Bridal Suite (1939)

Margo likes movies from the 30s, so get ready for some extra-old classics!

We watched this a few months ago so my memory is a little rusty but it also wasn't all that great...Robert Young plays an irresponsible playboy who forgets his own wedding day...TWICE. I mean, it's kind of hard to get behind the marriage at that point no matter how invested you may be in a happy ending.
His father is quite properly disgusted with him and cuts him off. His mother, indulgent to a fault, decides he needs a doctor's note from her favorite psychiatrist and drags him to Switzerland where the hapless doctor is vacationing in his chalet.
I'll tell you that this photo is of the happy young playboy and his innocent mountain maiden. And I'll tell you that there is a happy ending. But I will be damned if I'm going to explain the intricacies of the strudel-making, glockspiel-playing, antics in pajamas and avalanche-inducing yodeling that we will have to endure in order to arrive at that happy ending.
Margo looked up the starring actress, Annabella, and learned that she was all the rage in France and was imported with great fanfare to America, to no great success. You can see why. Though she comes across as sincere and sweet and Robert Young is affable as always, there is nothing to really excite you about their chemistry.
Ultimately, it's a silly movie.
Will not watch again. Two stars.

In This Our LIfe (1942)

The commentary tells me that Bette Davis referred to this movie as being one of the worst movies ever made. The commentator, however, seems to believe it was one of the most wonderful movies ever made. I only made it through about ten minutes of commentary, but she was full of praise for cinematography, characters, and the ways the plot is set up. Watch and decide.

The melodrama is summed up for me by the exchange below:

Stanley (Bette Davis) has just thrown a fit about not wanting to leave a restaurant yet, even though her new husband Peter needs to get home and to bed for work the next day. Peter leaves miserable and without her. When he gets home, however, he finds that she has jumped into her car and sped home to beat him there...
Peter: You ought to be spanked.
Stanley: For being a good wife?
Peter: For making me love you so much.

In this film, Stanley cheats on her fiance and runs off with the husband of her sister Roy (Olivia deHavilland). Roy is heartbroken, and takes solace in the arms of Stanley's ex-fiance when what starts out as a comforting friendship between the two of them turns into a romance. Stanley, meanwhile, cannot settle down... she burns through her marriage (see the labels for a spoiler), and returns home to wreak more havoc. Stanley may or may not want her old fiance back, may never learn to drive safely, and may never learn to be ethical. By the end of this movie, Stanley's behavior threatens not only the happiness of her own family, but the future of a family (mother=Hattie McDaniel) which has worked for Stanley's family Stanley's whole life and adding a theme of societal racism to the film. Much drama.


Two stars, because the actors were good. But really, too melodramatic for me. I don't think I'll be seeing this again.

Other memorable quotes:

"[Stanley needs] someone to boss her."
"She'll have a husband soon."

"You little minx." (said to Stanley by her uncle)

"You little flirt." (and again, the uncle)

In response to why Stanley's mom (Billie Burke) is so calm about Stanley having run off with her sister's husband: "We've got her on the drugs."

Father of the Bride (1950)

Poor Stanley (Spencer Tracy) has to deal not only with the fact that his daughter is getting married...and he doesn't even know the financial stability or sense of the groom... but also with the fact that the wedding is going to be a humongous, expensive affair.

The conflicts the characters had were just so silly. The wedding was almost called off when the groom had an idea that the bride didn't like for a honeymoon destination. Also, if the family couldn't afford it and the bride, Kay (Elizabeth Taylor), really wanted a small wedding as she claimed, why did the family pay movers to have all of the furniture removed from their home so that they could host almost 500 people at the reception? And why was Kay wearing this dress?

Weddings don't always have to make people crazy, right?
Two stars. I'm not sorry I watched it, but I probably won't watch it again.

Wizard of Oz (1939)

Of course I've seen the Wizard of Oz before - who hasn't? When we were kids they would broadcast it once a year and my mother would make me take a nap so that I could stay up to watch it. And just as obviously, it gets four stars. Duh.


