Casanova Brown (1944)

Demonstrating how not to make a good impression on your in-laws.
(That's their house in the background.)

Casanova Brown is one of those films that tries to be too many things at once--screwball comedy, modern day retelling of the Casanova legend, social commentary--and succeeds at all of them, at least up to a point. While perhaps a bit more focus in the story's conception could have made a tighter, more elegant film, as it stands it is laugh out loud funny from start to finish, and that is more than enough to make it a winner in my book.

Gary Cooper heads a stellar cast in a comedy of remarriage so true to formula it seems the role surely must have been written for Cary Grant. Mild mannered English professor Casanova "Cass" Brown (Cooper) learns, on the eve of his marriage, that his first wife has just had a baby (his, naturally). That first marriage lasted less than twenty-four hours, from their chance meeting in the library to his burning down her parents' house the next morning, and the two of them have not spoken since their annulment. He only learns about the baby at all because his ex-wife Isabel (Teresa Wright) is putting the baby up for adoption, and the hospital needs his medical records. Cass falls for the baby just as quickly as he fell for her mother, and when he realizes that he has no legal rights to the child, he kidnaps her. Isabel and her father and his new fiance and her father all spend the next few weeks trying to track him down and keep him from doing anything rash, like eloping with the chambermaid. So much for the Casanova angle to the story.

Much of the humor in Casanova is of the "painfully embarrassing" variety, but stops just shy of the line where it starts to feel more like a horror movie than a comedy. It comes awfully close to the edge--throws spitballs over it in fact--but never quite crosses. The worst of it comes relatively early, when Cass goes to visit his new in-laws and finds they don't keep an ash tray in the library. This prompts a desperate search for a place to put out his cigarette, until he finally puts it out in his handkerchief and stuffs it in his pocket. For his next act he tries to convince them he doesn't smoke, even as his smoldering jacket says otherwise. Of course, lies like this spread like wildfire, and so does fire--particularly when you treat it like a stray cat, and throw books and newspapers at it to make it go away.

If the whole movie were like this, funny though it is, I'd be crying myself to sleep tonight. Thankfully, most of the rest of the film is less painful to watch, centering in the first half around Cass's relationship with his future father-in-law (Frank Morgan) and in the second around his bungling attempts at caring for an infant. Cooper and Morgan make a wonderful comic duo, Cooper's quiet sincerity making him the perfect straight man for Morgan's bumbling effervescence. In fact, the biggest criticism I have of Casanova is that these two don't get more screen time together. Both actors bring such warmth and good humor to most every part they play, and their relationship, with all its quarreling and insults, is both recognizable and endearing.

Frank Morgan very nearly steals the movie.

The second half of the film takes a more serious tone, although thankfully never at the expense of the comedy. Even more bewildering to Cass than the sudden knowledge that he is a father is the realization that he has no legal rights to his own daughter. That's not fair, he argues, and of course he is right. One could read much of this film as an argument in favor of paternal rights. In defiance to the notion that a woman is somehow better equipped to raise a child than a man (outside of the obvious biological advantage), Cass does an excellent job at caring for his hostage in spite of his inexperience. While the film makes light of his terrified precautions against germs and his obsession with charting her weight at hourly increments, he also makes no serious blunders and pretty much does everything as he should. When the baby is reunited with her mother, Cass must teach her how to hold the baby and how to burp her. As a new mother, she has no more natural instinct for these things than Cass did.

Although the film is ostensibly a romantic comedy and progresses through three different love interests for Cass, the heart of the story is his relationship with his daughter rather than any of the adult women. That relationship is powerfully and sympathetically portrayed, and the film never relies on mere cuteness for its impact as so many films about children and babies often do.

Careful. There be germs a-foot.

Teresa Wright gives a solid performance as well, and is as beautiful and likable as always, although even so Casanova, her fifth film, is by far the weakest item in her early resume. Her first three films (The Little Foxes, Mrs. Minivr, Pride of the Yankees) each earned her an Oscar nomination, and her fourth (Shadow of a Doubt) arguably should have. She just doesn't have the screen time to really develop a memorable character here, although even as it is she is instantly charismatic enough that it's no surprise when Cass picks her in the end (if you don't see that ending coming, you probably need to get out more).

