CMBA Blogathon: THE HARVEY GIRLS (1946)

The theme for this year's CMBA Blogathon is "Planes, Trains, & Automobiles," which makes the 1946 musical, The Harvey Girls, an obvious choice. The movie won an Oscar for its train themed song, "On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe," and it depicts, in a fictionalized and colorful way, the importance of the train in bringing women to the American West. Adapted from a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Harvey Girls stars Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, and Virginia O'Brien as three young women who head West on the train to find new opportunities and romance. While it's not a perfect picture, this is a fun, lively musical that tells an often unknown story about women's part in settling the frontier, made even more entertaining by the presence of outstanding actors like Angela Lansbury, Marjorie Main, Ray Bolger, and John Hodiak.

The Harvey Girls were real people; these young women went West to staff the Harvey Houses that sprang up along the railroad lines in the late 19th century. Fred Harvey recruited young women with good backgrounds and civilized manners to work in his establishments, where train passengers found a short rest and a good meal during their stops. For women of that time, there were few respectable job opportunities out West, but the Harvey Houses provided good wages along with room and board. The crisp uniforms and cheerful manners of the Harvey Girls brought a wholesome, civilized femininity to rough country, and their presence helped to tame wild frontier towns. One notable Harvey House location was the Grand Canyon, where the Fred Harvey Company provided concessions and visitor services until 1968. Today, the El Tovar Hotel at the South Rim includes a display honoring the Harvey Girls and the 1946 film tribute to their legacy. Becoming a Harvey Girl changed the lives of many women who yearned for independence and adventure. Over 100,000 young women took the opportunity that the Harvey Houses offered, and you can learn more about their stories by watching the trailer for the 2013 documentary film, The Harvey Girls: Opportunity Bound.

In the movie, Judy Garland's character, Susan, doesn't set out to be a Harvey Girl at all. She responds to a call for a mail-order bride, but when she meets the intended groom (Chill Wills) she jumps at the chance to become a Harvey Girl like the other young women on her train. Marjorie Main plays a funny but effective chaperone and manager for the young ladies in her charge, while Cyd Charisse and Virginia O'Brien appear as two Harvey Girls who befriend Susan. The girls encounter a different type of Western womanhood in Angela Lansbury's saloon singer, Em, who doesn't appreciate the competition or the straitlaced morality of the new arrivals. Susan attracts the interest of the bar's owner, Ned Trent (John Hodiak), while Virginia O'Brien's character, Alma, engages in an awkward but entertaining romance with Chris (Ray Bolger). Sadly, O'Brien disappears from the movie in the third act, thanks to shooting delays that made her pregnancy impossible to hide, but she does get in a particularly funny performance with the song, "The Wild, Wild West."

If The Harvey Girls romanticizes the real experiences of the women who staffed the restaurants on the Santa Fe lines, it also depicts women as individuals who went West for many reasons, and not just as daughters, wives, or prostitutes. Women's Westerns have been few and far between in Hollywood history, but when they do come along they reveal fascinating hints at stories that have largely been left untold. As a musical comedy, The Harvey Girls is lighter and sweeter than Westward the Women (1951) or cattle queen dramas like The Furies (1950) and Johnny Guitar (1954), but it does a great job leaving the viewer wanting to know more about the real women who took that chance for a new life out West. Trains made Harvey Houses necessary, and Harvey Houses made a place for young women to earn a living and lead independent lives. That's a theme worth singing about!

You can find a full-length review of The Harvey Girls in my book, Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching, available on Kindle at Amazon.com. For more about The Harvey Girls, try the 1994 book by Lesley Poling-Kempes, The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West.

Classic Films in Focus: ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI (1951)

Hollywood churned out Westerns during the 1950s, but only a few of them became true classics on the level of Winchester ‘73 (1950) and The Searchers (1956). The rest, like William Wellman’s Across the Wide Missouri (1951), amused the Saturday matinee crowd well enough, and today they are still decent company for an hour or two, especially for fans of the genre as a whole. Although it’s by no means a great film, Across the Wide Missouri offers just enough entertainment to make it interesting, especially in its fine cast and gorgeous Technicolor scenery. Classic movie fans will appreciate Clark Gable in the lead role, with supporting players like Ricardo Montalban, John Hodiak, Adolphe Menjou, and J. Carrol Naish.

Gable stars as Flint Mitchell, a beaver trapper who takes a pretty native wife (María Elena Marqués) as a business arrangement to open up new territory. Soon enough he finds himself in love with his spirited bride, but their happiness is threatened by the antagonism of the Blackfoot warrior, Ironshirt (Ricardo Montalban).

