Brief Reviews

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) ***½
I've read or heard more than once that this movie, the Oscar winner as Best Picture of 1969, is one that hasn't dated. I cannot, however, totally agree. The first 40 minutes or so—with their fussy, stream-of-consciousness direction and editing—strike me as dated indeed. The story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a naive, Candide-like Texan who travels to New York with dreams of striking it rich as a gigolo, the movie is remembered by those who have seen it for the graceless Joe's episodic encounters with a series of satirically exaggerated New Yorkers, his friendship with the pathetic Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), and its sad ending. These parts of the movie are very good indeed.

But Joe Buck is not a particularly deep or complex character, and except for his connection with Ratso and his becoming a bit more realistic in his expectations, he doesn't really change much during the course of the movie. So the first part of the movie, with its complicated flashback-and-dream structure that tells the backstory of Joe, seems unnecessarily detailed, just so much showy padding. It only delays the arrival of the genuinely interesting parts of the movie and tells us far more than we really need to know about Joe to appreciate his experiences in New York. Ratso's background is dealt with far more briefly and directly, without resorting to cinematic gimmicks, and yet tells us enough about Ratso to understand him.

Fortunately, the last two-thirds of the movie is very entertaining, and the performances are uniformly excellent (Brenda Vaccaro is especially good in a supporting role), although Hoffman's interpretation of Ratso is at times perhaps just a bit too colorful. Both he and Voight received Oscar nominations for Best Actor. If the first part of Midnight Cowboy were as compelling as the rest of the movie and better integrated in terms of style with what follows, this film might well deserve a full **** rating.

BLUE VELVET (1986) ****
This is one movie that for me hasn't dated a bit. It's still just as unique and thrilling an experience as it was when it was first released more than twenty years ago. From the beginning it is clear that sinister things lurk beneath the placid surface of the small lumber town where the film takes place, just as in the opening sequence predatory insects lurk beneath the picture-perfect lawn of Jeffrey Beaumont's (Kyle MacLachlan) home. The movie's beginning is deceptively innocuous, almost like a Hardy Boys story, as Jeffrey and his girl friend Sandy (Laura Dern) set out to solve the mystery of the severed ear. Things soon get pretty strange, and every time you think the movie couldn't possibly get any more bizarre, director David Lynch throws another bomb at the audience.

The cast couldn't be better. Besides wholesome MacLachlan and Dern, it includes exotic Isabella Rossellini as a troubled night club singer known professionally as The Blue Lady, a heavily made-up Dean Stockwell as spaced-out Ben the Sandman, dreamily lip-syncing to Roy Orbison, and, most memorable of all, Dennis Hopper as the demented villain Frank Booth, a morass of volatile psychosexual obsessions. The movie also contains astonishingly hallucinatory images, haunting music, and a 20-minute long slam-bang roller coaster ride of a finale.

Lynch keeps his propensity for over-egging the pudding with too much weirdness successfully controlled, and the movie lands squarely in the middle between the surrealism of Eraserhead and the more conventional narrative style of The Elephant Man, without sacrificing the visual genius of those earlier films. Lynch delivers a gloriously mind-boggling, eye-popping, candy-colored thrill ride of a movie that keeps the viewer guessing and on the edge of the seat the whole time. When normalcy is finally restored at the end, it's like waking up from a particularly vivid nightmare.

THE PAINTED VEIL (2006) ***
Rather lost in the Christmas deluge of movies released in 2006, this film got very good reviews, but my reaction to it is mixed. Based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, it is the story of an inhibited bacteriologist, Walter Fane (Edward Norton), who rashly falls in love with a young London socialite, Kitty Garstin (Naomi Watts). She marries him largely to spite her domineering mother and returns with him to his post in colonial Shanghai. There she has a passionate fling with the local Lothario, and when Walter finds out about it, he relocates them to a remote inland area where a cholera epidemic is raging.

