The Best Movies You May Have Never Seen (Dec 2015)

Recommended and reviewed by Lady Eve's Reel Life

German filmmaker Max Ophuls.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Max Ophuls, the legendary German-born director most well-known for the films he made in France-- La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), The Earrings of Madame de… (1953), and Lola Montès (1955)--also directed four films in America during the post-war era. The jewel among these, and a film equal to his best French work, is Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948).

A romantic drama based on a novella by Stefan Zweig, Letter From an Unknown Woman charts the course of an ill-starred love affair. Such a narrative may seem sheer melodrama, but this film is a genuinely transporting experience. Credit this to Ophuls’ famed mastery of the mobile camera (moving here with the grace of a Viennese waltz) and staging, a polished script by Howard Koch (Casablanca) and strong lead performances by Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan.

Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan.

Letter From an Unknown Woman opens in elegant turn-of-the-century Vienna during the wee hours of a wet night. A well-dressed man (Jourdan) steps down from a carriage and, saying goodnight to his companions, jokes about the duel at dawn to which he has been challenged. Entering his well-appointed flat alone he tells his manservant that he will be departing again very shortly, "Honor is a luxury only gentlemen can afford," he remarks. The mute servant indicates a letter awaiting him and he opens the envelope and begins to read as he makes preparations to flee:

"By the time you read this letter, I may be dead," it says. The voice of a woman, the letter writer, begins to speak the words she has written, “I have so much to tell you and, perhaps, so little time…” As the man intently reads on, her tale unfolds in flashback.

The woman, Lisa Berndle (Fontaine), recalls how, as a girl, she became enthralled with up-and-coming concert pianist Stefan Brand, the recipient of her letter. Though the suave virtuoso had been completely unaware of her, Lisa privately harbored a deeply held fantasy that their destinies were entwined. And they are, but not in the way she imagined; the brief encounters they do share exact an incredible cost.

Lisa’s letter has come as a surprise and a shock to Stefan and he only finishes reading it as the dawn is breaking.

As the film circles from present to past to present again, it appears that both Lisa and Stefan have been the victims of their own misspent passions; she risking everything for an unattainable ideal, and he wasting himself on a string of shallow affairs. John, Stefan's mute valet, perhaps mirroring the director’s own viewpoint, observes the all-too-human folly around him and serves as a silent, compassionate witness.
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Recommended and reviewed by Richard Finch, co-founder of the Foreign Film Classics Facebook Group 

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Paulette Goddard.

The Young in Heart (1938). This Selznick production is a charming comedy about the Carletons, a family of con artists exiled from the French Riviera 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.

Roland Young as "Sahib."

To make themselves more credible, when they reach London 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. 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 Flying Wombat.

The Carletons are expertly played by Roland Young 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 as the dithering, scatter-brained mother; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as the son; and winsome Janet Gaynor as the sweet-natured and intelligent daughter. The stage actress Minnie Dupree plays the childlike Miss Fortune, and lovely Paulette Goddard is Fairbanks's love interest. The movie also includes an incredible futuristic automobile called a Flying Wombat (actually a 1938 Phantom Corsair) that at several points plays an important part in the film. 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.

Between Two Worlds and Outward Bound: One's a Classic, One's Not

The following review contains plot spoilers.

John Garfield learns his destiny.

Long ago, when I could still be surprised by a classic film, I discovered Between Two Worlds on a local TV station. It quickly entranced me with its tale of a mysterious ocean liner drifting through misty waters with only a handful of passengers. The steward, Stubby (Edmund Gwenn), seems to know a lot more than anyone else--and, indeed he does, for he is dead and so are all the passengers. They are sailing to their destiny and each one's personalized fate will be delivered to them by the Examiner (Sidney Greenstreet).

Greenstreet as the Examiner.

