Another Old Movie Blog

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books. From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

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Ward Cleaver's World War II heroism

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:06:00 +0000

Ward Cleaver sat sipping coffee with his wife, June, in their suburban kitchen and mentioned, “When I was in the Seabees, I got into a fight over a picture of Lana Turner.”

It’s not something we expect of Ward, but little droplets of his life through the series, before he came The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and his children’s go-to guy for getting them out of trouble, were fascinating. More than his children realized, he was the epitome of the Greatest Generation and what happened to them after the war.

This is my entry into the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon, hosted by Terence over at his wonderful A Shroud of Thoughts blog. I look forward to this blogathon every year because it gives me a chance to showcase performances by actors from classic films who took guest spots, or sometimes took their entire careers, over to the small screen.

Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, the father on Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963), was one such actor who began his film career in 1940 (we covered his role in The Blue Dahlia – 1946 here), and played a variety of supporting roles in big films, starring roles in B-movies, and lots of uncredited parts. He was in his late forties when Leave it to Beaver gave him steady work, made him a household name, and for generations afterward, made him the number one dad on TV.

One of the most well-remembered shows of the era—largely because succeeding generations have grown up with reruns, featured Beaumont, Barbara Billingsley as his wife, June; Tony Dow played their older boy, Wally… “and Jerry Mathers as The Beaver.” The show was well-written, often quite funny, and Jerry Mathers was probably one of the most natural child actors of the day. The boys were average kids revealing the world of postwar childhood to their occasionally baffled elders, and each episode ended with some kind of lesson—but often not for the boys, rather, for their parents. This represented a sea change in TV sitcoms and reflected the growing importance, and perhaps coddling, of The Baby Boomers. (Though to be accurate, Wally, who was supposed to be 13 years old when the show started in 1957, would have been born during World War II, and therefore, technically not a Boomer.)

When television dawned in the living rooms of (some) American homes at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s, popular shows were geared more to the Greatest Generation, the ones who were buying the TV sets. After a day of work, they would unwind with comic Milton Berle on The Texaco Star Theater, Jackie Gleason on The Honeymooners, or the brilliant, Your Shows of Shows with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, and a cast that couldn’t be beat.

These were mostly sketch comedies, but even The Honeymooners, which could be considered a sit-com, did not feature children in the cast. These were shows for grownups, the stars were their contemporaries, and though kids could enjoy them, the shows did not spotlight their experience, their world.

As the fifties progressed, more family sit-coms appeared, but even Make Room for Daddy, centered more on star Danny Thomas than on his children. One could say Robert Young of Father Knows Best, at least got equal time with his kids, mostly. By the time Leave it to Beaver appeared in the fall of 1957, television began more and more to showcase, and to market to, the young Boomers.

Hence, we have Ward Cleaver, a likable, intelligent man with a likable intelligent wife, taking a backseat to the adventures of their kids. We don’t know much about Ward and June. Hints drip out once in a while about her boarding school, his growing up on a farm, their meeting in college. They have social engagements only once in a great while with friends they otherwise never discuss.

The wonderful boor Fred Rutherford, who works in Ward’s office, is seen more as a pain in the neck than a friend.

Even Beaver and Wally never seem to know much about their parents and are always surprised they had a life before the kids came along. The Boomers usurped the Greatest Generation in part due to their parents’ doting on the kids, and also living in the moment after what were likely difficult childhoods in the Great Depression and the world blowing up when they came of age. They were forward-looking people, who wanted orderly quiet now, and as a result, unless their children were persistent in asking about “the old days,” they might never know.

As a child, I liked the boys and their exploits—though it annoyed me that they were such terrific liars. Nice boys, to be sure, but in each episode, they lied about something and thereby needing to be rescued by dad. Unlike their parents, we got to meet all the kids’ friends (and most of them really funny). Oddly, all the kids’ friends were backstabbers. Truly, a strange dynamic at work here. (Although all Larry Mondello would have to do would be to enter a room and I’d crack up.)

I was drawn more to the adults. I even liked Fred Rutherford. I liked Mrs. Rayburn, the principal. I still do. She’s one of my favorites on the show.

I especially liked Ward and June. I think I felt sorry for him with his several reminisces of having a strict, somewhat mean-sounding father, and so he went over backwards to try to be lenient with his sons. Ward actually resembled my father a little, though in personality was nothing like him. They were both tall, lean, and had the same haircut. My father served in the South Pacific during World War II, and so did Ward.

Ward served in the U.S. Naval Construction Battalions, called “CB” or Seabees. Formed in 1942, it supported Navy and Marines, and is now the U.S. Naval Construction Forces.

Ward’s mention of getting into a fight over a photo of Lana Turner was in season 6, episode 29, “Eddie's Sweater.”

In “The Visiting Aunts” (December 18, 1958, season 2, episode 13), Ward recollects wryly of Aunt Martha and her friend, whose husband is always referred to as “The General,” came to their wedding and was surprised that June was marrying a Seabee, as if that wasn’t good enough for an Army man.

In “The Perfect Father” (March 14, 1958, season 1, episode 22), Ward puts up basketball hoop over the garage for the boys. He muses “I must have put up hundreds of those all over the South Pacific when I was in the Seabees.” June teasingly responds, “I guess we all contributed to victory in our own way.”

June, we learn in “Mother’s Day Composition” (April 30, 1960, season 3, episode 31), volunteered at a USO during the war and served coffee and donuts. This was not quite as impressive as Beaver’s friend Richard’s mother, who was a WAC private, then a corporal, and eventually became a captain. In “Kite Day” (June 10, 1961, season 3, episode 37) we learn his father flew a P-38 in the war. Beaver scoffs, “Ah, those are so old, they don’t even make models of them anymore.”

So much for past glory. Even Eddie Haskel (Ken Osmond was great in this memorable role) suffered shame when in “Summer in Alaska” (May 9, 1963, Season 6, episode 33), Wally recalls that when they were kids, Eddie bragged that his father was a three-star general in the war, but they found out otherwise when they discovered Mr. Haskel’s air raid helmet in a closet, proving he was a civilian air raid warden during the war.

During the war, anyone doing his bit was considered patriotic, but to the kids growing up later in peacetime, only the most heroic actions would be worth bragging about. We come to “Beaver’s Hero” (April 9, 1959, season 2, episode 28), when the boys discover the secrets of their father’s wartime footlocker.

Mr. Willet (played by Wendell Holmes) is Beaver’s substitute teacher (Miss Landers is sick) and he tells the class about the world war. Wally asks The Beav, “Which world war?”

Beaver replies, “You mean there was a lot of them?”

“There’s two of them that I heard about.”

Beaver responds, “I think it was the one that President Eisenhower was in.”

“Yeah, that’s the one Dad was in, too.”

Beaver asks his mother, “Was Dad and Mr. Eisenhower in the same war?”

June says yes and Beaver replies, “It’s something having your father in the same war with the president.”

This, his ignorance, I found stretching credulity as a child, as those of us who had parents in World War II certainly knew about the war, because being only 20 or 25 years ago was still part of the social memory. Also, we watched Combat when we were kids and took turns playing Vic Morrow and Rick Jason. I can recall wearing plastic World War II-style helmets and throwing plastic grenades over a fence into a neighbor’s yard, and the bunch of us running to “hit the dirt” on someone else’s front lawn, covering our heads and making “ka-pow” noises. When it was safe to stand, we had to climb over the fence into the neighbor’s yard to retrieve the plastic grenades. Something which I never saw Vic Morrow or Rick Jason do, by the way.

So there were times I found Wally and Beav’s self-involved ignorance rather frustrating. But, to continue…

Back in class, Judy Hensler (played by Jeri Weil), brags that her father was a hero who flew his own plane in World War II. Gilbert’s uncle was a Marine sergeant who was “almost a general.”

(I like how the teacher calls the kids by their surnames and “ladies and gentlemen.” I didn’t run into that until college.)

Beaver tells the kids his father was a hero, that he has a trunk in the garage full of guns and grenades, “and all kinds of stuff he took off of enemy guys.” Judy accuses him of being a liar, which makes her very smart, because he is.

Wally and Beaver look at the trunk in the garage with the Seabees insignia. Their mascot emblem was a fighting bumblebee with a machinegun, a wrench, and a hammer. Wally assumes the reason the bumblebee is carrying a hammer is so that if they “miss the guys with the gun, then they can hit him with a hammer.” There are photos of young June pasted on the lid of the footlocker, starlet photos of Barbara Billingsley. Beaver has to be told that this is his mother and that she was ever that young.

He finds a T-square and thinks it’s a sword. There is a tripod for surveying, that he thinks is the “bottom of some kind of machine gun,” and a transit, which Beaver thinks is a gun barrel. With each item, Beaver spins a fantasy narrative, but Wally has his doubts, and Ward interrupts. He laughs at an old photo of himself the boys have dug out of the trunk. He and a buddy, both bearded, are wearing grass skirts on some South Pacific island base and mugging for the camera. My dad had a couple silly photos of his pals, too. He sent a grass skirt home to my mother. I still have it. Generations have used it for costumes. My sister labeled the bag it’s in, “Mother’s Grass Skirt,” which, provocative-sounding, makes me laugh every time I see it.

“How many guys did you kill in the war, Dad?” Beaver asks, finally getting to what is the meat of the matter for him.

Ward tells him he didn’t kill anyone. Explains the Seabees, and that his primary job was building airfields and bases.

Beaver wonders, disappointed, “Gee, Dad, was all you did in the war was see if the ground was level?”

Ward answers, with a somewhat weary tone in his voice, remembering, “I sure did a lot it, Beaver. Acres and acres.”

Now Beaver has a dilemma; his friends will know he is a liar, and also find out that his dad was not a war hero, which is probably the bigger shame for him. He tells Wally, “How was I supposed to know that all Dad did in the war was measure dirt.”

Mr. Willet calls and asks Beaver to bring his father’s war souvenirs to class, but not to bring anything dangerous. “You’d better check with your father.” Good idea.

To help cover for the Beav, Wally writes a false letter from Ward to June, dating it from the war period, to document his bravery, which is typically funny. It’s not the first phony note Wally has written for him. “Dear Mom…”

“Wally, he calls her June.”

Wally writes Ward’s position from Wake Island, because he cannot spell Guadalcanal. He writes how Ward captured 65 prisoners, and the general said, “Good goin’, Ward.”

Ultimately, Beaver decides not to use it and throws it away. Ward finds the letter and calls Mr. Willet to explain, and the teacher, with great delicacy, decides to change the focus of the class to the Louisiana Purchase and move off World War II. Nice guy.

Ward tells Beaver, “There were thousands of us in the service who weren’t heroes.”

Beaver answers, “Yeah, but a guy likes to think his father was.”

“Well, you see Beaver, they put a man where they thought he could do the best job. Now, I was an engineer, so I could do a better job with tools than I could with guns. There were lots of fellows in the Seabees who were heroes, but I just didn't happen to be one of them.”

Beaver responds, considerately, “You know, Dad, I’ll bet you were the best dirt leveler in the whole Seabees.”

I’ll bet he was, when he wasn’t hanging up basketball hoops for his bearded buddies.

Hugh Beaumont was actually a Methodist minister, who was a conscientious objector during World War II, and served as an Army medic. As mentioned previously on this blog, Lew Ayres, who was also a conscientious objector, volunteered for the U.S. Army Medical Corps and served as a medic and chaplain’s aide in the South Pacific under fire, earning three battle stars. I don’t know if Beaumont served stateside or overseas. Even during the run of Leave it to Beaver, he served part-time in various churches as a lay minister.

Richard Deacon, our beloved Fred Rutherford, also served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and had studied medicine in college before turning to acting.

Too bad the school principal, Mrs. Rayburn wasn’t in this episode. Doris Packer, who played her, served in the U.S. Women’s Army Corps, a WAC like Richard’s mother. She entered as a private and reached the rank of Technical Sergeant.

The war touched everyone in that generation, in one way or another. Most of them put it aside pretty quickly and moved on, just as they'd put the Great Depression behind them, like Ward and June, in their comfortable suburban home, trying to make the kids' childhoods easier than theirs, and two boys who didn’t know how lucky they were.

Have a look at some other terrific posts in the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon over at A Shroud of Thoughts.

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Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

Inherit the Wind - 1960

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:53:00 +0000

Inherit the Wind (1960) pits Fredric March versus Spencer Tracy, and fundamentalist religion versus science, but at its core is the premise that knowledge should not be repressed because the religious right is uncomfortable with it.

This is obviously a timely message for our present era, but the script was based on the 1955 play by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, whose message was more about the repression of McCarthyism than creationism, who used the famous standoff of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial to reflect on not only the right of free speech, but of the very right to think for oneself.

“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral,” goes one line in this strong, literate script.

As regards the battle between Mr. March and Mr. Tracy as actors, it is a pleasure to see two old lions with juicy character parts to play. Since much of the story takes place in a courtroom, which is inherently dramatic, this gives them a notable setting to joust.

Spencer Tracy, of course, was famous for stealing a scene just by standing still, but Fredric March stretches even his usual strong screen presence by unrepentant scenery chewing in this movie. At times, it appears to render his character somewhat cartoonish, but then, we know that bombastic men who enjoy public notoriety can sometimes appear cartoonish.

Directed by Stanley Kramer, the film is rich in atmosphere with the setting of a small Southern town almost lyric in its storytelling. I love the slow-moving camera that glides around characters in a scene without sharp, abrupt cuts.

We begin with the tick-tock of the clock on the courthouse, and the march of a sheriff, joined by others including a minister, to the jailhouse to retrieve the prisoner for his trial. There is no one else on the streets, and its almost like a “high noon” showdown in a western.

There is no desperado in the jail, however, just young Dick York, a high school science teacher who has taught his class about evolution from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man. We will soon see that it is something of a show trial rather than a criminal indictment; the creationists have enticed a nationally known public speaker to prosecute the case, and an equally nationally known lawyer arrives to defend Dick York.

York plays his role with sensitivity and nuance, he was really a fine actor before his more well-known gig as Darrin Stevens in the TV show, Bewitched. His character is overwhelmed by the attention, pained over the separation from his fiancée, who is not sure his crusade is either wise or necessary, and ultimately he takes a principled stand because of the trauma inflicted on the parents of a student by fundamentalist insensitivity over their son’s tragic death.

Gene Kelly plays a smart-aleck reporter, whose newspaper has provided the services of Spencer Tracy as a means to showcase the event and sell papers.

Florence Eldridge, the real-life wife of Fredric March, plays his wife here. This was the final of several films she made with her husband. We last saw her play his longsuffering wife here in Another Part of the Forest (1948). She is not so longsuffering in Inherit the Wind, but she does have a lot to contend with keeping her larger-than-life husband supported with her understanding, fried chicken, and occasional admonishments to keep him in line.

The characters played by Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Gene Kelly, and Dick York are, of course, all based on real-life people. They are given fictional names here, perhaps to keep the story more of a parable than a documentary. The real figures are William Jennings Bryan, who like his fictional counterpart played by March is a three-time unsuccessful candidate for president, was a Secretary of State under President Wilson, and a noted orator whose “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 pushing for keeping the U.S. off the gold standard monetary system made him a giant of nineteenth-century American politics. He, like his fictional counterpart, also supported women’s right to vote, which makes him a fascinating contradiction.

