Dust Be My Destiny (1939)

Dust Be My Destiny (1939). Cast: John Garfield and Priscilla Lane. The original ending of the film had Joe and Mabel shot to death, but the failure of  of the film, You Only Live Once, which had a tragic ending, prompted the Warner Bros. studio to want a happy ending. When writer Robert Rossen refused to write the new ending, Seton I. Miller was brought in to write it.

Joe Bell, who is very embittered, after he was wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit, but.. when the real culprit was caught and confessed, he is released. Later, he and his friends are picked up for vagrancy and sentenced to a county work farm. There, he meets Mabel Alden, the stepdaughter of the brutal and drunken prison foreman and the two fall in love.

When her step father catches them together, he slaps Mabel and in turn, Joe hits her stepfather, who dies of a heart attack because of his poor health caused by alcoholism. Running for their lives Joe and Mabel, leave the work farm and cross the state line and marry.

Mabel, wants to turn themselves in, but Joe does not think any one believe them and refuses, she sticks by him. They are given a job by kindly diner owner, Nick, who even helps them escape when Mabel is caught and Joe breaks her out of jail. 

Needing money, Joe.. is on the verge of pawning his camera, when he stumbles on a bank robbery and captures it on film.

Impressed with the pictures, Mike the newspaper editor, offers Joe a job on the paper and Joe confides in him. Later, when members of the gang threaten Mike unless he returns the negatives. Joe saving his life attracts the attention of the newspapers, and once again is threatened with being exposed as the wanted fugitive. As he is getting ready to flee once again, Mabel, not wanting to live a life on the run turns in her husband.

Will Joe ever find justice and forgive Mabel for turning him in?

This film is worth seeing for Garfield's performance, but Henry Armetta and Alan Hale are both excellent, and there's an enjoyable Max Steiner score.

Priscilla Lane (June 12, 1915 – April 4, 1995) was born on June 12, 1915, in Indianola, Iowa, a small college town south of Des Moines. She was the youngest of five daughters of Dr. Lorenzo A. Mullican, DDS, and his wife, Cora Bell Hicks. Dr. Mullican had a dental practice in Indianola. The family owned a large house with 22 rooms, some of which they rented out to students attending nearby Simpson College.

Priscilla and one of her sisters, Rosemary, traveled to Des Moines every weekend to study dancing with Rose Lorenz. The girls made their first professional appearance September 30, 1930, at Des Moines' Paramount Theater. Priscilla, then 15, performed on stage as part of the entertainment accompanying the release of her sister Lola's Hollywood movie, Good News (1930).

After graduating from high school, Priscilla was permitted to travel to New York to visit a third sister, Leota, who was then appearing in a musical revue in Manhattan. Priscilla enrolled at the nearby Fagen School of Dramatics, and Leota paid the fee.

At this time, talent agent Al Altman saw Priscilla performing in one of Fagen's school plays and invited her to screentest for MGM. She was 16 years old. Priscilla wrote to a friend in Indianola, "Leota accompanied me to a sort of theater in a New York skyscraper. Others were there being made up. One was a strange looking girl with her hair slicked back in a sort of a bun. Her name is said to be Catherine Hepburn. Not very pretty, I thought, but Mr. Altman said she has something. Margaret Sullavan, the Broadway actress, was there too!" A follow-up letter said that her test had proven unsuitable. Neither Hepburn nor Sullavan were approved, and neither received a contract from MGM at the time.

In 1932, Cora and Rosemary arrived in New York. Cora immediately went to work pushing her two young daughters into attending auditions for various prospective Broadway productions, without success. During a tryout at a music publishing office, orchestra leader and radio personality Fred Waring heard them harmonizing. He found them attractive and talented and soon signed them to a radio contract.

Priscilla, who at this time adopted the surname Lane, quickly became known as the comedienne of the group. Rosemary sang the ballads, while Priscilla performed the swing numbers and wisecracked with Waring and various guests. Back in Iowa, Dr. Mullican instituted divorce proceedings against his wife on the grounds of desertion, and the divorce was granted in 1933. Rosemary and Priscilla remained with Fred Waring for almost five years.

 In 1937, Waring was engaged by Warner Bros. in Hollywood to appear with his entire band in Varsity Show, a musical starring Dick Powell. Both Rosemary and Priscilla were tested and awarded feature roles in the film. Rosemary shared the romantic passages with Powell, while Priscilla was a high-spirited college girl. Priscilla Lane, the youngest of the Lane Sisters, in the trailer for, Cowboy from Brooklyn (1938).

Warner Bros. purchased Priscilla and Rosemary's contract from Fred Waring and signed them to seven-year pacts. Priscilla's first film after Varsity Show was Men Are Such Fools (1938), in which she starred with Wayne Morris. This was followed by Love Honor and Behave (also 1938), another light romantic comedy with Morris, who, playing her husband, spanked her 47 times in a scene for which she declined a double, and Cowboy from Brooklyn, again teaming with Dick Powell. The publicity department at the studio suggested that Priscilla and Morris be seen together around town. They liked each other and did date for a period; however, Priscilla later said it was never serious on either side.

