Tagged: Ida Lupino
Women’s Prison (US 1955)
(from Dr Macro’s collection)
I was prompted to look for this film (I found it online) after a comment on my post about Benedetta. It was suggested to me that the idea of a ‘nunsploitation’ picture was closely related to the women’s prison film, a genre that began to develop particularly in the 1950s as the American film industry – and film audiences – began to change. Films about women in prison offered an emotional hotpot of female only communities placed under pressure. Such films can be traced back to the silent era, gradually developing in pre-code Hollywood but then being restricted to approved stories of rehabilitation during the studio period. In 1950 Warner Bros released Caged and United Artists released So Young, So Bad. These two studio releases signalled the start of a move towards harder narratives and the establishment of a more defined genre repertoire. Women’s Prison in 1955 was one of the first films to focus entirely on the prison community with all the criminal activity and judicial procedures prior to incarceration being omitted.
The women assemble outside their cells for morning roll-call
My choice of this title is simply because it is Ida Lupino’s last cinema release for a major studio in which she takes the lead role. She would continue acting in TV dramas and independent cinema releases until the late 1970s but at this point, still aged only 37, she remained able to command the screen and to ‘carry’ the film. Why was the only recognised female director in Hollywood at the time prepared to star in a ‘women in prison’ picture? The answer is simple economic necessity. The attempt to distribute the films produced by Filmakers, the company owned by Lupino and her second husband Collier Young, was proving unsuccessful and in January 1955 it moved to find another major distributor for future product. It was also in trouble with the Screen Actors Guild because it had sold a film (Never Fear, 1950) to television without paying residuals to the actors involved. Lupino needed to find extra income. Women in Prison was made by an independent, Bryan Foy Productions, but it was distributed by Columbia. There was a strong supporting cast with Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter and Phyllis Thaxter as the featured inmates and Lupino’s then husband Howard Duff playing opposite his wife as the potential good guy. Lupino herself was the manic and sadistic superintendent of the women’s half of a state prison in which the overall governor ran the men’s half. The two communities were physically separated but the possibility that an inmate could cross over to the ‘other side’ would become an aspect of the plot. The writers Jack DeWitt and Crane Wilbur were experienced in a range of genres as was director Lewis Seiler and DoP Lester White. Ida Lupino could at least be confident that these guys knew what they were doing.
Deputy Sheriff Green (Lorna Thayer) delivers Helene (Phyllis Thaxter, left) and Brenda (Jan Sterling) to the prison at the start of the film
Wikipedia has an interesting page on the ‘Women in Prison’ genre and unsurprisingly there is a scholarly interest in the genre from feminist film academics. Women’s Prison arguably brings together several familiar elements of the developing repertoire and establishes a new direction for the genre which takes off in the mid 1950s and then rapidly expands in the 1970s. Ida Lupino herself appeared in a TV movie in 1972, Women in Chains in which she is the lead, again as a tyrannical chief warden. Women in Prison opens in a classical manner with the arrival of two young women as new prisoners. Brenda Martin (Jan Sterling) has been inside before for passing fake cheques and she knows what to expect. Helene Jensen (Phyllis Thaxter) is a middle class woman convicted of manslaughter having caused the death of a child in a road accident. She is already traumatised and clearly unlikely to get through the brutal treatment in which, as a new inmate, she is to be kept in solitary for the first few days. Brenda will attempt to support Helene but we are quickly introduced to two other characters who will also be central to the narrative. Cleo Moore plays the voluptuous 1950s young woman found in many exploitation films of the period and Audrey Totter plays the wife of a convicted criminal who has refused to betray her husband and has been convicted of possession of a weapon. He is being held in the adjacent men’s prison and the plot involves his attempts to to get into the women’s prison and visit his wife. There are two other notable supporting players. Juanita Moore, one of the few African-American players to feature in a variety of roles in Hollywood in the studio period (i.e. not only as a music star or as a servant) is part of an all-black quartet in one of the cells. This segregation is not commented on. Moore would have her biggest role as the mother in Douglas Sirk’s hit melodrama Imitation of Life in 1959. Vivian Marshall plays a stripper who is able to perform impersonations of film stars and this will also provide a key plot device in the film.
