Tag: Walter Connolly

Lady for a Day (1933)

Capra’s charming comedy is really a sort of proto-Ealing film, and certainly a lot of fun

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: Warren William (Dave the Dude), May Robson (Apple Annie), Guy Kibbee (Henry D Blake), Glenda Farrell (Missouri Martin), Ned Sparks (Happy Maguire), Jean Parker (Louise), Barry Norton (Carlos), Walter Connolly (Count Romero), Nat Pendleton (Shakespeare), Halliwell Hobbes (Butler), Hobart Bosworth (Governor)

Based on a short story called Madame La Gimp (probably wise to change that title), Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (for which he received his first Oscar nomination) fits neatly into his wheelhouse in one sense with its feel-good, comic sentimentality. But it also feels rather like an Ealing film made before the studio even existed. It’s a film where ordinary folks, some of them not exactly saints, with a mix of cunning and luck, run circles around the powers that be in the name of a good cause. It’s also a sharp, witty, fast-paced comedy with a happy ending. It’s a real crowd-pleasing comedy.

Apple Annie (May Robson) is an ageing fruit seller in New York City, who has seen better days but now lives in a rundown flat. But she’s doesn’t want the daughter, who she gave up for adoption decades ago, to know that. Using headed notepaper from a posh hotel, she has spun her a story for years that Annie is a well-to-do society figure in the Big Apple. So, it’s a disaster when daughter Louise (Jean Parker) writes back saying she’s engaged to the son of a Spanish count and is bringing him to New York to meet her mother. Apple Annie’s story seems doomed – but her salvation is that she is the lucky charm of rogueish gambler gangster Dave the Dude (Warren William) who never does a deal without buying one of her apples first. Can Dave ‘s money and his crew – with the help of a borrowed apartment – act out her fantasy for real?

Lady for a Day becomes a charming, fast-paced, semi-farce with Dave’s rough-and-tumble crew constantly trying to keep a step ahead of Louise’s prospective husband and father-in-law finding out the truth. They are helped by a large group of semi-vagrants from Apple Annie’s neighbourhood, all presented with an endearingly, non-patronising sense of supportive community. This leads to a constant parade of hustling their visitors from place-to-place, intercepting phone calls to the Spanish consulate and roping in a parade of New Yoick hustlers to play society grandees at a soiree. All of this while trying to stay one step ahead of the police and press, who are both convinced if the Dude is chucking this much money and people around, he must be planning a big score.

It’s the sort of charm you can’t imagine being allowed to fly even a year later: gangsters who don’t for a single-minute consider renouncing their life of making money from illicit deals (among other things), presented as put-upon, but-decent guys, bending over backwards to make an old woman’s dream come true. Lady for a Day doesn’t for a second suggest there should be a price to pay for their naughty day jobs. ‘Worse’ than that, in true Earling style, it presents the police chasing after them as dumb flat foots, hopelessly clueless and off-the-pace. Hard to believe the Hays Code passing that.

But it really works here, especially since Capra directs with phenomenal zip and wit. You could imagine a version of Lady for a Day weighted down in cheap sentimentality (in fact, you don’t need to – Capra made it in 1961 calling it A Pocketful of Miracles), but instead this is genuinely funny with well-drawn characters. Warren William is very good as the increasingly put-upon Duke, who can’t believe he’s been pulled into funding this good deed, but commits to it with world-weary resignation. He ‘sparks’ brilliantly off Ned Sparks’ rat-a-tat, cynical fixer flummoxed by his boss turning ‘Father Christmas’ but as determined to deliver on the deal as he would be on any other criminal enterprise.

And refreshingly Lady for a Day’s plot still has an air of criminal enterprise about it. They aren’t above threatening Halliwell Hobbes’ excellently dry butler with a bit of physical harm if he doesn’t play his part to perfection (doesn’t stop Hobbes getting in a cuttingly witty line about Sparks’ poor grammar). When a trio of journalists cause problems, they kidnap them (only for a few days they promise!). Difficult people are quietly strong-armed out of the way. Capra – working with a typically excellent Robert Riskin script – gets the tone just right, with just enough whimsical, Wildean farce.

This also plays into several set-pieces. The planning of the elaborate soiree is a particular gem. Packed with a parade of gamblers, tough guys and molls – all lacking even a drop of sophistication – they are carefully given a named role (one of them protests playing the Secretary of Defence – “a secretary is a secretary”) and a single line of high-styled dialogue, which they require hours of careful coaching to not fumble. The entire idea is excellent and superbly executed. Their dialogue is all provided by Guy Kibbee’s (quite excellent here) English gent-turned pool hustler, ‘playing’ Annie’s husband and enjoying a taste of the high life – while, in another memorable scene, discovering his pool hustling skills are more than a little helpful to the cause.

The film also works because it has a lovely, heartfelt performance by May Robson (Oscar nominated) as Annie. There is a wonderful Dickensian quality to Robson, with Apple Annie a Mrs Gamp with a tragic past (there are several references that she was once a lot more affluent than shifting apples on the street). Robson makes her sweet but sparky but never loses track of her vulnerability and fear that the truth may be discovered. She makes the character feel real and grounded, meaning the scenes with her daughter (which could have tipped into sentimentality) are genuinely quite touching.

It’s another successful beat in a fast-paced film that is entertaining, genuinely quite heart-warming and stuffed with excellent performances from a parade of studio players grabbing the sort of roles they wouldn’t normally get by the scruff of the neck. With its compassionate regard for the little guys, while not presenting either vagrants patronisingly or gangsters naively, it constantly entertains. It’s got a pre-Code daring about it (there is a neat joke about a gay hairdresser and a hint that Annie had her child out of wedlock, neither of which would have flown years later) and in its comic wit and fast-paced energy it’s one of Capra’s finest. Sure, it ends before Annie has to return to her previous life (and I’ve no idea what they would do if Louise visited again) but the film is as much about spinning a charming fantasy for us as it is for the characters.

Twentieth Century (1934)

A producer and his muse bicker, feud and fall in love in the theatre in this funny proto-screwball

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: John Barrymore (Oscar Jaffe), Carole Lombard (Lily Garland), Walter Connolly (Oliver Webb), Roscoe Karns (Owen O’Malley), Ralph Forbes (George Smith), Charles Lane (Max Jacobs), Etienne Girardot (Mathew J Clark), Dale Fuller (Sadie), Edgar Kennedy (Oscar McGonigle)

Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) is the biggest showman on Broadway. He can take the rawest stone and polish it into the brightest diamond. Lily Garland (Carole Lombard) is just such a stone, a lingerie model turned superstar of stage and screen. Trouble is, Jaffe is also a control freak who turns mentoring into manipulation. After three years Lily leaves – and Jaffe can’t get a hit without her. Smuggling his way onto the luxurious 20^th Century Ltd express train from Chicago to New York, can Jaffe use the journey to win Lily back?

Hawks’ comedy is, along with It Happened One Night, one of the prototype screwball comedies. In some ways its even the best model. It has all the elements you expect: lightening fast dialogue, farcical set-ups, mistaken identities, ever more overblown rows, a dull second banana as the ‘new’ love interest, ludicrous misunderstandings and its heart a mismatched couple who get more of a thrill from fighting each other than they do from loving anyone else. You can see the roots for half the comedies that Hollywood produced over the next ten years here.

The film also captures the greatest screen performance by the leading actor of the American stage in the early years of the 20^th century, John Barrymore. Barrymore’s performance is a delight –something near a self-parody – a larger-than-life role of bombast and wild-eyed eccentricity that should feel ridiculously over-blown, but actually really works. Jaffe is a force-of-nature, and that’s the performance Barrymore gives. He hurls himself into the fast-paced dialogue, delights in the physical comedy (from prat falls to swooning fits) and he gives the film most of its understanding of the mechanics of theatre (Hawks famously said he knew nothing about it). It’s a delightful, hilarious comic performance.

He’s well matched by a star-making turn from Carole Lombard, in one of her first roles. Initially overawed by working with Barrymore, Hawks coached Lombard to worry less about “acting” and to focus more on bringing her natural sharp-edged comedic instincts to the film. Something she does to huge success: you can feel the performance getting larger, wilder and more hysterically funny as the film goes on. By the time she’s half playfully, half furiously kicking at Barrymore’s stomach during one late argument in a train compartment, we’ve seen a brilliant comic actress find her stride. Lily goes from a talentless ingenue to a grand dame of stage and screen – but never loses (only conceals) her chippy rumbustiousness nature.

It’s all wrapped up in a neat parody of the artificial, overblown, performative nature of acting and theatrical types. These two are always putting on a show: either for themselves or for each other. Everything is filtered through their understanding of scripts and stories and their trade has made them artificial and unnatural people. If they feel larger-than-life, its because small intimacies don’t shift seats in the theatre. And the theatre is of course the real calling of an actor – not those shabby temptations of the big screen.

Not that the theatre is really that different. The film is book-ended by rehearsals for two almost identical Jaffe productions. Both of them are feeble Southern Belle dramas, with shock murders, deferential servants and stuffed with secrets and lies and plot reveals which could have been thrown together by chimps with typewriters. Between these, Jaffe stages a ghastly sounding Joan of Arc play and flirts with the most tasteless Life of Jesus play you could imagine (with an all-singing, all-dancing role for Lily as Mary). But then art seems to be less important than exhibitionism to these guys.

It’s not as if Jaffe’s style is designed to explore depth of character with his actors. For all his fine words in rehearsals, Jaffe is soon drawing chalk lines on the floor to tell Lily exactly where to stand on every line (the floor soon resembles a spider’s web of crossed lines and numbers) and finally gets the scream he wants from her in a scene by sticking a pin in her derriere. Lily is both infuriated and delighted by these methods – she keeps the pin as a treasured totem for years – but it’s clear acting is really an excuse for all the attention seeking screaming and shouting that they do anyway.

Twentieth Century makes for a neat little satire on the artificial nature of some acting, but at heart its mostly a very fast-paced, witty film that bottles two cracker-jack performers who engage in a game of one-up-manship to see who can deliver the wildest, hammiest and most entertaining line readings. Hawks directs with a confident assurance and the train-based finale (it does take nearly half the film to board the eponymous train) is a perfectly staged farcical comedy of entrances, exits and misunderstandings. The film itself is as theatrical as the personalities of its lead characters – and all the more delightful for it.

It Happened One Night (1934)

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert as the original odd-couple who find love in It Happened One Night

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: Clark Gable (Peter Warne), Claudette Colbert (Ellie Andrews), Walter Connolly (Alexander Andrews), Roscoe Karns (Oscar Shapeley), Jameson Thomas (“King” Westley), Alan Hale (Danker), Arthur Hoyt (Zeke), Blanche Friderici (Zeke’s wife), Charles G Wilson (Joe Gordon)

Two contrasting people thrown together over a set period of time, at first rub each other up the wrong way but then, doncha know it, frustration turns to love and suddenly we’re nervously watching to see if a last minute complication will throw a spanner into the works. If it sounds like a classic set-up – that’s because it is. Where did you think the set-up came from? Capra’s comedy – which scooped the Big Five at the Oscars (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay) is one of the most influential films ever made – and one of the funniest and sharpest examples of great film-making from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

“Daughter escaped again, watch all roads, airports, and railway stations in Miami.” Heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) has eloped with daring-but-dull flying ace “King” Westley (Jameson Thomas) but her father Alexander (Walter Connolly) won’t wear it as he’s sure Westley is only after her money. So, Ellie literally jumps ship in Florida (swimming to shore from her father’s yacht, she’s got some guts that girl) and decides to make her way to New York to reunite with her husband. Hopping on a Greyhound bus to New York, she meets recently fired New York reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and, after a series of unfortunate incidents, the two of them end up penniless and travelling across America together. Will their waspish banter blossom into something else?

It Happened One Night is so delightful, as soon as its finished, you fancy skipping back and watch it again. It’s such a brilliant, sexy, romantic comedy it’s odd to think nearly everyone involved wasn’t even sure they wanted to do it. Re-named from the less catchy Night Bus (and who cares if the film actually takes place over several nights), it was rushed into production to take advantage of Colbert’s availability (she only agreed to do it if it filming took four weeks). Gable was loaned out by MGM against his will. Capra and Colbert didn’t really get in and screenwriter Robert Riskin re-wrote the script on set. If you ever needed proof adversity leads to a classic, take a look at this.

It Happened One Night beautifully charts how two mismatched people can be surprised by how much in common they have. Both are, in their own way, fiercely independent. Ellie will marry the man she wants, and hang the consequences. Peter gets the spike permanently because his unique way of doing things doesn’t fit with his editor. They are both quick-witted people with dreams who don’t suffer fools. At first she thinks he’s smug (and in a way he is), he feels she’s entitled (after all its day two before she asks his name). But they bounce off each other from the start, each an equal match for wit (not to mention they both clearly fancy the pants off each immediately).

What’s going to bring the “walls of Jericho” tumbling down between these two? Forced into sharing a hotel room at night, Peter astounds Ellie’s expectations by throwing a sheet up between them, their own little wall of Jericho. Colbert judges perfectly this scene how Ellie’s exasperation also mixes with something pretty close to disappointment. After all she’s already cuddled up to Peter, sleeping on the bus – and Peter in no way objected. Later, in a mirroring hotel room scene Peter will speak openly about how he’s longed for a woman with freedom and spirit (and Gable does this with a beautiful wistfulness) – exactly the qualities he has seen grow in Ellie over their days together.

What works wonderfully is how naturally this relationship becomes first a friendship, then something deeper. Improvising a marital argument, pretending to be a plumber and his wife to put detectives off her scent, they complement each other perfectly. What’s fabulous about this scene, is that (to their surprise) they are equally delighted by how smart and witty the other is. Their gleeful giggling is not only very sweet, but also the start of a new chapter in their relationship. The scene culminates with one of the few moments of intimacy on film involving clothes going on, as Peter helps Ellie button up her blouse.

What’s endearing about them – helped by Riskin’s sparkling dialogue – is how they settle into ‘roles’ and eagerly bounce off each other. Peter increasingly effects a parody of self-importance, claiming to be a world expert on everything from donot dunking to hitchhiking. Ellie gleefully punctures his grandiose claims, but enjoys playing up to her own image of the heiress, at sea in the real world. This is how real people fall in love – and the film is confident enough to have them exchange private jokes we can’t hear on the backseat of a car. It’s gloriously romantic because it feels true.

Gable and Colbert’s chemistry is scintillating. Both are supremely funny, but also grounded. When they lark about they feel like real-life sweethearts. Colbert gives Ellie a wonderful vulnerability under the self-entitlement. She’s snappy and quick-witted but confused and even a bit frightened by her growing feelings. Gable’s easy charm also has a slight chip on his shoulder: but he’s also laid-back and more than willing to look silly, proud but self-aware with it. He’s also a hugely adept physical comedian (his demonstration of how to hitch-hike is hilarious).

Moments have passed into film lore. Gable’s extraordinarily silly hitch-hiking routine, cars streaming past, until Colbert flashes a bit of leg. This is a beautifully staged scene, a cheeky bit of sexuality a brilliant punchline to an extended showcase for Gable’s comic timing and Colbert’s reactive skills and composure. The dialogue exchanges between the two are superbly delivered. The film was a massive sleeper hit – it even has one of the best examples of reverse product placement, when the reveal Gable’s character didn’t wear an undershirt allegedly led to sales of that garment plummeting.

The direction from Capra is spot-on, classic Hollywood but mixed with some beautiful framing and some dynamic camera movements, including some lovely tracking shots particularly through the bus (Capra’s visual direction in a confined space here doesn’t get enough credit). Capra also ensures we don’t forget this was the time of depression: money is tight for everyone, many of those on the bus are desperate for work and the out-of-touch affluence of Ellie rightly raises heckles.

Above all, Capra creates a hugely sweet romance – with lashings of sexy chemistry but not a jot of sex. Wipes and fast transitions keep the pace up. The dialogue pacing is perfect. He uses light wonderfully: in the two hotel room scenes, light carefully divides up and then unifies our two leads, dancing off their Ellie’s eyes and reflecting how they are beginning to see each other in a new light. It has a reputation as a screwball comedy, but really its a carefully paced character comedy, where Capra lets the relationship flourish organically from scene-to-scene (only Peter’s “hold-the-press” editor and irritating fellow bus rider Shapely – the inspiration for Bugs Bunny – are characters who could walk into screwball unchanged).

Above all, he draws fresh, relaxed and emotional performances from the two leads. The bond between them has been so comfortably formed – and resonates so strongly – that the film can get away with being possibly the only romantic comedy in history where the couple never kiss and don’t share the screen in the final act. It’s a film where two characters bantering and sharing heartfelt truths, sleeping in separate beds on opposite sides of a sheet has more sexiness and emotion to it than a world of rumpy-pumpy. It Happened One Night is just about the perfect romantic comedy, oft-imitated but never-bettered. You’ll want to watch it again as soon as it finishes.