Theodora Goes Wild (1938)

There are several problems with Columbia’s 1938 screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild. Firstly, it isn’t very screwball. Secondly, it isn’t very funny. But worst of all, it’s not merely unfunny and dull, it’s actively annoying.

Theodora Lynn (Irene Dunne) lives in a small town and is a pillar of the local community. She plays the organ in the local church and teaches Sunday School. She is also, unbeknownst to the townsfolk, the author of a scandalous novel. And it’s not just a scandalous novel, but a huge bestseller as well. She has managed to keep her real identity a secret until her publisher persuades her to go out on the town during a visit to New York. She makes the acquaintance of a rich young artist named Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas). Unfortunately he follows her home and proceeds to harass her unmercifully.



He taunts her about her small town life and tries to convince her that she needs to break away and become a free spirit, a rebel. Like he is. He proceeds to create a major scandal in the town. He’s a thoroughly unpleasant and irritating young man so naturally Theodora falls madly in love with him. And then discovers he’s not a free spirit after all. He’s trapped in a loveless marriage. He cannot get a divorce because his father holds a political office and dreads the thought of scandal.

Now Theodora turns the tables on him, following him back to New York and disrupting his life and creating scenes and being generally troublesome.



Now at this point you might be thinking that this doesn’t really sound like a zany fun-filled screwball comedy, and you’d be dead right. In fact it’s a mean-spirited and miserable movie. It even resorts to animal cruelty to try to get cheap laughs, and that pretty much sums up the type of movie this is.

A year later Irene Dunne gave a wonderful performance in another Columbia screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, but that one was a real screwball comedy and she had a great co-star in Cary Grant and in Leo McCarey a director who thoroughly understood comedy. In Theodora Goes Wild her performance is patchy at best. The fact that she falls for a creep like Michael makes it difficult to feel any sympathy for her character.



Melvyn Douglas on the other hand is thoroughly and comprehensively obnoxious as Michael. Generally speaking I have no problems with Douglas as an actor. The blame for his annoying performance here can therefore largely be laid at the feet of director Richard Boleslawski and screenwriter Sidney Buchman. Buchman must accept much of the blame for the film in general since his script is conspicuously lacking in actual humour.

The movie drags along for 94 minutes and let me tell you it was a very very long 94 minutes.



Columbia have released this movie in their Icons of Screwball Comedy series. This DVD series comprises two four-movie sets and is to be welcomed although I certainly hope the other movies are of a higher standard than this one.

Cry of the City (1948)

Cry of the City is a superb example of late 40s film noir from 20th Century-Fox, enlivened by some terrific performances and directed by one of the masters of the noir style, Robert Siodmak.

The story is not strikingly original. Two kids, childhood friends, grow up in New York’s Little Italy. Martin Rome (Richard Conte) is seduced by the glamour of crime and fast living; his friend Candella (Victor Mature) becomes a cop. It’s a story Hollywood loved - two kids from the same background whose fates are very different but indissolubly linked. Now Rome is in hospital in a critical condition with four bullets in him after killing a policeman in a bungled robbery. He’s so far gone he receives the last rites. If he lives it won’t make any difference because he’ll get the electric chair anyway. We naturally expect that we’re going to get a classic noir flashback to explain how Martin ended up in this situation.



But that’s not what happens. This is not the end of the story, it’s just the beginning. Martin pulls through and finds himself in the prison hospital. While he lay apparently dying he was visited by a crooked lawyer who tried to get him to confess to a jewel robbery, a robbery that ended in a vicious murder, a crime that has been attributed to another criminal who just happens to be the shady lawyer’s client. He’s also visited by a young woman, apparently his girlfriend.

This jewel robbery is a major current case. The jewels have not been recovered and only one of the robbers was ever caught. Detective-Lieutenant Candella and his partner Lieutenant Collins (Fred Clark) start to think that maybe there’s something in the lawyer’s story, and maybe if they can find the girl they can find the real answers.



Martin breaks out of prison, determined to find his girl before the police do. He’s been a notorious womaniser but this time it’s different. He really loves her. He loves her almost as much as he loves himself, which is really saying something. Martin is still in a bad way, his wounds have opened up again and he can barely stay on his feet. He gets help from an old girlfriend, Brenda (Shelley Winters), and a shady doctor but he’s still not much more than a walking corpse. But he’s still capable of killing people. His latest murder has left him in possession of the much sought-after missing jewels and he’s closing in on the person who really committed the jewel robbery, hoping to do a deal - to exchange the jewels for money and a ticket out of the country.

