How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

How to Marry a Millionaire was a major hit for 20th Century-Fox in 1953. It’s a frothy comedy with a star-studded cast.

Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable are three New York models who share an apartment and a vocation. Their vocation is quite simply to marry millionaires. Schatze Page (Bacall) is the brains of the outfit. She’s the one who came up with the idea that it was no good just hoping a millionaire would come along. You have to make it happen. You need to get organised. You have to be scientific about it.

The first step is securing a suitable base. Millionaires are unlikely to be interested in a girl who lives in a slum. Schatze has solved that problem. She’s rented a luxury apartment. Fortuitously the owner has had to flee the country to avoid the IRS. The three women between them can only just manage to pay the rent. When they need to buy food they sell an item of furniture. The fact that they don’t own the furniture is a minor detail.



Finding suitable millionaires isn’t that easy even when you’re highly organised but Schatze does eventually find a promising prospect in oil man J. D. Hanley (played by an ageing William Powell). He’s 30 years older than her but he does have 30 million dollars and that’s good enough for Schatze. Meanwhile she’s trying to avoid the attentions of Tom Brookman (Cameron Mitchell). She thinks he’s very cute but she’s convinced he pumps gas for a living and she sees no future for herself with a man who isn’t rich. What she doesn’t realise is that the slightly shabby Brookman is in fact a fabulously wealthy millionaire. He just doesn’t like wearing neckties, and he’d rather have a burger than go to a fancy restaurant.

Meanwhile Pola (Monroe) keeps running into the owner of the apartment who has returned to the US but is still on the run from the taxman. She doesn’t know who he is but she ends up taking a fateful flight to Kansas City with him, during which she discovers that some men most certainly will make passes at girls who wear glasses.



Loco (Grable) has found a millionaire but he’s married. And she’s found a guy she really likes but he’s penniless.

Of course you know that the girls are going to learn that love is more important than money. The slightness of the plot isn’t a problem. There’s plenty of potential here for sparkling comedy but somehow it just doesn’t quite come off. The problem is that Nunnally Johnson’s script is a little short on verbal fireworks. There’s plenty of comic talent here but the payoff isn’t up to expectations.

The weakness of the script doesn’t make much difference to Monroe since much of her humour in this film is physical. But Bacall and William Powell desperately need witty dialogue and they don’t get enough of it.



Powell in particular seems strangely flat. He still has the charm and the sparkle in his eye but he’s not given enough to work with.

Grable is also a bit of a weak link. She was probably a decade too old for the role and her character seems to be a bit superfluous.

With television having a devastating effect on the movie business Hollywood responded by putting their faith in big pictures. Fox went all out with this one. It’s in Technicolor, it’s in Cinemascope, and there’s even an extra touch of pomposity in the form of an overture. The intention was clearly to transform a lightweight comedy into a Major Cinematic Event. I personally quite enjoy 50s Hollywood excess so none of that bothers me very much and the movie does have that wonderful Technicolor lushness. And it evidently paid off at the box office.



It’s certainly not a bad movie. It has some amusing moments and it’s enjoyable enough. Its deficiencies only really show up when you compare it to a movie like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, released earlier in the same year. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has the energy and the wit and the style that How to Marry a Millionaire tries to achieve but falls a little short of.

Definitely worth seeing.

The Man I Love (1947)

The Man I Love is another film noir that turns out not to be really a film noir. It belongs more properly in the genre of the 1940s woman’s melodrama, but with a film noir sub-plot. And it’s a pretty good movie.

This 1947 Warner Brothers movie stars Ida Lupino, which always helps. Lupino is Petey Brown, a nightclub singer. Sometimes I think that all women in the 1940s were nightclub singers. Maybe I’ve watched too many 1940s movies. Petey seems to be the archetypal world-weary cynical tough girl but as we will find out she has a tender side.

In a moment of particular world-weariness Petey decides to return to LA to see her family. It’s getting close to Christmas and she’s temporarily without a man and she’s feeling a bit on the lonely side and she’s fond of her family.



