Tag: Edward Everett Horton

The Front Page (1931)

Original and (perhaps) best version of the pioneering cynical journalism story

Director: Lewis Milestone

Cast: Adolphe Menjou (Walter Burns), Pat O’Brien (Hildy Johnson), Mary Brian (Peggy Grant), Edward Everett Horton (Roy Bensinger), Walter Catlett (Jimmy Murphy), George E. Stone (Earl Williams), Mae Clarke (Molly Malloy), Slim Summerville (Irving Pincus), Matt Moore (Ernie Kruger), Frank McHugh (McCue), Clarence Wilson (Sheriff Pinky Hartman), Fred Howard (Schwartz)

Unscrupulous newspaper men fling fast-paced banter at each other, caring less about the truth and far more about how the copy sells. In many ways the deeply cynical The Front Page hasn’t really aged at all. Probably why it keeps coming back round again-and-again, in different forms for different eras (most famously of course, spiced up with a gender-swopped Hildy as the screwball romance His Girl Friday). I’ll make a confession – not a surprise for those who know my heretical views on His Girl Friday – it’s never been my favourite play and I’ve never found it as funny as others. But, despite my doubts, it’s hard to deny the flair and energy of Milestone’s early talkie.

Star-reported “Hildy” Johnson (Pat O’Brien) has decided the time is right to give up the newsprint game and find happiness with sweetheart Peggy Grant (Mary Brian). But his ruthless editor Walter Burns (Adolphe Menjou) doesn’t want to hear it from his star reporter. Burns is determined to drag Hildy back into the game, and the press-stopping story of an anarchist who escapes hours before his scheduled execution is just the thing to tempt Hildy away from those wedding bells.

And so we get the ultimate cynical press story, adapted from a play that practically invented the image of the newspaper man as a heartless adrenalin junkie more interested in the scoop than the truth. The Front Page is all about the process of collecting the news, and how easily and casually this can be spun into what an audience wants. If the truth does out eventually, it barely happens as a result of the journalists. In fact, our heroes largely end up pushing it because it will get them out of a tight spot and shift a hell of a lot of copies tomorrow morning.

Milestone’s film for years existed as only a bastardised version of the international print: made up of Milestone’s third choice takes and angles with re-edited lines. Restored into his original vision, it’s striking how dynamic and cinematic The Front Page is. While His Girl Friday has it beat on pace (giving us the same story and almost the same amount of dialogue in twelve fewer minutes), arguably Milestone’s film has the edge on cinematic technique. Milestone uses dynamic camera angles and set-ups to inject pace, from the long tracking shot of Burns prowling his newsprint rooms to the rotating camera that roves around the film’s primary location, the courthouse press-room.

It uses fast-cuts and zooms to great effect: the opening shot of a sack of flour, crash zooms out to reveal it’s being used to test a gallows; the ‘yo-yo’ effect as the camera bounces rapidly up-and-down to take us from one reporter’s face to another during a harried reporting scene. Milestone makes large chunks of otherwise single-location farce, come to life through witty angles and blocking, knowing when and when-not to include an actor in the frame to make a joke work. It’s fast-cutting gives it an early screwball style that further accelerates its sense of momentum. It’s a very astutely, very skilfully directed movie that feels several years ahead of its time, and certainly a whole other level above some of the stilted play adaptations Hollywood was churning out.

Even though the script has never been my favourite, it also picks up a lot of screwball dynamism (and healthy dose of pre-Wilder cynicism) in its bones. It’s chorus of newspapermen, all corrupted to various degrees, are finely delineated, each with their own clear characteristics. From Frank McHugh’s shallow cough to Fred Howard’s banjo, via Edward Everett Horton’s prissy germaphobia and half-hearted attempts at woeful poetry, they each have complementary personalities that helps the comedy spark even more. That’s even without their utter disinterest in the personal lives and tragedies of those they are reporting on, or their shameless gilding of the facts of every story (a lovely audio montage sees them all reporting wildly different versions of an arrest).