A strong ensemble cast includes (from left) Phllis Thaxter, Adelle August, Vivian Marshall, Audrey Totter, Cleo Moore and Jan Sterling
Jan Sterling and Audrey Totter in the prison laundry
The whole cast of inmates performs well as an ensemble which also includes the female warders, one of whom is played by Mae Clarke (who had a grapefruit pushed into her face by Jimmy Cagney in 1931’s Public Enemy). This leaves the central tussle between Lupino’s Amelia van Zandt as the superintendent and Howard Duff as the prison doctor who appears to be both general physician and psychologist. He will attempt to stop the harsh treatment of Helene but will be overruled by the superintendent. Lupino is genuinely terrifying as the sadistic van Zandt. She wears tight-fitting costumes complete with a studded leather belt to which are attached her master keys. By contrast all the female inmates are dressed in drab and poorly fitted uniforms. This would change in later examples of the genre with the opportunity to show prisoners in skimpy costumes and stages of undress being exploited as the production code was eased in the 1960s. Women’s Prison concentrates on the ensemble and the interweaving stories which build to an ultimate confrontation with van Zandt.
Ida Lupino as the sadistic superintendent tries to get information out of Joan Burton (Audrey Totter)
The superintendent clashes with the prison doctor (Howard Duff) over the impact of her treatment of the prisoners
Women’s Prison in the Columbia ad in Motion Picture Herald for February 1955
I found the film very entertaining and Variety‘s reviewer seemed to share my view. The January 20 1955 trade show screening report concludes that this film is a “good entry in the programmer market”. This raises the question of the ‘B’ picture designation. Ida Lupino has been tagged with the designation of a ‘B’ picture director and, in the 1950s, a ‘B’ picture actor. The film scholar Annette Kuhn published a book on Lupino’s directorial work in in film and TV which was given the title ‘Queen of the Bs’. I’ve not read the book but I suspect that the title has been applied by other commentators rather glibly. I think that Variety‘s comment here refers to the studios’ double bill practice in the early 1950s. Columbia distributed Women’s Prison as an 80 minute feature which could be paired with one of several other Columbia pictures, but it was also promoted in the trades alongside Columbia’s A releases. Variety shows the film being booked with films such as Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (1954) with Glenn Ford and The Violent Men (1955), a Western also with Glenn Ford. Masterson of Kansas (1954), also a Western, was another picture from the previous year which was paired with the prison film. Women in Prison was the lead on these double bills and was performing well in cinemas. Box office for the film was ‘good’ in New York, ‘sock’ in Philadelphia and ‘sturdy’ in Chicago. Cleo Moore was recognised as a draw when she made a personal appearance. Columbia also had a Korean War picture, Bamboo Prison (1955) which was in a double bill with Women’s Prison and the this did very well in Philadelphia. In New York the film did good business as part of a vaudeville programme. In several locations Women’s Prison lasted two or three weeks.
Generally the film is referred to as a melodrama in the trades and there is also a sense in which it is viewed as a ‘social problem’ melodrama. Although the closing sequence presents exciting action, the real thrust of the narrative is for the women to expose the incompetence and and dangerous behaviour of the superintendent towards the inmates. The promotional material for the film hints at more in terms of sensationalist exposure than is actually delivered. What we get is a well-made drama and a worthy entry in Lupino’s long list of credits.
I’d like to acknowledge the detailed blog post by ‘Monster Girl’ (Jo Gabriel) on Women’s Prison which is well worth a read and offers a woman’s perspective on the genre. Here’s an early scene from the film when the two new inmates meet Juanita Moore who explains that she’s called Polyclinic after the hospital she was born in!
Road House (US 1948)
This is a strange film. It has flaws, especially in the script, and never seems quite sure what kind of film it is. Nonetheless it entertains and pleases audiences, mainly I think because of the performances of its four leading players. Top of the bill is Ida Lupino and she holds it all together with Richard Widmark at his most manic and Cornel Wilde and Celeste Holm in more conventional roles. William Donati, Lupino’s biographer, tells us that the project was taken to 20th Century Fox by Lupino’s new agent Charles K. Feldman who had bought the rights to the story ‘Dark Love’ for her. He successfully sold the project to Fox with a significant fee for Lupino as the lead.
Ida Lupino as the Queen of Road House
This was a crucial period in 30 year-old Ida Lupino’s career. She’d left Warner Bros. in 1947 after a seven year contract during which time she’d often been suspended and loaned out to other studios, but had appeared in leading roles opposite Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield and Errol Flynn. Now she was a freelance trying to arrange her own work. She was also about to re-marry and Donati notes that both she and Collier Young, her new love, had thought that ‘Dark Love’ was the right story. I haven’t managed to find the original ‘Dark Love’ story. I’ve read elsewhere that it was a short story rather than a novel and it isn’t mentioned in IMDb’s credit list. Instead there are six writers listed with Edward Chodorov as producer and solo writer of the actual screenplay. So, I guess he’s responsible. The film was directed by Jean Negulesco, another refugee from Warners who had worked with Lupino on Deep Valley, her last Warners picture in 1947. Donati suggests that Lupino had asked for Richard Widmark who had been a sensation, nominated for an Oscar, in his first screen role as ‘Tommy Udo’ in Kiss of Death (1947). Widmark was under contract at Fox and the other two leads were the studio’s choices.
