The Great Ziegfeld (1936, Robert Z. Leonard)

Second-billed Myrna Loy shows up in The Great Ziegfeld at around the two-hour mark. The film runs three hours. The about a half-hour of it is musical numbers; they’re presumably recreations of the actual Ziegfeld stage productions, but even without having read the Wikipedia article first, it’s obvious Ziegfeld’s a glorifying tribute. Loy’s most significant scene is when she—playing stage, film, and radio star Billie Burke—tells husband Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. (played by William Powell) she’s okay with him cheating on her to get his mojo back. The way Loy sees it, Powell needs to cat around with his showgirls to make a show a hit. Unlike Powell’s other ingenues in the film, he’s not trying to star-make Loy; she knows the showbiz score. At least when it comes to brilliant men.

Of course, even with Hayes Code constraints, Ziegfeld goes out of its way to show Powell as a better husband than his wives realize. First wife Luise Rainer is the protagonist in the first half of the picture and gets so shafted in the second we don’t even find out she died, spending her life after leaving Powell miserably pining for him. He was supposed to run back to her, and we see him start that process, then the film cuts ahead. The film successfully obfuscates the actual couple’s common-law marriage and then their common-law divorce. It also drops the most important mistress, instead turning Virginia Bruce’s pursuit of Powell into a drunken jealousy (of Rainer) arc for Bruce. Powell’s just a hapless victim; Bruce kisses him once, Rainer sees it, leaves him. In the dialogue, Powell explains he’s just got to keep the girls happy, and sometimes the only way is for them to drunkenly maul him.

He had been grooming Bruce earlier, but it could’ve very well just been for stardom.

Because for Powell to get really excited about a woman, he’s got to steal her from best friend, alter ego, and rival Frank Morgan. They start together at the Chicago’s World’s Fair, with Morgan hawking Egyptian bellydancers and Powell trying to play it straight with strongman Nat Pendleton. Once some horny bored housewife notices Pendleton’s pecs, however, Powell realizes he’s got some premium beefcake to sell, and he starts making it big.

Even though selling beef—literally what Powell’s disappointed musical teacher dad Joseph Cawthorn says to him—isn’t what Powell wants to do with his life long-term, he does realize if he sells cheesecake, he can make a fortune. Not just chorus girls, but glamorous chorus girls, ostensibly the average American girl (so many of them look exactly the same; it’s quickly uncanny). There are never any casting sessions—other than Powell proving his fidelity to the audience and resisting nubile Jean Chatburn–and there’s little insight into Ziegfeld’s actual creative process. Director Leonard only seems interested in the musical numbers, not even feigning interest in the characters.

Outside Rainer for the first half.

Heck, the movie even fudges the ending, even though the film came out only three years after the story ends. Nothing matters as much as the musical numbers.

There’s an impressively mounted one with a giant staircase. But it’s impressive as a technical feat, not because Leonard all of a sudden gets better at directing the numbers. Then there’s a great Harriet Hoctor ballet number. Oh, and Fanny Brice (as herself) is all right. Though it sort of douses her in misogyny. The film’s wading in it—and with a delayed bit of racism thrown in too—but Ziegfeld’s intentionally cruel to Brice and leans in on it. Everyone must suffer for the Ziegfeld genius.

Powell’s fine. It’s a very flat part, but he’s likable. Loy’s okay. It’s an extended cameo, and they should’ve created the unbilled major supporting role with Ziegfeld. Plus, she gets a crap part. Not crappier than Rainer, obviously, because Ziegfeld tosses Rainer for Bruce, but then it turns out it isn’t actually promoting Bruce. It’s just getting rid of Rainer.

Oh, the Ray Bolger number is good.

A.A. Trimble is a lousy Will Rogers.

Morgan’s easily the best performance, but it’s also the least complicated role.

Incredible photography from Oliver T. Marsh, George J. Folsey, Karl Freund, Merritt B. Gerstad, and Ray June. Sometimes bad editing from William S. Gray; some of it is lacking coverage or just weak direction from Leonard, but not all of it.

Subtracting out the musical numbers, Great Ziegfeld’s a middling, lengthy studio programmer with some good stars. With the musical numbers… it’s the same, just with unimaginatively presented, grandiose musical numbers. While they don’t add anything to the film, they would look great on the big screen.

The Invisible Woman (1940, A. Edward Sutherland)

It’s entirely possible The Invisible Woman’s concept is a good one—instead of a horror movie, doing a screwball comedy where the female lead is invisible most of the time. Woman is—at best—indifferently acted, poorly directed, atrociously written, without even reasonable special effects. But the idea itself isn’t necessarily bad.