In a recent interview on Turner Classic Movies, Norton, along with Watts one of the film's producers, spoke of how much he admires Out of Africa, and in many ways The Painted Veil is reminiscent both of that movie and of the later films of David Lean, its scenery so gorgeously picturesque that it overwhelms the human element of the story. And the human element of The Painted Vail is none too compelling to begin with. As Walter, Norton, an excellent actor, seems petulant, cruel, and emotionally aloof. Watts fares a bit better with her vapid and self-centered Kitty, but Kitty's shallowness keeps her from being more interesting, and her transformation at the end seems awfully abrupt. No doubt these characterizations were intended, but that doesn't make these people any less remote and unappealing.

The British actors Diana Rigg and Toby Jones make stronger impressions in more sympathetic and nuanced supporting roles. Besides those performances, the film benefits from its stunning landscapes, its depiction of the hardships of the villagers, and its portrait of the political turmoil and resentment of colonialism in 1920's China. The Painted Veil is worth seeing for its glossy surface virtues, but the inability of its lead characters to fully engage the emotions is a definite hindrance to complete enjoyment.

THE YOUNG IN HEART (1938) ***½
This Selznick production is a charming comedy about the Carletons, a family of con artists exiled from the Riviera after their professional deceptions are discovered by the authorities. On the train to London they are befriended by a gullible and lonely rich old lady named Miss Fortune (!) who has no living relatives, and they quickly concoct a plan to fleece her. She essentially adopts this family of scoundrels, who then set to work subtly persuading her to leave them her money in her will.

To make themselves more credible to her, they temporarily assume the appearance of conventionality and even get jobs. The more fond they grow of Miss Fortune, the more they unexpectedly find their new lives of respectability growing on them, and she becomes a sort of moral fairy godmother, granting the family not riches but ethics. Under her influence they find themselves in the end transformed into honest citizens. The movie, released the same year as You Can't Take It with You, is in a sense a Capra comedy turned on its head, with a family of eccentrics finding happiness by forgoing their nonconformist ways and becoming conventional.

The Carletons are expertly played by Roland Young (Topper) as the father, a blustering former actor who pretends to be a British colonel retired from colonial India and is called Sahib by his family; Billie Burke (the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz) as the dithering, scatter-brained mother; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., for once quite good, as the son, Richard; and winsome Janet Gaynor as the sweet-natured and intelligent daughter, George-Anne. The stage actress Minnie Dupree plays the childlike Miss Fortune, and lovely Paulette Goddard plays Richard's love interest. The movie also includes an incredible-looking automobile called a Flying Wombat that at several points plays an important part in the proceedings. The typically high Selznick production values (including an elaborately staged train wreck), appealing cast, and plot that balances the roguery of the Carletons with the guilelessness of Miss Fortune, and humor with sentiment, results in one of the more unusual comedies of the 1930's and a very entertaining viewing experience.

Monica Bellucci Shoot Em Up Photocall in Rome

Body and Soul: A Knockout of a Movie

I am not a fan of the sport of boxing. But I am a fan of movies, and in the history of cinema boxing has often been a subject dealt with directly or indirectly. The sport has been put to many uses by filmmakers: for sentimentality (The Champ, 1931), for laughs (Harold Lloyd's The Milky Way, 1936 and its remake starring Danny Kaye, The Kid from Brooklyn, 1946), to symbolize lost dreams (On the Waterfront, 1954), to indict racism (The Great White Hope 1970) and legal injustice (The Hurricane, 1999), to inspire in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam (Rocky. 1976), to explore the subject of euthanasia (Million Dollar Baby, 2004).

One of the first studios to exploit the genre was Warner Bros., the studio that specialized in pictures about working-class, blue-collar men and women and in gangster and crime films. It's not surprising that the studio introduced into its boxing movies the involvement of organized crime in the sport. Its early boxing pictures even featured mainstays of its crime films like Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart (Kid Galahad, 1937) and James Cagney ( City for Conquest, 1940). Along with gangsterism, the Warners boxing movies included many elements that became staples of the genre for the next twenty years: dirty tricks by opponents, rigged fights; manipulation of the boxer by managers, promoters, and racketeers; betrayal by the boxer protagonist of lovers, relatives, and lifelong friends.