The four leads of Road House pose for a promo
As the title implies, Road House features an out of town venue comprising a bar lounge and a ten-pin bowling alley owned by ‘Jefty’, Jefferson T. Robbins (Richard Widmark). The setting is somewhere in the North of the US, close to the Canadian border. The film opens with an almost documentary sequence of the venue’s operations behind the credits and then cuts to the manager, Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde) opening the door to find a strange woman in his office. She’s playing solitaire and smoking with one stockinged leg draped over the edge of Pete’s desk. This is Lily (Ida Lupino) – a seemingly sharp ‘broad’ who isn’t very impressed with Pete. He eventually discovers that Jefty found her in Chicago and offered her a six week stint singing in the bar. It’s a great opening and despite a strange and not very attractive hairstyle, Lupino commands the picture from the start. She’s the star and her performance proclaims the fact. All the other three leads in Road House are older than Lupino but she exudes maturity and presence in her performance and Widmark and Holm were relative newcomers to film work (both were experienced stage actors). Cornel Wilde was more experienced after several years as a lead player, playing opposite Ida Lupino in Life Begins at Eight-Thirty (1942) and opposite other female stars such as Ginger Rogers, Maureen O’Hara, Gene Tierney and Linda Darnell. But in this opening sequence he seems slightly awed by Lupino.
Jefty, Susie and Pete in a deep focus composition
The innovation in this film is that Ida sings. She’s a jazzy, bluesy singer with a low gravelly voice. She’s called ‘no voice’ both by the characters in the film and commentators on the film but somehow she ‘performs’ the songs in a darkened room with her cigarette smouldering on the piano (and burning it!). (See the clip below.) The piano playing could be dubbed (but I know Ida composed music, presumably she could play the piano). However, it’s quite believable that the audience in the bar is mesmerised. Two songs were released as singles I think – ‘One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)’ by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer and ‘Again’, specially written by Lionel Newman for the film. Lupino sings four in all. Lily is a hit with the punters and with both Jefty and Pete. In her earlier Warners film The Man I Love (1946), Ida was dubbed as a nightclub singer, so her singing here is a clear benefit of being a freelance – though I guess it might have had to be negotiated.
The narrative offers us a struggle between Jefty and Pete over Lily’s affection
The film has three main sections. I’m not keen on the idea that Hollywood narratives always have three ‘acts’ – usually they have more in my readings. But in this film once Lily is established she becomes a softer character and it seems clear that we are heading into a classic triangular mating ritual in which both men will eventually want to marry her. Celeste Holm’s Susie, the cashier at Jefty’s, is the character squeezed out by Lily’s arrival. Lily seems to change quite dramatically once she has established herself. I believe in Lupino’s performance but I found the change abrupt. Much worse though is the plotting of the events which lead to the film’s climax, which don’t make too much sense, although I suppose they work on a kind of symbolic level. Perhaps if the film’s generic identities were a bit clearer it would be easier to understand.
‘Over-determined masculinity’ with Lily framed beneath the stag’s head
Road House is often discussed as a film noir. Ida Lupino is also often described as a star of film noir, as well as the first woman to direct a film noir (The Hitch-Hiker, 1953). 1948 is certainly ‘peak noir’ in terms of the numbers of films with noir lighting and mise en scène and doomed characters trying to deal with the immediate post-war world. However, I’m not sure that Ida was ever a femme fatale as such in her studio pictures. Road House was photographed by Joseph LaShelle who had worked at Paramount on two classic Otto Preminger pictures, Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945), both of which have noirish elements. ‘Jefty’s’ operates mainly at night and the latter part of the film is shot on what appears to be an extensive studio set of a forest at night. The film is certainly plausible as a noir in terms of lighting. The main problem for me is that the story assumes Jefty and Pete have been friends for a long time. Jefty comes from a wealthy family and has the capital whereas Pete lives above the bar. There is no attempt to invoke the war so the typical film noir scenario of men returning from war with problems doesn’t enter into the discussion. On the other hand, Lily is an ‘independent woman’ who could be in a film noir narrative. I think this is really a romance melodrama that eventually morphs into an action drama. Rather than the usual ‘significant objects’ of a film noir mise en scène, the predominant images of the final section are concerned with an over-determined masculinity as Jefty and and Pete battle over Lily. This is introduced in the early scenes of the film when Lily notes the stags heads in the bar and the office of Jefty’s. She even stays at the only hotel in town, which is called ‘The Antlers’.