Martin is also being assisted by his kid brother Tony who idolises him. This is one of the major things driving Lieutenant Candella - he’s known the Rome family all his life, he’s very fond of the patents and he can’t stand the thought that Tony is going to end up just like Martin. Candella is a cop who combines toughness with sensitivity and the thought that one day he’ll be watching Tony take the walk to the electric chair upsets him greatly.



The support cast is extremely strong. Shelley Winters’ role is all too brief but she’s excellent. Hope Emerson is extraordinary as one of the most villainous women in film noir.

Interestingly enough it was originally intended that Victor Mature would play Martin Rome. There are those who think this would have produced a better picture, Mature being a more likeable actor than Conte and therefore more likely to make us care about the fate of this killer on the run. I’m not convinced by this. Richard Conte makes Martin a glamorous but rather unsympathetic character. He’s incapable of feeling any real emotions. He uses people and he kills people without hesitation. This actually makes the film better balanced. In a movie such as this you can’t help feeling some sympathy for the hunted criminal but by making Martin so cold-blooded Conte ensures that we also empathise with the dedicated cop who’s hunting him.



Victor Mature’s finely judged performance perfectly complements Conte’s. Candella is a good cop and a good man, but without being dull or sanctimonious. It’s the less glamorous role but Mature shows his quality as an actor by making the most of it. Mature has been criminally underrated as an actor. If you put him in a costume epic he’d give you an outrageously camp performance, because that what’s he thought (no doubt correctly) was expected. But if you put him in a role that required real acting he’d deliver the goods.

In fact everything about this movie is perfectly judged. The cinematography is in the classic noir style and is suitably moody and atmospheric. Robert Siodmak’s direction is faultless. The acting is superb. Everything works just as it should. This is 1940s Hollywood film-making at its best.



Strangely enough although Fox have released most of their notable film noir titles from this era on Region 1 DVD Cry of the City has not been included, a bizarre omission. It is however available nearly everywhere else. Aztec’s Region 4 DVD lacks extras but it’s a nice transfer and is definitely recommended.

Stray Dog (1949)

Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 Stray Dog (Nora inu) is a crime film that is often seen as an example of Japanese film noir. It certainly has many affinities to film noir and Kurosawa was almost certainly influenced by American film noir but there are some crucial differences as we’ll see.

Murakami (Toshirô Mifune) is a rookie homicide detective. His inexperience causes him to fall victim to a pickpocket on a bus, and his gun is stolen. He assumes he will be dismissed from the force for such an egregious failure but his chief has no time for that kind of self-pity and tells Murakami to get on with his job.



Murakami becomes obsessed by the necessity of getting his gun back. The stolen gun will have fatal consequences and will also drive the plot. The gun is used in an armed robbery and Murakami is convinced that it’s only a matter if time before it’s used in a murder, and his sense of guilt takes him to the edge of self-destruction.

He is teamed with an older detective, Sato. This then becomes the classic cop movie combination of the wise old detective teaching the green youngster the ropes. The gun itself becomes merely a symbol, an example of the workings of fate but Kurosawa is mostly interested in how we respond to fate.



Murakami’s quest for his lost firearm will take him on a journey into the seedy depths of the world of petty crime, a world of casual violence and nihilism. His fate becomes entwined with that of the man who now has his gun, a man who seems set on destroying himself and others with a vicious disregard consequences.

Like American noirs Stray Dog deals with the difficult adjustment to the new post-war world. But Kurosawa has little sympathy for those who use the war as an alibi for failure and despair.



There are major differences compared to American noir (or French noir for that matter). The idea of wallowing in victimhood is explicitly rejected. Yusa and Murakami have both suffered from the blows of fate but the most important line of dialogue in the movie occurs when Murakami’s boss tells him that bad luck can be an opportunity or it can destroy you. What is crucial here is that it doesn’t have to destroy you. It only destroys you if you choose to allow that to happen.

The noir world of chaos and self-pity can be defeated. If Murakami chooses the path of duty, if he accepts that as a cop he has a job to do and gets on with it he will survive. Survival is a choice, a message you can’t imagine finding in an American or a French noir. Kurosawa’s movie is dark but there’s a fundamental optimism that is antithetical to the universe of film noir. Family and duty can bring salvation, another message you don’t normally associate with film noir.



