A Lady of Chance (1928)

A Lady of Chance is a 1928 MGM silent film starring Norma Shearer. It’s a lighthearted comic crime melodrama/romantic melodrama.

A Lady of Chance was shot as a silent film. By this time audiences were losing interest in silent films so MGM added some dialogue scenes. That soundtrack is apparently lost so the movie now survives only as a silent movie. What we get on the DVD is a modern score - I turned the volume down to zero as quickly as possible. I’ll watch a silent movie with no sound at all rather than endure a modern score.

Dolly Morgan, nicknamed Angel Face (Norma Shearer), is a con artist. She’s working the old badger game. It’s a racket she knows well.

She has a prime sucker lined up. His name is Hammond. Hammond knows that Dolly isn’t exactly a respectable girl. That’s OK, he doesn’t want a respectable girl. He wants a bit of fun. He knows that girls like Dolly don’t give away their favours without getting a few presents in return. Of course he doesn’t know just how much his fun is going to cost him this time. It’s going to cost him ten grand (an immense amount of money in 1928). He’ll have to pay up because if his wife finds out he’s in big trouble. She is not a very understanding woman.

Dolly is working this racket on her own, but unluckily for her she runs into two former partners-in-crime, Brad (Lowell Sherman) and Gwen (Gwen Lee). They want a piece of the action. Of course they intend to double-cross Dolly and she intends to double-cross them. When it comes to double crosses Dolly is an expert. She ends up holding the ten grand but she will have to make a hasty departure.

Dolly has a new sucker lined up, Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown). This could be it, the big score that every girl in Dolly’s line of work hopes will come along. Steve is a cement tycoon which sounds promising enough but when he tells her about the plantation back home, in the South, she knows she’s hit the jackpot. Ten grand is chicken feed compared to a score like this.

And the best thing is that Steve is as dumb as a rock. He even offers to marry her. She can’t wait to see that plantation. When she arrives in Steve’s home town there will of course be some surprises in store for her.

Dolly has been thrown for a loop and now the last thing she needs is for Brad and Gwen to turn up. Which of course they do.

While it’s not a conventional formulaic romantic comedy this is a movie that combines comedy with romance. It is amusing, and it is very romantic.

The acting is pretty good. Johnny Mack Brown makes Steve suitably innocent and naïve but he’s so well-meaning we can’t despise him.

Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee are fun as likeable rogues. Gwen Lee in fact is a delight. Lowell Sherman’s reputation hasn’t stood the test of time which is perhaps a little unfair.

Norma Shearer is fine and she manages to sell us on Dolly’s sudden change of heart. It’s a brittle amusing performance. These four main players really work extremely well together. Norma Shearer looks fabulous, which is easy for an actress to do when she has the great Adrian designing her gowns.

Robert Z. Leonard is not a director you’ll find on most people’s great directors lists and he’s not one of the darlings of auteurist critics but he made some extraordinarily good and interesting movies, include the superb 1949 noir The Bribe and the very underrated pre-code Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise).

This is a very lightweight movie but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else and it has a breezy charm. Highly recommended if you’re in the mood for something frothy.

The Warner Archive DVD presentation is very good.

I haven’t seen a huge number of Norma Shearer’s films. I want to see more but her movies are remarkably difficult to find. I do highly recommend one of her earlier silent pictures, Lady of the Night (1925), in which she plays dual roles.

Road To Paradise (1930)

Road To Paradise is a 1930 First National pre-code movie.

Loretta Young plays dual roles. She plays Mary Brennan, an orphan girl who has been raised by two good-natured crooks, Nick and Jerry (known as Jerry the Gent). Mary is a nice girl but she’s not entirely honest herself. It doesn’t take much effort to persuade her to join the crooks in a daring criminal enterprise.

Mary also has an unusual paranormal ability which will later become very important.

Young also plays wealthy socialite Margaret Waring. She’s very wealthy indeed.

Mary and her two crooked pals notice Margaret in a speakeasy. They are amazed by the resemblance. The two women look identical.

This gives the two crooks an idea. Having Mary impersonate Margaret could make it much easier to burgle Margaret’s house. One of the things they noticed about Margaret in the speakeasy was that she was wearing some very expensive jewels.

The burglary takes on a slightly farcical quality with a cheerful Irish cop spotting the two crooks on the roof and pursuing them with a notable lack of success. Various cops spend most of the movie in pursuit of these burglars

The burglary also leads to unintended consequences.

Everything hinges on the question of identity. There’s just no way to tell the two women apart.

One of the things that happened after the Production Code took effect in 1934 is that genre boundaries became more rigid. In the pre-code it was not uncommon to come across melodramas with some of the lighthearted character of comedies, and movies that were more or less comedies but with strong melodrama overtones. The tone of pre-code movies was often fluid.

