe to conclude that she really is dead. The judge regards it as an open-and-shut case and declares her legally dead, allowing Nick to marry Bianca (Gail Patrick). So it comes as quite a shock to poor Nick when they get to the hotel where they’re to spend their honeymoon and who should he spot in the foyer but his deceased first wife.



Ellen is very much alive. She has spent the last seven years marooned on an island, until finally she was picked up by a Portuguese freighter. Now Nick has one wife too many. That’s embarrassing enough, but which wife does he actually want? Since Irene Dunne is the star you get no prizes for guessing he wants Ellen. Or at least he’s pretty sure he does. He’s fond of both of his wives. After all if you marry a woman it generally means you’re fond of her.

If he’s going to pick up where he left off with Ellen, what is he going to tell Bianca? After all, it’s not exactly the sort of thing a woman wants to be told when she’s only been married for a few hours.



You might think this was enough of a problem for one man to deal with but there’s worse to come. It transpires that Ellen wasn’t alone on the island. There were two survivors stranded on that island, and the second survivor was a man. A rather good-looking man named Steve Burkett (Randolph Scott). Just the two of them, alone together on an island for seven years. What could they possibly have found to do? Nick has a pretty shrewd idea.

It’s a good basis for a screwball comedy, offering opportunities for the wild confusions and misunderstandings so characteristic of the genre, and for the kinds of progressively escalating craziness equally associated with this type of film. A good set-up is not however enough to make a good screwball comedy. The situations need to be truly funny as well as crazy. Happily My Favorite Wife scores very heavily on this count as well with a sparkling screenplay that gives Grant and Dunne ample opportunities to demonstrate their considerable skills at this sort of comedy.



With a very capable supporting cast it all comes together perfectly. Randolph Scott is particularly good. Gail Patrick is the one weak link. Not that her performance is bad - she just doesn’t get the good lines.

Leo McCarey (who directed Grant and Dunne in the wonderful The Awful Truth) was to have directed but was hospitalised after a car crash. Garson Kanin took over and did a serviceable job, although had McCarey been at the helm it might well have been an even better picture.



I picked this one up on a Cary Grant double feature Region 4 DVD. Picture and sound quality were truly atrocious, so there are clearly some bad versions of this movie floating around. The movie itself, although not quite in the top rank of screwball comedies, is thoroughly enjoyable.

Gunga Din (1939)

Gunga Din is one of those movies that demonstrates that a troubled production history doesn’t necessarily lead to a bad film. It can result in a very good film.

To say that this 1939 production was based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same name would be misleading. It would be more accurate to say it was inspired by the poem and by his collection of short stories Soldiers Three but in fact the screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur is pretty much an entirely original story. Many writers worked on this project but the plot of the final film was largely the work of Hecht and Macarthur.

Several different directors were at various times slated to direct the film, including Howard Hawks. Eventually RKO settled on George Stevens because up to that time he’d had a reputation for bringing movies in on time and on budget. Ironically Stevens went way over budget on Gunga Din!



Many actors were also at various times considered, including Robert Donat and Ronald Colman, before the final lineup of Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr was chosen for the three leads, with Sam Jaffe as Gunga Din and Joan Fontaine as Fairbanks’ love interest.

This was in fact a very very big production for RKO. There was a good deal of location shooting, mostly at Lone Pine in California (a perennially popular movie location), and some impressive sets. And some very large-scale action scenes.



Sergeants Cutter, MacChesney and Ballantine (Grant, McLaglen and Fairbanks) are three firm friends serving in the British Army in India. They’re good if somewhat rowdy soldiers who see themselves as being a bit like the Three Musketeers. Until a terrible disaster intervenes - Sergeant Ballantine announces he’s going to get married and leave the army! His bride-to-be Emmy (Joan Fontaine) thinks the army is much too dangerous. Of course now it’s up to Cutter and MacChesney to save their pal from this awful fate.

Cutter has other plans on his mind as well, like looking for a fabulous treasure rumoured to be found in an abandoned temple. He has two companions in the quest for the treasure. One is the regimental water-carrier, Gunga Din, who has dreams of being a real soldier. The other is one of the regiment’s elephants, Annie (the particular pet of Sergeant MacChesney).



What Cutter doesn’t know that the temple is in fact the headquarters of a revived Thuggee cult. The murderous Thugs were thought to have been eliminated but this is far from being the case. The Thugs have moved beyond their usual practices of ritual murder and are now planning large-scale revenge on the British who had suppressed their cult. This will put the whole regiment in danger. The three friends all become involved in a desperate attempt to foil the Thugs’ plans and Gunga Din will find a role to play as well.

It’s a wonderful rousing adventure tale. It starts in a light-hearted vein but gradually becomes more serious and ends with a spectacular battle scene.



The very strong cast is a major asset. While Joan Fontaine has little to do the film affords the other players plenty of opportunities and they make the most of them. Cary Grant’s performance is heavy on the comedy but that suits the tone of the movie well enough. The standout performance though comes from Douglas Fairbanks Jr, an actor I find myself liking more and more.

George Stevens may have had set an outrageous amount of RKO’s money on this picture but the results are worth it. The movie cost so much that it made a loss on its initial release despite doing good business at the box-office but it was regularly re-released and ended up being a very profitable property.



The Region 1 DVD looks great and includes some worthwhile extras.

One of the classic Hollywood adventure movies.