Olivia de Havilland is no longer on board as part of the Flynn team, having graduated to Oscar-winning status and no longer on the Warner Brothers payroll.  Instead, we have beautiful and gifted Viveca Lindfors as the Spanish queen (an Austrian) married to a weak, stupid king (Romney Brent).  In the Basil Rathbone slot—the villainous duke dressed in black—there’s Robert Douglas, who acquits himself ably.  But Flynn isn’t completely without his old cohorts.  Character actor Alan Hale, who played Little John to Flynn’s Robin Hood, is back as Flynn’s sidekick, and they’re joined by Una O’Connor, cast as servants in both pictures.

As always, Flynn is enviably suave and slyly funny while causing sexual mayhem, and he’s equally at home as the fencing instructor of Madrid’s royal academy.  What keeps the film buoyant, and in the Robin Hood tradition, is its consistently light and prankish tone, not to mention its vibrant Technicolor, Oscar-winning costumes, and fairly spectacular sets, including one of the great staircases of Hollywood history.  This is no budget-conscious variation of 1930s splendor.  Warner Brothers gave Flynn, whose box-office muscle had already peaked, a lavishly mounted vehicle, admirably enhanced by director Vincent Sherman’s brisk pacing and Max Steiner’s rousing score.

Flynn and Lindfors get to play one of those irresistible loves-that-can-never be, with Flynn’s womanizing attitude tamed (temporarily) by Lindfors, his first true love.  Their impossible love is the emotional undercurrent running through the movie, while the action scenes reach their climax in the swordfight between Flynn and Mr. Douglas, up and down that sumptuous staircase.  Adventures of Don Juan is a classy, high-grade escapist entertainment.  No, it’s not on par with The Adventures of Robin Hood, but that’s no reason to dismiss it or to deny yourself its many varied pleasures.

Just as Cochran’s movie career was petering out, he got the best (and perhaps most unlikely) role of his career, the recovering alcoholic in Come Next Spring.  This lovely, virtually unknown gem was made with genuine feeling and authentic small-town ambiance, similar in its impact to the wonderful Stars in My Crown (1950).  Set in Arkansas in 1927, it is an effortlessly relaxed, charming, and touching picture.  The film opens with Cochran’s return to his family after a nine-year absence.  He had run out on them, a drunk, but has returned sober (which he has been for three years).  Ann Sheridan, another favorite of mine, another player at the end of her good years, is his wife.  They have a daughter (Sherry Jackson) and a younger son (Richard Eyer) who was born after Cochran bolted.  The thrust of the drama is derived from Cochran slowly proving to his family and their community that he can be trusted, that he is worthy of them, that he is now different.  Sheridan takes him back as a hired hand on their farm but not into her bed.  Their daughter has been mute since a childhood trauma.

Cochran gives what should have been a career-altering performance, certainly one worthy of an Oscar nomination, far beyond the limited boundaries of his stereotypically slimy roles.  He’s intensely likable here, someone we’re rooting for from the moment he appears.  His rehabilitation is deeply absorbing, so alert and alive, so poignant and open.  His best scene is a beautifully delivered speech to young Miss Jackson, about how she came to be mute following a car crash in which Cochran was driving under the influence.  It’s also lovely to watch Cochran and Sheridan fall back in love.  Sheridan, however, isn’t quite at her best, strong and low-key but a bit stiff and too muted.

Director R.G. Springsteen, a man who spent his film career making B and C westerns, crafted a surprisingly gentle and emotionally varied film.  There may be moments of sentimentality and unevenness, but this is still a rare kind of easygoing, unforced commercial filmmaking.  It’s interesting that we never see Cochran drunk yet utterly believe in his alcoholism.  The film came and went without notice, doing nothing for Cochran’s Hollywood career or reputation as an actor.  He did go to Italy, following in Anthony Quinn’s La Strada footsteps, and worked with an Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, on Il Grido (1957), a minor but effective neorealist drama, stark and simple, grim but beautifully made, another feather in Cochran’s cap that did next to nothing for his career.

Cochran died from a lung infection at only 48 in 1965.  He had spent most of the previous decade working on television programs.  You can easily enjoy him in all those Warner Brothers melodramas that play constantly on TCM, but the one to watch for is Come Next Spring, the one that shows you the Steve Cochran career that might have been.  The thing about the movies is that it’s never too late to be discovered.

