Three Comrades was certainly a prestige project:  produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz; directed by two-time Oscar winner Frank Borzage; starring the much-admired Margaret Sullavan and a top-billed post-Camille Robert Taylor; based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front); and with a script co-credited to Fitzgerald and Edward E. Paramore.  Set in Germany, it’s one of those between-the-wars dramas, a “lost generation” movie.  It may not be one of Borzage’s more distinctive movies, such as 7th Heaven (1927), A Farewell to Arms (1932), or Desire (1936), but it’s nonetheless lovingly made and occasionally rather touching.  It’s best at handling the malaise and hopelessness of its post-WWI “lost” figures, while less good at charting the rise of those brutes who would soon come to be known as Nazis.  The film’s blatant subtext is the events going on in Europe at the time the film was made, the dawn of the Nazis’ march through the continent.

The film opens on Armistice Day in 1918, as the title’s soldier buddies (Mr. Taylor, Franchot Tone, and Robert Young) begin their post-war transition.  But the action mainly takes place in 1920, with increasing rumblings of violent unrest.  The guys go into business together, owning and operating a garage, working as both mechanics and cabbies.  Young is the most politically active, the most fiercely against the new post-war bullies.  (In a real twist, Young plays a fervent Nazi in The Mortal Storm, a 1940 war-themed drama also directed by Borzage and starring Sullavan.)  The subplot, concerning Young’s activism and Tone’s subsequent involvement on Young’s behalf, is never as convincing or compelling as the main plotline (which focuses on Sullavan).  Mr. Tone is partly to blame.  He gives one of his tirelessly overemphatic performances, as if he wants to show us how hard he worked on each and every one of his line readings.

The film’s chief asset is inarguably Ms. Sullavan.  First seen wearing a beret (and looking sensational in it), Sullavan was never more attractive, despite playing a dying girl.  She’s a fallen aristocrat, once rich and now poor, half-English and half-German, and apparently being “kept” by Lionel Atwill.  She’s a defeatist not entirely without hope, unmistakably marked by a sadness with which she now drifts through life.  Call her a walking casualty of the war, seemingly without a future.  Her tuberculosis is in remission but it will return.  All this adds up to a luminous Sullavan performance, one of enormous delicacy, a kind of brave fragility.  And it’s completely unforced, enhanced by subtle shades of feeling and a heartbreaking tenderness.  Because of her charm and warmth, it’s easy to believe that all three guys quickly adore her.  But it’s she and Taylor who fall in love.  Though she confesses the truth of her condition to Tone, she marries Taylor without telling him how ill she is.  When she coughs at 44 minutes into the movie, well, you know where this is going.  (For Taylor, it’s Camille all over again.)  She doesn’t want to drag down the “comrades,” or hold Taylor back from living a full life, all of which leads to the moving sacrificial ending.

The only flaw in Sullavan’s performance has nothing to do with her acting.  It’s the overglamorization inflicted upon her by MGM.  She’s always too made up, always glossily lipsticked no matter how sick she gets.  Despite the film’s dramatic (and cosmetic) flaws, Three Comrades is an undeniably affecting movie.  Sullavan received her only Best Actress Oscar nomination for this performance (losing to Bette Davis in Jezebel), and she won the New York Film Critics Award that year.

If the latest Great Gatsby doesn’t put you in a Fitzgerald mood or state of mind, then Three Comrades and Margaret Sullavan will very likely do the trick.

The movie that made him a U.S. star was King Solomon’s Mines (1950), ironically in a role reportedly turned down by Flynn himself.  It was a massive hit for MGM, and a surprising Best Picture Oscar nominee.  (Though an often exciting entertainment, its characters and situations are fairly stock.)  With two directors credited—Andrew Marton replaced an ill Compton Bennett—and boasting eventually Oscar-winning color cinematography and film editing, this was a Grade A production of B-ish material.  And it really does deliver the goods, putting on quite a show.  More than either Granger or his lovely redheaded leading lady, Deborah Kerr, the star here is the on-location footage, a dazzling assortment of images capturing the animals and tribes of Africa.  At its core, King Solomon’s Mines is a beautiful and exotic travelogue complete with virtually nonstop animal gazing.

