What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[AmateisGal]

Dial M for Murder

TCM is running a tribute to Warner Brothers' 100 years in the business. Some great programming for the month of April!

 

[Worf]

Thought I posted this one but it didn't seem to take.

Errol Flynn Double Feature. "Dawn Patrol" and "Charge of the Light Brigade". Both starring Flynn, Donald Crisp and David Niven. Seen em both tons of times but love em still. Tales of daring Do for "King/Queen and Country". The latter is terrible fictionalized history but fun nonetheless. And for the cherry on top, both are scored by the great Max Steiner who also is the subject of a fascinating documentary on TCM!

Worf

 

[Touchofevil]

TCM this morning with Dark Passage, Crime Wave, and Bullitt with a few cups of coffee. A nice way to start the last day of Spring Break.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

There are films to watch for immersion. Anything with McQueen will definitely do. Bullit, Great Escape, Sand Pebbles,
Thomas Crown Affair, Cincinnati Kid. Mag Seven. McQueen portrays characters in situs that demand attention and make me think. And continue thinking about the film with its plot long afterward. His Hell is For Heroes has a scene with him and another Yank, Fess Parker that is extraordinary for its attendant silence component. Thunder in silence capture is extraordinary film. I flipped around yesterday for really any-thing-atall, needed my fix but a few possibles
swept by and I realized I needed any McQueen and only McQueen. Mag 7 with Yul whose also great. I just can't look at any of the silly shit farce peddled nowadays.

 

[The one from the North]

There are films to watch for immersion. Anything with McQueen will definitely do. Bullit, Great Escape, Sand Pebbles,
Thomas Crown Affair, Cincinnati Kid. Mag Seven. McQueen portrays characters in situs that demand attention and make me think. And continue thinking about the film with its plot long afterward. His Hell is For Heroes has a scene with him and another Yank, Fess Parker that is extraordinary for its attendant silence component. Thunder in silence capture is extraordinary film. I flipped around yesterday for really any-thing-atall, needed my fix but a few possibles
swept by and I realized I needed any McQueen and only McQueen. Mag 7 with Yul whose also great. I just can't look at any of the silly shit farce peddled nowadays.

And let us not forget 'The Getaway'. King of cool teams up with propably my favourite director, Sam Peckinpah.

 

[Fading Fast]

Home Before Dark from 1958 with Jean Simmons, Dan O'Herlihy, Rhonda Fleming, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Mabel Albertson


Gaslighting became a verb because of the movie Gaslight where a husband uses abusive and manipulative psychology to convince his wife she's going insane so that he can steal her money.

In Gaslight, almost from the beginning, we know what the husband is trying to do, but what would a movie look like if we didn't know?

What if, for most of the movie, we didn't know if the wife is truly losing her mind or, conversely, if the husband, and the wife's stepmother and stepsister, are really trying to drive her insane, in this case, so that the husband can marry the stepsister?

That's the premise of Home Before Dark and, other than being a bit too long, it's an engaging plot with good characterizations all well acted by a cast of mainly second-tier stars.

Jean Simmons, the biggest star in the cast, plays the young wife of a college professor, played by Dan O'Herlihy. They live in her house, she comes from some money, with her stepmother, played by Mabel Albertson, and her stepsister, played by Rhonda Fleming.

Also living in the house, as a boarder, is a colleague of O'Herlihy, a Jewish professor, played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., whom O'Herlihy "championed" at the college when Jews were often denied tenure positions at "old-line" colleges.

It's a thread that's never fully developed, but later, Simmons accuses O'Herlihy of "dropping" his support for Zimbalist Jr. when it was no longer advantageous for O'Herlihy's career.

The main story, though, is whether or not Simmons - who at the open is being picked up from a state mental institution by her aloof but seemingly concerned husband, O'Herlihy - is mentally unbalanced or is a victim of a plot against her by her family.

Now back at home, we see the house has an oppressive atmosphere as Albertson passively aggressively over-mothers Simmons, while Fleming, who seems like she might truly be Simmons' friend, has a casual ease with O'Herlihy that drives Simmons mad.

A bullying housekeeper, played by Kathryn Card, doesn't make the home any nicer. This leaves Zimbalist Jr., the boarder, as Simmons one true friend, which is odd since she only met him when she came back from the institution.

That's the complicated setup with the rest of the movie being a series of interactions that has you guessing throughout whether Simmons is paranoid or if the husband and "steps" are playing a vicious long-ball game of driving Simmons mad.