Civil War-era westerns are a fascinating sub-genre, placing the war in an unfamiliar context, far outside the realm of Gone With the Wind or Abraham Lincoln.  A fine example of a Civil War western is Budd Boetticher’s impressive Westbound (1959), a Colorado-set picture about the North’s attempt to move gold from the West to support the war effort (plus the South’s attempt to foil the plan), and starring, of course, Randolph Scott.  Rocky Mountain, directed by William Keighley, is another potent melding of an intriguing Civil War plot and a turbulent western landscape.

Robert E. Lee sends a Confederate captain (Flynn), with seven other soldiers, out West to find outlaws who will fight for the South in the war’s waning days.  The men rescue a stagecoach from an Indian attack, saving a Yankee woman (Patrice Wymore, soon to be the real-life Mrs. Errol Flynn) on her way to meet her Union fiance (Scott Forbes).  Like Anthony Mann’s great western The Naked Spur (1953), this is one of those rugged films without a single scene set indoors.

Shot in stunning black and white, and primarily taking place on a gorgeous location called “The Rock,” Rocky Mountain is bookended by two outstanding large-scale action sequences:  the aforementioned stagecoach attack, with Flynn and his crew hopelessly racing to get to the coach before the Indians do; and the climactic sacrificial slaughter, in which Flynn and his men play decoy so that Ms. Wymore and others can be saved.  This massacre is brutally staged, with Flynn and his team no match for an onslaught of Indians.  (It may remind you of Flynn’s similar fate as Custer in They Died with Their Boots On.)  But the violence isn’t gratuitous, resulting in an emotionally painful and deeply sad episode, made even more affecting by the fact that Union soldiers try valiantly to aid Flynn but are unable to get there in time.  Is there another Civil War movie that ends with Yankee soldiers planting and raising a Confederate flag out of respect and gratitude for their “enemy”?

Perhaps the movie sags a bit in its middle section, but it’s consistently surprising and unusual.  Flynn was beginning to look fairly worn before his time, but he gives a solid, fully engaged performance.  (You’ll see a young Slim Pickens as one of Flynn’s men.)  Rocky Mountain is a moving western/war movie, both heartbreaking and hopeful, also scenically expansive, intellectually stirring, and emotionally intimate.  It demands attention for its fresh spin on American history, as well as for being one of the best films that no one’s ever heard of.

The good years of Ferrer’s movie career came at the start, particularly in three roles as Frenchmen.  He made a striking debut, and received an Oscar nomination in the supporting category, as the selfish Dauphin of France in Victor Fleming’s hollow and mostly misguided version of Joan of Arc (1948), with Ingrid Bergman repeating her Tony-winning stage triumph in the title role.  This may be the only time that I have ever thought that Ferrer wasn’t in a movie enough.  Bergman glows, a bit tediously as the film drones on, more a pageant than a drama, but Ferrer injects it with the zing missing elsewhere. 

Ironically, Ferrer never looked more attractive than with the extended nose he wore as the title character in Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), repeating a stage performance that had won him a Tony in 1947.  And that’s really all the film is, a filmed record of a dazzling theatre performance.  It’s an unforgivably cheap production, beyond stagy, beyond looking like a television production.  Ferrer won the Best Actor Oscar (over fifty years before Nicole Kidman got her own false-nose-assisted Oscar for The Hours), and he is wonderful as Paris’ greatest swordsman, also a soldier, poet, playwright, and all-around superman except for that nose (and his masochistic tendencies).  The biggest surprise is that Ferrer, soon to be one of our hammiest actors, gives a performance devoid of self-indulgence, and in a role so inherently theatrical!  Oh, he’s dazzling, but he’s also deeply affecting.  The movie, if you can call it that, is all Ferrer and nothing else.  It was a performance worth preserving, definitely, but, regarding that Oscar, weren’t there more deserving performances that year, ones that truly lived and breathed for the screen, such as William Holden’s in Sunset Boulevard, Gregory Peck’s in The Gunfighter, and John Garfield’s in The Breaking Point?

In 1952, who but Ferrer could have been as convincingly cast as Toulouse-Lautrec in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge?  A visually ravishing film that is far less successful dramatically, it does truly look like one of its subject’s paintings.  Huston’s work is far more impassioned regarding the film’s look than its content, and who could blame him with the riches of Technicolor so irresistibly at his disposal?  Those first twenty minutes, set inside the Moulin Rouge, are an astonishing display of color, movement, atmosphere, and flat-out beauty.  With his penchant for makeup and disguise, Ferrer was by now the Paul Muni of the 1950s, but, as in Cyrano, he is surprisingly restrained as Lautrec.  But the conception of the character is unfortunately very limited, portraying him as a quietly sad and brave and dignified (yet pitiable) man, reducing his life to a soap opera, not much different than the way Larry Hart (Mickey Rooney) was depicted in Words and Music (1948), another great talent with romantic woes because of his small physique.  Ferrer also plays Lautrec’s father, a count.  Overall less satisfying than Lust for Life (1956), the biopic about Van Gogh, Moulin Rouge is still an admirable work, and it brought Ferrer another Best Actor Oscar nomination, his final one.

Among the terrible Ferrer performances, consider the following.  In Whirlpool (1950), he’s laughable as a stud and never the figure of stylish menace (playing an astrologer/hypnotist) that the film requires.  In The Caine Mutiny (1954), he starts well, as Van Johnson’s defense counsel, but, unable to leave well enough alone, he insists on overacting his big drunk scene.  Probably his worst and most obnoxiously offensive performance came when he played Sigmund Romberg in Stanley Donen’s Deep in My Heart, in which Ferrer, not content with his insufferable acting, tried to wow us with his song-and-dance skills (the way Kevin Spacey tried, with similarly unappetizing results, in Beyond the Sea).  Ferrer was later the worst thing in the all-star cast of the mostly awful Ship of Fools (1965), this time as a Nazi.  The problem with all of these performances is that Ferrer remained outside his characters, self-consciously commenting on them while playing them, coming off as dreadfully phony.  This continued, for example, with his laugh-free performance in the backstage comedy Enter Laughing (1967).  By then, Ferrer seemed so puffed-up and self-important that he had smothered whatever sense of humor he had, incapable of being light and charming.  And if being on the ship of fools wasn’t enough, there he was as part of the ensemble of Voyage of the Damned (1976).

Ferrer also directed seven feature films between 1955 and 1962.  The best one may be I Accuse! (1958), a retelling of the Dreyfus case, another French story.  Though it’s a good, worthy version, Ferrer himself, playing Dreyfus, can’t compete with the poignancy of Joseph Schildkraut’s Oscar-winning Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola (1937).  Ferrer’s is a bizarrely unsympathetic performance, all technique in its pose of nobility.  His eyes are dead, yet he never seems anything less than immensely impressed with himself.  But, aside from his handling of himself, he did a fine job with Gore Vidal’s screenplay and the film’s host of esteemed actors, including Viveca Lindfors and Donald Wolfit.  His final two directorial efforts were, of all things, Return to Peyton Place (1961) and State Fair (1962), in which he did not appear.

Remember him for his Dauphin, Cyrano, and Lautrec (his Oscar-nominated French trio), despite the fact that, in the next several decades, he seemed to do everything he could to make us forget them.

I loathe the 3D phenomenon we’re living through.  I keep thinking, and hoping, that it’s going to end any minute now.  Aside from Avatar (2009), Hugo is the first 3D movie I’ve seen that actually makes the process an integral part of the experience.  This is an exquisitely crafted, rapturously beautiful, and ultimately very moving film, not necessarily a kids’ movie, just a movie about a boy in an admittedly fairy-tale situation.  In the early 1930s, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is secretly living within the inner workings of a Paris train station, continuing to winds its clocks in fulfillment of the job his uncle had (and abandoned). 

As you’ve heard, this isn’t “gangster” Scorsese, but, rather, “film preservation” Scorsese, with Hugo unexpectedly evolving into a poignant valentine to early film visionary Georges Melies, a forgotten and outmoded figure by the 1920s.  Broke and anonymous, Melies (Ben Kingsley) runs a toy stall in the train station, but, through Hugo’s intervention, will be rediscovered and restored to acclaim and appreciation.  With its mix of technology (the constant workings of clocks, machines, trains) and dreams (which is how Melies describes movies), the film celebrates cinema’s wondrous melding of technique and imagination, with the result that Hugo feels as state-of-the-art as Melies’ films did at the turn of the last century. 