The film opens with suffering butler Charles Ruggles—he gets lots of jokes, they’re always terrible, he’s always bad. His bits are so universally bad, it seems like it has to be director Sutherland. Even Shemp Howard is occasionally amusing. He’s mostly godawful, but every once in a while, some gag won’t completely fail. Everything with Ruggles is a fail. Every single joke. And there are probably four Ruggles jokes every twelve minutes, if not more. The movie runs seventy-two minutes total. So thirty-some lousy Ruggles gags.

Ruggles works for John Howard. Howard is the romance lead, a playboy who funds lovable mad scientist John Barrymore’s projects. Only Howard never asks to see results—not until the movie starts, when Barrymore needs to turn someone invisible. It needs to be a person; Howard apparently won’t believe it if Barrymore turns the cat invisible. The human subject is going to be Virginia Bruce. She initially wants to get invisible to seemingly erase herself from reality. Bruce isn’t good in the scenes where she’s getting philosophical about woman’s place in the universe and so on but at least it’s character.

When she does get invisible and gets to do whatever she wants, it’s just messing with crappy boss Charles Lane. When Lane’s bad, it’s a sign Invisible Woman is never going to be good or even okay. Even with Ruggles, even with Howard, even with Barrymore basically letting his elaborate make-up do all the acting, if the movie were at least funny with its big supporting cast of comedy regulars… it’d have a chance.

But no.

Because Sutherland’s direction is terrible.

And the script—from Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo, and Gertrude Purcell (from a story by horror guys Curt Siodmak and Joe May)—is terrible. So the movie doesn’t have a chance. Ever.

The best part of the movie is Margaret Hamilton, who plays Barrymore’s assistant and her dismissive, impatient attitude is perfect for the part and movie. She doesn’t camp it up, but she seems to be acknowledging the quality constraints and so on and excels—reasonably—within them. The movie sort of trades her screen time for Oscar Homolka, which is appropriate for Invisible Woman. Hamilton’s the best, Homolka’s the worst. Now, obviously, dramatically speaking, Howard’s the worst. But for the comedy—and Woman’s a comedy–Homolka’s an endless pit of bad comedy.

Invisible Woman gets so painfully bad in the last third—it’s also a slog of seventy-two minutes, probably because there’s not a good “Invisible Woman” set piece. Sutherland is clearly inept at the special effects sequences but the movie needs them. There’s not even a big screwball number, just more plot, as Homolka’s gang goes after Barrymore and friends.

Howard—Shemp—is in the gang. Donald MacBride is in the gang. Edward Brophy is in the gang. Invisible Woman wastes Edward Brophy. Wastes him in a way you think they’d never seen an Edward Brophy performance before. Including the one he’s giving here.

Terrible editing from Frank Gross doesn’t help things either. Occasionally the cuts make it seem like they’re doing a lot of work—revised audio looped in to dialogue-free visuals, jokes muted and faded out on—and maybe Gross was doing the best he could with Sutherland’s footage. It’s sadly immaterial, other than to correctly portion the blame.

The Invisible Woman’s laugh-less and charmless, only impressive because they can never find a good joke, not even on accident.

Flight Angels (1940, Lewis Seiler)

When the studio system collapsed, so did the B-picture promotion system–a star of a B-picture could end up the star of an A-picture… For example, Jimmy Stewart started out in B-pictures, so did Eleanor Parker, so did Humphrey Bogart (I think). Occasionally, B-pictures made A-picture money (The Thin Man). It was a good system and there hasn’t been anything like it since–the rash of soap opera actors going mainstream did have a few good results (Alec Baldwin, Anne Heche) but none lasting–and that phenomenon has ended. It was never as successful as the promotion system and its disappearance is unfortunate, because it did produce good actors.

Flight Angels has an odd mix of actors, career-wise. Virginia Bruce, the star, was on the downswing. Her romantic interest, Dennis Morgan, was on the upswing (he ended up in musicals no less). Jane Wyman has a supporting role and runs wild with it, making the best of the script and turning in the film’s best performance. These actors’ success in light of the script–which alternates between a commercial for American Airlines and an astoundingly sexist portrayal of working women–is Flight Angels biggest surprise. The film doesn’t start out as anything but the commercial, so when the flight attendants–sorry, stewardesses–all get together to talk about marrying rich passengers and scream and run around and… fight (there’s a cat fight in Flight Angels), I couldn’t help but dream of a showing of Flight Angels with a debate afterwards between Margaret Cho and some female Conservative. Many A-features, for example, have a strong sexist attitude running through them (The Women, The Philadelphia Story), but I guess studios reserved the blatancy and cat fights for the B-features. Maybe not many theaters on the coasts played B-features. I suppose it’d be worth investigating. Oh, I forgot… not a history major anymore.

Still, Flight Angels is a well-handled film. Director Seiler has a lot of experience and the film even had one really nice shot. The special effects by Byron Haskin (who later directed) aren’t as nice as the aerial photography. On one hand, Flight Angels is an interesting historical document, on the other, it does have some nice performances from a likable cast. Either way, it’s a diverting seventy minutes.