Set in 1897, the film features Kerr (top billed) as a prim but feisty British woman who hires Granger—a fellow Brit and safari guide and big-game hunter—to take her into uncharted African territory in search of her missing husband.  Their first scene together sets up their relationship, one of antagonism and sexual attraction, always a good combo at the movies.  Granger is a widower with a 7-year-old son.  Kerr is wealthy and offers him a bundle.  Along the way, most of the animals go right for Kerr (tarantula, snake, tiger, etc.); she even steps on an alligator.  Eventually Granger and Kerr kiss; it turns out she doesn’t love her husband.  Throughout, Granger is properly roguish and appealing, but neither he nor Kerr can compete with a thrilling stampede, a desert trek, or a Watusi dance.

The climactic scene in the mines is disappointing, not at all impressive-looking and much too brief in screen time.  But all this movie really asks of you is that you have a good time.  And how could you not?  It’s got Africa, color, wildlife, not to mention thrills and romance, the entrancing Kerr, and the arrival of Stewart Granger, firmly staking his claim as a leading man both elegant and macho, funny and no-nonsense, and fully equipped to take on all kinds of adventures for the next half-decade or so.

Footnote:  Granger and Kerr were reteamed for The Prisoner of Zenda (1952) and Young Bess (1953), two costume pictures, the latter starring Jean Simmons in the title role.

Though it’s a minor event in the history of the movie musical, You Were Never Lovelier is nonetheless an enchanting picture.  The direction (by William A. Seiter) is light, the script (co-written by director Delmer Daves) is fun, clever, and occasionally witty.  Unlike so many musicals of its era, it gets points simply for not being dumb.  In fact, it’s romantic-comedy situation is good enough to stand on its own, without the songs and dances (though don’t you dare try to remove them).  And the black-and-white cinematography, the sets, and Hayworth’s gowns are all splendid.  If it’s not a top-tier Astaire musical, well, then it’s near the top of his second tier, despite the fact that he’s playing one of his kind-of-a-jerk roles who also happens to be a renowned dancer, a gambler, and a guy from Omaha (just like Fred Astaire).

The movie is set in a romantic Hollywood conception of Buenos Aires.  Crusty Adolphe Menjou is a hotel owner with four daughters (Rita plays the second one).  There’s a bit of Taming of the Shrew here, with the two youngest sisters having to wait to marry until Rita first ties the knot.  But Rita has no burning inclinations to find a husband.  And so, to whet her amatory appetite, Menjou puts a secret-admirer scheme into motion.  In a typical rom-com mistaken-identity set-up, Rita wrongly believes that Fred is the guy in love with her.  And then she falls for him.  Rita may not be a marvel at light comedy, as Ginger Rogers was in plots like this, but she is clearly a mega-sized movie star (not to mention a swell dancer).

Fred and Rita aren’t exactly a plausible romantic team, yet they’re still quite pleasing together.  They have some of the Fred and Ginger chemistry, with Fred making Rita seem more sophisticated, and Rita making Fred seem like more of a catch (by chasing him).  But their 19-year age difference is apparent, and Rita’s potent sexual charisma can seem like too much for mild-mannered Fred to handle (at least when not on the dance floor).  There’s really no sexual charge between them, as there was between Fred and Ginger, and as there would be between Rita and Gene Kelly in Cover Girl (1944).  Even so, Fred and Rita are a transporting duo when they’re dancing, and, finally, what’s more important than that?

There are two great ballads in this musical, both by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer:  “Dearly Beloved,” which got a Best Song Oscar nomination (and lost to “White Christmas”), and “I’m Old-Fashioned.”  The first is sung only, not given a dance sequence, while the second is the occasion for the first great post-Ginger romantic dance of Fred’s career, proving that there was going to be life after Ginger regarding those rapturous choreographed seductions that changed the face of movie musicals in the mid-1930s.  As in the best of the Fred-Ginger love dances, the romantic fate of Fred and Rita is sealed during “I’m Old-Fashioned,” when they discover the chemistry they share in their bodies (especially their feet).  Later, in a far more playful mood, their jazzy and upbeat “Shorty George” is an exuberant, uninhibited delight.

