Long before we got the woman-in-peril slasher films that popped up like dandelions in the late fifties into the sixties, then developed into those Halloween-type movies of the seventies and eighties, woman-in-peril movies could be much more adult, intelligent and, frankly, interesting. Like 1944′s Gaslight (directed by George Cukor).

The major difference between those films and this one is the later ones were based on shock whereas Gaslight is all about suspense — it’s a psychological thriller rather than a gore festival.

It’s a wonderfully atmospheric movie set in a foggy, dark London of the Victorian period. It begins following a murder, the death of young Paula’s famous mother. (Ingrid Bergman plays Paula.) Paula is taken away from her home and goes to live with relatives.

The movie then jumps ahead about ten years. Paula takes singing lessons (her mother was a singer) but her heart isn’t in it. She’s in love with her instructor’s assistant (Charles Boyer).

They eventually marry and, despite Paula’s anxieties about returning to the home her mother died in, her new husband wants to go to London and so she insists they move into her old home.

But once married, her husband appears to behave erratically and treats Paula almost as a child. One moment he’s kind; the next he is cruel. He justifies his harsher behavior as concern because Paula is growing increasingly unstable mentally.

She sees things others don’t see. Things disappear that she has apparently taken though she can’t recall doing so.

She begins doubting herself; she doesn’t know what is wrong with her but she becomes convinced she’s at fault.

All the while, however, there is a police inspector (Joseph Cotton) watching from a distance. The case of the death of Paula’s mother has never been solved and he believes he can crack it. He’s suspicious of Paula’s husband.

The movie revolves around the “gaslighting” of Paula, the psychological games being played on her to make her doubt her sanity and make others distrust her. (The term “to gaslight” someone gives the movie its title. It also refers to the frequent dimming of the gas lights Paula sees.)

Bergman’s performance as a woman slowly losing her mind is great — she received an Oscar for it.

Equally good are Charles Boyer as a smarmy devil destroying his wife’s mind, and Joseph Cotton as the dashing, intelligent inspector.

The movie’s look is also brilliant — it also received an Oscar for Best Interior Decoration.

It’s very detailed in its sets and, as mentioned earlier, atmospheric. It creates a wonderful mood that enhances the suspense and makes this a great film to watch.

This is by no means a great movie but, for some reason, I like it. For one thing, I love the song. It’s horribly corny, but … well, I like it. Go figure.

I think I’d call River of No Return (directed by Otto Preminger) a comfort movie. Like another movie I get the same feeling from, Father Goose, it just feels comfortable watching it and I don’t tire of it. At the same time, I can’t help having qualms because I know it’s not a particularly good film. It’s not bad, either. It’s just a middlin’ kind of movie.

And very cornball. Marilyn Monroe is a honky tonk floozy in a town in the Northwest. Robert Mitchum is a guy with some land he’s working out in the wilderness. Because of a bad guy and Indians (yes, Indians) they’re forced to take a raft down river.

Well, there’s a lot more than that. Essentially, this is an old-fashioned adventure movie with a romance thrown in. Robert Mitchum looks a bit more clean-cut than he normally does, and Marilyn is … well, Marilyn in tight jeans, saloon singer corsets and so on.

Despite this wishy-washy review, there are a couple of really nice elements to the film. One is Marilyn’s singing.

She does quite a bit of it (including a nice rendition of that cornball song I love, River of No Return) and it demonstrates what a nice voice she had and her talents as a singer.

The other element of the film that stands out is the second-unit work. The scenery and the shots that incorporate it are wonderful. Shot in British Columbia I believe, the natural backdrop is quite stunning and the cinematography is top-notch.

As part of the Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection II, the film has gone through the restoration process and the image is fabulous. Maybe a little too much so.

The problem with having such a good image is you get to see some major continuity problems, such as the changes from location work to studio. This must have been a rushed, low budget affair as a very poor job has been done matching lighting and other elements, and it’s really quite obvious.

You also get to see some omissions in the restoration process. During dissolves, you see one quality of image then, just as the dissolve ends, the quality of the image, particularly the light element, jumps to a much higher quality.

It’s almost as if once the dissolve ends, someone turns on the lights. I don’t recall noticing this the first time I watched the disc. But I did the second time. And, not being a tech guy, I’m guessing the problem is in the restoration. However, given the poor job in the filmmaking, perhaps its in how the film was originally made.