The Front Page has a strong performance from Adolphe Menjou as the debonair Burns, here embodied by Menjou as a heartlessly ambitious Mephistopheles-type, constantly throwing titbits of temptation in the way of Hildy. Milestone even films him with a Devilish-Murnau strength, popping up seemingly everywhere he needs to be at any moment in time. Add in Menjou’s suave delight in some ruthlessly amoral lines and you have a genuinely spot-on piece of casting. This is less of the case for Pat O’Brien, the sort of actor more familiar as the best friend to a real star, here showing he doesn’t quite have the charisma to carry a dynamic part like Hildy (in fact, O’Brien would have been perfect casting for the male-version of Peggy: dependable, sturdy, dull).

Nevertheless, he and Menjou bounce off each other well in a film that has more than a little homoerotic energy in it (surely the idea for the gender reverse spun from this!) Even Peggy points out Hildy seems as least as excited as the thought of inconveniencing Burns as he does in marrying her (“you’re going to marry me to spite Mr Burns?”). Hildy isn’t just a man fighting against his urge to report on any events happening around him (a potential fire sees him bemoaning he doesn’t have a camera to hand). There is a life and energy to him when riffing ideas with Burns, that he just doesn’t have with anyone else. The two of them burst into life like naughty kids in each other’s company, in a way they just don’t with anyone else.

Hildy may end the film heading into the sunset, but you suspect Burns’ scheme to bring him back (a witty typewriter ping covers a sensor banned piece of naughty language as Burns calls Hildy an SOB on the phone to an underling) is going to succeed with very little hinderance. Because these guys are made for each other and, just like the rest of the cast, they need the buzz of being in the room where it happens far more than the dull dependency of a job in advertising for Peggy’s Dad’s firm.

That The Front Page does very well and while I’m still not an admirer of a play I found overly cynical and glib, Milestone’s dynamically staged version of it may (ironically) be the best of many committed to the screen.

Lost Horizon (1937)

Capra’s well-made Utopian dream lacks any of self-awareness of the flaws in its vision

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: Ronald Colman (Robert Conway), Jane Wyatt (Sondra), Edward Everett Horton (Alexander Lovett), John Howard (George Conway), Thomas Mitchell (Henry Barnard), Margo (Maria), Isabel Jewell (Gloria Stone), HB Warner (Chang), Sam Jaffe (High Lama)

Life can be such a never-ending rat race, the idea of chucking in that relentless pursuit of fortune and glory can be really tempting. Fortunately, it turns out there is a place you can do that: Shangri-La, a halcyon Utopian community buried deep in the Himalayas. There the mountains give it a gloriously perfect climate and preserves its residents youth for potentially hundreds of years. It’s a paradise for legendary diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman), one of a group of Westerners whose plane crashes near-by, all of them invited to make their lives there.

It’s easy to see why this appealed to Frank Capra – even if his real idea of Shangri-La was Small Town America – and he poured years (and millions of dollars) into this dream project (it also took years to make back the investment). Conway is part of a group of mostly British Westerners escaping revolution in China. In Shangri-La, he’s deeply drawn to the peaceful ideology outlined by their host Chang (HB Warner) and Shangri-La’s spiritual leader, the Great Lama (Sam Jaffe). Not to mention the charms of resident Sondra (Jane Wyatt). Problem is, his brother George (John Howard) is desperate to return home. What will Robert choose?

Lost Horizon has a lot to admire about it, in among the incredibly earnest force of its telling, devoid of any drop of cynicism or irony. This is like a 101 of what to expect from Capra? It’s a celebration of the glories of living a simple, pure life without ruthless ambition and realpolitik. It’s filmed on a highly impressive scale by Capra – the gargantuan sets certainly show where the money went. Striking sequences, like a seemingly never-ending torch-lit parade of the people of Shangri-La marching towards Chang’s opulent estate, are breathtaking.

It hosts a fine parade of actors: Colman is perfect as the debonair, world-weary Conway, Horton and Mitchell make their supporting comic double-act genuinely funny (Horton, in particular, litters the film with wonderful bits of comic business using everything from mirrors to jewellery boxes), HB Warner makes a series of infodump ideological sermons more engaging than they deserve and Isabel Jewell creates a great deal of charm in the blousy Gloria. Interestingly, perhaps the most compelling sequence of Lost Horizon occurs before they even arrive, as these characters feud and panic on a hijacked plane taking them in totally the wrong direction.