In the 1940's and 1950's, many boxing movies were made in the tragic vein, movies that followed the rise of a talented young boxer from obscurity to celebrity and his fall precipitated by the corrupting effects of ambition, fame, greed, pride, and loss of values. One of the first of the movies in this vein, one that in many ways became the template for those that followed, was Body and Soul (1947), whose chief character, Charlie Davis, is played by John Garfield.

The marvelous opening sequence of the movie immediately establishes a noirish feel (in fact, it is considered a film noir by some) and presages the striking staging, photography, and editing of the rest of the film. In the middle of the night, an apparently deserted training camp with a makeshift boxing ring is shown from overhead. In a traveling crane shot, the camera moves to one of the buildings in the compound, through its window to the bed where a sleeping man lies tossing and turning, and stops on a close-up of his face. The agitated man is Charlie Davis (Garfield), repeatedly muttering the name "Ben" in his sleep before suddenly snapping awake. A nighttime drive into a large city follows, where Charlie visits his mother and his estranged girl friend Peg, and we learn that Charlie is scheduled that night to fight a young contender for the world boxing championship. When he arrives at the stadium that evening, he lies down to rest before the fight and dozes off. The film then, in the fashion of the 1940's, drifts into an extended flashback that tells the story of Charlie's life for the last fifteen years or so.

Charlie, it turns out, became a fighter not by choice but from necessity. His origins lie in the kind of working-class, melting-pot, Depression-era big city neighborhood found in so many Warner Bros. films of the 1930's such as Dead End. In those films poor young men often turn to crime to escape the poverty and economic hopelessness of their environment. Charlie's life, though, is not hopeless. His parents (who are clearly portrayed as Jewish, a fact made explicit later in the film) are the owners of a small candy store. Charlie is an aimless young man who wants neither to take over his parents' business nor to go to college as his mother urges him. Though he has a talent for using his fists, neither does he want to be a fighter as his best friend Shorty urges him, even after Shorty lures Charlie into demonstrating his pugilistic talent in front of a local fight promoter, Quinn (William Conrad).

It is only after his parents' store is destroyed and his father killed when gangsters throw a bomb into the speakeasy next door that he at last consents to a bout. While celebrating his first victory, he meets Peg Born (Lilli Palmer), an art student from Greenwich Village, with whom he begins a relationship. Charlie's rapid rise to the top is shown in a brief montage, and within a year he is rich, famous, and engaged to Peg. It is at this point that a gangster named Roberts takes an interest in him and offers him a Faustian deal: a chance at the world title, with a guaranteed win. The price Charlie must pay is high—allegiance to Roberts, demotion of Quinn, ditching Shorty, and postponing his marriage—but Charlie agrees to the deal. It is clear that he is now ruled by all those things that will inevitably lead to his downfall—ambition, greed, pride—and is prepared to betray both people and principles to get what he wants. As Shorty says to Peg about the new Charlie, "He's not just a kid who can fight—he's money. And people want money so bad they make it stink, and they make [him] stink."

The results of Charlie's decision are dire: tragedy for Shorty, estrangement from his mother, the replacement of Peg with a slutty night club singer (this femme fatale character another element imported from film noir), Charlie's coming more and more under the control of the racketeer Roberts, a hedonistic and reckless lifestyle that will eventually bankrupt him both financially and morally. The only thing in all this that seems to affect Charlie is the damage he causes to Ben (Canada Lee), the champion that Roberts matches him against. Roberts tells Charlie that he is to fight Ben for fifteen rounds to a guaranteed decision in his favor. What he doesn't reveal is that Ben has a blood clot on his brain and not only is unlikely to last fifteen rounds but may very well be killed. Ben is seriously injured in the fight and although he doesn't die is permanently damaged and must retire. Out of remorse Charlie hires Ben as his personal trainer. Ben is the one person Charlie remains faithful to, and his character is in a way a reminder both of the one remaining bit of Charlie that is incorruptible and of the human price of the game Charlie is involved in.