Priscilla was next assigned the lead in Brother Rat, which had been a very successful Broadway play. Again she played opposite Wayne Morris, and among the cast were newcomers Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Jane Bryan, and Eddie Albert. The film, when released in October 1938, was a big success for all the young players. At this time of professional success, the sisters were informed that Dr. Mullican had died in Iowa.

After winning her raise, Priscilla returned to work, but the films assigned to her were no better than those she had turned down. Brother Rat and a Baby (aka, Baby Be Good, 1940) was an inferior sequel and Three Cheers For the Irish (also 1940) gave her little to do. The British Picturegoer magazine, always a supporter of the Lane Sisters, stated that all was not right with Priscilla Lane. In its June 15, 1940 issue, they wondered why "Priscilla was still knocking at the door of major stardom". They felt Warner Bros. was casting her as stooge to such actors as John Garfield and James Cagney. They went on to say Priscilla had great charm and while not a really great dramatic actress, deserved much larger and more important roles than she was getting.

The same magazine, two years later on August 22, 1942, referred to their 1940 article and once again expressed disappointment at Warners' treatment of the star. They were unaware that she had already left the studio. On April 28, 1941, she was heard on Lux Radio Theater with George Brent and Gail Patrick in Wife, Husband and Friend. At Warner Bros. she appeared opposite Ronald Reagan in a light hearted comedy, Million Dollar Baby (1941) and as a night club singer in Blues in the Night (also 1941). Frank Capra requested her for the lead opposite Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace. The comedy film was completed in early 1942, but was not released until 1944; it was held up by contractual agreement not to distribute the film until the play's long Broadway run was over. It was Priscilla's last Warner film. Her contract was terminated by mutual agreement after five years with the studio.

She freelanced next, signing a one-picture deal with Universal Studios where she starred with Robert Cummings in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). The director did not want either Cummings or Lane for their roles. Hitchcock felt Lane was too much the girl next door. Universal insisted that they play the leads, and when the film was released, her acting was praised while some criticism was focused on Hitchcock for reworking so much from his earlier films into this wartime spy drama.

 She had commitments for two more films. The first was Silver Queen (1942) for producer Harry Sherman in which she co-starred with George Brent. She played the owner of a gambling house in 1870s San Francisco. The other film was a Jack Benny comedy, The Meanest Man in the World, released in January 1943. Lane then retired from films.

For the duration of the war, she followed her husband across America as he moved from one military base to another. She was generous with her talents and often performed at camp shows. While living in Van Nuys, she was offered and accepted the leading role in Fun on a Weekend (1947) for producer–director Andrew Stone, co-starring Eddie Bracken. When the film was released, Variety opined, "Miss Lane, who's been absent from films for some time, gives a good enough performance which should ensure her work in more pictures." However, Lane returned to domestic life. Once again she and her husband moved, this time to Studio City.

 Lane accepted the offer of the lead role opposite Lawrence Tierney in a film noir, Bodyguard (1948), starring as Doris Brewster. During an interview with a Hollywood correspondent, she stated, "I didn't realize how much I miss filming until I came back. I love this work, and I hope to make many, many more pictures." Bodyguard would be her last picture.

 An expected contract with RKO Studios did not come to pass. In January 1951, Cora Mullican died at the San Fernando Valley home her daughters had bought for her years earlier. Priscilla returned to show business briefly in 1958 with her own show on a local television station broadcasting from Boston. Titled The Priscilla Lane Show, she chatted and interviewed celebrities visiting the area. She enjoyed the television experience, but family demands proved too much, and she gave up after a year Lane dated assistant director and screenwriter Oren Haglund.

Impulsively she eloped with Haglund to Yuma, Arizona on January 14, 1939, but left him the following day. The marriage was soon annulled. In November 1941, Lane became engaged to publisher John Barry, whom she had first met in 1939. She wrote in the November issue of Photoplay about how she looked forward to their marriage. She also stated she would continue her career.

 In early 1942, the engagement to Barry ended after she met Joseph Howard, a young Air Force lieutenant, at a dude ranch in the Mojave Desert. A native of Lawrence, Massachusetts, he had joined the Army Air Corps straight from college in 1939. He was scouting the area for likely sites for air bases and had taken a short vacation. The couple were married on May 22, 1942, in Las Vegas, Nevada at the home of the executive officer of an Army Air Force gunnery school.

 At the war's end in 1945, Lane and Howard were living in New Mexico and she was pregnant with their first child. Their son, Joseph Lawrence, was born on December 31, 1945. In 1946 after Howard's discharge from the service, the couple moved back to California, where they resided in Victorville. Howard, who had a degree in engineering, became a building contractor. The family moved to Van Nuys in December 1945.

 Afterwards Howard and Lane moved to Studio City. Priscilla became pregnant again in 1949. On April 17, 1950, her daughter Hannah was born. By June 1951 the boom in the construction industry in New England had Lane and her family moving back to Howard's native Massachusetts. Howard left the final decision to end her career to Lane, who later declared she never regretted her choice.