But there is often something a little too pure about Lost Horizon. Even as the film-making beautifully unspools, it’s hard not to notice that for a huge chunk of this long film very little really happens beyond slightly sanctimonious speechifying comparing ‘our’ civilisation with the peaceful life of Shangri-La. In fact, it’s easy (particularly in our more cynical age) to start feeling a bit twitchy. So earnestly perfect is everything there, with a simplistic and unchallenging view of kindness and brotherly love, it starts to feel like being continually slapped by a SparkNotes copy of Thomas More. Capra uses John Howard’s blowhard George, to put a counter-view – but fills him with such ambition and desire that we are of course never in danger of taking him seriously.

Graham Greene wrote of the film “nothing reveals men’s characters more than their Utopias” before observing the design of Shangri-La resembled nothing more or less than a luxurious Beverly Hills Estate. Rarely has a truer word been spoken: this mountainous paradise, with its carefully designed gardens, well-stocked libraries, grand ballrooms and lush woodland perfect for riding feels like a slice of affluent middle-class Western civilisation in the middle Tibet. It makes for an interesting window into the film today.

Because it’s hard not to see Shangri-La as less of a land of beautiful contentment, and more as a sort of colonialist wet dream. Scratch the surface and it’s a very hierarchical community. Literally at the top of the hill, living in upper-class harmony surrounded by art, books, comfy armchairs and fine dining are the elite (all bar one of them Westerners). At the bottom, in their huts, live the Tibetan natives happily continuing their traditional way of life, happy to live and work (unlike the Chinese revolutionaries who Conway and co flee in the film’s opening) in the shadow of their betters. A smarter film than Lost Horizon might have pointed out the irony that Shangi-La is just a colony where the natives haven’t yet embraced political self-determination – but I’m not sure if such an idea occurred to Capra.

As soon as this crossed my mind, I couldn’t help picking holes in the calamitous internal logic of the film. Shangri-La’s only contact with the outside world is via a group of Tibetan sherpas who trek up and down the mountain once a month bringing supplies from the outside world – presumably its them who have trooped up thousands of books (including the complete works of Robert Conway!), hundreds of mediocre paintings and roomfuls of rococo furniture. The kindly inhabitants of Shangi-La’s palace never considered overseeing the construction of basic plumbing and power generation for the natives living in the valley below them (though they somehow recruited contractors to supply those things to their house on the hill).

In fact, the whole of Shangri-La’s world is set up on maintaining a strict two-tier system that keeps people content by making sure they never think for themselves. (What passes for education, is a series of patronising missionary-style sing-alongs). Even more chilling, the Grand Lama (a softly spoken Sam Jaffe, under mountains of make-up) has dreams of Shangri-La rebuilding global civilisation after its inevitable destruction, the whole world adopting his simplistic ideology. He means well, but I couldn’t help be reminded of Dr Strangelove orgasmically rising from his chair at the thought of creating a fascist Utopia of sexual bliss under an Earth poisoned by nuclear radiation.

None of these ideas enter into Lost Horizon’s simplistic world-view. It sticks with saying what the world needs is to be crafted into a sort of country estate, a sort of Tibetan Downton Abbey, with everyone happy with their assigned place in the chain. Lost Horizon gets as close as it can to any form of social criticism when Conway bemoans 90 ‘whites’ were saved from that opening Chinese revolution while thousands of natives were left to die. But aside from that, is exactly what it says on the tin: there are no flaws in Shangi-La.

And maybe I’m being impossibly cynical. Lost Horizon is a lovely film to bathe in for a while – after all Capra, at his peak, couldn’t make a clanger if he tried. But there is a more complex story on the edges here. If Lost Horizon had showed us more of Conway’s Gulliver-Like return to civilisation, lost in a series of spinning newspaper headlines, it could have given us more of that. But Capra is no Thomas More or Jonathan Swift. The satirical and suppressive elements under a hierarchical Utopia are alien to his mindset. Lost Horizon is a reassuring promise founded on shaky ground indeed.