Spencer Tracy’s character is based on Clarence Darrow, eminent attorney and one-time supporter of William Jennings Bryan in his presidential campaigns. It also seems like an abrupt contradiction when Tracy and March meet at the local hotel and we think the fireworks will start, but they greet each other as old friends.

First, Tracy greets Florence Eldridge warmly; they are old friends, too. We are set up to understand that though the citizens of this small town who clamor at the courthouse and burn Dick York in effigy are hot under the collar at feeling their religious beliefs are threatened, the fight between the two old gladiators is an intellectual sparring of mutual respect.

Gene Kelly’s character is based on the acerbic journalist H.L. Menken, himself a bundle of contradictions who enjoyed tearing down pomposity, but was himself an elitist, who was not a fan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The so-called Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in a blistering hot week of July 1925. Here in the movie, a local funeral parlor passes out fans with their advertising to the people in the courtroom. Later in the film, the two combatant counsels get permission to peel off their suit coats. (In the real trial, the proceedings were finally allowed to take place outdoors due to the awful heat in the courtroom.)

Because the teaching of evolution is taken as a blasphemy by creationists who take the Bible as literal, and is illegal in Tennessee, the story quickly becomes, as it did in 1925, a fight to preserve religious teaching from being pushed aside in relevance by scientific thought. We begin the story, as the men march to from the courthouse, one of them wearing a clerical collar, we hear an acapella rendition of “Give Me That Old-Time Religion.” It sung as a slow, stately dirge by Leslie Uggams. This is just a voiceover, however. We do not see her, nor do we see any people of color in this movie. Another interesting contradiction.

This is a somber moment, and though the quiet streets of this small town will soon be filled with street vendors selling souvenirs and hot dogs, and an actual carnival with a Ferris Wheel, the intent at the outset in this community is to keep their dignity and pride.

In the courtroom, Mr. Tracy and Mr. March, both of nimble minds despite their tired bodies, hash out not so much the Constitutional ideas of separation of church and state, or the First Amendment, but rather confine themselves almost entirely to biblical logic and illogic.

Mr. March states with authority that the world began in 4,004 B.C. on October 4^th at 9:00 a.m., and Mr. Tracy after some thrust and parry, gets Mr. March to admit that the day at the time of creation might not have been a precise 24 hours. One day might have lasted years, or eons.

This is the crux of the courtroom battle, for Tracy’s expert witnesses, all representing scientific disciplines, are disallowed by the judge, played by Harry Morgan. To build his case, Tracy must rely on putting Mr. March on the stand instead and using Mr. March’s formidable knowledge of the Bible to turn the tables on him.

Because they are old colleagues and know each other well, the twists and turns of their minds is like playing chess with a familiar opponent.

Fredric March, rather than protest, actually enjoys being put on the stand because he is something of a grandstander, who clearly directs his remarks not to the jury, and not to Mr. Tracy, but rather to the crowd in packed seats in the courthouse, and the new-fangled radio microphone in court. He loves an audience.

This is where March does most of his mugging and scenery chewing, but how close this came to the real William Jennings Bryan, I really don’t know. He is, at least in the film, an example of a highly intelligent man who enjoys an argument, but with God on his side, anyone who opposes him must be morally deficient. The townspeople, already disposed to find fault with Dick York’s teaching evolution in his science class to their teenagers, is gleeful to see his lawyer marked as a heretic.

At one point, we see Fredric March, along with his wife, show great compassion and concern for Dick York’s fiancée, played by Donna Anderson. She is troubled by the trial, especially since her father is actually the minister, played by Claude Akins. He is a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and in one scene, when he prays to a photo of his deceased wife in his daughter’s presence, begging his wife not to condemn their daughter for loving and defending a heretic schoolteacher, from falling from the way of grace, and we see he is unfeeling, cold, manipulative, and arrogant. When she seeks guidance in the matter from March, he is kind and we see another side of the famous grandstander.

However, in confidence, she has told him that Dick York left the church. A student of his drowned two years previously, a 13-year-old boy, and Preacher Claude Akins said the boy was damned because he had not been baptized. This infuriates Dick York, and pains the boy's parents, who are in the courtroom. His father is played by Noah Beery.

March gets her on the stand and twists her words to break her, until his wife, Florence Eldridge, from the gallery, shouts his name to stop. Is he trying to get the fiancée to repent of loving Dick York and shame her as her father tried to earlier, or does he just really want to win this case? Is it his religious zeal or his competitiveness that turns him to cruelty?

Beyond the scenery chewing, the other aspects of March’s portrayal I find distracting is his heavy makeup and obvious skull cap to replicate William Jennings Bryan’s baldness.

Spencer Tracy manages to mock Fredric March enough to the point where even the devout gallery snickers at March and applauds Tracy, and that evening when March and Florence Eldridge retire to their hotel room, he is an exhausted and frustrated man, hurt at being laughed at in court. We wonder if he is emotionally stable.

At the end of the trial, his character collapses in court from the heat and dies, as did the real William Jennings Bryan (though some weeks after the trial was over). In the next scene, when Tracy is quietly packing his briefcase in court, and Gene Kelly snidely congratulates him and triumphs over the theatrical ending of Fredric March, Tracy pays tribute to March. He calls him a great man.

Mr. Kelly teases Tracy, and they have a brief war of words, and Kelly learns and delights in the contradictions he has discovered in Tracy.

All the three principal men in this story have their contradictions, and we leave it to Florence Eldridge’s summation when Donna Anderson confronts her about her husband’s cruel fanaticism: “My husband is neither a saint nor a devil, and he makes mistakes…if he’s been wrong, at least he stands for something.”

Gene Kelly stands for nothing, he’s only here for the deliciously cynical mocking. As Tracy says to him, “You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.”

One of Kelly’s lines I love: “It’s a newspaperman’s duty to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

As Tracy leaves the courtroom, we hear Leslie Uggams’ lovely voice again, acapella, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It is slightly more triumphant-sounding, but still a sober reflection as a national song against the Civil War rebellion and the lauding of the Republic, but a republic that rejoices in victory as “the coming of the Lord.” Again, another thought-provoking contradiction. We are a nation full of them.

Inherit the Wind, (which Tracy quotes from the Bible, “he that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind” Proverbs 11:29) is one of the films from that pivotal era I mentioned in this post on A Face in the Crowd (1957): There was…

“…something noticeably different about movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There is no name for them, at least not that I know of, but they are pointedly liberal in their message. Films like Inherit the Wind, Twelve Angry Men, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird, Seven Days in May, are different from the cynical noir of the late 1940s and early 1950s, as if in the wake of crumbling of McCarthyism, an era when liberals were politically and legally persecuted, when the Silent Generation marched cautiously, blindly toward the New Frontier, the writers—who were the most persecuted under McCarthyism, came out from the noir shadows and said, 'Enough. Our turn in the sun now.'”

Inherit the Wind, which comes out of the McCarthy era, is really about free speech, including, but not only, the right to quote from other than the Bible. As Tracy says, “It is a good book, but it is not the only book.”

I recall an incident from when I was in college, I think it was in 1980. I had a geology class, and the professor cheerfully announced that anyone in class who may have had deep religious beliefs need not be unsettled by the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe, because it could have been God who created the Big Bang.

I was shocked by his announcement. I had been raised to go to church and considered myself religious, yet I found nothing upsetting by learning about science. It never occurred to me that a college professor in a very progressive state (Massachusetts) would feel the need to placate anyone about science possibly refuting their literal interpretation of the Bible.

No one in class, as I remember, made any comment or reacted, so perhaps I was the only one surprised. Along with church, I was also raised on the notion of separation of church and state.

I thought he was a good teacher, and I enjoyed the class, and soon we were engrossed in talking about another Big Bang, as that was the year Mount Saint Helens erupted. He never mentioned anything about that being in the Bible.

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Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

The Miracle Woman - 1931

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:19:00 +0000

The Miracle Woman (1931) stars Barbara Stanwyck as a con artist Evangelist preacher who is unexpectedly ministered to by someone in need. The title character of the movie reflects its era with an obvious nod to the real-life Aimee Semple McPherson, the most popular media evangelist of her day, who reached celebrity status in the 1920s and 1930s, but the similarity ends there. Stanwyck’s “Sister Fallon” has a backstory more mundane and a future more ordinary than McPherson’s lionized life path, but Stanwyck’s incredible adventure brings her, more than her followers, an epiphany and a kind of humble salvation.

Directed by Frank Capra, this was Miss Stanwyck’s second of five films with him. The story is told briskly, with some beautiful camera work, and several of Capra’s tender touches. It is not a story of a woman losing faith or mocking faith; it is the story of a woman deeply disgusted by the hypocrisy of churchgoers. Ultimately, the faith lost and restored is her faith in mankind.

The title card warns us, “The Miracle Woman is offered as a rebuke to anyone who, under the cloak of Religion, seeks to sell for gold, God’s choicest gift to Humanity—FAITH.” This is to keep the censors at bay and to reassure audiences that the studio does not support religious fakes.

We are also reminded of the verse from Matthew, “Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing.” That could apply, as it has for millennia, to the world of politics as well as religion.

But the story about Stanwyck’s character is far more interesting than the possible rise and fall of a corrupt preacher—we have seen real-life examples of that to fill a mountain of tabloids—because she is not an arrogant, greedy, sociopath, someone with whom we could not really identify and therefore might cheer her downfall. She is simply a strong but troubled young woman who needs to right a wrong and find her place in the scheme of things.

The movie starts with the lovely hymn, one of my favorites, “Holy Holy Holy! Lord God Almighty,” and a large church, packed with congregants, as Miss Stanwyck takes the pulpit. She is not the minister; her ailing elderly father is, but he is unwell, and she is standing in for him today to read his dictated sermon. After which, she delivers one of her own.

The church deacons have recently hired a younger man to fill the post as minister, and after twenty years, Stanwyck’s pop is getting the sack. At the point in the sermon where her father quotes the 23^rd Psalm (King James version), “The Lord is My Shepherd,” she breaks off because that is where her father left off just before he dropped dead.

The congregation is stunned. She plows ahead with a much more fiery sermon of her own, blasting them for throwing her father away and for their hypocrisy, accusing them of killing him. “The laborer is worthy of his hire—but you wouldn’t pay him what you pay your chauffeurs.” He hadn’t accumulated enough savings in his tenure at the church even for a decent burial. She goes on to threaten to make public the temperance union members who subscribe to bootleggers, and the (apparently many) adulterers among them.

“This isn’t a house of God; this is a meeting place for hypocrisy!”

The congregation runs away from her; they can’t get out of that church fast enough.

Sam Hardy makes his entrance, a visitor to the church, who consoles her on the loss of her father and her home (they’re probably going to want her to vacate the manse pretty quickly now), and offers her a new career.

“Religion’s like anything else—great if you can sell it, not good if you can give it away.”

Aha. Turning the tables on the “faithful” by feeding into their hypocrisy and profiting from it. She wants revenge, but is uncertain. He assures her, “You’re not a hypocrite if you admit it.”

He builds up her new career as a faith healer, an evangelist who gains a following through radio and through her own theatrical services at a barnlike church.

We are now introduced to David Manners, a handsome and charming actor who played affable, mostly lightweight leading man roles in the early 1930s, later returning to the stage and eventually leaving acting in the 1950s to write. He is probably most famous for his role in Dracula, released this same year of 1931 and which we covered here. Manners plays a blind World War I vet who will have a profound impact on Stanwyck.

His introduction to us is one of Capra’s skilled emotional moments. We see a woman sitting quietly in her apartment before an open window, slowly rocking her child in a cradle next to her. She looks off, with an expression that is enigmatic; seems to convey weariness and yet serenity, as she listens to Stanwyck preach over the radio. The woman’s vacant expression is fascinating; we don’t know her story, but she is not conveying feelings of being inspired or comforted by the evangelist. Capra could have had her easily rapt, but she is in a world of her own, maybe just enjoying a quiet moment after a morning of housework and never-ending chores and obligations.

Manners leans out from a window above across the alley and asks her to turn down the radio, which she does. Before he pulls his head in, there is a downward shot over his shoulders showing us what the alley looks like and how high up he is. Another deft Capra shot that, though we don’t know it yet, is a kind of foreshadowing, because Manners will contemplate killing himself by jumping out that window in a moment.

As he pulls his head in and we see his apartment, the Army helmet draped over a lamp and various photos and souvenirs of the war, we understand his past, and discover he is blind.

His kindly landlady, Beryl Mercer, brings the mail with bad news—his songwriting efforts fail to get him published. When he eventually returns to the window to consider throwing himself out, he hears Stanwyck’s voice from his neighbor’s radio again. Her sermon has taken a turn into a pure Depression-era keep-your-hopes-up theme, reminding her followers that John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was a blind man.

Manners’ expression softens, and he gently laughs, feeling, if not inspired, then at least a little foolish for feeling so sorry for himself.

He wants to know more about the voice on the radio, and his landlady takes him to one of her services, which he attends as one amused by the circus-like setting rather than being immediately drawn in. He is not looking for religion; he is just curious.

The large choir in their sweaters and singing World War I songs like “Over There,” seem more like a college football cheerleading squad than a church choir, but Stanwyck, or more to the point, Sam Hardy, knows the way to catch profits is to catch the most gullible segment of the population, and to catch them, one needs to appeal not to their intellect, but to what makes them feel good, and to put on a good show.

To this end, the curtains part, revealing lions in a large cage. Stanwyck makes her entrance from an upper balcony, walking down a long ramp to the stage below, wearing a white gown, dressed as if she is an angel. She enters the cage (Hardy makes sure the lions have been fed and staff are standing by to shoot the animals if they attack Miss Stanwyck), and begins her call to the faithful, to encourage them to enter the cage with her and be healed.

The hired shill for tonight is drunk and misses his cue, but Manners stands to volunteer. He is not really seeking a cure; he just wants to find out more about Miss Stanwyck and talk to her. He also senses she has been left hanging by no one going up to accept her challenge. His landlady is concerned, “The lions will eat you!”

He responds with easy self-effacing humor, “No, they won’t; I’ve got a Murad.” I think this might be a reference to the advertising slogan for the aromatic Turkish Murad cigarettes.

We have another topical reference of the day to vaudeville’s worst act, The Cherry Sisters, when Sam Hardy berates one of the other hired shills about her lousy performance, “You ain’t even one of the Cherry Sisters.”

After the show, Stanwyck, in her dressing room, tells Hardy she feels frustrated, like a prisoner, and is growing tired of the act. He insists she continue, partly because they are so successful, and partly because he is growing obsessed with her and is increasingly possessive.

Giving Manners a ride home in the rain—Capra often sets romantic or sensual moments in the pouring rain in his pictures—he invites her up to his apartment and they get acquainted. He amuses her with his toys, a mechanical music toy and a “dancing doll,” and, rather creepily, his ventriloquist’s dummy dressed like a WW1 soldier.

She learns to laugh again and is perhaps touched that his gentle man, with all his problems, has no malice in his heart, no thirst for revenge as she has had.

Before she leaves Manners after her first visit to his room, there is sweet moment where she turns to glance back at him, and the camera shifts to David Manners, standing there with something like expectancy, more on our part perhaps than his. He cannot see her looking at him, but he senses she has not left yet.

Stanwyck hesitates, then she goes back to him for a brief, soft kiss.

