An Englishman on a Ruritanian holiday finds himself caught up in courtly intrigue. Ronald Colman is delightfully genteel in duel lookalike roles as both the Englishman and the soon-to-be coronated king. He’s helped along the way by David Niven and C. Aubrey Smith. It’s a quick adventure tale filled with romance, moats, fencing, and evil usurpers (one gleefully played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr.).
Oscar Nominations: Best Art Direction; Best Music, Score
I wish this had been a bit longer to fully flesh out the motivations and actions of the characters better. Feeling neglected from the long hours her husband, William Powell, puts in as a lawyer as well as receiving evidence of a potential liaison on his part, Myrna Loy succumbs to her own dalliance. Probably because of the Hays Code, these affairs, and their consequences, are both alluded to more than seen. Loy and Powell have great chemistry as always, but they are given little time to really play off each other. Una Merkel is also wonderful as Loy’s friend who always seems to be around.
I hadn’t remembered watching this before, but once it started, it became immediately familiar. The previous time I had watched, I found Miriam Hopkins’s character way over the time. Now that I am more familiar with her other work, I now know it’s less the actress and more what the character called for. She’s an extremely histrionic, romance author and she’s costumed as if someone took the best author photos those novels. She’s wonderfully juxtaposed to smart and serene Bette Davis, composed in front of others even when facing heartbreak. In some ways they don’t make sense as lifelong friends and professional semi-rivals, but sometimes that’s what the best relationships look like from the outside.
I had gone into this fairly blind and was left more underwhelmed than expected. I fear there isn’t anyone out there currently to bring fully realized musicals to the big screen. Reading the wikipedia entry for the stage version, it seems like the story was sanded down so utterly that there is little conflict left in the film aside from ‘should I stay or should I go’. The answer that question is unearned in the end. I can understand wanting Lin-Manuel Miranda to be part of the movie, but his character could easily have been sacrificed in order to develop some of the main ones fuller. The songs make Hamilton seem less impressive as they all seem to have been reworked into that musical. The lip synching, especially for the younger women, is poor and disengaging. Instead of singing about their actions, the actors often seem to be doing things because the song tells them to. Maybe it feels more real for people from the area, but here, aside from an overabundance of fanny packs, Washington Heights appears to be little different from any other neighborhood in any other city. All that being said, there was a real joy expressed in the film and real emotion portrayed, particularly from Anthony Ramos and Olga Merediz, that it is hard not to feel immersed in the production. 
I have a feeling that Michael Landon watched this movie a billion times before creating Highway to Heaven. A handful of prisoners, including Clark Gable, escape the prison on Devil’s Island guided by a person with heavenly connections. It’s odd that this was included in a Joan Crawford box set since she’s secondary as a love interest to Gable. She looks very pretty in this film, more natural than I’ve ever seen her. The rest of the film is bizarre with a very specific, preachy version of morality which some of the escapees eventually succumb to while others do not.
I’m not even going to pretend that I understand most of what this film is trying to say. At a luxury hotel, a man meets up with a woman, who is staying there with another man, and talks of an affair that they had a year earlier which she denies. As someone who often suffers from sensory overload, this film felt a lot like being in a crowded room where it’s difficult to pull out particular voices. The dialogue is repetitious and brings forth a dreamy ambiguity where it’s hard to trust the recollections of either of the main characters and there’s no telling what actually happened last year at Marienbad.
Oscar Nominated: Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen
Joan Crawford is a dancer left behind by the carnival she works for and tries to setup home in the last small town they had stopped in. Unfortunately sheriff Sydney Greenstreet runs this town with an iron hand and does not want her kind around. Like Sadie McKee, she finds herself a sugar daddy to marry, despite originally being in love with someone else early in the film. Unfortunately Joan is at least 10 years too old for this role and her hair and clothing make her look 10 additional years older. Despite being miscast in the specifics of the role, Crawford brings quite a bit of strength to her character and its great to see her and Greenstreet battle against each other.
I mostly avoid these Disney live-action money grabs for good reasons. They throw lots of money at the production (How many rock songs can we fit? Buy them all!) and little care for actually addressing the origin story (How exactly does Cruella become a wannabe dog killer?). The purpose seems to be to distract with lavish visuals and to touch as many points from the original film as possible with no actual direction or purpose. The Emmas put their all into their characters for sure and I enjoyed the casting of Horace and Jasper, but there’s no explanation as to why anyone goes along with the machinations of someone clearly suffering from a mental illness nor how that extra neatly wrapped up ending even comes to pass.
Oscar Win: Best Achievement in Costume Design
Oscar Nominations: Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling
This is the strongest performance by Joan Crawford I’ve seen thus far. After being offended by her snobbish employers, she runs off to the city with her musician boyfriend. When he abandons her, she manages to find herself an alcoholic sugar daddy to marry. The ending is a bit contrived and everything is wrapped up a bit too easily, but Joan makes it worth watching. Though all these ups and downs, Crawford brings a complete range and humanity to the Sadie character.
I really enjoyed the chemistry between Alan Rickman and Yasiin Bey in this HBO film about heart surgery pioneers Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas. It’s a fairly standard biopic portraying the years long partnership of the two, but also does a decent job of detailing the numerous racial injustices Thomas experienced as ‘just’ a researcher. There are a handful of small, mostly underutilized roles played by some strong actors, like Kyra Sedgwick, Mary Stuart Masterson, Merritt Wever, and Gabrielle Union, but the film is really between Rickman and Bey.