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The Leopard Man (1943)
Cult Classic Shows What Suggestion Over Graphic Violence Can Do
Val Lewton produced three classic horror movies under Jacques Tourneur's direction, with their last collaboration May 1943 "The Leopard Man," a big cult favorite for many future filmmakers. The RKO film was able to reach such a lofty status by its ability to scare the wits out of viewers without graphically showing any blood and gore so familiar in today's slasher movies. The late William Friedkin, who directed 1971's "The French Connection" and 1973's "The Exorcist," cites "The Leopard Man" as one of his favorite movies, mainly because it scared him beyond belief. Friedkin lamented what Lewton and Tourneur did on the screen is "something that we as filmmakers have lost. We now feel we have to show everything. Every plunge of the knife, every moment of pain and agony that the victims have to go through, that's what you see in horror films today. People cut up by hacksaws, people ripped apart at the hands of alien creatures." Two scenes especially are noted in "The Leopard Man" as terrifying classics. Movie historian Danny Peary points out they are "among the scariest in film history, when a young girl (Margaret Landry) is chased home by the leopard through the dark, deserted streets and winds up outside her locked door, unable to get inside." Tourneur cut to the inside of the house showing a trickle of blood seeping through the bottom of the closed doorway. The other shows "another young girl (Tula Parnen) trapped inside a cemetery after dark, and something on the tree limb above her is ready to pounce." Both sequences contain Lewton's patented "jump scare" or the 'Lewton Bus,' the sudden scare popping up from quiet desperation Lewton first introduced in his 1942 "Cat People." The name "The Leopard Man" was given to Lewton by RKO executives just as his previous two movies were suggested to build a story from a simple title. He found in his research author Cornell Woodrich's 1942's Black Alibi" to base his film loosely on a serial killer who stalks his prey around a New Mexico town while a leopard is running loose. In the plot, black cat, the same leopard named Dynamite seen in "Cat People," was rented by Jerry Manning (Dennis O'Keefe) to promote his performing girlfriend, Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks) as a publicity stunt. Jealous of her rival Gabriella Clo-Clo (Margo), a singer-dancer, Kiki brings the leopard into the nightclub, only to see the cat escape her grip. The town's citizens become jittery with the leopard running amok, heightened by numerous killings. "What leapt out at me was the lighting, which is impeccable throughout," wrote film reviewer Hal Astell. "Whenever people proclaim the superiority of color and modern technical marvels, I always point them to Hollywood in the forties, as film noir was mastering just how much could be done with light and shadow in glorious black and white." RKO felt the Lewton/Tourneur partnership would benefit the studio better by spreading their talents separately on their own projects. Tourneur was especially saddened by the split, saying, "We had the perfect collaboration -- Val was the dreamer, the idealist, and I was the materialist, the realist. We should have gone right on doing bigger, more ambitious pictures and not just horror movies." Lewton's film career as a producer ended eight years later when he died of a heart attack in 1951 at 46. Tourneur continued directing movies and television shows until the mid-1960s.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
One of Avant-Gard's Most Influential Films
Dreams are hard to portray in cinema, yet many attempts have been attempTed to duplicate such a sleep phenomenon. One of the more successful movies capturing the surrealism of the dream state is filmmaker Maya Deren's 1943 "Meshes of the Afternoon." The low-budgeted short film created by Deren, with her husband Alexander Hammid as camera operator, is credited as the forerunner to the New American Cinema, encompassing experimental and avant-garde films of the 1960s. Director David Lynch was a huge fan of Deren's; her influence is seen in many of his works, including 1997 "Lost Highway" and 2001 "Mulholland Drive."
Ukrainian-born Eleonora Derenkovskaya, shortened to Deren when her family immigrated to Syracuse, New York, was 26 when she produced "Meshes of the Afternoon." She described her "trance film" as "concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience." As the main figure in the movie, Deren is seen reclining on her upper floor apartment's chair, falling asleep after picking up an orchid from the ground on her way home. She dreams of reoccurring images where a knife from a bread cutting board emerges as the prominent object throughout the 14-minute film.
Writer Diana Marin describes ""Meshes of the Afternoon" as a "poetic psychodrama, the film was ahead of its time with its focus on depicting fragments of the unconscious mind, externalising disjointed mental processes, dreams, and potential drama through poetic cinematic re-enactments brought to life by uncanny doppelganger figures." Filmed in her and her husband's Los Angeles home, Deren's pioneering short was originally released as a silent. Her spouse, Teiji Ito, a composer, inserted music to make it more stirring. Spending only $250, Deren later joked, "I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick." Earning a Bachelor's degree in literature at New York University and a Master's in English Lit at Smith College, Deren was a big fan of French Symbolists, writing her thesis on the subject. Much of her dozen shorts are experimentally-based films, utilizing an entire repertoire of cinematic tricks, including multiple exposures, jump cuts, slow motion, all delivering out-of-body experiences. Instead of trying to invent a plot that moves, Deren later said in one of her many lectures, "use the movement of wind, or water, children, people, elevators, balls, etc. As a poem might celebrate these. And use your freedom to experiment with visual ideas; your mistakes will not get you fired."
Deren was later fascinated with Haitian voodoo rituals as well as its people, who believed and practiced it. She died at 44 of a brain hemorrhage, attributed to her drug use of amphetamines and sleeping pills as well as malnutrition. The American Film Institute established the Mayan Deren Award, which goes to independent filmmakers. "Meshes of the Afternoon" is recognized as one of the most important avant-garde experimental films ever made, ranking number 16 in 2022's Sight and Sound Great Films of All Time poll. It's also included as '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die."
Mr. Lucky (1943)
Despite Not Getting Mrs. Grant, Mr. Lucky is Still a Winner
RKO studio's head Charles Koerner was dreaming about having non-actress Barbara Hutton, one of the richest women in the world, star alongside her husband Cary Grant in May 1943's "Mr. Lucky." The romantic tale of an unscrupulous gambler who eventually falls in love with a rich volunteer socialite was a role made in heaven for Hutton, who inherited a fortune from her grandfather Frank Woolworth. She had read the script her newly-wed husband brought home to study and was interested.
Koerner knew having the couple, labeled by pundits 'Cash and Carry,' would generate a ton of publicity if they appeared together in "Mr. Lucky." Grant spotted the newspaper article written by Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons headlining Hutton's part opposite her husband, and he hit the roof. Grant immediately rang up Koerner on the phone, and stated he would flatly refuse to play the part of Joe 'the Greek' Adam. Right then Koerner knew his dreams of a box office bonanza were dashed.
Actress Laraine Day ended up playing the role of socialite Dorothy Bryant, a volunteer for the War Relief organization. Dorothy is approached by Joe, who proposes a charity casino night to raise funds for the troops overseas. She convinces branch supervisor Captain Veronica Steadman (Gladys Cooper) to approve Joe's offer. Trouble is, Joe is in cahoots with unsavory characters who plan to skim the profits for themselves. Former actor Milton Holmes, a tennis pro at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, remembered a nightclub owner who had raised $40,000 in a charity gambling event at a nearby church, and wrote a treatment about it. Holmes told the story to Grant, who introduced him to RKO executives, setting up the script process.
Film reviewer Greg Klymkiw wrote of "Mr. Lucky," "The movie's blend of doomed romance, redemption and desperation against the backdrops of both world war and the criminal underworld, is what makes it one of the most tantalizingly original films of this period and perhaps one of the best works to come out of RKO." The film was the highest grossing picture for RKO since its 1939's "Gunga Din." Utah-born Laraine Day, in her sixth year in Hollywood, had starred in MGM's film serial 'Dr. Kildare' in the late 1930s. She hosted her own television show in the early 1950s, as well as her own radio program in New York City interviewing politicians, sports and show business personalities from midnight until 3 a.m. Married to baseball manager Leo Durocher in 1948, Day read numerous baseball books, and became the host for the New York Giants pre-game TV show, earning the name "First Lady of Baseball."
Grant and Hutton had wed on July 8, 1942 after they met in Hollywood while Barbara was publicizing War Bonds. During their engagement they loved to dance. But the paparazzi was constantly nearby, forcing them to slink out of restaurants and nightclubs through back alleys. The couple signed a pre-marital agreement, but the actor was frustrated by the three-time married Hutton, who spent her fortune like a drunken sailor, leading to an off and on living arrangement. They divorced amicably in 1945, with Grant saying, "Barbara is a fine woman. I blame myself entirely for the split-up with her. People did not know her, the fine person underneath, because of the publicity about her money." Barbara countered, "Cary is a dear. But he isn't interested in anything but his career and after all, when you are married to a man you must have something to talk about." Hutton married four more times after divorcing Grant, and died single in 1979 at 66, with her fortune nearly depleted.
The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)
One of Clint Eastwood's Favorite Movies; Nominated Best Picture Oscar
Henry Fonda remembered witnessing a lynching as a teenager in Omaha, Nebraska, which left an indelible memory throughout his life. When he was offered the part of a cowboy who protested the lynching of three men in May 1943's "The Ox-Bow Incident," the actor jumped at the chance in this Academy Award Best Picture-nominated film.
Director William Wellman, who bought the rights to Walter Clark's 1940 novel 'The Ox-Bow Incident,' was frustrated with Hollywood studios repeatedly rejecting the book's premise. Only 20th Century Fox boss Darryl Zanuck was willing to finance the movie. "I went to all the producers for whom I had worked and got turned down. Zanuck was the only one with the guts to do an out-of-the-ordinary story for the prestige, rather than the dough." Zanuck knew the film wouldn't be a money-maker, saying "It won't make a dime," he said, "but I want my name on it."
Zanuck tacked on several stipulations to Wellman's contract. Among those was Wellman as to be given a low budget, and he had to shoot it in the studio's lot. Plus the director was obligated to handle two other Fox films no matter how bad the scripts. Wellman had bought the book's rights from producer Harold Hurley, who wanted to have Mae West in the pivotal role as the saloon keeper. The director said casting Mae West would have been "ridiculous."