Besides its noirish touches, Body and Soul benefits immensely from several things that place it ahead of its subsequent imitators. Only two fights are actually shown in the movie, Charlie's fight with Ben and the fight with the young contender at the end. These fights are depicted in a way that influenced the visual style of boxing movies for years to come: with rapid cuts, almost blurry close-ups of the fighters slugging at the camera, low-angle shots from ringside, and brightly lit overhead shots of the ring. According to the Internet Movie Database, cinematographer James Wong Howe (one of the greats of the studio era) shot some of this footage by wearing roller skates while holding the camera and having an assistant push him around the ring.

Because so little of Body and Soul deals directly with the boxing matches themselves, the emphasis of the movie is much more on its Faustian theme and on the interaction among its characters than on sport, making the movie one more of theme and psychology than of action. The film is also very much a love story; in fact, the movie was originally titled An Affair of the Heart. Peg, Charlie's lover, is played by the German-born actress Lilli Palmer (who at the time was married to Rex Harrison), and she is most convincing and appealing in the role.

The movie also benefits greatly from its title song, which is played almost continuously for the picture's duration. Already well known when the film was released (it was especially associated with Billie Holiday, who had recorded it three times before the movie's release, the first time in 1940), it is a love song with a haunting melody and is as much a part of the movie as the theme song from Laura is of that film. When Charlie and Peg first meet, they dance to it as a lilting waltz. Later during a wild party at Charlie's swanky new apartment, it is arranged as an uptempo, jazzy dance number. The constant use of the song underscores the Faustian theme of the movie, as Roberts succeeds in controlling Charlie's body and attempts to control his soul as well. It also emphasizes the love story element by continually reminding us of the competition between Roberts and Peg for Charlie's body and soul. And it reminds us of Charlie's own internal conflict: Which will ultimately control him, his body (boxing and material success) or his soul (his few remaining principles and his enduring feelings for Peg)?

As well as being a love story, Body and Soul is also a potent character study. And the thing that anchors the movie most securely in the memory is the towering performance by John Garfield as that character, Charlie Davis. Garfield was ideally cast in the role. Born in 1913 to Russian immigrants, as a child he studied boxing and drama at a special school for difficult students. An experienced New York stage actor, he was apparently the actor Clifford Odets had in mind when he wrote the boxing drama Golden Boy. Garfield made his first movie, Four Daughters, in 1938 for Warner Bros., where he would remain for the next seven years. In that movie he plays a bitter and alienated musician who ultimately commits suicide to keep the naive girl who marries him from ruining her life by staying with him. Some have cited this performance, which earned him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor, as the first portrayal of the anti-hero in American movies. (He received his only other Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor, for Body and Soul.)

While at Warners, Garfield, unable to serve in the armed forces during World War II because of a heart condition, co-founded the Hollywood Canteen for soldiers with his Warner Bros. colleague Bette Davis and served as the organization's vice president. Before leaving the studio, he was cast in many roles similar to the one he played in Four Daughters, a misunderstood and unhappy young man controlled by outside forces, a sort of prototypical version of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. If these roles were initially the result of typecasting and studio attempts to build a screen image, they were aptly chosen, and the screen persona of the angry young man stuck. Reportedly, Garfield was even the first choice to play Stanley Kowalski in both the stage and screen versions of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Body and Soul was one of the first movies Garfield made after leaving Warners and was produced by Enterprise Productions, the independent production company he co-founded. At the time, Garfield was playing the best roles of his career: in Humoresque (1946), the last film he made at Warners, as the brilliant violinist who becomes the protégé of possessive Joan Crawford (in what for me is her finest performance); in the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) as the drifter who comes under the spell of seductive but deadly Lana Turner; in the Best Picture Oscar winner Gentleman's Agreement (1947) , directed by Elia Kazan, as Gregory Peck's Jewish friend; and the next year as a corrupt lawyer with mob connections in another film noir classic, Force of Evil (1948), directed by Abraham Polonsky, who wrote the screenplay of Body and Soul. All of these films are highly recommended.

As Charlie, Garfield projects the same cockiness of attitude as the young James Cagney, and with his breathy voice and New York accent at times even sounds very much like Cagney. But even though he plays Charlie with the same self-assurance as the young Cagney, his Charlie is still a young man adrift, unsure of what he wants from life. Garfield shows how this lack of a moral center leaves Charlie open to fill the vacuum with all the wrong things, the things that eventually corrupt him and alienate him from those who love him. And he shows how vulnerable Charlie is to being controlled by forces that would use him for their own ends and then discard him.