There’s too much of Xavier Cugat and his orchestra, yet no major dance to go with the title tune.  And why must we wait 35 minutes to see Astaire dance for the first time (in Menjou’s office)?  You can spot Larry Parks as one of the sisters’ suitors, five years before he co-starred with Rita in Down to Earth (1947).  Menjou’s wife (and the girls’ mother) is played by Barbara Brown, a clone of Fay Bainter.

You Were Never Lovelier was an enormous improvement over the previous Fred and Rita picture, You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), which has none of their follow-up’s magic or charm (or great tunes).  Call me old-fashioned, but it delights me no end to see Fred and Rita, in all their glory, at their primes, newly gracing the cover of something that I wrote.  

House of Bamboo has a fairly routine set-up:  Robert Stack stars as a U.S. army sergeant who goes undercover to infiltrate the mob of kingpin Robert Ryan.  What elevates the film above its business-as-usual plotting are the Tokyo locations, the wide-screen compositions, and, yes, the rapturous use of color.  Fuller’s direction is visually superb; this is masterly, painstakingly crafted moviemaking.  Japan comes to vivid life as a place of sensual power and delicate beauty.  (The movie makes sumptuous, and sometimes exciting, use of Japanese screens.)  There’s a seemingly authentic feel for Japanese culture, resulting in a more than usually credible culture clash with the Americans.

Fuller’s control of the plot and his cast is far less secure.  The beautiful images distract viewers from the hollower aspects of the story and its characters.  Stack is mostly one-note, humorless enough to be appearing in a spoof (gearing up for Airplane!).  At first he’s playing a tough hood, and then it’s revealed that he’s an investigator putting on an act.  Yet there’s no difference in him, no new depths, after we discover that there’s more to him than first suspected.  He’s relentlessly stoic and tense, very black and white (despite the color).  His romance with lovely Shirley Yamaguchi humanizes him somewhat, but barely.

As for Ryan, his role is pretty standard mob-leader stuff.  However, you could make a case (and some have) that his character is gay.  When the very good-looking Stack arrives, Ryan clearly notices, decisively shifting his attention to him and away from Cameron Mitchell, who up until then was Ryan’s very definite “favorite” crew member.  Despite the gay twist, Mitchell’s tossed-aside role also feels like a stock character.

And so it’s Joe MacDonald, the cinematographer, who is the movie’s real star, not just for his saturated colors but for the thrilling mobility of his camera.  Kudos as well to the art directors responsible for those breathtaking colors in the sets, just waiting to be enhanced by MacDonald’s camera.  With style to burn, the movie climaxes in a great amusement-park sequence, second only to the one at the end of Strangers on a Train (1951).  There’s also a memorable scene when Ryan shoots a man in a bath barrel, with water pouring out of its bullet holes.

A pulsating mix of beauty and violence, a triumph of style over content, House of Bamboo makes something indeed special out of something potentially ordinary.   

The director, Jacques Tourneur, had recently helmed Out of the Past (1947), perhaps the quintessential example of pure film noir.  On Berlin Express, he worked with the great cinematographer Lucien Ballard, and these two artists created a film that seems rather comfortable accommodating both a nightmarish, nocturnal world of glamorous intrigue and the stark, devastated reality of on-location Frankfurt and Berlin.  Well done and satisfying as it is, there’s no denying that its plotting is awfully farfetched and implausibly fast-paced.

The plot hinges on the protection of a German doctor, a man who recently led a fact-finding commission regarding the reunification of Germany.  He hopes that his work will keep the Americans, the French, the English, and the Russians, each currently occupying a German zone, will remain on friendly terms.  The doctor is on his way from Paris to Berlin to present his findings to the Allies.  Meanwhile, an evil German underground is bent on killing the doctor and promoting unrest, hoping for an end to all prospects for a peaceful post-Nazi future.  Just what this doctor has to tell the Allies is never made clear, so you just have to accept the fact that it’s “important” and that his work is for the good of all (whatever it may be).  I hesitate in telling you who plays the doctor because that’s one of the film’s enjoyable twists.