Between Two Worlds is the kind of the film Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger might have made if they worked within the studio system in 1940s Hollywood. Granted, it lacks the imaginative visual style of, say, A Matter of Life and Death. However, it creates a haunting portrait of its fateful journey, framed effectively by the despair of World War II. Its other strengths include an all-star Warners Bros. cast (John Garfield, Eleanor Parker, Paul Henreid, and Greenstreet) and a stunning score from composer Eric Wolfgang Korngold.

Daniel Fuchs adapted the screenplay from Sutton Vane's 1924 stage play Outward Bound. Vane's play also served as the basis for a 1930 film version starring Leslie Howard and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

From the day I learned about the Leslie Howard version, I was intrigued with seeing it. Little did I know it will take me over three decades. But last month, to my delight, Outward Bound popped up on TCM On Demand. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a huge disappointment.

Certainly, my expectations set the bar high, which likely impacted my assessment. I am also acutely aware of the limitations of early sound films, such as the absence of background music and the tendency to minimize camera movement. In regard to Outward Bound, those limitations emphasized its theatrical origins. Indeed, it seemed as if one was watching a filmed play--a fact reinforced by a lengthy opening narration that describes the virtues of Vane's play.

Howard as Tom Prior.

Great acting could have carried the day--after all, much of the dialogue is the same in both films. However, it's the performances that sadly doom Outward Bound. Even Leslie Howard overplays his role as Tom Prior, one of the first passengers to discover the truth. It's almost as if he was still mastering the nuances that separated acting on the stage from acting on film.

Interestingly, Howard appeared in the stage version of Outward Bound, but in a different role. He played Henry, one of the two lovers who commit suicide (a role played by Fairbanks in the 1930 film and Henreid in Between Two Worlds). I think Howard would have been fine as Henry, but suspect the producers thought Prior was a juicier part (it is--and Garfield provides the required intensity in the later film).

Outward Bound has its virtues. The fog-enshrouded darkness creates the required mysterious atmosphere. Helen Chandler, as Fairbanks' lover Ann, has a touching scene near the end where she believes Henry has been lost to her. However, there's no doubt that Between Two Worlds is a vastly superior film, a quiet, disconcerting classic that leaves a lasting impression.

"Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford" by Donald Spoto

Faye Dunaway as Crawford.

If you know who Joan Crawford is, then surely the image you conjure up when you think of her is that of the grotesque Mommie Dearest as portrayed in the book by her adopted daughter, Christina Crawford, and in the subsequent horrific movie starring Faye Dunaway. In his latest biography Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford (William Morrow, 352 pages), author Donald Spoto presents the many sides of Joan Crawford--the good the bad and the ugly. The result is a portrait of a woman plagued by inner demons that seemed to haunt her through her entire life, although she made a Herculean effort to banish them forever.

Spoto is not an apologist for Joan Crawford's tarnished image, nor does he try to revise history. He presents the facts as they happened and comments on their validity and impact upon Joan, her private life and on-screen persona. He made full use of the vast amount of information available electronically, filling the pages with direct quotes from many of the people who were instrumental in creating Joan Crawford, the star: her ex-husbands, lovers, writers, directors, and studio moguls. This was a complex woman, and if you want to look beyond "no more wire hangers," this is a good place to start.

The driving force in Joan Crawford's life--the fire in her belly, the impetus for everything she ever did--was her devastatingly unhappy childhood, and her efforts to erase all vestiges of the impoverished and love-deprived Lucille Le Sueur. Each chapter in the book represents a specific timeframe in Joan's life, chronicling her interactions with the people and events that contributed to her intensely personalized master plan for success. The seedlings are planted in her unstable childhood, never knowing her real father and going through a series of stepfathers, who eventually walked out of her life, reinforcing her sense of abandonment and initiating an ultimately frustrating search for someone to love her. She was forced to leave school in the fifth grade and join her mother providing for the family. She worked wherever her mother managed to find employment, mostly in laundries where the family lived on site in what could be described as little more than a hovel. The years spent working as a laundress, with its inherent drudgery and monotony, provided fodder for her ever increasing inferiority complex. Her bother, Hal, an early 20th century version of a slacker, was her mother's favorite, and was never asked to contribute to the family upkeep.