In the midst of Charlie's apparent success, Garfield manages to suggest the continuing dissatisfaction with his life that lingers just beneath Charlie's surface, his unease that his life has no center, his conflict and just a hint of regret about the course his life has taken, and the quiet desperation with which he relies on the broken fighter Ben as a kind of anchor. Late in the film, after the last day of training for the last fight, there is a sequence in the training ring between just Charlie and Ben. In this calm interlude, the two actors show amazing rapport, and Garfield makes the vulnerability and self-doubt Charlie has been concealing for most of the movie (except in some of his scenes with Peg) more apparent than at any other point in the film.

The movie ends with Charlie's final professional match, against the young contender for the world title. The promoter Roberts has suborned Charlie by promising him an easy defeat if he will throw the fight—on exactly the same terms he promised when Charlie fought Ben all those years before: fifteen easy rounds and a decision in favor of the newcomer. Of course, he doublecrosses Charlie as he did Ben earlier, and when Charlie realizes this well into the fight, he must face one last conflict: whether to accept Roberts's lucrative deceit or to rebel against it and reclaim his dignity while risking Roberts's considerable wrath. This gives the movie a tidy circular structure that may seem a bit pat, but that circular structure serves a valid thematic purpose by giving Charlie the chance to make a different decision this time, to atone for the past and irrevocably alter his future.

One last thing that should be noted is how many of those associated with Body and Soul later became victims of the witch hunts for Communists in the film industry that occurred in the 1950's. Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriter, Anne Revere, who played Charlie's mother, and Canada Lee, the African American actor who played Ben, were all blacklisted in the U.S. Polonsky and Revere didn't work again in the industry for years, although Polonsky did some writing using a front. Lee did star in the British anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) before he died in 1952. Garfield's daughter Julie has said that she believes the controversy about her father's politics and the prospect of being investigated by Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee caused the stress responsible for Garlfield's death from a heart attack in 1952, when he was barely 39 years old. The movie's director, Robert Rossen, survived HUAC investigation and continued to work in Hollywood, but only because he, like Elia Kazan, "named names."

Whether you are a fan of boxing or boxing movies or. like me, just a fan of good movies, Body and Soul is a film not to be missed. Its superior direction, writing, photography, and unforgettable performance by John Garfield place it well ahead of other movies in its genre.

Discovering Carole Lombard

During October 2008 Turner Classic Movies paid tribute to Carole Lombard as its Star of the Month, giving me the chance to learn more about this actress. One of the major stars of the early Hollywood studio period, Lombard is an actress who has a devoted following. There is even a film/fan site (Carol & Co.) that publishes almost daily articles about her. But before the TCM tribute I had seen her in only a couple of films, both of them well-known screwball comedies from the 1930s, one of my pet genres. Having now seen several more of her films from the late thirties and early forties (she died in a plane crash in 1942 at the age of 33), I can understand why she has inspired such devotion among her fans. She will not supplant my absolute personal favorites of the early studio era—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Irene Dunne—but she will now be one of my also-greats, joining the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, Greta Garbo, and Margaret Sullavan—not bad company to be in.

Carole Lombard appeared in her first movie in 1921 at the age of thirteen. She had appeared in around 60 films before she got the lead in the movie that made her a star: Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (1934). This was the year screwball comedy was born in Hollywood with It Happened One Night, setting off a craze for the genre that lasted nearly ten years. (According to the website notstarring.com, Lombard turned down the lead in It Happened One Night.) Twentieth Century was the other notable example of screwball comedy from that year and exhibits the take on the genre that Hawks would continue with his masterpieces Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). It's all there in Hawks's very first attempt at the new genre—the frenetic pacing, rapid-fire dialogue, contrived but hilarious situations, put-upon supporting characters, and egotistical lead characters.

