"My Favorite Brunette" (1947)

By 1947 the film noir genre had firmly taken hold as a type of Hollywood film. The tough talking, big city detective prowling an urban landscape of underworld criminals and femme fatales, trying to solve some sordid crime with too many suspects on hand. So it was inevitable that it was a ripe for parody. What's interesting about this entertaining little film is that the filmic ribbing came so quickly to the nascent genre and it manages to bend the rules but also play by them as well. Bob Hope, sans  his usual screen cohort Bing Crosby, although Der Bingle does make a cameo appearance here, is a frustrated advertising photographer who dreams of being a hard boiled private eye. Without spoiling anything, he gets his wish, but he bumbles his way through the entire proceedings. Everyone in the picture is playing it straight, as if they're in a real noir thriller, including the heavies, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney. Hope plays all the comedy to himself, in sotto voce asides so that only we the audience hear his thoughts. It's a running stream of consciousness gag that was later stolen by Woody Allen in his nervous comedies to great effect. Luscious and lovely Dorothy Lamour is on hand as the wealthy widow who hires Hope to find her missing husband. She's just window dressing, but then so many noir females were just that. At least she's game and has fun with the part. If you like genre-bending fare do put it on your list.

"Fahrenheit 451" (1966)

One of the strangest pairings of director and movie genre ever attempted. Francois Truffaut was one of the seminal creators of the French New Wave, a style of filmmaking noted for it's looser, grittier, less formalistic approach to storytelling. It's themes were contemporary and dealt with current social issues. So what was he doing helming an adaptation of a popular science-fiction novel set in a dystopian future? Well, the answer was probably (and primarily) Truffaut's love of the written word and/or art, and, secondarily, the dangers of totalitarian governments. It's a frightening future where books are banned, not just censored. You can't read them, own them, write them. Oskar Werner is a "fireman" working for the state. It's his job to ferret out and extinguish any books owned by lawbreakers. When he meets a lovely girl on the monorail (Julie Christie) who we find out is part of an Underground devoted to saving and preserving books, his sentiments begin to change. But if his superiors find out he's fried, pun intended. The movie has strange rhythms. It doesn't have the pacing of a typical Hollywood thriller, but the oddly antiseptic production design of this paranoid world somehow fits. It's got a Flash Gordon-meets-Mod-Sixties vibe. Werner and Truffaut famously hated each other through this production but the actor's Teutonic accent works to heighten the Nazi-like proceedings. In a another odd touch, Christie plays a dual role as Werner's mind-numbed wife who spends her days in a drug induced torpor watching her giant flat-screen TV (a future prediction the art directors got right). This is one of those quirky movie curios that's definitely worth the time, if only for the haunting and beautiful ending, justifiably famous, that only an artist like Truffaut could pull off.

"My Favorite Wife" (1940)

This is the movie that put the screw in screwball comedy. An amazingly sexy sex farce that somehow manages to tell you exactly what's going on but only by inference and innuendo, all while remaining smart, witty, and very funny. The Hayes Code censors were either asleep at the wheel or just plain dumb to let this one slip through. It's a modern take on a tale as old as Methuselah. Roughly based on a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Irene Dunne returns to her family and husband (Cary Grant), after seven years having been assumed dead from a shipwreck. Grant has since remarried to a stiff new wife (Gail Patrick) and hilarity ensues. He's married to two women while both are staying at the same resort hotel, wink wink. To complicate things, he finds out that Dunne wasn't alone on that deserted island, she was with Randolph Scott, who breaks the Hunk-O-Meter scale he's so blindingly handsome here. Grant fumes when he imagines the possibilities of those two canoodling on their island hideaway. But on a meta level, there's more here than meets the eye. See, in real life Grant and Scott were "roommates" living together, hopeless bachelors, FOR TWELVE YEARS in the '30s and '40s. Was it a real love affair as many have speculated? Just Google "Cary Grant Randolph Scott lovers" and look at the cozy pictures of their living arrangement and you decide. But it does add a spicy layer of meaning to the film, as in the scene where Grant first spots Scott at a swimming pool in his skimpy bathing suit. His eyes bug out so much it's like he's a character from a Tex Avery cartoon. Dunne is luminous and her chemistry with Grant is undeniable, that's  probably why they made three pictures together. Director Garson Kanin concocted this frothy cocktail and it's laced with some pretty strong spirits that'll leave you with a groggy smile on your face.

"Mrs. Miniver" (1942)

Maybe the most successful piece of war propaganda Hollywood ever produced. A moving and sentimental story of one British family during the early stages of the WWII and their town's siege by German forces, this film caused American audiences to sympathize with the Allied cause in spades. Isolationism was a dead, let's go kill those Jerries! This is one of those classy, glossy MGM prestige pictures that still works because director William Wyler carefully calibrates the message without getting preachy, and the tears are earned, not squeezed out of you. The fine cast, headed up by Greer Garson as the stalwart mother, Walter Pidgeon as her affable husband, and Teresa Wright as the teenage ingenue who falls for the Minivers' son (Richar Ney), are just the sort of likable people Americans identified with. Besides one nasty German soldier, the great Dame May Whitty is on hand as Wright's grandmother to inject some stuffy antagonist troubles into the family's tribulations. A sincere and entertaining effort all around.

"Call of the Wild" (1935)

If you needed any other proof why Clark Gable was nicknamed 'The King' in 1930's Hollywood, then look no further than his charismatic star turn in this tale of the the Yukon Gold Rush at the turn of the 20th Century. He's sexy as all hell as a down on his luck fortune hunter who's searching for an apocryphal gold mine up in the backcountry mountains. He's aided by three loves, Loretta Young as the wife of lost prospector who knows the way to the gold, Jack Oakie as his comic relief sidekick, and Buck, his loyal St. Bernard sled dog. The story gives only a passing glance to the plot of Jack London's popular novella which put the anthropomorphized Buck at the center of the action. This being Hollywood they weren't going to make the biggest male lead of the day play second fiddle to a dog. What you do get is a lot of fun romance, dog races, snarling wolves, and stunning wintry vistas shot in Washington state. Reginald Owen shows up as the hissable baddie trying to steal the gold (and Buck). And let's not discount the performance of the canine himself. It's no wonder that Gable ends up with the lovable pooch over Young!

"Key Largo" (1948)

Proof an all star cast can take okay material and transform it into something great. Liberally adapted from a play by Maxwell Anderson, John Huston directs this story of a WWII vet (Humphrey Bogart) visiting the widow (Lauren Bacall) of one of the men in his company who died under his command in the battle of San Pietro. She lives with her wheelchair ridden father-in-law (Lionel Barrymore), the proprietor of a seen-better-days resort hotel in the remote Florida Keys. Things take a noir turn when we find out the the other guests at the place are a snarling kingpin mobster (Edward G. Robinson), his band of thugs, and his desperate ex-lounge singer gun moll (Claire Trevor). A bad hurricane hits and there's much verbal sparring, as Robinson tries to strong arm Bogie into getting him to Cuba and away from the law. Things could've gotten stagey here but Huston keeps things moving and the cast is like a finely tuned machine, everyone doing what they do best, especially Trevor who won a much deserved Oscar for her emotionally bruised character. When she does a boozy off-key rendition of "Moanin' Low" she's an exposed raw nerve. Robinson is always good as the heavy and Bogie is...well, Bogie. Nobody did the reluctant hero better in the history of movies.

Haiku review: "Five Came Back" (2017)

Old Hollywood goes
to war; fascinating and
essential viewing.