Among the film’s highlights are the flashbacks to Melies in his glass studio, feverishly creating movies that seem both primitively stagy and astoundingly cinematic (in their camera tricks and special effects).  For lovers of film history, Hugo is an overwhelming, essential experience.  Its theme of ”fixing things,” both mechanically and in human terms, is tenderly wrought.  Scorsese pays tribute to one of the men who gave birth to the movies as we know them, and his heartfelt gratitude is felt in every frame.  But this isn’t any film-class lesson that you should see and like because it’s good for you.  Hugo, inspired by “fantastic” films made over a hundred years ago, becomes one of the more magical and transporting films of its own time.

It was Brute Force (1947), a prison picture at Universal, that placed him in the film-noir arena to which he properly belonged.  His next three films proved that he was a distinctive talent with a keen eye for composition, a gift for creating compelling and believable atmospheres, and a worldview both fatalistic and touching.  The Naked City (1948) is one of the key docudramas of the post-war era, a look at the inner workings of New York City’s homicide squad.  It’s all terribly familiar now, but this was a fresh experiment forever enhanced by its continual location photography.  Though it has a solid, well-built story, plus the bonus of the unexpected casting of Barry Fitzgerald as the police lieutenant, this is definitely a case of style over content, with the explicit realism of the actual city becoming the dominant character.  The film took home Oscars for cinematography and editing, and it’s capped with a memorable final line:  “There are eight million stories in the naked city.  This has been one of them.” 

Dassin surpassed The Naked City with the next one, Thieves’ Highway (1949), starring Richard Conte (the Italian John Garfield) as a tough war veteran, a trucker in conflict with bad-guy produce dealer Lee J. Cobb.  This socially conscious noir is a forerunner to On the Waterfront (not just because of Cobb’s casting as the villain), a tale of a man being abused by a big shot and fighting back.  It deals in cheating, violence, and revenge, and is primarily set in San Francisco among Italians and Greeks.  The black and white is stunning, the locations are gritty, the script is hard and relentless.  However, it needed more depth of character, and it suffers particularly from Cobb’s overacting and a none too plausible climax and ending.  Dassin’s direction, though, has consistent flavor and texture, and this is the rare film in which the male lead ends up with the sympathetic whore (Valentina Cortesa) rather than his blond fiancee (Barbara Lawrence), who turns out to be greedy.  

Best of the three is Night and the City (1950), a London noir with Richard Widmark as a punk and a hustler, “an artist without an art.”  Widmark actually does more running than acting here, with the film doing for London what The Naked City did for New York.  Gorgeous black and white is matched by a good, nasty plot and sharp dialogue.  The film charts the demise of a slick opportunist.  Dassin’s direction combines style with heat, bringing palpable life to a grim underbelly of society.  Widmark gives his usual hyper-intense but superficial performance, and Gene Tierney is shockingly wasted as his long-suffering girlfriend.  Herbert Lom, with his Peter Lorre eyes, is the big-time crook, though he’s not terribly scary.  It’s Googie Withers who steals the show as the rotten wife of club owner Francis L. Sullivan.  She has real bite and edginess, an overt sexuality, and a real flair for cruelty.  Night and the City is the finest example of Dassin’s ability to combine, complement, and balance voluptuous visuals with large, intense (and sometimes desperate) emotions.  It’s a standout noir.

During the blacklist, Dassin found international acclaim when he made the French heist movie Rififi (1955), winning the Best Director prize at Cannes.  He then found his greatest popularity as the writer-director (and star!) of Never on Sunday (1960), which made Greek actress Melina Mercouri a worldwide sensation as a happy-go-lucky hooker.  Dassin plays her reformer, making the picture a lighthearted version of Rain.  Yes, he proved to be a charmless, amateurish actor, but he did receive Oscar nominations for his writing and direction, while Mercouri found herself among the Best Actress nominees.  They had another notable success with Topkapi (1964), a comic caper in which Mercouri masterminds a scheme to steal four emeralds from a sultan’s dagger on display at the titular museum in Istanbul.  Peter Ustinov is expectedly and delightfully funny as the Mercouri cohort with a fear of heights, though the Oscar he won seems an excessive gesture of appreciation for what is, essentially, a typical Ustinov performance.  