Crawford and Franchot Tone.

Joan's lack of education also preyed on her ego and contributed to the feelings of low esteem that she would eventually obsessively attempt to conquer. Uneducated and unrefined, she realized that she had to learn how to present herself physically and mentally in order to survive in the Darwinian social structure that existed in Hollywood. She readily acknowledges that her marriages to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Franchot Tone provided her with a veritable masters degree in self-improvement. Both men introduced her to literature, the arts, politics, and she gleaned enough information to comfortably engage in conversations with the more sophisticated members of her husbands' circle of friends and the Hollywood elite.

Joan with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Joan had many teachers who provided the lessons she needed in order to perfect her image. The gesturing and wide-eyed expressions of the silent films had to be replaced with more subtle and nuanced use of the face to convey a characters emotional reactions. Crewmembers shared important aspects of lighting and camera placement, which provided her with a working knowledge of behind the scenes filmmaking. Costume designers and makeup artists helped her during the various phases of her career, creating the right look for the flapper, shopgirl, independent woman, and sophisticate. The right look, in public, at the studio and at home, was fanatically maintained. From hair to shoes, Joan could never appear as the girl next door in jeans and a blouse. She was a star, and fans expected nothing less than the image they saw on the silver screen.

Joan wished very much to have children, and give them all the love and advantages of a good home. This quest proved disastrous and often legally questionable, as in desperation, she turned to so-called "baby brokers." Despite a resolve to prevent the children from experiencing the pain and loss of her own childhood, she could not overcome the demand for perfection nor could she provide the children with the stability of a father figure. As testament to her failed attempts to create a happy household, each child harbored totally disparate memories and images of Joan as a mother.

Alfred Steele.

Joan's own pursuit of love, resulted in numerous long and short-term affairs; even while married, she continued her quest for the seemingly unattainable, but still felt devastatingly lonely. When Alfred Steele, the charismatic president of Pepsi-Cola entered her life, she knew she would marry him and felt confident that he would bestow her with the love she so achingly craved and banish the spectre of loneliness from her life. After Steele's untimely death in 1959, age 58, Joan maintained that during her four years of marriage she felt fulfilled and truly alive for the first time in her life.

The ferocity of determination, which had transformed a little waif from Texas into one of the most glamorous denizens of Hollywood also applied to her career path, effecting the choices she made regarding roles she was offered and roles she wanted to play. She transitioned easily from silent films to talking pictures. She'd been one of MGM's brightest stars and continued to be so with the introduction of sound. However, she became frustrated with the roles she was assigned, the quality of the scripts and directors who did not share her ambitions regarding stardom. Her acting style and appearance were constantly evolving in an effort to achieve perfection of the image that she fervently believed was still a work in progress. Spoto presents an interesting timeline of films along with revealing insights into Joan's choices, and her feelings about the completed film. He devotes almost a chapter to a wrongheaded decision by Joan to star in a film called Torch Song, considered one of the worst movies ever made and one of the most unintentionally hilarious. Contrary to world opinion, Joan loved it, and even bemoaned the fact that they didn't make pictures like this anymore.

There is also a document presented in the book, originally published in Life Magazine in February 1964, detailing the require-ments Joan demanded at all hotels she stayed at during a publicity tour for the film Strait-Jacket. Its excesses are reflective of Joan Crawford's self-image, that of a great motion picture star representative of all the glamour and sophistication associated with Hollywood and therefore entitled to all the creature comforts available at whatever cost.

If you're a long-standing Joan Crawfor fan, you are probably familiar with much of the information presented in this book. Fledgling admirers, however, will find this a veritable treasure trove of the events and people who helped power Joan Crawford's juggernaut to her rightful place as a Hollywood legend.

HarperCollins Publishers provided a review copy of Possessed to the Classic Film & TV Cafe.