Tag: Gale Sondergaard

The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944, Ford Beebe)

When Leon Errol saves lead Jon Hall from drowning, even though they’ve previously established The Invisible Man’s Revenge takes place in England, I was sure they’d teleported to Australia. Errol is very Australian. Openly Australian. He’s also the closest thing to amusing as Revenge gets.

Despite being the fourth in the series, starring the same lead as the last entry with the same family name, The Invisible Man’s Revenge is unconnected to the previous entries. It opens with Hall getting to England. He’s escaped a South African mental hospital, murdering his way through interns to freedom. We don’t see any of the murdering, it’s just in a newspaper clipping after we get some of Hall behaving peculiarly while buying a new suit. The suit buying sequence, much like the one where Errol tries to shake down English lord Lester Matthews, is just filler; Revenge runs under eighty minutes and it needs lots of filler.

It’s hard to pick on the script too much given the context—Hall’s a terrible lead, no better script is going to help him out. Beebe’s direction is middling. The special effects aren’t great. They have a few better moments and a few worse moments, but the only memorable Invisible Man set piece is Errol playing darts and naked and invisible Hall running them over to the dart board for the bullseye. The other big set piece involves Hall attacking romantic nemesis Alan Curtis in a dark wine cellar; the lights are out so they don’t have to do any Invisible Man effects. It’s a rather lackluster finish.

Curtis isn’t very good either. So Curtis is bad. Hall’s bad. Matthews isn’t good. See, years ago Matthews and wife Gale Sondergaard (who apparently quit the movie halfway through when she decided it got too stupid; she just vanishes, never mentioned again) were on a diamond expedition with Hall. He bumped his head, fell unconscious, they abandoned him, heard he was dead, took his stake in the diamond mine, but now he’s back and they don’t want to pay up. Not only does he want his money, he wants their daughter, Evelyn Ankers, who’s barely in the movie—like she too knew better—but there’s the definite implication Matthews and Sondergaard promised her to him. Even though they’d never met. There’s also the not zero chance Matthews and Sondergaard did try to have him killed. They certainly did the second time around. Or maybe Sondergaard just thought she was in a different movie.

John Carradine is fine as the scientist who makes his pets invisible then convinces Hall to try the serum. The film’s only got the one screenwriter—Bertram Millhauser—credited but between Sondergaard’s disappearance and Carradine’s change of behavior, it really seems like someone else fixed up the second half. Or at least changed it. It’s hard to say if it’s a fix. Because Carradine goes from encouraging Hall to get invisible so he can murder the rich people who pissed him off, but then when Hall wants help in that mission, Carradine has forgotten how he convinced Hall to do the serum in the first place.

Again, not a competent script, but also again… what help would a competent script have been.

Actually impressive photography from Milton R. Krasner—the one scene with day-for-night is excellent—is the only technical standout. The dog’s good? Carradine’s got a dog and it figures big into the plot. Sort of absurdly but whatever. So long as it brings the movie to the end.

Revenge is a bad movie. Worse, it’s a slow bad movie; realistically, Sondergaard’s fate is in a cut scene—Hall doesn’t actually kill anyone for quite a while in the film and the body count is very low—so maybe she was a plot sacrifice, but the idea of there being cut scenes and subplots to Revenge is more a threat than anything else. Less might be incomprehensible but a coherent narrative isn’t worth more minutes on the runtime.

The Invisible Man’s Revenge plays like the movie’s punishing you for watching it.

Dramatic School (1938, Robert B. Sinclair)

Given Dramatic School is all about top-billed Luise Rainer’s rise of stage stardom, it might help if she were actually the protagonist of the story, instead of its—occasional—subject. Because Rainer’s got to share the film with a bunch of other characters, none particularly interesting. There’s Rand Brooks, who’s the headmaster’s son and from a long line of actors. Then there’s Gale Sondergaard as the renowned stage actress turned instructor, who resents having to teach in general and Rainer specifically. Though Rainer idolizes her. Supposedly. We don’t ever really see much of it. And then there’s second-billed Paulette Goddard, who doesn’t have much interested in acting, just gossiping with her classmates and dating a string of wealthy men and refusing to marry any of them.

Virginia Grey, Lana Turner, and Ann Rutherford play some of the other students. Rutherford is dating Brooks and ends up getting more to do than either Grey or Turner (Turner gets fourth billing, which is way too high even without Rutherford).

The film takes place in Paris, which only makes sense when Rainer is onscreen because no one else even hints at a French accent. Rainer goes to acting school all day and works in a factory all night, alongside sympathetic aunt Marie Blake (who has nothing to do in the film whatsoever, not even dote on Rainer when she’s down).

So one fateful night—in the first ten minutes of the eighty minute movie—stage sensation Genevieve Tobin (who’s also way too highly billed at fifth) shows up at the factory with her wealthy beau, Alan Marshal. There’s a little incident, but it’s not important other than to introduce Rainer to Marshal so she can make up this grandiose lie about having an affair with him. Eventually Goddard meets Marshal socially and sets a trap for Rainer, hoping to humiliate her.

Will Marshal let himself be played? Does it end up mattering?

I won’t spoil the first, but it doesn’t end up mattering at all for the narrative. When Rainer gets her big break, it’s got nothing to do with the plot until that point. It’s incredible how fast screenwriters Ernest Vajda and Mary C. McCall Jr. get bored with their… screenplay. Other than Goddard, the script doesn’t dwell on anyone. Turner and Grey are interchangeable, Rutherford is mostly scenery until she all of a sudden gets attention. Goddard doesn’t have a character. She exists as a foil to torment Rainer, who’s usually too busy in her own head to even notice Goddard’s plotting cruelty.

The third act has this big showdown between Rainer and Sondergaard, following the film infusing a “Sondergaard is getting dissed for being an actress nearing forty” subplot, which also brings in Henry Stephenson (as the headmaster) quite a bit. Stephenson’s only slightly less unbelievable as an accomplished Parisian actor than Sondergaard, who no one thought to give more characterization than shrill. She’s in the second scene of the film, bitching about (at that point) utterly harmless and barely introduced Rainer. Sondergaard is opposite Margaret Dumont in that scene; Dumont’s great. Shame she’s only in the movie for two scenes and never when Rainer’s finally out of her shell, which takes way too long. Especially for a movie ostensibly about her.

Rainer’s performance is fine. She gives the best performance in the film, which isn’t much of a compliment. Vajda and McCall can’t even be bothered with thin caricaturization, much less thin characterization. Marshal, for instance, is an utter bore. He’s got some charm, but he’s dramatically inert, upstaged by everyone opposite him. Including an uncredited, nearly silent John Picorri as his valet. Sinclair doesn’t know how to direct his cast, but he really doesn’t know how to direct Marshal.

Of the students, Grey’s probably the best. If Goddard got a character before the third act, she might be better but since she doesn’t… nope. Turner’s kind of annoying.

Sondergaard, who isn’t important for the majority of the runtime, ends up being the most important player in the film. She’s really not up for it. Stephenson’s miscast. Brooks gets a rotten deal as his son too. Supposedly Brooks can’t act. But based on the exercises in the acting classes, none of the students can act. It’s not until the third act, when Rainer’s on a real stage, there’s any evidence of ability. Watching Rainer’s play in the movie, you wish the movie were just Rainer in the play. It might make up for the rest of the nonsense. Unfortunately, it’s not the movie and it’s also way too quick an interlude. Because then there’s the wrap-up, which is simultaneously tepid and vapid.

Dramatic School isn’t terrible. It doesn’t have enough energy to be terrible. Rainer’s got potential, but the script isn’t there and the direction isn’t there. Her character’s name is Louise too. It’s like, if you’re going to have the main character be an aspiring actress with the same name as the successful actress playing her… maybe there ought to be something to that coincidence. At least some emphasis. Instead, the script does everything it can to avoid Rainer and focus on everyone around her. But not give them anything to do until the end. And even at the end it’s just busywork, resolving pointless plot threads.

The film’s competent and useless. Even as a vehicle—as it seems to have been—for MGM ingenues, it’s useless. It seems like it’s more producer Mervyn LeRoy’s fault than anyone else’s. Like, Sinclair obviously wasn’t going to come through on the direction. Ditto the screenwriters. Someone needed to right the ship. No one does.

Sons of Liberty (1939, Michael Curtiz)

Despite Michael Curtiz directing and Claude Rains starring–Curtiz does better than Rains–Sons of Liberty is a rather tepid little short.

Rains plays a Jewish proto-American (circa 1776) who sacrifices all for the United States. He even dies penniless because he won’t sign a document on the Sabbath. Of course, Liberty never says the word “Jewish.” I was shocked when someone identified a rabbi by title.

The short also has a lot of problems establishing characters. Gale Sondergaard shows up as Rains’s wife–she’s not very good either. She shows up after Rains has supposedly been in jail for a year. I understand they’re playing fast and loose with history–I didn’t look up the real story because I wouldn’t want it ruined–but Curtiz and writer Crane Wilbur ignore even the most basic narrative requirements.

While it’s interesting as a historical document, but Liberty is a flop.

1/3Not Recommended

CREDITS

Directed by Michael Curtiz; written by Crane Wilbur; directors of photography, Sol Polito and Ray Rennahan; edited by Thomas Pratt; music by Howard Jackson; produced by Gordon Hollingshead; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Claude Rains (Haym Salomon), Gale Sondergaard (Rachel Salomon), Donald Crisp (Alexander McDougall), Montagu Love (George Washington), Henry O’Neill (Member of Continental Congress) and James Stephenson (Colonel Tillman).

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Enter Arsene Lupin (1944, Ford Beebe)

It’s hard to find anything good about Enter Arsene Lupin. Ella Raines isn’t as bad as the other primary cast members, though she’s not as good as some of the bit players. The film does hold some historical value both in the use of the Universal European backlot set for England–apparently, 1944 London looks a lot like a German town in the 1850s–and for director Beebe and screenwriter Bertram Millhauser’s insistence on xenophobia.

The French are, with the exception of lead Charles Korvin, treated as either blithering idiots or lovable simpletons. The English are a little better, but not much. The Greeks are worst of all, getting a particularly harsh treatment in dialogue. Americans, unrepresented in the film, must be the best.

The anti-French sentiment comes out most strikingly in J. Carrol Naish. He’s a moronic police inspector who talks nonsense, with a terrible accent, and the British treat him accordingly (like he’s a fool). But Korvin’s sidekick, George Dolenz–he cooks, of course–doesn’t get much better treatment.

Hungarian Korvin doesn’t even attempt a French accent. He’s just blandly European. He’s also supposed to be charming–he’s a gentleman thief, after all–but it doesn’t come off.

Some of the problem is Korvin, some’s Millhauser’s weak script, but most of it is Beebe’s inept direction. From the first scene, it’s clear Beebe can’t stage a scene for suspense or dialogue. The best directed moments of Arsene Lupin are the insert location shots.

It’s a dreadful picture.