During World War Two Hollywood studios looked for scripts that were either filled with levity, or propaganda to receive government credits. Studios felt a movie about lynching would be a complete downer in these bleak times. But once the film was released, critics universally praised "The Ox-Bow Incident," with The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther writing, "it is not a picture which will brighten or cheer your day. But it is one which, for sheer, stark drama, is currently hard to beat." Clint Eastwood lists it as one of his favorite movies, while director Samuel Fuller ranked it one of the best.
Henry Fonda was increasingly discouraged with the quality of movies he was getting under 20th Century Fox, and claimed later 1940's "The Grapes of Wrath" and "The Ox-Bow Incident" were the only two he was proud of while at the studio. Fonda was intrigued by the role of Gil Carter, an ornery cowpoke who likes to mix it up. He ultimately becomes a defender of fair justice in his attempt to wait on their verdict until the three cowboys accused of murder and stealing cattle are tried in court. Gary Cooper refused the part, and Fonda stepped in, willingly to be paid at scale for the role. Being in the movie stirred up memories of when he saw from his father's second-floor Omaha print shop window the lynching of Will Brown on September 28, 1919. "It was the most horrendous sight I'd ever seen," Fonda recalled. "We locked the plant, went downstairs, and drove home in silence. My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope."
In "The Ox-Bow Incident," a posse is formed once word got out a nearby rancher was shot and his cattle was stolen by three men. With the sheriff gone, his deputy is joined by former Confederate officer Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), who takes charge of the group along with his timid son Gerald (William Eythe). Worked up in a lather of revenge, the posse vows instant retribution to those caught. That evening, they find three men sleeping inside the Ox-Bow Canyon with cattle nearby. One of them, Donald Martin (Dana Andrews) claims they purchased the livestock, but couldn't prove the sale since they didn't receive a receipt. The other two, Mexican Juan Martinez (Anthony Quinn) and Alva Hardwicke (Francis Ford, director John Ford's brother), a senile old cowhand, concur. Most of the posse members, including "Ma" Jenny Grier (Jane Darwell), want immediate action. Only a small minority feel the proper thing to do is to transport the three back to town to try them at the town's courthouse.
Film historian Tim Dirks described "The Ox-Bow Incident" as "an intense, blunt, and downbeat examination of frontier justice with simple characters that represent various philosophical stances, opinions, or attitudes. It is an authoritative indictment of angry mob rule and violence that lead to a brutal lynching of three suspicious outsiders." The production took place in 1941, but Zanuck withheld its release for two years.
"The Ox-Bow Incident" was one of actor Harry Morgan's earliest film roles as Gil's sidekick. The future star of TV's Dragnet and M*A*S*H*, Morgan, born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit 1915, was a member of New York City's Group Theatre in the late 1930s. Once he entered Hollywood in the early 1940s, Morgan enjoyed a robust film and television career lasting well into the late 1990s. He died in 2011 at the age of 96.
The "The Ox-Bow Incident" is bookended by the same dog trotting in front of Fonda and Morgan on horseback riding into and out of town. The film, set in 1885 Nevada, was the last Academy Awards Best Picture nominee not to be nominated in any other category. It is one of '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.'
The More the Merrier (1943)
Charles Coburn's Oscar-winning Performance; George Stevens Last Directed Comedy
Washington, D. C. experienced a severe housing crunch during World War Two with the enormous expansion of the United States government as well as thousands reporting to military bases around the area. The Academy Awards Best Picture nominee May 1943 "The More the Merrier" focused on the hilarious situations arising from crowded boarding houses in the region.
Washington, D. C. wasn't the only city experiencing such a housing crunch. Leaders in major urban areas near government facilities encouraged home owners with extra rooms and couches to rent their space to strangers for patriotism-and as a source of extra income. Single and married governmental and military personnel, away from their families, largely shacked up with the opposite sex, who in the cities numbered eight to one females to males, mostly all innocent arrangements. Actress Jean Arthur had refused a number of movie proposals from Columbia Pictures. She paid her friend scriptwriter/director and a former Army officer Garson Kanin $25,000 to come up with a story fitting her screen persona. Kanin was aware of the housing shortage and composed a treatment called 'Two's a Crowd.' Kanin, along with Arthur's husband Frank Ross developed the screenplay "The More the Merrier," which was Oscar nominated for both Best Original Story and Best Screenplay.
George Stevens, the director for Arthur's recent hit 1942's "Talk of the Town," and actor Joel McCrea as her boarder, were brought on board. Stevens, delaying his enlistment into the Army's combat photography unit, butted heads with Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn, who disagreed with Stevens habit of overshooting his scenes. McCrea remembers Cohn approaching him and complaining, "What's that son of a b.... Stevens doing, making all that film? He used more exposed film in one picture than in any five pictures I've ever made." Stevens, who directed many comedy classics, made this his last funny picture. WW2 changed him after covering the intense Normandy invasion and the horrors of Nazi extermination camps. He limited himself to just dramas and Westerns when he returned to Hollywood.
Jean Arthur plays federal government employee Constance Milligan, who's advertising her D. C. spare room for "patriotic duty." Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), a multimillionaire volunteering his services to build more housing, secures a room in Constance's home without telling her of his rich background. Sergeant Joe Carter (McCrea), about to be shipped overseas, is invited by Dingle to share his room while she's at work. Constance, engaged to bland bureaucrat Charles J. Pendergast (Richard Gaines), initially is upset at her two boarders, but eventually warms up to them, especially Joe.
Frank Capra, who directed Jean Arthur several times, claimed she was always a basket case before filming, regularly throwing up in her dressing room. McCrea was aware of Arthur's track record, especially during love scenes. While filming an important scene in "The More the Merrier" where the two are first attracted to one another, McCrea repeatedly fidgeted his hands around her shoulders, arms and hands to distract her. Before a night club scene, he and director Stevens had to cox her out of the dressing room after she refused to get on the set. McCrea ranked his performance, despite all the behind the scenes drama, as his funniest. The film also introduced the pioneering split-screen technique where the two lovers, with their beds separated by a thin wall, express their love for one another, similar to those in 1958's "Indiscreet" with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and 1959's "Pillow Talk" with Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
Charles Coburn won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. His habit of citing Civil War Admiral David Farragut's famous orders, "Damn the Torpedoes-Full Steam Ahead" caused fits with the Hays Office censors who were offended by the swear word. TV Guide complemented Cobern's performance, stating the actor was "nothing short of superb, stealing scene after scene with astonishing ease."
Jean Arthur gained her first and only Academy Award Best Actress nomination in "The More the Merrier." She would appear in only four more movies, her last in 1953's "Shane," which Stevens persuaded her to come out of retirement. Stevens earned an Oscar nomination for Best Director, and won the New York Film Critics' director award. The American Film Institute nominated it for movie's Greatest Love Story as well as the Funniest. The Best Picture nominee was remade in 1966's "Walk, Don't Run," starring Cary Grant, whom McCrea always felt would have been perfect in his role of Joe Carter.
Heavenly Music (1943)
A New Spin on Classical Music Updated to Modern Tunes
How is it possible songs are so different from each other when there's so few notes to the music scale? That's the premise in the Academy Awards Best Short Subject (Two Reels) Live Action winner, May 1943's "Heavenly Music." The script of the MGM short film poses the age-old question of how can there not be a group of similar songs after centuries of compositions.
Bandleader Ted Barry (Fred Brady) checks into heaven after his death. An angel floating nearby, Joy (Mary Elliott), happens to recognize him and supports his entry into heaven's Hall of Music. There he greets the past masters of classical music, including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Wagner and Bach. For admission into the Hall he plays an audition tune on the piano which includes a stanza from the Nutcracker Suite. The composers go nuts at the audacity he shows in 'stealing' from their music. They challenge Barry to compose an original song in ten minutes that will stand the test of time for 200 years like their compositions. Inspired by a kiss from Joy, Ted composes the song 'Heavenly Music.' He then performs the tune in the style of each classical composer, proving he has as much talent as these musical legends.
"Heavenly Music" was created in response to popular band leader/saxophone player Freddy Martin, who was mentioned by the heaven's gatekeeper, Mr. Frisbie (Eric Blore). Martin's schtick during the 1940s was to rework classical musical symphonies and pieces into a contemporary style, complete with modern lyrics. In 1941 Martin adapted Tchaikovsky's 'Piano Concerto No. 1' with lyrics added by Ray Austin. He recorded it as 'Tonight We Love,' with crooner Clyde Rogers singing the words, accompanied by Martin's orchestra. It became an instant hit, the first smash for Martin, who continued his successful formula by adapting other classical works to his big band style. The practice of formatting classical music into pop songs continues as personified by the 1960s girl group 'The Toys,' releasing their version of Martin's 'A Lover's Concerto,' which reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song was based on Christian Petzold 18th century 'Minuet in G major.'
"Heavenly Music" concludes with Billie 'Buckwheat' Thomas from 'The Little Rascals,' in the role of Gabriel, playing one of Ted Barry's songs on his trumpet. Thomas, 12, was finishing "Our Gang" as the 22-year-old series was winding down by the kids' last short film, November 1943 'Dancing Romeo.'
This Land Is Mine (1943)
Jean Renoir's Only Anti-Nazi Film While in Hollywood
Forced to flee his native France when the Germans invaded the country in the spring of 1940, Jean Renoir surprisingly directed only one anti-Nazi film during his World War Two stay in Hollywood. Renoir's May 1943 "This Land is Mine" departs from the usual battle-filled movies released during this period and focuses on a more philosophical approach of homeland resistance to the German occupation. The film, according to critics, is as relevant today as it was during the war.
