Movie Review: His Girl Friday (1940)

A screwball comedy with a lot to dislike, His Girl Friday tries to find laughs in a love triangle and a death row drama, and fails on both counts.

Ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) arrives at the offices of The Morning Post newspaper with her new fiance and insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) to tell her ex-husband and Post boss Walter Burns (Cary Grant) that she is quitting journalism to settle down with Baldwin. Burns wants to win his girl back and immediately starts scheming to disrupt Hildy's plans to join Baldwin and his mother (Alma Kruger) on a train to Albany.

Burns finds ways to make Baldwin's life miserable while tantalizing Hildy with an opportunity to delve into a breaking story: a sad man named Earl Williams (John Qualen) is about to be hanged for the crime of shooting a police officer, but his execution may be politically motivated to garner votes in an upcoming election. Hildy can't resist a potential scoop and heads to the prison's press room to interview Williams and investigate local political machinations.

Directed by Howard Hawks as an adaptation of the 1928 stage play The Front Page, His Girl Friday mostly consists of characters shouting across rooms, talking over each other, and hollering down the phone, and often all three at once. While there is an undoubted loony energy to all the verbal sparring, it is badly dated, surprisingly unfunny, and more often than not, quite cruel.

At the heart of the film's problems are the two acutely unlikeable male characters. Walter Burns is conniving, manipulative, self-centred, mean-spirited and singularly selfish. Admittedly the film is intended as a jaundiced view of newspapermen, but Burns is also supposed to be the main romantic interest. He instead leaves a cold, slithery trail at the core of the film. His competition is Bruce Baldwin, a meek wimpy man who does not stand a chance against Burns' buzzsaw tactics. Neither man comes close to deserving Hildy, and the romantic elements never spark in any direction.

The rest of the plot is equally uneven. The Earl Williams story descends into numerous newspapermen, law enforcement types and corrupt politicians bellowing past each other, the comedy again not working as it squirms uneasily next to themes of ignored depression, on-screen suicide, and extrajudicial state executions treated as a joke.

Rosalind Russell almost saves the film on her own with a confident, sassy display as Hildy Johnson, with enough style, smarts and instincts to keep up with fast-breaking stories and Burns' shenanigans. But the one good performance cannot overcome a stage-bound, distractingly vociferous yelling match full of distasteful characters.

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Movie Review: The Women (1939)

A stylish view of life through the eyes of an all-female cast of characters, The Women is a whirlwind tour of what occupies New York's upper class. And for the women of high society, the main topic of obsession is men.

Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) is sweet and trusting, the loyal wife of Stephen (none of the men are ever seen or heard) and mother of Little Mary (Virginia Weidler). Mary's cousin Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) visits the beauty salon to get the latest Jungle Red nail colour, and learns from the gossipy manicurist that Stephen is having an affair with department store perfume seller Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford). The news spreads rapidly, and eventually reaches Mary. Initially Mary is respectful of the wishes of her mother (Lucile Watson) to keep her marriage intact, but eventually she confronts Crystal and then Stephen before deciding to get a divorce.

Mary travels to Reno, where divorces are quickly handed out to women marching out of their marriages. On the train she meets Countess de Lave (Mary Boland), who has divorced numerous husbands, the spirited Miriam (Paulette Goddard), and the delicate Peggy (Joan Fontaine). In Reno they all stay at the ranch house of the outspoken Lucy (Marjorie Main), who readily doles out advice to her guests. As Mary moves into a new phase of her life as a single woman, there is a nasty surprise in store courtesy of Stephen and Crystal, while Sylvia gets a shock of her own, leading to new alliances among the ladies of New York.

Directed by George Cukor, working to earn his title as a "women' director", The Women is a talky, often boisterous movie. Based on Clare Boothe Luce's play, this is a story set in the salons, gyms, kitchens, department stores, fashion boutiques and living rooms occupied solely by women. And the ladies talk and talk and talk, sometimes too quickly, often interrupting each other, at other times screaming in delight or anger. Nothing happens in the film other than what is talked about, in person or over the phone, and the stories of failing marriages, sordid affairs, divorces, pregnancies and revenge are all recounted through shared gossip or conversations often delivered at a rapid pace.

And ironically for this man-free zone, the lives of the women are almost solely preoccupied by their men. Mary and her friends are obsessed with the thoughts, actions, feelings of their husbands and lovers. Liberated as they are by 1939 standards, the lives of these upper class women are dominated by continuous plans to win, please, defend, support, seduce or punish their men. Other than one gossip columnist, none of the women appear to have any jobs worth mentioning, and the precocious Little Mary requires limited parenting, leaving the women plenty of time to exchange sharp barbs and hatch men-related schemes.