In the pre-code era there weren’t too many rules. If for example you wanted to take a movie such as this one and add an element of the paranormal then you simply went ahead and did so. Road To Paradise is a typical pre-code oddity which simply ignores genre boundaries.

Loretta Young was aways a delight in her pre-code movies. This movie is no exception. She’s utterly adorable as the criminally inclined Mary. She handles the dual role quite successfully. The focus is more on Mary than on Margaret. Mary is very likeable - she’s a crook but she’d prefer not to be.

The best line in the movie is when one of the crooks who raised her comments, "I could never understand this desire for respectability. It always seemed kind of morbid to me.”

The other players are all perfectly adequate but this film completely belongs to Loretta Young.

This movie was directed by William Beaudine, later to become known as One-Shot Beaudine for his practice of never shooting retakes. In his later career, spent mostly making B-movies, that was understandable. His success was based on being able to bring low-budget movies in on time and on budget every single time. That doesn’t make him a bad director and in Road To Paradise he displays considerable skill.

What makes it recognisably a pre-code film is its indifference to the law. Being a criminal is OK as long as you’re basically a nice person. And if you’re a young sweet pretty female then it’s definitely OK.

Road To Paradise is cheerful and good-natured. Loretta Young is more than enough reason to give it a spin. Recommended.

This movie is included on a two-movie Warner Archive DVD paired with another Loretta Young pre-code film, Week-End Marriage.

Take a Girl Like You (1970)

Take a Girl Like You, based on Kingsley Amis’s famous novel of the same name, was directed by Jonathan Miller. It came out in 1970.

Jenny Bunn (Hayley Mills) is a young school teacher from the north of England where she has had an upbringing of a very traditional nature. She moves into the home of local politician Dick Thompson (John Bird) and his wife Martha (Sheila Hancock). They have two female lodgers, the other being Anna (Geraldine Sherman).

It’s not long before Jenny meets Patrick Standish (Oliver Reed), a lecturer in the local technical college. Patrick is a notorious ladies’ man. Anna was one of his previous conquests. He intends to make Jenny his next conquest.

There should be no problem. Jenny obviously likes him. The chemistry is there between them. There is however an impediment. Jenny is a virgin. She’s not just a virgin. For Jenny it’s not so much a choice as a vocation. No amount of persuasion will change her mind. She can’t really explain why she’s so determined.

It’s all rather exasperating to Patrick. On the other hand, despite his womanising, he’s a basically decent guy. He certainly has no desire to force himself on an unwilling woman. He’ll use plenty of plausible persuasion but he’s not a man to take things any further.

Patrick and Jenny make the acquaintance of Julian Ormerod (Noel Harrison), a very rich very idle upper-class chap who lives in a palatial home and devotes himself to pleasure. Being very rich and very upper-class he is of course a socialist (there is some gentle satire in both Amis’s novel and the film).

Patrick is also introduced to Julian’s current mistress, Wendy (Aimi MacDonald), a ditzy blonde minor TV personality with no sexual inhibitions at all. Wendy thinks Patrick is rather a dish.

Jenny won’t sleep with Patrick but she certainly doesn’t intend to let another woman have him. Jenny is kind of sort of in love with Patrick although she’s reluctant to admit it to herself.

Patrick lays siege to Jenny’s fiercely defended virginity. They have no idea that they might actually fall in love but of course they do, and they both end up having to rethink their attitudes towards both sex and love.

You do have to remember that Kingsley Amis’s novel was written in 1960. The Sexual Revolution had not yet gathered any momentum at all. By 1970 it was in full swing. So by 1970 Jenny’s obsession with virginity would have seemed perhaps less plausible than would have been the case a decade earlier.

At this stage the career of Hayley Mills was thriving and she seemed to be making a very successful transition to grown-up roles. Sadly, as the 70s progressed her career lost momentum. She was always equally adept at serious and comic roles and she’s excellent in this movie, managing to avoid making Jenny seem too prissy or too much of a calculating tease. Whether or not we agree with Jenny’s obsessive defence of her virtue we can’t help liking her.

This is a slightly unusual role for Oliver Reed but he did have a greater range as an actor than he’s usually given credit for, and he could project a great deal of charm. Like Hayley Mills he has a slightly tricky role here. Patrick is a bit of a lad but despite his inveterate womanising he has a certain basic decency. Reed is likeable and amusing here.

Noel Harrison was a very underrated actor and gives a typically charming performance as Julian, a thoroughly pleasant man with no morals whatsoever.

Sheila Hancock is also somewhat underrated and she’s very good as well. Aimi MacDonald is amusing as the vapid Wendy. The whole cast is good. Look out for Penelope Keith in a very small very early role.

All of the characters have some depth. Their motivations and emotions are often beset with contradictions and they don’t always understand their own feelings.

This was the only feature film directed by Jonathan Miller, an extraordinary figure in the late 20th century British cultural scene - he directed plays and operas, he was a writer and TV presenter and a humourist.