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Stealing, swindling and sex abound in Lubitsch’s masterful – and influential – early Hollywood comedy

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Miriam Hopkins (Lily), Kay Francis (Madame Colet), Herbert Marshall (Gaston Monescu), Charles Ruggles (The Major), Edward Everett Horton (Francois Filiba), C. Aubrey Smith (Adolph J Giron), Robert Greig (Jacques, the butler)

“Ah, that Lubitsch touch!” It was a slogan invented by the studio (probably to help turn Lubitsch into a brand – see also “The Master of Suspense!”). No one has ever been quite sure what it is exactly – but you can’t argue it doesn’t exist after watching Trouble in Paradise. A smoother, more charming slice of Wildean wit mixed with saucy naughtiness you couldn’t hope to find. All put together with effortless, cosmopolitan wit by Lubitsch, where every shot and camera movement has been planned for maximum effect. No wonder it’s one of the great early Hollywood comedies.

It’s Vienna and a Baron and a Countess are sitting down to a wonderful dinner together. But both know all is not what it seems: they’re both professional conmen. The Baron is Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall), the Countess Lily (Miriam Hopkins) – and they can pick each other’s pockets as easy as breathing. Falling in love, they team up and head for Paris, there to relieve fabulously wealthy Marie Colet (Kay Francis) of some of her firm’s dividends. Gaston becomes Marie’s private secretary – but don’t you know it, he finds himself falling in love with her. Will he go through with the scam? And will Lily give him the choice? The answer is almost certainly not what you think.

Trouble in Paradise is so swift, smooth and gloriously comically inventive that its very existence is enough proof of that Lubitsch touch. The comic business here is so marvellously done, so hugely influential and inventive, that half the comedies existing owe it a debt. Take a look at that first sequence as the two of accuse each other of being thieves and liars, in between passing each other the salt, with consummate politeness then proceed to take part in a pickpocketing game of one-upmanship (purses, pins, watches, garters, you name it!). All shot and directed with a perfect mixture of one-take dryness, matched with perfectly chosen fluid camera movements that accentuate punchlines.

Then there’s that script (“Do you remember the man who walked into the Bank of Constantinople and walked out with the Bank of Constantinople?”). It’s crammed to the gills with sensational bon mots with more than a touch of Wilde or Coward but also a certain emotional truth (“I came here to rob you, but unfortunately I fell in love with you.”). Trouble in Paradise is an intensely suave and sophisticated film that delights in making its characters feel like the nimble-thinking smartie-pants who always know what to say, that you’d love to be, but never quite are.

It’s grist to the mill of Lubitsch, who coats the film in the three things that really makes it work: European sophistication and ruthlessly dry wit; playfully smooth direction; and more than a dollop of sex (and lots of people in this, let’s face it, are pretty impure to say the least). Sex is in fact what’s at the heart of this film: they may be criminals, but Gaston and Lily are at least as interested in getting some of that as anything else and Marie is more than a match for them.

Trouble in Paradise is pre-Code – and far racier than anything we normally expect from Old Hollywood. After all, this is a film that makes a series of perfectly timed punchlines out of a Butler constantly knocking on the wrong bedroom door to find Marie, unaware that Gaston and Marie are “spending time together” elsewhere. Gaston and Lily’s first meeting is capped with a “do not disturb” sign being hung on their bedroom door. The word sex gets bandied about. In case we missed the point, Lubitsch shoots a romantic clinch between Gaston and Marie by focusing the camera on the bed where their shadows are being cast, looking for all the world like they are lying down on it. Later Lubtisch will focus on a clock marching forward in time as we hear Gaston and Marie flirt (and clearly more than just flirt) as the time flows by.

No wonder when the Code was introduced, Trouble in Paradise was slammed on the shelf for years. It’s more than clear that Gaston has it away with Marie and Lily – and, even more scandalously, no one seems to mind that much. There is sexual liberalness to Trouble in Paradise. Marie is happily stringing along two boorishly foolish suitors (Charles Ruggles as a bluff retired major and Edward Everett Horton as a slightly pompous fop, fleeced in the past by Gaston – both very funny). Gaston feels many things, but never ashamed, while Marie seems sexually excited by the idea that he might be a crook. (Their first meeting is a simmering swamp of sexual tension.)

Lubitsch keeps the film flowing so effortlessly, it glides down barely touching the edges. The humour is spot on and perfectly delivered. At one point Lily (still disguised as the Countess at this point) phones her “mother” in front of Gaston. Her conversation is polite and giddy – then Lubitsch cuts to the other end of the call where her crude landlady is prattling bored on the end, and we realise it’s all part of a con. Gags like this have inspired filmmakers for years. You can see the root of half the screwballs that were to come in the love triangle flirtatiousness between Marshall, Francis and Hopkins.