Simmons and Zimbalist Jr. are the one oasis of nice in the movie as she seems calm and friendly in her early morning walks with Zimbalist Jr., which has you believing she's sane. But then she flies into a fit of rage over an innocuous comment Fleming or O'Herlihy makes and, once again, you're no longer sure.

Director Melvyn Leroy captured the look and feel of a claustrophobic, insular and judgmental mid-century New England college town perfectly where "friendly" encounters or cocktail parties are really stressful stratagems that can lead to career or social advancement or setback.

Simmons is outstanding as the wife who might be going insane or might be being gaslighted. But everyone in the cast - O'Herlihy as the cold husband, Albertson as the annoying stepmother, Fleming as the potential husband stealer and Zimbalist Jr. as Simmons' one true allie - creates engaging characters

It is also, for us today, fun time travel to the mid 1950s, including several wonderful on-location scenes in Boston. Plus of course, there are the big cars, heavy overcoats, women coiffed and coutured to the max and several institutional buildings that declare their importance by their heavy brick and stone construction.

Home Before Dark is heavy on the melodrama and can feel plotless, but it's also a smart variation on the theme of Gaslight that is believable, in part, because every character is an imperfect person, like in the real world.

 

[LizzieMaine]

*sigh* Well friends, I took one for the team. If you're thinking of watching "80 for Brady", don't. Allegedly based on a true story about a group of five women over the age of 80 who dubbed themselves the "Over 80 for Brady" club because they "like" Tom Brady, it's completely predictable and even worse than it sounds. In the movie, four of the ladies win tickets to the Super Bowl, manage to lose them before the game, but get in anyway. Along the way they meet Guy Fieri, Billy Porter, and, of course, Tom Brady (in the real world they have not yet met Mr. Brady), and hilarity ensues...oh, wait, no it doesn't.

Watch it if you must, but don't say I didn't warn you.

My mother, alas, would join this club in a minute. She also "likes" Tom Brady. I think it's contagious.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

And let us not forget 'The Getaway'. King of cool teams up with propably my favourite director, Sam Peckinpah.

Damn, North, now you did it and started the Scrooge Scott subtitle again that I agonized over and always do
at Christmas time, a cinema cross-pollination that occurs when favourite thespians intersect in different yet like
films, a subtle variant to Scott-Sim Christmas Carol is the Scott-McQueen The Last Run and The Getaway, otherwise
known as the Scrooge Scott subtitle again. Dickens is bad but the Hemingway-Faulkner Scrooge Scott subtitle again much worse. There is a leather belt brain chew here that goes well with a good Portuguese wine served ice cold.

 

[Edward]

The last few days have seen my first flights since 2019. All a joy, as they were on a work project where I fly long haul, to Beijing, by business. Two seven/eight hour flights each way this time, via Dubai. On the way out I slept for much of the air time (having foolishly decided to stay away for ten hours in the lounge in Dubai as I wasn't fully sleepy when I landed there....), but I still caught up on three films I had previously missed. Number one, The Batman. An excellent picture; if you've been put off to date because it stars glittery disco ball vampire boy, don't be. It's a little bit of a step back from the "reality rules" of the Nolan trilogy, but still retains a firm believability. Pattinson's take on the character reminds me less of any traditional Batman, more of Rorschach from Watchmen (who, of course, was very much based on Batman - had Batman been born to a very much lower station in life, and lived more like Travis Bickle than Bruce Wayne). Very good indeed. The take on the Riddler as the main villain in this version is quite unlike any other I've seen, quite wonderful. I do hope we see more from this take on the franchise. There is the promise of the Joker at the end, which I'd really like to see. While he's appeared in every version of the Batman property and so might be considered overused by some, I do think this version could throw up something really interesting.

Next up was Baz Luhrman's Elvis picture. Beautiful. Don't expect the last word in biography - this is the legend, and an Officially Approved one at that, so there's no significant exploration of certain aspects of the story, but still one well worth seeing. It certainly brings out both the good and the bad that Parker did Elvis, in what seems to me a fair portrayal of him at least. Young Austin Butler's performance as the man himself is stunning. More fully convincing visually earlier on, though Elvis' decline in the Vegas years is pretty well represented - especially the fact that the 'fat' period was actually quite a short one, and that Elvis went downhill very quickly, ultimately, in the end. The interrelationships of Elvis' music with his black influences - and the onward link to hip hop - is covered, though could have been done better. It feels occasionally a little heavy-handed (obviously seeking to counter unfair allegations that Elvis "stole" from black music), and yet at the same time I think it could have been much clearer about Elvis' decisions in some cases. It does note some of his motivations in recording "If I can Dream", and his reaction to MLK's death, but In the Ghetto, as a record which Elvis himself fought to release and which was very important to him to record, deserved more than just a closing credit sequence - albeit used very nicely there. On the whole, not the definitive biopic of Elvis (this has yet to be made, and will doubtless be a multi-part, big budget streaming series once Priscilla is gone), but a very entertaining and worthwhile version of the Elvis legend.