Whatever genre categorisation is appropriate, Road House proved to be a popular film (Monthly Film Bulletin called it ‘slick entertainment’) with over $2.3 million in distributor rentals for 20th Century-Fox, the second most successful studio of the year in the US. 74 years later the film still has its fans and for many of them this is a film noir classic. It’s also a film in which Ida Lupino revels in being at the centre of the story. It does make you wonder what would have happened if Warner Bros. had put her in a similar film back in 1942. Here’s that first scene at the piano:
The Hard Way (US 1943)
In 1942 Ida Lupino was an established star at Warner Bros. She had top billing in the 1941 film that made Humphrey Bogart an A list star at Warners – High Sierra. This followed her performance in They Drive By Night (1940) which had wowed the critics. She had lead roles opposite Edward G. Robinson in The Sea Wolf (1941) and John Garfield in Out of the Fog in the same year. Everything was going well but still Warner Bros. didn’t really know what to do with her. She was loaned out as the lead in two films for Twentieth-Century Fox and one for Columbia before she got another Warners role – and this only because Bette Davis turned it down. She was top-billed in The Hard Way and this turned out to be one of the few films for which she received the recognition for her performance that she always deserved. On the film’s release a year later it won the New York’s Critics’ Circle award for Best Actress.
Helen and Katie at home before Katie’s new career takes off
As in many of Lupino’s films, her role in The Hard Way is not the heroic role but instead the one that drives the melodrama narrative. Lupino plays Helen Churnen, a woman in her mid-twenties who has married an older man, a worker in an industrial town. Her mother had died and Helen thought marriage would save her from poverty during the depression. Now she feels trapped. She intends to prevent her younger sister Katie (Joan Leslie), who lives with her, from suffering the same fate. Joan Leslie had been a child performer and after several uncredited roles in films in the 1930s was finally getting adult roles. In 1942 she was still just 17 tears old. The narrative of The Hard Way sees Katie leaving high school and hoping to become a stage performer. Helen determines to be her ‘stage mother’, abandoning her marriage to accompany Katie and trying to make sure she becomes successful. Katie meets a pair of vaudeville performers, traditional ‘song and dance men’ played by Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan. Carson’s character, Albert Runkel, falls for Katie in a big way and it is through him that she gains an entry into show business. But it is Helen who makes sure that Katie exploits her talent, sometimes by ‘any means necessary’. Kunkel’s performer partner Paul Collins sees Helen’s involvement as poisonous and what might have been a showbiz ‘rags to riches’ story becomes a dark melodrama with tragic outcomes.
Helen and Albert get together but Paul and Helen have their doubts about the relationship
The original idea behind the film was based on a story by Irwin Shaw about the relationship between Ginger Rogers and her mother Lela. Ginger joined a vaudeville show as a dancer when only 14 and married at 17 in 1928. She eventually got second lead roles in film musicals in 1930. The screenplay for The Hard Way by Daniel Fuchs and Peter Viertel was intended as a vehicle for Bette Davis, but was also offered to Ginger Rogers herself according to some sources. Both turned down the role. Ida Lupino was sometimes seen as Warners’ back-up for Davis but she was ten years younger than Davis (and seven years younger than Rogers). When she made The Hard Way she was just 24, but played the role much older so that the relationship with Leslie’s character sometimes feels like the classic mother-daughter relationship of the 1940s ‘woman’s picture’. In 1942, just a few months into the American involvement in the Second World War, some directors as well as male stars were beginning to become unavailable after signing up for service. Warners clearly saw The Hard Way as a major production but the director job went to the relatively low-profile contract director Vincent Sherman. Sherman had worked on a range of projects, including films with John Garfield and Humphrey Bogart, but not yet with major female stars. After The Hard Way he would direct Lupino and Davis in two films each and later two more with Joan Crawford, so Warners must have been satisfied with what he achieved. Two other significant names on The Hard Way were James Wong Howe as cinematographer and Don Siegel in his familiar role as ‘montage editor’ before his directorial career took off a few years later. Wong Howe didn’t enjoy working on the film because he thought Sherman was too inexperienced. This seems an odd remark (quoted in Alain Silver’s book James Wong Howe, The Camera Eye, Pendragon 2010) and it may simply be that the celebrated cinematographer thought the film wasn’t going to be an interesting story in visual terms. But that too is not really the case.