All three of them are excellent. Marshall had few better opportunities to showcase his dry wit and sex appeal (he was so often cast as stuffy, dull husbands), and he’s the ideal arch gentleman here, with a twinkle in his eye at his daring smartness and very sexy in his confidence. (The constant shots of Gaston running up and down stairs is, in itself, a gag – Marshall had only one leg and all that running was a body double). Far from a rube, Kay Francis makes Marie a sexually curious, determined and out-going woman who knows what she wants and happily plays the game to get it. Miriam Hopkins has a punchier feistiness as a woman who can shift personae with effortless ease.

Trouble in Paradise – that Paradise being Gaston and Lily’s natural partnership – slides so smoothly from set-piece to set-piece, each of them shot with superbly smooth camera movements that perfectly accentuate their comic impact, that it continues to offer huge entertainment. Brilliantly acted, packed with superb set-pieces, it benefits above all from that glorious Lubitsch touch. Sophisticated, amoral, naughty but with a touch of heart among all the lying and cheating, it’s very funny and very cheeky and all about sex and stealing. It’s a landmark film.

The Devil is a Woman (1935)

Lionel Atwill and of course Marlene Dietrich play out the final chapter of von Sternberg’s psycho-sexual fantasies in The Devil is a Woman

Director: Josef von Sternberg

Cast: Marlene Dietrich (Concha Perez), Lionel Atwill (Captain Don Pasqual Costelar), Edward Everett Horton (Governor Don Paquito), Cesar Romero (Antonio Galvan), Alison Skipworth (Senora Perez), Don Avarado (Morenito)

The Devil is a Woman has more than a whiff of being made after the Lord Mayor’s Show. It’s an impression not helped by the fact that it takes place in the aftermath of a town carnival, with Sternberg having apparently emptied the Paramount props cupboard of paper streamers. The Devil is a Woman is the final film made by Sternberg and Dietrich, a piece of contractual obligation for all concerned. Sternberg’s career deflated swiftly after it and the entire film has an autumnal sadness about it. No one seems particularly interested in what they are making, and it finds nothing new to say or do that Sternberg and Dietrich haven’t already done, other than set it in Spain (a decision that did not delight the Spanish government).

Dietrich is Concha Perez, a beyond ruthless, heartless, scheming, femme fatale who teases and uses men for her own ends with nary a second of guilt. Her web is starting to form around revolutionary Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero). He’s warned off though by her former beau (victim?) Don Pasqual (Lionel Atwill), a middle-aged aristocrat who Concha effortlessly made dance to her tune and fund her many affairs, all while giving him just enough affection to keep him on board. Pasqual recounts his relationship with Concha in flashback – but will Antonio give a damn? Or is a duel on the cards between the two? Watch out Pasqual is an expert marksman…

For decades The Devil is a Woman was considered a lost film, until Sternberg provided one of the few copies of the film to the Venice Film Festival in 1959. This copy however did not contain the 17 minutes of footage cut from the film by Paramount (it’s a very short film, less than 80 minutes). Even found though, it’s a minor work, a little coda to seven collaborations between director and star, some of them iconic classics.

The film has all the foibles of Sternberg – and is a final indicator why this visual stylist found himself so hideously out of step in the era of the talkies. Dialogue and story are so secondary that you can’t help but notice their crudeness. When Sternberg has longer dialogue scenes, he shoots them with a cursory flatness that suggests he them over and done with as soon as possible. The passion of the film – what passion there is – goes into the visuals, whether it’s the streamer filled carnivals, the thundering rain that powers down on the duel or (of course) the sultry, painterly shots of Dietrich in luscious black-and-white.

The problem is that there isn’t really a truly striking visual in the film: perhaps Sternberg had used all his fire on The Scarlet Empress or maybe, after the disaster of that film, he was worried (or had been firmly told) that his final Paramount film had to have at least some semblance of the conventional to it. So, The Devil is a Woman is a conventional film with little flashes of imagination and visual skill – like the balloon that bursts to reveal Dietrich’s face (marksman to burst the balloon none other than Sternberg himself). It all adds to the end-of-an-era feeling that permeates the film.

