The Grant Mystique: In Name Only (1939)

If Cary Grant was the king of the screwball comedy, then the queen was Carole Lombard. Grant and Lombard appeared in the same film three times before Lombard's untimely death in 1942, but none of those films was a comedy. In Sinners in the Sun, Grant had no more than five or six minutes of screen time in total opposite Lombard. In The Eagle and the Hawk, they never shared the screen at all. The only true co-starring vehicle they made together was In Name Only (1939, directed by John Cromwell), a romantic drama. It is ironic that Grant's most famous comedy co-stars--Irene Dunne and Katherine Hepburn--were primarily known as dramatic actresses, while the greatest female comedienne of the age made only dramas with him. This teaming of Lombard and Grant might not have happened at all if Katherine Hepburn hadn't been tagged as "box office poison" in the press after the failures of Bringing Up Baby and Holiday (among other films). Hepburn had subsequently been released from her contract with RKO. It is conceivable that his trio of early films with Hepburn delayed or inhibited Grant's ascent to superstardom. None of them was a financial success in spite of the classic status accorded them years after the fact. In any event, Hepburn was out and Lombard was in. Lombard herself was taking a break from comedies. Her other film from 1939 was Made for Each Other opposite James Stewart, another weepie directed by John Cromwell. It had been a financial disaster. Lombard's life at the time paralleled the plot of In Name Only. She was biding her time until Clark Gable could divorce his wife and she could marry him. Gable, for his part, was off making Gone With the Wind. Her career at the time was also eerily similar to Grant's. Like Grant, she had been contracted to Paramount during her early career, a contract that she finished in 1938. Like Grant, she had chosen to become a free agent when that contract expired. Like Grant, she wasn't starring in comedies in 1939 (Grant's other two films that year, Only Angels Have Wings and Gunga Din, were nominally adventure stories). For both actors, In Name Only was something of a crossroads. Grant had already had a couple of big hits after he left Paramount, though he had had some disappointments, too. He hadn't had a major hit in a serious drama, though. Lombard hadn't yet had her own hit after leaving Paramount and it remained to be seen if she could carry a serious drama. In Name Only turned out to be a film both of them needed. It was moderately successful.

Revisiting Horror 101 with Dr. AC: The Brood

My friend, Aaron Christensen, invited me back on his video podcast to talk about one the horror movies that made the biggest impact on the young version of me: David Cronenberg's 1979 film, The Brood.

Enjoy.

---

This blog is supported on Patreon by wonderful subscribers. If you like what I do, please consider pledging your own support. It means the world to me.

A Retro Prometheus

Lisa Frankenstein (2024, directed by Zelda Williams). I'm sure the name came first. Surely screenwriter Diablo Cody thought of the play on "Lisa Frank" and tailored a Lisa Frank-inflected Gothic to suit the name? I can't imagine it started with the story. The title is too big a cultural illusion. There are plenty of films where this was the order of operations in their creation, including at least one great one. Cody denies that this is the case. She says that this is just a coincidence, that the genesis of the film is as a distaff reworking of Weird Science. Maybe that's true. I have a suspicious nature. Cody is certainly capable of writing stories of great sophistication. Juno and Young Adult are both layered, complex character studies underneath the hipster dialogue that made their screenwriter famous. That's not this film, alas. This is a ramble-y nostalgia piece. It's so savvy about its time and influences that one can't help but be suspicious about its provenance. It has its pleasures, sure. It's just...if you're not a specific kind of viewer, one raised at the right time and in the right place, one steeped in a specific kind of culture from the late 1980s, then this film is kind of a mess.

Favorite Stars in B-Movies Blogathon 2024: Graylisted

It is easy in film critic land to ascribe the shape and form of most films to an overriding artistic impulse on the part of the filmmakers, but this is only true in a small number of films. Most films are at the mercy of social and commercial forces that are well outside the control of directors, producers, and even studios. Back in the day, B-films were particularly susceptible to these forces. The function of these movies was to make money, after all, not plumb the depths of the human condition. If they sometimes managed to exist as actual art, it was often entirely accidental. Whatever their artistic aspirations may be, most of the people who do the nuts and bolts work of making a film are there because it's a job. This includes actors, who may appear in films for entirely mercenary reasons. There are plenty of B-movies starring A-list actors or directed by A-list directors who for one reason or another needed a paycheck at the time. It's a cruel twist of fate that Michael Caine couldn't accept his first Oscar in person because he was busy making Jaws 4: The Revenge. Caine got a lovely house out of the deal, or so he says. The commercial and social pressures on the art of movies were especially strong in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when making a living in movies often depended on one's politics.