While Murakami feels some sympathy for the criminal the movie in general presents criminals as rabid dogs who must be destroyed. The violent world of the criminal is not glamorous, it is a squalid and pathetic world of losers.

The very fact that Kurosawa takes elements of film noir and puts them to his own uses makes this a particularly interesting film. This is one of Kurosawa’s less known movies but it’s arguably one of his best. Recommended.

Dance, Fools, Dance (1931)

You could be forgiven for assuming that the 1931 MGM release Dance, Fools, Dance is another of Joan Crawford’s early flapper comedies, something along the lines of Our Modern Maidens (1929). In fact this is a gangster movie. She does start the movie as a flapper however.

Bonnie Jordan (Crawford) and her brother Rodney (William Bakewell) are the offspring of a fabulously wealthy industrialist. They have been indulged for the whole of their young lives, lives that have been a constant search for pleasure, revolving around yachts, parties and bootleg liquor. Then comes the Wall Street Crash. It’s such a shock that their father promptly drops dead of a heart attack. His fortune had been completely wiped out and Bonnie and Rodney are now penniless.

What are they to do now? Bonnie suggests that the best option might be to get jobs but Rodney has no intention of demeaning himself by performing useful work. Bonnie finds employment as a cub reporter on a major daily newspaper; Rodney goes to work for notorious bootlegger Jake Luva (Clark Gable). He assumes that no actual work will be required - he will simply use his society connections to find more customers for Jake’s bootleg hooch.

He soon finds out that he will be required to do rather more than this, and that working for a gangster can be rather unpleasant. Especially when he finds himself in the middle of a major gangland killing.

Bonnie finds that being a cub reporter mostly involves covering things like poultry shows. She gets her big break in tragic circumstances. The paper’s star reporter is gunned down by Jake Luva’s goons. This reporter had taken Bonnie under his wing and she takes his murder rather personally. She jumps at the chance offered to her by her editor to undertake a very dangerous assignment - to infiltrate Jake Luva’s organisation.

She gets a job as a dancer at one of Luva’s night-clubs and soon catches the eye of the mobster. The facts she uncovers will come as a devastating blow to her.

The movie can be seen as a transitional vehicle for Crawford. She plays the kind of wise-cracking hedonistic flapper that had become her specialty but Bonnie is a flapper who grows up and takes on adult responsibilities. This grown-up Bonnie is a resourceful, brave and determined woman and points the way forward to the roles she would play in her later career. We get to see her dance (and she’s a remarkably energetic and sexy dancer) and we get to see her do some serious acting. She completely dominates the movie, as she was to do time and time again in her subsequent career. It’s a fine performance.

Clark Gable was still playing stereotyped gangster roles at this stage of his career but his star quality is already evident. The supporting players are generally solid. There are a few definite pre-code moments, such as Bonnie suggesting to her boyfriend a kind of trial marriage.

MGM is not the studio that comes to mind when you think of early 30s gangster movies but they did make a few very interesting forays into the genre (Beast of the City being a particularly interesting example).

Dance, Fools, Dance is very much a melodrama but it has some very dark moments and on the whole it’s a fairly effective gangster flick with the addition of Crawford’s feisty girl reporter making it part of the newspaper movie genre as well.

This is one of the best of Crawford’s early movies. It’s been issued in the Warner Archive DVD-R series, and it’s a pretty good print. Definitely worth a purchase.

Lonely Wives (1931)

Lonely Wives is a movie that I discovered in one of those Mill Creek sets of public domain movies but don’t be put off by that. It’s actually a rather outrageous little pre-code sex farce.

Edward Everett Horton is a familiar face to classic movie fans but he’s mostly known for his comic relief supporting performances. Lonely Wives gave him a rare opportunity for a starring role and it’s an opportunity he grabs with both hands.

Horton plays two roles, and this being classic farce much of the humour will come from the resulting instances of mistaken identity.



Richard ‘Dickie’ Smith (Horton) is a successful lawyer who is the soul of probity and clean living, devoted to his work. Until 8 o’clock each evening. At that hour we’re told he “blooms.” His mother-in-law Mrs Mantel tries to keep him on a short leash, especially at the moment when his wife is out of town. When he “blooms” he develops a taste for feminine company, not always of the most respectable kind.