Either way, there are some technical issues with this movie that stand out.

So … This is a troubling film. I can see so many problems with it. Yet, despite that, I like it.

This film is an old favorite of mine and seeing it again after all these years didn’t disappoint. It’s wonderful. However, a cautionary note needs to be sounded.

This movie is sentimental. It’s politically incorrect. It is not Ireland. If these sorts of things get your shorts in a knot, avoid this movie.

The Ireland of The Quiet Man is an Ireland that never existed. It is loaded with every Irish cliche imaginable. For all I know, this movie is responsible for generating many of them. While it doesn’t include leprechauns, it might as well with the drunken Irish priest played by Barry Fitzgerald (Going My Way).

So what is this movie? It’s the other side of the John Ford coin. As a director, he may have been the apotheosis of the American macho Hollywood filmmakers of the 40s and 50s. Like Howard Hawks, his films were about men – stoic and tough and articulated best through John Wayne. It was directors such as these that made the western what it was, creating the formula that would be worked and reworked and improvised on in so many later films.

Despite their surface toughness though, all these films were high romanticism. They were idealized images of what men were or should be. The North American stoic is, like the cynic, an inverted romantic.

The movie The Quiet Man perfectly illustrates this. Keep in mind that this is a movie made by the same man who gave us Stagecoach, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande and The Searchers.

This time, however, rather than the spare-talking tough warrior, we see the Ford male in domestic surroundings. The warrior at home, as it were; the patriarch in love.

And if the westerns and war films are excessively tough-minded, here we see the same excess mirrored as sentimentality. Everything is idealized (hence, the Ireland we see). Everything is fantasy.

Essentially, it is a fairy tale and one that works tremendously well. A large part of the reason for this is the pairing of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara (Miracle On 34th Street). They always worked well together but never more so than in this movie.

And the relationship they have – at odds, somewhat embattled, and a bit appalling to a contemporary audience with the surface submissiveness of the Maureen O’Hara character – is thoroughly engaging.

And just to remind us we’re in the macho world, we get a brilliant brawl at the end of the film. This is the man’s Harlequin romance. And while it may be a guilty pleasure, it is a pleasure nonetheless.

Watching In a Lonely Place, I couldn’t help recalling all those English Lit classes about tragedy and the hero with a tragic flaw. This is a film noir with Humphrey Bogart playing such a character and the result is a great, if heartbreaking, movie. (It’s a little eyebrow raising to find out the set was a replica of a place where director Nicholas Ray lived and the film is called In a Lonely Place.)

This is a movie about loneliness. As with many noirs, the hero (or anti-hero) is an outsider. He’s isolated from everyone around him. Here, however, he has a chance to alleviate that loneliness, finding love with a woman he feels understands him (Gloria Grahame).

Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with a less than stellar career. He’s cynical about the business he’s in, dislikes its commercialism and goes about with a chip on his shoulder. He also has a volatile temper. The anger he carries around with him is generally repressed but always on the verge of boiling over. Often, it does.

He’s given a novel to read to see what he can do about turning it into a script. But rather than read the novel, he gets a starry-eyed hatcheck girl to come over to his place and tell him the story (since she has read it). Later, after leaving, the girl is found murdered. Steele becomes the lead detective’s prime suspect.

Steele has an alibi, however. It comes by way of Laurel Grey (Grahame), his neighbor across the courtyard. Steele and Grey develop a relationship and are soon in love. This love frees Dixon from his demons, at least for a time, and he starts riding a creative wave, writing the script he’s been asked for but, at the same time, turning it from a trashy novel into something considerably better.

But the investigation of the murder haunts Dixon and Laurel. His temper soon resurfaces and she sees this part of him. Soon she (and we, the audience) start to wonder if Steele is innocent or not. His temper certainly makes it seem possible he committed the crime.

Doubt and distrust begin to eat away at Dixon and Laurel’s relationship and it soon starts to spiral downward.

Bogart is tremendous in this movie and you could make a good case for this being his best performance. While you can empathize with him to an extent, and want the relationship of Dixon and Laurel to work, you can’t help also disliking him because of his anger and suspicions. With a personality such as his, with his emotional problems, it’s easy to see how if the relationship were to work it would soon become characterized by domestic violence.