She fell in love with New England, and the couple settled with their children in Andover, Massachusetts. Lane was busy with her family. She gave birth to a second daughter, Judith, on August 22, 1953. The Howard's fourth and youngest child, James, was born December 4, 1955.

Outside her family, Priscilla remained busy. She was devoutly religious, having converted to Roman Catholicism, as had her elder sister Lola. The family attended church regularly, and she was involved with Catholic charities.

She enjoyed tending her garden, growing flowers and vegetables. She ran a girl scout troop and volunteered at local hospitals.

In July 1972, Joe Howard retired from business, and he and Lane moved to their summer home at 7 Howards Grove in Derry, New Hampshire. Howard died suddenly on May 18, 1976, aged 60. He was still in the Air Force Reserve, which he had joined after his discharge from active duty in 1946. Heartbroken, Priscilla remained in Derry. She said, more than a year later in 1977, "I'm still trying to pull myself together after Joe's death." She busied herself with volunteer work and her garden until her death.

Gentleman's Agreement

Gentleman's Agreement, 1947
Directed by Elia Kazan
Nominated for 8 Oscars, Won 3
Up Against: The Bishop's Wife, Crossfire, Great Expectations, Miracle on 34th Street

The Gentleman's Agreement is the story of a widowed father, who goes "undercover" as a Jew for research on an article he's writing on Antisemitism. I was really interested in this movie when I picked it up from the library and read the back cover (yes, I order them, not knowing anything about them), and hoped it was going to be a good one! And I was not disappointed.

Gregory Peck plays Phillip Skyler Green (Skyler Green is his writing name, Phil Green his normal name), the writer and widowed father living with his son and grandmother, having just arrived in New York City. Upon arriving he meets his new boss's (and head of the magazine) niece, Kathy. Kathy is a lovely girl, beautiful, and smart, and she and Phil are instantly attracted to each other, and find themselves quickly engaged. But when Phil's boss tells him he wants him to write a piece on antisemitism, Phil is hesitant, but takes the piece on. While mulling over how to go about it, he realizes he must declare himself as a Jew and see the results for himself. Nobody knows him in New York, he's only just arrived. And he quickly starts to see things he didn't quite imagine.

The story gets more complicated as Phil starts to realize what he can and can't do. He can't go to the hotel he wants for his Honeymoon because it's "restricted", he see's the way people react when he mentions he's Jewish, and the assumptions people make of him. All of this seems a little naive of Phil, considering his best friend growing up was a Jew, and antisemitism seems to be everywhere. Eventually, even Phil's son Tom gets targeted with name-calling.

The story is well told, a double plot concerning Phil and Kathy, and Phil's research on antisemitism. And what I really appreciated about the movie is that it didn't focus on the outwardly antisemitics and how horrible they are, but how the people who dislike it so much but don't do anything to change anything, let comments and jokes slip by, etc, are just as bad. And they're the ones who could make a difference if they spoke up. You can't change the world by hating something and knowing what's wrong. It's knowing what's wrong and doing something about it. It was a well-told message, and something most people forget. About any issue. 

Gregory Peck is great as Phil. He's serious, he's troubled, he's a caring father, and a romantic lover, and he's a serious writer. While the topic of antisemitism stays within the upper-class only (would've been more interesting to expand it wider than that), it was an interesting insight. Whether it's because it doesn't happen much anymore, or because it just doesn't happen here in Canada, I thought this film was interesting and I learned a lot. Sure, I knew about the goings on in the States, but not really to the extent of this movie showed.

In general the acting was very good. It scored 3 nominations, with Celeste Holm, who played Phil's flirty friend Anne, taking home the Supporting Actress Oscar. The pacing was really good, the music good, and it was just a really interesting and intriguing film. I can imagine it was quite controversial when it came out, being released in the 40s, right after WWII.

Overall, I liked it, learned a lot, and appreciated the strong message it gave. The only way to change the world is to get up and do something about it.

8/10

Humoresque (1946)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Jean Negulesco


Joan Crawford has never been one of my favorite actresses of the Hollywood studio era. In the movies she made at MGM in the thirties, her driving ambition to be a movie star seemed to overshadow her acting. She always gave the impression of trying too hard—over-emoting in dramatic roles and too tense to be wholly convincing in lighter ones. And she never really seemed at ease playing the kind of upper-crust sophisticates who dominated MGM movies of the time. It didn't help that she usually got parts only after they were rejected by MGM's two biggest female stars, Norma Shearer (whom Crawford had doubled for early in her career) and Greta Garbo. Nor was she helped by being so often cast opposite flaccid leading men with whom she appeared to have little chemistry, actors like Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor, Melvyn Douglas, or Franchot Tone (to whom she was married for several years). Still, there's no denying her popularity in the early thirties, when she was named one of the top ten box office stars for five years running.

