Back Page (1934, Anton Lorenze)

It makes sense director Lorenze never made any other films after Back Page because there’s no easy way to describe the disinterested direction. Well, outside Lorenze and cinematographer James S. Brown Jr. using the same exact camera composition for what seems like ninety percent of the film. When there’s an actual reaction close-up of someone (besides lead Peggy Shannon, who gets them occasionally), it feels like a momentous occasion, like Lorenze is finally going to take an interest.

He does not.

And it’s fine. Back Page is only sixty-five minutes, which is how long lead Shannon has to carry the thing on her charm alone.

Shannon is a big time New York newspaper reporter who gets canned for doing a story about a rich guy (Richard Tucker) writing to his mistress she should kill herself and then she kills herself. Shannon just refuses to learn the first rule of newspapering—rich white men are not accountable.

Her work buddy Russell Hopton sets her up with a job out in nowheresville California running a tiny newspaper. Hopton knows the newspaper owner (Claude Gillingwater) and knows he won’t hire a woman, so it’s good Shannon’s name is “Jerry” so everyone assumes she’s a dude.

Shannon does have to talk Gillingwater into a trial run before it becomes really obvious she knows more about how to run a newspaper than Gillingwater ever did, plus she isn’t going to kowtow to the local businessmen just because.

Pretty soon—like after a terrible scene introducing Shannon to the office staff (Sterling Holloway is profoundly, exponentially bad to the point Fred Bain’s editing can be described as misanthropic for subjecting the audience to more Holloway)—Shannon discovers there might be something hinky going on with local Scrooge Edwin Maxwell and the oil well he suspiciously encouraged the town to invest in.

Also it turns out Gillingwater’s got some arrangements with Maxwell he hasn’t told Shannon about and then Hopton shows up to throw an addition spanner in the works.

Outside Holloway none of the acting is particularly bad. Not even David Callis, who starts as a buffoonish business owner but ends up being one of the better characters. A better director would’ve helped Callis (and probably Holloway) but the script is fairly tepid too.

Shannon’s reasonably engaging and always sympathetic throughout. And she and Gillingwater are genuinely cute. Shame the same can’t be said about her and Hopton. Though Hopton’s definitely the weakest performance outside Holloway.

Luckily, it’s only sixty-five minutes and only tedious for ten of them.

The Great Moment (1944, Preston Sturges)

There are a handful of “Sturges moments” in The Great Moment. I suppose I’d define those moments as the ones where the predictable or familiar filmic device transcends artifice (even if it’s as artificial as the text a character is reading appearing on the screen for the viewer to read as well) and becomes… ideal. Sturges’s understanding of how to make a comedic scene work is amazing. His pacing is perfect, the editing, everything. But The Great Moment isn’t a comedy. It’s the rather depressing story of the discoverer of anesthesia, played by Joel McCrea.

Sturges is visibly passionate about the story (the film’s thesis being the discoverer got a raw deal), but he allows that passion to blind him from his strengths. So, even while there are those good Sturges moments and the film’s generally well-written, there’s a lot of problems. First, Sturges frames it as a flashback with, presumably, bookends. But he quickly discards the framing. Second, the end… once it becomes clear the story’s got a terribly depressing conclusion… Sturges has a serious problem (there’s no, for example, great moment in the film for McCrea–I kept waiting for it, no less). It reminds me a little of Mason & Dixon. Both Sturges and Pynchon are stuck with some sense of historical reality, but Sturges didn’t find… damn it… any great moment.

But the biggest problem is with McCrea and wife Betty Field. They barely have a relationship (though they do have mostly invisible, off-screen children) and it only gets worse near the end, when Field’s become a nouveau riche would-be society woman. The film’s focus is on McCrea’s discovery and both he and Sturges do a good job chronicling the various experiments and developments. But Sturges doesn’t have a story to do it in… he’s lionizing the man, certainly not examining him, but not even acknowledging his surroundings (which is why the film has a terrible ending–Sturges didn’t see outside his strict constraints).

The film’s got some masterfully done scenes, McCrea’s performance is solid as can be (though even he can’t pull off Sturges’s all too contrived ending), and the supporting cast is excellent. Harry Carey and William Demarest (who might look a little too much alike) are both quite good, as is Julius Tannen. But Field’s most present in those framing scenes, so there’s a major hole.

I’m not sure I’d say it was a good attempt, but it’s one with a lot of integrity… another reason Sturges couldn’t pull it off–he was way too invested in it. Biopics belong to the subject, regardless of liberties taken, never to the storyteller.