Three Loves Has Nancy (1938)

Robert Montgomery is a distinct improvement over Robert Young. I'm sorry, but I just don't get that funny feeling in the pit of my tummy for poor little Robert Young that Robert Montgomery can give me.

Janet Gaynor's a cutie, too and it's her routine that carries this movie.
So the premise here is that Nancy's fiance goes missing on her wedding day, so, naturally, she goes to New York to fetch him. Nancy is a small-town girl from the south and has never traveled. On the train she meets Mr. Niles (Montgomery), who is returning to New York because he's heard that Vivian, the pest of a girl who is trying to corner him and wring a proposal out of him, has finally left for Europe.
Nancy is a complete bumpkin and gets herself into trouble at every turn. Mr. Niles first helps her, then helping her turns into a disaster and he never wants to see her again.
When she can't find George, however, she turns up on Niles' doorstep with perfect timing - he uses her to convince Vivian he is engaged to someone else.
Now ensconced in his life, Nancy turns his world and the world of his publisher, next door neighbor, and best friend, Mr. Hanson, upside-down - just by being herself.
It's a tour-de-force performance by Gaynor who is perfectly convincing with the help of her neat but completely unfashionable outfits. Bustling around innocently, she's actually quite clever. At one point Mr. Niles is interrupted by the telephone for the third time in a row and says "who invented those things, anyway?" and she replies with crisp precision: "Alexander Graham Bell," and adds, "in 1865." She'll teach you a thing or two, MISTER Niles.
Margo and I were actually laughing out loud at some of the slapstick scenes and there were a lot of great one-liners.
Still searching for the missing fiance, Nancy finds his ukele at a shop where he used to work. She bursts into tears, "George's ukele!" The store clerk just looks at her with stony indifference and quips "You'd cry more over it if you had to hear him play!"
After a long evening of monologues from Joan Crawford and earnest expressions of virtue from gamblers, it was really nice just to laugh.
Margo and I both proclaimed this a buried gem that we put in a category with Bringing Up Baby and we would definitely watch it again. Four stars.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

It seems (conversation with Amy) that a classic movie on this blog is a movie made before Amy and I were born. So...A thoroughly fun movie. Four stars, and I would probably watch this again, although it would probably be most fun if I wait forty years and forget who the murderer is. The chances of forgetting, though, are probably not so high, seeing as I (very smugly) guessed what was going on while watching this time (and no, I have not read the book).

Without giving anything away... Poirot is traveling on a train with a number of interesting characters... One fellow traveler confides to Poirot that he has been receiving death threats and wants Poirot to take on his case and protect him... Poirot refuses... A blizzard traps the train in the middle of nowhere... The man is found dead in his cabin... Who did it?

I loved the interrogation scenes and Poirot's helper who yelled, "He/she did it!" after ever interrogation. Murder aside, this movie also made me want to sit in a luxurious dining car and sip tea with my fellow travelers. Not sure about the sleeping cars.

The Thin Man (1934)

Up until this week, Jess and I had no idea that Myrna Loy was decapitated. As a 16-year-old high school student in Venice, CA, Loy posed for a student-made statue representing the "Spiritual." Her statue was flanked by "Mental" and "Physical." The statue was eventually surrounded by a tall white fence to protect it from graffiti. Most recently it was seen headless, lying in a scrap pile behind the school. Now it is gone and the only way to see it is to watch for a glimpse of it in the movie "Grease," filmed at Venice High. Watch the screen around Danny when he meets back up with his friends after the summer. Sigh.

We went to see a screening of The Thin Man at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood sitting on a picnic blanket with palm trees in the background.

We don't know where to begin with this movie - it represents all the reasons to love classic movies: the costumes are awesome - remarkable without being laughable - all the details and style of another era plus the elegance that we miss these days. Jess wants this dress:

The writing is awesome: witty and quick and dry and calculated to keep the plot moving so that even though the movie is only an hour and a half long, the plot is quite complicated and intriguing.

There are great characters, and plenty of them, and the bit players are every bit as good as the leading actors.

The mystery is great and the clues are dropped in a satisfying way, creating suspense and leaving you lots of room to speculate without giving away the guilty party until the last minute.

Two things that this movie has, though, make it stand out above even other great classic films in its genre: the chemistry between Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) who play a canny, irreverent, affectionate couple who are as likely to elbow each other as they are to embrace and are constantly ribbing each other - and the antics of Asta, their adorable, clever and comical terrier.

Four stars, of course, from each of us. That means eight total. We will both be seeing this movie again.

Shadow of Doubt (1943)

I always think that I won't like Hitchcock, because Hitchcock does suspense so well, and suspense makes me crazy and anxious. But, I did love this movie.



Small town girl wishes for some excitement, prays for it, gets it, in the form of big-city uncle, begins to suspect uncle of murder, plot twists, suspenseful conclusion.

It's got a smart, spunky young woman, a normal family (note, they play bridge!) a white-picket-fence town and a cute FBI agent for the spunky young woman to meet.



Three stars, will watch again (but not as much as a movie without all the suspense!).

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

I wanted to see this movie for a long time, mostly because it's referenced in "When Harry Met Sally." When Sally spots Harry in a bookstore and says she won't say hi because he never remembers her anyways, Carrie Fisher's character tells her that she's probably destined to fall in love with him, it's just like the movie..."you're the most contemptible man..." So I saw it and promptly forgot all about it. This doesn't mean it is not a great movie, though! I just rewatched it, and it definitely deserves four stars.



This movie is great Hitchcock. There are trains, there is intrigue... Iris (Margaret Lockwood) is traveling home to England to be married, and she's not terribly happy about it. While in the hotel by the train station she meets a number of the other passengers who are about to be on her train. There's the couple having the affair and the dopey guys who are obsessed with cricket. And most significantly, there's the charmingly sarcastic musician Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) who threatens to share her room with her -scandal!- when she has him thrown out of his room for playing his music and dancing too loudly. And of course there's the sweet old governess Miss Froy. Iris is mysteriously knocked out by a flower pot before getting on the train, and Miss Froy stays with her and helps her. After spending part of the day with Miss Froy on the train, Iris wakes up to find that not only is Miss Froy gone, but that most of the other passengers deny every having seen her and claim that Iris has been alone the whole time. Gilbert is the only one willing to help her... and the intrigue begins...

The love story between Iris and Gilbert's characters can be summed up with three quotes:

1) When they meet: "You are the most contemptible person I've every met in my life." her
"Confidentially, you're a bit of a stinker, too." him

2) After having spent a number of intense hours together trying to solve the mystery of the missing Miss Froy:
"Do you like me?" him
"Not much." her

3) When things are going the most swimmingly: "You heartless, caddish, swollen-headed beast..." her, of course as she is kissing him

So I love the mystery, and it was probably good that I didn't remember the plot, because that allowed me to enjoy the mystery all over again. The movie also made me think a lot about why I love stories where the characters hate each other before they fall in love. Do we all love these stories? Someone else must, or there wouldn't be so many of them...