Category: 1930s

After the deaths of her parents, Maureen O’Hara travels to the titular locale to join her aunt Marie Ney whose husband runs the inn. Unbeknownst to O’Hara, her uncle uses the inn as the headquarters for a gang of wreckers who engineer shipwrecks which they then plunder. While it doesn’t share most of the hallmarks of director Hitchcock’s well-known films, it’s relatively entertaining in its own right. It has a few captivating scenes, such as the initial shipwrecking, and a charmingly over the top performance from Charles Laughton as the pompous local justice of the peace. 

Arriving in Paris with only the clothes on her back, American showgirl Claudette Colbert convinces cab driver Don Ameche to drive her around looking for jobs. She eventually gives the smitten Ameche the slip and finds herself joining a well-dressed crowd going to a concert, convincing the other patrons that she’s really a rich baroness. I’m not generally a fan of Colbert but still attracted to the roles she plays. Here she’s quite the heroine who knows what she wants and unabashedly goes for it. The film really picks up when Ameche relocates Colbert and the two constantly one up each other to the confusion of their high society hosts.   

At her father’s diner in the Arizona desert, Bette Davis falls in love with intellectual drifter Leslie Howard, but their romance is short lived when Humphrey Bogart uses the diner to hide from the police with his gang. I liked the setting, but Howard comes across as so spineless that it’s hard to see him as a love interest even when stuck in Nowheresville Arizona. The usually formidable Davis is similarly soft which leaves Bogart to carry the bulk of the film in a rather small role though Genevieve Tobin offers a moment or two of poignancy in her roles as one of the additional hostages. 

The arduous task of flying mail across the Andes Mountains is made much more dangerous with airline director John Barrymore’s determination to have his night delivery program succeed. Putting real stakes in the delivery is a sick child in Rio de Janeiro desperately needing a polio serum from Buenos Aires. A star-studded affair that includes Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, Lionel Barrymore, and Myrna Loy, these heavy stakes are oddly only discussed as bookends at the beginning and end while the rest of the film rests on conflict at the airline and the personal lives of its pilots. I have an affinity for postal films and this one certainly has gorgeous vistas and a lovely South America map showing the connections that must be made, but I wish it had an added runtime to really flesh out each of the star characters and the importance of the activity at hand.

Denied dinner as a punishment for stealing, Sacha Guitry becomes the only survivor of a meal that killed his entire family. He soon learns that dishonesty pays and resolves to live his life by this credo. Narrated by the adult Cheat as he’s writing his memoirs, it’s a delightful romp through his adventures as a charming rogue travelling through a life of deceit with occasional attempts at honesty. The film ambitiously weaves the present and the past relying solely on Guitry’s voiceover for much of its dialogue.  

When tailor Maurice Chevalier travels to Vicomte Charles Ruggles’s castle to collect on past due payments, he finds himself faking an aristocratic identity and falling in love with Ruggles’s niece Jeanette MacDonald. While I liked both Chevalier and MacDonald much more than other films I’ve seen them in, the other characters outshine the leads, particularly a trio of Macbethian aunts and a delightfully sex-crazed Myrna Loy. The film does display a number of surprisingly well-crafted musical numbers that would be more expected during the golden age of musicals versus in a pre-Code, relatively early talkie.