Her need for revenge is fading away, and this is noticed by Sam Hardy. He trails her with a jealous heart. She rebuffs his advances.

Her faithful chauffeur, played by Frank Holliday, can cover for her only so far, and Hardy becomes menacing. Their manager, who gets a third of a cut of the offerings and merchandising they take in (Manners had bought a plaster bust of Stanwyck to “see” what she looks like, and she is embarrassed at the tacky merch), is found dead. Later, Hardy will threaten Stanwyck with the same fate if she does not run away with him to the Riviera. He plants news stories that she is going to take a break for her health and travel the Holy Land.

She agrees to go, to protect David Manners from Hardy. She confesses to him that she is a fake, but he comforts her. She "writes" notes to him in fabric on paper so that he can feel the outline of the letters. It must have been an arduous process and looks like a ransom note.

He and the landlady break into the “tabernacle” and to Stanwyck’s dressing room so he can become familiar with the placement of the items in the room, to pretend to Stanwyck that his sight has been restored, freeing her to leave, but it doesn’t work.

On her farewell performance, the crowd is overflowing and exuberant, and she is about to confess her fakery to them, when Hardy cuts the lights. It is reminiscent of the scene in Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941, previously covered here) when Gary Cooper is about to “out” the Edward Arnold gang and his microphone is cut in the stadium, and no one can hear him. This was Barbara Stanwyck’s fifth and final film directed by Frank Capra.

A horrific fire breaks out, and people panic, and Stanwyck, strangely, encourages them to stay and sing, that fire cannot hurt them if they have faith and believe in God. Perhaps she has begun to believe her own powers. Sensibly, they leave the building.

Manners, who wakes up in her dressing room after having been punched in the face by Hardy, heroically makes his way down to the stage and rescues her. They are both removed from the scene outside on stretchers as the crowd recites The Lord’s Prayer.

We jump to many months later, when in New York City, Sam Hardy is working on another scam with a boxer, and he spots Stanwyck on the street wearing a Salvation Army uniform, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with her new fellow Salvation Army colleagues. She is happy, having just read a telegram from David Manners stating a possible operation might restore his sight, but concedes it might not, “Who cares?” He also mentions that the ventriloquist's dummy will be his best man at their wedding. I think he's kidding.

Hardy remarks, “She gave up a million bucks for that? The poor sap.”

The truly religious are servants to mankind, not managers of mankind. Stanwyck has found her redemption. She had never really demonstrated a lack of faith in God; such a question was too difficult for the studio system of the day, even Pre-Code, to examine unless the character could be brushed off as evil and dispatched by the final reel. What she needed to overcome was her cynicism over mankind, which I think is a more interesting subject to explore; it leads far more easily to corruption.

The Miracle Woman can currently be seen on YouTube.

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The Great Dictator (1940)

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:22:00 +0000

The Great Dictator (1940) straddles absurdity and warning. The monologue Chaplin delivers at the end is shockingly timely today, and yet it was meant for a previous generation who fought fascism with humor, and then drama, and then, when that wasn’t enough, with armies.

Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” persona had been officially retired in his previous film, Modern Times (1936), which we covered here. Yet the hapless misfit, here known only as a Jewish Barber, retains the Tramp’s innocence, athletic clumsiness, and knack for getting in and out of trouble. But here he also has a doppelganger, in the form of a dictator who sends his goon squads to threaten Jews, as he plans for war on a neighboring country. Despite the childishly pompous dictator’s fiendish actions, he is himself a buffoon, a joke, and something to be laughed at for his ineptitude. We do not really fear him…but we do have a sense of fear over his cult following, who carry out his every whim.

It was a daring film, not only to mock a figure who was clearly meant to represent Hitler during a time when we were not yet at war, but to draw attention to the fact that the Jews were so named as his scapegoats and his first victims. Other films of the late 1930s and early 1940s, even those that boldly decried fascism at home and abroad, shied away from explicitly pointing out that Jews were being treated badly. It was a courageous and utterly decent move by Chaplin, but he wrote in his 1964 My Autobiography (NY: Simon & Schuster, p. 392), Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis. For all its boldness in showing ruffian soldiers painting “JEW” on a shop window, the movie has more than its share of silliness.

Some scenes, such as the dueling barber chairs between the dictator and his adversary dictator played by Jack Oakie, clearly meant to be Mussolini, seem right out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Mel Brooks-style Springtime for Hitler-type gags that mock the arrogance of the fascists, and the dictator's frantic speech delivered to his adoring throngs in a kind of pidgin-German reminds one of the fast and furious faux German speech of Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. They were the imitators; Chaplin was the original.

There are two serious characters, though, on either side. Henry Daniell plays an advisor to Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator. Daniell is sinister, quiet and utterly serious. He seems far more dangerous than the dictator, if only because he is more intelligent, more self-disciplined, and sociopathic. Compared to him, the dictator seems like a clown.

The other serious character is played by Maurice Moscovitch as Mr. Jaeckel, an elderly leader in the Jewish ghetto who helps the Jewish Barber and his community in any way he can. We see his concern and his resolve, but he is actually helpless against the onslaught of oppression.

Billy Gilbert has a comic role as a bumbling staff member of the dictator, and we note the silly names further poke fun at the bad guys. Gilbert is “Herring,” possibly a shortening of Hermann Göring, and the evil Henry Daniell plays “Garbitsch,” (garbage).

Two people who have the biggest impact on the Jewish Barber are Reginald Gardiner, who plays an officer in World War I who was saved by the barber and later repays the debt by saving him from the dictator; and Paulette Goddard as Hannah, a waif of the ghetto.

Miss Goddard was married to Chaplin at the time, and serves as his innocent love interest. Though this movie does not really have the Chaplin trademark pathos of many of his comedies, what there is can be discerned through the scrappy Paulette Goddard, orphaned and supporting herself doing housework and laundry, and facing the bullying soldiers.

The movie begins in the later days of World War I where Chaplin as the Jewish Barber is part of a German (or Tomanian, as the country is called Tomania) artillery. Though the setting with its trenches and bombed-out landscape of leafless trees is bleak, there is a jolt of silliness in how he maneuvers the Big Bertha howitzer, and how he loses a live hand grenade up his sleeve.

He comes upon Reginald Gardiner, a downed flyer who is desperately trying to escape in his plane from the advancing enemy, and Chaplin helps him, with more gags about flying upside-down. Though the plane crashes, they survive and we have the end of the war in blaring headlines, movie fashion.

The Jewish Barber spends many years in the hospital due to his injuries from the crash, and has amnesia. He does not realize a decade has passed when he leaves the hospital; he thinks it has been only a matter of weeks, and like Rip Van Winkle, he returns to find his village utterly changed. His barber shop is now part of the ghetto, and “JEW” is written across the shutters.

But he seems oblivious to the change at first, or at least does not realize the significance of what is happening around him. Soon, he ends up the prey of a troop of soldiers, who put a noose around his neck and try to hang him from a lamp post. Suddenly, Reginald Gardiner intervenes, remembers his old friend, and saves his life. Since he is an officer, he gives orders to the soldiers to leave Chaplin and the Jews alone.

Meanwhile, the dictator is still spewing his ridiculous orders, and it seems silly when he and Henry Daniell, wanting to preserve Aryan purity, which means getting rid of dark-haired and dark-eyed people as much as Jews, remark, “We’ll get rid of the Jews first, then concentrate on the brunettes!”

Planning world domination, we then have the memorable scene of the dictator considering a large globe in his office, which is actually a balloon, and he tosses it, dances a dreamlike ballet with it. But at last, it pops in his arms.

Back to the Jewish Barber, who no less silly, shaves a man to the frenetic strains of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5.

The dictator wants a loan from a banker named Epstein, whom we do not see, but is denied, and therefore he will send his troops to march on a country named Osterlich (Austria). First, he meets with his counterpart dictator, Napaloni, played by Jack Oakie, and they try to top each other in self-importance.

The barber and Paulette Goddard are thrown together in the ghetto by circumstances and through the matchmaking efforts of Mr. Muscovitch, who advises the barber to open a beauty shop for women and insists he practice on Goddard. At first, absentmindedly attempting to shave her as he would a male customer, the barber instead washes and coifs her hair, making the Cinderella of the ashes beautiful.

But life gets suddenly grim again when Reginald Gardiner refuses to attack Jews and has lost favor in the high command. Though he heroically joins their resistance, he cannot protect them anymore. He and the barber are captured and sent to a concentration camp.

When they make their escape in stolen officers’ clothing, we finally get to the point we knew was coming all along—the Prince and the Pauper switching of the identical barber and the dictator. (Chaplin’s famous character with his dark toothbrush mustache so resembled Hitler that people referring to Hitler on the sly sometimes called him The Little Tramp, to avoid saying his surname.) The barber and Reginald Gardiner are whisked to an enormous outdoor stadium, Nuremberg-like, to make a speech of conquest.

The jokes end here, as the barber, looking sickened in his seat, awkwardly steps up to the stage (how ironic that the word “liberty” is solidly in stone there) and the radio microphones, and the vast sea of willing cult members in uniform leaning on his every word.

He gives the famous speech that resonates with us today. That it does resonate would not make Chaplin proud of his work, but would leave him, as it leaves us, dazed, depressed, and heartsick. And angry.

The movie concludes with a close-up on Paulette Goddard, who listens to the speech on the radio. It is a hopeful and inspiring ending. But it is not true. It would take several years of war to stop the madness, because when a people wait too long, madness can only be stopped by force.

It is important to face bleak facts and fight evil in any way possible, even to give one’s life to do so, but it is also important to realize that the evildoers are not invincible. They can be taken down with the rule of law. Laughing at them also helps. They hate that.

Watch the speech here below. The entire movie can currently be found on YouTube.

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The Impatient Years (1944)

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:23:00 +0000

The Impatient Years (1944) is an example of the kind of movie that is hardly ever made anymore, but was a staple of Hollywood’s heyday: current events. In this case, the consequences of a hasty wartime romance, a quickie marriage and a baby – but when the couple are reunited when the soldier returns Stateside, they discover they are strangers.

(By the way, have a look at the "A" sticker on the car windshield in the picture above - and have a look at this previous post on gas rationing as depicted in the movies of World War II here.)

It’s a comedy, but it’s also a poignant and even rather sad take on what was a common problem as the divorce rate soared in the post-war years. Even for those couples choosing to stay together, it was often a tough adjustment. In a real sense, there was no getting back to “normal.” There was only a mature and resigned acceptance that adapting to a new life was the only course. Both husband and wife would have become different people in the meantime, due to their wartime experiences.

Jean Arthur is the lady, and she brings her trademark comic chops and intelligent silliness to the role of a young woman, repeatedly described by her father as a “nice girl,” so that we wouldn’t mistake her marrying a soldier almost the moment she met him as indicative of a “V-girl.” “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t brought up right…it was wartime and they fell in love.”

Now, however, waiting with her father at the bus station to welcome home her soldier husband on medical leave, she’s as nervous as a cat and clearly uncomfortable with the idea of being married to somebody she knew only for four days.

Lee Bowman plays her husband, home on temporary medical leave. He’s just as uncomfortable with Jean as she is with him, more so because he is coming home not only to a wife he barely remembers, but to a father-in-law he’s never met, and must try to make himself at home in a house he’s never been to and is already crowded.

Charles Coburn is Jean’s father, reprising a similar role of curmudgeonly matchmaking as he did in The More the Merrier (1943) of the previous year. In fact, you’ll notice his “The Torpedo Song” of that movie being reprised as a theme for his character in The Impatient Years every time Coburn enters a scene. He is the voice of common sense, trying to get his daughter and son-in-law to give each other a chance before they divorce – the movie starts in divorce court and the plot is then revealed in flashback.

There are two more people in the house who are strangers to Lee Bowman, one is his infant son, in whom he is delighted, but nervous as to how to hold him. He has seen only pictures, and is disappointed to have missed his first words – which include “Mama,” and “Henry.”

Henry, played by Phil Brown, is the other stranger, a boarder in the house. He is a young man who has been immensely helpful with the baby and who regards Jean and the baby as his surrogate family. A proper fellow who enjoys the routine around the baby that Jean Arthur has established for the home, Henry, as Charles Coburn remarks to Lee Bowman, “He’s a very fine young man. You’re going to get very sick of him.”

And we see why, but I feel rather sorry for poor Henry, usurped by the baby’s real father. Despite his late-hour, petulant confession to Jean Arthur that he is in love with her, he stands no chance. Yet there he is, in Jean’s room, soothing the baby while she goes to warm up the bottle of milk, with Lee Bowman staggering around, trying to find a place to hang up his uniform.

When Jean returns and the baby is settled, Bowman asks casually, “You finally got him in bed?” and we know that her uneasy reply of “yes,” just short of a double-take is because at that moment, they are both thinking of Henry. It is one of a few clever double meanings in this script.

As I remarked in the post on her work in The More the Merrier: “Miss Arthur makes this brittle woman interesting, and lovably obtuse.” One could say the same for her character here in The Impatient Years, except that here she is slightly more irritable as a means of defense. Her skittishness, and his own being baffled by the strange surroundings and stranger family, Lee Bowman nonchalantly decides to sleep on the floor, giving the excuse that he is not used to a bed after rugged Army life. It is a gallant move to put his wife at ease, though we can see that she might also take it as an insult. He ruefully remarks of the baby in the crib next to her bed, “I think he’d be ashamed of his old man.” It is both self-deprecating and a shaft of conscience to Jean Arthur.

But they quickly get on each other’s nerves the next day and decide to call their marriage quits. We are brought back to the courtroom scene where Charles Coburn, in an attempt to force them to get to know each other as a way to avoid divorce, suggests to the judge, played by Edgar Buchanan, that they be required to re-live the four days of their courtship that led to their marriage. Judge Buchanan remarks, “You boys and girls think it’s very romantic to get married just because it is wartime. You don’t stop to think for a minute that there’s going to be an after the war time, with a whole long life to be lived together.” Yes, if they're lucky.

It is an admonishment to the young lovers in the audience, and it is a daffy screwball comedy turn in the great tradition of that era, and so we have our second half of the movie as the now bickering couple find themselves in the scenes of their hasty courtship in San Francisco, revisiting the same restaurants, tourist sights, hotel, and marriage license office, leaving confused desk clerks in their wake. As Miss Arthur grumbles about a marriage license clerk who does not understand that they need to fill out a marriage license to get a divorce, “For heaven’s sake, if he’s going to be so stupid, let’s go.”

Ironically, it is their very spatting like an old married couple that brings them closer together, along with reliving the scenes of their romance and being away from Pop, the baby, the crowded house, her regimentation with household chores, and Henry.

Because they need to follow through on the judge’s orders, they kiss, but only to avoid committing perjury. But aha, there’s a glimmer of falling in love again.

Grant Mitchell plays a befuddled hotel desk clerk very concerned about Jean Arthur’s welfare when he thinks Lee Bowman is not only a wolf, but mentally unstable; and Charley Grapewin is the world’s oldest bellboy.

He loyally sits outside Jean’s door all night to protect her, and humors Lee Bowman when Lee says “I love you,” meaning this is the message he was trying to tap in their old code on the wall of Jean’s adjoining room. Charley thinks Lee loves him.

When sailor Frank “The Old Magoo” Jenks cuts in at a hotel dance, we see Lee Bowman getting jealous, to Jean’s delight. But she saves Bowman from the MPs by vouching he is her husband and takes him firmly by the arm, “C’mon, darling.”

Finally, they trek to the house of the minister who married them. He is Harry Davenport, and his sweet wife is Jane Darwell. She remembers the couple, and the old folks are thrilled that a couple married in their livingroom, for once, came back to visit them. It is not a screwball moment, but a very sober example of what a long and dedicated marriage is, and Mr. Bowman and Miss Arthur feel somewhat shamefaced at their fecklessness.

Afterward, they end up at the place where they had their wedding dinner—a Chinese restaurant where the vocalist is Bob Haymes, actor and singer Dick Haymes’ younger brother. I’m not sure the point of this interlude of him singing at their table, except to give the up-and-coming fellow a bit of screen time. He has a nice voice. But the dinner is where they really relive their wedding night—Jean becomes ill on fried shrimp, just as she did the first time.

The hotel clerk and his erstwhile bellboy are on the alert when Bowman must carry her up the stairs and she blithely announces her husband has poisoned her. Charles Coburn and poor Henry arrive at the 11^th hour with a telegram ordering Bowman to the military hospital for his end-of-furlough checkup.

It now appears that since their trial courtship is over and Bowman is ordered back to active duty, there’s nothing to keep them together anymore.

In a sweet ending, however, Jean returns to her father’s house to reunite with her baby and discovers Bowman there, playing with him on the floor. Miracle of miracles—the little boy takes his first steps to Daddy, and Jean is overcome with emotion. She wants the toddler to walk to her next, and Bowman asks, “Can I come too?”

We have our happy ending, except for Henry, of course. He's out of luck.

The movie, while not packing a punch like The More the Merrier, has some good moments, and it is particularly noteworthy that the screenwriter and associate producer for the film was Virginia Van Upp (1902-1970) – a child actress in silent films, later a script writer, producer, film editor, casting director, agent – pretty much a Hollywood jack-of-all-trades, unusual for a woman at that time. (And is this a swell photo or what?) She had been brought over from Paramount to Columbia for Cover Girl rewrites that same year by studio boss Harry Cohn. Lee Bowman also appeared in that film.

Speaking of the studio boss, The Impatient Years was Jean Arthur’s last film for Columbia under her much-hated contract with much-hated Harry Cohn. She was free at last, and the wonderful A Foreign Affair (1948) here, and Shane (1953), discussed here, were ahead of her.

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Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2025

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5th Anniversary of Treason and a Failed Coup

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:10:00 +0000

Never forget January 6th. Hold it in the same vein of warning, mourning, and determination to right the wrong as we do with September 11th or December 7th. It might even be more important, as the enemy within is more dangerous to our democracy.

The morons who were whipped to a frenzy to attack the Capitol, assault police, threaten to kill the Vice President and several in our government, and as if to punctuate their disgusting nature, to defecate in the halls of that hallowed building that President Abraham Lincoln was determined to finish even during the Civil War as a symbol of our survival as a nation -- they have been pardoned by the Felon, the lead traitor.

Now it's time to pursue him and the others who orchestrated the conspiracy, the ones who engineered the attack. Be a patriot and watch Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's testimony. Push your government to prosecute the traitors.

Public Domain Day - 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 15:58:00 +0000

Welcome to 2026, and our annual celebration of Public Domain Day!

This year, movies from 1930 that are now in public domain include:

Betty Boop’s first cartoon Dizzy Dishes, and several more Mickey Mouse cartoons

All Quiet on the Western Front

Animal Crackers – starring the Marx Brothers in their second film.

In King of Jazz, in which, as the Center for the Study of Public Domain, Duke Law Center astutely notes: a man gets drunk and stammers: “You know what’s the matter with this country? It’s a tariff! That’s who!”, referring to the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that worsened the Great Depression and eerily reflects our own troubled times.

Morocco with Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich

The Blue Angel, likewise, with Marlene Dietrich in her breakout role, introducing her to American audiences.

Hell’s Angels – Jean Harlow’s first film

The Big Trail – John Wayne’s first feature role, though his stardom would wait until later in the decade.

Free and Easy – Buster Keaton’s first speaking role and singing role.

For more on the movies, books, music, and art of 1929 that now enters public domain, have a look at this Center for the Study of Public Domain, part of the Duke Law Center website.

Here's a look at past posts on movies entering public domain:

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2024

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2023

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2022

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2021

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2020

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Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:05:00 +0000

Thank you for the pleasure of your company. Ginger Rogers, David Niven, and I (not pictured -- I must have been parking the car) wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Stars Caricatured in Christmas Television Cartoons

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 12:21:00 +0000

Classic film stars have been caricatured in many animated cartoons, even Christmas cartoons as noted in this previous post of Toyland Premiere (1934). But the made-for-television holiday cartoons of Rankin/Bass utilized caricatures of stars of Hollywood’s heyday not for satire or even humor, but to lend cachet to their well-scrubbed retellings of pop Christmas folklore.

While not all classic film stars who voiced animated characters had their likenesses caricatured in the cartoon – Mickey Rooney, for instance, in the several times he voiced Santa Claus (The Year Without a Santa Claus – 1974, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town – 1970, and Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July – 1979) Santa never looked like Mickey Rooney. I suppose Santa Claus is too well-known (or perhaps, trademarked?) to look like Mickey Rooney.

But Fred Astaire, playing a generic mailman character in Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town is okay to look like a caricature of Fred Astaire, likewise Red Buttons as the ice cream man in Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July – which also gave us a stupendously (or perhaps stupefying is the word) over-the-top Ethel Merman who runs a carnival show. It’s a lumbering feature cartoon with no discernable point, but Hal Peary has his last role as a whale, with a Great Gildersleeve giggle. I find that endearing.

These cartoons were all animated with the mesmerizing stop-motion photography of jerky movements and stiff portrayals, literally.

There were two Christmas cartoons of my childhood which were especially profound for me, first Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962), which I’ve mentioned before in this previous post. Definitely NOT stop-motion photography here. Jim Backus owned the role of Mr. Magoo so thoroughly and was my introduction to Dickens at the tender age of probably three.

The second cartoon that was really meaningful to me was The Little Drummer Boy (1968). Like the other Rankin/Bass cartoons mentioned above, this also featured stop-motion photography (and all the cartoons are musicals) and told the story of an orphaned boy during the time of the Nativity who hates people because his parents were killed by bandits, and finds healing with the power of love. I was fascinated by the scenes of ancient Judea, of narrow streets, endless desert dunes, and the people who came to their ancestral cities to be taxed by the Roman emperor. Even as a six or seven-year-old, stories about real people interested me more than fairy tales about snowmen or Heat Miser (though I still know the words to that song).

Jose Ferrer (not caricatured) plays a rogue, a carnival showman who enslaves the orphan boy when he discovers the boy can sing and play a drum and charm animals into dancing. The showman thinks he can make a bundle off the kid. (Painting a phony smile on the kid's face horrified me as a child.) He even sells the boy’s cherished camel to one of the Wise Men, and the boy is even more furious and heartbroken.

The boy follows the Star as the Three Kings are doing so that he can catch up to them and get his camel. But then a Roman centurion charges by on his chariot like an ICE thug and runs over the boy’s other little friend, a lamb. We suspect if he’d had a Taser, he’d have used it just for the thrill of cruelty. Authoritarian governments haven’t changed in thousands of years. This boy has suffered so much in this cartoon, we can barely take any more at this point.

One of the Three Kings tells the boy to appeal to the Baby Jesus for help, and here we have our opening to the song (cue Vienna Boys Choir) “The Little Drummer Boy” and “I have to no gift to bring…shall I play for him?” Though the stop-motion photography is just as jerky and crude as in the other cartoons, the story here is deeper, and the thoughtful, contemplative telling of it leaves a greater impression. This cartoon, for me, was also notable for introducing me to Greer Garson.

Miss Garson is an unseen narrator and is credited as “Our Storyteller.” Her rich, cultured voice is soothing and enchanting, and we are carried through time and space in her opening, “And it came to pass that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed…”

When the boy’s heart is touched by the pure love of the Infant, and his lamb is healed, Greer tells us, “He realized the hate he carried there was wrong, as all hatred will ever be wrong.”

It would be many years before I discovered Mrs. Miniver or Pride and Prejudice, so The Little Drummer Boy was my introduction to Greer Garson, or at least her beautiful speaking voice.

Perhaps a cartoon Greer in caricature would have lessened the gravitas of the story, but I think I would have liked to have seen Our Storyteller. A woman in such a serious, venerable role would have been inspiring.

But to depict her in caricature or not? Hmm.

Wishing a peaceful and happy Christmas to all who celebrate.

***********************************

GIFTS FOR THE CLASSIC FILM FAN!!!!!!!

Christmas in Classic Films provides a roster of old movies with scenes to conjure Christmas of days gone by. Makes a nice gift, if you know an old movie buff, or if you just like to give presents to yourself.

The paperback is available at Amazon, but also here at Barnes & Noble.

The hardcover, so far, is available only at Amazon.

Here are a few other classic movie books I've written for your gift-giving pleasure:

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. - for sale in paperback and hardcover at Amazon,

And in paperback and hardcover here at Barnes & Noble.

Hollywood Fights Fascism - here in paperback at Amazon.

Movies in Our Time - here in paperback at Amazon.

And all of these books are available as well at my page on Bookshop.org, which helps support independent bookstores.

The Holly and the Ivy - 1952

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:37:00 +0000

The Holly and the Ivy (1952) brings together a stellar cast in the simplest of settings: a country church parsonage, but against the backdrop of a family reunion made anxious by unresolved issues. It is Christmas, when the ethereal joyous aspects of the holiday fight all-too-human depression, where a need to mend ties is hampered by resentment of those ties. The movie is a British production in a decidedly good old English story, but the theme and the feelings are universal to any culture.

The British seem to have mastered Christmas, giving us many of our customs, our carols, and inasmuch as Dickens has provided our most treasured allegorical Christmas theme of modern redemption in the form of A Christmas Carol. The Holly and the Ivy also gives us redemption, in a much softer manner: Ebeneezer Scrooge had a restless night with three ghosts to take him backward and forward decades in time to learn his lesson, but while it takes the Greogry family roughly the same overnight Christmas Eve hours to ride a storm and emerge the better for it on Christmas Day, their challenges are easier to overcome, with a little understanding.

One of the criticisms of the movie seems to be that it does not deal in depth with the characters’ problems and motivations. That’s usually a fair complaint, but in this movie, I think the brief sketch we are given is enough. Certainly, animosity between family members is not always due to complex reasons or ferocious events; quite often it stems from ordinary misunderstanding and miscommunication. We are not mind readers, and that is sometimes our biggest hurdle in human relationships. We rarely forgive each other for it.

Sir Ralph Richardson plays a clergyman running a rural church in the county of Norfolk, the part of England bordering the North Sea known as East Anglia. He was originally from Ireland, but settled into his assignment in this parish as a young man. The parsonage may be a simple home, but the church is described as a venerable edifice from the 14^th century. We don’t see much of the church, just a few Currier and Ives-type shots of a snowy village church that belong on a Christmas card—a comforting and inspiring illusion.

Sir Ralph is elderly, a bit of an absent-minded professor, with a cheerful nature and a kind heart, but may overpower his family with his chatty enthusiasm that won’t let them get a word in edgewise and that serves as a barrier to them ever piercing his optimistic armor with their nagging problems.

He is a widower, having lost his wife earlier in the year. One criticism I would make is that we don’t know enough about her and her influence on her family and their sense of loss and grief, but the kids’ issue is really Pop.

Every Christmas, he extends invitations to his sister, his wife’s sister and brother, and to his three grown children to gather at the parsonage for Christmas Eve. The movie opens with the ebullient carol, “The Holly and the Ivy,” and the family receiving their invitations and deciding whether or not to come—all but Celia Johnson, who plays his eldest child, who still lives at home and runs the household for her father. We’ll come back to her.

The first invitation comes to his sister-in-law played by Margaret Halston, herself a childless widow who lives in a residential hotel. She hopefully collects her mail at the front desk and happily sees the envelope from her brother-in-law, anticipating it to be the annual invitation to spend Christmas with his family. The desk clerk asks if she’ll be remaining in the hotel for Christmas, as they have some refreshments planned to cheer up those with nowhere to go. When Miss Halston opens her invitation and reads it, she triumphantly responds, “No, I shall not be here for Christmas.” Her eyes shine with anticipation and relief that is touching and sad.

Like Sir Ralph, she is also elderly, playing a kind aunt, appearing at first to be somewhat dotty, but through her fey appearance, we come to see she is wise, intuitive, and with a generous heart.

The other aunt, Sir Ralph’s Irish sister who has not lost her Dublin accent, is played by Maureen Delany. She is a spinster, renting a room that is far simpler than Miss Halston’s lodgings, denoting her reduced circumstances. She is blunt, occasionally rude, and quite funny. She delivers frankness with a deadpan expression, and if her standards are rarely met to her satisfaction, we may realize that that is not really her greatest disappointment; she rather enjoys human failings after a fashion. However, she does carry a regret that has hampered her happiness and even brought about her reduced financial circumstances: she, like Celia Johnson, remained at home to care for her elderly parents and lost the chance to have a life of her own by putting them first. She and Aunt Margaret Halston have become friends through these annual Christmas visits, and Miss Halston even gives up her first class train carriage to sit with Miss Delany in third class so they can catch up.

Hugh Williams plays an uncle reading his invitation in a pub with friends around discussing his Christmas plans. He is one character I would like to know more about, as there is some great depth of understanding about him. He is godfather to the younger daughter, played by Margaret Leighton, whom we only hear discussed but do not see until the movie is halfway through. He makes special effort to contact his niece, Miss Leighton, to get her to go to the family gathering, but we are told she is very busy with her career as a fashion journalist. There is more to his concern for her, but we shall see that soon.

There is something poignant in him, this dapper career army officer with the trim mustache, when his mates remark that it must be boring to visit a country parson for Christmas, but Mr. Williams confides that he once wanted to be a clergyman. When he was a young man, his father offered him two choices: go into the army or to the church. When Williams replied he wanted to become a clergyman, his father laughed at him, “and I found myself at Sandhurst.” Sandhurst, of course, is the British military academy.

Fathers have a lot to answer for in this movie, as one way or another, they are the deciders of their children’s futures.

The last member of the family is currently in the British army, too, but he is a lowly enlisted man fulfilling his couple of years of “national service.” He is Sir Ralph’s son, played by Denholm Elliot, and he also has a choice waiting for him when his service is completed. His father is saving his meager clergyman’s salary to send his son to Cambridge University, but Mr. Elliot, a roguish, boyish scamp, wants nothing to do with higher education when he gets out of the army. He doesn’t seem to know how to tell his father. There are many strong and wistful characters in the movie, but Elliot just seems weak, and maybe that happens when so many about one are strong.

Now we come to Celia Johnson, busily decorating (with holly branches) and cooking and preparing for the family Christmas. We might expect her to be a sentimental homebody, but there is a hard edge to her that suggests something more under the surface. Though she dotes on her father and briskly handles the hostess duties for this family holiday, she seems to steel herself with a resolute sense of duty, rather than enjoying her position in the family.