One montage includes this expressionist image of Katie threatened by clocks announcing her next deadline
When the film was completed, Jack Warner felt it was too downbeat and he asked for the addition of an opening scene with a more glamorous Lupino who would then introduce the story as one long flashback (in a manner not dissimilar to the start of a film noir). This sequence required a set similar to those used by Wong Howe for parts of Out of the Fog, his first film shooting with Lupino. The town of Greenhill, where the story proper begins, is presented using a sequence which is said to have been taken from a Pare Lorentz documentary made during the Great Depression. Later in the story there are several opportunities taken to use the montage skills of Don Siegel for the familiar swirl of theatre handbills, performances, newspaper headlines etc. against a musical medley and a voiceover narration. It’s possible that Lupino spent some time with Siegel (who was also a Warner Bros. contractee). Later he directed the last of the films produced by Lupino’s company The Filmakers, Private Hell 36 (1954). There are certainly expressionist images both in the montages (a screen of clockfaces representing the pressure on Katie as her career develops quickly), in some of the many backstage scenes and in the opening sequence. The art director on the film was Max Parker, seemingly another Warner contractee who would work with Lupino again on her last Warners picture, Deep Valley in 1947. The Hard Way uses many music tracks, both diegetic and non-diegetic, and they are all listed on the film’s Wikipedia page.
Albert devises a nightclub cabaret act with Katie . . .
. . . but Helen is always there ready to manipulate producers, club owners and agents. Helen is here with the agent Max Wade (Nestor Paiva).
The Hard Way was a success at the box office. Variety in January 1944 reported rentals (i.e a net return to the studio production division) of $1.5 million, placing the film as twelfth among the 14 Warners films that returned for than $1 million to the studio in 1943. Lupino also appeared alongside the other leading Warners players in the third-placed title in Warners’ list, Thank Your Lucky Stars – a compendium film of sketches and musical performances, one of several such films made during wartime. This had rentals of $2.8 million. In the same report, Ida Lupino is reported as fourth on the box office list for Warner Bros. after Bogart, Davis and Errol Flynn. Given this high spot in the Warner Bros. roster it’s perhaps surprising that Lupino didn’t get better parts over the next couple of years.
Helen with fading star of musical theatre, Lily Emery (Gladys George), offering her one drink too many and aiming to create an opportunity for Katie
But what did Ida’s loyal fans and more general audiences make of her role and her performance? Too often, even with top billing and her usual strong performance, Lupino’s character was out of the limelight – quite literally in this case. In The Hard Way it could be argued that Helen is the villain, capable of stepping on anyone who stands in the way of Katie’s success. But Helen is doing this for her sister and she only knows how to do it the hard way. Vincent Sherman understood the story and he strove to make the town of Greenhill as grimy and smoky as he could – somewhere that a bright young woman would want to escape from. A wartime audience in 1943, especially one with a majority of women, many in work for the first time, may well have understood the story too, including the bonds between the sisters. Helen is promoting the idea that a woman’s career is important. As some modern reviewers note, the mores of the time meant that no man could cope with the idea that his wife might become the main breadwinner and this becomes the pivotal realisation in the narrative. The film pleased Monthly Film Bulletin‘s reviewer in the UK (November 1942) who praised all the performances and saw Vincent Sherman’s direction “leaving nothing to be desired” for a film that “achieves a most unusual sincerity”. According to Lupino’s biographer William Donati, the star at first didn’t take to Sherman and thought she didn’t understand the film. She was quite ill during the shoot but most of all she was devastated by the death of her father, the great stage performer Stanley Lupino, from cancer at the young age of 48. But Ida was a trouper and she completed the film. After the positive reviews she felt better and formed a strong friendship with Vincent Sherman who would then direct two further Warners films with Lupino as lead.
The Hard Way is not easy to find in the UK, but it is available in the US and it’s an essential film in Ida Lupino’s filmography.