Gloria Grahame is also perfect. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else in this role. You can see the love and fear battling within her. In noirs, she’s the ideal femme fatale. (See The Big Heat, for example.)

The movie also has a perfect ending. It has something of a twist to it but it doesn’t seem forced or imposed. Rather, it seems inevitable.

While In a Lonely Place begins with the appearance of a potboiler murder story (which I gather the book it came from was), the murder here is just an excuse to tell the the real story — the relationship between Dixon and Laurel, and how Dixon’s flaw affects and determines its end.

Note: There is also some great black and white cinematography here. Roger Deakins has mentioned this as one of the movies that influenced the shooting of Coen brothers The Man Who Wasn’t There.

There’s a heck of a lot of drinking in this movie. But there’s also a heck of a lot of fun. In fact, The Thin Man is a delight from start to finish.

It begins as a standard, noir-like mystery-thriller of the period (1934). We meet some characters, most not very savory, and we soon realize that something none-too-good will happen. And it does.

There’s a murder but we’re not sure who committed it (though we’re given some possible suspects). And there is yet another mystery which we’re not necessarily aware of yet (the mysterious Wynant) — it will develop as the film goes on.

Only after we’ve been given all this story set up do we finally meet the stars of the film, William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, the cocktail loving, free-spirited couple who, between drinks, may poke their noses into a mystery or two. (Oh yes, there is their dog, Asta, too.)

Upon meeting Nick and Nora, the tone of the film abruptly changes. The pair party, wisecrack and generally take everything that comes into their lives breezily. Everything is a passing amusement.

From a noirish piece, we’re now into a comedy. (Maybe it’s more accurate to say a comedy has been laid over the thriller — more or less smothering it. And that’s more than okay. It’s a great comedy.)

Nick and Nora are absolutely charming. They’re always witty — which is remarkable since Nick, at least, is almost always tipsy. Powell plays it perfectly, not simply with the intonation of his lines but also to getting a bit of a slur into his voice.

While there is a great supporting cast this movie works primarily because of its stars, Powell and Loy. They work beautifully together. Loy is the perfect foil to Powell since she rarely takes anything he says seriously. She’s as casual as he is.

The movie also works due to its quick pace. Remarkably, with all the amusing nonsense going on, it also manages to be suspenseful. It wraps up with one of the best “gathering of all the suspects” scenes ever as Powell’s Nick tries to determine who the murderer is (he hasn’t a clue, but he doesn’t let anyone other than Nora know that).

This is definitely a movie about dialogue, of which Powell is a master.

Roger Ebert puts it best, I think, when he says, “William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance.” (For another great Powell performance, see My Man Godfrey.)

The Thin Man is absolutely great entertainment. It still plays well and it’s easy to see why it spawned a number of sequels. Together, William Powell and Myrna Loy are utterly charming.

Take an affluent couple with little regard for anything but themselves, pit them against each other, and you get The Awful Truth (1937), a genuinely great screwball comedy. Late in the movie, Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) quotes back to her husband Jerry (Cary Grant) his own words:

“Lend me an ear, I implore you, this comes from my heart:
I’ll always adore you, till death do us part.”

While it may not be great poetry, it succinctly states the theme of the film. The Warriners are social gadflies, each apparently going his or her own way with little regard for anything else around them, including each other. (However, this may be more true of Grant’s character than Dunne’s.)

As the movie begins, it turns out Grant’s character has been deceiving his wife. He’s a bit of a cad; a bit of a philanderer. He was supposed to be in Florida but wasn’t – he was off having fun elsewhere. He takes pains to keep this from her.

As it turns out, when he returns home he finds she is not there. He’s disappointed by this and a little put out. It’s okay for him to deceive his wife, but for her to deceive him? He’s outraged.

When she arrives, he only hears part of her story. He jumps to conclusions; he assumes she’s having an affair with her music teacher. An argument ensues and it leads (rather quickly, I might add) to divorce proceedings. Now the fight is on. Through the rest of the movie, they battle back and forth trying to get one another jealous, each trying to best the other.

They get so caught up in their fight, they don’t imagine what the actual consequences will be. It’s only when each starts to realize the end result, the other’s removal from their life, that they start getting doubts.

