Wonderland Burlesque's
Let's All Go To The Movies
She's A Lady!
Part XXXIV
Yes, sometimes? It takes a lady.
Or so these films would have us believe.
They promise lots of drama, the occasional comedy or musical, and a little bit of dirt!
Let's take a walk down Hollywood Blvd. and shine a light on these magnificent classic films.
This way, if you please. But remember...
Ladies first!
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A Lost Lady
(1924)
Based on the 1923 novel A Lost Lady by Willa Cather, this American drama was directed by Harry Beaumont and stars Irene Rich, Matt Moore, June Marlowe, John Roche, Victor Potel, and George Fawcett.
The film was released by Warner Bros. on December 18, 1924. With no prints of A Lost Lady located in any film archives, it is a lost film.
Actress Irene Rich married four times, but it's the man that got away (though he didn't get far) for which she is most infamous. She became involved in a deadly love triangle in 1949 when Agnes Elizabeth Garnier shot and killed wealthy businessman John Edwin Owen. Owen, was a former politician from Michigan. Garnier, Owen's personal secretary, killed her boss (who was married, but estranged and separated from his wife) and blamed Rich for coming between them. But Garnier quickly changed her tune. She told the district attorney that the gun went off accidentally when she was attempting to take the gun from an intoxicated Owen. Garnier pled not guilty. At trial, Rich claimed that she was not in love with Owen and that they were just friends. The prosecutor had decided not to try for first degree murder, and Garnier was found guilty of manslaughter, receiving a sentence of "one-to-ten" years. She was released from Tehachapi Prison in May of 1951 after serving less than a year-and-a-half!
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A Lost Lady
(1934)
Two days before Marian and Ned are to be married, he is killed by the husband of a woman he was seeing on the side. Marian becomes withdrawn and they send her to the Canadian Rockies for rest. While on a walk, she accidentally falls off a ledge and twists her ankle. She is found and rescued by Dan Forrester and his dog Sandy. He visits Marian every day even though she is still bitter. When it is time to go, he asks her to marry him and she accepts even though she will never love again. Back home in Chicago, Dan dotes on Marian and even builds a house in the country for his 'perfect wife'. Everything is going well until Marian meets a brash young transport owner named Frank. She rejects his advances, but he persists. When Dan leaves on business, Frank entertains her every day and Marian realizes that she may find love again after all.
Based on the 1923 novel A Lost Lady by Willa Cather, this American drama was directed by Alfred E. Green and stars Barbara Stanwyck, Frank Morgan and Ricardo Cortez.
The New York Times, critic Andre Sennwald wrote: "The present variation, to one who cannot forget the haunting beauty of the book, is like a stranger in the house. For the particular charm of Miss Cather's work was her method, and that has been rather definitely lost in the process of transition to the screen. The original lost lady was presented through the eyes of a sensitive boy. Now she walks the screen in plain sight, a woman married to a man she does not love, tormented by her need of a man she cannot have. It simmers down to that, finally, with Barbara Stanwyck, Frank Morgan and Ricardo Cortez to make a competent, unexciting and familiar movie of it. Change the title, remove Miss Cather's name from the credit line, and you have a made-to-order program film."
A review in the Los Angeles Times read: "One simply can't make up one's mind to care either about her being lost or found. The trouble seems to be that Willa Cather's story, with its deep implications, has been given a very superficial screen interpretation, with no real characterizations or psychological understanding. The heroine is an entirely unsympathetic character, an impulsive creature with no mind of her own; the hero a weak individual."
Willa Cather, on whose novel the movie was based, was so disappointed by it that she added a stipulation to her will that none of her novels were to be dramatized in any way for movie, stage, radio or television.
Buried in a quagmire of literary legal difficulties, this film was never included in the original WB library released to television in 1956. It surfaced a couple of times on Turner Classic Movies in 1994, but has never been seen since, so apparently its legal status remains uncertain.
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A Lady Takes A Chance
(1943)
AKA: The Cowboy and the Girl
Although his character in the film is named Duke Hudkins, John Wayne got his nickname "The Duke" long before. In his early teens living in Glendale, California, Wayne had a dog named Duke. They were so inseparable that family and friends called them Little Duke and Big Duke.
The film was produced for RKO Radio Pictures by Frank Ross, who was Arthur's husband at the time.
$250,000 was spent on advertising and at that time was one of the largest budgets ever used.
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Theodore Strauss remarked that screenwriter Robert Ardrey "managed to brighten up an old formula until it looks almost brand new" and wrote: "If A Lady Takes a Chance is quite continuously amusing, it is largely because of Miss Arthur's pert little ways, her prim hesitations at the wrong times, her un-cloying coyness. Quite gradually she has become one of Hollywood's delightful comediennes. Mr. Wayne, with his muscles and slow drawl, makes a sturdy partner in this romantic duet. Put down A Lady Takes a Chance as a plain, ordinary good time -which is what it sets out to be. What more can you ask?"