Crawford's career was set back in 1938 when a group of theater owners included her on a list of stars they considered "box office poison," a list that also damaged the careers of Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Mae West, and Marlene Dietrich. She did make a comeback of sorts in The Women (1939), where under the direction of George Cukor she made a strong impression in what was really a supporting role as the gold-digging nemesis of the picture's genteel star, Crawford's long-time rival Norma Shearer. Then in 1941 she got a plum role in A Woman's Face after Garbo turned it down and, again under the direction of Cukor, gave an impressive performance—at least in the first half of the picture, where she played against the great German actor Conrad Veidt—as an embittered woman with a disfigured face.

But any expectations of better parts after A Woman's Face didn't pan out; after Garbo and Shearer retired, the best roles seemed to go to Greer Garson. After a few more undistinguished films, Crawford's time at MGM came to a humiliating end in 1943 when the obsessively profit-conscious Louis B. Mayer decided not to renew her contract. Quick to move forward, though, Crawford then signed a contract with Warner Bros. The reigning female star there was Bette Davis, who got first choice of the best pictures, and again Crawford found herself in the position of being offered leftovers after they were rejected by someone higher in the studio's pecking order. In fact, she got her first assignment at Warners after it was passed on not only by Davis, but also by Ann Sheridan and Rosalind Russell. The picture was Mildred Pierce, and it not only revived Crawford's career, but showed she really could act and, after twenty years in Hollywood and something like sixty movies, got her an Oscar as best actress.

She got her next two pictures at Warners after they were also turned down by Davis, Humoresque (1946) and Possessed (1947), which got her another Oscar nomination. (I wonder if her success in these films had something to do with the famous rivalry between Crawford and Davis, whose career at Warners was rapidly winding down). For my money, those three performances are the best of Crawford's career. But as much as I like her in Mildred Pierce—she really did deserve that Oscar—and as good as she is in Possessed, it was in Humoresque that Joan Crawford gave my favorite of all her performances.

In Humoresque she plays a rich socialite, Helen Wright, who fancies herself a patron of unknown artists and keeps a group of attractive, sycophantic young men hovering around her. At one of her salon evenings a gifted young violinist, Paul Boray (John Garfield), attracts her attention with his playing. After the nearsighted Helen asks one of her toy boys to fetch her eyeglasses so she can get a better look at Paul, the undisguised sexual interest on her face shows that as well as his talent, she is also fascinated by his brooding good looks and almost surly manner. At their first meeting, fireworks fly. She baits him about being conceited and he responds by insulting her musically, playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" to suggest that she is a dilettante less interested in art than in her image as a patron of the arts, and also perhaps to allude to her waspish temperament and bevy of young drones. Yet despite this rocky initial encounter, before long he has become her protégé and she is paying the bills to get him started as a professional concert musician.

Helen becomes increasingly infatuated with Paul, and he seems to return her feelings—to a point. As she grows more possessive and he finds his career taking off, cracks begin to develop in the relationship. As the power dynamic in the relationship begins to reverse, she becomes more clinging and he begins to look for ways to assert his independence. There's a wonderful scene in the film where she takes out a cigarette and waits for him to light it for her, and he pointedly turns his back on her and pours himself a drink. When she begins to see that Paul will never be as devoted to her as she is to him, that his object of devotion is his music, it's clear that this is a love affair fated to end badly.

The role of Helen Wright gives Crawford the opportunity to show everything she is capable of, and she does so using an artfully judged balance of intensity and restraint. Helen may be a socialite now, but when she tells Paul about her first two marriages, it's apparent that her current social position is the result of her third marriage to a wealthy older man whom she dominates completely. It's also apparent that she intentionally surrounds herself with men who pay court to her like an imperious queen but whom she can keep at an emotional distance. Paul's resistance to being controlled by Helen just makes him all the more attractive to her; as her husband tells her, Paul has "a touch of the savage" about him.

This is a woman accustomed to being in control, to using her allure, money, and influence as instruments of power. Suddenly she finds that these things don't work on Paul in their usual way. Worse, this cool, manipulative woman finds herself losing her own self-control as she becomes increasingly enthralled by her younger protégé. Helen may give the impression of being a self-contained, almost overly confident woman, but her inability to keep in check her sexual feelings for Paul brings to the surface her repressed vulnerability. She is in actuality a profoundly unhappy woman hiding her unhappiness behind wealth and booze, an insecure, emotionally unfulfilled woman who has built emotional barriers between herself and the rest of the world and now suddenly finds herself susceptible to the power of her own feelings. When she sees the possibility of happiness with Paul, she seizes the opportunity with such ardor that she ends up smothering it.

John Garfield, who was just entering the peak years of his career, may seem an unlikely match for Crawford, but his moody, strongly masculine presence is exactly what is needed to bring out Crawford's strengths. Crawford herself had such a forceful screen presence that she tended to overpower her male costars. That certainly isn't the case here with Garfield. Actually, the movie at first seems really more his story than hers, the first half-hour of the picture taken up with establishing his backstory before she even appears. Once she enters the scene, though, hers becomes the dominant presence. A movie whose focus at first seems Paul's conflict between his art and love quickly becomes the story of a woman who falls in love with a man who can never feel as intensely about her as she does about him.