Take a Girl Like You is not a conventional romantic comedy but it is a comedy about romance. It’s not a sex comedy but it is a comedy about sex. While the British at that time certainly had a taste for broad comedy Take a Girl Like You is very different - it’s witty and sophisticated.

This was a time when British film-makers were starting to explore a topic that had always terrified them - sex. There was a keen desire to make movies that took an honest grown-up approach to the subject. The absurdly strict British film censorship was finally starting to loosen up just a little. Towards the close of the 60s there were countless British films tackling this subject, some of them doing so with surprising success. There were also quite a few British coming-of-age movies made around this time. In fact Hayley Mills had starred in one of the best of these, Sky West and Crooked, in 1966. The better British movies of this era dealing with sex include Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968), Baby Love (1969), I Start Counting (1969), Cool It, Carol! (1970), Age of Consent (1969), All the Right Noises (1970)

Take a Girl Like You is an offbeat mix but it has an infectious and enjoyable quirkiness. There is real chemistry between Hayley Mills and Oliver Reed which helps a great deal. Highly recommended.

The Powerhouse Indicator Blu-Ray presentation is excellent. There are a few extras including an interview with Hayley Mills (interestingly enough she has fond memories of working with Oliver Reed).

Bachelor Apartment (1931)

Bachelor Apartment is a 1931 RKO pre-code comedy that deserves more attention than it gets. In fact it doesn’t get any attention and that’s a pity.

Lowell Sherman stars and he directed the movie as well. He shares top billing with Irene Dunne.

Sherman plays rich New York playboy stockbroker Wayne Carter who has a problem. There are just too many women in his life. It’s not that he doesn’t like women. He likes them a lot. But he can only deal with so many at once. He certainly can’t deal with four women all at the same time.

He’s having a particular problem with Mrs Agatha Carraway (Mae Murray). They had had a steamy affair before her marriage to Wayne’s buddy Herb. Now Agatha wants to resume the affair but Wayne really isn’t interested at all. Unfortunately it is almost impossible for a man to convince Agatha that he isn’t interested in her.

There’s also Janet (Noel Francis). Wayne picked her up in a traffic accident. Janet is a lot of fun. Janet likes men a great deal. She’s a sweet girl but she will end up being something of an inconvenience. As far as Wayne is concerned they were ships that passed in the night but this ship keeps steaming back into port at the most inopportune moments.

Helene Andrews (Irene Dunne) and her sister Lita (Claudia Dell) are out of work and living in a seedy apartment. Lita is considering becoming a bad girl because bad girls get lots of nice things and she likes nice things. Helene would never consider doing such a thing. Helene has never had any trouble defending her own virtue. Her virtue is as well defended as Fort Knox. But now she has to defend Lita’s virtue as well.

As soon as Helene meets Wayne she disapproves of him. Wayne is however fascinated. A good girl is something totally out of his previous experience. He persuades her to accept a job as his executive secretary.

Wayne is now considering a major lifestyle change. He intends to give up his wicked ways and settle down with a nice girl and the nice girl he has in mind is Helene.

As you would expect lots of complications follow, with gun-wielding irate husbands and romantic misunderstandings and women suddenly popping up in bedrooms where they’re not supposed to be.

Irene Dunne gets the thankless good girl role but handles it reasonably well. Helene is supposed to be a bit prissy.

Not everybody likes Lowell Sherman in this movie but I thought his low-key performance was spot on. Wayne Carter is supposed to be a man who is cynical and a dissolute and at the same time bored and weary of his cynical dissolute lifestyle and I think Sherman nails the character perfectly.

Mae Murray had been a big star in the silent era but talkies killed her career stone dead. It’s not hard to see why. Her performance here is histrionic and affected and she is either putting on a ridiculously shrill voice or she simply has an unfortunate voice. Having said that I don’t mind her in this film - this is essentially a bedroom farce and so being outrageously over-the-top isn’t too much of a problem.

Claudia Dell has a more rewarding part as Helene’s sister Lita. Noel Francis is fun as Janet.

There’s plenty of mild pre-code naughtiness here. What would have landed this film in trouble with the Production Code after 1934 is its rather frivolous attitude towards illicit sex and its assumption that having illicit sex doesn’t make either a man or a woman a dangerous menace to society.

This is a breezy bedroom farce and it’s genuinely amusing and charming. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I especially enjoyed Lowell Sherman’s performance. Highly recommended.


This film is part of the five-movie Spanish Verdice Irene Dunne Pre-Code DVD boxed set, in English as well as Spanish. The transfer is not great but it’s acceptable.

Gidget (1959)

Gidget, released in 1959, was the first surfer girl movie and was so successful that it spawned several sequels and a TV series. It paved the way for the beach party movies of the early 60s and it established the existence of a major market for lighthearted teen romance comedies. It launched Sandra Dee’s career. It’s a fun movie and it was interesting in other ways as well, which we’ll get to later.

