Category: Directed by Lloyd Bacon

Miss Pinkerton (1932, Lloyd Bacon)

It’s not difficult to assign blame for Miss Pinkerton‘s failings, it’s difficult to identify anything good about it.

I suppose Joan Blondell isn’t bad in the lead, but she isn’t good. She’s just doing a persona. Wait, George Brent’s good. He’s the police inspector who–quite unrealistically–enlists nurse Blondell to investigate a wacky family for him. He doesn’t believe a murder is a suicide. Or vice versa.

But Blondell just walking around wide-eyed and a little flirty isn’t enough to make a movie. Pinkerton needs some kind of mystery, right?

One mystery might be why the filmmakers use the exteriors to a large house–not a mansion or estate–as the film’s central location. It’s endlessly large in the interiors, which don’t match the exteriors at all.

The supporting cast is atrocious, except C. Henry Gordon. Particularly bad are John Wray and Ruth Hall. Wray acts like he’s in a farce and Hall’s laughable as the victim’s fiancée.

The real problem with Pinkerton is director Bacon. He can’t get good performances from his cast and he can’t make the film’s weak mystery engaging. He also doesn’t seem to understand head room. People are constantly bumping their heads in Pinkerton.

Bacon’s problems directing aren’t immediately apparent because Ray Curtiss’s editing is so awful. It actually distracts from the direction until the head room issues get too obvious.

Barney McGill’s photography, while no great shakes, is competent at least.

Pinkerton‘s greatest success is being really short but still exceptionally boring.

It Happens Every Spring (1949, Lloyd Bacon)

I know nothing about baseball, but I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules to doctor the ball to guarantee no one can hit it….

The discussion of that dishonesty never comes up in It Happens Every Spring. Otherwise, it’s a nice little late 1940s Fox feature with the cast to match–Paul Douglas, Jean Peters, and Ray Collins. Douglas and Peters are particularly good, with Peters in the thankless girlfriend role that I don’t think she played often or at least, I’ve never seen her in it before. She and Douglas only have a scene together, but it makes you wish they’d done a movie together. Douglas is, of course, great.

It’s Ray Milland, as the forty-seven-year old “kid,” who comes off worst. He’s not particularly charming and the film’s incredibly dull when he’s moving the story along. It’s not even his obvious maturity that makes him so boring, it’s his distance from the whole thing. Spring doesn’t have much of a story (it fails to be either an American baseball film or a character piece), but it’s got a cast. Milland seems to have no interest in it. He’s not putting anything into the picture.

The writing is all right in spots–I particularly love how Douglas can get any piece of dialogue out and make it sound good–and it’s by Valentine Davies, who worked on The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which is great. Still, he couldn’t make this film move. It’s less than ninety minutes and it drags.

It occurs to me that I’ve only ever seen two other Milland pictures: Dial M for Murder and The Big Clock, both years ago. I don’t remember him ever impressing me. Spring does nothing to contribute. He’s just so ineffective, kind of like they wanted Cary Grant and couldn’t get him.

But Paul Douglas is great.