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: LADY OF BURLESQUE (1943)

How does one make a movie about burlesque strippers during the height of the Hays Code? It seems like an impossible task, but that's exactly what Lady of Burlesque (1943) attempts to do, with Barbara Stanwyck as the titillating titular lady. It's a minor film from Stanwyck's body of work, directed by William A. Wellman and adapted from a novel by burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, but it has certain charms, including a really striking quantity of exposed female flesh. As a backstage murder comedy, Lady of Burlesque delivers some laughs, several corpses, and an interesting perspective on the changing world of stage entertainment in the early twentieth century.

Stanwyck plays Dixie Daisy, the new girl in a burlesque show staged at an old opera house. She deals with the usual backstage politics, including jealousy and fighting among the girls and romantic entanglements among the various performers, but the atmosphere becomes even more heated when one of the strippers turns up dead, strangled by her own g-string. Dixie and an amorous comic, Biff Brannigan (Michael O'Shea), dance around their attraction to one another while trying to figure out who is conniving to ruin the show by killing off its stars. In the meantime, the killer strikes again, and the cops are ready to nab the first likely suspect in a crowd of offbeat characters.

The worst part of the movie might be Stanwyck's singing, but she looks great in the skimpy burlesque costumes and gives the dance numbers a good go. She seems perfectly at home in the backstage setting; in fact, Stanwyck herself was a product of that world, having been raised by her showgirl sister after the early death of their mother. The other girls are all amusing characters, especially Stephanie Bachelor's irritating prima donna, the Princess Nirvena. Michael O'Shea's Biff is a fun guy and a good match for Stanwyck, although Pinky Lee is funnier as the childlike comic, Mandy.

If you like Stanwyck's comedic turns in The Lady Eve (1941) and Ball of Fire (1941), you'll enjoy Lady of Burlesque, as well, and it's also good for those who like the backstage shenanigans of "puttin' on a show" films like 42nd Street (1933). Lady of Burlesque earned an Oscar nomination for its score, but there were a whopping 16 nominees for the award that year, including Casablanca (1941), although the winner was ultimately The Song of Bernadette (1943). Oddly enough, William A. Wellman's other 1943 picture was The Ox-Bow Incident.

For more of Stanwyck's lesser known films, try Night Nurse (1931), Baby Face (1933), and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). She earned an Academy Award nomination for Stella Dallas (1937) but is probably best remembered today as the scheming murderess of Double Indemnity (1944). Gypsy Rose Lee appeared in several films, including Stage Door Canteen (1943) and The Trouble with Angels (1966), but the memorable film associated with her is the biopic, Gypsy (1962), with Natalie Wood playing the striptease celebrity. See more of director Wellman's work in The Public Enemy (1931), A Star is Born (1937), and Westward the Women (1951). He made several other excellent Westerns over the course of his career.

Lady of Burlesque is now in the public domain, so you can watch it for free at the Internet Archive or on various streaming video providers like Netflix Instant Viewing.

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

Classic Films in Focus: NIGHT NURSE (1931)

As part of the Turner Classic Movies collection, Forbidden Hollywood Volume 2, Night Nurse (1931) represents the kinds of pictures made before the infamous Hays Code took effect and began to censor what movies could and could not show to the American viewing public. Prurient interests aside, Night Nurse is worth watching for several reasons, not the least of which is the opportunity to see Barbara Stanwyck square off against Clark Gable.

The plot focuses on Stanwyck's character, Lora Hart, a plucky young woman who devotes herself to a nursing career and eventually becomes entangled in a scheme to murder two little girls for their trust fund money. The first half of the film chronicles Lora's rise through the nurse training program, showing her to be a determined but good-hearted girl who faints in the operating room after a patient suddenly dies. The look on Lora's face as she hands out babies in the maternity ward tells us all that we need to know about her basic nature, so it comes as no surprise when her maternal instincts are roused by the plight of her two young charges, who are being slowly starved to death in a conspiracy engineered by the mother's menacing chauffeur, Nick (Gable).

Stanwyck, of course, became an icon playing femme fatale and tough cookie types, and this role is something of a departure for her, even in the early days of her long career, although it helps pave the way for her maternal turn in Stella Dallas (1937). The plot of the film might have made Night Nurse a Gothic tale except for the resolutely practical personality that Stanwyck manifests, and it is a great relief to see her aptly named Lora Hart so courageous and unyielding when other heroines might have collapsed under the strain.

Gable is just pure evil as Nick, the villainous chauffeur who keeps the girls' mother sloppy drunk as part of his plan to murder the children and then grab the trust fund fortune by marrying the incapacitated woman. Presumably he intends to become a widower soon afterward. Everyone else in the movie seems to be deathly afraid of him, and it's easy to see why whenever he appears in his black chauffeur's uniform, reeking of cruelty and masculine power. He is a violent man, which the film shows us very early on and then never lets us forget. We understand that he is a man who really will starve defenseless little girls to death, and Gable makes for a perfectly convincing villain in every respect. If he hadn't become a leading man he might have made a fine character actor for heavies.

Enjoy the loose talk, the various scenes of Stanwyck and Joan Blondell dressing and undressing, and the other scandalous bits of the film, but take note of the "view from the driver's seat" camera work, too. The movie experiments with some wonderful camera angles designed to convey the drama and urgency of the medical profession, particularly in the ambulance scenes. Night Nurse is packaged as a source of titillation for those who want to see Hollywood’s lustier period, but it is a fine picture, tightly plotted and extremely well acted by some of classic cinema's greatest stars. The Night Nurse disc from the Forbidden Hollywood collection also contains the fascinating documentary, Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood, which provides a very entertaining overview of the Hays Code and the ways in which it altered the film industry's standards.

For more of Stanwyck’s Pre-Code pictures, see Ladies They Talk About (1933) and Baby Face (1933) on other volumes of the Forbidden Hollywood collection. Stanwyck makes some of her most memorable appearances in The Lady Eve (1941), Ball of Fire (1941), and Double Indemnity (1944). In addition to his iconic performance in Gone with the Wind (1939), see Clark Gable in It Happened One Night (1934), Wife vs. Secretary (1936), and The Misfits (1961). Director William A. Wellman also helmed The Public Enemy (1931), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), and Westward the Women (1951).

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