The arrival of a new secretary will be the first temptation put in his way. Minty Minter (Patsy Ruth Miller) is the sort of girl that Smith’s mother-in-law strongly disapproves of. She particularly disapproves of the way Minty walks. When we see Minty walking we can see that she has a point. It’s the sort of walk that is conducive to unclean thoughts.



Minty sees an opportunity for her friend Diane O’Dare (Laura La Plante) to get the divorce she’s after, probably at no cost. Well no financial cost anyway. When Richard Smith blooms he is unlikely to be able to resist Diane’s charms. Diane wants a divorce because her husband goes out most evenings. If he went out every evening she wouldn’t be concerned, but it’s the uncertainty she objects to. Such unpredictability can be inconvenient for a high-spirited girl like Diane. It can disrupt her social life.

With the chance of having a night on the town with not one but two attractive young ladies Smith is understandably anxious to slip way for the evening. But how to evade that mother-in-law? Then a piece of good fortune comes his way. A vaudeville entertainer known as Felix the Great Zero, whose act is based on impersonations of prominent people, wants to incorporate an impersonation of Smith into his act. This entertainer (also played by Horton) does in fact bear a striking resemblance to the lawyer. Smith agrees to Felix’s proposal on the condition that Felix take his place in his home that evening, so that his mother-in-law won’t realise he’s slipped out.



Of course it all soon becomes hopelessly complicated, especially when Smith’s wife arrives home unexpectedly while Felix’s wife also become involved (and unfortunately for Smith he isn’t aware of the identity of Felix’s wife). Everyone seems to be getting mixed up with the wrong husband or the wrong wife. Most confused of all is Smith’s butler, whose permanent state of intoxication does nothing to clarify matters.

Maude Eburne as Mrs Mantel is extremely irritating but the other supporting players are generally very good. What really matters is that Edward Everett Horton is in scintillating form and is good enough to make this a delightful entertainment.



The dialogue is exceptionally risque. There’s scarcely a line or a situation that doesn’t have a sexual connotation. Most importantly, it’s both naughty and funny. It’s all great fun.

Print quality is more or less what you expect from Mill Creek but it’s quite watchable.

Decoy (1946)

Decoy is an outrageous film noir potboiler that truly has to be seen to be believed.

It has the basic noir trademarks - the flashback, the femme fatale, the basically decent hero led astray by the aforementioned femme fatale, the atmosphere of seediness and despair. What it does with those ingredients is something else, something that explodes the boundaries of the genre. The result is not a great movie, not even a particularly good movie by conventional standards, but certainly a memorable one.

Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) has a problem. Her boyfriend is bank robber Frank Olins. He has $400,000 from his last robbery stashed away somewhere but he won’t tell anyone where. And he’s on Death Row after killing a bank guard. He wanted the money so they could have a life together but if he’s going to die he doesn’t want to take the chance that someone else will get his money and his girl. So he’s decided the whereabouts of the loot will die with him.



Margot and her other boyfriend, Jim Vincent, need to come up with a plan. The traditional solution would be to try to break him out of prison but they have a much better scheme than that. They’ve discovered there’s a drug called Methylene Blue that is an antidote to cyanide poisoning. And cyanide is the gas used in executions in the state of California. All they need to do is to get hold of Frank’s body after the execution, administer the antidote and then fool the revived bank robber into telling them where the money is.

To do this they’ll need the assistance of the prison doctor, Dr Lloyd Craig. That shouldn’t be a problem. He’s a man, and Margot can get any man dancing to her tune. So the plan seems fool-proof. Trouble is, Frank is a very suspicious guy so all he’ll agree to do is to draw her a map, and then give her half the map while keeping the other half himself. Frank is right to be suspicious but he has no idea just how ruthless Margot is. She’s not into the concept of sharing. Not at all. And if people get in her way she kills them.



OK, so the first thing you’re probably thinking is, hang on, an antidote to cyanide poisoning is all very well but if the guy has been executed then he’s dead. This has got to be a real heavy-duty antidote if it works on dead people. This would be a flaw in most films but this one solves the problem by simply ignoring it. Everyone in the movie simply takes it for granted that reviving dead people is no big deal. It’s a breath-taking piece of effrontery but somehow this movie gets away with it.

The outrageousness of this movie doesn’t stop there. By the standards of Hollywood in 1946 this is a seriously violent, seriously sleazy film. How they managed to get so much casual violence past the Production Code Authority remains a mystery. An even bigger mystery is how they managed to get away with one particular scene, one of the most vicious and sadistic slayings you’ll see in any movie.