Oscar Levant is on hand not only to play the piano, but also to serve as Paul's cynical, wisecracking friend and mentor, Sid Jeffers. The screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold is filled with articulate, well-crafted dialogue, and Levant gets the most attention-grabbing lines. Sounding as if they might have been written for Groucho Marx, his quips are at times so clever that they almost threaten to divert attention from the main plot of the film. Then there is the music. As in many films of the forties, the combination of passionate symphonic music of the Romantic era and big emotions is an unbeatable one, and Humoresque makes the most of it, using the music to underscore the emotional tone at key points. (The film also makes good use of popular standards by people like Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and the Gershwins, a particular standout being Crawford's drunken rendition of "Embraceable You.") The music almost becomes shorthand for Helen's sexual attraction to Paul.

One of the best sequences in the film happens during a big concert. As Paul plays the dramatic first movement of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, Helen sits alone in a box in the concert hall. Oblivious of the embarrassed and disapproving glances of his family sitting in the front row, she concentrates on him completely. Crawford plays her scenes in close-up without speaking a word, occasionally leaning forward or briefly closing her eyes or making the slightest movement with her lips. (At one point she seems to be muttering something, and I couldn't help wondering if it was "I love you . . . I love you.") Her performance is in the expressions on her face as she gazes at Paul as though hypnotized, with a mixture of adoration, lust, and surrender. Crawford's control of her facial expressions in these scenes is absolute and without even a suggestion of calculation, on a par with Garbo's in her greatest silent films.

Humoresque may deal with many issues—the class divide between Helen and Paul, Paul's conflict between the demands of his career and the emotional demands of Helen, the compromises necessary to establish a career in the arts. But when the focus of the film is Helen's feelings for Paul and Crawford is onscreen, it's impossible to take your eyes off her or direct your attention to anything but the emotions she projects. Hers is a presence saturated with that indefinable quality known as star power, but here grounded in real acting ability and for once transcending ambition with genuine feeling. I may have reservations about the totality of Joan Crawford's acting career, more that of a movie star than a real actress. But when a movie star is this good, it's easy to see why she was such a powerful screen presence for so long.

You might also like:
• Body and Soul: A Knockout of a Movie

This post is part of the LAMB Acting School 101 event on Joan Crawford. To learn more click here.

Hollywood Canteen

Wish fulfillment 1940s style is at its peak in “Hollywood Canteen” (1944). Movie stars are just regular folk, eager and helpful to entertain the soldiers at the Canteen, and it’s possible, just possible, that a Marine corporal could meet the movie star actress of his dreams and have her fall in love with him.

Writer-director Delmer Daves lays on the corn a little too thick here for my taste, but it’s not detrimental to the film. It must have pleased his bosses at Warner Bros. however, as the film is a love letter to the studio’s stars, and it became one of the highest grossing films of 1944.

Joan Leslie plays herself, or an idealized version of herself, who is the object of rapt adoration of Marine Corporal “Slim” Greene (Robert Hutton). Recovering from wounds, he is on leave in Hollywood and wants to see movie stars. A friendly short-order cook recommends the Hollywood Canteen, open only to servicemen, where he can see all the movie stars he wants.

The Canteen was a real place, founded by Bette Davis and John Garfield, where members of the armed forces could enjoy a meal, hear live bands and mingle with movie stars, all without costing them a penny. All the studios backed the idea, and many of Hollywood’s top stars could be found dancing with the troops, chatting with them about their girls back home, or serving coffee and donuts.

The movie “Hollywood Canteen” celebrates the place, but since this is a Warner Bros. movie, the stars Slim and his pal, Sgt. Nowland (Dane Clark) meet are mainly Warners stars. That’s too bad. Having stars from other studios sharing screen time would have made it a star gazers delight. We do get musical numbers from non-Warners stars The Andrews Sisters (Universal) and Roy Rogers and Trigger (Republic Pictures), but that’s about it. Oh, and Kitty Carlisle sings a reprise of “Sweet Dreams, Sweetheart” in the film, introduced by Joan Leslie earlier in the film.

I’ve often wondered why Rogers and the Andrews Sisters appeared in the film, but stars from other studios didn’t. I wonder if the Andrews Sisters performed so often at the Canteen that it was a natural they should be in the movie. Rogers sings the Cole Porter song “Don’t Fence Me In” which is later reprised by the Andrews Sisters. Republic must have been thrilled to have one of its stars appear in a Warner Bros. movie. I wonder what those negotiations were like?

There’s much to enjoy in the film, music-wise. Dennis Morgan and Joe E. Brown perform “You Can Always Tell A Yank”, a rousing number and Carmen Cavallaro and his band play “Voodoo Moon.” Jimmy Dorsey and his band play a few numbers as well. Classical violinist Joseph Szigeti does a duet with the “noted American violinist” Jack Benny, who is chagrined that Szigeti does not know “Love in Bloomioso.”

