Cinemagraphe

Reviews of Classic Film, with artwork and news

LAST UPDATE February 2, 2025


Fast Review

Thirty Day Princess - 1934: This comedy stars Sylvia Sydney and has a script by Preston Sturges (and Frank Partos), and on top of that there's a young Cary Grant along with Edward Arnold, and yet somehow this is second rate for all concerned. Sydney sometimes has the energy and focus to pull the dialogue and screen performances up to a higher level, and Edward Arnold is in fine shouting mode more or less throughout, but Cary Grant is rather rough around the edges and the script doesn't help a lot. Elements that turn up in later Preston Sturges' films like Easy Living and The Lady Eve are much more perfunctory here, and in general the tale of a veteran newspaper publisher falling in love with a young woman masquerading as a princess (because the real one is quarantined with mumps) has a hard time gelling all the ideas together smoothly. There is good tricky screen writing here, though, and if you're familiar with the "twins" gag from Palm Beach Story, you get sort of the acorn version here and it is a real plus for a movie that often feels out of step with its own ideas. Maybe Thirty Day Princess is the sort of film that drove Sturges towards later directing his own films from his scripts. Sylvia Sydney is fine and the main thrust of the story is perfectly screwball, but somehow a lot of this movie is simply out of time with itself.


Review

Midnight - 1939: Poor people thrown into the world of the rich is a mainstay of screwball era comedies, and Midnight handles it funnily, gracefully and effectively. Claudette Colbert is a young and beautiful American in Europe trying to find a way to marry into a better income level, gets lucky with a payout from a rich mother wanting her to stay away from her infatuated son, and Colbert immediately takes the wad of cash to Monte Carlo and ... blows it all.

Now essentially penniless except for the shimmering expensive gown she's wearing, she ends up in the charitable graces of a Paris taxi cab driver (Don Ameche) who drives her around the dark streets as she looks for a job, payment from which she has promised the taxicab driver a rate double the meter.

Her emergency job search isn't working out and she bails on the taxi cab and starts walking in the rain with her last money used to buy a newspaper to put over her head. Through a series of bizarre happenstances she gets ensconced into a large evening party of the very wealthy, and while pretending to be one of them (her shiny dress is perfect camouflage) she hopes to settle into a soft chair and rest her weary feet while everyone is listening to a Chopin concert being performed for them by an exasperated pianist who is constantly being interrupted.

Instead, Colbert gets pulled into a smaller group of the wealthy who are bored with the music and want to play bridge elsewhere in the huge mansion. Colbert's bridge partner (Francis Lederer) starts making googly-eyes at her, something that frustrates fellow bridge-player Mary Astor (as Helene Flammarion) who has her eyes on Lederer, but John Barrymore (as Astor's husband Georges Flammarion) wants to encourage Lederer's staring because its pulling Lederer's attentions away from his wife.

Sensing Colbert's true financial state, Georges Flammarion secretly bankrolls a whole phony identity for Colbert as "Baroness Czerny," the title derived from the name of the taxi cab driver who was trying to rescue Colbert earlier.

Though Barrymore is acting the part of a faery Godfather, he has also cooked up a mission for Colbert: keep Lederer away from his wife. Meanwhile, Don Ameche (Tibor Czerny) is organizing all of the taxi cab drivers of Paris to search for the poor missing American girl who, as far as they know, is at the cold mercy of the Paris streets.

Midnight is a carefully paced and structured screwball comedy that, while it has many funny situations and characters, depends a lot on how Claudette Colbert can satirically twist the meaning of a phrase to mean something much more than the words contained in a sentence she is speaking, a talent the actress put to good use in earlier films of girls in jeopardy, like Capra's 1934 It Happened One Night.

Don Ameche as the boundlessly energetic taximan on a mission of mercy holds up the other half (well, more like 40%) of the film and is good at modulating into other characters as the script (by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Edwin Justus Mayer and Franz Schulz) ends up having him pretending to be a baron and then a lunatic in a French divorce court (with Monty Woolley as the presiding judge!).

Poor John Barrymore is on screen showing the signs of physical decay that would take his life a few years later, but he seems to effortlessly play out his mentoring role as a man determined to keep wife Mary Astor close by, even if it means puppeteering a crazy cover story that only gets crazier as it unfolds.

Midnight was released in March of 1939 and is the kind of film that easily fits into the category of both a classic screwball comedy but also a worthy title made in the greatest year of Hollywood production.


Hercules Against the Moon Men

Updated review: Hercules Against the Moon Men, 1964


The huge Los Angeles fire destroying famous Hollywood landmarksCNN News


Hollywood 2024: no original movies made the domestic top 10 box office list – 10 top-grossing US films were all sequels and prequelsTechspot


Doris Day Send Me No Flowers 1964

Send Me No Flowers - 1964: Rock Hudson is a high-achieving hypochondriac who mistakenly hears his doctor referring to someone with only a few weeks to live before "their ticker" gives out, and he nervously applies the diagnoses to himself.

More about Send Me No Flowers - 1964

Draculas Daughter 1936

Dracula's Daughter - 1936

Gloria Holden stars as the progeny of you-know-who and gives an interesting and sympathetic portrait of a very self-doubting vampire, giving us the grim haunted stoicism of Countess Marya Zaleska who has come to London to make sure her infamous father is truly dead as the story in Dracula's Daughter picks up immediately from the ending of the 1931 Dracula. She steals the body of the Count and then disposes of him in a thorough fashion that goes beyond even what Dr. Van Helsing (Edward van Sloan) might prescribe, he being inconveniently unavailable because the police have him locked up for Dracula's murder as he has happily confessed to putting a stake through the chest of Zaleska's pater familias ("I did humanity a service" he calmly tells the investigators who are not accepting any talk of Dracula's vampire activities).

What pulls this film more into the 20th century versus Todd Browning's earlier film which was bathed in an almost medieval atmosphere of dread is how daughter Zaleska becomes concerned about herself in a very 20th century way, seeking the help of London psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) who she heard claim that any obsession can be defeated with the proper approach to dealing with it. Zaleska's self awareness goes in a dramatically different direction than Bela Lugosi's over-confident vampire king who we can not imagine seeking the help or sympathy of anyone other than a loyal coffin-lid lifter like Renfield, and in this way Dracula's Daughter is radically different with the vampire being both the victim and the monster at the same time.

Otto Kruger gives us an efficient and somewhat jocular Dr. Garth who meets Zaleska at a London cocktail party, and as he talks about his work with psychological problems, he provides the example of alcoholism as obsession, with his treatment method being one in which he puts the patient and a bottle of liquor together in a room and makes the patient overcome their compulsion in a direct test of willpower. Garth is confident of this method, but he little realizes that when Countess Zaleska puts her eyes (with perhaps a small seed of infatuation) upon him he has literally become the bottle. Though she makes a brittle pretense of certainty that she can fight the driving hunger of her vampirism, her manservant ("Sandor" played by Irving Pichel) coldly claims the effort can only fail, and in a kind of Iago-like whispering campaign he predicts the outcome of Zaleska trying to deny her "true" nature as only ending in a bloodbath.

Dracula's Daughter is early enough in the Universal monster movie cycle that it retains the flavor of those early films where the transition from silent film to "talkie" is still evident. The dramatic forms of the stage—and in this case, script writing—shape a story that is ostensibly a horror film but also remarkably contains both a basic melodramatic subplot and a prototypical screwball comedy undertone at the same time. Kruger's sharp-witted doctor is regularly battling a wise-cracking secretary (Marguerite Churchill) with the two firing funny dialogue back and forth in a style that was the bread and butter of comedy films like Bringing Up Baby just two years later.

Film historians typically congratulate producer Val Lewton for introducing a strong psychological presence within the horror film genre with 1942's Cat People, but in actual fact it was more or less there from the start if you consider the likes of 1920's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The psychological processes of madmen and monsters were already being explored in the early Universal horror movies, though usually in a cruder way compared to the sleight-of-hand that Lewton and his directors would use a decade later, but the template of a sympathetic but damned female "monster" is strongly outlined in Dracula's Daughter and has more than a little similarity to the outlines of the struggle Simone Simon portrayed as the "cat woman" in Lewton's later Cat People film.


Classic Flix has a sale on with a flat rate shipping of $4.99 and reduced prices on a list of BluRays and DVDsClassicflix


Criterion announces Crossing Delancey on 4K Bluray for Feb 2025

Crossing Delancey 4K BluRay

The Criterion website talks about the many extras on the disk release including a "new program on the making of the film featuring actors Amy Irving and Peter Riegert and screenwriter Susan Sandler."

Here's our 2016 review of the film Crossing Delancey.


Review: The Hangman - 1959

The Hangman 1959

Robert Taylor plays an embittered and jaded Deputy United States Marshal who is called "the Hangman" because of his success rate in bringing in escaped criminals. He has one final job to do before retirement, catching the last living member (named Johnny Butterfield) of a murderous gang that wiped out a Wells Fargo stage coach. The Marshal is faced with two obstacles: he doesn't know what the fleeing criminal looks like, and everyone he tries to enlist to help him identify the man refuses to do so. He ends up relying on the criminal's former girlfriend (Tina Louise) to help with the identification. More about The Hangman 1959



Teri Garr has died 1944–2024

The offbeat, quirky comic actor of Young Frankenstein and Tootsie has diedAssociated Press MSN

Teri Garr was an original who fought typecasting to the endYahoo

Mel Brooks talks about Garr's "German accent" that got her a role for Young Frankenstein.MSN Deadline

A Comedic Genius ahead of her timeRolling Stone MSN


Bride of Frankenstein

Updated review of the 1935 film directed by James Whale.


See this page on the coming release of the Our Gang/Little Rascals silent short films on Blu Ray – Classicflix.com

Years in the making, with over 800 man-hours of restoration invested in the shorts in this collection, ClassicFlix presents The Little Rascals - The Restored Silents, Volume 1 this November 19th. Volume 1 showcases the franchise in its infancy, including Our Gang (1922)—the premiere short in the series put together from eight different sources and now in its most complete form..."



Mitzi Gaynor has died - 1931-2024

Mitzi Gaynor

South Pacific star Mitzi Gaynor dies at 93UPI Press

Legendary South Pacific Actress has diedPeople Magazine

Chicago Tribune 2013 Mitzi Gaynor’s interviewChicago Tribune

"Showbiz Dynamo" Mitzi GaynorHollywood Reporter

Mitzi Gaynor's top ten moviesSoap Central

The career of Mitzi gaynorSoap Central


Kiss Me, Deadly - 1955

Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me, Deadly can be a bit jarring if you're not prepared for how this story (courtesy of director Robert Alldrich) is told and if you're conditioned to seeing the other, more ethical 1950's noir investigators of filmdom. Here, the private detective (played by Ralph Meeker) doggedly pursues a "thread that becomes a string that becomes a rope."

More about Kiss Me, Deadly - 1955


Raymie 1960

Raymie – 1960

Though a children's film about the difficulties facing a young boy, Raymie also has a background story about the adults who congregate on a fishing pier, day after day, where they (and the young boy) deal with the circumstances of their lives. Features John Agar and Julie Adams as adults with an on-and-off-again relationship and David Ladd as the boy determined to catch an impossible fish. More about Raymie - 1964.


Archives

Archives

Shopping Page

Belief-Code, Body Code and T3 Therapy? See Belief Code Therapy.com