Never on Sunday and Topkapi made a lot of people very happy but they were both seriously overrated, despite the admitted dazzle and magnetism of Mercouri, a formidable, irresistible life force.  Compared with Dassin’s film-noir pictures, these 60s hits seem forced, slickly commercial, and more flimsy than enchanting.  And not nearly as funny as people seemed to think they were at the time.  Dassin and Mercouri married in 1966 and were together until her death in 1994.

For the fullest appreciation of Dassin’s talent, skip his most famous movies and settle in for a double feature of Thieves’ Highway and Night and the City, immersing yourself, at a safe distance, in the dark, lurid, and shadowy pleasures of film noir.  It is as a master of this genre for which Jules Dassin deserves to be celebrated.

Crawford came out of relative B-movie obscurity to land the role of Willie Stark, a Huey Long-ish politician, in All the King’s Men, and he won his Oscar over such high-powered competition as Kirk Douglas (Champion) and Gregory Peck (Twelve O’Clock High).  Though it starts well, All the King’s Men increasingly falters, racing through its plot with insufficient character developlment, lacking the necessary depths and nuances to make it as fine as many apparently thought it was back in 1949.  Crawford is well cast and indeed formidable but he lacks fascinating transitions, devoid of the kind of subtlety or complexity that would make his larger-than-life character penetratingly human.  The problems lie more with an unconvincing script and the slack direction by Robert Rossen than with Crawford’s acting.  Though this politician’s rise and fall makes for some gritty, unglamorized moviemaking, the movie neither packs a punch nor does it live and breathe in a lifelike fashion.

Crawford’s other screen biggie is George Cukor’s charmed 1950 screen version of Garson Kanin’s classic stage comedy Born Yesterday, which gave us Judy Holliday’s ingeniously funny, Oscar-winning turn as “dumb blonde” mistress Billie Dawn (a role she created on Broadway).  Crawford is ideal as her brutish millionaire-mug lover, a junk mogul who has come to Washington to buy himself a congressman.  Crawford gets to share Holliday’s classic gin-rummy scene.  The overall film is stagy, more a showcase for Holliday than one of Cukor’s better movies, but it’s still irresistible fun, and it’s blessed with sterling contributions by Crawford and William Holden (as Holliday’s brainy, glasses-wearing tutor, the Henry Higgins to her ex-chorus girl Eliza).

If Crawford’s majority of 1950s films were of the noir-ish B variety, with titles like Down Three Dark Streets (1954) and Big House U.S.A (1955), there were also occasional surprises, such as his appearances in the all-star medical soap Not As a Stranger (1955), a big box-office hit, and Il Bidone (1955), a lesser Federico Fellini movie, with Crawford, I assume, hoping for the kind of success that fellow American Anthony Quinn had when he starred in Fellini’s La Strada.

One of Crawford’s unsung winners is The Mob (1951), a tough little film noir, a crackling entertainment that catches Crawford in his brief moment as a popular movie actor and a newly crowned Oscar winner.  And he carries the film with the confident assurance of a true star.  Stylishly directed by Robert Parrish, it’s a twisty, neatly plotted infiltration drama, with cop Crawford going undercover as a longshoreman to trap a killer.  With his mix of bruised likability and effortless potency, Crawford has an almost Bogie-like appeal.  He’s got lots of choice wisecracks, each of them well-aimed and tossed off easily (carrying on his mother’s tradition).  The film has a kidnapping, torture, crooked cops, a multi-surprise climax, all of which help to make it a quintessential 50s noir and one that deserves to be better known.

Crawford was one of the young men in Beau Geste (1939) and he played J. Edgar Hoover in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977).  Yes, he did quite a bit more than the one-two punch of All the King’s Men and Born Yesterday.  Let me add The Mob and at least call it a one-two-three punch.    

