Three Hearts for Julia (Richard Thorpe, 1943)

I watched Three Hearts for Julia only because IMDb claims that Joan Crawford was offered the lead role but turned it down. Not sure if that's true even though Crawford starred in Above Suspicion (my vote for her most underrated film) also directed by Thorpe and released the same year. But it makes sense since Melvyn Douglas has the lead role. The female lead (Ann Sothern) would have proven too back seat for Crawford.

The mostly negative IMDb reviews note the poverty of laughs in this screwball comedy. But even though screwball comedies feature more violence (as a result from having to live by the dictates of monogamous heterosexual romance, say) than yuks, this one is especially odd since the dictates of wartime propaganda abrade against the comedy. It would make a great double feature with Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947) in which Crawford oscillates between two men. Here, Sothern juggles three men and the atmosphere feels on its way to Daisy Kenyon's enervated milieu populated with characters pulling themselves in myriad directions only to arrive at a nerve-wracked nowhere.

Douglas plays a war correspondent who returns home to find that his wife, Sothern, a violinist in an all-woman orchestra, has filed for divorce due to his lengthy absences. She tries to be best friends with him and even enlists his help in choosing between two suitors after her favor. Sothern's blasé path toward monogamy gives off a distinctive Lubitschian fragrance. But to continue along that path would have given the MPPDA pre-Code jitters. Douglas wants and eventually gets her back via the help of conductor and Czech refugee Anton Ottoway (Felix Bressart).

The inevitable reunion pivots more on (wartime) musical logic rather than comedic exigencies, exemplifying Jane Feuer's notion, from her seminal book The Hollywood Musical, that the musical marshals the forces of American entertainment to bring a film to its resolution. Ottoway longs to do a solid for Uncle Sam. So he plans a USO concert of Americana instead of the Borodin, Wagner, and Rimsky-Korsakov of previous scenes (during which the women preposterously halt rehearsals with makeup applications and child rearing) and through various machinations, uses the event to bring the two principals together. The concert is a medley of warhorses like "Kingdom Coming" and "Home on the Range." Sothern has been playing somewhat listlessly until she sees Douglas in the wings at which point she launches into a near-lusty solo of "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad." But their reformation is made through the music - they never embrace! And given that WWII is raging, it's more important to form a community on the heels of the formation of a heterosexual couple. So as the orchestra moves into "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," the audience of military men sing along suddenly. Ottoway turns to them(/us) and the sing along blends imperceptibly into "America the Beautiful" for the last shot before the closing credits. If it feels uneasy, just wait 'til Daisy Kenyon.

Look fast for Marie Windsor in the orchestra.

 

 

The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood (John Francis Dillon, 1932)

The only reason I saw this flick in MOMA's Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries, 1928–1937 series is this description from the site: "This one throws in a satire of the movie business, as young Kitty Kelly (June Clyde) becomes a star at Continental Productions, and young Melville Cohen (Norman Foster) writes songs for musicals. Crisis arrives when audiences grow tired of all singing, all dancing—an experience Junior Laemmle knew firsthand." Well, that doesn't happen until well into the 75-minute running time. Dillon (who?) never shows young Cohen working on a musical. But you do receive an acknowledgment that theme songs were crusty by 1932. And apart from a scene in which Boris Karloff, Lew Ayres, Tom Mix, Gloria Stuart, etc. are hobnobbing at the Coconut Grove (I think...I was getting sleepy by that point), that's all worth noting about this wincingly unfunny ethnic comedy. Most painful was an interminable scene in which a Russian director rants while perfecting his art on the set. Ugh.

College Coach (William A. Wellman, 1933)

As the author of the indispensable coffee table book The Hollywood Musical: Every Hollywood Musical From 1927 to The Present (New York: Crown, 1981), Clive Hirschhorn is an oedipal father I have to kill. So I get snippy when I watch a film he deems a musical that turns out to be no so such thing. Hence College Coach, a tough, punchy campus flick typical of the programmers Wellman was pumping out in the early 1930s.

Of the five songs listed by Hirschhorn (and IDMb), one is a school song heard over the opening credits and five minutes later sung by a group of students around a piano. Another has only one line sung - a news reporter modifies "Just One More Chance" as "Just One More Pose." I heard neither "Meet Me in the Gloaming" nor "What Will I Do Without You?" at any point in the film (perhaps they formed part of the non-diegetic score). Which leaves only one song, "Lonely Lane" sung by Dick Powell for no discernible reason.

It's a serviceable enough hour-plus, though, that touches on corrupt college football coaches. Future Ed Wood luminary Lyle Talbot is in it and so is John Wayne in a brief speaking role.

Bresson scholars might want to check out a fight scene played out, in part, below the waist.

And I was partial to the moment when two boys dance together after a score.

But yeah, so not a musical.
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