The other film I watched was Living. Set in austere Britain of the early 1950s, Bill Nighy plays a buttoned-up, reserved insurance man who has existed rather than really lived. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, he resolves to make the most of the time he has left. A lot of the reviews of this picture have been negative, but I rather liked it. It captures a certain sense of period and social class very well. It can be a touch sentimental, but never mawkishly so. It's more a character piece than anything, and it passed a pleasant couple of hours. In lesser hands, the whole could have descended into cloying saccharine with a lot of forced, lazy comedy. The writing here, however, is better than that, and Bill Nighy plays very much to his strengths, to the point where it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ELVIS stirred sufficient angst across my London circle even though as biopic some darkness would fall,
so shadows fell with tears shed. I doubt another go at the King will be done.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Stranger from 1946 with Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young


Hollywood, in the second half of the 1940s, had a rich stock of war tales from which to develop plots with the "there is a Nazi hiding amongst us" storyline being one of the perennial favorites.

In The Stranger, Edward G. Robinson plays a tired but persistent post-war Nazi hunter looking for the fictional "architect of the Holocaust," Franz Kindler. Kidler escaped capture at the end of the war and has, since, effaced all evidence of his Nazi past.

Robinson's search leads him to a pleasant Connecticut town where Kindler, played by Orson Welles (who also directed), has assumed a new name, is teaching at the local prep school and is about to marry the daughter, played by Loretta Young, of a Supreme Court justice.

With that setup, the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game between Robinson and Welles as Robinson tries, first, to discover if Welles is Kidler and, then, when he satisfies himself that he is, to go about the hard job of proving it.

Stuck in the middle of this is poor Loretta Young who thinks she married a nice quirky teacher with an odd hobby of repairing glockenspiel clocks - scratch a veiled Nazi and his German shows. Young spends the movie making a slowly harrowing discovery.

While the plot gets a bit convoluted with way too many holes, the story's concept of a former Nazi hiding amongst "us" is that good and Welles, Robinson and Young are that talented, that they easily shepherd the story over its bumpy parts.

It helps, too, that the dialogue, while obvious, is powerful as shown in the below dinner table speech where Welles, feigning academic detachment, tries to articulate the "German" viewpoint.

Welles: The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world envy and hatred, conspired against, set upon by inferior peoples, inferior nations. He cannot admit to error, much less to wrongdoing, not the German.

We chose to ignore Ethiopia and Spain, but we learned from our own casualty list the price of looking the other way. Men of truth everywhere have come to know for whom the bell tolled, but not the German.

No! He still follows his warrior gods marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried, and he knows subterranean meeting places that you don't believe in.

The German's dream world comes alive when he takes his place in shining armor beneath the banners of the Teutonic knights. Mankind is waiting for the Messiah, but for the German, the Messiah is not the Prince of Peace. No, he's... another Barbarossa... another Hitler.

If that doesn't send a chill up your spine, then nothing will.

It is at this same dinner that Welles and his new wife have this baleful exchange:

Young to her husband Welles: I can't imagine you're advocating a Carthaginian peace.

Welles responded: Well, as a historian, I must remind you that the world hasn't had much trouble from Carthage in the past 2000 years.

It's not subtle, but even today, the words are disturbing, especially when later, as happens in The Stranger, a brief but haunting film clip of the concentration camps is shown.

Welles' directing so effectively juxtaposes the charming and "safe" Connecticut town, where families don't lock their doors at night, with the menace of Nazi Germany that it had to make audiences in 1946 go home feeling just a bit less secure wherever they lived.

Equally disturbing is Welles' portrayal of "the architect of the Holocaust" being able to amiably fit into this quiet American town. History has shown that many former Nazi monsters did bury their past identities and live unassuming lives after the war.

While Welles' acting isn't subtle, he has that all-important ability to own the screen, so much so, you can't take your eyes off him as you wait for his next word. It's not the theatrical talent of a Robinson, but you can't deny that Welles' presence on screen demands attention.