"This Land is Mine" set an opening day box office record nationwide. This was due to RKO's strategy of lining up 72 theaters in 50 cities to play the Renoir's picture simultaneously on the same day of its release, a policy Hollywood later adopted which continues to this day. The war film has a most unlikely hero in a high school teacher who's a self-admitted coward in the face of the German takeover of his French village. Charles Laughton plays the teacher Albert Lory, a momma's boy living with her, Mrs. Emma Lory (Una O'Connor). Albert's secretly in love with fellow school teacher, Louise Martin (Maureen O'Hara), but she's engaged to the supervisor of the railway yard, George Lambert (George Sanders). George is a believer of collaborating with the Germans in order not to make any waves. Louise's brother Paul (Kent Smith) feels just the opposite, and attempts to assassinate the town's Nazi commander, Major Erich von Keller (Walter Slezak), only to kill two of his soldiers instead. Ten villagers are taken from their homes and are threatened with execution within the week unless the killer is identified. That's when Albert gains a spine, resulting in an unforgettable courtroom speech.
"This Land is Mine" is a veiled attack on Vichy France, the southern portion of the country where the Germans gave the French a quasi-independent yet submissive governing body. Screenwriter Nichols uses Albert as a mouthpiece to critique those who passively succumbed to Nazi oppression, with a few even profiting from the German occupation.
Laughton, a close friend of Renoir's during their European days, said of the director's movie, "My role stood for countless thousands of bewildered little people of Europe who have to face a master they hate and cannot understand." Renoir had Laughton in mind when reading Nichols' script. "This Land is Mine" was Laughton and O'Hara's third film together, with their first in the actress' film debut, Alfred Hitchcock's 1939 "Jamaica Inn." The picture won the Academy Award for Best Sound Recording, the only Oscar a Renior film ever won. The director, always a stickler on capturing the most authentic sound in his films, begged the studio to install hard pavement on its lot to record the audio of the marching steps of the German soldiers. With concrete rationing in effect, the studio opted for cardboard, dubbing in the footsteps latter. "The incident enabled me to put my finger on the precise difference between French and American taste," Renoir said. "The French have a passion for what is natural, while the Americans worship the artificial." 20th Century Fox Darryl Zanuck said of the director when he returned to France after the war, "Renoir has a lot of talent, but he isn't one of us."
Renoir directed only one more movie during WW2 in Hollywood, finding it difficult to secure a script to suit his unique style. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum lists "This Land is Mine" as one of the exceptional movies left off in the American Film Institute's Top 100 Best Films.
Five Graves to Cairo (1943)
Billy Wilder First of Two WW2, Starring Erich von Stroheim in Rare Lead Role
On rare occasions Hollywood movies give the military an idea how to execute a mission during war. One of the more famous examples was found in May 1943's "The Five Graves of Cairo," written and directed by Billy Wilder. Dudley Clark of "A" Force, on a visit to Naples, Italy a few months before D-Day, saw the World War Two movie. He loved the premise of a British soldier taking the place of a deceased waiter at a North African hotel in a small desert town overrun by the Germans.
Clarke was the head of the British Army's deception department in Cairo. He was inspired while drawing up plans for Operation Copperhead to use a look-a-like to make the Germans think the main Allied invasion into Europe was landing on the south coast of France instead of the Normandy shores in June 1944. His department hired Australian actor M. E. Clifton James, a dead ringer to British General Bernard Montgomery, to be seen around Gibraltar and North Africa's Algiers in May 1944. The two areas were swarming with German agents, and couldn't miss spotting the fake general. Documents never revealed whether the Germans were deceived by the deception, but it was brilliant in its revelation.
"The Five Graves to Cairo" was Billy Wilder's second film he directed after his successful 1942 "The Major and the Minor" with Ginger Rogers. Wilder made two war-themed movies, this and the POW film 1953's "Stalag 17" with William Holden. Adapted from Hungarian playwright Lajos Biro's 1917 'Imperial Hotel," its title refers to five German fuel and supply depots secretly buried underneath five North African sites. Wilder and reliable writing partner Charles Brackett crafted the script, updating Biro's WW1's setting to WW2 where the British Army was pushed back deep inside Egypt by German General Erwin Rommel's forces.
Wilder was a big admirer of former silent movie director Erich von Stroheim, who was now subsisting playing small film roles. The director cast the Austrian native as Rommel, who arrives in the fictional town of Sidi Halfaya in Egypt as his army pushes towards Cairo. Meeting von Stroheim for the first time before the production, Wilder gushed, "This is a very big moment in my life, that I should now be directing the great Stroheim. Your problem, I guess, was that you were ten years ahead of your time." von Stroheim replied, "Twenty." Way back when von Stroheim was directing movies he drove studios nuts with his perfectionism in his characters' clothing and props. As an actor, he was no less so. Paramount Pictures allowed him to design his own uniform and apply his own make-up. As Rommel, he donned formal attire, unlike the real general's loose-fitting casual clothes. Von Stroheim also had darker make-up applied on his face from eye-level downward to reflect the general's habit of always wearing his hat in the desert's searing sun. He loaded the general's Leica camera with 35 mm film, even though the roll was never to be shown. "An audience always senses whether a prop is genuine or false," von Stroheim reasoned.
Wilder opened the first shot of Rommel by filming von Stroheim with his back towards the camera. The director later explained, "Standing with his stiff fat neck in the foreground he could express more than almost any actor with his face." In "The Five Graves to Cairo," Rommel arrives at the Empress of Britain hotel in the remote village to find British Corporal John Bramble (Franchot Tone) in the guise of the waiter Davos, who the general knows is a spy working for the Germans. Earlier, Corporal Bramble was the only survivor of a British tank crew who hightailed out of Tobruk after the Germans had overrun the area. He stumbles into the Empress hotel to find its owner Farid (Akim Tamiroff) and a French chambermaid Mouche (Anne Baxter), while Davos the waiter had been killed a day earlier by German bombing.
"As you'd expect from Wilder and Brackett," writes film reviewer David Brook, "the dialogue is razor-sharp and there's plenty of comedy, despite the war-movie trappings and serious tone taken towards the central drama. With a cracking pace, expertly wrought-out tension and an enjoyable yet effective villain, it deserves a place among Wilder's best."
Director Quentin Tarantino ranks "The Five Graves in Cairo" in his top ten favorite films. Producer/director Cameron Crowe saw a number of elements between this film and the 'Indiana Jones' series of movies. And Wilder's boyhood idol, von Stroheim, would play in another of the director's films seven years later in 1950 "Sunset Boulevard."
Edge of Darkness (1943)
In Like Flynn Gets a Boost From This Brutal Look at Norwegian Rebellion During WW2
Errol Flynn was known to be a lady's man during his prime. While making April 1943's "Edge of Darkness," a World War Two drama about local resistance against German occupiers in Norway, the actor had a fling with his co-star Anne Sheridan, causing a split with her actor husband George Brent. Soon two 17-year-old teenagers would emerge, accusing the 33-year-old actor of separately raping them. His subsequent trial delayed the filming of the WW2 drama, and placed a cloud on Flynn's previous impeccable image.
"I like my whiskey old and my women young," Flynn constantly bragged. When teenager Betty Hanson drank too much during a September 1942 Hollywood party, causing her to throw up, Flynn escorted her upstairs to clean her up only to, according to the young lady, be seduced by the actor. "I'm bewildered. I can't understand it. I hardly touched the girl," said Flynn after he was processed by the police for statutory rape. The District Attorney recalled a similar allegation from teenager Peggy Satterlee, an extra in 1941's "They Died With Their Boots On," starring Flynn. She claimed to be a passenger on his yacht and was taken advantage. Flynn hired fix-it attorney Jerry Giesler, who stacked the jury with female admirers of the actor. The defense lawyer was successful in painting the pair of accusers of having a history of loose morals and behavior. The jury found Flynn not guilty. "I knew those women would acquit him," said Satterlee after the trial. "They just sat and looked adoringly at him as if he was their son or something."
The term "in like Flynn" became popular after the trial. At first it meant "having no more trouble than Errol Flynn in his cinematic feats," with such roles as Robin Hood and Geoffrey Thorpe in 1940's "The Sea Hawk." But once the verdict sunk in, the phrase alluded to a person's success as a seducer. Flynn later used his charms to swoon Nora Eddington, 19, a cashier at the court house's snack bar where the trial was held. She later became his second wife.
Director Lewis Milestone remembers Flynn's depressed demeanor after returning to the studio from the trial. The actor kept his mind off his personal troubles by busily writing his memoirs. Milestone knew Flynn as a humble actor. "Flynn kept underrating himself," the director said. "If you wanted to embarrass him, all you had to do was to tell him how great he was in a scene he'd just finished playing: He'd blush like a young girl and muttering 'I'm no actor' would go away somewhere and sit down."
In "Edge of Darkness," Flynn is resistance leader Gunner Brogge, who lives in a small Norwegian fishing village occupied by the Nazis. Karen Stensgard (Ann Sheridan), daughter of the town's doctor, Martin Stensgard (Walter Huston), and wife Anna (Ruth Gordon), is in the resistance who's in love with Gunnar. The townspeople's anti-Nazi sentiments are hidden while they wait for a cache of arms from England due to arrive at any day when they can overtake their oppressors.
"Edge of Darkness" is famous for its unusual brutality seen on the screen, which the Hays Office normally clamped down on. But with America embroiled in World War Two, its censors gave greater latitude to Hollywood. Film reviewer Dymon Enlow said the movie "didn't shy away at all from showing the Nazis just straight up mowing down town folk with machine gun fire. Also, in the most shocking part of the film it strongly implies that Sheridan was raped (off screen) by the Nazis."
The script by Robert Rossen, who later became a director for 1949's "All The Kings Men" and Paul Newman's 1961's "The Hustler," was adapted from William Woods' 1942 novel of the same name. Director Milestone, whose pacifist classic 1930 "All Quiet on the Western Front" was opposite to the pro-war "Edge of Darkness," implemented his trademark camera moves during the battle scenes to heighten the carnage. In one of the rare instances where a zoom lens was used before 1950, he dialed in on the participants in several dramatic scenes, giving the movie a mid-sixties look. Milestone was thirty days late in delivering the movie, partly from Flynn's trial and at other times from thick fog coating the Monterey coast. The downtime created an interlude for Flynn to romance Sheridan, who was married a year before to actor George Brent, who caught the two cuddling. The two got into a fist fight, with, as rumor had it, Flynn bettered the hulking Brent.