When the doctor is kidnapped, his French secretary (Merle Oberon) leads a rescue mission through ravaged Frankfurt.  Helping her are four representatives, each from one of the Allied countries, each in Germany for his specific talent.  The American, Robert Ryan, is there because he’s an agricultural expert.  The others are Frenchman Charles Korvin, British Robert Coote, and Russian Roman Toporow.  Another good twist is that one of these men is the would-be assassin, waiting for his chance.

A major flaw is the ease with which clues fall into the path of this quintet, and the ridiculously short amount of time it takes to find the doctor.  Just how small a town is Frankfurt?  But, along the way, there are some visual dazzlers:  a shootout in an old brewery; a brawl in a water tank; and a climax in which the killer is caught because of a reflection from a train window.  Then it’s goodbye at the Brandenburg Gate, with the especially hopeful coming together of the American and the Russian, so touchingly oblivious to decades of Cold War ahead.

Ms. Oberon was married to cinematographer Ballard at the time this film was made.  Was naming her character “Lucienne” a little nod to hubby Lucien?  Her French accent is dreadful, and she’s easily outacted by the gentlemen surrounding her.  Ryan is his solid self, comfortably representing all that is strong, smart, and good in America.  The film is a bit too reliant on its narration by actor Paul Stewart, though it’s his job to set up the documentary feeling with which the film begins.  Once the plot gets rolling, you can feel Hollywood’s unwillingness to let go of Germans as the screen’s prime villains.  Like the great Notorious (1946), it makes gripping use of the possibility that the defeated Nazis are still plotting as we speak.  That paranoia is admittedly dramatically juicy, or was, at least, in those earliest post-war years.

Tourneur left film noir behind with two of my favorite Joel McCrea movies—Star in My Crown (1950) and Wichita (1955)—but, from the days of his horror classics—Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943)—through to Out of the Past and Berlin Express, Tourneur was a master of noir, whether in its purest form or in its variations.

This is a phenomenally ambitious account of those four days in September of 1943 when the Italians, having made peace with Eisenhower, must fight the Germans while waiting for the Americans to get to Naples.  Even though they know the tide has turned, the Germans continue their fight to hold on to Italy.  Four Days is not a documentary but it comes extremely close to looking like one, so unforced is its staging of its episodes, so consistent is its authenticity.  Shot in black and white with amazingly fluid camerawork, and technically wondrous in its use of sound and in its editing, the film has the immediacy and spontaneity of footage captured on the run.  It looks like the neo-realist films of the 1940s, specifically the very war-torn Open City (1945).

Four Days follows dozens of individual characters from among its cast of hundreds.  It’s astonishing how we get to know so many of them, and how so many of their stories become gripping.  Here are just a few of the characters with whom we become involved:  a mother who must separate from some of her children; the escaped reform-school boys who fight for the city that incarcerated them; a married woman and her lover who fight among the rebels; an Italian captain leading rebel forces.  And all the story threads are interwoven beautifully, seamlessly.  I can’t imagine the logistics of a movie that attempts to tell the story of an entire city fighting a war.  It’s an enormous undertaking, and the result is an enormous achievement.

The Germans round up all the men they can find and hold them hostage in a stadium, which incites the women, the children, and, of course, the rebels to fight back.  There’s a great scene when upper-floor residents throw furniture, even toilets, out their windows and onto German soldiers down below, and an especially powerful sequence in which some rebels ride around in a taxi with two dead Italian boys atop it, a way to rouse fellow citizens to enter the fight.  But there’s humor, too:  consider the veteran who hasn’t slept in three days and is immediately taken hostage when he finally crawls into his own bed.

The Four Days of Naples is a forgotten knockout, and a must for anyone interested in WWII.  It is what is known as a tribute to the little people, but there’s nothing condescending or phony or gooey about it.  There may be occasional sentimental flourishes, but there is so much going on, so much to savor, that any flaws are easily forgiven or even ignored.  At the end, you’ll mostly just feel grateful to have survived.

Also in the cast are Hoagy Carmichael, as Andrews’ roommate and bandleader, and Ethel Barrymore, as Oberon’s unmarried aunt.  (Both are in on Oberon’s scheme.)  Carmichael, who had recently appeared with Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Canyon Passage (1946), is his usual, laconically likable self, while the great Barrymore is at her smuggest, even though her role is essentially comic.