Casanova doesn't really offer anything you can't find in a dozen other films, but it is a solidly built story and a welcome addition to an imminently likable sub-genre. It will never be a replacement for The Awful Truth or His Girl Friday, but if you've already seen those and liked them, it's a good bet you'll enjoy Casanova as much as I did.

Once Upon a Time (1944)

Yes Sir, he dances!

Once Upon a Time calls itself a fairy tale, but personally I don't see it. Imagine Miracle on 34th Street meets Our Gang, where the role of Santa Claus is played by a dancing caterpillar and Cary Grant plays the lead. The story reads like the screenwriters surely must have lost a bet with someone, but snappy dialog and a solid performance by Grant make for a surprisingly entertaining bit of more or less family friendly fluff.

Ball of Fire (1941)

Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Ball of Fire, indeed.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when this script was pitched. "It's kind of a modern day fairy tale," the writer says.  "You know, a take off on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Only the dwarfs are lexicographers, holed up in their brownstone, I mean cottage, writing an encyclopedia. And Snow White is called 'Sugarpuss O'Shea,' a nightclub singer. And the evil stepmother is her fiance, mob leader Joe Lilac." Samuel Goldwyn shakes his head sadly, and asks where Prince Charming fits in. "Oh, there is no prince," the writer says. "Sugarpuss falls for one of the dwarfs." Of course, the writer was Billy Wilder, so presumably Goldwyn knew enough to trust his instincts even if the sense of the thing was not immediately apparent.

Second Chorus (1940)

Fred Astaire, Paulette Goddard, and Burgess Meredith.

The world of classic cinema is full of buried treasure. How many times have I watched a film only to wonder how it could have slipped under my radar for so many years? Suddenly this little movie I'd never heard of a week earlier I now can't imagine living without. That's the dream of course, and we do find them every now and then, but in spite of these rare fantastic discoveries, we don't really go scuba diving looking for sunken ships. We go diving to see the fish, or the way the sunlight dapples the water, or the coral formations. We go diving to see what we can see. We marvel over what our favorite performers did before or after they found or lost their stride, silent actors in talkies, strange experiments that didn't work.


Second Chorus is no life changing discovery, but while it belies the substantial talent of its principals, there's definitely enough punch left in the performances to make it an entertaining hour and a half. The script is far too weak to support the weight of its cast. There's not much of a plot, far too little music and almost no dancing,  and hardly any acting required from anyone involved. This may actually be something of an advantage for Fred Astaire and Artie Shaw, but the lovely Paulette Goddard and a shockingly young Burgess Meredith could have easily filled out more substantial roles, and character actor Charles Butterworth could, I am convinced, play anything you put in front of him.

Big Band films proliferated in the early 40's, and Artie Shaw was well set up to have a starring vehicle after his spectacular successes of the late 30's. This is not that film. Artie Shaw and his orchestra function in Second Chorus much like Baby the Leopard in Bringing Up Baby. The plot revolves around him, but you could also tweak the script a little so he never had to appear on camera and it wouldn't really change it much. The music sequences, such as they are, are neither well-filmed nor well-integrated, so they simultaneously do not seem to belong in the film and are not interesting enough in themselves to justify their inclusion on their own merits. The sounds Shaw milks out of a clarinet are stunning as usual, but need more visual punch in the stagings to hold them up on screen, and in this case it just isn't there.

Astaire himself cited Second Chorus  as his personal least favorite of his films, and while I haven't seen all of them yet, I imagine he wasn't far off. He plays a small-time college band leader, which sounds promising enough to start with. Personally I am really only prepared to accept Astaire in about four different types of roles: dancer, band leader, producer/promoter, or millionaire playboy. Anything too far beyond this falls a bit flat, like his abysmally unprofessional psychiatrist in Carefree. Of course, no one watches Fred Astaire to see him act, but unfortunately that's about all he does in Second Chorus. He has a paltry two dance numbers, in one of which we are expected to believe that he is simultaneously tap dancing, conducting an orchestra, and playing the trumpet, but even setting aside the plot holes it's a weak performance compared to almost any Astaire solo dance. "I've Got My Eye on You" from Broadway Melody of 1940, which was made the same year, shames this number to hell in a hand basket.

Fred and Paulette, having fun.