"Edge of Darkness" was helped by all the Flynn publicity from his trial, making it one of Warner Brothers' most profitable movies in its existence. The American Film Institute nominated it was one of the Most Heart-Pounding Movies produced.
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
Val Lewton's Suggestion to Violence More Effective Than Showing It
Modern horror slasher films are bloody, messy affairs, showing a lot more than movies from the Golden Age when filmmakers left such graphic violence to the imagination of their viewers. In April 1943's "I Walked with a Zombie," producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur demonstrated how eerie lighting and lurking shadows can create jarring psychological terror and unrelenting suspense to the unsuspecting audience.
Fresh off his critically-acclaimed 1942 "Cat People," Lewton was assigned by RKO's head Charles Koerner to create a picture around the exploitative title "I Walked with a Zombie." Gleaned from Inez Wallace's short story published in American Weekly Magazine, Lewton found the tale thin. The producer incorporated the plot of Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel 'Jane Ayre' to augment Wallace's bare narrative. Scriptwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray read up on Haiti's practice of casting hexes on people. "We were all plunged into research on Haitian voodoo, every book on the subject Val could find," remembered Wray. "He was an addictive researcher, drawing out of it the overall feel, mood, and quality he wanted, as well as details for actual production."
In "I Walked with a Zombie," nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is hired to look after Jessica (Christine Gordon), wife of sugar plantation owner Paul Holland (Tom Conway). Paul has his half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison) and his mother Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett) on a Caribbean island, inhabited by ancestors of former slaves brought over by his relatives centuries earlier to work the plantation. The island's natives suspect Jessica, who walks in a catatonic state, is a zombie, even though Dr. Maxwell (James Bell) has diagnosed her afflicted with brain fever. In an effort to cure Jessica's illness, Betsy walks with Mrs. Rand through a moonlit cane field to find the native's voodoo ceremony. Lewton inserts one of his now-famous "jump scares," first introduced in his "Cat People," as the pair walk.
The theme of reason versus superstition pervades throughout "I Walked with a Zombie." Film reviewer Christianne Benedict said, "In the scene late in the film when the voodoo priest attempts to draw Jessica back to the homeport, it seems plainly obvious that the supernatural is real. This is perhaps the film's most effective insinuate of the horrors lurking behind the mundane."
RKO gave Lewton strict orders to keep his films under $150,000, an extremely low budget for a movie. "Everything had to be cheap because we really were on a shoestring," revealed scriptwriter Wray. "That was another thing about Val - a low budget was a challenge to him, a spur to inventiveness, and everyone around him caught the fever. I got a rather bland-faced doll at a department store, cheap, and by the time she had been dressed in a soft gray robe, and her hair had been combed out to the appropriate 'lost girl' look, she too, was somehow transformed."
"I Walked with a Zombie" is studied for its characterization of slavery and racism, symbolically linking the mute zombies with the enslaved as they quietly went about their work. Even the practice of Haitian voodoo, a reshaping of the African diaspora religions, reflects "not only with surprising accuracy and dignity," wrote writer Jim Vorel, "but considers how those beliefs could be co-opted by the white man as one more element of control over the lives of the island inhabitants." Stylus Magazine ranked the RKO picture the fifth best zombie movie of all time. It's also included as '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.' The movie is known for Francis Dee's most famous role. She and husband Joel McCrea, married since 1933, remained together until the actor died on their 57th wedding anniversary. Francis lived to be 94, passing away from a stroke in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)
Sherlock Holmes Leaves the Victorian Era and Heads Into WW2 Intrigue
There was nothing better in the eyes of Universal Pictures executives then placing the legendary Victorian era detective into the capital of the United States during World War Two to solve a major international crime. Producing April 1943's "Sherlock Holmes in Washington," the studio made this the first Holmes' detective movie not based on one of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories. In addition, this was the first Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce-starring feature not located in London, England, with the pair traveling to Washington, D. C. for an investigation.
Universal bought the Sherlock Holmes movie rights from the Doyle estate in early 1942 after 20th Century Fox decided not to renew the franchise after producing the first two English detective films. Part of the agreement gave Universal permission to revise, create and modernize the Holmes' stories. The studio's first, 1942's 'Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror,' was based on a Doyle short story but set in London with a WW2 background. Rathbone and Bruce initially hated the idea of updating their characters. But their new studio insisted, justifying the change in the opening credits of "Sherlock Holmes in Washington" by stating in its prologue Holmes is "ageless, invincible and unchanging, solving significant problems of the present day." Roy William Neill took over producing and directing the remaining Holmes movies for Universal, starting with 1942's 'Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.' In the meantime Universal looked to produce more Sherlock movies by cutting their budgets to B-listed status.
"Sherlock Holmes in Washington" opens with a British secret agent hand-carrying to the United States government a document on microfilm vital to England's interests. The so-called McGuffin (a Hitchcockian term for an item viewers are focused on) is a matchbook the microfilm is secretly inserted into reading "V for victory." Just before the agent is captured by the enemy on a train bound for D. C. from New York City, he surreptitiously lends the matches to an unsuspecting passenger, Nancy Partridge (Marjorie Lord), who uses them to light her cigarette. Once the English government discovers its agent had disappeared, Holmes is called in on the case, sending he and Dr. Watson to America. Viewers are aware of the importance of the match book, but the Nazi agents aren't. Their scenes with Nancy are reminiscent of Hitchcock's 1942 "Saboteur," where its main character, actress Priscilla Lane, stuck in a similar situation, coincidentally wearing the same dress as Marjorie Lord does on the train before she's kidnapped. Perceptive viewers will notice the famous "V" matchbook has its strike plate in the front, the same side as where the matches are exposed. In 1973 the government mandated the strike plate be placed in back of the book opposite the matches for safety.
Critics were impressed by Rathbone's quick detective mind, with the reviewer from the New York Post writing, "What a public thinker, that Rathbone is! You can practically see the mighty muscles of his mind tense, grab, and get to the heart of the toughest mystery."
Crash Dive (1943)
Oscar Winner for Special Effects Was Tyrone Power's Final Movie Before WW2 Service
When America entered World War Two, a number of Hollywood stars joined the military to fulfill their patriotic duty. Tyrone Power, a seasoned pilot, was one of them, joining the United States Marine Corps in 1942. Before reporting for duty, his studio pulled strings to delay his reporting date to star in April 1943's "Crash Dive," the story of a PT boat officer assigned to a submarine. The Technicolor film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
Co-starring Dana Andrews as the submarine's commanding officer, and Anne Baxter as his fiancee who unwittingly falls in love with Power, "Crash Dive" was also a recruiting film for those interested in joining the Navy. Recruiters were positioned in the lobby of Grauman's Chinese Theatre signing up those interested in enlisting while "Crash Dive" was playing. At the end of the film's run, the Navy received permission to continue recruiting at the theatre for the rest of the year.
As an avid pilot, Power had logged in over 180 hours of flight time when he joined the Marines. After filming "Crash Dive" he reported to the San Diego Recruit Depot, then to the Officer's Candidate School at the Marine Corps Base in Quantco, Virginia, earning his wings and a first lieutenant ranking. At 29 Power was too old for flight combat. He volunteered to fly cargo transports, leading to missions at Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945 during the height of the fighting, carrying material and food in and wounded Marines out of the islands. He was released from the Corps in January 1946 after awarded a host of earned medals. "Crash Dive" was the actor's last film until the mid-1946's "Razor Edge." Power remained in the Marine reserves until his death in 1958 with the rank of major.
"Already enlisted in the Marine Corps," wrote film reviewer Ace Black, "star Tyrone Power headed off to recruit training for the real war soon after filming wrapped, a rare case of an actor staying true to the message of his own film."
The title "Crash Dive" came from the process of submarines flooding their tanks to descend under the surface to evade enemy planes and battle ships. Studio executives debated to name the film 'Submarine School' to avoid the public perception the movie's topic was about dive bombers. They opted for the more exciting description showcasing the USS Corsair, commanded by Lt. Cdr. Dewey Connors (Andrews), who initially formed a negative opinion on the incoming officer, Lt. Ward Stewart (Power), a PT boat captain who had expressed disdain towards subs. On a weekend trip to Washington, D. C. to gather his personal things before shipping out, Stewart meets Connors' fiancee, Jean Hewlett (Anne Baxter). Stewart, unaware of Hewlett's engagement, makes a move to swoop Jean off her feet. She eventually melts in Stewart's arms, causing friction between the two officers as they shove off to destroy a secret German base.
Jo Swerling's script was partially inspired by a U. S. Coast Guard unit patrolling Greenland in the summer of 1941 months before Pearl Harbor when one of its ship captured a Nazi weather station and submarine stopover site, hampering German forecasting in the North Atlantic. The classified operation wasn't revealed until after the United States entered the war since at the time Germany was a neutral country to America.
Besides "Crash Dive's" breathtaking pyrotechnics seen during the commando raid on the German base, the movie is known for its portrayal of messmate Oliver Cromwell Jones (Ben Carter), who broke the WW2 stereotype of African-Americans in film popular during the era. His reputation by the officers of the USS Corsair by playing a crucial role in the German base raid was unusual for the screen. He's loosely based on Navy Cross recipient Dorie Miller, a messmate aboard the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Miller carried a number of wounded men to safety in the middle of the bombing before manning an anti-aircraft gun, and without any training shot down at least one and possibly many more Japanese attack planes.
The footage of the U. S. Navy submarine base was filmed at New London, Connecticut, where the military displayed its latest subs. "Crash Dive's" won the Oscar for Best Visuals, and was the the forerunner in showing subs evading underwater anti-submarine nets sliding into enemy harbors such as the later released 1943 "Destination Tokyo" with Cary Grant.
Film reviewers The Metzinger Sisters said "Crash Dive" "was obviously catered to the feminine crowd as half of the movie is about the blossoming romance between Anne Baxter and Tyrone Power. Stunning color, great special effects and an exciting commando raid make this an all-around 'A' picture." The movie serves as a reminder of the great sacrifice even the wealthiest and most popular Hollywood stars made in the war effort.