Her sister Sally is holding things together there. Her husband is a GI who suffered a severe case of shell-shock during the war and he’s in an army mental hospital. The kid sister of the family is Ginny, a rather shy girl who’d rather babysit her neighbour’s kids than go out to nightclubs. And then there’s the one brother, Joey.

Joey is the big problem. He works for nightclub owner Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda). Joey thinks he’s a tough guy but unfortunately he’s not as tough as he thinks he is and he’s definitely not as smart as he thinks he is. He’s an accident waiting to happen. Petey goes to Nicky’s club to try to persuade him to stop leading Joey astray, but what she actually succeeds in doing is talking her way into a job there as a singer. Nicky is one of those guys who expects that if he employs a female singer she will also perform certain extracurricular duties of a personal nature. That’s OK by Petey. He’s a good-looking guy and she likes men and she especially likes men she’s not likely to get too involved with. Love ‘em and leave ‘em is her approach.



That’s all well and good but fate is about to step in. Joey gets involved in a fight and gets arrested. When she arrives at the police station to bail him out she finds that he’s already talked his way out by putting all the blame on the other guy. Now the other guy will get to spend New Year’s Eve in a cell. Petey knows quite well well that it was Joey who started the fight and her basic decency impels her to do something that will have major consequences. She bails the other guy out, even though he’s a complete stranger.

This stranger turns out to be a merchant seaman. When she runs into him again in a club they have a drink together and she makes a surprising discovering. This rather taciturn sailor is actually legendary jazz piano player San Thomas. Their mutual love of music draws them together and pretty soon they’re going around as a couple. But this guy is not like other guys she’s had. She really likes him. In fact she’s done something that is against all her principles. She’s fallen hopelessly in love with him.



San has a quality guaranteed to make him attractive to a woman like Petey. He’s a three-time loser who turned to the bottle when his musical career faltered and his first wife dumped him. He still hasn’t recovered from his marriage breakup. He’s emotionally damaged and vulnerable and afraid of being hurt. As it happens if there’s one thing Petey loves to do it’s rescue people. During the course of the movie she tries to rescue her brother, both sisters and her neighbours as well as San. It’s not that Petey is gullible. She’s actually pretty good at rescuing people and occasionally she even succeeds. She just can’t stand to see people destroy themselves.

It’s not long before brother Joey needs rescuing big-time. With Petey running around with her new boyfriend Nicky has been on the lookout for new sources of female companionship. He’s picked Gloria O’Connor. Gloria lives on the same floor of the apartment house where Petey’s family lives. Gloria is married with two kids but motherhood doesn’t seem to agree with her. Being married doesn’t seem to agree with her. What does agree with her is getting drunk and chasing good-looking rich men. When her husband finds out about this Nicky orders Joey to get Gloria away from the club to avoid a scene. Joey of course bungles this job disastrously and now he’s looking at the prospect of death row.



The plot might be a bit contrived but with Raoul Walsh in the director’s chair and Lupino in top form it works very well. Robert Alda is enjoyably smooth and sleazy as Nicky. Bruce Bennett is a little on the dull side as San but that kind of suits the character.

The movie of course belongs to Ida Lupino. Lupino had every qualification to be a great film noir femme fatale but oddly enough hardly every played such a role. On the other hand one thing she did supremely well was to play a basically decent woman and make her interesting, sexy and exciting. One slight disappointment is that her singing voice was dubbed by someone else. The next time she played a nightclub chanteuse (in Road House) she did her her own singing and she was fabulous. Not a fantastic voice, but a voice that reek of too many cigarettes, too much whiskey and too many men. In other words, the perfect film noir singing voice.



While it’s not exactly a hardboiled movie it does have some great lines, like Petey saying to San, “I might have known it was a dame. Nothing else makes a guy cave in like that does.” And Nicky telling Petey, “Grow up, baby. Stick with me in my gutter. We both talk the same language.”