Enough, enough, get back to the juicy plot.  Okay, Oberon arranges a composition contest, which provides Andrews with the $5000 prize money needed for the New York operation that will restore his eyesight.  (Supposedly he wins fair and square because he is so talented.)  The screwiness factor kicks into higher gear once Andrews can see again.  When he opts to remain in New York, Oberon hightails it east.  She “meets” him as the beautiful, rich Merle Oberon he has never seen before.  Speaking to her about the blind girl back home, he says, “Her voice was like yours.”  Yeah, uh, exactly like hers.  And so we’re complicit in Oberon’s hopes that he’ll ultimately reject her for the other her back home, his soulmate.  But can he resist the drop-dead glam Oberon and do the right thing?

By 1947, Oberon was in the waning days of her leading-lady stardom, but she still looks extremely beautiful in black and white, photographed by her husband Lucien Ballard.  Despite her obvious limitations as an actress, she must have been a woman of rare taste and personal style because, no matter the film, she is always costumed exquisitely, always appearing to be in supreme control of how she looks.  This makes her ideal for a picture like Night Song, which requires more in the way of hypnotic romanticism than it does in acting chops.  Oberon has the dreamy eyes, the none-too-deep competence, and the umistakable aura of a movie star, which, for Night Song, is better than having a great actress in her place.

Despite the film’s generally ludicrous nature, Andrews manages to give a restrained performance.  Though he is shamelessly manipulated by the plot, there is nothing shameless about his work, which is further enhanced by his ease at convincing us that he’s blind and that he can play the piano.  This film captures Andrews at his career peak, fresh from his triumph in The Best Years of Our Lives, one of the great American films of the 1940s.  More than anyone else in that classic’s impressive ensemble, Andrews is the film’s emotional anchor, the closest thing it has to a central character.  And he is superb.  It is ironic that its two other main male players, Fredric March and Harold Russell, both won Oscars for their performances, while Andrews, who truly gives the standout performance, wasn’t even nominated.

Night Song was directed by John Cromwell (father of actor James Cromwell), the man who made such memorable and diverse pictures as The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Since You Went Away (1944), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), even Caged (1950).  He also has the distinction of having directed both Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis in movies from 1934, serving Hepburn dreadfully in Spitfire while turning Davis into an acting sensation with Of Human Bondage.  If Night Song isn’t one of his biggies, it is nonetheless a very professional job and an irresistibly fun type of escapist movie-movie.  In its world of elaborately sustained improbabilities, easy fixes, and overall air of kitsch, Night Song may not inspire you to finish that concerto but it’s certainly a cure for the blues. 

Following the success and acclaim of their Davis/Wyler version, Warner Brothers wasn’t quite through with the material.  The Unfaithful, directed by Vincent Sherman, is an unofficial and uncredited remake, but it is also unmistakably The Letter, simply transferring its location and reimagining its characters.  No longer dealing with British high society on and around a Singapore rubber plantation, it is now set among the American upper class of Southern California.  This shift allows the film to take The Letter‘s surefire infidelity plot and use it to examine post-war American marriage.

Beautiful Ann Sheridan, an ideally tough yet tender leading lady for James Cagney in movies like Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and an ace wisecracker in hardboiled melodramas like They Drive By Night (1940), gave her best performance in the period soap Kings Row (1942).  (I included this deeply touching and emotionally vibrant performance in my 2002 book 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember But Probably Don’t.)  Sheridan never again got a part that good, or one that suited her so perfectly (though be on the lookout for Come Next Spring [1956], a real sleeper).  I’d say that The Unfaithful is second only to Kings Row as the best vehicle that Warners gave her in her roughly dozen-year association with the studio.  The always-likable, always-underrated Sheridan died at 51 in 1967.