Cabin in the Sky (1943)
Vincent Minnelli's Directorial Film Debut in Rare African-American Musical Under MGM's Arthur Freed
Producer Arthur Freed changed the shape of musicals when he was put in charge of his own unit within the MGM studio in the early 1940s. One of his earliest successes was April 1943's "Cabin in the Sky," a rare major studio's musical consisting of an all African-American cast. The picture was in response to an increasingly vocal African-American community who demanded better treatment of the race's portrayal in movies. Hollywood was also pressured by President Franklin Roosevelt's administration to create more employment opportunities for minorities in the film industry. After reading the proposed script based on the popular Broadway play of the same name, the NAACP "congratulated them on the treatment of this black fable, which avoided cliches and racial stereotypes." As one of only six full-length motion pictures the film's majors released from 1929 until mid-1950s featuring African-Americans, "Cabin in the Sky" was jammed packed with an all-star line-up.
MGM head Louis Mayer promised Freed free rein after his outstanding work as an associate producer for 1939's "The Wizard of Oz." The New York Time's Stuart Klawans wrote, "No movie executive today can tap the wealth of talent that Freed had under contract at MGM, backed up by all the costumers, carpenters, electricians and painters he might need. But that's only half the reason that it's hard to emulate Freed today. The other part of the reason: no modern studio executive has comparable artistic credentials."
Born into a Charleston, South Carolina musical family, Arthur Freed showed a flair for entertainment during World War One, organizing staged shows for the military. After the war he managed theaters while writing lyrics for popular music tunes. Hired by MGM in 1928 as a lyricist, Freed yearned to get into movie producing. After his big break in "The Wizard of Oz," Freed produced a series of successful hits with Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Busby Berkeley.
"Cabin in the Sky" marked the first film Vincente Minnelli, 40, directed, and began a string of musicals unparalleled in cinema. Born into a Chicago theatrical family, Minnelli's first job after graduating high school was designing stage sets. Minnelli relocated to New York City where his first musical direction was in the 1935 play 'At Home Abroad,' with Ethel Waters, the lead actress in "Cabin in the Sky." MGM signed Minnelli after several hits on Broadway, first as a consultant, then as a director. He was surprised at the latitude Freed had given him. "I interpreted the assignment, with more freedom than I'd dreamed possible, as just reward for past contributions," recollected Minnelli, who had earlier directed a handful of movie musical sequences.
Minnelli had his hands full with Ethel Waters though. Hired as a singer at 17 to work at a Baltimore theatre in 1913, Waters became one of vaudeville's most prominent singers during the 1920s, including regular appearances at the prestigious New York City's Cotton Club. She was the first black woman to integrate into the Broadway theatre scene, and was to first of her race to star in her own television show, 1939's NBC 'The Ethel Waters Show.' She was initially hesitant in playing the lead character, Petunia, in the play 'Cabin in the Sky,' saying, "I rejected the part because it seemed to me a man's play rather than a woman's. Petunia, in the original script, was no more than a punching bag for Little Joe. I objected also to the manner in which religion was being handled. After some of the changes I demanded had been made I accepted the role, largely because the music was so pretty. But right through the rehearsals and even after the play had opened, I kept adding my own lines and little bits of business to build up the character of Petunia."
In the movie version Petula is married to Little Joe (Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson), who wants to walk the righteous path but is always enticed by the gambling bug. He's shot over a gambling argument, and is clinging to life when Lucifer Jr. (Rex Ingram) pays him a visit. The devil is about to take him to the underworld before the Lord's Angel, the General (Kenneth Spencer), intercedes after hearing Petula's heartfelt prayers. He gives Little Joe six months to clean up his act. This begins Little Joe's challenge to go straight-or got eternally down.
Singer Lena Horne, 25, another Cotton Club alumnus from Brooklyn, New York, plays Georgia Brown in "Cabin in the Sky," a siren to Little Joe's wanton ways. In the past Horne was seen in several film musicals. Censors cut her introductory bathtub scene while she's singing 'Ain't It the Truth.' On the set Lena sprained her ankle dancing to a number played by Duke Ellington's band, forcing Minnelli to reshoot the scene with the disabled Horne sitting seductively enticing Little Joe while Petula confronts her. "Cabin in the Sky" is also known for filming the first 'moon walk' dance step in cinema. Bill Bailey, brother of Pearl, displays his unique moon walk while Ethel Waters sings 'Taking A Chance.' Perceptive viewers will notice the footage of the tornado bearing down on the nightclub is the same in 1939's "The Wizard of Oz."
Racial discrimination still existed inside the MGM studio when "Cabin in the Sky" was filming. The African-American actors were restricted from entering the studio's commissary for lunch. When MGM boss Louis Mayer heard about this, he personally invited all the actors to eat in his private dining room where he joined them. The next day, the ban was lifted in the commissary, allowing the actors to chow down there.
"Historically," wrote film reviewer Patrick Nash on "Cabin in the Sky," "it's an important movie. Like 'Hallelujah!' 14 years earlier it is an extremely rare example of a big budget Hollywood movie from the studio era to feature an all black cast." The Academy Awards nominated the Ethel Waters' song 'Happiness is a Thing Called Joe' as the Best Original Song. The American Film Institute nominated the composition as well for Best Movie Song as well as one of the Greatest American Movies.
Fires Were Started (1943)
First Docu-drama Which Re-creates Events Rather Than Records Them
Ever since Robert J. Flaherty introduced the feature film documentary in the early 1920s, there has been a fine line within the genre of strictly recording events as they really are or manipulating them to make the storyline more exciting. British filmmaker Humphrey Jennings chose the later when he produced April 1943's "Fires Were Started." He recreated the daily life of London, England, firefighters during the German Blitz in the fall of 1940 as they battled conflagrations from Luftwaffe bombings.
The documentary, also known as 'I Was a Fireman,' contains actual firefighters performing their heroic acts. Paradoxically, these non-actors followed a script which was a faithful re-creation on how they spent their day at the fire station during the peaceful interludes. At night it was a different story with the Germans busy bombing the city, sending these same firemen out in the streets with their hook and ladders. To show the men fighting the fires long after the Luftwaffe had gone elsewhere in Europe, Jennings obtained permission to set fires to empty buildings bombed earlier so the cameras could capture the firemen actors battling these flames.
"Since, at the time, there were no filmmakers brave enough to follow these firefighters during the war, they had to recreate the action," revealed film reviewer Chanan Stern. Adds film critic Frank Veenstra, "Although everything in this movie is being scripted it still feels all very real. It's a true engaging--and therefore also really powerful and effective movie."
"Fires Were Started" was one of the first full-length documentaries to use totally reconstructed scenes based on actual events. As the pioneer of the modern docudrama much popularized on television, this picture was the brainchild of filmmaker Jennings. Turning away from a promising academic career as a literary scholar and a surrealist painter to film, Jennings realized movie making was where the money was to support his family. The prestigious General Post Office Film Unit hired him in 1934 before the British Government Ministry of Information took over the post office's film division in 1940, renaming it the Crown Film Unit. Jennings directed a number of short films, largely patriotic in theme before making "Fires Were Started," his only feature production.
Jennings died at the age of 43 falling off a cliff on the Greek island of Poros in September 1950 while scouting for locations for his next documentary on post-war healthcare in Europe. He has been called by one of his fellow film documentarians, Lindsay Anderson, as "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced." Because of its importance in film history, "When Fires Were Started" is included in '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die."
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
First Multi-Monster Movie, with the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster
The rejuvenation of horror films in the early 1940s assured Universal Pictures whose portfolio was chockfull of classic monsters to produce more hair-raising scary movies. What better way, the studio felt, than to combine more than one grotesque into one extravaganza. Its latest demonic star, the Wolf Man, teamed up with the creature built by a mad doctor to make March 1943 "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man." The picture began a trend of multiple monsters interacting within one movie.
Curt Siodmak, scriptwriter for 1941's "The Wolf Man," wrote and directed "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man." The German filmmaker left his native country in 1937 after witnessing increasing anti-Semitism. In his script he set his newest monster movie in the fictional village of 'Vasaria,' meaning 'water place,' which plays a crucial factor in the film's ending. The picture begins with Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.), whose tomb was opened by grave robbers four years after his supposed death, happened to come back to life. Frankenstein's monster has only 15 minutes of screen time, and is first seen encased in ice in the cellar of the castle where he was last seen in 1942's "The Ghost of Frankenstein."
The backstories of the two monsters in "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" are directly linked to their previous films. Larry is recovering in the hospital from his father's conk on his noggin seen in "The Wolf Man" which killed him. Later Larry turns into a wolf only when the full moon appears, unlike the first movie when his transformation happens as the flowering wolfsbane plant is in full bloom. Frankenstein's monster, played by Bela Lugosi, has the brain of Ygor as seen in 1942's "The Ghost of Frankenstein." This is the first film where there's no Dr. Frankenstein, which has caused so much confusion where the public thinks the monster is named Frankenstein. Originally the studio wanted Lon Chaney, Jr. To play both monsters since he was Frankenstein's creation in 'Ghost.' But Chaney realized he couldn't withstand the physical endurance of the long make-up sessions required for both monsters. Lugosi's 'Frankenstein' spoke several lines in the movie through several layers of facial rubber. But at the movie's preview the audience laughed hysterically when he opened his mouth to speak. Siodmak later recalled, "Lugosi couldn't talk! They had left the dialogue I wrote for the Monster in the picture when they shot it, but with Lugosi it sounded so Hungarian funny that they had to take it out!" Also cut was a sequence detailing how the operation of Ygor's brain into the monster made the creature blind, causing it to walk with outstretched arms, a habit carried over in his later movies.
Lugosi, 60, literally collapsed from all the strain of lugging 35 pounds of extra padding to make him look bulky, and had to take a break from the filming. Causing another delay was Maria Ouspenskaya, as Maleva, the gypsy whose wolf infected Talbot. The actress, 67, broke her ankle in the scene escorting Larry to Frankenstein's castle, and was hospitalized.