Yes, indeed, we have Ricardo Montalban as the shirtless Blackfoot antagonist, looking almost as ridiculous in retrospect as Rock Hudson in Winchester ’73. Both of the most important “native” roles in the film are actually played by Mexican actors, with the lovely María Elena Marqués making a charming if ethnically inaccurate Blackfoot heroine. The chiefs are equally inauthentic; J. Carrol Naish plays Looking Glass, and Jack Holt appears as the aging Bear Ghost. Of the lot, the Marqués character, Kamiah, proves the most interesting. Unfortunately, she follows the Pocahontas model of Native American femininity; she’s spunky, eager to throw in with the white man’s cause, and safely controlled by tragedy.

Moments of startling cultural conflation provide some of the film’s best scenes. John Hodiak appears as a Scotsman who has adopted Blackfoot dress and culture, which makes his performance of a traditional Scottish jig quite a sight. Later, a Native American chief appears decked in a suit of medieval armor, buckskins, and a huge feather headdress. Throughout the film, the frontier appears as a place where cultural identities are negotiated and revised, with a diverse group of settlers banding together and sharing aspects of their national tastes and traits with one another. Thus we have characters like the French trapper, Pierre (Adolphe Menjou), joining the mix of Scots, Southerners, and natives who populate the wilderness.

Take note of Howard Keel as the uncredited narrator of the tale. For more of Wellman’s Westerns, see The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Buffalo Bill (1944), and Yellow Sky (1948). Gable made several Westerns late in his career, including Lone Star (1952), The Tall Men (1955), The King and Four Queens (1956), and his final picture, The Misfits (1961). Ricardo Montalban also appears as a Native American in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), but you can catch him in more diverse roles in Neptune's Daughter (1949), Border Incident (1949), and Battleground (1949). Look for more of John Hodiak in Lifeboat (1944) and The Harvey Girls (1946).

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.

Classic Films in Focus: TWO SMART PEOPLE (1946)

Before she was Ricky Ricardo’s wacky wife, Lucille Ball had a different career as an up-and-coming leading lady on the big screen. She never became as big a star there as she would on television, but Ball made several pictures that are still worth watching today, including the crime romance mash-up Two Smart People (1946). Directed by Jules Dassin, this minor classic offers an interesting mix of genres but is carried mostly by the performances of Ball and her toothy costar, John Hodiak. Fans of caper stories and con men will appreciate Two Smart People for its larcenous protagonists, while cinephiles will enjoy seeing Ball, Hodiak, and a supporting cast that includes Lloyd Nolan and Elisha Cook, Jr.

Ball plays attractive lady swindler Ricki Woodner, who gets involved with fellow con artist Ace Connors (Hodiak) at the behest of mutual acquaintance Fly Feletti (Elisha Cook, Jr.). Fly wants to get his hands on a stack of bonds stolen by Ace, but so does law man Bob Simms (Lloyd Nolan), who is taking Ace by train to New York and prison. Ricki tags along on the trip, which includes stopovers in Mexico and New Orleans, but her developing attraction to Ace complicates her efforts to make off with the bonds.

Despite her reputation as a comedienne, Lucille Ball could be as gorgeous and classy as any leading lady of her era, and she makes a good match for Hodiak and his carnivorous grin. Both actors know their way around the wised up attitudes of career criminals who are much better at lying than they are at telling the truth, even when falling in love. Their dishonest habits both bring them together and divide them, and much of the romance builds upon the problems of two untrustworthy people trying to come clean about themselves and their feelings for each other. The story underlines its themes of penitence and redemption by situating the last third of the action in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, where Ace describes his impending prison term as the Lent that follows a last wild night of self-indulgence.

The romance is further complicated by the presence of Bob as an unusual third wheel, given that Ace is technically under arrest the whole trip. Lloyd Nolan plays Bob as a perfectly straight arrow, which actually makes him subtly funny, and his mild demeanor keeps him likeable in spite of his kill-joy role as jailer. We like Ace because he’s more fun, but we never dislike Bob, partly because Ace clearly respects and likes his opponent, too. Bob’s opposite is Elisha Cook, Jr. as the devious, thoroughly nasty Fly, who threatens Ricki to keep her working for him and then resorts to more deadly efforts during the dramatic Mardi Gras climax. These two supporting characters represent the polar opposites of good and evil, law and chaos, with Ricki and Ace existing somewhere in between. The narrative’s insistence that the lovers pay for their past sins makes for something of a downer ending, but we’re meant to understand that they’ll come out on the other side worthy of having a new life together. The end result is basically a morality play, but there’s enough entertainment to make the dose palatable to most viewers.