Francine (Sandra Dee) is a 16-year-old girl about to spend the summer soaking up the sun on the beach. Her friends have other things in mind apart from sun worship. As far as they’re concerned they’re on a hunt for men and they intend to bag a few trophies.

Francine is bitten by the surfing bug. She sees the guys having so much fun and she wants to join. Surprisingly the surfer guys who hang around with Kahuna (Cliff Robertson) are not overly hostile. They agree to teach her to surf. Because she’s a girl and she’s very petite they christen her Gidget (short for girl midget). The fact that Gidget is as cute as a button may have something to do with the fondness the guys feel for her but they’re rather protective of her as well.

Most of the guys just spend the summer surfing but Kahuna is a full-time surfer bum. Moondoggie (James Darren) wants to be a surfer bum as well. Kahuna might be perpetually broke but he’s free. This movie marks a very early appearance of the drop-out in Hollywood movies.

Gidget falls for Moondoggie. He’s not very interested.

Gidget of course has a plan to land her man. Naturally everything goes wrong. Gidget finds herself in a very awkward situation.

There’s plenty of amusement to be had here. There’s some very obvious rear projection which adds to the charm of the movie.

Hollywood teen movies are often mocked for featuring teenagers played by actors who were pushing 30. For Gidget Columbia decided on a radical approach. If they were making a movie about a 16-year-old girl why not get an actress who could do it convincingly? Why not cast an actual 16-year-old girl? Which is what they did. And it works. As a bonus Sandra Dee turned out to be a talented comic actress with immense amounts of charm.

Gidget was made at an incredibly interesting time in Hollywood history, the period around 1958 to1962. The Production code was staring to crumble and Hollywood was tentatively exploring the idea of making movies that dealt with sex in an open and grown-up way. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Butterfield 8 and The World of Suzie Wong all came out during this brief period. There are very slight hints of this in Gidget. There is at least an acknowledgement of the sexual nature of the interest that Gidget’s female friends have in boys.

Of course there’s also a message that girls are allowed to have sexual feelings as long as they don’t do anything abut it. The Sexual Revolution was on the way but it wasn’t there yet.

There’s also a message about growing up. Growing up means giving up your dreams and giving up silly ideas about freedom. Who needs those things? I’m afraid that the happy ending to this movie left me incredibly depressed.

The acting is pretty good. Cliff Robertson is fun as Kahuna, a man who isn’t as sure of himself as he thought he was. There are early appearances by people who would go on to achieve at least a measure of stardom. There’s Doug McClure, Yvonne Craig and Tom Laughlin. And of course James Darren who later starred in one of my favourite 60s TV series, The Time Tunnel. In Gidget he even sings. He makes a fine leading man for Sandra Dee.

The movie’s biggest strength is Sandra Dee. She’s delightful and she’s very funny. It’s a great pity that this was to be her only appearance as Gidget. She has great chemistry wth James Darren.

Apart from my reservations about the ending Gidget is lightweight amusing romantic fun. Sandra Dee’s performance is enough to warrant a highly recommended rating.

Via Vision in Australia have released the three Gidget movies plus the 1972 TV-movie Gidget Gets Married in both DVD and Blu-Ray boxed sets (both very reasonably priced). Gidget gets an excellent anamorphic transfer, with no extras.

La Ronde (Circle of Love, 1964)

Roger Vadim’s La Ronde (AKA Circle of Love) was based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play Reigen, a play that provoked outraged reactions when it was published in early 20th century Germany. It was banned at one point. It was not performed until 1920 when it provoked further outrage. The play has been adapted to film several times, the best-known versions being Max Ophüls’ 1950 film and Vadim’s 1964 offering. The script for Vadim’s movie was written by Jean Anouilh.

Arthur Schnitzler also wrote the extremely interesting 1926 short novel Traumnovelle on which Stanley Kubrick’s final movie Eyes Wide Shut was based.

The structure of the play (and the movie) is a series of ten sexual encounters with each character figuring in two consecutive encounters with different people.

One of the things that really intrigues me is the extraordinary critical hostility to Roger Vadim. Critics who are prepared to gush over mediocre Hollywood directors seem to be enraged at the thought of a European director who failed to be serious-minded, pessimistic and obscure. Vadim’s output as a director was varied, interesting and always entertaining. Maybe he wasn’t overly deep, maybe he wasn’t an Ingmar Bergman, but he was inventive and fun. American critics might also be offended that Vadim treats sex lightheartedly.

Vadim assembled a fascinating cast that included Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean Sorel and Maurice Ronet but the big drawcard here is provided by three wonderful actresses - Catherine Spaak, Anna Karina and Jane Fonda. Fonda, who is fluent in the language, did not need to be dubbed for the original French version.

Vadim chose to set his movie in France in 1914, in the last days of La Belle Epoque. This gives it a slight melancholy tinge - this is a world about to be swept away by war.