Beware, My Lovely (US 1952)
This is a shortish (77 minutes) suspense thriller made for RKO by The Filmakers, the independent production company founded by Ida Lupino and Collier Young. The film was shot in just 18 days in July/August 1951 but delayed by RKO for a year. This followed a pattern given the eccentric behaviour of Howard Hughes as the owner of RKO. On Dangerous Ground, which like this film starred Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan, had similarly been delayed. One suggestion is that Hughes as part of his enthusiastic support for the communist witch hunt of the HUAC years was reluctant to release a film with Ryan whom he saw as a leftist. Lupino, a staunch Democrat managed to avoid trouble but she was friends with many of those hounded as communists. At this point she had directed four films for The Filmakers but she argued for Harry Horner to take the directorial role. Horner was a Czech émigré who had arrived in the US in the mid 1930s with Max Rheinhardt and eventually entered Hollywood as a set designer, winning two Oscars. He’d worked for Lupino as Production Designer on Outrage (1950). Beware, My Lovely was actually his first feature but because of the delayed release, his second feature came out first. It appears that Lupino did actually direct a couple of scenes when Horner’s wife was in hospital.
Ida Lupinophotographs so well in expressionist poses like this
Beware, My Lovely is an adaptation, by the original writer Mel Dinelli, of his Broadway play ‘The Man’ (1950). The play had begun as a radio drama in 1945 and it saw further radio and stage productions, a short story version in 1949 and later TV drama adaptations. Dinelli was no stranger to suspense thrillers or what would later be termed films noirs. He had worked as a writer on The Spiral Staircase (1946) with Robert Siodmak, The Reckless Moment (1949) with Max Ophüls and House by the River (1950) with Fritz Lang. All three directors were associated with the German film industry of the early 1930s) and all three films are concerned with a house as the location for suspense. All are also associated with film noir. Inevitably perhaps, Beware, My Lovely has been seen as a noir, probably because of the Lupino-Ryan casting, but there are other ways to think about it in genre terms. The film was made mainly on the RKO lot and although the RKO designer Albert D’Agostino is credited, Horner probably had a lot to do with the set and its presentation. It uses part of the house set built for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The presentation is also influenced by cinematographer George Diskant who had worked on On Dangerous Ground. (He would also go on to shoot The Bigamist (1953) for Ida Lupino).
Lupino and Robert Ryan were close friends and work together very well
The plot of the film is very straightforward. We first meet Howard (Robert Ryan) working as a handyman and clearing up after a job when he discovers the body of a woman – the householder? – stuffed into a closet. Alarmed, he flees the house and skips out of town on a freight train. We realise that the year is 1918 and it is approaching Christmastime in an anonymous town in the South-West. Helen (Ida Lupino), a young war widow, is preparing for the holidays. Her lodger is away for a few days but the house is busy with a group of local children and Helen’s rather snooty teenage niece, Ruth (Barbara Whiting). When the house quietens down, Helen welcomes her new handyman who will start some cleaning tasks. This is Howard arriving for his first day working in the house. There is clearly a nervous tension between the two and we are immediately concerned that Howard is some form of threat to Helen. That’s it really. The interior of the house becomes the sole location and the tension gradually mounts. The film depends on the performances of Ryan and Lupino and how they are presented in the complicated interior space of the house. The combination of the work of Horner, Diskant and the score by Leith Stevens (another of The Filmakers regulars) delivers a powerful narrative. Collier Young who produced the film despite being involved in a divorce from Lupino after only a brief marriage, felt that the film could not use the ending of the original play. He may also have been aware that Hughes probably wouldn’t have accepted it. Lupino’s original choices for a title were ‘At the End of the Day’ and as a second choice ‘The Terror’ but ‘Beware, My Lovely’ was imposed by Hughes with RKO handling all promotion of the film. The ending has been seen as a weakness by some critics but I think the film works well as it is. The action is confined to around ten hours or so with the two leads alone in the house.
Howard is mocked by Ruth
I’ve suggested that the relevant genre is not film noir, although there is expressionist camerawork in the house. The narrative is associated with the ‘woman in peril’ or the ‘home invasion’ scenario. But I think that despite the setting thirty years or so earlier, the film is linked to the contemporary social issue dramas of the other films by The Filmakers and especially those directed by Lupino. The Robert Ryan character is clearly mentally ill, perhaps with a form of paranoid schizophrenia. In a way this is linked to his rejection for military service and his sense of a slight to his masculinity. When Ruth makes a brief appearance during the day she mocks him for doing housework like cleaning – not a job for a ‘real man’. Helen is the good-hearted woman sensitive enough to want to help but also terrified. I think we could see this portrayal of mental illness as conveying a plea for understanding matching those concerned with rape, abortion, disability and so on in Lupino’s other films.
When the grocer’s boy delivers an order can Helen get out a plea for help?