It’s a movie that could very easily have become either sentimental or preachy but it never does. And the ending has a nicely bitter-sweet feel to it. Not a conventional happy ending, but definitely not tragic or hopeless. Hollywood in the 40s distrusted open endings, so full marks to Walsh and to Warner Brothers for daring to end the film this way. All in all a superbly made slightly noir-tinged romantic melodrama. Highly recommended. It’s available in the Warner Archive DVD-R series, and the picture quality is excellent.

Born To Be Bad (1934)

When one thinks of pre-code bad girls Loretta Young might not be the first name that springs to mind, especially given her later squeaky clean image, but she demonstrated in Born To Be Bad that she could be a convincing (if rather sympathetic) bad girl. In Born To Be Bad she’s just all bad, and delightfully so.

Letty Strong (Loretta Young) is a single mother. Not divorced or widowed - she’s never been married. Yes, this is definitely a pre-code movie. The first we see of her is an encounter with the truant officer. Among an assortment of other offences her son Mickey has been skipping school. Letty makes a moving and impassioned, and successful, plea for one last chance for her errant offspring. After which the son (who is all of seven years old) congratulates her for her skill in conning the truant officer. It is clear that mother and son are willing partners in crime.



They have bigger ambitions than this though. When a milk truck hits the boy they see their chance. In an emotional court-room scene we see the kid bravely dealing with life as a cripple. There’s not a dry eye in the house, at least not until the counsel for the milk company produces some motion picture film of the poor little crippled boy running around the streets and happily roller-skating, all this a week after the accident.

Not only do Letty and son lose the case, the judge decides it’s time the kid was taken away from someone who is clearly an unfit mother. At this point Malcolm Trevor (Cary Grant), the owner of the milk company, steps in. He and his wife are childless and he offers to adopt young Mickey. He, being an optimistic sort of guy, believes Mickey is not yet irretrievably lost.



Letty is not taking this lying down. She comes up with various schemes to kidnap her son but Mickey is starting to like living with Trevor and his wife. They have lots of money (money being something young Mickey has a considerable respect for) and they’re fairly easy-going and indulgent.

Letty still has an ace up her sleeve however. If all else fails, she’ll simply seduce Mr Trevor and then blackmail him. She’s a very resourceful mother. It’s a good scheme, but a phony seduction can easily turn into a real one, especially when one both parties are as attractive as Loretta Young and Cary Grant.



Cary Grant rarely turned in a bad performance and he’s very good as Malcolm Trevor. He is however comprehensively overshadowed by Loretta Young’s sizzling performance. She’s funny, she’s wonderfully wicked, she’s gorgeous and glamorous and quite remarkably sexy. She also gets to wear some stunning and very slinky dresses - this is full-on 1930s glamour.

Jackie Kelk as Mickey is one of the better child actors. He’s obnoxious and conniving but he’s genuinely amusing. Marion Burns has the rather thankless role of the good wife as Mrs Trevor.



It’s a very short movie. The running time of just on an hour makes one suspect it may have been cut but in fact it seems to have simply been a very short movie to begin with.

The Region 4 DVD presentation is, unfortunately, rather poor. The picture is incredibly grainy and there are no extras. Of course any pre-code movie release on DVD is better than nothing and it’s a fun and slightly naughty romp that is certainly worth grabbing if you’re a fan of pre-code Hollywood. And it’s worth it for Loretta Young’s dynamite performance.

Wings of Danger (1952)

Wings of Danger was one of Hammer’s early 50s film noir titles. It’s definitely one of the lesser entries in the Hammer film noir cycle.

The idea of a film noir aviation thriller is promising enough. Richard Van Ness (known to his friends simply as Van and played by Zachary Scott) and Nick Talbot (Robert Beatty) are flyers with a very small airline. They’re fast friends although Van is somewhat disturbed by Nick’s irresponsibility. This comes to a head when Nick insists on taking off in atrocious weather to deliver a bunch of flowers to Alexia (Kay Kendall). Nick’s plane fails to arrive and the following day wreckage is found off the coast.