Film reviewer Mark Bourne praised "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man," writing the movie "is stylishly effective, rollicking good fun. This turned out to be one of the most entertaining test-tube concoctions in the entire Universal Classic Monster canon." The movie was included in what is cinematically termed as 'monster rally films,' whose label derived from a number of local TV channels showing low-budget horror and science fiction movies on a regular basis. Larry Vincent hosted 'Seymour's Monster Rally' on KTLA Los Angeles in the early 1970s which featured among other flicks "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man," while Chicago's WSNS Channel 44 aired 'Monster Rally Movie,' hosted by John Dickinson from 1976 to 198.
Sugata Sanshirô (1943)
Akira Kurosawa's Directorial Debut Labeled as One of His Best
Japan's Akira Kurosawa was motivated to direct his first film by an ad for a soon-to-be published book he spotted at a news stand, piquing his interest while preparing for his directing film debut. After eight years working at Toho studios, he was given the opportunity to direct March 1943's "Sanshiro Sugata," launching one of Asia's most popular and influential filmmaker's career.
As the son of the head of the Army's physical education school, Akira, whose family roots were traced to samurai lineage, had a passion for martial arts. The ad Kurosawa spotted was about a book by Tsuneo Tomita, a judo master turned novelist. He wrote about young Sanshiro Sugata (Susumu Fujita), a talented but undisciplined fighter. Sugata attends a top-tier martial arts school, where on its staff has the city's best judo instructor. The teacher finds Sugata athletic, but he has to learn self-control and "humanity." A revelation hits Sugata like a thunderbolt as he clings overnight to a stake in a muddy pond gazing at a lotus blossom. He realizes there's more to life than just fighting his way to the top. Sugata competes in jujutsu and judo contests, leading up to his death-defying fight against Higaki (Ryunosuke Tsukigata), as they both try to win the hand of their shared love interest, Sayo (Yukiko Todoroki).
Before the production Kurosawa visited several stores daily looking for Tomita's book on the shelves. When it finally arrived, Akira quickly read it, loving every page. Knocking on Toho producer Nobuyoshi Morita house in the middle of the night, Kurosawa begged him to buy the movie rights. Early the next day Morita sent a representative to Tomita and his publisher to buy the film rights, which was fortunate for Akira since three days later others made the writer generous offers.
Kurosawa, 33, had literally worked his way up the ladder learning every phase of filmmaking when first hired by the film studio Photo Chemical Laboratories in 1935. From stage construction to film development, location scouting, lighting, to dubbing and editing, Akira graduated to third assistant director under Japan's premier director Kajiro Yamamoto. As an assistant director he handled nearly every scene in 1941's 'Horse,' since Yamamoto was pulled to concentrate on another project right before he directed "Sanshiro Sugata." Akira was a skilled writer, seeing two of his screenplays made into movies before named head director. He went on to write all his movies' screenplays, thirty in all.
Kurosawa was perfectly at ease while directing "Sanshiro Sugata." "I simply enjoyed it," Akira reminisced years later. "I went to sleep each night looking forward eagerly to the next day's shooting, and there was absolutely nothing painful in the experience. The whole task was carried out with a feeling of ease."
Military censors, whom in the middle of World War Two controlled every facet of Japanese life, made the approval of "Sanshiro Sugata" difficult. Akira said it was like "being on trial" having to laboriously justify every scene. Even though its plot was about martial rivalry between the judo and jujitsu fighters, the censors were apprehensive about Kurosawa's 'Hollywoodization,' with his fluid camera moves, quick cuts and close-ups, radically departing from traditional Japanese cinema's lengthy, static shots. Akira was exposed at an early age to the best American films, and he adopted many of their techniques. Toho's director Yasujiro Ozu among others employed at the studio who appreciated Kurosawa's new look were brought before the censors to defend the movie, which eventually saw 17 minutes cut.
"The film," described film critic Erik Beck "is most important for showing the direction that Kurosawa would take as a director. It would show some of his visual flair, show his ability to balance action and drama." "Sanshiro Sugata" wasn't available to the United States until 1974, and was remade five times in Japan. Kurosawa revisited Sanshiro in his 1945 sequel, "Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two." Film critic Michael Grost noted it was rare to have a film director produce one of his top films in his career right out of the gate. "It is one of his best," details Grost. "The whole film is really beautiful to look at. It is a very enjoyable viewing experience, and shows Kurosawa's skills at their peak. Kurosawa's continuous inventiveness with his camera, lends each scene in fact a fast pace, a sense that a lot new is always happening on screen."
The Human Comedy (1943)
Author William Saroyan's Slice of Life Movie Brought to the Screen
Writing a movie script and directing it into a movie is more difficult than one could imagine. Author William Saroyan felt he could easily do both, and submitted a screenplay which eventually became March 1943's "The Human Comedy," an Academy Awards Best Picture nominee. MGM studio head Louis Mayer, an admirer of Saroyan's writing, was told by the author he would like to direct his own script. Mayer tested him to see if he could direct by handing him an one-reel short production.
Mayer's assessment after viewing Saroyan's effort, 'The Good Job,' was he couldn't. The MGM boss gave "The Human Comedy" assignment to veteran director Clarence Brown. Saroyan was also stung by Mayer's decision to hire scriptwriter Howard Estabrook to boil down his unwieldy four-hour playing-time screenplay. Estabrook was so effective in reshaping the author's initial script Mayer later claimed it was his favorite movie his studio ever made under his watch. Rejected by Mayer's move, Saroyan later wrote a play called 'Get Away, Old Man,' a veiled reference to the MGM executive.
Film reviewer Cliff Aliperti said the movie "is a quality film and filled with professional and mostly strong performances. Mickey Rooney is very good, exceptional even." The young actor is the glue who holds the episodic movie together. He plays high schooler Homer Macauley, a part-time telegram messenger delivering letters which senior citizen Willie Grogan (Frank Morgan) transcribes from Morse code. Author Saroyan based his story on when he was a messenger boy in Fresno, California, and later as a manager in the Postal Telegraph office.
Actor Ray Collins as Homer's late father provides the beyond-the-grave narration in "The Human Comedy," while Fay Bainter is Homer's widowed mom who lends wisdom at every turn. Homer's older brother Marcus (Van Johnson) is stationed at the nearby Army training facility before shipping out overseas, and Donna Reed plays a family friend. Robert Mitchum, in his film debut, has an uncredited role as one of three soldiers on leave who takes their dates to a movie, which turns out to be 1942's "Mrs. Miniver." Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer and Jackie "Butch' Jenkins, 5, make appearances, the later as Homer's younger brother Ulysses. A MGM talent scout spotted Jenkins joking with other friends on the Santa Monica Beach. His short five years in Hollywood ended in 1948 when he developed a stutter. His mother moved the family to Dallas, before Butch settled on a farm as an adult. Someone asked if he missed having a film career. Jenkins answered, "There may be a better way to live than on a lake with a couple of cows, a wife, and children, but being a movie star is not one."
Saroyan was bitter seeing his script whittled down to just two hours. He tried to buy his original screenplay back from MGM. Mayer refused, prompting the author to write the 1943 novel 'The Human Comedy,' expanding his script. Published the week the movie was released, his book was a best seller. Saroyan, who also felt the picture was too syrupy for his taste, was awarded an Oscar for Best Story. The Best Picture nominee also saw Rooney nominated for Best Actor, and Harry Stradling for Best Cinematography.
Hitler's Children (1943)
Biggest Financial Budget to Gross Profit Ratio Smash Hit for RKO
One name was so repulsive Hollywood studios long avoided inserting it into their movie titles. That was until March 1943's "Hitler's Children" emerged as one of the big hits of the year, making it one of RKO's most financially profitable film (budget to box office ratio) in its existence. The production was a low budget affair, but resonated with the public, even outgrossing the studio's blockbusters such as 1933's "King Kong" and 1935's "Top Hat."
Director Edward Dmytryk confirms in his autobiography, "A title with the word 'Hitler' in it was considered box-office poison, and the exhibitors asked producer Doc Golden and RKO to change ours. Doc was stubborn - and he was right. The film cost a little over $100,000, and, running only in England and the Western Hemisphere grossed, by some accounts, $7,500,00." Dmytryk's math may be somewhat off, but estimates up to $3.5 million in receipts were still astronomical in those days for a Grade B movie. Because of its success, RKO handed Dmytryk and scriptwriter Emmet Lavery each $5,000 in bonuses. "Hitler's Children" opened up other movies with the name 'Hitler' in their titles, including 1943's 'The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler' and 1944's 'The Hitler Gang.'
Actress Bonita Granville, an Oscar nominee in 1936's "These Three" and as Nancy Drew in the popular serial, said "Hitler's Children" was her personal favorite. Granville received top billing and she played an adult, both reasons why she loved the film. Based on 'Education for Death,' by Gregor Ziemer, who was a headmaster at an American school throughout the 1930s, "Hitler's Children" has Granville playing Anna Muller. Born in Germany, Anna grew up in America, only to return to attend the American Colony School in Germany, right next to an academy filled with Hitler indoctrinated students. Fights break out constantly between the two schools, with Professor Nichols (Kent Smith of "Cat People" fame) doggedly separating them. One student, Karl Bruner (Tim Holt) is smitten by Anna, and they continue to have a relationship despite their opposing political views.
"Hitler's Children," notes film reviewer Paul Mavis, "goes into full, deliciously pulpy exploitation mode, with trips to the sterilization hospital, culminating in Granville being tied to the whipping post, her shirt torn from her back, as lover Holt nods for a Nazi goon to begin the fun." Adds reviewer Laura Grieves, "The film might have been propaganda intended to help encourage U. S. citizens in the fight against the Nazis in the darkest days of the war, but given things we know now about the horrors inflicted on so many by the Nazi regime, it doesn't seem exaggerated in the least; if anything it underplays the horror, or we wouldn't be able to stand watching it."