The film had a mixed reception but seemingly with more positive than negative responses – although Monthly Film Bulletin in the UK (July 1953) thought it ‘boring and ‘silly’. I couldn’t disagree more, but then I could always watch Lupino and Ryan together. Unfortunately RKO failed to get behind the film properly, tempting Collier Young and Ida Lupino to release The Bigamist themselves – and suffering from a lack of distribution muscle. Beware, My Lovely has been shown in the US on Turner Classic Movies and in the UK on the BBC and, more recently, on Talking Pictures TV. I think it is well worthwhile trying to catch if it comes around.
The Lady and the Mob (US 1939)
This was the second of two ‘B’ Pictures Ida Lupino made at Columbia in early 1939. Director Ben Stollof had become known for comedy short films and then B pictures at RKO. Ida Lupino had already made one film with him in 1937, Fight For Your Lady, when she was loaned out to RKO by Paramount. Now Stollof appeared to be making a film to be ‘presented’ by Columbia. Ida would at least have had some idea of what to expect. She was upset to be working on films like this, a 66 minute ‘gangster comedy’, but she was also grateful for the work after ending her contract at Paramount.
The plot is straightforward. Ida’s character Lila has fallen for Fred Leonard (Lee Bowman) in New York. They have agreed to marry and Lila is to travel ahead to Macklin City where Fred’s mother Hattie is a rich widow and the owner of a bank. Hattie (Fay Bainter, the star of the film) tends to treat each of Fred’s successive girlfriends as a replacement secretary and she sets a bemused Lila to work on her correspondence. But then by chance she discovers that a protection racket is being operated in the city which bizarrely seems to be focused on all the dry-cleaning shops. Hattie is not the kind of woman to take any kind setback lying down and when she is charged a little extra by her dry cleaner to cover his rising costs, she finds out about the protection racket and sets out to fix the problem. The police and the city mayor seem to be powerless so Hattie determines to fight the local gangsters herself. This involves re-visiting one of her previous ‘good deeds’ when she reformed a mobster who is now her loyal helper. Frankie O’Fallon (Warren Hymer) is charged with finding a gang of reformed criminals to act as a ‘counter-mob’, breaking up this new racket.
Fay Bainter as Hattie (left) and Ida Lupino as Lila, obliged to become the older woman’s secretary.
Hattie is rich and can therefore pay the men and equip them with an arsenal of weaponry and a bullet-proof car. A crime comedy ensues with familiar characters. Fay Bainter (1893-1968) was only in her mid-forties but is dressed almost as a Victorian matriarch. She therefore refers to the familiar figure of the warring granny, the older woman who appears almost as a motherly figure towards the reformed mobster. Jokes can be made about her naïvety but we know that she is much sharper and more resourceful than the average dim-witted hoodlum. Bainter was in fact a distinguished stage actor who had not been long in Hollywood. In 1939 she was still ‘hot’ having achieved the rare accolade of two Academy Award nominations in 1938. One was for Best Actress, playing opposite Claud Rains in White Banners for Warner Bros. She didn’t win for that but she did as Best Supporting Actress for another Warners film, Jezebel – now remembered as a Bette Davis classic directed by William Wyler. Davis won the Oscar for Best Actress. Fay Bainter played ‘Aunt Bessie’ but she was only 15 years older than Davis. There is a story here I think about how Fay Bainter goes from double Oscar nominee to lead in a ‘B’ picture in the space of a year. It was only a temporary setback and she returned to ‘third-billed’ roles in ‘A’ films during the early 1940s. Ironically she would work with Lupino again in 1947 on Ida’s last Warners’ picture The Deep Valley, when Ida Lupino was the star and Fay Bainter was fourth-billed.
In this film, Lupino has little to do apart from point up the antics of Bainter’s character. She does give the film a little sex appeal, at the beginning offering a passionate farewell to her fiancé and later donning a slinky black dress in order to entrap the lead hoodlum in a nightclub. Overall, however, this is perhaps the flimsiest role for Ida that I’ve come across so far. Fortunately, she would soon get the more prestigious role in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that would give her a stronger promotional platform.
The Lady and the Mob can be found online by searching for the title.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (US 1939)
Rathbone, Lupino and Bruce in a promo shot
I didn’t take too much notice of the Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson when I first came across them (on TV, I think). I didn’t really approve of updating the stories to include Nazis and ‘modern’ spies etc. What I didn’t realise was that the first two films were ‘A’ releases with significant budgets made by 20th Century Fox in 1939. Subsequently, Fox allowed their control over the rights to lapse for various reasons and they were taken up by Universal which began to produce a series of ‘B’ pictures with smaller production budgets in 1942. Eventually, Universal made a total of twelve films in which Rathbone and Bruce continued their characterisations up until 1946.
