Top Ranked Films of Michael Curtiz

Michael Curtiz
3 titles, 69th in points with 12,398

Born Manó Kertész Kaminer in Budapest, Hungary in 1886. After acting in then directing films there, Kaminer moved the the U.S. in 1926 to begin directing movies in Hollywood, and of course, created a stage name. He directed films first as Kertész Mihály, then in the U.S. as Michael Kertész. He has 173 film titles to his credit as director

The Walking Dead

“The Walking Dead” (1936) offers one of Boris Karloff’s best performances in a nifty little hybrid mixing the horror and gangster genres. Like so many Warner Bros. films from that era, it runs a tight 64 minutes and packs an awful lot of story, incident and character in its short running time. The always snappy 1930s direction courtesy the great Michael Curtiz, evocative shadow cinematography from Hal Mohr, and a chilling music score by an uncredited Bernhard Kaun make this one a winner.

The first half of “The Walking Dead” is pretty much a straight gangster yarn. Ex-con John Ellman (Boris Karloff) is framed for the murder of a judge by a gang who has the city’s police and court systems under their rule. The gang includes Barton MacLane and Joe Sawyer, so you know you’re in a Warner Bros. film. Legal work for the gang is done by the seemingly respectable Ricardo Cortez, at his most smug.

Ellman is innocent which can be proved if two witnesses come forward. They’re played by Marguerite Churchill, leading lady to John Wayne in the epic “The Big Trail” (1930) and future Green Hornet Warren Hull. They’re a pair of lovers working with Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn), a scientist interested in restoring life to the dead. The couple don’t want to get involved, but conscience compels them to come forward at the last minute. It’s too late and Ellman is executed.

Ellman’s walk to the electric chair is a marvelous sequence. The piano-playing Ellman asks that music accompany him on his final walk. A lone prisoner plays the cello as Ellman, the warden and guards walk slowly to the electric chair. Curtiz uses tilted camera angles and deep shadows to augment the atmosphere. The lonely sound of the cello and the atmospheric lighting really put the sequence over.

Gwenn asks the governor to ship Ellman’s body to him right away to use in his experiments. Like a modern day Dr. Frankenstein, Gwenn uses electricity to restore life to Ellman. It’s interesting to see Karloff, minus the famous Frankenstein monster make-up, strapped to a laboratory table with electricity shooting all around him. Gwenn offers a nice contrast to the intensity of a Colin Clive. Gwenn is no raving mad scientist, but genuinely interested in advancing the cause of science.

Horror elements kick in during the second half, when Ellman tracks down members of the gang as a sort of Heavenly avenging angel. He doesn’t kill the gang members, but approaches them to ask, in Karloff’s best funereal voice, questions like, “Why did you have me killed?”

Being approached by the walking corpse of the man they framed is enough for the gang members to cause their own deaths, like running in fright and straight into an oncoming train. Dr. Beaumont believes Ellman experienced something when dead. Is God using Beaumont as a force to cause the gangsters to feel immense feelings of guilt and remorse? The climax, set in a beautifully atmospheric cemetary, suggests that, with the figures of angels and crucifixes on display.

Karloff is marvelous here. A great actor, he would have made a marvelous silent film actor. He’s one of those actors who can express much by saying little.

“The Walking Dead” again proves there was no genre where Michael Curtiz could not excel. His earlier horror films for Warner Bros., such as “Doctor X” (1932) and “Mystery of the Wax Museum” (1933) are rare for the period in introducing strong horror elements into urban settings. “The Walking Dead” continues that trend and is probably the best of the three.

Virginia City

There’s a lot to like in “Virginia City” (1940), but it never quite comes together. There are some fatal casting problems, and the script is all over the place, but it’s all quite watchable and has the Warner Bros. professionalism stamped all over it. Still, despite being directed by the great Michael Curtiz, this is one of the lesser Errol Flynn entries of his starring years.

I would think some 1940 moviegoers must have felt terribly cheated after watching “Virginia City” if they were expecting a sequel to one of 1939’s biggest hits “Dodge City.”

Flynn had one of his biggest successes with “Dodge City”, a Technicolor town-taming western that holds up quite well today. At the end of that film he is asked to clean up another rough and tumble western town, Virginia City in Nevada. He agrees to the assignment, and the last scene shows him and frequent leading lady Olivia deHavilland off to Virginia City, accompanied by a triumphant Max Steiner music cue.