The most interesting beat in the film is the feeling that we are watching yet-another on-screen playing out of Sternberg’s own psycho-sexual drama. Surely, he saw more than a bit of himself in Pasqual? The older, refined man, hopelessly infatuated with the beautiful, younger woman who drains him dry of money and prestige, but won’t commit herself to loving him? Pasqual the masochist who keeps coming back for more and more humiliation and sexual rejection? Hard not to think that there was more than a bit of Sternberg in Atwill’s performance – or that Concha’s late abandonment of Antonio to return to Pasqual was Sternberg’s own fantasy. Of course, it’s all Sternberg’s view, where he was very much the Henry Higgins. Dietrich would very well disagree.

The Devil is a Woman has its moments. Although often (despite being very short) rather slow – the long flashback-structure back story takes it time and then some – Sternberg can still find moments of beauty. Cesar Romero brings a lot more charisma and interest to the sort of handsome beefcake role John Lodge played in The Scarlett Empress. (In a bizarre advance in-joke Romero wears something very close to a Batman style mask at one point). Dietrich is given little to do other than be as cold as possible, but she manages to add depth and shade to her character. Atwill is rather good as the masochist Pasqual and the rain-soaked duel between him and Romero is worth the price of admission.

It can’t change the fact though that this is rather a sad coda to a great collaboration, an after-thought where it’s not clear that anyone was really interested in the content itself. It’s final shot is fitting: a chariot rides away into the sunset. It fits for this partnership – and effectively for Sternberg’s career which never achieved these heights again.

Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941)

Edward Everett Horton, Robert Montgomery and Claude Rains deal with death, admin and body swops in Here Comes Mr. Jordan

Director: Alexander Hall

Cast: Robert Montgomery (Joe Pendleton), Evelyn Keyes (Bette Logan), Claude Rains (Mr Jordan), Rita Johnson (Julia Farnsworth), Edward Everett Horton (Messenger 7013), James Gleason (Max “Pop” Corkle), John Emery (Tony Abbott), Donald MacBride (Inspector Williams), Don Costello (Lefty), Halliwell Hobbes (Sisk)

One of the best things about the Hollywood Studio system is that created an environment where middle-brow talents could suddenly lift themselves up to create something very special. That’s certainly the case with Here Comes Mr Jordan, the career high spot for its director and its main stars. It’s the sort of product of Classic Hollywood where everything comes together perfectly and delightfully.

Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) is a boxer with a shot at the title. An amateur pilot, Joe flies his own one-man flight to New York for the match. On the way, his plane crashes. An officious Angel, Messenger 7013 (Edward Everett Horton), collects his soul – only to find on arrival in heaven that Joe was meant to survive the crash and live for another 50 years. Unfortunately, by the time the mistake is found out, Joe’s body has been cremated. Head Angel Mr Jordan (Claude Rains) has no choice other than to find Joe another body on Earth. So Joe winds up in the body of millionaire Bruce Farnsworth, recently murdered by his wife Julia (Rita Johnson) and secretary Tony Abbott (John Emery). In his new body, Joe decides to correct Farnsworth’s wrongs, returning his embezzled money to investors and helping to free the father of Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes), who took the blame. Joe also wants to retrain for a boxer – recruiting, much to his confusion, his old coach Max Corkle (James Gleason) – and he and Bette begin to fall in love. But Joe’s destiny, it turns out, is to be the champ – and he can’t do that in Farnsworth’s body. How will Mr Jordan clean this mess up?

Here Comes Mr Jordan is a delight, a hilarious musing on reincarnation and afterlife, in which the next world is as weighted down by bureaucracy and red tape as much as this one. With neat, unobtrusive direction from Alexander Hall (who never hit the jackpot like this again), the film keeps its comic balls up in the air beautifully, while throwing in some neat observations around life, death and fate. The script bubbles with lovely bits of invention, from the Afterlife to a bureaucratic organisation to Joe’s inhabiting of Farnsworth’s body (after trying a few other bodies on first), while still appearing to himself (and we the viewers – a neat idea that the film invites us not to think about too much as Joe’s mannerisms and physicality must be completely different from Farnsworth) unchanged from his original body.