Warner Bros. stars are portrayed as pretty swell types. When it’s learned Slim has a crush on Joan Leslie, Bette Davis, John Garfield and Jane Wyman conspire a plan for her to give him a special kiss. Later, when Slim becomes the Millionth Man to enter the Canteen, he is practically given the key to the city, as well as the chance to have any actress in town as his date for the weekend. Naturally he chooses Joan Leslie. (I would have picked Rita Hayworth, but with my luck I would have been the Millionth and One Man).

I think the film would have worked much better if Joan Leslie played a fictional actress, and not herself. Dramatically it would have worked better. Here, it’s kind of odd and off-putting. Slim goes to Joan’s house to pick her up and he meets her parents. Dad is played by Jonathan Hale (Mr. Dithers in the Blondie movies). All moviegoers knew who Jonathan Hale was, so all pretense of this really being Joan Leslie is thrown out the window.

Hutton and Leslie do play well together – indeed they could not be more All-American – but I wish she had played a fictional, up-and-coming actress. After all, Janis Paige doesn’t play herself, but Angela, a studio messenger who catches the eye of Sgt. Nowland.

I always enjoy Golden Age movies set in Hollywood and we get to see the backlots of the studios, and “Hollywood Canteen” is no exception. Naturally Warner Bros. gets to show off their backlot, and its here we get to a musical number that stops the show dead in its track, a dreadful number called “Ballet in June” performed by Joan McCracken and company. We do get to meet dance director LeRoy Prinz, and I was amused to note that he somewhat resembles Busby Berkeley. Prinz routines were often the bane of Warners musicals (“Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1942) being the exception), and “Ballet in June” does nothing to dispel that notion.

Enough carping. There’s other good comedy on display here, notably Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet lampooning their sinister screen images. Their scene together is one of the highlights of the film.

As can be seen by the still above, we have, left to right, Jack Carson, Jane Wyman, John Garfield and Bette Davis signing autographs and visiting with the men. Was it like this every night? Probably not. I don’t doubt that many stars put in many hours at the Hollywood Canteen – and its East Coast counterpart the Stage Door Canteen, also the subject of a movie a year earlier – but this film posits that the place was crawling with stars every night of the year.

My dad served in the Navy in World War II and visited the Hollywood Canteen on leave one night. He didn’t remember the band that was performing there – odd, as his memory for such details was remarkable – and that night there were no stars there. He did remember getting served coffee and donuts by an exceptionally pretty girl there. After the war he went to the theater and saw “Holiday in Mexico” (1946), an M-G-M musical, and noticed one of the cast members. He remembered her as the girl who waited on him at the Canteen.

She turned out to be Linda Christian, probably best known today as the second Mrs. Tyrone Power. She had a short-lived acting career. I remember her fondly from the gloriously absurd “Tarzan and the Mermaids” (1948). It was Johnny Weissmuller’s last appearance as the Ape Man, and boasts a grand Dimitri Tiomkin score, beautiful on-location photography in Mexico and George Zucco as a high priest of a pagan cult. Co-starring in a movie where George Zucco plays a high priest trumps appearing in a Best Picture winner anytime, but that’s just my opinion.

Rating for “Hollywood Canteen”: Three stars.

Body and Soul: A Knockout of a Movie

I am not a fan of the sport of boxing. But I am a fan of movies, and in the history of cinema boxing has often been a subject dealt with directly or indirectly. The sport has been put to many uses by filmmakers: for sentimentality (The Champ, 1931), for laughs (Harold Lloyd's The Milky Way, 1936 and its remake starring Danny Kaye, The Kid from Brooklyn, 1946), to symbolize lost dreams (On the Waterfront, 1954), to indict racism (The Great White Hope 1970) and legal injustice (The Hurricane, 1999), to inspire in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam (Rocky. 1976), to explore the subject of euthanasia (Million Dollar Baby, 2004).

One of the first studios to exploit the genre was Warner Bros., the studio that specialized in pictures about working-class, blue-collar men and women and in gangster and crime films. It's not surprising that the studio introduced into its boxing movies the involvement of organized crime in the sport. Its early boxing pictures even featured mainstays of its crime films like Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart (Kid Galahad, 1937) and James Cagney ( City for Conquest, 1940). Along with gangsterism, the Warners boxing movies included many elements that became staples of the genre for the next twenty years: dirty tricks by opponents, rigged fights; manipulation of the boxer by managers, promoters, and racketeers; betrayal by the boxer protagonist of lovers, relatives, and lifelong friends.

In the 1940's and 1950's, many boxing movies were made in the tragic vein, movies that followed the rise of a talented young boxer from obscurity to celebrity and his fall precipitated by the corrupting effects of ambition, fame, greed, pride, and loss of values. One of the first of the movies in this vein, one that in many ways became the template for those that followed, was Body and Soul (1947), whose chief character, Charlie Davis, is played by John Garfield.

