Charles Wagenheim Movies

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

In this drama, set in Paris, a devout communist is slowly seduced into becoming a capitalist by a persuasively pretty young woman. The tale begins as the young man shoots at a banker and then flees the police. He runs into the woman's apartment, and for some reason, she decides to let him stay. She then tells him that she is the banker's ex-wife, and they begin to converse; she is fascinated by communist philosophies and in turn shares her views on capitalism with him. He comes to like them and so abandons his other ideologies for the bourgeois life. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This entry in MGM's "Crime Does Not Pay" series focuses on customs evasion. It shows how even wealthy people, not just career criminals and smugglers, attempt to evade paying customs tax on items they bring back from overseas. ~ Brian Gusse, All Movie Guide

Fourteen scriptwriters spent five years toiling over a movie adaptation of war correspondent Vincent Sheehan's Personal History before producer Walter Wanger brought the property to the screen as Foreign Correspondent. What emerged was approximately 2 parts Sheehan and 8 parts director Alfred Hitchcock--and what's wrong with that? Joel McCrea stars as an American journalist sent by his newspaper to cover the volatile war scene in Europe in the years 1938 to 1940. He has barely arrived in Holland before he witnesses the assassination of Dutch diplomat Albert Basserman: at least, that's what he thinks he sees. McCrea makes the acquaintance of peace-activist Herbert Marshall, his like-minded daughter Laraine Day, and cheeky British secret agent George Sanders. A wild chase through the streets of Amsterdam, with McCrea dodging bullets, leads to the classic "alternating windmills" scene, which tips Our Hero to the existence of a formidable subversive organization. McCrea returns to England, where he nearly falls victim to the machinations of jovial hired-killer Edmund Gwenn. The leader of the spy ring is revealed during the climactic plane-crash sequence--which, like the aforementioned windmill scene, is a cinematic tour de force for director Hitchcock and cinematographer Rudolph Mate. Producer Wanger kept abreast of breaking news events all through the filming of Foreign Correspondent, enabling him to keep the picture as "hot" as possible: the final scene, with McCrea broadcasting to a "sleeping" America from London while Nazi bombs drop all around him, was filmed only a short time after the actual London blitz. The script was co-written by Robert Benchley, who has a wonderful supporting role as an eternally tippling newsman. Foreign Correspondent was Alfred Hitchcock's second American film, and remained one of his (and his fans') personal favorites. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Made just before America's entry into World War II, Paris Calling is one of the earliest French Underground adventures. When the German march into Paris, a polyglot of French patriots organize to undermine the Nazi occupation troops (represented by Lee J. Cobb, who plays his character with a surprising amount of depth). Elizabeth Bergner plays a French aristocrat who learns that her ex-fiance (Basil Rathbone) is a collaborator; she agrees to help the Underground, even unto killing her former lover. Gale Sondergaard, normally a villain, is sympathetically cast as a blowsy waterfront entertainer whose waterfront dive serves as Resistance headquarters. And how do the neutral Americans figure into all of this? Yankee-doodle-dandy Randolph Scott parachutes into view as a pilot for the RAF. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Boston Blackie, the suave crook-turned-detective created in 1910 by pulp writer Donald Boyle, had been popping up sporadically in films for nearly two decades by the time Columbia launched its "Boston Blackie" series in 1941. Chester Morris starred as the title character in Meet Boston Blackie, wherein the ex-thief protagonist and his underworld cronie The Runt (Charles Wagenheim) meet a mysterious young lady named Marilyn Howard (Constance Worth) while disembarking from an ocean liner. When a murder takes place, Blackie and the Runt trail Marilyn to Coney Island, followed in close proximity by Inspector Farraday (Richard Lane), who thinks (as he always does) that Blackie is somehow tied in with the killing. Before long, our hero and heroine are mixed up with a gang of foreign spies operating out of a funhouse. Cleverly directed by Robert Florey and atmospherically lensed by cinematographer Franz Planer, Meet Boston Blackie was an excellent launching pad for one of Columbia's most profitable film series. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Half Way to Shanghai is Burma, according to this Universal B-grade actioner. The film takes place almost in its entirety on a train bound from Lashio to Rangoon in the days just prior to the Japanese invasion. Passenger Alexander Barton (Kent Taylor) becomes the reluctant hero of the piece when he comes into possession of a map showing Chinese defense sites. When he's not trying to elude Nazi agents Zerta (George Zucco) and Van Simet (Lionel Royce), Barton is dealing as best he can with the film's two heroines, Vicki Nelson (Irene Hervey) and Caroline Wrallins (Charlotte Wynters). Half Way to Shanghai bears traces of the earlier Universal suspenser Bombay Clipper, which took place on a cramped passenger plane. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Mystery of Marie Roget is more faithful to its Edgar Allan Poe original than most Universal films of its ilk, even though the Poe story and the film aren't exactly twins. Based on the factual unsolved 1842 murder of one Mary Rogers, the film stars Maria Montez as the unfortunate heroine, a popular Parisian entertainer. No innocent young damsel, Marie Roget spends a great deal of her time plotting the demise of her younger sister Camille (Nell O'Day). Shortly afterward, Marie herself disappears, and before long the mutilated, unidentifiable corpse of a young woman turns up. It is up to master detecive Dupin (Patric Knowles) and his Dr. Watson-ish assistant Gobelin (Lloyd Corrigan) to piece all the clues together. The film's best moments belong to Maria Ouspenskaya as Maria's sardonic grandmother. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Marlene Dietrich was supposed to have starred in Universal's Sin Town, but the script was not to her liking. Dietrich was replaced by Constance Bennett in the role of a glamorous suspect in a small-town murder. Broderick Crawford and Leo Carrillo costar as a couple of con men who must solve the killing of a newspaper publisher lest they be convicted of the crime. At 75 minutes, the film moves too quickly to pause for such niceties as motivation and logic, but few in the audiences of 1942 complained. Sin Town's three-person writing staff included Richard Brooks, later the director of such "A" pictures as Elmer Gantry and In Cold Blood (though he never did write for Marlene Dietrich). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The general perception of the Technicolor costume adventure movies that Maria Montez and Jon Hall made for Universal in the early 1940's is that they were pure escapist entertainment, intended to make people forget for an hour or so about the Second World War and the general world situation. And generally that is true about them -- they were mostly no "about" much more than having fun for 90 minutes or so amid pretty sets with lots of action and some pretty women in exotic outfits. But watching Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, one has to wonder if even here the screenwriter, Edmund L. Hartmann, was able to totally get away from the day-to-day reality around him. The opening Mongol invasion of Bagdad and the murder of the old Caliph (Moroni Olsen) while trying to set up a government-in-exile without thinking of the German and Japanese conquests and occupations of various nations that would have been going on at the time; additionally, the fact that the old Caliph is murdered with the help of a traitor in his own noble ranks -- a "quisling" in the term coined during World War II -- wouldn't have been missed by audiences at the time. Further, the screenplay very specifically paints the forty thieves as heroes who have gone from being criminals to an active resistance force against the occupying Mongols -- indeed, at the denouement, their invasion of the palace is greeted as a day of liberation by the people of Bagdad. The movie walks a strange tightrope, casting about veiled topical references of that sort, even as is otherwise sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to cast Andy Devine as a desert bandit. Obviously, Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves was sold as -- and mostly intended as -- light entertainment, but just below that glitzy Technicolor surface were some fascinating allusions to the real world. None of this stops Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves from being immense fun -- it is, even if the "fun" isn't totally escapist in nature -- and it's great to look at as well, even 60 years on; Universal has apparently kept preservation-quality source materials on this and Hall and Montez's other Technicolor costume romps. And this particular entry in that group of movies also contains one very instructive clue to the morays and censorship of the time in one scene, in which the hero meets the heroine bathing at an oasis -- the makers seem to have been forced to insert a particular shot that is there for no other reason then to make it clear that she is not totally naked when he sees her. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Cattlemen Robert Paige and Noah Beery Jr. run up against a shady syndicate, set up to squash the dealing between independent dealers and cattle buyers. Paige sets up his own exchange, in direct competition with cattle baron Thomas Gomez. He also falls in love with Anne Gwynne, daughter of a man killed by Gomez's top henchman Lon Chaney Jr. (billed misleadingly as "Chango the Mad Killer"). In the hands of Universal's resident serial director Ford Beebe, Frontier Badmen exudes an energetic pace that puts many an "A" picture to shame. Western fans were particularly gratified by the presence in the supporting cast of singing cowboy Tex Ritter and onetime silent-screen action star William Farnum. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Song of Bernadette is a reverent recounting of the life of St. Bernadette of Lourdes. As a teen-aged peasant girl growing up in the tiny French village of Lourdes in the 19th century, Bernadette (Jennifer Jones) experiences a vision of the Virgin Mary in a nearby grotto. At least, she believes that she did. The religious and political "experts" of the region cannot accept the word of a silly little girl, and do their best to get her to renounce her claims. Bernadette's vision becomes a political hot potato for many years, with the authorities alternately permitting and denying the true believers' access to the grotto. No matter what the higher-ups may think of Bernadette, there is little denying that the springs of Lourdes hold some sort of recuperative powers for the sick and lame. Eventually, Bernadette dies, never faltering in her conviction that she saw the Blessed Virgin; years later, she is canonized as a saint, and the Grotto of Lourdes remains standing as a permanent shrine. The 20th Century-Fox people knew that The Song of Bernadette would whip up controversy from both the religious and the agnostic. The company took some of the "curse" off the project with a now-famous opening title: "To those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. To those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible." Jennifer Jones' performance in The Song of Bernadette won her the Best Actress Oscar in 1943. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide