FilmFanatic.org

Synopsis:
The shy personal assistant (Joan Fontaine) of a brash society lady (Florence Bates) falls in love with a wealthy widower (Laurence Olivier) whose deceased wife, Rebecca, continues to haunt the memories of those she left behind.

Genres, Themes, Actors, and Directors:

• George Sanders Films
• Hitchcock Films
• Joan Fontaine Films
• Judith Anderson Films
• Laurence Olivier Films
• Widows and Widowers

Response to Peary’s Review:
The unnamed heroine in Daphne DuMaurier’s best-selling gothic romance novel — simply referred to as “the second Mrs. DeWinter” — represents the fulfillment of most girls’ dreams: a mousy, self-effacing young woman in an unsatisfying job, she is literally swept off her feet by a handsome millionaire, and taken to live in a gorgeous, postcard-perfect mansion in the English countryside. The fairy tale quickly turns sour, however, once the new Mrs. DeWinter (played here by Joan Fontaine in her “captivating” leading-role debut) encounters the household’s domineering housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) — a “witch in black” — and realizes that her position as lady of the house will be continuously overshadowed by a “ghost” (the memory of her husband’s larger-than-life former wife, Rebecca). The tautly scripted three-act narrative of this Oscar-winning “best picture” neatly takes us through Fontaine’s whirlwind romance with Mr. DeWinter (Laurence Olivier), her insecurity as mistress of a household haunted by its troubled past, and a police investigation in which numerous secrets are revealed and Fontaine’s loyalty to her husband is severely tested.

If Rebecca isn’t “great Hitchcock” (it doesn’t stand among his very best work), it’s still fine entertainment. The performances throughout are uniformly excellent, with Olivier appropriately haunted and restrained as Fontaine’s brooding husband, and Fontaine perfectly portraying the brew of conflicted emotions felt by her character, who remains both nervously submissive and incredulous about her position until a pivotal shift in the plot later on (a point at which Peary argues the film “loses its power”, but I disagree). The supporting cast is fine as well, with Anderson delivering the performance of her lifetime as disturbed Mrs. Danvers (Peary refers to her portrayal as “chilling” and “soulless”); George Sanders briefly stealing the scenery in a characteristically smarmy role later in the film; and Florence Bates nicely capturing the essence of an overbearing society woman who borders on caricature but just manages to avoid this fate (listen to her conflicted reaction upon hearing about her assistant’s sudden engagement to Mr. DeWinter). A combination of appropriately spooky sets (Manderlay is a truly haunted house), George Barnes’ Oscar-winning “atmospheric cinematography”, “Franz Waxman’s moody score”, and “the clever way Hitchcock uses space so that Fontaine seems dominated by her surroundings” contribute to the film’s “amazing tension”, and turn it into a suspenseful mystery we’re eager to keep watching.

Redeeming Qualities and Moments:

• Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs. DeWinter (nominated by Peary as Best Actress of the Year in his Alternate Oscars book)
  
• Laurence Olivier as Mr. DeWinter
  
• Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers
  
• George Sanders as Jack Favell
  
• Florence Bates as Mrs. Van Hopper
  
• Impressive sets
  
• George Barnes’ cinematography
  
• Franz Waxman’s score

Must See?
Yes, as Hitchcock’s only Oscar-winning picture (and one of only a few, shamefully, to even have been nominated).

Categories

• Important Director
• Oscar Winner or Nominee

(Listed in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die)

Links:

• IMDb entry
• NY Times Original Review
• Combustible Celluloid Review
• DVD Savant Review
• ReelViews Review
• Digitally Obsessed Review
• TCM Articles
• Time Out Capsule Review
• Tired Old Queen at the Movies Video Review

Synopsis:
A bookish wallflower (Joan Fontaine) marries a charming rake (Cary Grant) who quickly arouses her suspicions when she discovers he is both a liar and a penniless thief.

Genres, Themes, Actors, and Directors:

• Cary Grant Films
• Hitchcock Films
• Homicidal Spouses
• Joan Fontaine Films
• Marital Problems
• Newlyweds
• Plot to Murder

Response to Peary’s Review:
Peary spends the bulk of his review of this early American Hitchcock film — his follow-up to Rebecca (1940) — complaining about its ending (which, by the way, is discussed to some extent in nearly every online review — so be forewarned if you’ve never seen it). He notes that Fontaine “saves [the] picture with [her] gusty performance”, but claims that Grant simply “looks stiff”. He points out a couple of “good scenes — Grant carrying [a] glowing glass of milk to sick Fontaine, a dinner conversation about murder”, but ends his review by once again arguing that “the disappointing resolution keeps it from being top-grade Hitchcock”. I actually agree with Peary that this isn’t “top-grade Hitchcock” — but not just because of the ending. Although there’s a credible amount of tension throughout the entire film (which is told from Fontaine’s point of view), we’re quickly frustrated by her simpering unwillingness to act on her increasingly mounting suspicions.