The various sexual encounters cross class boundaries, and cross the boundaries between the respectable and the non-respectable.

There’s also adultery (which was probably what got the original play into so much hot water).

By 1964 these things were no longer so shocking, in Europe at least.

This is a chance to see Jane Fonda at her peak as an actress. She’s delightful as the adulteress wife Sophie. I like all the actresses in this movie. I’m a huge Catherine Spaak fan (if you haven’t seen her delightful 1968 movie The Libertine then do so immediately) and I loved her here. Anna Karina is charming and amusing. I like Marie Dubois a great deal as the likeable prostitute.

I mostly like the actors as well, especially Claude Giraud as the soldier Georges and the great Maurice Ronet as Sophie’s husband. And I’ve always rather liked Jean Sorel (who plays the cynical Count).

Mention should be made of Henri Decaë’s lush cinematography and Maurice Binder’s witty and playful opening titles. I also loved Jane Fonda’s outrageous bird hat.

Vadim appeared to have no great interest in politics and perhaps that’s one of the reasons critics don’t like this movie. The opportunity was there for some biting political satire (and there is some) but Vadim was not particularly interested. Personally I’m grateful to Vadim for keeping the politics to a minimum.

Even by 1964 standards this movie is rather tame. There’s a lot of sex going on but we don’t see it and there’s a bit of almost-nudity.

A lot of people seem to prefer the 1950 Max Ophüls version. I can’t comment directly on that because I haven’t yet seen the Ophüls film although I am intending to do so in the near future.

I’ve reviewed a number of Roger Vadim’s movies over the years. The Night Heaven Fell (1958) and Love on a Pillow (1962) are both quirky intriguing offbeat movies. Barbarella (1968) of course is simply wonderful and I even have a definite soft spot for his much-reviled Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971).

The Kino DVD of La Ronde offers a very nice 16:9 enhanced transfer. The only extra of note is a brief interview with Vadim and Jane Fonda.

La Ronde is lighthearted and amusing. Recommended.

Madam Satan (1930)

Those who are only familiar with Cecil B. DeMille’s later films might be rather surprised by his 1930 musical sex comedy Madam Satan. If however you’re familiar with his silent films then Madam Satan is just the sort of thing you’d expect him to come up with. It’s like his sophisticated silent comedies but with musical numbers, and even more outlandish. It’s one of my favourite DeMille movies.

This movie was made during DeMille’s brief time at MGM, a very grim time for the director. He was being harassed by the IRS and made a series of box office flops. Those flops included, sadly, Madam Satan. He would return to Paramount and bounce back in a big way with the box-office smash Sign of the Cross in 1932.

The marriage of Bob Brooks (Reginald Denny) and his wife Angela (Kay Johnson) is in big trouble. Bob has been playing around. We get the feeling he’s been playing around quite a bit. His latest playmate is Trixie (Lillian Roth). He’s also been spending too much time with his charming but dissolute friend Jimmy Wade (Roland Young). When Bob and Jimmy get together there will be alcohol and girls involved.

Trixie is the last straw for Angela. Bob gets his marching orders.

But Angela doesn’t really want the marriage to end. And she realises that some of the accusations that Bob has hurled at her are true. She isn’t exactly a fun-loving girl. She’s a staid boring resectable housewife. She isn’t glamorous. And maybe she is a bit sexually cold. Maybe it isn’t surprising that Bob is bored with her.

She realises she has to do something. She doesn’t want to turn herself into a tramp like Trixie. She does however decide that she needs to be much more sexy, much more glamorous and much more exciting. She needs to be more like a mistress than a wife.

The perfect opportunity will be a masquerade ball that Jimmy Wade is throwing on board a zeppelin. Angela will put in an appearance, in the guise of Madam Satan. She makes quite an entrance.

The first half of the movie is a typical pre-code sophisticated sex comedy, and it’s very funny. The second half takes place entirely on board the zeppelin, and it’s totally mad and bizarre.

Jimmy’s party is definitely wild. The highlight is the auction. The six prettiest women take part in it. The men have to bid for them. The winning girl gets to be Belle of the Ball. The men get to dance with the women for whom they put in successful bids. Being the sort of party this is we can assume that as the evening progresses there will be more than dancing involved. Trixie has made it clear to Bob that she expects to be Belle of the Ball, no matter how much it costs him. Bob is OK with this, being totally under Trixie’s spell. At least he’s under her spell until the mysterious super-sexy Madam Satan turns up. Of course she is masked, so Bob has no idea he is being seduced by his own wife.

Then the storm hits and Madam Satan becomes a crazy disaster movie.

The visuals are what make this movie movie so memorable. The costumes worn by the women at the ball are insane. They’re wonderful, but insane.

The ball is like a Roman orgy on a zeppelin.