At more than 130 minutes in length, The Women is packed with...women. If the film has a weakness, it's in the large number of characters, often introduced in a hurry and proceeding to contribute a ton of verbiage. It's sometimes difficult to keep track of - or care about - all the multitudes of women who have to have their say. And inserted into the middle of the film is a technicolour fashion show sequence that is both jarringly out of place and a welcome respite from the overflowing rivers of estrogen.

The performances of the lead actresses are bright, energetic and catchy. Shearer gets the most extended and sympathetic role, and is generally closest to the relative sanity of reality. Russell is larger than life, sassy, funny and ensures that Sylvia is unable to control her urge to gossip, the girl who makes the world go round until it smacks her in the face. Crawford has few scenes, but Shearer's real-life rival vamps up the screen with a claws-out performances full of naked, marriage-wrecking ambition. Goddard and Fontaine also shine in smallish roles.

The Women gently takes some humorous pokes at its heroines while celebrating their emotional strength, resourcefulness and determination. These women may need their men, but they certainly also know how to thrive in their man-free havens.

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Movie Review: Gypsy (1962)

A musical biography, Gypsy is all about Rose Hovick, the mother of celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, rather than the story of Gypsy herself. A tad self-indulgent, the film nevertheless hits many high notes.

It's the 1920s, and Rose (Rosalind Russell) is the prototypical stage mother, desperate for her young blonde daughter June to achieve success on the vaudeville circuit. Older daughter Louise is less talented and apparently not suitable for life as a star. Rose was never herself successful, but teams up with minor show business promoter Herbie Sommers (Karl Malden) and stops at nothing to place June in the middle of a tacky show that achieves modest success, with Louise very much on the sidelines.

June grows into a teenager but Rose, terrified of ever growing old, still treats her like a child. June reacts by suddenly getting married and fleeing her domineering mother. Rose is left with no choice but to turn all her attention to Louise (Natalie Wood). An unexpected detour into a cheap burlesque theatre in Kansas exposes Louise to the art of stripping: to her mother's horror, Louise stumbles upon something she is good at. She adopts the stage name of Gypsy Rose Lee and her career as an exotic dancer takes off.

Gypsy is 143 minutes long, and it's highly questionable whether there is enough story to fill two and half hours of screen time. Director Mervyn LeRoy, adapting the book based on the stage play inspired by a book, instead packs the movie with songs, most of them sung by Russell, and too many of them the same: the theme of never giving up, battling the odds, striving for success, and wanting it all is repeated in various guises. Once Rose's resolute persona is set, her songs, although generally short in duration, become predictable and teeter on tiresome.

But Rose is a such a powerful personality that the film gets away with it. The role model for any mother wanting to trample all over her children's lives to fill the void in her own, Rose is overbearing and relentless. She dupes her own father, drags her children across the country, insists on treating the teen-aged June like a baby, reacts to losing June by setting up Louise as a straight swap regardless of the gap in talent, leaves Herbie hanging for years without committing to him, and is finally resentful rather than happy when Louise achieves success. Rose's destructive blind ambition is such that any mother watching Gypsy would instantly feel better about herself.

Natalie Wood has relatively little to do but does it well. It is only in the final quarter of the film that the persona of Gypsy Rose Lee emerges from the wreckage of Louise's psyche, and Wood as Gypsy immediately brightens the movie. Finally a star in her own right and not because of her mother's incessant pushing, Gypsy shines on stage and quickly graduates from tacky to glamorous locales. That after all the years of struggle Rose sees nothing in Gypsy's success except her own left-behind agony is confirmation of her abject self-obsession.

As Herbie, Karl Malden has the thankless role of being drawn to Rose's thorny personality and holding out for the day when she will see in him more than just another stage enabler. Herbie is patient and resilient, and Rose takes full advantage.

LeRoy manages to sufficiently break Gypsy out of its stage confines, although it remains very much an artificial set-bound production. The glossy production design overpowers the attempts at recreating the grim reality of struggle on the second rate vaudeville tour scene.

Gypsy is a grand celebration of a larger than life mother, with destiny delivering a distorted realization of a dream. Yes, one of her daughters achieves stardom, but Rose never anticipated neither the art form nor the emptiness that remains when the success of others fails to conceal the failure of her own life.

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