With The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) focusing on how returning servicemen were handling the delicate transition to civilian life, why couldn’t there be a movie about a woman of the home front and her adjustment to her returning husband?  And wouldn’t this be especially dramatic if the wife was trying to keep secret an affair she had while her husband was away fighting?  This is how The Letter was revamped for 1947, making it an unexpectedly relevant melodrama actually about something, a post-war confrontation with the repercussions of a confusing and lonely wartime at home.  Things appear to be wonderful for Sheridan, with soldier husband Zachary Scott home safely from the war and ambitiously getting his house-building company off the ground.  When a man accosts her in front of her home, just as she’s unlocking her door, she and this assumed stranger soon disappear behind the door.  This is the beginning of the film’s equivalent of Bette Davis and her six gun shots.  The scene is cleverly filmed from outside the house, a violent sequence distressingly viewed only in shadow, further heightened by its unsettling noise.  We learn that Sheridan has stabbed him dead—after all, no one can compare with Bette Davis in the gun-shooting department—and she isn’t about to admit that this guy was her lover.  In this version, she had already ended the affair and felt guilty and regretful about it ever having happened.  Like Davis’ lover, Sheridan’s is essentially faceless and identity-free.

The backstory is that Sheridan and Scott married recklessly during wartime, knowing each other just two weeks.  Sheridan’s affair was with a sculptor.  But there is no letter to incriminate Sheridan.  In its place is an unmistakably identifiable bust of her, for which she posed.  While Cooper, Cornell, Eagels, and Davis all knew they had to retrieve that letter, Sheridan wants to get her bust back.  (Should they have called this movie The Bust?)  It’s most effective to have something as sensual as a piece of sculpture as a lasting representation of Sheridan’s sexual abandon, complete with flowing hair.  It’s much sexier, and more visually striking, than a mere piece of paper.  And, yes, her lover had a wife:  that’s Marta Mitrovich in the Gale Sondergaard role.

Sheridan, who could sometimes seem stiff and sound monotone, comes through with one of her more fluid performances, an honest and smart piece of screen acting.  Zachary Scott, better when playing louses, is dull at first but he becomes more interesting and alert once he learns the truth.  And Lew Ayres is solid in the lawyer role, memorably played by James Stephenson in the Davis version.  But it’s the great Eve Arden, as Scott’s high-living divorced cousin, who really surpasses herself.  She shows what a fine actress she was, not just a gal with an awe-inspiring proficiency with snappy quips.  Here she reveals the humanity beneath the zingers, crafting a character with more depth than at first suspected.  She’s particularly marvelous in a major climactic scene with Scott at her posh apartment (with a large balcony), in which she essentially defends Sheridan (and all wartime wives).  In a more typical role, Arden had appeared with Scott when they both supported Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945).

The Unfaithful is superbly shot and designed in black and white, making it a first-rate piece of Hollywood craftsmanship, complete with a throbbing Max Steiner score.  It’s talky in the best sense of the word:  it’s filled with conversations worth listening to.  More adult than the usual so-called “woman’s picture,” as well as an intelligent and worthy remake, the film does become an admittedly preachy anti-divorce plea, fervently hoping (in the words of the Ayres character) that the Sheridan-Scott union can withstand this test and not declare defeat.  (It’s a tricky dilemma for the era’s Production Code, not wanting to “okay” either infidelity or divorce, probably wanting Sheridan to be punished but not wanting Scott to leave her.  We should be grateful that they didn’t just kill her.)  If there’s real hope for Sheridan and Scott, then there’s hope for other post-war couples who also may not have really known each other when they married.  I wonder how many wives saw this movie and were terrified that their wartime dalliances might come back to haunt them.  Not to mention their busts.

Anna arrives on the New York waterfront to stay with her father whom she hasn’t seen for fifteen years.  After she was raped by a cousin, Anna spent the last two years working in a Minnesota brothel.  When she moves onto her father’s coal barge, she finds love with a sailor.  When he proposes marriage, she tells the sailor the truth about herself.  After some high drama, there’s a happy ending.  And that joy extended off the screen, with the critics, the audience, and even the Academy (which awarded Garbo a Best Actress nomination) hailing Garbo’s first talkie a winner.  Today it looks more like they were giving her the benefit of the doubt, not wanting to discourage her or, heaven forbid, send her back to Sweden.  I’m certainly glad it worked out the way it did.  Who wants to imagine 1930s Hollywood movies without Greta Garbo?  Even so, I suspect that I would have greeted this film’s premiere with a reaction similar to the kind that poor John Gilbert was receiving upon the release of his earliest talkies.

On the same sets, and in some of the same costumes, Garbo also starred in another MGM-made film version of the play, but this one in German.  Clarence Brown directed the English-speaking Anna, while Jacques Feyder directed her German counterpart.  Though both films look fairly cheap and static, there’s no question that the German picture is superior, and that Garbo is better in it.  Why is that?  To answer that question fully, I watched both versions back to back, with just a dinner break in between.  The German version is really only marginally better overall, but it’s unquestionably better acted.  Plus, there’s something much easier about reading bad dialogue (in subtitles) than there is in actually having to listen to it.  While Garbo looks astonishingly beautiful (that hair, those hats!) in both versions, she is clearly more at home in the German film, far more comfortable speaking German than English.  But even her body is more relaxed, which allows for emotions that appear to be more organic and spontaneous.  In the German film she is an actress in control, while in the “American” picture her acting is very uneven, marked by awkward, phony gestures and forced emotions, with only rare flashes of her luminous gifts.  She appears to have no technique, nothing to cling to, acting in fits and starts.  And the words don’t come out of her naturally, seeming to belong to someone else, while her body continues to look unsure, sometimes fidgety.  Clarence Brown seems not to have helped her very much, and he definitely didn’t deserve his Oscar nomination.

George F. Marion created the role of Anna’s father, Chris Christopherson, on Broadway and he repeated his role in the English-language film.  He happens to be quite dreadful, not to mention nearly unintelligible with his Swedish accent.  In the German version, Hans Junkermann, certainly a better actor than Marion, plays the part more seriously, without any of the dopey or childlike qualities in Marion’s annoying performance.  The German version doesn’t have much use for comic relief, which is a blessing, but there are plenty of so-called laughs in the English version, thanks mostly to Marie Dressler as Marthy, the father’s drunken bedmate.  Dressler, who was just about to break into major stardom, plays Marthy as the kind of drunk you normally find in a comedy sketch, and her performance amounts to an extended comic drunk scene.  She is over the top as only she could be, yet she can also be amusing, even welcome in such a dreary little drama.  You can never mistake what she’s doing for fine acting, but it’s hard not to like Dressler and smile at her obvious love of performing.  She was, after all, the mistress of mugging!  However, Salka Steuermann (better known as Salka Viertel, five-time screenwriter of Garbo movies) plays the German Marthy as if she were a real human being, not a vaudeville comic.  She plays the role straight, and so she, like the rest in her cast, seems much more like a real and ordinary and sympathetic person.

Character actor Charles Bickford, in much younger days, plays the love interest, the Irish sailor.  Even a very young Bickford seems a ridiculous partner for Garbo; she’d be way out of his league in any possible circumstance.  But his performance is primarily undone by his irritating Irish brogue, which constitutes about ninety-percent of his performance.  (Hurry up, Charles, and become the old-man Bickford of mid-century Hollywood movies!)  In the German version, all references to the character being Irish were removed, which luckily means that the actor, Theo Shall, didn’t have to act in Irish-accented German!  Shall is only slightly more attractive than Bickford, but he definitely makes a better fit with Garbo.

In the English-language movie, a credit reads “Gowns by Adrian.”  Fine, he did some great costumes for Garbo here, but where are the gowns?  I realize that such a prestigious credit was not always meant to be taken literally, but it’s especially odd in a film about an essentially homeless hooker.  Garbo’s entrances into these two movies are notable for their differences in her costumes and makeup.  The English-speaking Anna, intended for the more glamour-loving American audiences, looks pretty chic compared to the more realistically woeful German Anna, who looks much tartier, particularly with that heavy eye makeup.  Helped by these coarser details, Garbo seems much more able to project a hard-knocks dame.  The Germans saw a worn-out whore, while the Americans got a slumming movie star.