The inquest finds no suspicious circumstances but Van coms across evidence that Nick’s past was perhaps just a little on the shady side. And the airline owner may be equally shady.

Van is in love with Nick’s sister Avril. It’s not quite clear where Alexia fits in although it’s fairly obvious that she is a bit of a bad girl and she may also be involved in some of the dubious undertakings that NIck was mixed up with. There’s also a blackmail subplot.



It takes most of the film’s modest 73-minute running time for these various plot strands to start to come together. When they do connect the results are satisfactory enough but some viewers may not have the patience to stick around long enough to find out. And some plot elements seem rather undeveloped.

Terence Fisher directed but while the movie is fast-paced (as you expect from Fisher) it lacks a little in the area of dramatic tension compared to most of his films.



Hammer’s distribution deal with Lippert Films in the US required them to include a second-rank American star in their pictures. This was either someone whose career was in decline (like George Brent) or someone who had never quite made the grade as a major star but was still a well-known name and a recognisable face (like Lizabeth Scot or Dan Duryea). Either Hammer showed very good judgment in picking these actors or they were very lucky because most of these American imports gave pretty good performances. Zachary Scott kind of fits into both categories - he was one of those actors who looked for a while like being a big star but it didn’t happen and by 1952 he was certainly struggling. His performance is perfectly adequate here.



The British supporting cast is solid enough with Kay Kendall being the standout.

There are some nice shots of rather cool vintage aircraft although the flying angle isn’t developed quite as strongly as one might have hoped.

VCI’s DVD presentation, in their Hammer Film Noir series, is quite acceptable. Not a great movie but still worth a look.

Knight Without Armour (1937)

Knight Without Armour was one of the more lavish 1930s productions of the British film industry. The scale of the movie was spectacular and producer Alexander Korda imported Marlene Dietrich to star, for which she was paid a colossal salary (and she was worth every penny). The gamble paid off and the movie made money.

Dietrich is paired with Robert Donat, at that time one of Britain’s biggest stars, in what is a lovers on the run movie with a difference. It’s also a kind of espionage movie, although again an unconventional one.

The first half hour or so is spent establishing the background. Writer Frances Marion (who adapted James Hilton’s novel) and director Jacques Feyder do a find job of setting this up quit economically considering the considerable complexity of the plot.



Donat is Ainsley J. Fothergill, a rather inoffensive Englishman working as a translator and journalist in Czarist Russia in 1913. He is recruited by the British secret service. His task is to infiltrate the revolutionary underground in St Petersburg and report back to the British government on the seriousness of the threat posed by this movement. He has little success as a spy and is captured by the Secret Police and sent to Siberia.

Three years later the prisoners in Siberia are freed in the wake of the evolution. Fothergill has befriended a leading communist in prison, a man who becomes a powerful figure under the Bolshevik regime. As a result Fothergill finds himself appointed as a commissar. His first major task is to escort the beautiful Countess Alexandra Vladinoff to Petrograd for trial. She has to removed to Petrograd before the local peasants lynch her as a wicked aristocrat.



Fothergill has no intention of delivering the countess to the Cheka (the murderous Soviet secret police). Apart from the fact that he’s a decent fellow and would never do such a thing anyway he has fallen in love the countess (and she has fallen for him). The rest of the movie comprises their desperate attempts to stay one step ahead of the secret police whilst finding themselves caught in the middle of the Civil War and having to dodge both the White and Red Armies.

The brave new world of the Revolution has turned Russia into a butcher’s yard and created a nightmare world of chaos. The two unlikely lovers have the odds sacked against them but all they can do is to keep running.



Jacques Feyder and cinematographer Harry Stradling create a moody epic that is utterly enthralling. The visuals are stunning, with some great night scenes. Much of the action centres around trains, which are always good for both suspense and atmosphere. The psychological stress brought by civil war is neatly (and movingly) encapsulated by a memorable sequence at a railway station where the station master continues faithfully to carry out duties, signalling trains that never arrive and instructing non-existent passengers to board non-existent trains.

Another memorable scene occurs in the immediate aftermath of Revolution. The Countess wakes up and finds herself completely alone in her palace. She calls for the servants but no-one answers. In confusion she wanders out into the grounds and is still alone - until suddenly a horde of revolutionary peasants appears over the crest of a ridge and bears down upon her. But she is an aristocrat and bravely faces the mob.



While the Bolsheviks are depicted as the chief villains a civil war brutalises everybody and their White opponents are equally as enthusiastic in machine-gunning their political enemies whenever they are able to capture them.

Robert Donat was extremely ill during the filming (he suffered from very severe asthma which in the 1930s was practically untreatable) and could not have completed the film without Marlene Dietrich. She insisted that he not be replaced and her support and encourage got him through. Despite his health problem he gives (as always) a superb performance. Fothergill might in theory have been a spy but he has long ceased to care about politics, his only concerns being to survive and to ensure that the woman he loves survives.

Dietrich is at her best in what is a very sympathetic and vulnerable role. The chemistry between the two leads is terrific and their unlikely love seems completely believable.



This movie has apparently been released on DVD. I saw it on late-night Australian television. It was a decent enough print although I’m now tempted to get hold of the DVD.

A great love story with an epic sweep, and a beautifully filmed movie. Highly recommended.

The Naked City (1948)

The Naked City was one of the most influential crime movies in Hollywood history. Released in 1948 it more or less established the template for the police procedural. But is it a good movie? The answer to that, sadly, is no.

It’s also most definitely not a film noir although you’ll find it included on just about list of film noirs.

It’s a movie with a reputation that is based entirely on the way the material was handled rather than the actual plot. So we’ll get the plot out of the way first. At 1 am in New York a model named Jean Dexter is murdered. At first there are very few leads. There’s a middle-aged man called Henderson who appears to have been her lover (or perhaps more probably her sugar daddy). No trace of Henderson can be found. And there’s a guy named Frank Niles who certainly knew her. Everything Niles tells the police turns out to be a lie so despite having an apparently airtight alibi he becomes the focus of the investigation.



The movie than follows, in considerable detail, the painstaking process whereby the police finally track down the killer. There are no flights of inspiration involved - just lots of routine police work.

It was promoted as the first movie to be shot entirely on location with no studio shooting whatsoever. The claim is rather doubtful. There are several scenes that certainly look like studio interiors and there are a couple of fairly obvious process shots. Nonetheless it was filmed almost entirely on location in New York, and it was the first Hollywood movie that really made location shooting a big issue. The filming was fraught with problems - on several occasions the camera and camera operator had to be hidden in the back of a truck so as to avoid attracting crowds of curious onlookers.



The intention was to make a movie that would look like a documentary, so as well as shooting on location the decision was made not to use name actors (apart from the star Barry Fitzgerald). The actors were mostly either unknown at the time or actors who worked mainly on stage and who would therefore not be familiar to movie audiences. The idea was to give the impression that these were real people rather than actors.

It’s by no means necessarily a bad idea but in practice the results are disappointingly dull. What seemed innovative and fresh in 1948 now seems gimmicky and contrived. The acting is mostly terrible and has the effect of drawing attention to the artificiality of the production rather than making it seem more real. And Barry Fitzgerald may have been an Oscar-winning actor but he’s entirely wrong for the movie and his hammy performance is distracting.



Even more distracting is the voiceover narration by producer Mark Hellinger. It’s too intrusive and the attempts at sardonic humour quickly become tedious and annoying.

Director Jules Dassin does not (to my way of thinking) seem to have a clear idea of what he’s trying to achieve. The tone is jarringly uneven.

Dassin claimed that Universal re-edited the movie before its release and removed much of the political content. For that at least we can be thankful to Universal. Dassin always had a tendency to bludgeon the audience with his very simplistic political views.