Around this the film gets some neat pot shots at big business corruption. In some ways this is a little like A Matter of Life and Death mixed with Capra. As in Capra, the humble, kind-but-not-super-smart regular Joe is the one who takes a long-hard look at the corruption and greed of Big Business and Corporate America and decides “there has to be a better way”. The kind of guy who solves major business problems simply by doing the right thing and listening to his heart. Counterbalancing that is Joe’s ongoing obsession with continuing his boxing career, from his determination to get a body that’s “in the pink” (a phrase that drives Mr Jordan up the wall) to roping in his ageing butler into a series of vigorous workouts.

A large part of the charm of Joe Pendleton lies in the brilliantly dry, witty, sweet but still a little selfish qualities that Robert Montgomery (Oscar nominated) brings to the part. Playing the part with a homespun Brooklyn honesty and simplicity, Montgomery also has a childish delight in finding he can pass unobserved as this new man (particularly funny after his initial terror that he will be “found out” any second), while his boxing obsession has an endearing genuineness to it. Montgomery, as well as getting the light comedic tone spot on (no surprise that Cary Grant was the first choice for the role – although he could never have played the working class Joe as well as Montgomery does he) he also builds a very sweet and charming romance with Evelyn Keyes (also in a career best role), who is ill-treated but defiantly assured of the importance of doing the right thing as Bette.

The whole cast is quite superbly assembled, seasoned pros, doing their thing with aplomb. James Gleason was Oscar-nominated as Joe’s befuddled manager, trying to wrap his head around incarnation. Gleason also gets some of the finest gags, as Corkle tries to interact with Mr Jordan, who remains invisible to the living – but also brings a genuine warmth and tenderness to his feelings for Joe, who he clearly sees as a son. As Mr Jordan, Claude Rains is smoothness personified, playing the entire film with a relaxed grin on his face, gleefully mixing in an obsession with ensuring the “rules” are followed, while offering a dry reaction to events such as murder. As his underling Edward Everett Horton brings his patented A-game of flustered middle-man.

Mr Jordan grins so much through the film it’s easy to forget that he’s basically the Angel of Death. Reasonable and supportive, Jordan is also blithely unaffected by death and murder. The film, among the jokes and the general air of a fairy tale, has a little vein of darkness. In his introduction Jordan is overseeing the collection of souls from some of the battlefields of World War II. Later he calmly informs Joe of Farnsworth’s murder taking place even as they speak. The film doesn’t hesitate to shy away from the details of Farnsworth’s killing – or from two further murders. It’s a little nugget of darkness in amongst the charm, and a reminder that this comedy on death and the afterlife took place while the world was tearing itself apart. No wonder death can sometimes not be as big as a deal to everyone as it is today (especially to the Angel of Death).

Because the film has a more Capraesque belief that what matters is not who we are but what’s inside. Joe will appear as Farnsworth to everyone, but eventually what people will respond to (he is told by Jordan) is the person inside not the outward appearance. The potential that Joe may have to move to a new body to fulfil his destiny of becoming the champ, doesn’t meant that he and Bette need to necessarily be apart if his heart remains the same. While the film does suggest (I feel darkly!) at one point that Joe may forget who he was originally the longer he is in a new body, the more it stresses the point that the basic qualities of his decency won’t be lost.

Its ideas like this – combined with expert telling and superb Classic Hollywood grace and skill in its shooting, directing and acting – that give Here Comes Mr Jordan a little bite, along with its comic impact. Nominated for seven Oscars it won two – and it stands to be remembered in what was a glory year for Hollywood. You might expect something rather slight – but this delightful comedy is as thought provoking as it is playful.

Top Hat (1935)

Astaire and Rogers dance Cheek to Cheek in Top Hat

Director: Mark Sandrich

Cast: Fred Astaire (Jerry Travers), Ginger Rogers (Dale Tremont), Edward Everett Horton (Horace Hardwick), Erik Rhodes (Alberto Beddini), Helen Broderick (Madge Hardwick), Eric Blore (Bates)

It’s got the sort of plot PG Wodehouse would consider a bit far-fetched. Due to a series of misunderstandings and mistaken identities (that the script executes quite a few linguistic gymnastics to keep in place, since a few words from someone would sort it all out in seconds), Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) falls in love with Broadway star Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) but believes that he is in fact West End producer Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton) who is married to her best friend Madge Hardwick (Helen Broderick). So, thinking Jerry is a cad, she decides to run away to Venice with her boyfriend, Italian dress designer Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes) – only for a confused and infatuated Jerry to follow.

