USA,
1937, 95 min
Shown in 1987
CREDITS
- dir
-
Mitchell Leisen
- prod
-
Arthur Hornblow
- scr
-
Virginia VanUpp, Oscar Hammerstein II
- cam
-
Ted Tetzlaff
- cast
-
Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Lamour, Charles Butterworth
-
COMMENTS
Fred MacMurray in person, hosted by Albert Johnson.
As Mitchell Leisen’s reputation is restored, this may stand as his best picture and one of the most touching romances of the 1930s. It traces the love and breakup of a hairdresser/singer (Carole Lombard) and a brilliant, feckless trumpeter, “Skid” Johnson (Fred MacMurray, so good, so weak and desperate that the one film makes one reconsider his whole career). In terms of liquid, shifting style, it is a link between von Sternberg’s creation of exotic setting at Paramount and the approach of film noir. From the startling opening, in which the world appears to consist of different levels that pass in the morning, through the evocation of a lustrous, raffish Panama, there is a fusion of music, movement, light and shadow that is bittersweet and intoxicating. Not many American pictures are better at seeing how lovers fall short of their own romanticism... Stars rarely got to play failures in the confident days of Hollywood, but given that chance they looked like actors and characters.
—David Thomson
FACTOID #202
At the 1978 SFIFF, Paul Mazursky received a tribute at the Palace of Fine Arts. Apparently, the facility’s janitorial staff had not been notified, and the padlocked doors of the Palace had to be cut so the filmmaker and his audience could be let in.
