TUGBOAT ANNIE

TUGBOAT ANNIE (1933). Director: Mervyn LeRoy. 

Annie Brennan (Marie Dressler) lives and works on her tugboat, along with her often-drunk and lazy husband, Terry (Wallace Beery), whom she dearly loves. The only thing that comes between them is their son Alec (Robert Young), a successful captain of a luxury liner, who is disgraced by his father's behavior and wants his mother to leave him. This causes an estrangement between son and parents that is painful for all. Tugboat Annie features that swell team Dressler and Beery in top form. (Although Young is okay, he's rather one-note and out-classed in this company). Maureen O'Sullivan is excellent as Alec's girlfriend, and Frankie Darro is fine as Alec as a boy in the earlier scenes. Tugboat Annie and its leads never let you forget the pathos underneath the comedy. The only debit is that the climactic storm-at-sea sequence goes on a little too long, and is a bit confusing as well. 

Verdict: Dressler and Beery at their best. ***.

THE TOY WIFE

Luise Rainer

THE TOY WIFE (1938). Director: Richard Thorpe. Screenplay by Zoe Akins.

"A woman is like a postage stamp. Once there's a black mark on her, she's no good to nobody." -- Pick.

In pre-Civil war Louisiana, two sisters live on a plantation with their slaves and their father. Gilberte, or "Frou Frou" (Luise Rainer) is the pretty and somewhat muddle-headed younger daughter, and Louise (Barbara O'Neil) is the more practical and less attractive older daughter. The young mountebank, Andre Vallaire (Robert Young), wants to propose to Frou Frou, but he is too late, as she has already decided to accept a proposal from the lawyer, George Sartoris (Melvyn Douglas). The trouble is that Frou Frou doesn't love George, but Louise does ... and Andre will not forget Frou Frou. Things come to a boil when George asks Louise to come and run the household, as Frou Frou --  a "toy wife," in his estimation -- seems incapable of doing so.

Luise Rainer and Alan Perl 

Had The Toy Wife starred, say, Bette Davis, it would probably not be a nearly forgotten film today. Luise Rainer, who is outstanding in the film, had already won back to back Best Actress Oscars (for The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth) before appearing in this film, but for various reasons her career faded out soon after and long-lasting major stardom never materialized. Douglas, Young and especially O'Neil are also very good in the film, along with Theresa Harris [The Flame of New Orleans] as Frou Frou's maid and companion, "Pick," Libby Taylor as the housekeeper Suzanne, and Alma Kruger [Saboteur] as Andre's disapproving mother. Little Alan Perl is a charmer as George and Frou Frou's son, Georgie.

The Toy Wife's patronizing treatment of black characters is typical of the period, unfortunately, but the film is still absorbing and has a very touching conclusion. There is first-rate cinematography from Oliver T. Marsh and a nice score by Edward Ward.

Verdict: Memorable, well-acted, and unpredictable drama. ***.

H. M. PULHAM, ESQ.

Hedy Lamarr and Robert Young

H. M. PULHAM, ESQ. (1941). Director: King Vidor. Based on a novel by John P. Marquand.

Harry Pulham (Robert Young), a successful businessman with a mansion, wife and children, thinks back on his life and remembers the woman he fell in love with but didn't marry twenty years earlier. The oddly named Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr) is another copy writer in a firm where the young Harry is employed, and the two gradually fall in love. But Marvin is too independent to want to be a proper Bostonian wife, and Harry eventually marries someone else. Thinking that his marriage to wife Kay (Ruth Hussey) has been a failure, he goes to see Marvin again ...

Paging Marcus Welby? Robert Young

H. M. Pulham, Esq. has several notable features: an excellent performance by Hedy Lamarr [Algiers], which is generally considered the best of her career; a very good performance from Young [Honolulu], who seems superficial and miscast at first but handles subsequent scenes beautifully; a memorable supporting cast which includes Charles Coburn and Fay Holden as Harry's parents, Van Heflin as his buddy, and Hussey as his wife; and a truly lovely ending which explains the whole point and purpose of an enduring marriage between two people. Bronislau Kaper's [Them] score is also of note, as is King Vidor\s direction. In a two-shot with Young and Lamarr she leans back and falls into shadow, forecasting her eventual disappearance from his life.

Verdict: Interesting study of one man's life and loves. ***.

THEY WON'T BELIEVE ME

THEY WON'T BELIEVE ME (1947). Director: Irving Pichel.

A man named Larry (Robert Young), on trial for murder, takes to the stand and tells his sordid story to the jury in an effort to save his life. Married to the lovely but somewhat controlling Greta (Rita Johnson of The Second Face), Larry enters into an affair with Janice (Jane Greer). Later he finds himself falling for yet another woman, Verna (Susan Hayward), and plans to run away with her. But fate intervenes, two of those women wind up dead, and Larry's in deep trouble. The absorbing picture is uncompromising not just for its anti-hero and other unsympathetic characters, but for its knock-out of an ironic ending. Johnson, Hayward and Greer all deliver, and Young, who did play bad guys in the days before Father Knows Best, is nonetheless cast against type as Larry  -- that just makes his performance more effective. Most of the characters in this are distinctly unlikable for one reason or another, but that doesn't affect one's enjoyment of the movie. Jane Greer [Run for the Sun] looks especially luscious in this. Johnson and Young also appeared together in Honolulu.