It’s relatively easy to accept Fontaine’s whirlwind marriage to Johnnie as the consequence of an overly sheltered young woman fearing spinsterhood (certainly plenty of naive, desperate women in real life have married cads or outright psychopaths out of similar motivations) — but once she learns about his lies and financial indiscretions, there’s no excuse for her hesitation in getting out. We’re meant to believe that she simply can’t help herself (she’s too in love with Johnnie), but I don’t buy it. (Interestingly, she’s never given reason to worry about him cheating on her with another woman — which indicates that perhaps women will put up with a lot of nonsense in a marriage as long as they don’t believe their primacy as “woman number one” is being threatened.) Meanwhile, other elements of the screenplay are clumsy as well: how convenient is it, for instance, that Johnnie and Lina happen to be friends with a mystery novelist (Auriol Lee) who’s exploring various methods for untraceable murder? The origins of this friendship are never explained, so it comes across as simply a plot contrivance. With that said, Fontaine’s Oscar-winning performance — in a decidedly imperfectly written role — is fine, and film fanatics will likely be curious to see the movie for this reason alone.

Redeeming Qualities and Moments:

• Joan Fontaine as Lina
  
• Atmospheric cinematography
  

Must See?
Yes, simply for Fontaine’s Oscar-winning performance.

Categories

• Important Director
• Oscar Winner or Nominee

Links:

• IMDb entry
• NY Times Original Review
• Qwipster Review
• Digitally Obsessed Review
• DVD Savant Review
• TCM Article
• Tired Old Queen at the Movies Video Review

Synopsis:
A teenage waif (Lillian Gish) abused by her adoptive father (Donald Crisp) finds refuge in the home of a kind Chinese shopkeeper (Richard Barthelmess).

Genres, Themes, Actors, and Directors:

• Asian-Americans
• Child Abuse
• Cross-Cultural Romance
• Donald Crisp Films
• D.W. Griffith Films
• Lillian Gish Films
• Racism and Race Relations
• Silent Films

Response to Peary’s Review:
Peary refers to this “D.W. Griffith classic” — an unflinching early look at child abuse and racial prejudice — as “perhaps the cinema’s first outright tragedy”, yet points out that the use of various tints and the strategic employment of a “special soft-focus lens” gives the film “an almost poetic feel that tempers the harshness of the story”. He notes that the “overly sentimental” storyline (based on a short story by Thomas Burke) “surely appealed to Griffith because it again let him lash out at the evil city, again deal with miscegenation and suicide, and again — and this is the disturbing element — sacrifice an innocent girl to our cruel, immoral world.” Indeed, the three central characters are so elemental in their attributes — “snarling Crisp”, “stoical Barthelmess”, and timid Gish — that the wafer-thin story (not really suitable for a feature length film) comes across as more of a fable or a fairy tale than any kind of realistic narrative. This is especially true given that the age and developmental maturity of Gish’s character (Lucy) is left so vague: the 26-year-old Gish* could literally be either 10 or 15 or 20; she’s so petite and huddled over from fear at all times that we can’t really tell — and when Barthelmess hands her a doll to play with (!), we get seriously confused. (In the original short story, the character was 12 — which I suppose lends some credence to this scene.)

The film’s terribly antiquated, casually racist subtitle will likely turn many modern film fanatics off; but once they make tentative peace with both this and the (then standard) casting of white men in both central Asian roles, they’ll likely be pleasantly surprised to find that Griffith — the infamous director of America’s most egregiously racist classic film, Birth of a Nation (1915) — seems to at least be trying to portray the film’s Chinese-American protagonist (Cheng) in a reasonably respectful light. Indeed, it’s gratifying to know that Griffith “considered the main theme of his film to be that Americans wrongly consider themselves superior to foreigners, including the Chinese, who have a noble, peace-loving philosophy”. Cheng is shown at the beginning of the film to be a noble-minded Buddhist missionary hoping to convert European heathens to more peaceful ways — and thus his quick descent into opium addiction after arriving on the sordid shores of London is given a bit of context and justification, rather than simply perpetuating the trope of drug-addled Asians. (Actually, as I think about it, this piece of the narrative could easily have been expanded upon: I’d love to have seen more of Cheng’s travails upon arrival in London.)

At any rate, Cheng’s poetically romantic yearnings towards Lucy could be (and are) explained away as merely a platonic desire to love and assist that which is most pure and good in the world — though, again, it would have been much more fulfilling to see this most unusual cinematic couple actually moving towards something “real” together. This would have required a more substantial storyline in general, but at least would have given a shred of credence to the fantastical poster (shown above). In terms of the lead performances, Peary accurately argues that “Crisp overacts”, “Barthelmess under-acts (as if he believed one change of expression would let us know that he isn’t really Oriental after all)” — but Gish “acts up an exciting storm”. He notes that “from her timid talking, stooped, crooked posture, and terrified eyes, Gish immediately gets us to understand that her beatings are a daily thing for her”, and she is “totally convincing” in the role. Her character’s ability to “smile only if she lifts the sides of her mouth her fingers” was apparently thought up by Gish herself, and remains one of the film’s most indelible (recurring) images.