The Stranger has a too-obvious plot, but that doesn't matter much as the performances of the leads, the harrowing philosophical exchanges and the mood created by the menacing Nazi presence in this pleasant town make The Stranger an engagingly disturbing movie.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

The somewhat mis-titled Missing Women (1951) is about the Bureau of Missing Persons searching for Penny Edwards' character who is tracking down the thug who shot her husband as she and he were motoring along on their honeymoon. The less-than-an-hour diversion starts with a tracking camera roving into the BMP office as a file is handed to a distinguished silver-haired gent at his desk, who then looks up to the camera (us) and introduces the story.
Eschewing the police, Edwards goes undercover on her own and seeks the crummy hood (James Millican) who murdered her husband. We watch her locate clues and actually take part in a crime order to gain acceptance into the criminal organization of which the killer is a part.
Reliable John Gallaudet plays the detective who was originally supposed to investigate the murder, and tall, athletic Jim Brown is the sergeant who joins in the case.
Somewhere in the recent past it was Murder, She Said (1961) with Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, a product of the MGM British studio. Marple witnesses a murder on a train, but no one believes her, so she sets out to find the guilty party. Rutherford's performance as a snooper whose "eccentricity" belies her insightful mind was flawless. A fun watch, but the Missus and I guessed whodunnit about half-way through.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Brad Pitt's classic Fury. Pitt is a loner detached yet integral with his tank crew who fights the war from an inner
depth most compelling. His crew are hardened men joined by a cast off Ishmael straight out of Melville.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Rhonda Fleming starred opposite Burt Lancaster in Gunfight At OK Corral which featured a scene between
these two having a lovers quarrel before the namesake title fight. A King and Queen set atop a chess board where
both lovers, man and woman spoke to each other as equals.

Nowadays with all strictly sexualized sensational, the searing of heart and soul between a man and woman in love
is seldom, if indeed ever seen much less shown with such mature theme.

 

[Edward]

Murder on the Home Front, (2013), on Netflix. Doctor, working for the Home Office as a forensic analyst in wartime London, and his new assistant, an ex-journalist, crack the case of a multiple murderer using forensic evidence from the crime scenes. Not helped by bungling police and home office intrigue. Why does officialdom seem so keen to convict a man they believe innocent? The film has a very 'made for TV' feel to it, like a well done BBC Agatha Christie made for broadcast at Christmas. Nicely paced and worth seeing. I am not aware of them ever having made more with these characters, though it could easily have served very well as a feature-length pilot for a series.

 

[Fading Fast]

Night After Night from 1932 with George Raft, Constance Cummings, Alison Skipworth, Mae West and Wynne Gibson


A former boxer, now bootlegger, buys a foreclosed Park Avenue mansion at the start of the Depression and turns it into a very successful nightclub/speakeasy, but now he has to defend it against a rival gang.

The speakeasy owner also starts taking etiquette lessons because he wants to mix with the swells, which happens when the beautiful daughter of the mansion's former owner shows up one night.

George Raft, an actor no one would accuse of having too-much range, is tailor made for the role, here, of a handsome gangster trying to come up in the world socially - a surprisingly popular 1930s movie theme.

With the wonderful Alison Skipworth playing his tutor, Raft wants to leave his world of mugs, thugs and dames behind, which isn't easy as his former girlfriends - played by Mae West, with a lilt, and Wynne Gibson, with venom - keep trying to hold him in that old world.

Enter society cutie Constance Cummings, the daughter of the former blue-blood owner of Raft's mansion/nightclub/speakeasy, who comes to the club to see her old home. Raft and she kinda hit it off as she's the exact type of girl he's been looking for: pretty and "class."

She, in return, is attracted to him in a "he's interesting albeit in a crude" way, but she's engaged to a staid, wealthy and socially respectable man, played by Louis Calhern.

She likes Calhern, but is only really marrying him because his money and position would give her back what she lost in the Depression.

That's the setup and it's a good one for the movie's theme of "coming up or down in class" to play out in multiple ways.

The theme is sharply symbolized when we see the overly decorated bedroom of Raft's - he's bought what he thought were all the "right" things - contrasted with the simple elegance of Cummings' new bedroom. Raft, immediately, sees what he's done wrong.

Raft is considering selling his club to the rival gang, as the club represents his old world of crime and thuggery, so that he can marry Cummings with a fresh start. The problem is, while Cummings likes Raft, she can't see herself married to a gangster.