Dmytryk replaced the original director Irving Reis, who fought with the producer. Dmytryk, 35, began in motion pictures as a messenger for the Famous Players-Lasky, a predecessor of Paramount, and worked his way up to film editor, then in the mid-1930s as a director, primary in B-pictures. He did get to direct an occasional big-budgeted movie such as John Wayne in 1945's "Back to Bataan," but a brief membership in the Communist Party banned him from working in the United States when he was included in The Hollywood Ten. He returned in 1951 to testify before Congress, and was rehired, directing such classics as 1954's "The Caine Mutiny" and 1964's "The Carpetbaggers."
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
Berthold Brecht's Only Personal Script Which Turned Into a Hollywood Movie While in America
Berthold Brecht was one of Germany's most popular playwrights in Europe. He skedaddled out of his native country once Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933, and settled in Hollywood to try his luck in movies. While in America Brecht had one of his scripts made into a motion picture, March 1943's "Hangmen Also Die!" Loosely based on the assassination of SS official Reinhard Heydrich, who was in charge of occupied Czechoslovakia, the Brecht-written movie was the second of four anti-Nazi films directed by Fritz Lang.
As a fellow German emigre, Lang was familiar with the work of Brecht, whose plays such as 'The Three Penny Opera' heavily influenced European literature. Along with Lang Brecht shaped the story for "Hangman Also Die!" just four months after the so-called 'The Hangman of Europe' had been assassinated. The details of the Nazi's death were still trickling in when Brecht, assisted by writer John Wexley, typed out the screenplay whose title was named by a studio secretary winning the $100 prize contest between cast and crew.
Even though Brecht was paid handsomely for his work in "Hangman Also Die!" he was bitter about the experience laboring alongside Lang. Writing in his journal, Brecht noticed the director "sits with all the airs of a dictator and old movie hand behind his boss-desk, full of drugs and resentment at any good suggestion, collecting surprises, little bits of suspense, tawdry sentimental touches and falsehoods, and takes licenses for the box office." Wexley, a member of the Screen Writer's Guild, which determines who wrote the scripts, composed such classics as 1938's "Angles With Dirty Faces" and 1939's "Confessions of a Nazi Spy." Wexley convinced the guild he was solely responsible for the screenplay, claiming Brecht and Lang drew up the original story. Based on Wexley's lobbying, Brecht, not a guild member, reflected, "I feel the disappointment and terror of the intellectual worker who sees the product of his labors snatched away and mutilated." Lang, aware of the controversy, admitted in 1967, "Brecht got a raw deal here." Bertolt's name was anglicized in the opening credits as Bert Brecht. The entire episode soured the German writer on Hollywood.
"Hangmen Also Die!" is a loose interpretation on the events after the assassination of Heydrich, who sent thousands of Czechs to their deaths as well as the primary architect on the extermination of the country's Jewish people. In the film surgeon Dr. Frantisek Svoboda (Brian Donlevy) was involved in the plot before the movie opens. Heydrich's real assassins were British intelligence-trained Czech and Slovak soldiers who parachuted into the area on May 27, 1942 to snuff him out. The German reprisals were swift, with over 1,300 executions of suspects, their relatives, known partisans, and those disloyal to the Nazi cause. The entire village of Lidice was destroyed, suspected as the epicenter of partisan activity.
In "Hangmen Also Die!" Dr. Svoboda seeks refuge in the apartment of Mascha Novotny (Anna Lee), whom he noticed had steered the pursuing Nazis away from him. Her father, Professor Stephen Novotny (Walter Brennan), a former revolutionary, agrees to harbor the doctor. Brewmaster Emil Czaka (Gene Lockhart) is a Quisling who tattletales on several partisans, setting up an interesting double-crossing situation.
Film Reviewer Glenn Erickson said, "Lang applies the same techniques he uses in his totalitarian spy thrillers: A fast pace, cross-cut dialogue, and complicated subplots. He gives himself few showoff moments but instead concentrates on getting powerful performances in this overlapping, violent (for a film with almost no onscreen violence) chain of events." With expressionistic lighting and camerawork of James Wong Howe, "Hangman Also Die!" features the Academy Awards nominated Musical Score of fellow German exile Hanns Eisler, who had composed music for several Bertolt's plays. Jack Whitney also was Oscar nominated for Best Sound Recording.
Brecht remained in the United States until October 1947, when he testified before the U. S. Congress' House Un-American Activities Committee. From his previous Marxist-themed plays and some of the dialogue in "Hangman Also Die!" Brecht spurred staunch anti-Communist critics to claim the playwright was a commie. Hollywood studios eventually blacklisted him at the height of the Red hysteria. The day after he appeared before Congress, Brecht left for Switzerland never to return to the states.
Desert Victory (1943)
Oscar-Winning Documentary First to Capture Wide Battlefield in UK's First WW2 Win
Before the British produced March 1943's "Desert Victory," filmmakers had little idea how to cover a broad field of battle in World War Two and edit the footage into a cohesive documentary. A network of cameramen from the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, four of whom died while photographing the WW2 North African campaign, proved it could be done by capturing stirring footage of the wide ranging desert battles. Once edited, the United Kingdom Ministry of Information, who funded the film, claimed the documentary would "transform the international view of Britain" and make "an impact on filmmaking around the world." Such a pronouncement was accurate, earning the feature the Oscar for Best Documentary.
The English film highlights the Battles of El Alamein and other North African British victories in the autumn of 1942, collectively known as the Western Desert Campaign. UK troops led by newly-appointed Lt. General Bernard Montgomery turned back the German troops of General Erwin Rommel, known as 'The Desert Fox,' at the critical junction of El Alamein, Egypt, in late October 1942, This was the first victory for England against Germany in WW2. Initially there weren't any plans to make a full-length documentary with the film the British Army cameramen took. A chance meeting between the British film unit's producer David MacDonald and the commander-in-chief of the overall forces in the Middle East, General Harold Alexander, led to a discussion on what could be done with all the canisters of film reeled off on the front lines during the Second Battle of El Alamein. MacDonald told the general he favored producing a documentary, to which Alexander agreed. The producer journeyed to England's Pinewood studio to shape the Oscar-winning picture.
"Desert Victory" became an invaluable morale booster for the war-weary English yearning to witness the events on the theaters' screens they read about in their newspapers. Film historian Hilary Roberts described how the documentary proved "The Army had been transformed from a losing force into a force which could win battles against really well-trained, well-equipped troops which German General Rommel's forces actually were. It transformed the international view of Britain and it transformed Britain's view of itself so. That's quite a significant achievement for a one-hour feature documentary film."
The experienced photographers in the Army's Film Unit were required to undergo military training in case they needed to take up arms to fight in situations facing the enemy. Percentage wise they suffered the highest casualties of any unit in the British Army in WW2 while some were captured and sent to POW camps. The Western Desert Campaign was the first time in WW2 cameramen were on the British front lines. As historian Roberts noted, "Film shows and screenings were terribly important for the troops and that really gained momentum in 1943, so at the time of El Alamein itself, awareness of what the cameramen were doing amongst the troops, in general, was relatively low but the success of the film and the photography at El Alamein changed all that and it was an absolute landmark."
Prints of "Desert Victory" were sent to President Franklin Roosevelt and the military brass. Viewing its fluid camerawork compared to the low quality of static shots the U. S. photography units were producing at the time motivated the United States armed forces' film units to produced better quality footage. Not only did "Desert Victory" "have an impact in Britain," said Roberts, "but it certainly had an impact on filmmaking around the world."
The Outlaw (1943)
This Movie Changed the Conventional Thinking of Sex Appeal in Film
Howard Hughes was looking to amp up the pizzazz from actress Jane Russell. Turning to his drawing board, the producer sketched an uplifting design which proved to be one of Hollywood's more provocative marketing ploys in February 1943's "The Outlaw," a scandalous film which changed the conventions of cinema. As an aviation industrialist, Hughes, who had a passion for movies, came up with an innovative bra with curvy underwire metal supports in each cup to give his star a more uplifting look.
"Legend has made it sound like he was trying to design some kind of aerospace dynamic thing," said author Christina Rice. "But according to Jane, he just wanted to do something that was seamless, so that under her clothes it didn't look like she was wearing a bra." Trouble was, his metal-framed contraption was incredibly uncomfortable for Russell to wear. Describing the newfangled bra as "ridiculous," the actress secretly discarded the bra after she wore it for a couple of minutes, and replaced it with her own bra with padded cups. She tightened the shoulder straps to lift her top and concealed her substitution to Hughes.
"I never wore it in 'The Outlaw,'" Russell said years later, "and he never knew. He wasn't going to take my clothes off to check if I had it on. I just told him I did."
The millionaire Howard Hughes' top priority in "The Outlaw" was showing off Russell's assets, producing an edgy Western aimed at capitalizing on the actress' sex appeal. The censors at the Hays Office, through much back and forth, eventually gave its stamp of approval. Its plot featured Old West legends Pat Garret, Doc Holiday and Billy the Kid. Distributors such as 20th Century Fox refused to handle the film because of all the controversy. Hughes, a believer in the adage bad publicity is better than no publicity at all, stirred up the impression his movie was the juiciest film ever made. Completed in early 1941, he spent the next two years making headlines criticizing the Production Code for erecting barriers on "The Outlaw." Joseph Breen, the head censor of the Hays Office, submitted a letter to Look Magazine's editor placing the blame entirely on Hughes.
While all this controversy was swirling, Russell, 19, under contract with Hughes, spent the two years busy posing for publicity photos. Dubbed "the motionless picture actress," her photos in farm settings, complete with ripped blouses and hiked up skirts, emphasized "The Outlaw's" sexual allure. "The haystack images she was okay with until they were doctored," said author Rice. "She rolled into San Francisco for the premier and started seeing these gigantic billboards of herself. She was mortified and really upset."