She has a problem. Unknown to her family, she has a fiancé, played by John Gregson. He is an engineer, and has a job lined up in South America for the next five years and wants to take her with him. They are not children; they are in their thirties, their lives been on hold for many years due to her late mother’s illness, passing, and her father’s needing her. She turns him down, but Mr. Gregson continues to implore her to reconsider. He thinks her younger sister should take a turn at looking after the old man. Naturally, no one considers the son to be an appropriate caregiver; he has an education, a career, and one day, a family of his own to pursue, as is the prerogative of male children.

“I don’t know what I’d do without her,” her father exclaims more than once, meaning it to be a compliment, but we flinch, as she does, because it is a burden.

The guests arrive, and the uncle, Hugh Williams, explains Margaret Leighton’s absence with the excuse that she has the flu. That is a lie, and he will feel foolish when she finally arrives by herself.

She is a sophisticated Londoner now, a professional. Her father admires her success and takes an interest in her work, fusses over her when she comes home, but she is distant with everybody except Uncle Hugh, with whom she appears to have a comfortable relationship. He knows her secret, but protects her privacy.

Aunt Maureen Delany, with her caustic Irish manner of being funny without realizing it, scoffs at Celia Johnson’s sacrificing her future to care for her father, reminding her that she did the same and regrets it. “There I was stuck looking after me mother until I’m 45 and my figure gone.”

Celia Johnson, considering the holly branch in her hand, notes it has a bitter smell when broken, as in the song, “bitter as any gall.”

The aunts feel the father should retire, move to smaller digs that would enable him to care for himself, thereby sparing Ceilia any further responsibility for him, but Sir Ralph, who does not know about his daughter’s fiancé or his son’s wish to not go to university, has no intention of retiring. He feels vital and vibrant still, despite always needing someone to hand him his galoshes. Yet, he also has regrets about his work.

He knows that during his Christmas sermon, one of thousands he has written in his lifetime, his congregation would rather be home, “basting the Christmas goose.”

Meanwhile in the kitchen, the sisters have a showdown while washing dishes. Celia comes out with her problem and asks her sister to stay and look after Pop, but Miss Leighton refuses.

Celia observes, “You’ve grown hard.”

Margaret replies, “Life does change people.”

Celia notices that her sister is not happy, and finally gets her secret from her. Miss Leighton had an American lover during the war, and he was killed. She was pregnant. The mores of the day made coming home to her parents with this problem difficult for her, but worse, she felt, since her father was a minister.

Her child was born, and she kept him and raised him with the help of a friend in the city. She named her baby boy Simon, and apparently enjoyed motherhood even as she kept the secret from her family. Simon died six months earlier, just before her mother, of meningitis.

Coping with this heartache meant drinking, and Uncle Hugh kept both secrets from the clan, letting Margaret lean on him when she chose.

Celia Johnson is surprised and moved, and understands the awkwardness of telling their father. Margaret remarks offhandedly, “He thinks of me as someone I no longer am.”

Christmas and its preparations are painful for her, and yet something has brought her home. Perhaps it is no longer needing to hide Simon.

As cranky as Aunt Maureen Delany is, she’s the one to answer the door to carolers and drops coins in their box.

As the older relatives settle for a quiet Christmas Eve night around the fire and each other’s company, Margaret Leighton and brother Denholm Elliot head out for the movies, which dour Aunt Maureen thinks is scandalous, and even Sir Ralph sheds some of his affability by remarking with disgust that the cinema has more influence in the lives of people than the church does.

Later on, son and daughter both return drunk. They have not gone to the cinema. Margaret Leighton passes out on the floor, and Denholm Elliot has found the courage from the bottle to shout at his father and accuse him of being someone who cannot be told the truth.

The tense, dramatic scene melts into the next morning, Christmas Day, with the bachelor uncle quietly coming down the stairs with a few wrapped presents to place under the scraggly tabletop tree. There’s something quite poignant about that, but we never get more info on the uncle. Miss Leighton plans to leave this morning, not able to endure anymore Christmas with her family, and he will drive her to the train station.

Denholm Elliot, no worse for wear for a night drinking, and not even particularly shamefaced about it, offers a begrudging apology to his father, and there is a nicely framed scene of their difficult discussion through the branches of the tree, with the Christmas tree between them. Sir Ralph demands to know why he cannot be told the truth, and the son finally explains that because he is a clergyman, his children cannot come to him with their problems. He tells Sir Ralph about Margaret’s issues and that Celia wants to get married and go to South America.

He's crushed and feels like a failure as a father, just as he has often felt ineffectual as a minister. “I’ve been of no use to you.”

But despite what his children believe is his innocence due to a religious life, their father manfully tackles this problem and their image of him head-on. In another nicely framed scene, he sits on the stairs with his daughter Margaret and confronts her, and expresses heartfelt sympathy and understanding for all she has experienced. He takes charge and provides the guidance she needs and proves, as he states, “Do you think that because I’m a parson I know nothing about life?”

He knows more than they do, and in his empathy, shows far more sophistication than his children. As a clergyman, moreover, he is distressed that their impression of him means he has been distorting and misrepresenting religion. He warns her not to turn her back on life.

Margaret Leighton, suddenly as if a great weight is lifted on her shoulders, decides to stay, not only for the rest of the Christmas family holiday, but to remain with her father (one suspects he needs no one but she needs him), so that Celia Johnson can marry her beau and take off for South America.

The son seems to have no great resolution for his complaints, but perhaps they were petty after all and he just needs a little more growing up to do. Quite possibly his bellowing sergeant may knock the self-pity out of him, if not his mischieviousness.

The end credits roll as they head off next door to church to watch the old man do his thing. One senses it is without a sense of obligation this time, but rather a sense of pride that they gather in the back pew for a little Christmas magic.

Next week, Christmas Day, we’ll have a look at some Hollywood stars’ voicing 1960s and 1970s television Christmas cartoons.

***********************************

GIFTS FOR THE CLASSIC FILM FAN!!!!!!!

The paperback is available at Amazon, but also here at Barnes & Noble.

The hardcover, so far, is available only at Amazon.

Here are a few other classic movie books I've written for your gift-giving pleasure:

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. - for sale in paperback and hardcover at Amazon,

And in paperback and hardcover here at Barnes & Noble.

Hollywood Fights Fascism - here in paperback at Amazon.

Movies in Our Time - here in paperback at Amazon.

And all of these books are available as well at my page on Bookshop.org, which helps support independent bookstores.

Bush Christmas (1947)

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:12:00 +0000

Bush Christmas (1947) is a window on a world of the past that seems almost fanciful, to our modern perspective, as to be dreamlike, but it existed. This era, this world, was more hardscrabble than many of us might understand, and yet there was a simplicity that brought joy and freedom in ways we might also find difficult to imagine.

This all sounds rather airy, but I think this is the impression one leaves with at the end of the movie. In its way, it may not leave us (at least in America) with Christmas nostalgia, but it does evoke nostalgia for the imagination and adventure of childhood.

The movie was an Australian-British production, filmed by director Ralph Smart with the intention of making a children’s movie for the British market, specifically for what were “cinema clubs” – Saturday matinees. Showing British kids stories of the then Empire countries in this post-World War II era was an important and entertaining way to bolster ties between them.

John McCallum, a popular Australian actor who appeared in numerous British movies, narrates the movie. Chips Rafferty, a then up-and-coming Australian movie star is given top billing and plays one of the bad guys. Most of the cast featured adults with minor film or stage experience in Australia, and they are secondary to the children in the movie, who get most of the screen time and most of the rather scant dialogue.

Some of the kids had some radio experience, and Helen Grieve, who plays Helen, had done a previous film with Chips Rafferty. She is the oldest child and more polished than the others, but even the inexperience of the other kids and the few lines they say to each other are astonishingly irrelevant to the success of the movie. From McCallum’s introduction to the film that sets us in the Australian Outback, telling us of an event that happened last year, we are lulled into a comfortable storytime.

We are reminded at the outset by the narrator that in Australia, Christmas occurs during summertime. The kids in the story are just being let out of school for the Christmas holidays, and they joyously run from the little Outback schoolhouse to—their horses. Already, we’re astonished at how different their world may be to ours.

The children are played by Helen Grieve, the oldest; Nick Yardley and Morris Unicomb as her younger brothers; and Michael Yardley as a British boy who is in Australia as one of the kids evacuated from Great Britain during the Blitz. The narrator tells us that he is home in England by now (it being 1947).

The other member of their group is an Aboriginal child named Neza, played by Neza Saunders, who was discovered at a mission station. He, like the other kids, is given little to say but is quite natural and unaffected. The native people are always referred to as The Blacks in the movie, and though he is clearly one of the gang, riding away from the school on his horse (though we don’t know if he actually attends with them), we see that the other kids still regard him as a “type” rather than a person. When he won’t join them on a ride to a certain place, saying it is a bad place, they scoff at his superstition. When they smear soot on their faces to pretend they are commandos, they laugh when he copies them because his skin is already dark.

Though Neza, through his knowledge of bushcraft, actually keeps them alive when they are alone in the Outback, they are not above seeing him as clownish. Likewise, Old Jack, played by Clyde Combo, is also played by an Aboriginal actor and he helps to track the kids when they are missing. He is shown as a knowledgeable stockman employed by the kids’ father, and without him, they might still be missing.

For the most part, however, Neza is given due attention by the director as an authentic and interesting part of life in Australia to British kids who will never travel there.

The kids, on a detour on their way home, come across two men played by Chips Rafferty and John Fernside, who discuss horses with them. They want to buy horses, and the kids supply information on who in the valley has the best horses to sell. These men are actually horse thieves scouting the area. They give two bob (which is two shillings) each to the kids to not tell anyone they were there, giving the excuse that they want to buy the horses before rival horse traders can get to them. This all seems innocent enough to the kids, so they take the money and promise not to tell. When Helen gets uncomfortable with this, they go back to return the money, but the men are gone.

When the kids return home to the ranch, or “station” as they are called in Australia, they tell their father that they are late because of a Christmas party at school.

They are preparing for Christmas at home, too. All of them look forward to a trip to “the city” where they will buy presents for each other. Their father is played by Pat Penny and their mother is played by Thelma Grigg.

When horses are stolen in the valley that evening, including a valuable mare and foal from their father, the kids put two-and-two together and realize they allowed the bad guys to do this. They confess, dad is angry, and the kids feel that they must be responsible and make it right.

So they tell their parents they’re going camping for a couple days at a nearby watering hole, which evidently is nothing to worry about because their parents don’t. The kids’ real plan, however, is to trail the bad guys, with Neza’s expert help, and bring back the stolen horses.

What follows is an adventure that for all its daring, doesn’t really seem improbable, given the remote location and the obvious independence of the children, most of whom appear to be under 12 years old.

They track the bad guys, now joined by a third ruffian played by Stan Tolhurst. One of the men, Fernside, is a bit of a lazy oaf, but all three appear to be quite dangerous, so this is no tale of smart kids besting a bunch of adult buffoons. There is real danger present, both from the rustlers and from the unforgiving environment. At one point, the kids run out of provisions and Neza shows them how to live off the land by eating cooked snake and live grubs. They’re willing to try the snake, but the grubs don’t go over as well.

It reminds me of a painting I bought when I was in the Outback many years ago (which I mentioned in this previous post on A Town Like Alice (1956). The painting on fabric, called “Bush Tucker” shown here, depicts snake, frog, and grub cuisine by Aboriginal artist Julie Nabangardi Shedden. Tucker is Australian slang for food.

A testament to the kids’ independence is the reaction of their parents when, after some days, the kids don’t return from their camping trip. Mother decorates a spindly tabletop scrub pine, and in an unworried tone, “Time the children were home.”

Father responds, “Probably forgot what day it is.”

Though the kids are resourceful when they catch up to the bad guys—stealing their boots and food when they sleep, and pushing small boulders down a hilly trail to keep from being caught when the bad guys are after them—there is real suspense, particularly in a few harrowing moments when young Michael loses his glasses and stumbles too close to a cliff.

There is a happy ending, where horses have been returned and the local constable, finding the bad guys through trailing the kids, proclaims, “These kids have proved themselves to be good citizens.” Certainly, a compliment not often heard today, nor aspired to, but quaint to hear.

Their Christmas lunch around the table, the family, and Neza, all wearing the traditional paper crowns from their Christmas crackers, enjoy their mince pies and Christmas pudding, traditional English fare that migrated here.

Next week, we take the traditional English Christmas back to Blighty with The Holly and the Ivy (1952), and a rather untraditional Christmas story.

Bush Christmas is here on YouTube.

***********************************

GIFTS FOR THE CLASSIC FILM FAN!!!!!!!

The paperback is available at Amazon, but also here at Barnes & Noble.

The hardcover, so far, is available only at Amazon.

Here are a few other classic movie books I've written for your gift-giving pleasure:

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. - for sale in paperback and hardcover at Amazon,

And in paperback and hardcover here at Barnes & Noble.

Hollywood Fights Fascism - here in paperback at Amazon.

Movies in Our Time - here in paperback at Amazon.

And all of these books are available as well at my page on Bookshop.org, which helps support independent bookstores.

Toyland Premiere - 1934

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 13:14:00 +0000

Toyland Premiere (1934) unites favorite studio theme of a gathered cast of caricatured movie stars – with Santa Claus. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is the host for this holiday party, more about gags and mischief than seasonal joy or, heaven forbid, peace on earth.

We discussed several cartoons that featured caricatures of Hollywood stars in this previous post. This escapade in Toyland Premiere brings us cartoon images of Tarzan, Shirley Temple, Frankenstein’s Monster (this is a Universal cartoon, if you haven’t figured it out by now), and Bing Crosby, who croons a brief hello. Shirley sounds more like Betty Boop. There are others in tow, but highlighted are Laurel and Hardy, whom we visited last week in Babes in Toyland (1934).

Santa arrives at the party, after a slow start in his workshop when he discovers his famous red suit has been eaten by moths. Helpful elves spray paint his blue coveralls red and slap some popcorn strings on him to simulate the white fur trim – hey, it’s the Depression. We have to make do.

Oswald gets Santa to make an appearance at a large downtown department store, and a parade of giant balloons, not unlike the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, greets him. On the toy department floor is where the party and the Hollywood stars await him.

It turns into a bit of a melee when Laurel and Hardy are prevented from eating cake by the Frankenstein Monster, who growls at them and warns them off. They get stuck in a dragon suit and are attacked by toy soldiers, not unlike the ones in Babes in Toyland, made the same year (see this previous post from last week) which is probably the inspiration for this scene. A little cross-publicity never hurts.

Santa laughs at all this and the cartoon ends suddenly and without any explicable conclusion. I suppose most Christmas parties are like that. Except for the Frankenstein Monster part, but I’ve never met your friends, so I don’t know with whom you associate.

We’ll revisit Hollywood stars’ representation in Christmas cartoons in a few weeks when we conclude our annual Christmas series of posts, but for the next two weeks, we’re going to take a detour to other parts of the globe. Next week, Bush Christmas (1947) will take us to Australia.

***********************************

GIFTS FOR THE CLASSIC FILM FAN!!!!!!!

The paperback is available at Amazon, but also here at Barnes & Noble.

The hardcover, so far, is available only at Amazon.

Here are a few other classic movie books I've written for your gift-giving pleasure:

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. - for sale in paperback and hardcover at Amazon,

And in paperback and hardcover here at Barnes & Noble.

Hollywood Fights Fascism - here in paperback at Amazon.

Movies in Our Time - here in paperback at Amazon.

And all of these books are available as well at my page on Bookshop.org, which helps support independent bookstores.

Babes in Toyland - 1934

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 11:56:00 +0000

Babes in Toyland (1934) stars Laurel and Hardy in a fairytale land battling evil and proving that virtue conquers all. There’s quite a bit of bumbling going on, but it all comes out right in the end.

The boys are boarders in the shoe of the Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe. They work in a toy shop which, we may be surprised to learn, is a supplier to Santa Claus. Perhaps his elves were on strike, otherwise why would there be this outsourcing? There were a lot of strikes in the Great Depression; quite possibly the elves had poor working conditions and low pay and no coffee breaks. Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong!

Charlotte Henry plays Little Bo Peep, who keeps losing her sheep. She’s got an even more dreadful problem, however. A villain named Silas Barnaby, played with old-time mellerdramer exaggeration by Henry Brandon (even his makeup is exaggerated), lusts after the winsome shepherdess. Bo Peep is also a resident of the shoe, on which there is a mortgage – held by Barnaby, of course. He demands of the Old Woman, played by Florence Roberts, that she force Bo Beep to marry him, otherwise, he will take her shoe. The big one that they live in. She’s behind in payments. It’s the Depression.

Meanwhile, Tom-Tom, the Piper’s Son, played by Felix Knight, is in love with Bo Peep, and after a duet or two, we see the feeling’s mutual. He’s a trilling tenor (it’s a musical, of sorts), but he is no match for the persevering evil Henry Brandon as Barnaby. Here’s where Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee step in, and that’s Stan and Ollie.

At first, they plan to take their life savings ($1.48) to pay off the mortgage, but failing that, they hope to ask their toyshop boss, played by curmudgeonly William Burress, for a loan.

But the boss fires them for making a huge mistake…and it is huge. The toy soldiers they were to make on order for Santa (because his long-suffering elves are on strike for a decent wage and an end to child-elf labor), have been made the wrong size. They’re HUGE, a little bigger than life size, and when they are wound up (actually, just push a button on their backs), they clomp around like Frankenstein’s monster and are almost as scary.

The boys try to steal the mortgage document from Barnaby, Ollie nearly gets drowned in a judicial ducking, and Bo Peep, trying to save the Old Woman’s home, tearfully agrees to marry the villain. Stan bursts into tears. “Upset? I’m housebroken!”

The whole menagerie of Mother Goose (who’s also there, played by Virginia Karns and sings “Toyland”) characters live in the snug little village, and we might be reminded of the later Wizard of Oz (1939) set, but this one is in black and white. It also has, like Oz, a race of monsters seemingly controlled by Barnaby, not unlike the flying moneys, called Bogeymen, who live in the dreadful Bogeyland. They are creepy. Their netherworld cavern reminds one a little of the lair of the Phantom of the Opera.

After much travail, Stan and Ollie save the day with their earlier mistake – the giant toy soldiers. They are put into action and in the movie’s climax, the battalion vanquishes the hideous Bogeymen and Barnaby, to the tune of Victor Herbert’s “March of the Wooden Soldiers.” Some of them are figures brought to life with stop-motion animation, and in other scenes are actors. I think the most striking scene is when one of them, in Frankenstein monster-like fashion, bursts through a wall and loses his head. It’s funny and upsetting at the same time.

Another weird and creepy creature is a money-like Mickey Mouse. It’s his earlier version, but it’s seeing him alive and hopping around and teasing a cat that puts one off. Definitely, not our beloved and recognizable Mickey.

The movie has since been colorized, but the original black-and-white version is still available, including on YouTube. For many a Boomer, this was a beloved annual holiday tradition, despite its flaws. I can’t say it was in my house—there were other movies that were considered “musts” for the holiday season, but I think any time spent with Laurel and Hardy is well worth it.

Next week, we’ll have another visit to a mythical toyland with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in Toyland Premiere (1934).

Until then, may I wish Americans here and abroad a very Happy Thanksgiving!

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The paperback is available at Amazon, but also here at Barnes & Noble.

The hardcover, so far, is available only at Amazon.

Here are a few other classic movie books I've written for your gift-giving pleasure:

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. - for sale in paperback and hardcover at Amazon,

And in paperback and hardcover here at Barnes & Noble.

Hollywood Fights Fascism - here in paperback at Amazon.

Movies in Our Time - here in paperback at Amazon.

And all of these books are available as well at my page on Bookshop.org, which helps support independent bookstores.

My classic film books for the gift-giving holidays!

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 12:54:00 +0000

We'll be talking about Christmas movies for the next several weeks, and to lead off the month of classic film yuletide, I'd like to remind you of my book, Christmas in Classic Films, which provides a roster of old movies with scenes to conjure Christmas of days gone by. Makes a nice gift, if you know an old movie buff, or if you just like to give presents to yourself.

The paperback is available at Amazon, but also here at Barnes & Noble.

The hardcover, so far, is available only at Amazon.

Here are a few other classic movie books I've written for your gift-giving pleasure:

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. - for sale in paperback and hardcover at Amazon,

And in paperback and hardcover here at Barnes & Noble.

Hollywood Fights Fascism - here in paperback at Amazon.

Movies in Our Time - here in paperback at Amazon.

And all of these books are available as well at my page on Bookshop.org, which helps support independent bookstores.

Next Thursday, which happens to be Thanksgiving for those of us in the U.S., we'll have a look at Laurel and Hardy as Babes in Toyland (1934), which you can lazily enjoy as the tryptophan kicks in from the turkey dinner.

eBOOK SALE THIS WEEKEND - HOLLYWOOD FIGHTS FASCISM!

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:22:00 +0000

EBOOK SALE THIS WEEKEND - Continuing the weekend sales of several of my eBooks, this weekend, you can download my HOLLYWOOD FIGHTS FASCISM (which usually sells for $4.99) for $1.99, a 60% savings!

Purchase the eBook SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15TH or SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16TH here at my Shopify store...
https://67db75-35.myshopify.com/products/hollywood-fights-fascism

or at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo and a variety of other online shops at this link. https://books2read.com/u/b6KxEW

Or at Amazon here. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L36TFM8

Here's some info about the book:

Past is prologue. Our greatest gift from the Greatest Generation was freedom from fascism. Relive, and celebrate, how evil was faced, discussed, dramatized...and fought.

Classic films were a weapon.

The Greatest Generation received instruction, inspiration, and, of course, entertainment from a source that affected them perhaps even more than the greater technology of generations to follow: the movies.

The movies of the day tell us a lot about that generation, that first generation that fought fascism: what was expected of them, what they hoped to achieve, and how they saw themselves. It is not a perfect measuring stick, but the movies of the day show a passion for fighting fascism by everyday people.

The essays in the book were adapted from original posts here at Another Old Movie Blog.

Terror Aboard - 1933

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 13:10:00 +0000

Terror Aboard (1933) is an eerie mystery that, though from the Pre-Code era, feels more like a noir film of a later period with its flashbacks and cynicism. However, we have Charles Ruggles in a comedy relief role to break the omnipresent gloom, and that certainly anchors us to the Pre-Code days.

This is my entry into the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “Early Shadows and Pre-Code Horror Blogathon,” and you can find many more terrific blogs participating here.

A ship, perhaps a fishing boat, travels through murky fog, blasting its horn to warn any unseen vessel. As the fog clears, they see a yacht a short distance away, and they sound the warning again and try to make contact, but there is no reply, and the boat seems adrift.

Curiously, from this distance, they can see no one on board. The captain takes a small detail of men, including the ship’s doctor, and takes a launch over to the yacht to investigate. The camera cuts to the other side of the yacht, where a man leaps into the water, unseen. We will get back to him later. This post, as usual, is awash with spoilers.

As the captain and his men cautiously roam about an empty ship, one of them is clubbed from behind. They find passengers on the boat at last—dead ones. A woman is found lying in a hallway—frozen to death. A man is found hanging in a cabin. The captain mutters morosely, “This is some kind of devil ship.”

Suddenly, a fire breaks out in the engine room, and they quickly retrieve the bodies they’ve found and prepare to leave the yacht. They also find a telegram addressed to a man named Krieg that had been sent two days earlier, which reads, “grand jury indicted you for forgery and grand larceny…” This Krieg is bankrupt, and the police are after him.

Now we drop into our first flashback. We meet Krieg himself, a dapper middle-aged man with a trim mustache, played by John Halliday. He owns this yacht.

As he reads the telegram he has just received, he ponders his situation—and we are launched into a second flashback, to October 1929, when the stock market crashes and mobs run on banks, and men swarm in panic on the stock exchange floor.

The crash of 1929 made for a dismal and sickening backdrop for movies of the Great Depression. Just its mention, or even the image of falling stocks on a ticker tape was easily recognizable shorthand for catastrophe. Cinematically, it need not be explained. Certainly, through the decade of the 1930s, repercussions still stung from this event.

Mr. Halliday, natty in his yachting cap and uniform jacket, visits the ship’s radiographer, played by William Janney, who sends and receives the telegrams. He knows Janney has seen the message, for he deciphered the Morse code. He has a companionable chat with him, talking of wanting to live on a nearby deserted island, lays out his plans to change course for it, but Janney seems obtuse either to what might be both a bribe and a threat. He only catches on when Halliday takes out a gun. Because the camera is cut away from the instant the gun is fired, and we see only Janney’s expression of horror, we are teased into thinking that Halliday has shot himself, committing suicide.

Then, after a long, rather agonizing pause, Janney falls, slumping to the floor, his white uniform covered in blood. Halliday sets the scene to make it look as if Janney committed suicide. Then he takes the guest list of passengers.

We get to meet them one by one, and their relationship to Halliday is briefly etched. Verree Teasdale is an older woman, the wife of his business partner, encouraging ingenue Shirley Grey in Miss Grey’s forthcoming nuptials to Mr. Halliday. Yet Grey seems troubled, and perhaps not entirely at the age difference between them. They will marry when the yacht reaches Australia. We soon learn that she really loves Neil Hamilton, but they had quarreled.

Miss Teasdale will have her own marital problems come to the fore, as she is pursued in an adulterous relationship with Jack LaRue. Morgan Wallace, Teasdale’s husband, will fight with LaRue and LaRue will knife him to death with a letter opener. This violence is, however, subtly orchestrated by Halliday. We come to understand he wants to eliminate his passengers. We will see his hand scratch their names off the passenger list as they die.

Complicating his plans is the late addition to the guests on board when his fiancée’s former love, played by Neil Hamilton, arrives unexpectedly by plane, which he ditches in the ocean near the yacht. He has been tracking down Shirley Grey to reunite with her. We see a hand add his name on the passenger list, like an additional chore on a things-to-do list. Hamilton is handsome, rugged, flies a plane, and we assume he may be better equipped to cheat death on this cruise than the other passengers, perhaps even saving Miss Grey, to boot, but they end up getting locked in the engine room. Where a fire breaks out. “It’s all right, darling. We’ll get out of this somehow.”

Hamilton, you may recognize as the future Commissioner Gordon on the Batman TV series in the 1960s.

There is a poisoning, a hanging, and Verree Teasdale gets locked into the ship’s meat locker, where she freezes to death, and more names are scratched out.

Charles Ruggles has a prominent role as a ship’s steward, and he is comic relief, bumbling around, playing the amiable coward, terrified by all the murder around him, clutching at lucky charms. We might assume that he will survive because God protects bumbling clowns, at least in old movies.

The captain of the yacht, played by Stanley Fields, begins to suspect Halliday of the horrific deeds. Meanwhile, the crew grumble among themselves, worried and wanting to escape, and finally they rush a lifeboat, but Halliday shoots them.

Then a blast from a ship’s horn in the fog, and we are immediately taken back to the present when the yacht is seen drifting at sea. The ship pulls up alongside the yacht, and captain and crew investigate. Halliday, we discover, lurking about, is the one who smacked the sailor on the head. He starts the engine room fire, and he is the man whom we earlier saw leaping from the yacht into the sea to swim for it.

Against all odds, Neil Hamilton and Shirley Grey are rescued from the fire, and all are speedily removed from the burning yacht to escape to the other ship.

John Halliday, whether driven mad by his indictment over the stock collapse or whether he was just a diabolical manipulator who was determined to win at all costs, is seen at the end of the film being pursued by a shark. Horror begets horror, but it seems as if, as with many Pre-Codes, the just desserts are not a moral indictment, but a cheap thrill to round out the final reel.

For more fun with spooky Pre-Code ne’er do wells, have a look at these great posts at the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “Early Shadows and Pre-Code Horror Blogathon,” and you can find many more terrific blogs participating here.

Terror Aboard can currently be seen on YouTube.

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Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

CMBA Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:09:00 +0000

Many thanks to the voters of the Classic Movie Blog Association for the honor of this award for my essay on Massacre (1934), which you can read here. CMBA is a class act, and I would encourage any classic movie blogger to apply to join our ranks.

If You Could Only Cook - 1935

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 12:59:00 +0000

If You Could Only Cook (1935) is another Depression-era screwball comedy that uses the Great Depression as a springboard to humor. It also serves as a backdrop to contrast the silliness with the bleak realities of everyday life that presented challenges and provided plots.

Like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1935), a movie of the same year that we discussed recently here, this movie also features star Jean Arthur and brings along favorite gravely-voiced tough guy Lionel Stander in a supporting role. He is one of the few clear-eyed and sensible people in this movie who wears his cynicism like a shield. Everybody puts up defenses in the Great Depression, and some have more survival skills than others.

On the other end of the spectrum of cynicism is Frieda Inescort in a brief role as the bluenose fiancée of Herbert Marshall, who slyly seems to drive him to the altar in the manner of closing a business deal. She has social standing in a respected old family that has, through generations, lost its fortune. Marshall is new money, an automotive engineer who owns his own car manufacturing company. She and her former debutante friends see it as the perfect match.

The movie opens on their wedding rehearsal in the family mansion, their friends and attendants, like Miss Inescort, just going through the motions of what a real, meaningful wedding celebration should be. When Herbert Marshall leaves after the rehearsal to return back to work and a board meeting at his company, we see that he is not exactly happy. Though he looks forward to his wedding, a sadness, a sense of dissatisfaction nags at him. Frieda Inescort neither requires nor wants wooing. Herbert is a romantic, and would like to have the experience of sentimental romance with a partner who could share life as an adventure.

He faces disappointment at work, too. His executive board does not approve of his new, futuristic, and somewhat cartoony designs for a line of autos. He is told, “This company is in no condition to spend money on wild ideas” for his car designs, because the public has no money to spend on the cars.

Herbert’s response is a bit of fiscal cheerleading: “This country’s on its feet again, and soon it’ll be spending as it never did before.”

By 1935, the year of this film’s release, the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt did reduce unemployment since he took office in 1933 (and would continue to drift downward as the decade ended) but we were a long way from spending as we never did before. When it comes to survival tactics, Mr. Marshall's character survives the gloom by being naively optimistic.

But fed up with his frustrations at his company, as well as in his personal life, he goes to a park as a brief respite, an afternoon’s escape to brood. It turns into the kind of adventure he would have liked to have with his fiancée, Frieda Inescort. Instead, he is a far luckier man; he discovers Jean Arthur.

She is on the bench he has chosen to sit upon and brood, reading the want ads in a newspaper, her suitcase by her side. She’s down to her last nickel and has lost her digs. But her survival skill is grit, determination, and belief in herself. By his presence in the park in the middle of the day and perhaps by his dejected demeanor, she assumes he is also out of a job.

“Jobs are hard to find, aren’t they?” she remarks sympathetically and offers him the “help wanted-male” section. “It’s tough these days. About 200 people for every position.” Not unlike today.

We are given to understand she is used to office work, but she comments, perusing the servant positions, that “the only good ones are for couples,” a cook and butler, fetching $175 per month. “That’s real money.”

Mr. Marshall, amused, responds, echoing the title, “Now if you could only cook.”

She admits to being a good cook, having kept house for her widowed father since she was a girl. Then a light dawns and she suggests they apply for the job together as a cook and butler.

Here we have a switch in the usual screwball scenario: she is the practical schemer, and he is the “madcap heiress,” persuaded to go along on a ridiculous romp. It’s a fun premise, and since one never takes fairy tales or screwball comedies seriously, we do not wonder why, since he’s rich, he just doesn’t find her a job in his corporation. He clearly takes an interest in her and wants to help her, but with very human self-interest, he sees this as a final escapade before resigning himself to the seemingly inevitable world of a dull marriage and an unfulfilling career.

Their prospective new employer is a gangster and former bootlegger played by Leo Carrillo, who fancies himself a gourmand and is especially pleased with Jean Arthur’s demonstration of merely holding a clove of garlic over a pan of sauce to infuse its flavor (I want to think she was putting him on, but again, one should never look for sense in a screwball comedy).

Lionel Stander is Carrillo’s right-hand man, who vets all employees and anyone ever trying to get close to his boss. He is shrewd and will soon suspect the new butler and cook are not what they seem. Carrillo, for all his dangerous authority, is as grandiose as a character in an opera, flighty, passionate, and with the kind of zest for life we sense Herbert Marshall would like to have.

The “couple” is shown to their new digs—a room over the garage. It has one double bed.

Mr. Marshall will take a daybed couch out on the porch, assuring her with good humor that she does not need to worry about being unable to lock the door. When Jean retires that night to the double bed, he climbs down the trellis and heads back to his apartment to get clothes and to get a few lessons in how to be a butler from his own butler, played by Romaine Callendar. Callendar, from an old English acting family, did a lot of stage work, and this was his first film since a couple of silents in 1918. He frequently played butlers.

Bess Flowers, our favorite uncredited extra, can be spotted at the wedding rehearsal.

Romaine Callendar teaches Herbert Marshall to greet people at the door. The wedding is a week away. Herbert has one week of fun left.

Soon, the lark turns complicated, as both begin to experience possessive feelings for one another, if not love. She is annoyed and complaining when she discovers he has been out all night, and dismisses his excuse of returning for his clothes, as if he is a wayward husband caught carousing. When Leo Carrillo, who begins to fancy Jean, puts his amorous moves on her, Herbert gets angry, warning Carrillo off, defending his “wife.”

And bloodhound Lionel Stander, discovering their separate sleeping arrangements, does not believe they are married. But they fight as if they are married.

The experience has woken Herbert Marshall up—he wants more from life than this playful situation, and decides to return to his company at night, take his experimental designs for cars, and start over. He shows the designs to Jean, and she likes them, taking far more interest in his work than Frieda does. They are lounging on the double bed with the designs, and he kisses her. It’s okay, though, both of them still have their feet on the floor.

But Lionel has followed him, and he thinks Marshall has broken into the company to steal the designs.

It’s their day off and they plan to meet for lunch, but Jean says first she has an errand. She takes his designs to sell to another company, hoping to give Marshall the confidence he needs in his work. But the company notifies the board of Marshall’s company that Jean has stolen these designs that belong to them. Poor Jean is nabbed by the cops, but Lionel Stander, who follows pretty much everybody, tells the boss that Jean is being interrogated, whereupon Leo Carrillo sends his boys to get her out.

Neither Lionel nor Jean thinks, at this point, that the designs are really Herbert’s, because he has used a fake name, and they think he has stolen the designs.

Leo Carrillo criticizes Jean for being so naïve. “How did you happen to fall for it?”

She replies helplessly, “The Depression.”

Stander adds, incredulously, “I’ve heard of a lot of things blamed on the Depression.” The Depression, like Bess Flowers, always gets a bit part in 1930s screwball comedies.

When they discover that Herbert is the famous car manufacturer, Jean is angry and humiliated, thinking he was just “slumming” at her expense, and Leo Carrillo helpfully says he has arranged a hit on him.

Jean is aghast and asks him to call it off, because…ready? She loves him.

Herbert, without much enthusiasm, has shown up in a morning suit (or should that be "mourning"?) for his nuptials, and Leo, who has become protective of Jean, sends his boys into the middle of the ceremony to kidnap Herbert. He’s not unwilling to go, but holding the wedding party and guests at gunpoint is pretty funny.

The mob brings Herbert back to Jean, who is still mad at him, but the gangsters trick Jean into revealing her true feelings by pretending to shoot Herbert.

“Darling!” she sobs in his arms.

If it’s an odd way to find romance, well, blame it on the Depression.

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Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

Halloween in "Meet Me in St. Louis"

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:58:00 +0000

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) celebrates Halloween in a manner that probably had not been done before in movies, or even since. Here, it is a time for children’s mischief and pranks, but the treats are a holiday spread for the entire family, a cozy home-party with no costumes or gory decorations.

The movie takes us through an entire year of a family living in St. Louis, Missouri, from the summer of 1903 through the spring of 1904, and the four seasons each make up an “act” in the story. The summer begins with anticipation for the building of the fairgrounds for next year’s St. Louis World’s Fair – or as little Margaret O’Brien grandly announces, “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition.”

The Technicolor musical is a lovely feast for both the eyes and ears, and parties and special events are opportunities to move the plot along in song. Christmas, famously, is the winter portion of the movie and the climax of the story, where Judy Garland, the second-oldest daughter and middle child of five kids, croons the touching and sweetly sad, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to console Margaret O’Brien over the dismal prospect of the family moving away from St. Louis.

Spring is the shortest act, where the loose ends of the tale are tied up and we have our happy ending strolling through the magnificent grounds of the World’s Fair. Before all that, however, we have an autumn interlude, which is a big chunk of the movie.

Judy has barely made an inroad to her romance with Tom Drake, “The Boy Next Door,” and the older brother, played by Henry H. Daniels, Jr., isn’t even in this segment because he’s away at college. Most of the segment focuses on the two little girls, Margaret O’Brien and Joan Carroll, who dress in costumes that came out of a rag bag and join neighbor kids on the street, who are piling scraps of wood and furniture on a bonfire in the road. They break up into commando units to play pranks on neighbors.

Mother Mary Astor, as her girls are getting ready to join the fun, reminds them that a neighbor lady has folded up a hammock and set it aside for the kids to “steal,” but would they please return it when they’re done. This tells us that Halloween is intended to be more mock hooliganism than the actual thing—at least until young Margaret and Joan make a thrilling escape from a policeman after an attempt to derail a trolley.

Even before that surprising finale to the evening, we might raise our eyebrows at the idea that Margaret must prove her courage to the other kids by marching up to a feared, forbidding neighbor about whom they tell gross rumors of being a wifebeater and killer of cats, and throw a handful of flour into his face, screaming that she hates him (Grandpa Henry Davenport has advised her to wet the flour first, that way it will stick better). This is to break a banshee spell. She does the job, albeit trembling all the way, and he, nonplussed, wipes the flour off his face as if he knows it’s just a Halloween thing not to take seriously, like the lady who allows her hammock to be stolen as long as she gets it back. Margaret becomes a hero to the other kids, and her assault on a neighbor is apparently a rite of passage.

More concerning to today’s parents might be the sight of small children burning half the crates and small tables in the neighborhood in a huge bonfire in the road, unsupervised, if not unsanctioned.

I can remember in the dim recesses of my childhood watching my father burn autumn leaves in the road by the curb, and also in a large rusty metal barrel, taller than me, meant for that purpose. But it’s nothing I or my friends would have been allowed to do ourselves.

Halloween, despite the modern decorations meant to induce horror, has become a much tamer thing for children.

And apparently, far less civilized and mature for the adults (compared to today). We see the family in the movie sitting down to a table with cake and apples, and the bounty of the season, for it seems more a celebration of harvest and autumn as a completion of another phase in the year. As family maid and cook, Marjorie Main, blithely announces as she sits down with the family to enjoy her own piece of cake, “Well, here it is Halloween, and we’re all another year older.”

Just as we settle into a cozy Victorian parlor scene, chaos erupts. Margaret O’Brien returns with a bloody lip and a tale of being attacked by Tom Drake. Judy runs next door to belt Tom. We assume this will not help their romance. A doctor is summoned (for Margaret, not Tom), and Margaret receives a few stitches, is tucked into bed with treats and made a fuss over—enjoying her invalidism immensely. Joan Carroll returns and excitedly tells Margaret what she missed when she left the fun—that the dummy “body” the kids placed on the trolley nearly derailed it, and they had to run from the constable. Tom Drake had saved the girls from the police by hiding them down an alley, but they scoff at his interference. As Margaret notes with a superior air, “As if anybody ever pays attention to girls!”

But a worse calamity suddenly befalls when Papa Leon Ames returns home, triumphant with the news that he is being promoted at his law firm and the family will be moving to New York.

Goes over like a lead balloon, and the family gives him the cold shoulder, from Grandpa down to little Margaret, and one by one, upset, they leave the parlor.

Mom Mary Astor repairs the damage by soothing Pop, sitting down at the piano and playing the Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed tune “You and I.” I don’t know if she’s really playing on the track, but you can see for yourself her “playing” is confident and realistic—as Mary Astor was a trained pianist herself. Pop drifts towards the piano, putting down his cake, and wistfully begins to sing, but the sweet duet is dubbed, however.

One by one, the family all return to the parlor, resume the cake-eating, drawn by the sound and the comforting scene of their parents’ fine example of “life goes on.” The family unit is all that matters.

The Halloween scene had moments of treats and tricks, and serves to put proper perspective on life’s challenges. It’s easy to fight off pretend goblins and make-believe doom; it’s a lot scarier to face moving away from your comfortable house, your friends, and everything familiar to be forced into the great unknown.

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Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

Requiescat in pace - June Lockhart

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 20:31:00 +0000

Farewell to June Lockhart, who passed on October 23rd, having reached her 100th birthday last June. She was another treasured link to the Golden Age of Hollywood, before she became better known to younger generations through two television series and guest spots.

We will remember her as Belinda Cratchit, her real-life parents Gene and Kathleen Lockhart playing Bob Crachit and his wife in A Christmas Carol (1938), and as Lucille Ballard in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). She had a brief role in Keep Your Powder Dry (1945) here.

She also won a Tony Award in 1948 for Outstanding Performance By a Newcomer in For Love or Money.

It is a triumph to reach the century mark, but especially gratifying when one has lived a life so full of personal and professional accomplishments.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:24:00 +0000

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) is a thoughtful commentary on the Great Depression masquerading as a screwball comedy. There are screwballs aplenty, to be sure, but director Frank Capra, as is his wont, manages to show humanity’s noble fight against cynicism in a world full of bad guys lining up to crush us.

Gary Cooper is Mr. Deeds, a flaky, tuba-playing writer of greeting card poems who could be called a misfit except that he fits in very well in the small Vermont community where everybody else is also marching to the beat of their own drum. It is only when he goes to town – New York City, that he stands out as an oddball. Mr. Deeds is idealistic, but suspicious of the motives of people who turn out to actually have ulterior motives—making him strangely canny for someone so naïve on the surface. He is gentle, except for when he belts people in the mouth for pushing his buttons. He is liberally generous to some, and yet expects to get value from his charity from others and admires those who have enough pride to not ask for his help.

Gary Cooper plays the role that fits him like a glove with such ease and believability that his co-star, Jean Arthur, no less capable in her trademark role as the sassy foil, makes it difficult for us to decide who is the more fascinating. It is a case, perhaps, of two actors who employ the same method of effortlessly charming us by apparently just amusing themselves.

Just as he can be a bit vague and preoccupied when spoken to, she also seems distracted by other thoughts, or maybe just has the ability to keep more than one idea in her mind at the same time. When he is approached by the lawyers for the estate of his deceased uncle, he listens with only one ear, busy with his tuba, or dashing off to the window to watch a passing fire truck. When her editor speaks to her, Jean Arthur is playing with a piece of rope or a puzzle toy, seemingly not listening but taking in every word he says. Cooper’s and Miss Arthur’s characters are more alike than even they realize.

Gary Cooper is brought to New York to accept the inheritance left to him, which includes a large mansion and a great fortune. We see he’s a babe in the woods in the big city, but the estate attorney, played by Douglass Dumbrille, steers him to social obligations and financial investments. Mr. Dumbrille’s motives are not fiduciary, however. He attempts to get Cooper to make him power of attorney so that he can control the money and live high off the hog on it, just as he did when the uncle was alive.

Lionel Stander is great in the role of the savvy, snarky man on board to control the press. He is a gravely-voiced tough guy, with more of East Side in him than the gloss of Mr. Dumbrille, and is as disdainful as he is incredulous that Cooper is unfazed by the fortune and actually seems to not particularly want it.

We are treated to a glimpse of Franklin Pangborn as one of the harried tailors trying to measure and outfit Mr. Cooper as he animatedly discusses business with Mr. Dumbrille.

Jean Arthur is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist given the assignment of getting a story on the new millionaire in town, Mr. Cooper, and she pretends to be a poor soul trudging about town looking for a job. When Cooper escapes his bodyguards for a bit of freedom, he encounters her one rainy night on the sidewalk in front of his mansion, fainting from hunger.

He brings her to a cozy restaurant where she is revived with a meal, and after she tells him her story, assuring him she has just gotten a job and starts tomorrow and does not need further help from him, he is charmed, and calls over a violinist playing sad and sweet music.

Her face, coyly partially hidden under the cloche hat, beams. She is enchanted and he very quickly falls in love.

His face, reacting to the pleasure of treating her thus, is a marvel of sweetness and boyish enthusiasm. One of his goals in life is to meet a woman who is a damsel in distress that he may save, and he thinks he has found her.

The romp begins when he recognizes famous literati at the next table and wants to meet them. They are invited to join the party, mainly because the literary men know he is the famous newly rich composer of greeting card schlock and they want to make fun of his work. Jean is wary, she’s not sure if he realizes he is being mocked, but he’s not as naïve as he sounds. He knows very well they are mocking him and he calls them out for their bad manners. It ends with him throwing punches, but one drunken poet, played by Walter Catlett, who gets a charge out of seeing his colleagues thrashed, befriends Cooper and wants to do the town with him. Off they go.

Cooper, introduced to alcohol, spends the evening on a spree, including such antics as feeding a horse a bag of donuts. He will end up being brought home by two cops without his clothes. Jean leaves the two drunken fellows with the staff photographers who are sneaking behind them, and heads home to write her article on Cooper, dubbing him “Cinderella Man.” (However, we know that he’s not the real Cinderella Man; that’s boxer James J. Braddock, who was dubbed thus by writer Damon Runyon the year before Mr. Deeds was released. See the movie Cinderella Man – 2005.)