Twentieth Century was just about the last remaining classic screwball comedy I had never seen, and what a treat it was to see it at last. The movie has now joined my list of the top examples of the genre. John Barrymore, lampooning his own image, stars as Oscar Jaffe, a flamboyant, manipulative, often hysterical Broadway director given to melodramatic pronouncements like "The iron door slams!" and "Anathema! Child of Satan!" at moments of heightened emotionalism. Lombard plays his new discovery, a shopgirl named Mildred Plotka whom Jaffe wants to rename Lily Garland and transform into a star. Only Jaffe has any faith in the newcomer's ability, and at this point the screenplay requires that Lombard be weepy, immature, and so insecure that she is ready to give up the idea of acting and return to the sales counter. But with patience, encouragement, and gentle cajoling, Jaffe does succeed into molding her into a star.

Three years later Lily is the most esteemed actress on the New York stage, and Jaffe, like a true Svengali, is now romantically involved with her. But he has become so possessive, controlling, and jealous that Lily can no longer stand him. Now Lombard must play her character in a completely different mode—successful, confident, mature, independent, and rebellious. She walks out on Jaffe ("That's not love," she says of their relationship. "It's sheer tyranny. I'm no Trilby.") and heads for Hollywood.

The plot now shifts ahead even further. Lily is a hugely successful movie star, and Oscar is close to financial ruin, not having had one successful production since Lily left him. By chance he finds himself on the same train as Lily, the Twentieth Century Limited, traveling from Chicago to New York. Convinced that his career will be saved if he can just get her to star in his next production, he determines to get her to agree to do so before the train reaches its destination. The dirty tricks campaign he embarks on (not dissimilar to Cary Grant's efforts to stop his ex-wife from remarrying in His Girl Friday) and the complications that follow occupy the bulk of the movie.

The rub, though, is that Lily, having achieved Hollywood stardom, has become as much of a temperamental egomaniac as her former mentor, and Lombard is now required to portray Lily as a swollen-headed, self-centered shrew. Reportedly, Lombard was so intimidated by working with Barrymore, who at the time was still at the height of his profession, that Hawks had to take her aside and threaten to replace her if she didn't loosen up and stop holding back in her scenes with him. Whatever Hawks did, it must have worked, for Lombard easily holds her own with Barrymore for the rest of the movie and gives as good as she gets. It was no surprise that Barrymore was up to the demands of his role. The surprise is how well Lombard, pretty much untried in this type of exaggerated, broad comedy, does with her role, which unlike Barrymore's requires her to act convincingly in three different modes—first insecure, then independent, and finally insufferable.

If Twentieth Century clearly showed how good Lombard was at broad comedy, it only hinted at her remarkable range as an actress. It took a whole series of movies to do this. In My Man Godfrey (1936), another classic screwball comedy, Lombard plays Irene Bullock, one of those proverbial madcap heiresses. But her performance is much less theatrical than in Twentieth Century, and her sweet-natured, guileless naiveté is utterly charming. Her speech is fast and breathless, rather like Katharine Hepburn's in Bringing Up Baby. Like Hepburn in that movie, Lombard's character is impulsive and mercurial, and she shows the same child-like resolve to get her man. This performance earned Lombard her only Oscar nomination.

The next year Lombard made another classic screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred. She plays Hazel Flagg, a young woman who has been mistakenly diagnosed with radium poisoning and is turned into an overnight media celebrity by a cynical reporter played by Fredric March. This is a movie loved by many, but—prepare yourselves for sacrilege—it is one that I have never totally warmed to, even after repeated viewings. For some reason the movie just doesn't click for me the way my favorite screwball comedies do. Despite mixed feelings about the film, I still find the lead performances outstanding, particularly Lombard's, in which she shows a flair for unpretentious physical comedy that pokes fun at her glamor and her astounding beauty. Many consider this her signature performance, and for anyone interested in her career it is essential viewing.