The above sounds much more serious than it plays. The film is supremely funny. The lines are quick and witty and Grant’s pratfalls are perfect.

The supporting cast, including Ralph Bellamy (who again gets to play the dull nice guy, as he would later in 1940?s His Girl Friday), are tremendous and truly add to the film. (They always do in films of that period.)

The chemistry between Grant and Dunne is wonderful. She meets and plays off of his quickness and facial expressions with great skill and ease. She often gets the best of him in a scene. They seem made for each other.

If there is any flaw in The Awful Truth it may be the ending, which may be a tad too sentimental. It works, but it nudges at that fine line.

If, like me, you love screwball comedies this movie is a must. It’s definitely one of the better ones. Highly recommended.

Everyone has his or her favorite movie and I have mine – My Man Godfrey. It’s from way back in 1938, directed by Gregory La Cava, and is in beautiful black and white (though there are colorized versions out there). Since this is my first post here at Movie With Me, it seemed the best movie to start with.

I love screwball comedy, I love Carole Lombard and I love this movie, perhaps because both, the genre and the star, are at the top of their form. And let’s not forget the pitch perfect William Powell as Godfrey.

From what I gather, the very term “screwball comedy” comes from a performance by Carole Lombard, though there seems to be some confusion about whether it was a reference to her in My Man Godfrey or Nothing Sacred (1937). But someone, at one time, referred to a performance by her as “screwball” and the term stuck.

My Man Godfrey is a template for this kind of comedy.

Anything you could ever want to know about screwball is in this movie, beginning with Lombard’s performance as Irene Bullock, the quintessential ditsy, rich young woman, the heart and soul of this type of film. But perhaps the thing that puts Godfrey a cut above other movies is that they have not only constructed the perfect screwball comedy, they go a little beyond it with a compelling, if frenetic, romance and even social commentary.

The beautiful and the wealthy, dressed in tuxedos and gowns and all a bit “spiffed” (as Jimmy Stewart refers to it in Harvey), are amusing themselves with a scavenger hunt. The crowning achievement in the hunt is to return with a “lost man,” someone who is out-of-work and homeless due to the Depression.

One of the hunt’s parties, led by Irene’s sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick), comes across Godfrey. Unfortunately, Godfrey doesn’t receive her with the gratitude she expects. Rather, Godfrey is offended and angry at how callous and frivolous they are.

Then Irene comes along. She’s thrilled at her sister’s treatment and somewhat apologetic for how Godfrey has been treated. Godfrey sees Irene as not the sharpest knife in the drawer but more or less harmless. He sees how anxious she is to beat her sister in the hunt due and decides, why not? He’ll go with Irene and see just how frivolous and vain these rich people are.

He does, she wins, Godfrey gets to express his opinion of what kind of people the wealthy are and then … Then, Irene gets the idea of hiring Godfrey as the family butler. And he accepts!

From here on in it’s Godfrey, the one sane person in the film, and the wealthy, self-indulgent, and screwy Bullock family.

The movie excels with an extraordinary cast providing marvelous performances, including Eugene Pallette as the financially beset, ineffective patriarch of the house.

The house is like an insane asylum. But Godfrey’s presence has a calming influence, to a small degree, since he is the one voice of reason and understanding. With Godfrey around, everyone begins to become more grounded and, frankly, more human. They begin to lose their self-absorption and see the world, and people, around them.

But it isn’t only Godfrey who as an effect on others, and it isn’t only the family that is affected. Lombard’s Irene has an effect on Godfrey, seducing him with her madcap antics and her way of seeing the world. Reason alone isn’t exciting. Irene’s craziness is also vitality. Godfrey slowly falls in love.

All of this happens with a chaos of fast-paced dialogue and quick moving action. It’s a frenetic world Godfrey has entered and he is a fish out of water.

The pairing of Lombard and Powell is absolutely perfect. His droll, hang-dog look of seriousness against her constantly changing expressions of wild excitement and abject sorrow make a great contrast.

When I think of the age of this movie, I am amazed. It still does everything you could possibly want a film to do. It’s funny, exciting, and moving, and it does all this while remaining essentially simple.

If ever a film warranted the term classic, it’s My Man Godfrey. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen it. And no matter how many times I do, I always find it rewarding.

My favorite movie.