The marvelous opening sequence of the movie immediately establishes a noirish feel (in fact, it is considered a film noir by some) and presages the striking staging, photography, and editing of the rest of the film. In the middle of the night, an apparently deserted training camp with a makeshift boxing ring is shown from overhead. In a traveling crane shot, the camera moves to one of the buildings in the compound, through its window to the bed where a sleeping man lies tossing and turning, and stops on a close-up of his face. The agitated man is Charlie Davis (Garfield), repeatedly muttering the name "Ben" in his sleep before suddenly snapping awake. A nighttime drive into a large city follows, where Charlie visits his mother and his estranged girl friend Peg, and we learn that Charlie is scheduled that night to fight a young contender for the world boxing championship. When he arrives at the stadium that evening, he lies down to rest before the fight and dozes off. The film then, in the fashion of the 1940's, drifts into an extended flashback that tells the story of Charlie's life for the last fifteen years or so.

Charlie, it turns out, became a fighter not by choice but from necessity. His origins lie in the kind of working-class, melting-pot, Depression-era big city neighborhood found in so many Warner Bros. films of the 1930's such as Dead End. In those films poor young men often turn to crime to escape the poverty and economic hopelessness of their environment. Charlie's life, though, is not hopeless. His parents (who are clearly portrayed as Jewish, a fact made explicit later in the film) are the owners of a small candy store. Charlie is an aimless young man who wants neither to take over his parents' business nor to go to college as his mother urges him. Though he has a talent for using his fists, neither does he want to be a fighter as his best friend Shorty urges him, even after Shorty lures Charlie into demonstrating his pugilistic talent in front of a local fight promoter, Quinn (William Conrad).

It is only after his parents' store is destroyed and his father killed when gangsters throw a bomb into the speakeasy next door that he at last consents to a bout. While celebrating his first victory, he meets Peg Born (Lilli Palmer), an art student from Greenwich Village, with whom he begins a relationship. Charlie's rapid rise to the top is shown in a brief montage, and within a year he is rich, famous, and engaged to Peg. It is at this point that a gangster named Roberts takes an interest in him and offers him a Faustian deal: a chance at the world title, with a guaranteed win. The price Charlie must pay is high—allegiance to Roberts, demotion of Quinn, ditching Shorty, and postponing his marriage—but Charlie agrees to the deal. It is clear that he is now ruled by all those things that will inevitably lead to his downfall—ambition, greed, pride—and is prepared to betray both people and principles to get what he wants. As Shorty says to Peg about the new Charlie, "He's not just a kid who can fight—he's money. And people want money so bad they make it stink, and they make [him] stink."

The results of Charlie's decision are dire: tragedy for Shorty, estrangement from his mother, the replacement of Peg with a slutty night club singer (this femme fatale character another element imported from film noir), Charlie's coming more and more under the control of the racketeer Roberts, a hedonistic and reckless lifestyle that will eventually bankrupt him both financially and morally. The only thing in all this that seems to affect Charlie is the damage he causes to Ben (Canada Lee), the champion that Roberts matches him against. Roberts tells Charlie that he is to fight Ben for fifteen rounds to a guaranteed decision in his favor. What he doesn't reveal is that Ben has a blood clot on his brain and not only is unlikely to last fifteen rounds but may very well be killed. Ben is seriously injured in the fight and although he doesn't die is permanently damaged and must retire. Out of remorse Charlie hires Ben as his personal trainer. Ben is the one person Charlie remains faithful to, and his character is in a way a reminder both of the one remaining bit of Charlie that is incorruptible and of the human price of the game Charlie is involved in.

Besides its noirish touches, Body and Soul benefits immensely from several things that place it ahead of its subsequent imitators. Only two fights are actually shown in the movie, Charlie's fight with Ben and the fight with the young contender at the end. These fights are depicted in a way that influenced the visual style of boxing movies for years to come: with rapid cuts, almost blurry close-ups of the fighters slugging at the camera, low-angle shots from ringside, and brightly lit overhead shots of the ring. According to the Internet Movie Database, cinematographer James Wong Howe (one of the greats of the studio era) shot some of this footage by wearing roller skates while holding the camera and having an assistant push him around the ring.

Because so little of Body and Soul deals directly with the boxing matches themselves, the emphasis of the movie is much more on its Faustian theme and on the interaction among its characters than on sport, making the movie one more of theme and psychology than of action. The film is also very much a love story; in fact, the movie was originally titled An Affair of the Heart. Peg, Charlie's lover, is played by the German-born actress Lilli Palmer (who at the time was married to Rex Harrison), and she is most convincing and appealing in the role.

The movie also benefits greatly from its title song, which is played almost continuously for the picture's duration. Already well known when the film was released (it was especially associated with Billie Holiday, who had recorded it three times before the movie's release, the first time in 1940), it is a love song with a haunting melody and is as much a part of the movie as the theme song from Laura is of that film. When Charlie and Peg first meet, they dance to it as a lilting waltz. Later during a wild party at Charlie's swanky new apartment, it is arranged as an uptempo, jazzy dance number. The constant use of the song underscores the Faustian theme of the movie, as Roberts succeeds in controlling Charlie's body and attempts to control his soul as well. It also emphasizes the love story element by continually reminding us of the competition between Roberts and Peg for Charlie's body and soul. And it reminds us of Charlie's own internal conflict: Which will ultimately control him, his body (boxing and material success) or his soul (his few remaining principles and his enduring feelings for Peg)?