It's not snotty condescension, just someone, at least initially, unable to see past her old world. But like Raft is rethinking his values, she's rethinking hers as entering a marriage without love is weighing heavily on her.

The nuance that the writers and director Archie Mayo got right is showing Cummings as an honest woman. She tells Calhern, and she admits to herself, that she is only going to marry him because he has money and position. You like her more for her honesty.

The other neat nuance is that Raft, the gangster, former boxer and the guy who doesn't know which fork to use, loses respect for her when she tells him she's going to marry for money and position. He's a "thug," but he believes in marrying for love.

That's the main story in Night After Night, but an added spark is the side story of Raft's tutor Skipworth - a pleasant, refined older woman who is refreshingly non-judgemental of Raft - spending an evening drinking with Raft's old girlfriend, Mae West,

West, in her screen debut here, already had her "Mae West" brand of sex, humor and mirthful greed fully developed. So as with Raft and Cummings, Skipworth and West represent the clash of two worlds that surprisingly works well for both of them.

West sees that Skipworth is a nice woman who's "refinement" could help her in her business (West owns a string of beauty parlors for the swells), just as Skipworth sees that West could offer her a way to escape her boring, albeit "proper," life.

West and Skipworth's scenes together, which could stand alone as comedy sketches, are some of the best in the movie. You feel the genuine warmth these two opposites quickly develop, especially as West introduces Skipworth to champagne and hangovers.

Skipworth and West, like Raft and Cummings, represent an extreme version of something many in the Depression were facing: a new world where people from formerly different classes were now forced to mix socially and professionally and, quite often, in a speakeasy.

It's the acting talents of those same four, Skipworth, West, Cummings and Raft (giving Raft a bit more credit than he deserves) that give soul and depth to this fast-moving effort.

You will also marvel at how well and quickly an old stage actress like Skipworth adjusted to the new medium of "talking" movies.

Night After Night has some early "talkie" clunkiness, a few bumpy transitions and it could use a soundtrack, but it is also surprisingly funny and insightful as it chews through a ton of story and character development in its short, entertaining seventy-three-minute runtime.

 

[AmateisGal]

View attachment 509595
The Stranger from 1946 with Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young


Hollywood, in the second half of the 1940s, had a rich stock of war tales from which to develop plots with the "there is a Nazi hiding amongst us" storyline being one of the perennial favorites.

In The Stranger, Edward G. Robinson plays a tired but persistent post-war Nazi hunter looking for the fictional "architect of the Holocaust," Franz Kindler. Kidler escaped capture at the end of the war and has, since, effaced all evidence of his Nazi past.

Robinson's search leads him to a pleasant Connecticut town where Kindler, played by Orson Welles (who also directed), has assumed a new name, is teaching at the local prep school and is about to marry the daughter, played by Loretta Young, of a Supreme Court justice.

With that setup, the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game between Robinson and Welles as Robinson tries, first, to discover if Welles is Kidler and, then, when he satisfies himself that he is, to go about the hard job of proving it.

Stuck in the middle of this is poor Loretta Young who thinks she married a nice quirky teacher with an odd hobby of repairing glockenspiel clocks - scratch a veiled Nazi and his German shows. Young spends the movie making a slowly harrowing discovery.

While the plot gets a bit convoluted with way too many holes, the story's concept of a former Nazi hiding amongst "us" is that good and Welles, Robinson and Young are that talented, that they easily shepherd the story over its bumpy parts.

It helps, too, that the dialogue, while obvious, is powerful as shown in the below dinner table speech where Welles, feigning academic detachment, tries to articulate the "German" viewpoint.

Welles: The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world envy and hatred, conspired against, set upon by inferior peoples, inferior nations. He cannot admit to error, much less to wrongdoing, not the German.

We chose to ignore Ethiopia and Spain, but we learned from our own casualty list the price of looking the other way. Men of truth everywhere have come to know for whom the bell tolled, but not the German.

No! He still follows his warrior gods marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried, and he knows subterranean meeting places that you don't believe in.

The German's dream world comes alive when he takes his place in shining armor beneath the banners of the Teutonic knights. Mankind is waiting for the Messiah, but for the German, the Messiah is not the Prince of Peace. No, he's... another Barbarossa... another Hitler.

If that doesn't send a chill up your spine, then nothing will.

It is at this same dinner that Welles and his new wife have this baleful exchange:

Young to her husband Welles: I can't imagine you're advocating a Carthaginian peace.