Lombard's work in two lesser-known movies is further evidence of her versatility. In 1935 she made a little comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen called Hands Across the Table, in which she plays a manicurist in a swanky New York hotel whose one goal is to marry a rich man. She sets her sights on rich paraplegic Ralph Bellamy but finds herself falling in love with Fred MacMurray, whom she believes to be penniless. (Of course, he isn't.) It sounds like a classic screwball comedy situation, but the movie lacks the antic quality typical of the genre. Lombard comes across as quite level-headed and practical and maybe just a bit disappointed with life. In the end she chooses MacMurray not just because of love, but also because she is simply too nice to exploit Bellamy in such a mercenary way. Lombard creates a quietly touching and intelligent character who is quite distinct from her boisterous Lily in Twentieth Century, her energetic Hazel in Nothing Sacred, or her whimsical Irene in My Man Godfrey.

Lombard turns in another impressive performance that showcases her ability to integrate the light with the serious in In Name Only (1939). In this film she plays a widow and mother who rents a house for the summer from Cary Grant. Grant is unhappily married to Kay Francis, who he has discovered married him solely for his money. Grant and Lombard are immediately attracted to one another and quickly fall in love. The problem is Grant's possessive wife, who refuses to give him a divorce. The movie is a showcase for the range of both Lombard and Grant, who seem to have tremendous chemistry. They are allowed to behave at times in a relaxed, loving, and light-hearted manner with each other—the considerable charm of both actors at full throttle—and at other times in a serious and troubled manner when various obstacles, including the machinations of Grant's duplicitous wife, keep them apart. The plot is pure soap, but both Lombard and Grant rise above the familiar plot to create characterizations that are completely winning. If there were ever any doubts about Lombard's ability to handle serious roles, her performance in In Name Only surely put them to rest.

In two of her last movies Lombard returned to the comedy genre she was so associated with. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) is a screwball-type comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his only effort at a purely comic picture. The movie, while enjoyable, lacks both Hitchcock's distinctive touches and the sparkle typical of the genre. Lombard is the best thing in the movie, and the presence of her by-now distinctive personality is alone sufficient reason to watch it.

The most remarkable thing about the movie is how closely Lombard conforms to Hitchcock's idealized image of blonde beauty as personified by his other leading women like Madeleine Carroll, Grace Kelly, and Eva Marie Saint. Lombard was a very beautiful woman, but she never looked lovelier than in this picture. She is photographed by the great Harry Stradling in ways that deliberately emphasize her stunning facial beauty. Time and again, as she was photographed in close-up, with her full lips, prominent cheekbones, and straight, rather long nose, I was reminded of Greta Garbo. Like Garbo, Lombard's face seems mask-like, sculpturesque, and ethereal—an archetypal image of timeless female beauty. Garbo's favorite cinematographer, William Daniels, once remarked that Garbo "had no bad angles." The same could be said of Carole Lombard in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and to adore that exquisite face is reason enough to see this movie.

Carole Lombard's last picture, To Be or Not to Be (1942), improbably manages to combine topical anti-Nazism with pointed comedy. Released the year after her death, it was directed by Ernst Lubitsch. In Lombard's entire screen career, she was probably never paired with a director whose light comedic touch was so attuned to her own comedic skills, and in this film she gives what to me is her most enchanting performance. As the beautiful leading lady of a Polish theater troupe that finds itself engaged in a battle of wits with Nazis to help the Polish Resistance and to effect its own escape to Britain, she is married to its egotistical leading man, played by Jack Benny.

Lombard's restrained performance forms quite a contrast to Benny's intentionally hammy one; she is at times required almost to play the "straight man" to her costar. Benny's outrageous antics propel the complicated ruse the troupe concocts to dupe the Nazis, while the beautiful Lombard handles the romantic distractions involved in the ruse. She never falters in the face of Benny's purposeful overacting but delivers an understated portrait of a woman who possesses great shrewdness, poise, and dignity beneath her glamorous exterior. The Lubitsch touch and the Lombard touch turn out to be a perfect match, and the film stands as an appropriate valedictory tribute to her beauty, grace, charm, and ability to seamlessly blend seriousness with humor.

By all accounts the real Carole Lombard was an unpretentious, generous, lively person with an outsized sense of humor. In one way or another those qualities all come through in her movie characters. Add to those qualities her great acting talent and her gorgeous looks, and you have a working definition of what is referred to as Star Quality.