Jacques Vanaire Movies

The final pairing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, an adaptation of a Rodgers & Hart musical, stars Eddy as a playboy who fantasizes that he is romancing an angel (MacDonald). ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire star in Holiday Inn as a popular nightclub song-and-dance team. When his heart is broken by his girlfriend, Crosby decides to retire from the hustle-bustle of big city showbiz. He purchases a rustic New England farm and converts it to an inn, which he opens to the public (floor show and all) only on holidays. This barely logical plot device allows ample space for a steady flow of Irving Berlin holiday songs (including an incredible blackface number in honor of Lincoln's Birthday). Oddly enough, the most memorable song in the bunch, the Oscar-winning White Christmas, is not offered as a production number but as a simple ballad sung by Crosby to an audience of one: leading lady Marjorie Reynolds. Fred Astaire's best moment is his Fourth of July firecracker dance. Ah, but what about the plot? Well, it seems that Astaire wants to make a film about Crosby's inn, starring their mutual discovery Reynolds. Bing briefly loses Reynolds to Astaire, but wins her back during the filming of a musical number on a Hollywood soundstage (eleven years earlier, Bing enjoyed a final clinch with Marion Davies under surprisingly similar conditions in Going Hollywood). As with most of Irving Berlin's "portfolio" musicals of the 1940s, the song highlights of Holiday Inn are too numerous to mention. This delightful film is far superior to its unofficial 1954 remake, White Christmas. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Though the United States still wasn't at war when Phantom Submarine was made, the film emphasizes the importance of "preparedness." Plucky newspaperwoman Madeleine (Anita Louise) is sent to the Panama Canal to get the lowdown on a mysterious enemy submarine that has been bedevilling Allied shipping lanes. Stowing away on a salvage vessel, Madeleine immediately runs afoul of diver Sinclair (Bruce Bennett), who's ostensibly looking for sunken gold off the Carribean. In truth, Sinclair is testing out a diving suit of his own invention, which previously had been rejected by the Navy. Between them, Madeleine and Sinclair manage to discover the purpose behind the "phantom submarine", exposing an Axis spy ring in the process. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The much-maligned Playmates callously offers the appalling spectacle of a thoroughly dissolute John Barrymore in his final screen performance, but the film isn't quite as bad as it's supposed to be. Barrymore plays himself, a washed-up ham actor up to his ears in debts. When the IRS demands payment for back taxes, Barrymore's press agent Pete Lindsey (Peter Lynd Hayes) and manager Lulu Monohan (Patsy Kelly) suggest a sure-fire moneymaking scheme: the venerable thespian will transform bucolic bandleader Kay Kyser (also playing himself) into a Shakespearean actor, in exchange for a fat radio contract. Neither Kyser nor Barrymore are keen on this set-up, but while Kyser is willing to go through with the plan, Barrymore seeks various devious methods of wriggling out of the committment. Barrymore goes so far as to sic his peppery girlfriend Carmen del Toro (Lupe Velez) on poor Kyser, hoping to dissuade the bandleader from showing up at the climactic Long Island Shakespeare Festival peformance. When this fails, Barrymore spikes Kyser's throat spray with alum, only to be rendered speechless himself when the spray bottles are switched. Suffice to say that all ends happily, with Kay Kyser and his aggregation (Ginny Simms, Harry Babbitt, Ish Kabibble et. al.) performing a rather pleasant "swing" version of Romeo and Juliet. Admittedly, it's rather hard to watch Playmates knowing that John Barrymore had once been regarded as the greatest actor of his generation. Even so, a few bright moments shrine through, notably a poignant scene in which Barrymore briefly recaptures the old magic by reciting a few passages from Hamlet's soliloquy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The W. Somerset Maugham play Home and Beauty was successful Americanized as Too Many Husbands (British title: My Two Husbands). Led to believe that her husband Fred MacMurray has drowned in a shipwreck, socialite Jean Arthur marries Melvyn Douglas. In time-honored Enoch Arden fashion, MacMurray turns up alive. The rest of the film finds Jean's two husbands figuratively duking it out for her affections. For a Production Code-era film, Too Many Husbands is remarkably risque, with a delicious open-ended denouement. And besides, we get to see the matchless Jean Arthur do the rhumba! In 1955, Columbia trotted out this property once more, and the result was the musical comedy Three For The Show, starring Jack Lemmon and Marge & Gower Champion. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In 1938, Jezebel was widely regarded as Warner Bros.' "compensation" to Bette Davis for her losing the opportunity to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. Resemblances between the two properties are inescapable: Jezebel heroine Julie Marsden (Davis) is a headstrong Southern belle not unlike Scarlett (Julie lives in New Orleans rather than Georgia); she loves fiancé Preston Dillard (played by Henry Fonda) but loses him when she makes a public spectacle of herself (to provoke envy in him) by wearing an inappropriate red dress at a ball, just as Scarlett O'Hara brazenly danced with Rhett Butler while still garbed in widow's weeds. There are several other similarities between the works, but it is important to note that Jezebel is set in the 1850s, several years before Gone With the Wind's Civil War milieu; and we must observe that, unlike Scarlett O'Hara, Julie Marsden is humbled by her experiences and ends up giving of her time, energy, and health during a deadly yellow jack outbreak. Bette Davis won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Julie; an additional Oscar went to Fay Bainter for her portrayal of the remonstrative Aunt Belle (she's the one who labels Julie a "jezebel" at a crucial plot point). The offscreen intrigues of Jezebel, including Bette Davis' romantic attachment to director William Wyler and co-star George Brent, have been fully documented elsewhere. Jezebel was based on an old and oft-produced play by Owen Davis Sr. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

American mousetrap salesmen Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy journey to Switzerland, reasoning that where there's cheese, there's mice. When they innocently try to pay their dinner bill with phony money, Stan and Ollie are put to work in the kitchen of the Alpen Hotel. Their enforced stay coincides with the visit of famed composer Walter Woolf King, who has come to Switzerland to soak up "local color." He also hopes to write an operetta that will succeed on its own merits, without the lovely voice of his lovely actress wife Della Lynd winning over the audience. But Lynd is determined to star in King's latest opus, and to that end she finagles Stan and Ollie into getting her a job as a hotel chambermaid. As the plot rolls along its merry way, Ollie labors under the misapprehension that Lynd is in love with him. Swiss Miss is, on the whole, one of Laurel and Hardy's weaker feature films, with far too much emphasis on the romantic leads and way too many forgettable songs ("Crick Crick Crick Here the Cricket" is a particular low point). But the team's individual scenes save the show, even though Stan Laurel, who'd been ill during production, looks like he's about to fall asleep at any moment. Best bits: Stan hoodwinking a St. Bernard out of a cask of brandy; Ollie serenading Lynd while Stan accompanies him on tube; and the legendary sequence, immortalized by film critic James Agee, wherein Stan and Ollie try to transport a piano across a rope bridge high above an alpine chasm--only to confront a gorilla! One of the screenwriters of Swiss Miss was Jean Negulesco, later the director of such memorable films as Mask of Dmitrios, Three Strangers, Titanic and How to Marry a Millionaire. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this musical sequel to the highly successful Artists and Models, Jack Benny plays Buck Boswell, the leader of a troupe of performers who end up broke and stranded in gay Paris. To rustle up a little cash, he decides to produce a musical fashion show. Boswell hires an American father and daughter to perform because he thinks they too are impoverished. Things happen, and Boswell nearly loses his show until his two Yanks reveal that they are loaded. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Technicolor is the main attraction of this overheated South Seas adventure. Ray Milland, Akim Tamiroff and Barry Fitzgerald play three shifty sailors who commandeer a smallpox-ridden boat and set out to sea. A typhoon washes them ashore on a faraway Pacific island, which is ruled by a white religious fanatic (Lloyd Nolan) who has set himself up as the local god. The three sailors anxiously await an opportunity to appropriate the "god's" valuable stash of pearls and head for the mainland. Only one of the sailors escapes to tell his story; check out the cast list and guess which one survives. The third filmization of Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne's novel, Ebb Tide is rough going until Lloyd Nolan shows up to deliver the picture's best and subtlest performance. The story would be filmed again in 1947 as Adventure Island. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Having turned down the opportunity to produce Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), MGM's Louis B. Mayer had second thoughts when the Capra film swept the 1935 Oscars ceremony. Mayer hastily commissioned an It Happened One Night wannabe titled Love on the Run, tailored for the talents of Joan Crawford and Clark Gable (who, of course, had starred in the Capra picture, and had copped one of those Oscars). Gable and Franchot Tone play rival journalists Michael Anthony and Barnabas Pells, who travel the length and breadth of Europe to outscoop one another. Crawford portrays madcap heiress Sally Parker, who is engaged to marry fortune-hunting Prince Igor (Ivan Lebedeff). Whereas in It Happened One Night the heroine (Claudette Colbert) linked up with Gable in order to expedite her elopement with the wrong man, in Love on the Run Crawford seeks out Gable's help to escape her impending marriage with Prince Igor. The two stars combine their flight across Europe with business, dogging the trail of international aviator Baron Spandermann (Reginald Owen), whom Anthony suspects of being a spy. Pells goes along with Anthony and Parker, and soon all three of them are tied up (literally, in Pells' case) with an espionage ring. While it is Clark Gable who ends up with Joan Crawford at fadeout time, it was Franchot Tone who claimed her as his bride in real life. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The 1936 comedy-mystery The Princess Comes Across might well have been inspired by a real-life incident during the silent-movie era, in which a crafty San Francisco stenographer hoodwinked the Hollywood elite into believing that she was a Spanish princess. Carole Lombard stars as an alluring Swedish beauty who travels under the name of Princess Olga. Everyone whom she meets en route to America on the steamship Mammoth bows and scrapes to the Princess, while Hollywood anxiously awaits her arrival to star her in a big-budget film. Only the ship's bandleader, King Mantell (Fred MacMurray), refuses to defer to Olga, sensing that she may not be all she claims. Mantell's instincts are right on target: the "Princess" is a brass-nickel phony, a Brooklyn girl named Wanda Nash who has cooked up her royal guise with drama coach Gertrude (Alison Skipworth) as a publicity stunt to crash into movies. Unfortunately, a weaselly blackmailer Darcy (Porter Hall) gloms onto Wanda's true identity and offers to keep quiet in exchange for a huge cash settlment. At the same time, Darcy is attempting to shake down several other passengers on the Mammoth, including King Mantell. Inevitably, Darcy is found murdered in the "Princess"'s stateroom, and Wanda finds herself one of several likely suspects, among them Mantell. A quintet of international detectives, travelling to a convention in America, sets out to solve the mystery, which becomes even more mysterious when one of the detectives also turns up dead. Taking matters in his own hands, Mantell vows to clear Wanda's name, and in the course of things he realizes that he's madly in love with her--but will Wanda give up her hoax, and her future showbiz career, for Mantell's sake? Among the many highlights in this engagingly daffy film is Fred MacMurray's rendition of the enchantingly forgettable song "My Concertina." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This big-budget 1936 RKO Studios picture lost money, perhaps due to a cool box-office reception to the idea of leading lady Katharine Hepburn in drag, and a rare-for-its-day screen kiss between two women. Edmund Gwenn plays the title character's father Henry, who is obsessed with gambling. His daughter Sylvia (Hepburn) has stolen some expensive lace which they hope to smuggle from France to England. To elude police, she cuts her hair short and disguises herself as a man. She and her father board a ship, and a drunken Henry confesses their scheme to Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant), a jewel smuggler. To divert attention away from him, Jimmy snitches on Henry to the customs officials, and Henry has to pay up or be arrested. Later, Sylvia confronts Jimmy on a train and punches him. Jimmy apologizes and cuts them in on a scheme to steal jewels from a wealthy family, using his friend Maudie (Dennie Moore), a maid in the house. But Sylvia, still disguised as a man, talks Maudie out of it, and she responds with a kiss. Maudie and Sylvia's father fall in love and Maudie, an aspiring actress, invests money in a show to open in a seaside resort. There they are invited to the mansion of a wealthy artist, Michael Fane (Brian Aherne), who is unsettled by Sylvia's obvious affections before finally discovering that she's a woman. Jimmy is attracted to Michael's roommate, the Russian-born Lily (Natalie Paley) -- and from there, the romantic entaglements between the aformentioned parties proceed like a Shakespearean comedy. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide