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buxtonhill
Reviews
Die 3 Groschen-Oper (1931)
lumbering movie but great visually
The movie isn't a filmed version of the stage play and doesn't pretend to be. It moves along at a sometimes creaky, sometimes disjointed pace. And when does it take place? There was no coronation of anybody in Victorian England, and I don't believe they had telephones. But those are quibbles. The thrill of it is the art direction - the expressionistic sets, set decoration and costumes are wonders. All those steep staircases! Those "London" streets! Terrific.
I wonder if some of the disjointed sequences and odd pacing of the movie result from the fact that it's a reconstruction, the original having gone the way of all entartete art in Nazi Germany.
The Feminine Touch (1941)
Better than most Kay Francis films, but...
...that doesn't mean it was much good though an improvement over most of her movies at Warners. Some witty dialogue, due quite likely to Ogden Nash's contribution. The story is nonsense and entirely predictable. The premise that any commercial house would want to publish Don Ameche's book is preposterous, and Ameche himself is uninteresting on-screen (as always). Like some of the other commentators, I didn't get the movie's fascination with beards. What was that all about? Kay Francis and Rosalind Russell were playing the wrong roles. Russell should have done better as the wisecracking assistant and Francis as the put-upon wife. Seemed odd. Maybe Metro was trying to re-shape Russell's image. And what was with that immense hat Kay Francis wore in one scene, perhaps the night club scene? It looked several large bats had been sacrificed for it. She could wear anything with aplomb, but that hat was near the far margin, even for her. The "gowns by Adrian", though tailored and stylish enough, were nothing like the flattering Orry-Kelly numbers from her Warners days.
Comet Over Broadway (1938)
Among her worst
The competition for the worst Warner Bros Kay Francis movie is stiff. I've only seen perhaps eight of them, but Comet over Broadway is the worst so far. The very best thing about it is that it's short. Oh, and the Orry-Kelly gowns (of course) are fine. James Wong Howe's cinematography is not. Kay Francis throughout looks fat-faced and far less attractive than she normally does. Minna Gombell whom I don't know otherwise is good as a semi-tough "burlesque" dancer (it looked more like a fashion show than burlesque). The closing shot - Kay Francis and her child (when did the child learn that Kay Francis was her mother? Did I doze off?) walking up a dirt path toward a prison painted in misty outlines on a sound stage drop is beyond ludicrous. The whole film is so cheap, so implausible and so careless that it feels infected by a sour cynicism on the part of everyone who made it: Warner Bros tossing garbage to dolts who don't know, in Warner Bros' cynical estimation of them, that what they're getting is garbage.
Always in My Heart (1942)
More padding than plot
There is enough "story" in the movie to fill a 60 minute feature but no more. The rest is padding, most of it extended and largely pointless musical numbers. Gloria Warren may indeed have had an unusually high vocal range, but her voice is painfully thin and painfully annoying, even allowing for the sound recording limitations of the period. She sounds like a church soprano whose voice will not mesh with the others in the choir. Her charisma matches her voice.
The ending of the movie is inevitable, and it is inevitable from the early prison scene between Kay Francis and Walter Huston. There is not even a mildly divergent sub-plot to move things along except for the perfunctory story concerning Frankie Thomas and his girlfriend. I kept expecting some unexpected plot points to develop around Sydney Blackmer, but none did.
However....Kay Francis and Walter Huston are very appealing and very charming. Their roles were hardly a stretch for either one of them, but they are worth watching. They make the whole thing, as tired and pointless as it is, watchable and even - almost - enjoyable. But not quite. I will watch anything with Kay Francis in it; no one else, ever, conveyed warmth and generosity as she did. This movie, sad to say given its limitations, is one of her better Warner Brothers films. She's terrific; her movies were not.
The Mask of Dimitrios (1944)
Second Rate
The movie doesn't make much sense. Neither do several other noir movies from this and subsequent eras, but Mask seemed particularly egregious. I barely understood why Sidney Greenstreet went to all the trouble he did with Peter Lorre's character when he might have obtained the only piece of information he needed from him - the (non) identity of the corpse - much more simply. Of course it's easy enough to concoct reasons, but they have to be concocted.
Peter Lorre, as fascinating as he is on-screen, never seemed to settle into his role. His Peter Lorre-ness was often at odds with the witty comedy dialogue given to his character. The two sets of rhythms - Peter Lorre obsequiousness and arch comedy - never coalesced.
What strikes me as odd about the movie(and perhaps its most entertaining quality)and about the other comments is that no one has remarked on the pervasive homosexual undertone to it. Most of the male characters seem to be homosexual, from the Turkish police officer who wants to get away from women, to the spy in Geneva with his cats and most of all Lorre and Greenstreet. Demetrios seems to be a sublimated, or not so sublimated, erotic ideal to the people who knew him. Of course the movie was made in the early 40's and they didn't have homosexuals then. Did they?
Are movies taken from Graham Greene books always told from the point of a writer? Think of The Third Man.