One of the reasons the German version is a few minutes shorter is because it doesn’t include the other version’s opening scene on the barge, the first of Dressler’s drunk scenes.  The German version starts with the father and Marthy emerging from the barge (in a long shot in which you can identify that it’s footage of Dressler and Marion).  The other notable absence in the German version is the trimming of the amusement-park scene.  Gone, thankfully, is the game scene in which Bickford tips two scantily clad cuties out of their beds by hitting a target with baseballs.  But the most significant difference between the two films occurs near the end.  In the German version, as in the play, Anna pulls a gun on her sailor when he returns, following his rejection of her.  Why no gun for the English-speaking audience?  At the very least, Anna’s use of the gun provides some suspense, but it also dramatizes her very real fear that he might try to rape her now that he thinks she’s “that kind of woman.”

The German version justifies Garbo’s emerging status as a major star of the new medium.  Yes, her opening hat is better in the English-language film, but her German Anna is the far more accomplished and promising performance.

Cradle Song stars Swiss-born Dorothea Wieck who had recently garnered international attention for her work in the German drama Maedchen in Uniform (1931), noted for its groundbreaking handling of lesbianism.  The film’s success brought Wieck to Hollywood.  Like countless European actresses, Wieck was to find out that she was not, according to Hollywood and the American public, another Garbo or Dietrich.  And this doesn’t seem to have happened unfairly.  Though Wieck is clearly a skilled player, she seems (and sounds) more like Luise Rainer than Garbo or Dietrich, which is not a compliment.  Like Rainer, Wieck is rather obvious in her effects, too self-conscious when dipping into her apparent bag of tricks.  Though the film unsurprisingly did not launch Wieck, it is nonetheless worth a look (if it ever rolls around again).

In many ways Cradle Song is a typical motherlove tearjerker, but it does have a twist:  the “mother” is a nun.  No, she’s not the biological mother, but she is essentially the mother of the piece.  Cradle Song actually plays like The Sound of Music in reverse:  Wieck, an adopted orphan now grown, has been playing mother/governess to the five brothers and sisters she has ostensibly raised, but she has decided to leave them and enter a cloistered order of nuns.  (Wieck plays a German girl who was orphaned in Spain, the film’s location.)  So, the film begins more like The Nun’s Story than The Sound of Music, with Wieck saying goodbye and entering her new world (though clearly smuggling a lifetime supply of lip gloss for her isolated existence).  Wieck is soon able to indulge her continuing maternal instincts when a foundling is left on the convent’s doorstep.  It is agreed that the nuns (but mostly Wieck) will raise the little girl.  She grows up to be Evelyn Venable, and it’s Wieck’s hope that Venable will join the order and remain with her.  But, of course, Venable, able to go out into the world, falls in love.

The character actresses playing the nuns are not unlike those assembled for movies set in theatrical boardinghouses or women’s prisons.  Warm, kindly Louise Dresser is the Mother Prioress, and crusty Georgia Caine is the sourpuss with a heart of gold.  Then there’s glam Gail Patrick, comical Nydia Westman, and likable pal Gertrude Michael.  Young Miss Venable is a fresh and attractive ingenue, very convincing at playing the pangs of first love (with bland Kent Taylor).  It’s soon apparent that the movie’s chief asset is Leisen’s specialty, which he clearly had control of at the outset of his directing career:  his ability to go beyond melodrama and locate a delicacy of feeling, a depth of character.  He allows his actresses to have their moments, always stressing individual characters over the mechanics of the plot.  And so we feel things, things that may have just zipped by in the hands of a less sensitive director.  There may not ever be any doubt about where the story is going, with Wieck learning that she must let Venable go, but Leisen lets it unfold as a lovely, small-scale female drama defined by his tender care.

As in all of Leisen’s films, the sets and the photography are beyond first-rate.  There is a rapturously beautiful image of Venable trying on her wedding veil.  And you know it’s a pre-Code movie because of the scene in which the baby girl is being breast-fed by a wet nurse.

As I watched Wieck find the strength to sacrifice Venable to the world and see her go off with her husband-to-be, I realized that the movie, thanks to Leisen, was better than it had a right to be.  What could have been maudlin and creaky is ultimately touching and restrained, perhaps most of all in the scene when Mr. Taylor, outside their window, asks the nuns to show him their faces so he can know who it was who raised his beloved bride and, therefore, remember them with due gratitude.