Margot is not just a femme fatale. She is the ultimate femme fatale. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Jean Gillie’s performance is extraordinary in its intensity. It’s not great acting but you certainly won’t forget it in a hurry.

Mind you, none of the characters have any redeeming qualities. Even the doctor isn’t really troubled by his conscience until he figures out he’s been double-crossed. The tone of this movie is unremittingly cynical.



For a Monogram production it’s reasonably professional. It doesn’t have the technical sloppiness you often associate with Poverty Row productions. It looks cheap but not excessively so and the cheapness adds effectively to the dinginess and atmosphere of moral squalor.

There’s a delightfully hysterical tone to this sordid tale. It’s a bizarre viewing experience but one not to be missed.



The Warner Home Video DVD looks sensational and includes a very very brief documentary on the film plus a moderately informative commentary track.

Stagecoach (1939)

In 1939 the western had been a staple of Hollywood filmmaking for two decades but it was a genre that was not taken very seriously. Westerns were low-budget potboilers cranked out mainly by Poverty Row studios. John Ford’s Stagecoach changed all that. It ushered in the epic western, westerns made as A-pictures featuring major stars and made by the top talents at the big studios.

It’s worth noting that it was not the only significant western to appear in 1939. Cecil B. DeMoIle's Union Pacific would also adopt an epic approach, and while George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again took a satirical view of the genre it was definitely a major step in the development of the western as something more than just horse operas.



But it was Stagecoach that defined the new style of western. John Ford had discovered two essential ingredients that were to become trademarks of his westerns and major icons of the genre - Monument Valley as the quintessential western location and John Wayne as the quintessential western star.

The plot is simple enough. A stagecoach has to run the gauntlet of hostile Apaches while the nine passengers and crew slowly reveal the depth, or in some cases the lack of depth, of their characters. One of the passengers is the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) and the journey has particular significance for him. He has broken out of prison and when he reaches his destination he will have to confront the three brothers who killed his father and his own brother. Since they’re tough hombres and he’s really just a goodnatured cowboy the probability is that this is for him a journey to his own death. At least the assumption of everyone else is that he hasn’t got a chance.



If you focus on the story then you could easily conclude that Stagecoach is really nothing special. It’s somewhat corny, it’s sentimental, the characters are stock types, the social commentary is heavy-handed and obvious (the social outcasts turn out to be more virtuous than the respectable types). None of that matters. What matters is Ford’s very serious approach to this material. He treats it as the stuff of epic. He gives it a grandeur that makes it work on that level, that forces the viewer to take it as seriously as the director did.

Ford had a good cast to work with and he got the best from them. While the characters may have been stock types that in some ways adds to the epic feel. We don’t expect the heroes of myth to be fully rounded characters. That would get in the way of the myth. And the performances are memorable. There’s a chilling moment when the aristocratic southern gambler played by John Carradine shows that he really does takes his code of chivalry as seriously as he claims to, and while we’re horrified by what he’s about to do it has to be admitted that it forces us to take the character as seriously as he takes himself.



Ford was a Catholic and the theme of redemption is central to the film. And there are three characters in particular need of redemption. There’s the alcoholic doctor (a role that won Thomas Mitchell an Oscar). Secondly there’s the whore, played by Claire Trevor, who manages to persuade us to believe she really is a whore with a heart of gold.

And then there’s the Ringo Kid. This is the role that made John Wayne a star. Prior to this he was regarded as a very lightweight B-western actor. This movie was not just the making of him as a star, but as an actor as well. Ford believed in him and cast him over the strong objections of producer Walter Wanger, and Wayne repaid the director’s faith handsomely. I find myself admiring John Wayne as an actor more and more. In our modern age which regards serious acting as something that should look as tortured and as difficult as possible the quiet authority of Wayne may not seem like real acting but in fact it’s far more effective than the contrived histrionics of today’s stars.



In this film Ford also provided an object lesson in how to shoot an action sequence. The extended chase sequence with the stagecoach being pursued by an Apache war party is a template for just about every similar scene in every subsequent movie but while it’s been copied countless times it’s rarely been surpassed. Ford also provides a lesson in pacing and structure, with character-driven scenes and action scenes in perfect balance. Orson Welles believed that you could learn everything you needed to know about filmmaking from watching Stagecoach and he was probably right.

The first of John Ford’s great westerns, a movie with a huge reputation that lives up to that reputation.