The Heiress is so great. There must be other films that are about the slow, brutal realisation that one is unloved, even by one’s nearest and dearest, and how that knowledge closes off and diminishes a person, but I can’t think of any. It would make a great double bill with Now, Voyager which has an almost opposite trajectory, ie learning to value and love oneself. Also interesting is the different traditions of acting all the protagonists –Olivia de Havilland, Ralph Richardson, Montgomery Clift, Miriam Hopkins –work in, and which Wyler prevents from clashing. Montgomery Clift is arguably at his most beautiful in the opening sequences. Wonderfully directed too so that space itself becomes allegorical (the uses of the staircase in the house). I want to explore the ending of the film more because doesn´t she in fact end up doing what her father wanted to and she herself railed against? In a way isn´t she defeated, bitter, vengeful and shut-in in her house, as her father wanted. Doesn´t patriarchy still win out in spite of Monty knocking desperately and helplessly at the door?
The Criterion is a great edition, and hidden amidst the extras is a fascinating short film on the role of the costume designer, using Edith Head’s decision making process through a film as a means to illustrate it.
One of the early three-strip Technicolor films (1938), and an action adventure classic, we visit 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, featuring Errol Flynn at his dashing, cheeky peak. We get swept up in its excited use of colour, social conscience, pleasantly laddish tone and swashbuckling combat.
Mike sees some of the film at an ironic distance, particularly the action, which he finds charmingly amateur. But while some things might have significantly changed over the last eighty years, the connection to the characters and the film’s sense of fun is intact. There’s a discussion to be had over the film’s messaging – José greatly appreciates the democratic tone to everything, the fairness with which Robin treats everybody and the grace with which he is able to accept defeat, while Mike suggests that his magnanimity would be more impactful if we were able to feel he were ever in true peril – but Flynn is simply so charming, so in control, and indeed, such a star, that the film can never sell it. Flynn conveys a certain superiority through masculinity, as José notes – he is a man among men.
The Robin Hood legend endures, this 1938 version only one of countless film adaptations, and we discuss why that might be. And there’s always room to mock Americans who try to tell English stories and get things wrong. It’s the joy of being English.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
Four’s a Crowd is Warners attempt to cash in on the screwball craze. The story was based on Wallace Sullivan’s ‘All Rights Reserved’. Sullivan had also written Libelled Lady(Jack Conway, 1936) and in fact this is a pretty direct lift of MGM’s much more successful film with Jean Harlow, William Powell, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy. This one has Rosalind Russell in a role prefiguring her Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday as a newspaper woman who sets to make a newspaper man out of rich publisher Patrick Knowles. She cons him into hiring his enemy, high powered public relations wiz Errol Flynn to boost the circulation. Flynn concocts a scam to make millionaire Walter Connolly the most hated man in America. Knowles is engaged to be married to Connolly’s grand-daughter, Olivia de Havilland. Mayhem ensues. Doberman’s chase after Flynn, partners are switched, there’s even a cute dog that looks like Asta.
It’s all pretty leaden. Comedy was not Warner’s forte. According to Alex K. Rode, at Warner’s ‘humour was an institutional deficit exemplified by the personalities of the men who ran the studio.’ Michael Curtiz knows how to visualise comic scenes. See for example how he stages the three-way conversation between Flynn, Russell and de Havilland:
or his staging of the race to the justice of the peace:
But though it all looks marvellous, the rhythm, pace and timing of the comedy is all slightly off. Flynn is not bad and could have been taught to be great in screwball — he had the requisite sense of humour about himself. De Havilland is also gifted. But Curtiz doesn’t much help anyone who didn’t already have comic timing coursing through their veins. Knowles comes across as handsome but stiff throughout. And of course Connelly and Russell steal the show. They know how to.
According to Alex K. Rode in Michael Curtiz: A Life, Hal C. Wallis praised the dashes Curtiz added in his attempt to overcome the script’s deficiencies, ‘All of those pieces of business of putting the dog under the waste basket, and getting de Havilland out of the room, and the rouge on the teacups, the added business with the skeleton…were excellent’ (p.226). They’re good ideas but, in motion, they lack the lightness, elegance, the frolicsomeness of good screwball. The frolicsome is not where Curtiz’s strengths lie.