Let's quickly run through why it rocks: musical, pioneering special effects, black-and-white turns to color gimmick (never fails to amuse me), costumes, costumes, costumes - just the munchkin costumes ALONE are worth watching the whole movie - small dog, camp factor of 10 to the tenth power, and the genuinely beautiful song, Somewhere Over the Rainbow - which incidentally is very easy to play on the piano, but very hard to sing. Oh, and the Wicked Witch - she is AWESOME and STILL scary. In fact, the actress who played her was reluctant to reprise the role because she felt it was too scary. Also it has a chant - Lions and Tigers and Bears OH MY! That you will find yourself using now and then, it's very effective. Much better than whistling,I've found, when you're walking through the woods on a dark night.



But now that I've also been enlightened by Angela Lansbury in the Wizard of Oz documentary I also know the following fun facts:

1. There were a total of three - or was it four? - directors who worked on it, including one of my favorites, George Cukor, who was responsible for several key changes to Dorothy's appearance also Victor Fleming, King Vidor, and Richard Thorpe. Yes, four.


2. Shirley Temple was considered for the part of Dorothy. It's easy to see how that would have been disgustingly cute...makes you appreciate the pathos that Judy Garland brings to the movie. It's almost as though she foresaw her own tragic death from an early age while Shirley Temple knew early on that she was going to wind up as a diplomat outliving everyone she ever starred with.


3. The original Tin Man was poisoned by his aluminum dust make-up and had to give up his role. The WORST part of this is that he had been forced to trade roles with the scarecrow. That scarecrow was damn lucky.

4. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch, was a single mother. I liked that a lot, makes her seem determined and somewhat victorious, in a way - she was going to be a character actor, and she created the ultimate character. Also, she caught on fire while filming!


It seems like a giant undertaking that must have been hell to work on. Also MGM was determined to outsell Disney's Snow White. I can just imagine the lecture they gave the munchkins about beating the dwarves at their own cute game.

I recommend the documentary (The Wonderful World of Oz: 50 Years of Movie Magic - 1990) because trying to find all the same facts to fact-check it seems like there is a lot of misinformation out there.

Go see it, and then, watch the Wizard of Oz again, I know I will.

Merrily We Live (1938)

What is with that title? Merrily We Live? There is just something wrong with that! Also, the entire cast walks arm-in-arm singing a theme song during the OPENING credits. That is gay gay gay and I, for one, think it's awesome that you can still tell a movie that is trying too hard to be a hit seventy years later.



This followed another movie I watched on TCM this weekend and I watched it while baking Whoopie Pies (recipe from Cooks Country). Maybe it's Billie Burke weekend (props to Trevor for correctly identifying her as Glinda the Good Witch from the original Wizard of Oz - I watched three movies without picking up on that...what's the matter with me?).

Anyhow, I loved this one. People faint through the whole movie and it is one of those thirties movies where we make fun of the crazy rich people which I have a feeling was supposed to take the edge off the Great Depression by making the rich seem ridiculous and at the same time letting you glimpse their lifestyle. Then again, those crazy rich people is still a popular theme today (Monster-in-Law, anyone? Wedding Crashers?).

There is a great butler character and a great zany younger sister (I love zany younger sisters like Meet Me In St. Louis' Tootie and Philadelphia Story's Margaret) but the romance is really great since the female lead starts out thinking she's kicking yet another of her mother's charity cases out of the house before he can wreak havoc and ends thinking that the love of her life is dead. In between they go through about a dozen different scenarios, all very entertaining. I love this kind of thing where you are never thinking about the lead characters falling in love but about the comic scenario they are caught up in and then before you know it, you realize you are sold on the love story as well.

Would watch again, in fact, already rewound to re-watch some scenes which I missed while baking Whoopie - I said BAKING you pervert.

Four Stars.

Topper (1937)

My Tivo's Cary Grant wish list picked this up. I sat right down to watch because it's a comedy and involves ghosts and Cary Grant - a really young CG.



First off CG looks great in this movie and it features special effects that I really have no idea how they achieved in that era. I really would like to know. They also had a really interesting rectangular-shape wipe transition early on in the film that must have been quite a feat at the time. Mainly, the ghosts disappear and reappear right on camera about four or five times which probably was a really big deal at the time. The equivalent of Transformers, probably.

CG and Constance Bennet play a dashing young couple - kind of an F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda at the height of their partying. They die in a fantasitc car wreck - you spend the first thirty minutes waiting for them to die in a car wreck cause you know that they will die and cause they drive everywhere like maniacs in this crazy cool car with a really weird fin on the back that I imagine was the 1930s equivalent of a DeLorean.