As well as being a love story, Body and Soul is also a potent character study. And the thing that anchors the movie most securely in the memory is the towering performance by John Garfield as that character, Charlie Davis. Garfield was ideally cast in the role. Born in 1913 to Russian immigrants, as a child he studied boxing and drama at a special school for difficult students. An experienced New York stage actor, he was apparently the actor Clifford Odets had in mind when he wrote the boxing drama Golden Boy. Garfield made his first movie, Four Daughters, in 1938 for Warner Bros., where he would remain for the next seven years. In that movie he plays a bitter and alienated musician who ultimately commits suicide to keep the naive girl who marries him from ruining her life by staying with him. Some have cited this performance, which earned him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor, as the first portrayal of the anti-hero in American movies. (He received his only other Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor, for Body and Soul.)

While at Warners, Garfield, unable to serve in the armed forces during World War II because of a heart condition, co-founded the Hollywood Canteen for soldiers with his Warner Bros. colleague Bette Davis and served as the organization's vice president. Before leaving the studio, he was cast in many roles similar to the one he played in Four Daughters, a misunderstood and unhappy young man controlled by outside forces, a sort of prototypical version of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. If these roles were initially the result of typecasting and studio attempts to build a screen image, they were aptly chosen, and the screen persona of the angry young man stuck. Reportedly, Garfield was even the first choice to play Stanley Kowalski in both the stage and screen versions of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Body and Soul was one of the first movies Garfield made after leaving Warners and was produced by Enterprise Productions, the independent production company he co-founded. At the time, Garfield was playing the best roles of his career: in Humoresque (1946), the last film he made at Warners, as the brilliant violinist who becomes the protégé of possessive Joan Crawford (in what for me is her finest performance); in the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) as the drifter who comes under the spell of seductive but deadly Lana Turner; in the Best Picture Oscar winner Gentleman's Agreement (1947) , directed by Elia Kazan, as Gregory Peck's Jewish friend; and the next year as a corrupt lawyer with mob connections in another film noir classic, Force of Evil (1948), directed by Abraham Polonsky, who wrote the screenplay of Body and Soul. All of these films are highly recommended.

As Charlie, Garfield projects the same cockiness of attitude as the young James Cagney, and with his breathy voice and New York accent at times even sounds very much like Cagney. But even though he plays Charlie with the same self-assurance as the young Cagney, his Charlie is still a young man adrift, unsure of what he wants from life. Garfield shows how this lack of a moral center leaves Charlie open to fill the vacuum with all the wrong things, the things that eventually corrupt him and alienate him from those who love him. And he shows how vulnerable Charlie is to being controlled by forces that would use him for their own ends and then discard him.

In the midst of Charlie's apparent success, Garfield manages to suggest the continuing dissatisfaction with his life that lingers just beneath Charlie's surface, his unease that his life has no center, his conflict and just a hint of regret about the course his life has taken, and the quiet desperation with which he relies on the broken fighter Ben as a kind of anchor. Late in the film, after the last day of training for the last fight, there is a sequence in the training ring between just Charlie and Ben. In this calm interlude, the two actors show amazing rapport, and Garfield makes the vulnerability and self-doubt Charlie has been concealing for most of the movie (except in some of his scenes with Peg) more apparent than at any other point in the film.

The movie ends with Charlie's final professional match, against the young contender for the world title. The promoter Roberts has suborned Charlie by promising him an easy defeat if he will throw the fight—on exactly the same terms he promised when Charlie fought Ben all those years before: fifteen easy rounds and a decision in favor of the newcomer. Of course, he doublecrosses Charlie as he did Ben earlier, and when Charlie realizes this well into the fight, he must face one last conflict: whether to accept Roberts's lucrative deceit or to rebel against it and reclaim his dignity while risking Roberts's considerable wrath. This gives the movie a tidy circular structure that may seem a bit pat, but that circular structure serves a valid thematic purpose by giving Charlie the chance to make a different decision this time, to atone for the past and irrevocably alter his future.

One last thing that should be noted is how many of those associated with Body and Soul later became victims of the witch hunts for Communists in the film industry that occurred in the 1950's. Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriter, Anne Revere, who played Charlie's mother, and Canada Lee, the African American actor who played Ben, were all blacklisted in the U.S. Polonsky and Revere didn't work again in the industry for years, although Polonsky did some writing using a front. Lee did star in the British anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) before he died in 1952. Garfield's daughter Julie has said that she believes the controversy about her father's politics and the prospect of being investigated by Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee caused the stress responsible for Garlfield's death from a heart attack in 1952, when he was barely 39 years old. The movie's director, Robert Rossen, survived HUAC investigation and continued to work in Hollywood, but only because he, like Elia Kazan, "named names."

Whether you are a fan of boxing or boxing movies or. like me, just a fan of good movies, Body and Soul is a film not to be missed. Its superior direction, writing, photography, and unforgettable performance by John Garfield place it well ahead of other movies in its genre.