Her editor, played by George Bancroft is pleased and wants to know how she managed getting through the bodyguards, the PR tough guy Lionel Stander, and a crop of flunkies. She remarks offhandedly, “I was the world’s sweetest ingenue.” She is to be awarded a month’s pay with salary.

Cooper, reading the headlines the next day, is obviously furious and wants to know whom he can punch (Jean has used a false name with him), but he consoles himself with another date with his dream girl.

They ride the double-decker buses through the city and he gets to see Grant’s Tomb in a lovely moment of wonder and patriotism. She is moved by his respect for history and great men, and he unknowingly throws a shaft of conscience at her with the remark, “What puzzles me is why people get so much pleasure out of hurting each other.”

On a park bench, they perform a duet of “Swanee River” and “Humoresque” with humming and pretend tuba playing and drumming with sticks on a trash can. It’s pretty good. I would have liked to see them rehearse that one.

Later, we see Jean’s digs, which she shares with pal Ruth Donnelly, who unfortunately does not have a large role, but we see she is an artist while Jean types her column on a big old typewriter on the coffee table in the living room. As she composes another hit piece on Cinderella Man, we see she is feeling guilty and having a change of heart. “I’m crucifying him,” she says, and the theme of the hero being crucified is another favorite Capra trope. We see it as well in Cooper’s role in Meet John Doe (1941), which we discussed here, and by James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), also starring Jean Arthur, which we discussed here.

But he does make good copy. He abruptly ends a soiree in his mansion for the opera set, scattering them with disdain and critiquing their pomp. He writes a poem to Jean that sounds like the opening salvo to a marriage proposal.

Then the inevitable. Lionel Stander discovers his dream girl and the writer of the articles is the one and the same, and he shows the proof to Gary Cooper, who is stunned, his very stillness and the way the director just lets the film roll is something wonderful. There were not a lot of male actors who could use their faces as effectively as Cooper. He truly had an ability to show the character’s innermost soul with his eyes and a very slight twitch of his expression. We see he is shocked, but also deeply heartbroken as if he might cry. After what seems like a long while, he turns his back to Stander and faces a window, lightly touching a curtain in an absent way.

Stander moves us as well with a quiet, “If I knew you were going to take it so hard, I would have kept my mouth shut. Sorry.”

Cooper, however, is dragged from the depths of despair by a man who breaks into the mansion with a gun. He is a desperate farmer out of work and he accuses Cooper of being just another heartless millionaire. He angrily reminds him of the outrageous antic of feeding donuts to a horse. “You never give a thought to all the people starving,” and that there were people in the world who could not feed their children or themselves. He is played in this wonderful scene by stage and movie veteran John Wray. He did nine movies in this year of 1936, all bit parts and most uncredited. Stander, by the way, did eight this year.

He collapses in tears and apologizes for brandishing a gun, saying he lost his head. “Standing in the breadlines. Killed me to take a handout.” Cooper gets him food and watches him eat. The wheels begin to turn and he gets an idea of what to do with the fortune he never wanted anyway.

He will offer 100 acres, a horse, a cow, and a plow to as many destitute farmers as his money will provide for, some 2,000, and he sets up headquarters in the grand foyer of his mansion, with staff to help, including the converted Lionel Stander, and soon his home is filled with applicants.

Douglass Dumbrille is not happy, nor a pretender to the family fortune who shows up with his gold-digger wife late in the game. Lawyer Dumbrille now brings a suit against Cooper, charging him with insanity and needing to be put under his guardianship. H.B. Warner is the head judge, and the public hearing is swamped with deponents, expert witnesses, and a whole lot of “forgotten men.” Jean is there, too, trying to make up to Gary Cooper and to help his case and keep him from being institutionalized.

He wants nothing more to do with her. He will not even defend himself. As part of his charge against Cooper’s philanthropy, Douglass Dumbrille builds his case on the aspect even more egregious than insanity: philanthropy itself. (Capra, a conservative Republican, had been once poor himself and did not mind pointing out the flaws in oligarchs.) “In these times, with the country incapacitated by economic ailments and in danger with an undercurrent of social unrest, the promulgation of such a weird, fantastic, and impractical plan as contemplated by the defendant is capable of fomenting a disturbance from which the country may not soon recover. It is our duty to stop it. Our government is fully aware of its difficulties. It is capable of pulling itself up out of its economic rut without the assistance of Mr. Deeds or any other crackpot.” One wonders if he includes President Roosevelt in that number. One wonders if Capra did.

Two of the witnesses are a pair of sisters, played by Margaret Seddon and Margaret McWade, from Cooper’s Vermont hometown who insist he is nuts, or “pixilated.” Afterward, when Cooper addresses them in his cross-examination, we learn they think everyone is pixilated except themselves.

But at first, he will not defend himself and remains stubbornly silent. It is only when Jean, harassed by Mr. Dumbrille into admitting she loves Cooper, that he relents and gets the gumption to fight for himself.

We have our happy ending when Cooper retains his freedom, his fortune, and is allowed to give it away to help end the Great Depression. He scoops Jean Arthur up into his arms and inexpertly kisses her.

We learn that when money is absent, pluck will go a long way to aid in survival. It might even have been true.

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Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

Children's Wartime Adventure Novels

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 14:01:00 +0000

My non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is available for sale in a new venue which many of you have discovered as a great source for your online book purchases -- Bookshop.org.

In an age where many readers are, for one reason or another, trying to avoid shopping at Amazon or other large online shops, and yet don't have very good access to a local bookstore, there is another option...

Bookshop.org is "An online bookstore that financially supports local independent bookstores and gives back to the book community." A portion of your online purchase will be donated to a fund supporting independent booksellers, and you can even request that the portion donated from your purchase will go to a specific, favorite local bookstore. They also have a database on their site that will help you to find local independent bookstores in your area.

Available here online from Bookshop.org (Children’s Wartime Adventure Novels – hardcover - https://bookshop.org/a/116354/9798330314133

Children’s Wartime Adventure Novels – paperback - https://bookshop.org/a/116354/9798330314942)

Children's Wartime Adventure Novels received the following BookLife review in Publishers Weekly:

"Lynch illuminates a fascinating, little-studied chapter of publishing history in this study of exactly what the title suggests: World War II adventure novels for young American readers, printed during—and in a few cases before—U.S. involvement in the war itself, in which protagonists in their late teens and early 20s set aside the anxieties of youth to do their part to stomp out fascism. In title after title, pilots and soldiers (the men, mostly) and nurses, reporters, WACs, WASPS, WAVES, and more (the women) evince courage, endurance, dedication to the cause, and a savvy sense for identifying fifth columnists. Lynch celebrates the novels' sense of ‘spirited adventure’ and ethos of ‘patriotic self-sacrifice’ while digging into thorny questions of propaganda and indoctrination, including racial and ethnic stereotyping…

“Lynch writes with infectious enthusiasm for the subject, soaring through detailed summaries of the stories of dozens of books like Red Randall at Pearl Harbor, Nancy Blake, Copywriter, and the surprisingly grim nurse adventure Ann Bartlett at Bataan, which is frank about wartime surgery: ‘a tattered mass of flesh and bone.’ Especially engaging are Lynch's considerations of the differences between the novels with girl heroes—these stories of the "protectors of the homefront" sometimes boasted career advice and a ‘surprisingly feminist spark of independence and derring-do’—and the high-flying, battle-oriented novels starring boys…

“Late chapters surveying questions of patriotism and stereotypes across a host of books...offer continual revelations and insights, a rich contribution to the study of American literature and propaganda. These books deserve serious study. Takeaway: Fascinating study of WWII teen adventure novels and the American character.” BookLife review in Publishers Weekly (May 12, 2025)

The book also received reviews by Celeste Schantz at A Reader's Almanac YouTube vlog (starting at 12:00)

And Meg Perdue at Books Off the Beaten Path YouTube vlog -

It is also available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

Stand Up and Cheer (1934)

noreply@blogger.com (Jacqueline T. Lynch) — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:57:00 +0000

Stand Up and Cheer (1934) is a morale-boosting movie about…morale boosting…during the worst years of the Great Depression. Whether it actually succeeded in spreading optimism could certainly be doubted, but it likely was successful as, at least, a diversion. The thin plot of a new government office being created to bolster good feeling during the hard times was the framework for a lineup of vaudeville acts and musical numbers that carries us through the end of the movie and the fictional end of the Depression.

Warner Baxter, a driven, hard-working producer (not too unlike the character he played in 42^nd Street the year before), is summoned by the President (who does not sound like FDR) to take over a new cabinet position, Secretary of Amusement (which reminds one, less cheerfully, of the “Secretary of Morale” position grifter and sellout to fascists Andy Griffith was given in A Face in the Crowd – 1957 – which we covered here). Mr. Baxter arrives at the Capitol Building in an autogyro, a 1920s and 1930s precursor to the modern helicopter. Someday I’d like to take a look at autogyros in movies and cartoons of that period.

Unlike the role Griffith played, however, Mr. Baxter is no megalomaniac, just a driven workaholic with a passion for the entertainment industry. He calls for entertainers of all types: circus acts, ballet, vaudevillians, but apparently no “boop-a-doop singers.” The Roaring Twenties are behind us, and flappers are passé (it’s all about autogyros now). He calls for auditions from all 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, which at that time was still a U.S. territory.

Madge Evans plays an underling in charge of the children’s division. We last saw her as the tragic and touching female lead in Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! (1933) here. She will eventually become Baxter’s love interest, though there’s hardly any time for that in the continual stream of acts, sometimes coming at us in unexpected ways. The first, rather startlingly, is when Baxter and Madge Evans are looking at a newspaper, and punching through the big headlines is Nick Foran (whom you may remember better as Dick Foran, changing his first name the following year) singing in a booming baritone, “I’m laughing.” Despite being out of work and down on his luck, this barrel-chested workingman declares that “I’ve got nothing to laugh about, but if I can laugh and sing and shout, brother, so can you!” His spirited verse launches a montage of people who’ve got nothing to laugh about either, but they still carry on cheerfully, including a farmer, a woman with many children washing laundry on the roof of a tenement, and, most touchingly, a garment worker at her sewing machine in a sweatshop.

Her moment in the song is not as rollicking; the tempo has slowed, and she is almost whisper-quiet, singing of dreams and future hopes.

The final verse in this song is taken by Aunt Jemima in what appears to be a church hall. The actress is actually named Tess Gardella, but the corporate logo – for reasons both racial and monetary – was seemingly deemed to take precedence over a real actress. Aunt Jemima was one of the oldest and most successful corporate logos in the U.S., dating back to 1889 and the Pearl Milling Company. Pushing their flour product at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, they hired Nancy Green, a former slave, to cook pancakes, tell stories and sing songs in a kind of cozy folklore embodiment of the home goodness of their flour, and Aunt Jemima became a company trademark. It was certainly not the first capitalist fantasy ever generated in our culture, but it would last longer than most.

The mammy image went through a few transformations over the years, but most curious was the adoption of the name by performers. To be sure “Aunt Jemima” began as a minstrel character even before she became a corporate trademark, but though several actresses were hired to portray her in company promotions, Tess Gardella, who originated the role of Queenie in the seminal Show Boat (1927) on Broadway, was billed as “Aunt Jemima,” as this was the stage name she used in vaudeville – though she was not connected with the company that made flour and pancake mix. (Reportedly, a light-skinned woman, she performed often in blackface.) You can see her here on this YouTube clip.

Another veteran of Show Boat was Stepin Fetchit, who played Joe in the 1929 “part-talky” version. His real name was, impressively, Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry. “Stepin Fetchit” was his own vaudeville creation, “The Laziest Man in the World,” and made him one of the highest-paid performers in vaudeville, and his name in the credits of Stand Up and Cheer is more prominent than most of the rest of the cast. For all that, the stereotype he embellished brought him no good fortune in later years and fell out of favor. Though I can admire his success in vaudeville and early 1930s films, I confess I find him one of the most annoying characters in this movie or most other movies he appeared in—not because of the insulting stereotype—Hollywood was full of them—but because of the quality of his speaking voice. To me, it’s like nails on a chalkboard.

Stepin Fetchit’s part in this movie is to latch on to Warner Baxter and take a job as a guard to keep out the riffraff. He stumbles about, has a comic struggle babysitting a penguin, and takes a plunge into a large aquarium.

Strangely, the penguin is voiced-over, muttering complaints, by an actor doing a Jimmy Durante impersonation, wearing Durante’s trademark hat. One wonders why Mr. Durante himself isn’t in the movie? Maybe the penguin had a better agent.

Stepin Fetchit isn’t alone in the physical slapstick department; Jack Durant and Frank Mitchell play a couple of bumbling senators who keep up with a stream of nonsense dialogue about a dam project (“We’ve been together on every dam project!”) while they do acrobatic tumbling and throwing each other around Baxter’s office. It’s quite funny and rather jaw-dropping. Literally.

Handsome John Boles, in his romantic tenor days, is dressed in a white Naval uniform and sings a love ballad with Sylvia Froos, he with the rolling “r’s” and she looking a little bored.

Look for little Scotty Becket in a brief, uncredited role as one of the child actors under Madge Evans' tutelage.

Warner Baxter runs into a snag when the big business oligarchs (though the term was not commonly used then) try to scuttle his project with a “campaign of ridicule.” He nearly quits.

I would expect any film buff worthy of the name knows that the real breakout star of the film was little Shirley Temple, who plays the daughter of hoofer James Dunn. She is a charming moppet—her own trademark, merchandising to follow—and sings a verse of “Baby, Take a Bow” with Mr. Dunn. Practically before the director could yell, “CUT!”, little Shirley was whisked away into a new movie called Baby, Take a Bow (along with Mr. Dunn), and became the highest box office draw for the next four years.

So memorable a figure she cut in Stand Up and Cheer, that in the film’s finale, after a rather long salute to hillbilly music “Broadway’s Gone Hillbilly,” (which features the always delightful sight of chorus girls dancing on top of New York City skyscrapers), that Shirley takes a solo bow in the big parade in Washington.

This happens when James Dunn rushes into the despondent Warner Baxter’s office and announces that the Depression is over!

“Factories are opening up! Men are going back to work by the thousands, our farm products are being sold the world over, savings accounts are leaping up, the banks are pouring out new loans! There is no unemployment! Fear has been banished! Confidence reborn! Poverty has been wiped out…We’re out of the red!”

That’s kind of a lot to scream at somebody, using up all those exclamation points like that. But Dunn is right, the Great Depression has ended, and to celebrate, an NRA-style parade commences with armies of workers, nurses, teachers, military—and little Shirley Temple—all singing “We’re Out of the Red.”

Must be true. Nick (Dick) Foran is back, dressed as Paul Revere, and his ghostly figure is riding across the sky on a horse, singing it, too.

I can remember watching this movie on TV with my parents when I was a child, and my mother chuckling, “And that’s how the Great Depression ended.” And my father snorting, “Yeah, just like that.”

Even as young as I was, I could tell they were being sarcastic, but at the same time, the strangely wistful, almost sad smiles told me they wished it could have been like that. They were the original audience for that movie when they were young teens. Maybe at that age they really believed the Depression could end like that, any day now. Maybe seeing the movie again after so many years, they realized they’d been hoodwinked. Maybe they also realized that the fantasy was needed at the time. Warner Baxter certainly thought so.

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Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.