For example:

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Edward G. Robinson was one of the cinema's biggest stars. He was principally known for playing gangsters, co-equal with James Cagney as an attraction in such roles. He was also able to expand into more varied roles where he played against the tough guy image. There is a wide gulf of difference between Caesar Rico Bandello in Little Caesar and the morally righteous insurance investigator, Keyes, in Double Indemnity or the henpecked and pussy-whipped artist, Chris Cross, in Scarlet Street. He had a broad range, which was often ignored by the studios who cast him. His range was certainly ignored by Warner Brothers where he made his breakthrough films. They cast him in a long succession of gangsters and tough guy parts. When Robinson was entertaining the troops on a USO tour during World War II, he found he got no response from the GIs unless he started his bits with an in-character speech by Rico, Little Caesar himself, before speaking as himself as a strident anti-fascist. The real Robinson was an intellectual, a famed art collector, a lion of the Hollywood Left, and an immigrant Jew. He put his money where his convictions were, too, donating to over 800 left wing and anti-Nazi and anti-fascist organizations in the 1930s. He was among the first big stars to make openly anti-Nazi films, starring in Confessions of a Nazi Spy well before the United States entered the war. After the war, he agitated for racial equality in the workplace and campaigned for civil rights. But no good deed goes unpunished.

A Tangled Web

It takes real effort to make a movie as breathtakingly awful as Madame Web (2024, directed by S. J. Clarkson), a film that can stand with the likes of Catwoman, Batman and Robin, and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace as the nadir of superhero cinema. Given the disjointed nature of its plot, I'm going to assume that what ended up on screen is the product of studio notes rather than any incompetence on the part of its main contributors. Certainly, the actors here are left hanging in the wind, actors being at the mercy of other departments. A bad performance isn't always the fault of the actor. Performances are created and sometimes undermined in the editing room. There's a failure to trust the audience in this film that is striking and conspicuous. You can't miss it. So probably the studio. I'm trying to be generous, here.

The Grant Mystique: Thirty-Day Princess (1934)

Thirty-Day Princess (1934, directed by Marion Gering) finds Cary Grant fading into the scenery a bit. This isn't the only case of this in his early films, but it's one of the most conspicuous. Grant was wholly unsatisfied with his part in this film and complained about it, prompting Paramount to loan him out to United Artists as punishment. Grant never forgot this. When his contract with Paramount was finished in 1937, he went freelance rather than re-up or sign with another studio. He wouldn't make another film for Paramount for a couple of decades. He held a grudge. Grant wasn't the only contributor unsatisfied with his work, either. This film credits Preston Sturges as one of its writers and, like Grant, he was unhappy with how little of his work ended up on screen. This is the only film on which Sturges and Grant both worked, so it's a missed opportunity.

Godzilla Is Inside All of Us

It seems absurd at this late date to be rediscovering the depth of metaphor in Ishiro Honda's Godzilla. Godzilla has been an icon of world cinema for seventy years, an embassador for international moviemaking in spite of the derision his films have sometimes received. After years of interpretations have pulled Godzilla out of the realm of metaphor and into the world of monster versus monster wrestling fights, that original nightmare born of the hydrogen bomb has faded into memory, but it hasn't vanished completely. Godzilla's home studio, Toho Pictures, has been leasing Godzilla to American studios for years at this point, and Americans don't have that memory of atomic destruction. They see in Godzilla a franchise to exploit, like good little imperial capitalists. Art isn't even in the equation. When it happens at all, it's purely by accident. Every so often, Toho makes a film of their own to keep their hand in and remind the world who owns Godzilla. On the occasion of Godzilla's seventieth year, they've taken Godzilla back to his roots. The result, Godzilla Minus One (2023, directed by Takashi Yamazaki), is an astonishment, a film that can stand not only with the original film from 1954, but as one of the best fantasy films ever made, full stop. It's certainly one of the best films of 2023. It's the real thing. It's a film with something meaningful to say about history and nation and the human heart in conflict with itself. It's a film that the makers of the American "Monsterverse" films should look at with dismay and shame and envy.