Of course the entire thing revolves around Dale having never met Madge’s husband, and Madge never for a minute questioning the description of her husband (despite the resemblance he clearly bares to Jerry in how Dale talks to him) – or when Madge later “introduces” Dale to Jerry, not saying a word that could suggest they’re not married. But that’s classic farce here, and the light comedy works an absolute charm with mistakes, confusion and jealous clashes occurring at every moment. Top Hat is a superb piece of witty light froth, with some cracking lines and some great comic set pieces.

And of course, its main attraction is some superb dancing from Astaire and Rogers in probably the highlight of their long collaboration with each other. The grace and skill of these two has to be seen to be believed – as does the natural synchronicity with which they move together. With Sandrich’s camera calmly and carefully tracing the lines of Astaire and Rogers’ movements, the viewer is invited to sit back and enjoy some of the finest dancing you are ever going to see. With music from Irving Berlin – and the songs are endlessly catchy – it makes for a perfect combination.

This is the film where Astaire first used top hat (of course!) and cane as part of a dance number. The play-within-a-film musical number “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” is perhaps one of the finest displays of tap dancing in the movies, in which Astaire moves from moments of stillness into explosions of energy, mixing cane taps with foot taps, ending in a superbly funny sequence where Astaire uses his cane as a “tap powered machine gun” to playfully shoot out the chorus line behind him. It’s a set-piece that makes you believe that Hardwick’s West End show really is the smash hit you keep hearing it is.

That’s then followed by a parade of no-less than three superb dances that chart the progress of Dale’s and Jerry’s relationship – from flirtation in “Isn’t it a Lovely Day”, full of side-by-side steps that lead into a growing physical looseness, to the grand ballroom “Cheek to Cheek” which uses every inch of a huge Venice hotel set to see the two lovers come back together again after confusions (and which ends with the famous slap of Astaire by Rogers for making her fall in love with him, with Astaire’s dreamingly happy “She loves me!” after she departs). Finally the two come together for a final duet dance – after of course all the confusion has been cleared up – which is yet another triumph of two dancers working in perfect partnership. You can’t help be swept up in the excitement of watching these two masterful performers push themselves to the limits.

That’s not to overlook that the film also operates because of the charm of the two leads. Astaire is a dreamy, compulsive, slightly naïve man, passionate about the things he cares about. Rogers is a bit harder-edged, but increasingly find herself both drawn to Jerry and appalled at the guilt in believing she is falling for her friend’s husband, her shame mixed with her strong emotional attachment.

But then she also interprets some of Helen’s seeming ease with the idea of her husband flirting with another woman as a (surprisingly modern) go-ahead for all the flirting that follows. Certainly Helen doesn’t seem fussed at the idea of her husband contemplating playing away (for all that she later punches Horace for not telling her truth). Perhaps that’s because she recognises her husband is as camp as Christmas, with Edward Everett Horton living in like a bickering old married couple with Erik Blore as his equally camp butler Bates. These two bicker cattily comment on everything from each other’s clothes to their manners.

Mind you Dale’s other love interest is an equally preening – and malapropism-prone Italian dress maker (Determined that “Woman shall wear my dresses no more!” after one particular moment of stress) played with wit by Erik Rhodes. It’s possible that with a lead as un-traditionally masculine as Astaire, it was thought best to make every other man in the film even less masculine than him. Either way, the film has a surprisingly modern air of sexual freedom in it, where husband swopping seems not entirely out of the question, and the Hardwick marriage (seemingly a marriage of convenience) might as well be an open one. Don’t often get that from a 1930s musical.

Astaire was critical of the script itself at first – it’s basically an exact rewrite of The Gay Divorcee, the Astaire and Rogers film from the previous year – but everything settles into one of the most triumphantly enjoyable and funny films the pair worked on, with Astaire at his most graceful and Rogers at her most dynamic. And the dancing is a joy that will last forever.