* TCM’s article lists Gish as 23-years-old when the film was made, but this doesn’t make mathematical sense, given that IMDb cites 1893 as her birth year.

Redeeming Qualities and Moments:

• Lillian Gish as Lucy, “the waif”
  
• A (relatively) bold exploration of both child abuse and cross-cultural companionship
  
• Billy Bitzer’s cinematography
  

Must See?
Yes; despite being “a bit disappointing”, it’s nonetheless considered a silent classic, and “is essential to any study of Griffith”. Selected to the National Film Registry, Library of Congress, in 1996. Available for free viewing at www.archive.org.

Categories

• Genuine Classic
• Historically Relevant
• Important Director

(Listed in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die)

Links:

• IMDb entry
• Greatest Films Review
• Slant Magazine Review
• Digitally Obsessed Review
• TCM Article
• Time Out Capsule Review

Synopsis:
W.C. Fields (as himself) tries to convince movie producer Franklin Pangborn (as himself) to make a surreal movie starring Fields and his singing niece, Gloria Jean.

Genres, Themes, Actors, and Directors:

• Comedy
• Hollywood
• W.C. Fields Films

Response to Peary’s Review:
Peary argues that this “last starring role” for W.C. Fields isn’t “top-grade Fields because he isn’t on-screen enough…, he isn’t bombastic or aggravating enough, and he isn’t being constantly harassed by the nincompoops that usually populate his films” — but I have to say I disagree. While Fields might not be on-screen continuously, his presence as screenwriter (writing under the typically creative pseudonym of Otis Criblecoblis) is fully felt throughout, to joyfully surreal effect. Indeed, Peary does acknowledge that this is “the film where the surrealistic nature of Fields’s comedy is most evident”, given that the film-within-the-film (pitched by Fields to an exasperated Franklin Pangborn; what brilliant casting!:

transpires in a fantastical alter-universe: Fields is traveling with his niece, Gloria Jean, on an airplane, when suddenly he “leaps… to retrieve his whiskey bottle and falls thousands of feet before landing safely on Margaret Dumont’s mountaintop estate, where she lives with her pretty young daughter:

… a gorilla:

… and [a] Great Dane with fangs”:

… and later arrives at a Russian village in Mexico (!).

Truly, the preposterous scenario proposed by Fields — which Pangborn, naturally, rejects as “impossible, incomprehensible, inconceivable; and besides that, it’s no good” — seems to be the loopy product of both Fields’s accumulated years of experience on wackily hybrid studio sets (viz. the film’s opening sequences), and his constant inebriation, which is referenced continually throughout both the meta-narrative and the fantasy film. In one classic scene, for instance, Fields enters “an ice-cream parlor, where, before blowing the head off his ice-cream soda, he turns to us to reveal that censors wouldn’t let him stage the scene in a saloon”. Within the fantasy film, numerous laughs are milked (sorry) when Fields shares a stiff drink of goat’s milk (!) with an engineer (Emmett Vogan):

Fields would find intoxicating substances under a rock if necessary, it seems.

At any rate, your enjoyment of this film will ultimately depend upon how much you’re willing to forgo straightforward narrative in favor of something much more — dare I say, post-modern? Rewatching it again last night, after viewing and posting on numerous “pure” Fields films, I find myself enjoying it perhaps most of all, simply for its perversely illogical and “messy” status. Knowing in hindsight that this was to be Fields’s final starring role, it could be viewed as an especially apt “sayonara” — i.e., Fields’s attempt to throw everything plus the kitchen sink into his grand finale. At the same time, as Dave Kehr notes, the film “has an appealingly inward, mournful quality, as if it were a swan song that only its singer could hear. Unconcerned with reaching the audience, Fields seems to be muttering to himself through much of the movie, his barely audible remarks often achieving a strange poetry: ‘The chickens lay eggs in Kansas. The chickens have pretty legs in Kansas.'”

Note: My single favorite moment (over in an instant): Franklin Pangborn, agitatedly trying to help Gloria Jean rehearse, is momentarily caught up in a male chorus line dancing through the studio.

Redeeming Qualities and Moments:

• W.C. Fields as himself
  
• Franklin Pangborn as himself
  
• Fields’s early interactions with a surly waitress (Jody Gilbert)
  
• Fields’ enjoyably surreal screenplay
  
• Plenty of characteristically zingy one-liners:
  

  “She drove me to drink, the one thing I’m indebted to her for.”

Must See?
Yes, as a truly surreal comedic effort — and for its historical relevance as Fields’ last film.

Categories

• Good Show
• Historically Relevant

Links:

• IMDb entry
• NY Times Original Review
• NY Times DVD Review (scroll down to final review)
• Spinning Image Review
• Greatest Films Review
• TCM Article