For more romantic criminals, try Trouble in Paradise (1932), To Catch a Thief (1955), and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). Jules Dassin, known mostly for his work with film noir, also directed The Naked City (1948), Night and the City (1950), and Rififi (1955). See more of Lucille Ball’s big screen roles in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), The Dark Corner (1946), and Lured (1947). John Hodiak stars in Lifeboat (1944), The Harvey Girls (1946), and Battleground (1949), and you'll also find him paired with Lloyd Nolan in Somewhere in the Night (1946). Elisha Cook, Jr. turns up everywhere from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to House on Haunted Hill (1959), while Lloyd Nolan takes the title role in Michael Shayne: Private Detective (1940) and its many sequels.

Two Smart People is currently available for streaming on Warner Archive Instant.

Classic Films in Focus: LIFEBOAT (1944)

Based on a story by John Steinbeck, Alfred Hitchcock's tense wartime thriller, Lifeboat (1944), will induce claustrophobia in some viewers, as the entire film takes place within the confines of a single small boat. The ocean around might be wide, but the space on the boat is small, so small that the handful of survivors packed into it find themselves entirely too close for comfort, especially since one of them belonged to the German U boat that sank the ship on which the others were traveling. As with so many Hitchcock pictures, Lifeboat reveals the director turning the screws on his characters, constantly increasing their tension as he also increases the body count. It's a taut, gripping, psychologically complex film, one that addresses some of the most uncomfortable themes of its era, from ethnic prejudice and racism to class divisions and the brutal impulses of mob justice.  

As the picture opens, we see the detritus of shipwreck floating across the screen, with a corpse inevitably closing the procession of debris. The survivors of the ship are quickly collected, beginning with the lifeboat's first occupant, journalist Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead). Joining Connie are members of the ship's crew, including alpha male Kovac (John Hodiak), mild Stanley "Sparks" (Hume Cronyn), injured Gus (William Bendix), and kindly Joe (Canada Lee). A wealthy businessman named Charles Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), a shell-shocked young mother (Heather Angel), and a lovelorn nurse (Mary Anderson) round out the Allied survivors, while the German Willi (Walter Slezak) turns up to make all of them anxious and conflicted about sharing the boat with their enemy.

All of the actors give fine performances, but Tallulah has the best lines, and she dominates the screen throughout the picture. We are set up to see her as the vessel's most interesting occupant from the start, when we find her sitting alone in the lifeboat, surrounded by her possessions, busily photographing the fallout of the disaster as if she herself were not endangered. Everything about her seems incongruous with this setting, from her mink coat and camera to her sparkling diamond bracelet. The other women, plucked from the oil-strewn sea, are bedraggled from the start, but Connie clings to her glamour and sexuality, and she manages to look good even when things seem to be at their worst, hoarding her store of lipstick the way the other characters cherish their water or rations.

I don't know that I like John Hodiak as Bankhead's sparring partner and love interest; he has plenty of prickly machismo, but he seems dangerous, unstable, a powder keg rather than a hero. There's something about his teeth that makes him look like a manticore, ready to eat the rest of the survivors alive if necessary. Hume Cronyn's gentle Sparks is by far the most appealing of the young men, and he is amply repaid for that amiability through a budding romance with Mary Anderson's character, Alice. William Bendix makes a sympathetic Gus, though doom seems to be written on his brow from the beginning, as he is the most nostalgic of the crew, and we all know that characters who look backward too much cannot have a future ahead of them.

All kinds of prejudice get an airing in this film, but the most striking, given the time period, might be that of race. The lone African-American survivor, Joe, is played with grace and dignity by Canada Lee. Apparently, Steinbeck felt that Hitch toned down the original story's engagement of race too much, but Lee's subtle reactions and measured comments eloquently convey the message to those who are willing to receive it. Only Joe will have the moral fortitude to resist the power of the mob when the critical moment arrives, and he is keenly aware that he and the German are connected by their shared status as "Other," even though he finds that connection an uncomfortable qualifier to his own patriotic sensibility. The German himself seems far less conscious of the possibility that he and Joe might be tied together in this way, and his ultimate role as villain undermines much of the sympathy we might otherwise have for him. His treatment of Gus, near the end of the film, merely vindicates our suspicion of him, leaving Joe as the far more complex anchor for the film's treatment of prejudice as a whole.

On a final note, you might wonder how Hitchcock manages his trademark cameo appearance in a film set entirely aboard a small, crowded boat. Be sure and have a good look at the ad on the back of the newspaper that one character holds up to read. He was a clever fellow, that Hitch! For more of Hitchcock’s films from this era, try Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Notorious (1946). Tallulah Bankhead, far more successful on the stage than in Hollywood, made few memorable films, but you can see her in Tarnished Lady (1931), The Cheat (1931), and A Royal Scandal (1945). Lifeboat was nominated for three Oscars, including a nod for Hitchcock as Best Director. It was one of five times that the director would be nominated for the award and not win.

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.