My interest in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is because the film featured Ida Lupino as the female lead. 1939 was a key year for 21 year-old Ida as she appeared in this and Lone Wolf Spy Hunt as well as her breakthrough ‘serious’ ‘A’ picture, The Light That Failed that opened on Christmas Eve. (Her fourth film that year was another Columbia ‘B’ picture, The Lady and the Mob released between Lone Wolf Spy Hunt and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.) See the ‘Ida Lupino Project page‘ on this blog.
Basil Rathbone as Holmes in disguise as a music hall entertainer
The investment in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is evident in several ways. Daryl F. Zanuck, Vice-President of production, appears to have taken a direct role in the production, though what he did exactly isn’t clear. The money is most obvious in the quality of the sets and the camerawork of Leon Shamroy. Shamroy was known for working with minimum lighting and the final chase sequence up the Tower of London is particularly fine. London is fog-bound as the hackney cabs race through the street sets designed by Richard Day and Hans Peters. There is plenty of music in the film credited to several composers and, something of a treat, Holmes in disguise as a music hall entertainer, sings ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ (actually not written until a few years after the narrative is set). The script was written by Edward Blum and William A. Drake (who had won an Oscar in 1932 for his script for Grand Hotel). The director Alfred W. Werker was seen as a safe studio director and this was considered one of his best films. Rathbone and Bruce are accomplished as the leads and would eventually become the benchmark for all future pairings. Ida’s part is substantial in terms of screen time and she was third-billed.
Ann Brandon consults Holmes and Watson
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes followed The Hound of the Baskervilles, released earlier in 1939 as the second 20th Century Fox Holmes and Watson film. (‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ was originally the title of the first collection of Holmes short stories published in 1892.) The film script was officially adapted from a play by William Gillette and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first staged in 1899 but the the narrative as filmed bears little resemblance to what became a popular play. It revolves around the rivalry between Holmes and Professor Moriarty. As it begins, Moriarty is being acquitted of murder in a London court of 1894 and Holmes is too late to submit new evidence. The two men meet and Moriarty vows to find a way to defeat Holmes by carrying out an audacious criminal act that Holmes will be unable to prevent. This involves Moriarty setting up an elaborate murder plot which will intrigue Holmes and take up his time allowing Moriarty to carry out the ‘crime of the century’. The murder plot is set in train by a cryptic message sent to a pair of siblings whose father was killed on a specific date. The young woman Ann Brandon (Ida Lupino) pleads with Holmes to take on her case and protect her brother. As the plot progresses, Ann becomes the main target for Moriarty’s diversionary attack. Once Holmes realises what Moriarty has done, the chase is on and the film finishes with that climactic chase at the Tower of London which sees the end of Moriarty.
A production still with Ida Lupino seated and Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce standing behind her.
William Donati in his biography of Lupino tells us that it was a New York radio performance by Lupino opposite Orson Welles in a ‘Mercury Theatre on the Air’ mystery play which persuaded Twentieth Century Fox to offer her the role of Ann Brandon. Ida had just married the South African actor Louis Hayward and intriguingly The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes featured a cast list made up almost entirely of ‘British Empire actors’. Out of the twenty actors at the head of the cast list, only two weren’t born in the UK, South Africa, Australia or the British West Indies (and one of those was Greek). In this context, Ida was perfectly cast and she had no difficulty playing a young woman in late-Victorian London. 1938-9 was a difficult time for Ida. She had ended her contract with Paramount, deeming the roles she had been offered either by her own studio or on loans to other studios as not developing her career in any way. Instead of seeing her as an actor capable of diverse leading roles she was invariably cast in lower budget films as variations on the floosie or young ‘flighty thing’. Ida’s own response to this was to change her appearance, so out went the ‘painted doll face with the peroxide hair’ and in came a more natural look for a slimmed down Ida. The two Columbia ‘Bs’ she made in late 1938 and early 1939 were her first films for a year. When she finally got a part in a more prestigious pic like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes it was definitely a step up from her perspective.
I enjoyed The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It’s good entertainment, handsomely mounted. Ida Lupino does a good job. True she doesn’t get a chance to really show the range of her talent, but the role is substantial and she matches the other established actors. The film was and remains very popular (it has an IMDb rating of 7.4). It did Ida no harm to be in a major studio production with high production values and from this point on, Ida Lupino moves towards being an ‘A’ List movie star. The next two films she worked on were crucially important.
The Case for Global Film 