“Virginia City” appeared a year later, not as a sequel, but as a Civil War western, and based on an actual historic incident. It also boasts the same director (Curtiz), screen writer (Robert Bruckner) and composer (Steiner), but, alas, no Technicolor.

Having escaped from Libby Prison with pals Alan Hale and Guinn “Big Boy’ Williams (also holdovers from “Dodge City” and the three would play together in “Santa Fe Trail” a year later), Flynn realizes the dying Confederacy needs one last daring plan to keep it going. The mining town of Virginia City is home to many Confederate sympathizers and its possible some of the gold and silver mined there will be used to refinance the Confederacy. It turns out he’s right, and it’s no less than Randolph Scott as the Libby warden who agrees to guide the treasure-laden ($5 million worth) wagon train from Nevada to the South. Randolph Scott is a welcome presence in any movie and he plays the Southern gentleman here to a T. Supposedly he was Margaret Mitchell’s choice to play Ashley Wilkes. I wish he had.

It’s a lot of fun to see Flynn and Scott recognize each other in a Nevada saloon, with both thinking the other was back East.

Of course there’s a woman both men love, a Confederate sympathizer played by Miriam Hopkins. I adore Hopkins in “Trouble in Paradise” (1932) and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1932) but she’s too brittle and harsh for the role and is arguably one of Flynn’s least effective leading ladies. They go together like pickles and milk. It’s not an enjoyable screen coupling, and her rendition of “Rally Round the Flag Boys” is also pretty rough on the ears. I prefer her singing “Jazz Up Your Lingerie” in Lubitsch’s “The Smiling Lieutenant” (1931), one of the greatest songs ever written.

The second miscasting mistake is the Mexican bandit John Murrell, played by, of all people, Humphrey Bogart. Yikes! His Mexican accent is strictly of the Frito Bandito type, and why they had to make him Mexican I’ll never know. They should have just made him a regular black-clad outlaw, like his role in the marvelously entertaining “The Oklahoma Kid” (1939). Many people feel Bogart’s worst screen performance is in “The Return of Dr. X”, his only horror film, but I have to give the nod to “Virginia City.”

Despite the miscasting, and the often unwieldy script, there’s much to enjoy. Curtiz’s compositions during the action scenes remain a marvel, and Steiner provides some of the best traveling stagecoach music ever. Flynn and Scott provide some stirring self-sacrifice at the end and we even get a climatic plea to Abraham Lincoln that is corny but somehow fits.

The film runs 121 minutes, and, unusually for a Curtiz film, one feels the whole two hours. A little trimming would have helped.

But it’s not a bad film by any means, and I will no doubt re-visit it again in the years ahead. Errol Flynn and Randolph Scott in a big budget western is not something to be ignored.

Rating for “Virginia City”: Two-and-a-half stars.

Captains of the Clouds

It’s interesting to watch two similar-themed movies from the same studio within a short period of time. The similarities become more apparent.

A few days ago I watched “Dive Bomber” (1941) Warner Bros. stirring tribune to aviation medicine. Last night I watched Warners’ tribute to the Royal Canadian Air Force, “Captains of the Clouds” (1942) starring James Cagney, Brenda Marshall, Dennis Morgan and the Warner Bros. stock company.

Both were directed by Michael Curtiz, and both were filmed in gorgeous three-strip Technicolor. Curtiz loves his aerial formations…if Busby Berkeley directed airplanes in a war movie, they would look something like this. Perfect formations, set in front of gorgeous sunsets or awesome mountain vistas - I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if enrollment in air forces around the world rose after people saw these movies.

Curtiz is well thought of as a director of action, and speed and pacing, but I think he needs to be placed higher in the pantheon of cinema visualists. The fact that both movies feature similar stunning aerial photography - yet different cinematographers - tips the hat to Curtiz.

The plot of “Captains” is formula, to be sure. No one ever played a scoundrel who sees the error of his way and redeems himself in the end quite like Cagney. Brenda Marshall, best known as Errol Flynn’s co-star in “The Sea Hawk” (1940), has some heart-stopping close-ups. She’s absolutely gorgeous.

I was also amused by each movie’s nightclub scenes, with the same version of “What’s New” being played by a dance orchestra. I don’t think I would have picked up on that had I not seen both movies so closely together.

There’s also a nice scene where Canada’s real life WWI air ace, General Billy Bishop, presents medals to the airmen.

“Captains of the Clouds” is formula entertainment, but when it’s this enjoyable, there’s no cause for complaint.