It’s likely that most of what is good in this film is due to cinematographer William H. Daniels. There are some stunning outdoor sequences. There are also some impressive action sequences. Another claim that has been made for the film is that it was the first crime film to feature an extended chase sequence (in fact it feature two such sequences). It’s another dubious claim. Hitchcock was doing impressive chase sequences as early as 1935 (in The 39 Steps) and there's a memorable example in his 1942 movie Saboteur. Having said that, the chase scenes in The Naked City are extremely well done.



In fact the movie switches gears halfway through and the second half is somewhat stronger. Ironically this is mostly because the second half is closer to being a traditional crime thriller with elaborate visual set-pieces.

Anthony Mann's T-Men was made about the same time and is a much more successful attempt to give a pseudo-documentary feel to a crime thriller.

Madman’s Region 4 DVD looks terrific and includes a moderately interesting audio commentary but is shockingly overpriced.

The Naked City was certainly a highly influential movie and that’s really the only reason to see it.

Bhowani Junction (1956)

Bhowani Junction is a good example of classical Hollywood film-making in the declining days of the studio system, and a reminder that Hollywood in the 50s could still deliver the goods.

George Cukor directed this film about fractured identities and divided loyalties in India in the last days of the British Raj. The stars, Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner, both felt (with some justification) that MGM failed to take them seriously enough as actors and failed to give them opportunities to show what they could do. Bhowani Junction gives them the chance to do some real acting and they acquit themselves well.

Granger is Colonel Rodney Savage, a career British army officer struggling to do his duty without betraying his humanity. His assignment is a thankless one but he’s the kind of man who is always inclined to make the best of a bad job.



Gardner is Victoria Jones. She is also a British army officer, but her situation is very different. Her father was British, her mother Indian. The prospect of independence for India was a frightening one for Anglo-Indians who found themselves belonging nowhere and wanted by no-one. To the British they were an embarrassment while to many Indians they were an object of hatred.

Having always thought of herself as being essentially British she now tries to re-invent herself as an Indian. She had been expected to marry another Anglo-Indian, ambitious young railway official Patrick Taylor (Bill Travers) but now she is persuaded she should marry an Indian. That’s only one of many difficulties she faces. When a sleazy British officer tries to rape her she kills him, and agrees that the body should be hidden.



Colonel Savage is fully involved trying to keep the railways running and at the same time battling against both the moderate Congress Party who seek independence through passive resistance and communist terrorists who seek to achieve the same goal through violence. And at the same time he finds himself drawn to Victoria Jones. It takes him a while to admit to himself that his feelings for her go behind mere concern for a subordinate who has got herself into trouble. Without their really realising what is happening an emotional bond is forming that will develop into love. But can they possibly have any future together?

Almost all the characters in the movie are caught in some way. A situation is developing where the pressure to take sides is becoming inexorable but for many there is no easy choice. And almost all the characters in the movie are also being forced to examine their true identities, and again there is often no straightforward answer.



The movie tries to take a fairly even-handed approach. Some of the British are vicious and stupid while others are intelligent and compassionate. Some of the Indians are violent and ignorant while others are courageous and determined. Some of the Anglo-Indians are hopelessly deluded while others are doing their best to face the future. This even-handedness might annoy modern audiences who are accustomed to movies that show Europeans as always automatically in the wrong but Bhowani Junction is too intelligent a movie to make such simplistic judgments.

Stewart Granger gives a fine understated performance. He’s not a story-book noble hero but Colonel Savage is fundamentally a decent man doing his best. Victoria Jones however is the key character. Ava Gardner’s performance is crucial, and she does a superb job. Bil Travers is the weak link, tending to be rather too histrionic.



This was a big production for MGM with plenty of location shooting but it’s by no means movie that relies purely on spectacle. The writing, the directing and the acting of the two leads are all thoughtful and subtle. I caught this one on TCM but I’m tempted to grab it on DVD.