DeMille was fascinated by decadence, both ancient and modern. And it’s obvious he didn’t entirely disapprove of it. DeMille was no puritan. The theme of societal decadence pop up in lots of DeMille silent films and would be spectacularly showcased in Sign of the Cross and in his 1934 Cleopatra. The Jazz Age rich decadents partying while the storm approaches the zeppelin are the equivalents of the Romans indulging in orgies while Rome burns in Sign of the Cross. DeMille however was not especially interested in ensuring that those who gave themselves up to decadence were punished. DeMille’s specialty was appearing to be on the side of respectability while making it perfectly clear that he really sympathised with wicked fun-lovers.

Kay Johnson looks great as Madam Satan. Reginald Denny manages to be a charming likeable unfaithful husband. The movie is however dominated by the gloriously over-the-top performances of Roland Young and Lillian Roth.

DeMille made some seriously deranged and outrageous movies and this is visually at least the most outrageous of them all. Watching it is like an acid trip, but a good acid trip rather than a bad acid trip. This movie is a wild and delirious ride. Like the passengers on the zeppelin you might want to hold on tight to your parachute.

Madam Satan is very highly recommended.

Madam Satan is available on DVD in the Warner Archive series, with a very good transfer.

Bombshell (1933)

Bombshell (later retitled Blonde Bombshell) is a 1933 MGM pre-code comedy with Jean Harlow playing a Hollywood star who is a bit like - Jean Harlow. With some hints of other famous (and notorious) female movie stars including fairly obviously Clara Bow. In fact there’s a great deal of Clara Bow in the character played by Harlow. It’s not exactly an exposé of Hollywood sex and sin. It’s more a glorious lighthearted celebration of Hollywood decadence but with plenty of satirical swipes at the hypocrisy, phoneyness and insanity of Tinsel Town.

Harlow plays Lola Burns, currently the biggest star in Hollywood. To say that Lola’s life is crazy would be putting it mildly. Some the craziness is caused by her family - her boozy bombastic father (played by Frank Morgan) and her worthless alcoholic brother Junior (Ted Healy). Some is caused by her constant succession of boyfriends. Her latest paramour is an Italian nobleman, the Marquis Hugo di Binelli di Pisa (Ivan Lebedeff). Hugo is really just a jumped-up penniless gigolo but Lola has fallen for the phoney nobleman schtick. Some of the craziness is engineered by Lola’s publicist E.J. ‘Space’ Hanlon (Lee Tracy). And a lot of the craziness stems from Lola’s bewildering series of enthusiasms.

Lola didn’t get to the top in Hollywood by being an intellectual genius. She’s the archetypal ditzy blonde. But she’s sweet and she’s adorable.

Her current director Jim Brogan (Pat O’Brien) is in love with her and wants to marry her. Space Hanlon is in love with her and wants to marry her. Naturally each of them tries to sabotage the other’s romantic efforts.

Lola resents Space’s efforts to drum up publicity for her. She thinks that it’s always bad publicity. But Space understands that bad publicity is good publicity. That’s a concept Lola has never been able to grasp.

Lola’s latest enthusiasm is babies. She wants a baby. At least she wants to adopt a baby. Or at least she wants to take a baby home from the orphanage on 30 day approval.

Lola will have to be interviewed by two very respectable elderly ladies to determine her suitability as an adoptive mother. While the interview is being conducted her household naturally erupts into total chaos.

Harlow is in dazzling form. She’s sexy and she gets some risqué lines and this being a pre-code movie she doesn’t need to tone down her innate sexiness at all. She’s also extremely funny. This might not be her best movie but it’s definitely her funniest performance. And while Lola Burns is incredibly ditzy we never lose sight of the fact that she’s a nice girl and fundamentally good-natured. We don’t have to feel bad about laughing at her. There’s nothing mean-spirited about the way Lola Burns is portrayed.

We really want Lola to be happy and to find love.

I’ve always felt that a little bit of Lee Tracy goes a long way but surprisingly I really liked him in this movie. Space Hanlon is supposed to be a deplorable human being. Somehow Tracy makes him rather likeable - he has no morals and no ethics but this is Hollywood and he’s no worse than anyone else in that town and he really isn’t malicious. He just wants publicity for Lola, that’s his job and he’s good at it. And I have to admit that in Bombshell he’s funny.

The supporting cast is simply wonderful. Frank Morgan as Lola’s father, Una Merkel as her personal secretary, Louise Beavers as her maid and Leonard Carey as her hapless butler are the standouts but there’s not a bad performance in the film.

This is a very meta movie. At one point Lola is doing reshoots for one of her earlier movies, Red Dust. And Lola is referred to as the It Girl, which was of course the moniker applied to Clara Bow. It’s also very clear that in this movie Jean Harlow is an actress playing the part of an actress whose life is a performance. It gets quite postmodern at times. It’s obvious that Harlow understood all this - her performance is sly and clever.