My favorite Durbin movie is It Started with Eve (1941), a film I like so much that I included it as one of the five films in my chapter “Vintage Comedies” in my book Screen Savers.  More a comedy with songs than an actual musical, it features a more adult Deanna (age 19) alongside Robert Cummings, an able light-comedy partner.  The film also afforded Durbin the opportunity to act with the great Charles Laughton (as Cummings’ father), with whom she proved to have a delightful and unexpected chemistry.  Eve is a cleverly scripted, buoyant mistaken-identity comedy, with Laughton soon pulling strings to bring Durbin and Cummings together.  Funny, genuinely warm and satisfying, it’s what is known as a real sleeper.

By the time Eve came along, Durbin had been a major star for five years, as well as the biggest box-office attraction at Universal, the studio whose prime asset had been Boris Karloff until Durbin came along.  In her debut picture, Three Smart Girls (1936), Durbin, guided by producer Joe Pasternak and director Henry Koster, became the breakout star of an ensemble cast.  (After all, the opening credits do announce:  “And Universal’s New Discovery Deanna Durbin.”)  Her singing voice was mature and clear rather than girlish or shrill, plus she had a girl-next-door prettiness and a nonchalant flair for comedy.  It’s one of those Little Miss Fix-It pictures, with Durbin the youngest of the titular trio (the others are Nan Grey and Barbara Read).  She successfully connives to reunite her divorced parents, Charles Winninger and Nella Walker.  Agreeable, sentimental, and wildly overrated in its day, Three Smart Girls is helped by Koster’s brisk, light touch and the bitchy fun provided by a fortune-hunting Binnie Barnes (whose sights are set on Winninger).  Then there’s the refreshing sight of young Deanna, claiming her stardom with enviable ease.

Next up was One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), another winner for the Durbin-Koster-Pasternak formula.  Cheerful and corny, with plucky Deanna again fixing the lives of the adults around her, this movie, in true Pasternak fashion, combines lowbrow comic sentiment with highbrow musical selections, something the producer continued in his days at MGM with Kathryn Grayson and Jane Powell, both of whom were molded according to the Durbin prototype.  Adolphe Menjou plays Durbin’s unemployed trombonist father, but don’t worry because Deanna will organize an orchestra of out-of-work musicians and soon have Stokowski himself conducting!  The film offers the incidental treat of Eugene Pallette and Alice Brady, so recently wonderful together in My Man Godfrey (1936), again (and almost identically) playing a rich married couple.  Like Three Smart Girls, it’s all pleasant enough, and Durbin’s appeal remains unforced, but it’s now hard to believe that both of Durbin’s first two movies were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.  We can accept their Depression-era popularity and their lighthearted escapism, but not their acclaim as exceptional movies.

Koster and Pasternak were also the forces behind It Started with Eve, their sixth and final collaboration with Durbin.  Her popularity started to wane after World War II, not helped by Universal’s attempts to overglamorize Durbin and put her into some inappropriate vehicles, such as Lady on a Train (1945).  But nothing dims the freshness, grace, modesty, and natural confidence of the young Deanna.  And, boy, could that girl sing!

Russell’s best film, and perhaps least typical work, is his adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1970), with a screenplay by Larry Kramer.  Russell was able to show his imaginative gifts without losing control.  Set in the 1920s, the film explores love, sex, passion, art, and death with a spirit of unconventionality that is perfectly in tune with the era in which it was filmed.  Despite the title, the men are the focus.  Alan Bates stars as a school inspector longing for a life of spontaneity and freedom.  Oliver Reed is his friend, a wealthy mine owner with a tighter, less open personality.  The sisters who come into their lives are Glenda Jackson and Jennie Linden, both schoolteachers.

Though the film never quite digs into the characters as deeply as expected, it is a colorful visual triumph, a film that plays more with your senses than your intellect.  Most famously, it features a frontally nude wrestling match between the two male stars, still the most homoerotically charged set piece in screen history, filmed in front of a roaring fire.  Over forty years after it was made, there’s still nothing quite like it.  It’s some kind of love scene, primal and instinctive, expressing an emotionally charged as well as physically connection that is beyond conscious thought or sexual orientation.  Bates also has a memorable nude walk in which he connects with nature, rubbing his body with tall grasses.  Ms. Jackson has an Isadora-like dance outside, plus she joins Ms. Linden and Eleanor Bron for a performance-art dance piece.  Though the film is dramatically limited, and is at its weakest and most forced in its final third, it still feels bold, fresh, vital. 