Verdict: Very satisfying and well-done film noir.

HONOLULU

Robert Young meets Robert Young

HONOLULU (1939). Director: Edward Buzzell.

Movie star Brooks Mason (Robert Young) is constantly besieged by admiring fans who are so aggressive they put him in the hospital. One day, however, it is not Brooks but his double, George Smith (also Young) who is "assaulted" and winds up admitted to emergency. From there he is taken to the home of Brooks Mason, whose butler (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) thinks he's seeing double. Brooks comes up with a plan. He will return to Honolulu, where George hails from, to take up his quieter life for a spell, while George takes over for him temporarily in New York and Hollywood. The complications are that Brooks -- pretending to be George -- falls for a dancer, Dorothy (Eleanor Powell) on shipboard -- but George already has a fiancee, Cecelia (Rita Johnson of The Naughty Nineties), in Hawaii. While the leads are okay, Gracie Allen [We're Not Dressing] provides the most fun as one of Dorothy's friends [George Burns has much less to do]. Clarence Kolb of My Little Margie plays Cecelia's disapproving [of George] father. Featherweight but harmless.

Verdict: Amiable stuff and nonsense. **1/2.

VAMPIRE CIRCUS

VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972). Director: Robert Young.

Count Mitterhaus (Robert Tayman), who has been putting the bite on children in a small European village, vows to destroy everyone after the townspeople finally catch up with him and dispatch him. No one is allowed to leave the village because of a quarantine due to the "plague" of vampirism, but years later a gypsy circus troupe makes its way into Stettel, its entertainers putting the bite on everyone to not only avenge the count but bring him back to life. It's hard to get absorbed in this movie because out of its one-dimensional characters it has no real protagonist, the closest being Dr. Kersh (Richard Owens) who believes vampirism is no more than a disease and gets past the guards to go out and find a cure -- but he isn't seen for most of the movie. Similarly his son Anton (John Moulder-Brown of The Boys of Paul Street) only appears sporadically. A bigger problem is that for all the sex and bloodshed Vampire Circus is kind of tedious and uninvolving.Worse, there's a highly unpleasant emphasis on the erotic seduction of children. With some exceptions, the cast seems strangely unattractive as well.

Verdict: Manages the bizarre feat of making a circus of vampires seem as boring as it is repellent. **.

THE BLACK CAMEL

THE BLACK CAMEL (1931). Director: Hamilton MacFadden. 

Inspector Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) is called in when an actress, Shelah Fane (Dorothy Revier), filming on location in Hawaii, is found murdered. Apparently Miss Fane knew too much about the unsolved murder three years earlier of another actor with whom she had been involved. The suspects include a fortune teller named Tarneverro (Bela Lugosi), a maid named Anna (Violet Dunn), Shelah's friend Julie (Sally Eilers), her boyfriend Jimmy (Robert Young in his "film debut," although he was also an extra in The Campus Vamp in 1928), Shelah's fiance Alan (William Post Jr.), an odd painter and beachcomber named Smith (Murray Kinnell), and Shelah's ex-husband Robert Fyfe (Victor Varconi). Aside from Oland, most of the actors are merely serviceable, although Violet Dunn is vivid, as is the ever-overwrought Dwight Frye in the role of a butler. Lugosi has a good-sized role, but is not really seen to good advantage. Handsome Varconi seems to have stolen his accent from Lugosi! Born in Hungary, Varconi was also in The Man Who Turned to Stone and Atomic Submarine. Stage-bound and slow, The Black Camel is a fairly dull Charlie Chan movie. Even the Monogram Chans were better than this. There's an amusing scene showing Chan at home with his snappy and very American family. 

Verdict: It creaks. **.

THE SECOND WOMAN

THE SECOND WOMAN (1950). Director: James V. Kern.

Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake) is visiting her Aunt Amelia (Florence Bates) when she meets and falls in love with Jeff Cohalan ( Robert Young) whose fiancee died in a car accident about a year previously. Jeff seems to have had a steady stream of bad luck ever since, especially since he's met Ellen -- his dog is poisoned, his horse breaks its leg in its stall, his house burns down -- and Ellen wonders if someone is out to get him while Amelia's doctor simply thinks Jeff is nuts and doing everything to himself. The film is well-produced, moodily photographed, and suspenseful as it proceeds to the final revelation. (More on which in a moment.) Drake is very good and makes an appealing, sympathetic heroine. Drake was married to Cary Grant for about 12 years, having met him while co-starring with him in Every Girl Should Be Married. Young is quite good at times as Jeff, even if he doesn't quite have the presence and authority of a Grant and at the climax he's painfully perfunctory when he should be passionate and dismayed. While The Second Woman is never in the league of such films as Rebecca and Suspicion, which it tries to emulate, what really sinks it is the utterly ludicrous denouement, which stretches credulity to the breaking point, asking us to believe that someone would cover up something without at the same time giving the individual a strong and believable enough motivation to do so. John Sutton and Jean Rogers add some spice as a once-married, happily divorced couple who pass in and out of the proceedings. Rogers was in several cliffhanger serials including Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars in which she played Dale Arden. The Second Woman was her final credit.

Verdict: Absorbing, but what a wacky wind-up! **.