The Film Daily's review was positive: "Smart, clever romantic comedy should prove a box-office wow. Every moment of it is vastly entertaining and amusing beyond the ordinary. John Wayne turns in a far better job than one would have expected of him. One wouldn't be going overboard in saying it was his best work yet."
Red Kann was right: the film accrued $2,500,000 at the box office, earning a profit of $582,000.
Jean Arthur was an American Broadway and film actress whose career began in silent films in the early 1920s and lasted until the early 1950s. James Harvey wrote in his history of the romantic comedy: "No one was more closely identified with the screwball comedy than Jean Arthur. So much was she part of it, so much was her star personality defined by it, that the screwball style itself seems almost unimaginable without her." She has been called "the quintessential comedic leading lady".
So strong was her box-office appeal that she was one of four finalists for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Arthur remained Columbia's top star until the mid-1940s, when she left the studio. Arthur announced her retirement when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944. She reportedly ran through the studio's streets, shouting "I'm free, I'm free!"
Like Greta Garbo, Arthur was well known in Hollywood for her aversion to publicity; she was very guarded about her privacy and rarely signed autographs or granted interviews. Life observed in a 1940 article: "Next to Garbo, Jean Arthur is Hollywood's reigning mystery woman." As well as recoiling from interviews, after a certain age, she avoided photographers and refused to become a part of any kind of publicity.
Arthur's postretirement work in theater was intermittent, somewhat curtailed by her unease and discomfort about working in public. Arthur developed a kind of stage fright punctuated with bouts of psychosomatic illnesses. A prime example was in 1945, when she was cast in the lead of the Garson Kanin play Born Yesterday. Her nerves and insecurity got the better of her and she left the production before it reached Broadway, opening the door for a then-unknown Judy Holliday to take the part. In a 1954, she took on a stage production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, but she left the play after a nervous breakdown and battles with director Harold Clurman. After the movie Shane and her experience in Saint Joan, Arthur went into retirement for 11 years.
In 1967, Arthur was coaxed back to Broadway to appear as a Midwestern spinster who falls in with a group of hippies in the play The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. The production was an absolute disaster, eventually closing during previews when Arthur refused to go on.
In 1973, Arthur made front-page news after being arrested and jailed for trespassing on a neighbor's property to console a dog she felt was being mistreated. An animal lover her entire life, Arthur said she trusted them more than people. She was convicted, fined $75, and given three years' probation.
Arthur's first marriage, to photographer Julian Anker in 1928, was annulled after one day. She married and divorced once more and had no children. In 1979, actress Patsy Kelly said Arthur was a lesbian. Arthur died of heart failure in 1991.
You can watch this film in its entirety for free on YouTube!
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A Lady Without Passport
(1950)
There is a problem with foreign nationals using Cuba as a convenient jumping-off point for illegal entry into the United States. So U.S. Immigration Service Agent Peter Karczag is sent to Havana posing as a Hungarian frustrated with the legal immigration process and open to an alternative. By this means he uncovers the human smuggling ring run by Palinov. He also meets concentration-camp refugee Marianne Lorress, a Viennese working in a nightclub and one who has paid to be smuggled into the United States. When Karczag falls in love with her, he becomes conflicted, not wanting her to be among those he plans to have captured in his operation. So he tries to persuade her to stay in Cuba instead of being secretly flown to the United States.
This American film noir was directed by Joseph H. Lewis and stars Hedy Lamarr, John Hodiak and George Macready.
Hedy Lamarr refused to appear in the film until MGM agreed to pay her $150,000 for her work.
The film was shot in Cuba and Florida from early January through late February of 1950. Its working title was Visa but was changed to A Lady Without Passport soon after production wrapped. All the Florida scenes were supposed to take place in a hotel, but none were available, so Lewis moved the action to the Everglades.
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic A. H. Weiler wrote: "Romance is slightly more important than reason in this number, and while the scenery, meaning Havana and Florida, is authentic and picturesque, the goings-on are as intriguing as those in any garden variety melodrama. The ring of connivers who are dedicated to smuggling aliens into this country get their come-uppance but it hardly seems worth all the effort. Unimpressive, come to think of it, is the word for A Lady Without Passport."
Variety praised the film: "Beginning is a bit too cryptic for quick understanding, but when plotline does take shape, the story builds and holds attention. Joseph H. Lewis' direction spins it along expertly, neatly pacing the suspenseful sequences."
According to MGM records, the film earned $668,000 in the U.S. and Canada and $336,000 elsewhere, leading to a loss of $444,000.
Hedy Lamarr
A Lady Mislaid
(1958)
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "An attempt at a short comédie noire, this film needs a more ruthless and macabre line in humour to exploit a promising situation. Conventional characters and a flagging plot produce, instead of the witty melodrama that might have emerged, a tame piece of make-believe."
The Radio Times gave the film two out of five stars, writing: "A quaint idea and a decent cast make perfectly respectable entertainment out of an hour-long British programmer, but there's not much more to be said for it."
Phyllis Calvert
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And that's all for now, folks.
Tune in next time...
Same place, same channel.
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A Lady Without Passport - Movie Trailer
(1950)
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