All four stars are excellent, but it was Jackson who got most of the praise, culminating in the Best Actress Oscar.  The role really isn’t large enough for that prize, but voters, many of whom I suspect had never seen Jackson before, were clearly impressed with her piercing line readings, electric presence, and provocative intelligence and sexuality.  But it’s really Bates’ film more than hers. 

Russell’s theatricality and his brazen flair for shocking audiences (in this case with all the male nudity) were here at the service of the material, enriching the characters’ struggles to live outside the norm.  The problem with most of Russell’s movies is that his theatricality and his desire to shock often overwhelm and suffocate everything around them, resulting in impossibly garish and mystifying works that seem more crazed and impenetrable than dazzling and innovative.  But with Women in Love he got the balance just right.

Before making the transition to directing in 1947 (with the spirited Good News), Walters’ most significant contribution to film was as Judy Garland’s dance partner in the finale of Presenting Lily Mars (1943).  He would go on to direct Garland in two of her best vehicles, Easter Parade and Summer Stock, making her one of several stars directed by Walters at least twice (and sometimes three times), among them Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, and Shirley MacLaine.  Caron (Lili) and Reynolds (The Unsinkable Molly Brown) received Best Actress Oscar nominations under his guidance.

Walters’ best film is the beguiling Lili, which you can read about elsewhere on this blog (in the post titled Lili, Gigi, Gaby, Fanny…Leslie).  It won him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, an honor never bestowed upon either Stanley Donen or George Sidney.  And look at Walters’ competition that year:  Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, George Stevens, and William Wyler.  Not bad for a hoofer!  (Zinnemann won for From Here to Eternity.)

In the same year as his entrancing and heartfelt Lili, Walters directed a different kind of classic, a camp classic called Torch Song, in which he also appears (again hoofing).  It looks as though Joan Crawford thought she was stumbling upon her very own All About Eve, playing a major theatre star, inexplicably of the singing and dancing variety.  Crawford devours this cardboard backstage drama, nasty to everyone but her fans, alive only onstage, lonely anywhere else.  You get the idea.  The character is a hard, tough, controlling bitch, acted by Crawford without any nuance or shading, merely coasting on her considerable reserves of flash.  All until blind pianist Michael Wilding comes into her life, and, well, you can guess the rest.  After guiding Leslie Caron to such an honest and beautiful performance as Lili, Walters had his work cut out for him in dealing with an object as immovable and impenetrable as Crawford is here.  On the 25th anniversary of her stardom, Crawford seems preoccupied with showing off her legs, even though the rest of her is a fright:  short orange hair, enormous face, heavy eyebrows, and a straight-across red gash of a mouth.  It was, after all, her first all-color vehicle.  (Watch for Maidie Norman as her secretary-cook, nine years before she tended to Crawford’s needs in a similar vein in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?)  It is perverse fun that Walters cast himself as a dancer on the receiving end of Crawford’s ire, when he trips over one of her intimidating gams and is told by her that he’s being paid to dance around that leg!  If Lili soared on indisputable emotional simplicity, Torch Song is mired in showy but false veneers.

Walters reteamed with Leslie Caron for The Glass Slipper (1956), obviously yet another Cinderella movie, this one a semi-musical.  On paper, it must have seemed destined to be a beauty.  However, it just doesn’t come off.  Caron may be the best acted Cinderella you’ll ever see, but she acts a little too well, making this Cinderella seem more in need of therapy than Prince Charming, kind of an irritatingly ”Method” Cinderella.  Torch Song’s Michael Wilding is the sensitive prince, again saddled with a stinker of a role, coming off as dull and sexless.  The Roland Petit ballets are turgid and unimaginative, and Walters’ direction oddly lacks rhythm and pace and sweep.  The only genuine magic here comes from Estelle Winwood as the fairy godmother, played here as an eccentric, shoplifting bag lady.  It’s an inspired, unpredictably funny and wise performance.  The Glass Slipper is what is known as an interesting and honorable failure.