The other dance number in Second Chorus, however, is something rather special. It's a spontaneous little swing number with Paulette, who looks adorably leggy in a short flippy skirt. Certainly the technical difficulty is nothing much. Paulette is a charming actress and a very capable dancer, but set against Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, Cyd Charisse or even Judy Garland, her steps just don't stack up. But there's more going on here than just the steps. The pair twirl and tap around the set with an ease and fluency that make it a delight to watch. On top of this, the routine has a wry comic note to it, without being outright funny, that I have never seen Astaire quite hit with any of his partners after Ginger, but it was a big part of what made that pairing the stuff of legend. It sort of makes you think of all the films that could have been if anyone had had the foresight to see what seems so obvious to me now.

The absolutely delightful Charles Butterworth.

While I'm here, a nod of deepest respect is due to Charles Butterworth, for his performance as the music-loving, (talentless) mandolin-playing bottle cap magnate. His character is of course ridiculous, but Butterworth carries the role with dignity and somehow keeps him from being pathetic, reminding me somewhat of an aging Buster Keaton. There's nothing special or interesting about the part, but the performance is spectacular, and he all but steals the show.

Sometimes you really do find buried gold, but more often what you see is just a flicker of light and shadow, beautiful for a moment, but insubstantial. Second Chorus is by any objective criteria a terrible film, but that doesn't mean it's not worth watching.

Thrill of a Romance (1945)

Esther Williams, "America's Mermaid"

It is a little known fact that between the years of 1942 and 1955, MGM employed a highly paid executive think tank, composed of all the relevant experts in the fields of music, psychology, women's fashion, and aquatics. Their sole task, to concoct interesting and original plots revolving around the eternal, unfailing premise of Esther Williams in a bathing suit. Boy, they had some doozies. While in her early films she generally played a woman who simply liked to swim, by the late 40's her roles got more and more elaborate, usually with Williams playing some form of underwater dancer at one of the many nightclubs with swimming pools that proliferated in the 40's. She was also cast in a biopic of famed swim star Annette Kellerman (perhaps best known for her introduction of the one-piece bathing suit to America); she played a sea goddess, crossed the English Channel with Tom and Jerry, and headed up an all-water ski Busby Berkeley chorus line.

The Major and the Minor (1941)

Ray Milland, "the Major," and Ginger Rogers, "the Minor"

The films of Hollywood's golden age seldom have much shock value for viewers today. After all, the Hays office was there to make sure things never got too interesting, handing out last minute marriage licenses at all the right moments so things stayed respectable. Thankfully, the directors of the period were nothing if not inventive, so a surprising amount of scandal seems to have flown just under the radar. There are times, though, when our own standards today have become more conservative, so plot twists the Hays office didn't blink an eye at are downright shocking today. Enter Billy Wilder's US directorial debut, The Major and the Minor, a patriotic war-years comedy about a military school instructor who falls in love with a twelve year old girl.

Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)

Although Fred Astaire would never again reach the same level of charm and appeal with another partner as he did with Ginger Rogers in the 1930's, he certainly gave it a good run all the same. After moving from RKO to MGM in 1939, Astaire partnered with some of the finest dancers in the business, although after Ginger he never worked with the same girl for more than two films. Astaire's list of leading ladies in the 40's and 50's reads like a role call of the most talented and glamorous actresses in Hollywood, and, naturally, the best dancers: Judy Garland, Ann Miller, Rita Hayworth, Cyd Charisse, Jane Powell, Vera-Ellen, Leslie Caron, Audrey Hepburn, Paulette Goddard, and my personal favorite: Eleanor Powell, in Broadway Melody of 1940.

For Me and My Gal (1942)

Judy Garland as Jo Hayden

Magic. It doesn’t matter how many times I watch For Me and My Gal; from the first chord of the title song I’m hooked. Gene Kelly is a two-bit comic vaudeville dancer, who has decided that a double act with Judy Garland is his ticket to fame and fortune. The fact that she is already part of a team doesn’t bother him much. “You had me pegged,” he tells her, “I’m never gonna win any blue ribbons for being a nice guy.” He’s right, too. Kelly’s character proves time and again in this film that he is pretty much a worthless cad. Fortunately, Kelly himself is likable enough to pull it off, so we root for him anyway.