Hughes secured a theater in San Francisco to show the movie for the first time in public on February 4, 1943. City police and religious groups in the region were highly distressed by the large provocative posters displaying a seductive Russell on piles of hay. But the publicity proved to be a major attraction with packed audiences filling the theatre. Its success spurred Hughes to distribute "The Outlaw" himself into other city venues. More than a few state censor boards created roadblocks on the showings, outraged at such questionable scenes which showed Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel) taking advantage of Rio McDonald (Russell). Frustrated, Hughes gave up on his piecemeal showings until 1946 when United Artists agreed to distribute the film. Through several re-releases, "The Outlaw" eventually took in over $20 million by 1968, an astronomical box office take in those days which more than covered its production costs.
Was "The Outlaw" worth all its hype? Its original director, Howard Hawks, left the production to handle 1941's "Sergeant York." Scriptwriter Jules Furthman eventually took over the directing reigns. "This is a drab, dreary, and slow-moving oater in just about every way," observed film reviewer Mitch Lovell, echoing what scores of critics wrote about the movie. "You know you're in trouble when the great Gregg Toland (1941's "Citizen Kane") is your cinematographer and the film still looks blah." Upon seeing the Western even Russell called it boring. Hughes had brought on board veteran actors Thomas Mitchell as Pat Garrett and Walter Huston as Doc Holliday, yet the pair, according to reviewers, weren't able to overcome the inferior direction of Furthman's as well as Jack Buetel amateurish acting as Billy the Kid .
Russell, born in Bemidji, Minnesota and raised in southern California, appeared in high school plays. Upon graduation she was a receptionist while doing side work as a model. Hughes spotted one of her photos, and on just her looks signed her to a seven-year movie contract. Her first film was "The Outlaw" as Rio, whose brother was killed by Billy. Hughes later said of Russell, "There are two good reasons why men go to see her. Those are enough." As a devout Christian, the actress didn't mind becoming one of the more popular pin-ups during World War Two, despite her lack of on-screen presence. Her next film was 1946's "Young Widow," which proceeded "The Outlaws" in nation-wide distribution, exposing her to the public for the first time on the screen. A couple of years later she was the rage of Hollywood with Bob Hope in 1948's "The Paleface," as well as with Marilyn Monroe in 1953's "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."
Jack Buetel as Billy the Kid was born and raised in Dallas and long aspired to be a film actor. As an insurance clerk, Buetel was spotted by Hughes' talent agent, who recommended him for the Billy role because of his looks. Like Russell, he was signed to a standard seven-year contract by Hughes at $150 per week. Hughes refused to loan him out when Buetel received an offer to be in John Wayne's 1948 "Red River," whose role went Montgomery Cliff in his film debut. At long last Buetel received a part in 1951's 'Best of the Badmen' and a handful of small roles before television beckoned, with his last part in 1961's 'Wagon Train.'
"The Outlaw" not only broke new ground with its sex appeal but was an early example of a 'psychological Western,' one which flipped the good guy/bad guy images of the Old West's legendary characters. Such revisionist films made outlaws sympathetic to viewers, which Buetel's characterization of Billy the Kid surely was.
They Stooge to Conga (1943)
One of the Most Violent, Yet Best Stooges' Film
Film historians acknowledge their most brutal film is January 1943's "They Stooge to Conga." What made this so unusual was Del Lord, known more for his intellectual Stooges skits, is the director rather than Jules White. One particular scene was so vicious even by Stooges' standards programmers edited it out whenever shown on TV or outright banned the entire film. The Stooges are repairmen tasked with fixing a doorbell in a house secretly harboring German and Japanese agents in charge of steering via radio waves a Nazi submarine through a nearby heavily-mined city harbor. Moe is thrusted through a wall as Larry and Curly pull on the other end of the doorbell wire, causing an actual wooden plank to crash down on Moe's head. Among other acts of mayhem is the controversial scene where Moe and Larry push Curly up a telephone pole to check out the electrical wires. Curly, wearing spiked climbing shoes, punctures Moe's scalp and eardrum while nearly poking his eyes out before Moe grabs a flame torch, firing Curly's butt to get him up there. Curly gets zapped by electrical wires as he rearranges them, and then falls on Larry and Moe standing on the ground. He's so charged with energy he powers a light bulb in one ear, only to see Moe take a screwdriver in Curly's other ear to pop it.
"They Stooge to Conga" contains an early appearance of Lloyd Bridges, in one of his last uncredited roles, as a telephone customer frustrated by his connection because of Curly's rerouting several telephone wires. And Christine McIntyre, a future regular in Stooges' films, is briefly seen as one of the phone operators in only her second movie. Moe reprises his uncanny impersonation of Hitler in his third of four movies where he plays the Fuerher, this time posing as the German Chancellor inside a framed painting while the Nazi agents enter their radio room.
Dizzy Detectives (1943)
Crazy Time in an Antique Store for the Stooges
The Three Stooges short films traditionally were shown on television during the 60's and 70's on Saturday mornings aimed at children. As funny as the three comedians were, some parents felt they were too violent for their kids. The second Stooges' shorts released in early 1943 gave them plenty of ammunition to support their case.
In February 1943's "Dizzy Detectives," this Stooges classic shows decapitations, a knocked-out police commissioner, and a three-way brawl which everyone except Curly is clonked unconscious, and ends with a gorilla blown up. Directed by Jules White, who was known for his affinity with physical comedy, "Dizzy Detectives" is strangely front-ended by a four-minute clip from the Stooges' 1935 "Pardon My Scotch," where they're carpenters. The scene is the one Moe actually was sent to the hospital after falling off a table Curly had cut in half with a power saw, causing him to break several ribs. The sequence seamlessly segues to the three as police officers assigned to capture the "Ape Man" (Ray 'Crash' Corrigan, the stuntman who specialized in dressing in his own gorilla costumes.). The ape is causing havoc in the city, but is controlled by three thugs, one who wants to be commissioner of the police to rip off the city.
The violence grows as the Stooges stake out an antique store where the ape is known to frequent. In one scene Curly is lying on a sofa napping when he wakes up to discover a hat on one of his feet. Startled, he shoots at it, clipping one of his toes off. As an early teenager, Curly was cleaning a rifle when it accidentally discharged, hitting his ankle, an injury causing him to limp throughout his life. Curly also sits on a chair rocking back and forth, not knowing there's a cat beneath him with his tail waging. Curly rocks one too many times crushing the feline's tail, causing the cat to scream while sending the Stooge flailing in fright. Later, Curly finds himself stuck in a guillotine, and unknowingly pulls on a rope in an effort to free himself, only to find its blade falling upon his neck. Moe and Larry, emerging from their hideout in a trunk, see the head of a mannequin next to them the gorilla has knocked off, thinking it's Curly's head decapitated.
Der Fuehrer's Face (1942)
Oscar Goes To Disney For Best Cartoon
Disney won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for his January 1943's "Der Fuehrer's Face." Donald Duck dreams he's in Nazi Germany working in a military armaments factory. This was the only cartoon with Donald in the lead to win an Academy Award, and it's a doozy. Donald's nightmare occurs in a dystopian world dominated by swastikas. Every breathing animal, from the bird in a cuckoo clock to a rooster, gives the 'Heil Hitler' salute. The cartoon ends in a positive note as Donald awakens from the nightmare to face a patriotic conclusion. "Der Fuehrer Face's" displays a Nazi Germany world filled with hate and brutality counterpointed by America's love for peace.
Saludos Amigos (1942)
Disney's Contribution to Closer South American Ties in WW2
Ever since the beginning of World War Two, the United States was concerned about the strong ties several South American countries had with Nazi Germany, everything from trade to cultural relationships to their many German immigrants. The U. S. government enlisted Hollywood's help in promoting ties between America its neighbors to the south. Walt Disney lent his studio to such an effort by producing February 1943 "Saludos Amigos" ("Greeting, Friends").
Under the sponsorship of the U..S. State Department's Office for Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) established in the summer of 1941, Walt and twenty of his employees, including musical composers, artists and technicians, visited South America to research the life down there. Nelson Rockefeller, head of the CIAA, felt Disney was perfect to connect his popular characters such as Donald Duck and Goofy with the Latino culture. Concurrently, the film footage shot by the Disney team showing the daily lives of those in the southern hemisphere would reflect to Americans how similar they were to the people in Latin America. When first projected such images came as a surprise to those who were expecting jungle civilizations. Film historian Charles Richard noted Disney's "Saludos Amigos" "did more to cement a community of interest between peoples of the Americas in a few months than the State Department had in fifty years."
Its timing couldn't have come at a more perfect time for Disney, whose studio was severely affected by WW2. The European market was nearly nonexistent, which had earlier provided a huge financial boast. A crippling employees strike in 1941 also created a monetary hardship. Once Pearl Harbor drew the U. S. into the war, Disney lost some of his best animators to the service. The studio turned to making military training and propaganda films, including "Saludos Amigos," consisting up to 95 percent of his productions.
"Saludos Amigos" was the first of "package films" Disney produced during the 1940s, which came in three formats: the South American travelogue, the musicals and the duopoly, feature films split into two separate stories. The Latin American films, first "Saludos," and followed by 1944's "The Three Caballeros," were immensely popular. Four cartoons made up "Saludos," each originally intended to be shown separately in South American movie theaters.
"Saludos" led off with Donald Duck meeting the locals in the 'Lake Titicaca' regions of Bolivia and Peru, culminating with his frustration in riding a stubborn llama. 'Pedro' is next in the form of a human airplane whose mission is to transport mail over the high Andes Mountains to its destination. Sensitive Chilean cartoon artist Rene Boettiger (Pepo) was taken aback at how the airplane slandered his native country, and came up with his own flying hero in his later cartoons by transitioning the airplane into a condor bird named 'Condorito,' becoming as one of Latin American's most popular animated personalities. The third cartoon was titled 'El Gaucho Goofy,' featuring the pooch as a Texan cowboy who adapts to the Argentinian gaucho way of life. The final segment is 'Aquarela do Brasil.' Donald Duck reappears along with his friend Jose Carioca, who became a very popular Brazilian animated character. He demonstrates samba dancing's intricacies.
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