When the mood switches to romance the romance with wealthy Boston blue-blood Gifford Middleton (Franchot Tone) plays out like a scene from a 1920s Hollywood romantic melodrama with Tone playing his rôle in a deliberately cornball way.

Being a pre-code movie the dialogue gets quite risqué at times. You never doubt for a moment that all these people have sex regularly and regard it as a normal part of life. And marriage is strictly optional. The movie isn’t attacking marriage or love. Lola wants love. And probably marriage. But it certainly doesn’t suggest that that has to mean devoting herself to baking and child-rearing.

The Warner Archive DVD is barebones but it’s a decent transfer. It would of course be nice to see an extras-laden Blu-Ray boxed set of Harlow’s superb pre-code movies but so far there’s no sign of that happening.

Bombshell is a delight from start to finish. It’s a grown-up movie and it’s a feelgood movie and it’s a very funny movie. Very highly recommended.

No Man of Her Own (1932)

No Man of Her Own is a 1932 comedy/romance starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. I went through a major phase of enthusiasm for pre-code movies some years back but it’s quite while since I’ve watched any. I’m intending to revisit the scandalous and wicked pre-code era and since I happen to own a copy of this movieI figured this would be a good starting point. I saw this movie so long ago that I had forgotten everything about it.

The movie opens with a high stakes card game. Babe Stewart (Clark Gable) has had a lucky night. Except that the way Babe plays cards luck has nothing to do with it. Babe and his cronies are card sharks and they’ve just fleeced another victim.

One of Babe’s cronies is Kay Everly (Dorothy Mackaill). She’s Babe’s girlfriend. At least she thought she was. Babe has just given her the bad news that she’s now his ex-girlfriend. Kay makes a fuss. This amuses Babe. He thought she knew the score. It’s not as if he’d ever told her he loved her. Babe picks up women and discards them but he is as he says a straight shooter when it comes to women. If they’re smart girls they know what the deal is right from the start. But Kay takes it rather badly when she finds herself in Dump City.

A cop named Collins (J. Farrell MacDonald) is making things hot for Babe and his pals. Babe figures it might be wise to stay out of New York for a while. He hops on a train and ends up in Glendale.

Glendale is a sleepy little town. Nothing ever happens there. It’s not all bad though. Babe does meet the local librarian, Connie Randall (Carole Lombard). Connie is your typical prim librarian. At least she appears to be prim and proper. In fact Connie is thoroughly bored with being prim and proper and she’s thoroughly bored with Glendale. Babe makes some very obvious advances to her in the library. She gives him the brush-off. Actually Connie thinks Babe is the most exciting man she’s ever met and she wants him but she thinks that playing hard to get would be her best tactic.

The closest thing Glendale offers to excitement is the dance out at Lake Inspiration. The locals think it’s pretty wild. Young people go there and do wicked things, like dancing.

Babe doesn’t think the dance will offer too much excitement but Connie will be there so naturally he makes sure he’s there as well. He thinks Connie might provide quite a bit of excitement. She’s clearly a girl with a bit of a wild adventurous side to her. One thing leads to another and they end up - married. They came to that decision in a sensible adult way. They tossed a coin. Heads they sleep together, tails they get married. Tails came up. And Babe never goes against the toss of a coin. It’s one of his superstitions.

So now he has a wife. And he has a problem. You see he’s told her a few little white lies. Actually he’s told her a bunch of whopping great huge lies. For one thing he’s told her he has a job. Of course Babe has never worked a day in his life. Now he’s going to have to pretend that he really does have a job.

The card-sharping is still going well and Connie proves to be an asset. She has no idea that the card games are crooked but she does know how to be the perfect charming hostess and having a sexy blonde around helps in getting the sheep to submit to being fleeced.

Inevitably the day comes when Connie figures it all out. That makes Babe’s situation really complicated. Also, inevitably, Babe figures out that he’s a lot more fond of Connie than he thought he was. He really doesn’t want to lose her.

This movie came at an interesting point in the careers of both Gable and Lombard. They were fast-rising stars but not yet the really major stars they would soon become. In fact Lombard has to share second billing with Dorothy Mackaill. This is, curiously enough, the only movie Gable and Lombard made together. Gable and Lombard are both terrific and they really steam things up when they’re onscreen together.

Dorothy Mackaill was a moderately big star during the pre-code era, after which her career came to an almost complete standstill. This happened to a number of stars. They just couldn’t make the transition to the strait-laced Production Code era. Her pre-code movies are worth checking out and I reviewed several during my last bout of pre-code fever - The Reckless Hour (1931), the breezy and charming Bright Lights (a backstage musical with romance and murder made in 1930) and the outrageously sleazy but wonderful Safe in Hell (1931). It’s well worth checking out any pre-code movie with Dorothy Mackaill. She doesn’t have a big part in No Man of Her Own but what she does she does well.

