Category: 1940s

When William Powell wakes up after being hit on the head, he discovers that had previously been in an amnesiatic state which he has now been literally knocked out of. Suddenly remembering that he is a con artist whose last real memory is from 9 years previous, he decides to continue on with the other life, where he is married to Myrna Loy, to pull off bigger swindles. It’s all incredibly silly and a bit convoluted (they don’t even bother trying to explain what happened 9 years ago nor how he started a new life back then) but there’s still the wonderful Powell-Loy chemistry that makes it worthwhile.

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 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.

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.

Told through the testimony of witnesses at a murder trial, this film is about woman disfigured as a child whose bitterness turns her to a life as a blackmailer. After reconstruction surgery, she turns away from crime and finds love. I’m not a big fan of Joan Crawford, but she looks her softest here over all and does a fine job portraying both sides of the woman’s character. The story is somewhat meh as it seems to suggest that looks guide a person’s character. I hadn’t realized it was a remake of a Swedish film, which explains why it was otherwise inexplicably set in Sweden. Some of the scenery was very beautiful, particularly when showing gondolas flying over mountain rivers.

The last of the Paul Robeson: Portraits of an Artist set that I hadn’t seen yet, this film only contains Robeson as an off-screen narrator and singer alongside various dramatizations detailing numerous attacks on the Bill of Rights, particularly against workers and unions. While being a somewhat dry pro-union piece with some of the dramatizations being overly long, it’s an interesting artifact enumerating Anti-American activities committed by people with power and fits well in displaying Robeson’s years as an activist.

This is a bit of an oddity of a true story about a Black American man who finds himself joining a Welsh mining community. Paul Robeson’s presence is strong here both in stature and voice, as the potential boon to the men’s choir is the catalyst for the community welcoming him into their fold. I have a lot of sympathy for mining towns where digging for coal is the only ‘good’ job available, but even eighty years ago, when there weren’t as many other options available, the work is ridiculously dangerous and difficult and questionably a win in the grand scale of things.

My favorite part of this movie was its great intro, following a lone man on his long walk through the twisty halls of a police station. The rest of the film is a passable film noir with quite the convoluted plot though somewhat unique premise. Edmund O’Brien is Frank Bigelow an everyman accountant and notary public who has been poisoned and is determined to use his last few days of life left to figure out who murdered him and why. He also is saddled with the clingiest girlfriend who interrupts his quest to play passive-aggressive mind games with him over the phone.