James C. Robertson in The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz doesn’t offer much of a recommendation: ‘At Warners the film enhanced Curtiz’s reputation, for he had salvage a medium-budget project, intended for another director ((first Dieterle, then Goulding)), with some ill-cast players’ (p.46). It didn’t much matter that all that time and effort ended up with a result that was at best OK-ish.
My favourite bits, as is often the case, are two tiny moments with Franklin Panborn as Knowle’s butler.
British Imperial jingoism from Hollywood directed by Michael Curtiz, a Hungarian. If you can ignore the Orientalism, Imperialism, and the rather offensive notion that Britons ruling the world is the natural order of things, it’s a rousing, visually exciting film, with fantastic action sequences.
Constantine Verevis writes that, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade is best known for its final sequence, the charge often cited as one of the most spectacular action sequences of the Hollywood studio period’ (p. 270). The compositions are dynamic and demonstrate how well Curtiz can handle crowds in action; the cutting moves from the Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem offering exposition, to the charge, to Flynn’s friends falling one by one, to Flynn rousing everyone to keep charging ahead. Flynn even picks up a British flag at one point and waves it proudly, and he finds the evil and traitorous Surat Kahn (C. Henry Gordon, in blackface) and manages to kill him at the end, getting personal revenge as well as facilitating British forces being redirected to fight and win The Battle of Sebastopol.
The Charge of the Light Brigade is notable for Olivia de Havilland turning down the Errol Flynn character, but perhaps only because, as the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem which the film is based on and actively cites in the extraordinary battle scene that brings us to the end of the film, he is fated to die at the end.
In fact the film revolves around a triangle where Geoffrey Vickers (Flynn) is engaged to Elsa Campbell (de Havilland) who has, since the engagement with one brother, fallen in love with the other, Perry Vickers (Patrick Knowles). This romantic triangle is alternated with scenes of the rigidity and nobility of the British army, which here go hand in hand and are in many ways personified by Elsa’s father (Donald Crisp) who asks her to remember her promise to Geoffrey and complicates rather than resolves the affairs of her daughter and those of the army. In the end, Geoffrey’s sacrifice is the permission Elsa and Perry need to marry.
David Niven has a lovely bit in an early role that helped push him on his way to stardom (see below). Curtiz stages it beautifully with rhyming scenes of the moon and the sun coming up, of Errol Flynn looking outside windows for the enemy, of dramatic lighting that helps arrange space within the composition and helps set a mood. The conversation between Flynn and Niven is a good example of the easy male camaraderie that is so characteristic of Flynn’s films; touching, emotional but jokey with it, yet the humour enhancing rather than undermining the feeling behind it all. According to Alex K. Rode , ‘David Niven appropriated a Curtiz utterance from the set of The Charge of the Light Brigade — ‘Bring on the empty horses’ — as the title of his best selling memoirs (pp.xv-xvi).
The film finally made me understand why Curtiz can’t be counted amongst the greatest. It’s not hard to make an audience cry. Show a child; show the child in danger; cut to a mother perhaps looking on; and then show something awful happening to the child: The audience is inevitably drawn to tears. Here, Curtiz not only does that in the Battle of Chukoti scenes (he would so again in Dodge City) but he does it over and over again within the film. He’s completely shameless when it comes to rousing emotion: mothers are killed in front of their children, children are massacred left and right. Even the bible and the flag is brought into play. As you can see in the flashback where all the horror of Chukoti is used as a rationale for Flynn to change the order of his superiors so that he may avenge it (whilst also permitting British forces to be better deployed). Curtiz is not above hitting you over the head to bring on some tears. It’s successful but crude.
Alex K. Rode writes that the ‘picture was designed as a follow-on vehicle for Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland and to emulate the success of Captain Blood and Paramount’s The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)’ p. 187. According Verevis, ‘Despite some controversy over its treatment of animals, The Charge of the Light Brigade became the studio’s most successful film of 1936, earning in excess of $1.5 million, confirming Flynn and de Havilland as stars, and further consolidating Curtiz’s position at Warner Bros’ (p.271).
Some of the compositions in the film are minimalist, modernist, striking to the eye, and particularly evocative in motion. I show some stills, which do not quite do them justice, below:
José Arroyo
Sources:’
Alex K. Rode, Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, University of Kentucky Press, 2017.
Constantine Verevis, ‘Devil May Care: Curtiz and Flynn in Hollywood’ in R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance eds. The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz, University of Texas Press, 2018, pp.265-277.