This is a pre-code movie so you might be wondering if we’re going to see Carole Lombard in her underwear. Have no fears. This movie does indeed include the obligatory pre-code underwear scene.

Pre-code movies take a bit of adjusting to. It’s not just the racy dialogue, the scenes of girls in their underwear, the occasional glimpses of nudity. It’s not just the absence of overt moralising. The whole tone is different. But there’s more to it than that. They tend to be structurally different compared to Production Code era movies. The Production Code forced writers to adhere to very rigid formulas. Things had to be wrapped up neatly in the end in such a way as to leave the audience in no doubt that the virtuous always get rewarded and wrongdoers always get punished. In the pre-code era writers had a lot more narrative flexibility. As a result the narrative structures often seem a lot looser. And more unpredictable. The writers were not forced to be constantly underlining a moral message. They could attempt plot twists that would have been unthinkable after 1934 and they could leave room not just for moral ambiguity but narrative ambiguity.

There’s some of that in No Man of Her Own. The plot lacks the sense of inevitability that you get in Code era movies. And you genuinely have no idea what is going to happen to the characters. You can’t just assume that all the male wrongdoers will end up serving long prison terms and all the female wrongdoers will end up dead. Once you adjust to the totally different world of pre-code Hollywood it becomes rather exciting.

No Man of Her Own is a pretty good pre-code movie. Gable and Lombard are in top form. Babe is a loveable rogue. Connie is a good girl but she’s not boring about it and she doesn’t moralise. She’s fun. There’s plenty of entertainment value here. Highly recommended.

My copy of No Man of Her Own is an ancient DVD from the dawn of the DVD era and the transfer is passable. This movie is now available on DVD from Kino Lorber.

Spinout (1966)

Spinout, released in 1966, isn’t one of Elvis Presley’s most highly regarded movies and it is pretty lightweight. But lightweight isn’t necessarily bad, as we will see.

Mike McCoy (Elvis) races cars and sings rock’n’roll and does both fairly successfully. His life starts to get complicated when a beautiful girl causes him to run off the road. Then rich businessman Howard Foxhugh (Carl Betz) starts to use his money and influence to try to force Mike to do things he doesn’t want to do. Fitzhugh wants him to drive his new racing car and he wants him to sing at his daughter Cynthia’s birthday party.

Now it’s not that Mike has any real objection to driving new racing cars and singing for girls on their birthdays. But Mike is a free spirit. He only does things when he wants to do them. He hates being pushed around. He’s terrified of the prospect of living a conventional life and accepting responsibility. He’s particularly terrified of the idea of marriage.

There’s obviously going to be a battle of will between Mike and Fitzhugh and Fitzhugh’s daughter Cynthia is going to be involved as well. Cynthia by the way was the girl who caused him to crash his car.

Mike has another problem. He’s being stalked by crazy writer Diana St Clair. She writes books about snaring the perfect man and she’s decided that Mike would be absolutely the perfect husband. In fact he’d be the perfect husband for her.

Cynthia Foxhugh and Diana St Clair are not the only women making his life complicated. His cute but ditzy girl drummer Les (Deborah Walley) is hopelessly in love with him.

Fitzhugh and his daughter come up with all sorts of schemes to manipulate Mike. The romantic complications escalate. And there’s the big road race coming up.

There’s nothing more than that to the plot but the script has plenty of zing.

This is very much a feelgood movie. It has lots of songs (which are mostly quite good), it has cars, it has girls. Lots and lots of girls. There’s a bit of race car action, there’s romance and there’s humour. This is a genuinely funny movie and it’s funny in a way that is both witty and good-natured. The characters are a fine collection of eccentrics, and they’re likeable. Even Fitzhugh, who at first seems like he might be a villain, turns out to be a pretty nice guy.

The acting is excellent. The three main female characters, all determined to marry Mike, are all totally different women with sharply defined personalities which gives the actresses (Shelley Fabares as Cynthia, Diane McBain as Diana St Clair and Deborah Walley as Les) something to work with and they make the most of it. The supporting cast is good.

Elvis is in fine form, breezing through the picture with effortless charm and charisma and with a good script to help him he manages to be quite amusing.

Norman Taurog directed no less than nine of Elvis’s films and in this one he keeps things brisk and snappy. Theodore J. Flicker and George Kirgo wrote the screenplay. A year later Flicker would write and direct the superlative spy spoof/satire The President’s Analyst.

The Warner Brothers Region 4 DVD offers an excellent anamorphic transfer. There are no extras.

Spinout might be lightweight but it has every ingredient you could ask for in a light-hearted Elvis Presley romantic comedy, and every one of those ingredients works. It’s a must-see for Elvis fans and even if you’re not particularly an Elvis fan you might well find yourself thoroughly enjoying this picture. Maybe it’s not quite as good as Viva Las Vegas but it’s still very very good. Highly recommended.