Welles responded: Well, as a historian, I must remind you that the world hasn't had much trouble from Carthage in the past 2000 years.

It's not subtle, but even today, the words are disturbing, especially when later, as happens in The Stranger, a brief but haunting film clip of the concentration camps is shown.

Welles' directing so effectively juxtaposes the charming and "safe" Connecticut town, where families don't lock their doors at night, with the menace of Nazi Germany that it had to make audiences in 1946 go home feeling just a bit less secure wherever they lived.

Equally disturbing is Welles' portrayal of "the architect of the Holocaust" being able to amiably fit into this quiet American town. History has shown that many former Nazi monsters did bury their past identities and live unassuming lives after the war.

While Welles' acting isn't subtle, he has that all-important ability to own the screen, so much so, you can't take your eyes off him as you wait for his next word. It's not the theatrical talent of a Robinson, but you can't deny that Welles' presence on screen demands attention.

The Stranger has a too-obvious plot, but that doesn't matter much as the performances of the leads, the harrowing philosophical exchanges and the mood created by the menacing Nazi presence in this pleasant town make The Stranger an engagingly disturbing movie.

I really like this movie but the scene with the dog...my heart can't take it. It just tears me up.

 

[AmateisGal]

Deception (1946) which teams up Bette Davis and Paul Henreid again. They have such amazing chemistry. And Claude Rains brilliantly plays a possessive musician and orchestra conductor.

 

[Fading Fast]

Man Wanted from 1932 with Kay Francis, David Manners, Una Merkel and Andy Devine


The three things that make Man Wanted special - a woman, with an open marriage, who enjoys running a business, a talented cast and A-picture production qualities - overcome its silly, off-the-shelf story about romantic entanglements.

Kay Francis, playing the head of a publishing company, is very good at a job she thoroughly enjoys. She can be curt with the men and women who work for her, but she's running a business and doesn't have the time or patience for worrying about others' feelings.

What's "shocking," though, is her quasi-open marriage to a society playboy where she seems okay with his philandering as long as he's somewhat discreet about it and still has feelings for her.

Into this unstable situation walks a handsome Harvard grad and salesman, played by David Manners, whom Francis hires away to be her personal secretary. Manners quickly becomes more of a business advisor to Francis, while also developing feelings for her.

Manners, however, is engaged to an annoying-as-heck and constantly whining woman, played by Una Merkel, who does, though, have a rich dad. Manners is clearly planning to marry for money, but with his looks, you'd think he could do better than screechy Merkel.

That's the setup in this short movie where the sexual tension mounts until Manners makes a move on Francis. She rebuffs him with a cold businesswoman aloofness, until she discovers her husband has developed real feelings for one of his paramours.

The climax is almost campy as all the deceptions and emotions spill out, but that doesn't really matter as the value in Man Wanted is Francis playing a serious businesswoman who doesn't simply chuck her career for marriage as often happens in 1930s movies, even precodes.

It's 1932 and both Francis and Manners give speeches about how traditional stereotypes are outdated as women are now, often, serious business professionals. It's mainly the men in this one who appear emotional and driven by passion, like Francis' husband or Manners.

One movie proves nothing, but it shows that the ideas that women can be business executives and that men can be the romantic and flighty ones were clearly in the mix in the early 1930s.

These ideas would be, sadly, all but removed from movies within a few years with the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code.

Books and newspapers from the era confirm, though, that the complexity of society and gender roles continued later in the decade even if movies denied it.

Man Wanted's talented cast, which also includes Andy Devine as Manners' friend from college, combined with Warners Bros. top production techniques - the sound quality and cinematography for 1932 are impressive - easily shepherd the story over its vacuous plot.

For us today, there is also a fun time-travel feel with all the cars, architecture and fashions of the period, including Kay Francis in an era-iconic hat. Plus, it's a neat peek into how the very few rich lived during the Depression.

Man Wanted can be silly, but it also has stunningly modern views. Its story construct of a successful type-A businesswoman surrounded by men distracted with romantic feelings is the set-up of many romcoms today. It is remarkable how contemporary Man Wanted's outlook is.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^I like thesis and era, really all of it. A tangent comment, definitely hooked HBO Perry Mason set 1932 Los Angeles.
A series that is grounded like a cigarette butt in street crime and grime, but rises to occasion higher end mischief larceny along the way with ample camera lens time focused at average folk who make do. Era economics is a large part of background here with superb attention to detail.