Category: 1940s

Horse enthusiast Barbara Stanwyck is married to Robert Cummings, a popular Civil War scholar. When his dislike for horses and her jealousy toward his overly-familiar fans get between them, they decide to divorce. It’s not one of my favorite Stanwyck films, but it does have enough humor and silliness to make it worth a watch. It’s a rare film that allows all of the characters to shine equally, even a teeny Natalie Wood in a small role as the couple’s daughter, but it definitely does nothing to making me think the Steeplechase is a good idea for horses. 

On the day a statue to the founder of Hoyt City is to be dedicated, reporters converge on the home of Barbara Stanwyck, playing a centenarian who has a mysterious connection to the founder. The film then flashes back to the past when Babs was just a teenager and infatuated with the future founder, played by Joel McCrea. They marry and the film proceeds to tell of their life together and apart, Stanwyck providing the cleverness and fortitude that made him so successful. Trying to show a ‘behind every great man there is a great lady’ tale, this mostly fails because there is little redeeming McCrea’s character except that he sometimes gets out of his way long enough to listen to Barbara. Multiple times in the film, he brings ruin to their lives whether through gambling away their savings or jealousy over another’s interest in his wife and are only saved because Stanwyck is that great.

So much more than actual battle films, I enjoy espionage films set during World War II. In this modernized version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Leslie Howard is a professor and archaeologist, almost an Indiana Jones prototype, who takes a group of students on a dig in Germany. His research is funded by the Nazis, but his trip is actually a cover in his attempts to free prisoners in a nearby concentration camp. An enjoyable film that really picks up the pace once the narrative moves from England to Germany, I imagine it was particularly effective as a morale booster during the war years, portraying the British as intelligent and cunning and the Germans as bungling buffoons.

At Christmastime, little Patti Brady is set to make her six month switch from living with her father, Errol Flynn, to moving back in with her mother, Eleanor Parker. During the switch-off, it’s obvious the adults have feelings for each other, but unfortunately Flynn’s womanizing ways rear their ugly head. He is not deterred by this nor the various other obstacles (another love interest for his former wife, a visiting Marine who his daughter has less than honestly been corresponding with) that get in his way. It’s a very sweet Christmas time romance. Patti Brady is cute as the precocious and adorably named Flip. Despite the somewhat stalker nature of the role, Flynn is impossibly charming, whether dressed in a Santa suit or displaying his Humphrey Bogart impersonation. 

The film begins with Robert Preston explaining to a doctor the circumstances that led his estranged wife Barbara Stanwyck to being found severely beaten and winding in the hospital. Finding herself bored during her husband’s reporting assignments at the Hoover Dam, she is introduced to the Las Vegas betting tables. The thrill she finds at the casino takes a hold on her as great as any addiction. The ending is a bit simplistic, but Stanwyck brings her A game to the role, believably portraying the downward spiral of the addiction from ‘borrowing’ money from her husband’s expense account to pairing with shady characters who won’t stand to being double-crossed.

There are a lot of gothic tropes in this film where Gene Tierney is a young woman living in Connecticut farm country with her religious family and dreams of there being more to life. (Un)luckily for her, she is soon whisked to Dragonwyck Manor by her distant cousin Vincent Price to be the companion to his young daughter. Before long, Price and Tierney grow close and he’s confessing to her his disappointment that his wife has not been able to produce a son. Tierney doesn’t do much with her role beyond looking wide eyed and innocent but a young Price is of course excellent, becoming more and more crazed and unhinged as an unrepentant drug user who finds his life of luxury threatened at every turn.