Anyway, after death they try to do a good deed by loosening up their stiff banker friend - Topper - who seems like he's not having any fun with his life and antics ensue.

The antics are alternately funny and not - hard to tell which gags might have been fresh at the time but are really old hat now. Like the invisible ghosts moving things causes all kinds of people to make surprised faces and rub their eyes - but in the days before Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie that might have been a laugh riot - who knows?

I like/hate the character played by Billie Burke - the prim proper and puritan patrician wife of the banker who just wants to be invited to a party by the Stuyvesants. But my FAVORITE character is the irritated butler who gets in the middle of the feuding husband and wife.

Cary Grant is really handsome and Constance Bennet is awesome as the playful, flirtatious, sexy but still totally good-hearted and somewhat innocent girl - the epitomy of who we all think we would have liked to have been in the 30s. She also has great hair and great outfits and gets to appear suddenly atop a ledge in a new outfit holding a bottle of champagne and get the better of a rude bellboy all in the same act and don't we all want to do that someday?

Three Stars. Would watch again.

A Bill of Divorcement (1932)

My Tivo picked this up for me under my Katharine Hepburn wishlist (I have three wishlists: for KH, Cary Grant and Sandra Dee) on TCM. It's a drama, which normally I don't like (prefer, in this order: romantic comedy, comedy, musical, western - I generally skip horror and drama).



In fact, I was set to watch Little Women, which I've seen before and don't like that much (because I always think Jo should end up with Laurie but that's another post). However, in the introduction to Little Women Robert Osbourne (the TCM host and my TV movie buddy) said that A Bill of Divorcement was KH's first movie, so I thought I ought to at least give it a chance.

Katharine Hepburn plays a young woman whose father is in a mental institution and has been for as long as she can remember. She is recently engaged and very much in love. Her mother has divorced the mental patient and is about to remarry a guy who can buy her a mink (which is supposed to be proof that he's the one who can really make her happy) when suddenly the father arrives at the house.

This is the point where you know it's based on a play because the only setting they ever appear in is this house. There might be several rooms, I'm not really sure because I was baking pies, but it's all in the house. The father has "come to his senses" all of a sudden and walked right out of the mental institution and home - this is strange because he doesn't recognize the house and makes some reference to how it's bigger than the old place - meaning presumably this is a house he's never been to before.

Anyhow, the mother gets married but can't bear to tell the father the truth and KH is caught in the middle of the drama trying to protect both parents. She's supposed to be somewhat temperamental and prone to outbursts - inclined towards insanity, we assume. So right away she takes her father's side, but she still sympathizes with her mother.

In the end, she breaks off her engagement because she's afraid of having crazy babies and sacrifices herself to live with her father so her mother can go, guilt-free, to live with the mink-buying man of her dreams. The ending is really unsatisfactory and strange - it just kind of trails off with a father-daughter piano-playing scene.

At first I was just completely struck by how KH was made up in the 20s style. Her mouth is dark and precise and her face pale and her eyes very dramatic and dark and pointy with slender eyebrows.

This plays her up in a such a different way than in her later movies when she was all mouth and cheekbones and eyebrows with very natural eyes. I was totally fascinated with this for the whole first act.

The whole movie was melodramatic in the extreme and I was left with mixed feelings about the way mental illness was portrayed. (My dad's a psychotherapist and I have several mentally ill family members so I'm fairly sensitive to portrayals of "crazy" people in movies).

The mentally ill father is played by John Barrymore (grandpa of Drew) melodramatically as a weepy, sentimental mess with a temper. Since all the characters are over-played that wasn't really troubling - almost every character was an offensive stereotype so, really, this guy gets fair treatment.

There were two theories advanced in the movie: that the mentally ill father was inherently insane because it was "in his blood" and that he came home from the war with shell-shock. JB makes a great speech about fighting to protect people who then marry other people and all he got was shell-shock - that will make the top ten list of guilt-trip monologues, for sure.

It's not that different from today, really - the causes of mental illness are still linked to both trauma and genetics. But the idea that you would not marry because you couldn't have children (no way!) and not have children because they might possibly have mental illness (huh?) seem completely dated.

Also, since these days we wouldn't put the guy away for what seems like a mild case of depression or PTSD, she'd never have got the Bill of Divorcement in the first place, and the whole movie would be blown.

Would NOT watch again. Definitely wouldn't have finished if I wasn't baking pie.

Two stars.