Universal Cinema Classics - Third Wave featuring Easy
Living/The Major & The Minor/Midnight (1939)/She Done Him Wrong
Picture:
C/C+/C+/C+ Sound: C/C+/C/C+ Extras: C- Films: B-/B-/B-/B
One of
the things that causes nothing but film fans confusion is how old movies from
one studio land up at another studio.
Was there a fire sale? Was one
studio in need of raising cash and in trouble?
Did someone mess up something in some crazy deal? Well, those are all interesting explanations,
but outside of co-productions or independent productions that switched back to
non-studio holdings, the reason many of the films in the Universal Cinema
Classics are from Paramount is television.
Many
studios did not even want to be involved in the new medium, thinking it would
instantly kill the studios. In this
transition, Paramount sold their films up to 1948 despite being the second
biggest studio around and after the fortunes they spent on their biggest
productions. Paramount bragged about the
instant money they got, but the Universal side soon recouped their expenditure
and used it as a big step to becoming a major studio themselves. Now comes four more gems from Paramount’s
early glory days.
Easy Living (1937) was written by future
directing genius Preston Sturges and helmed by the great journeyman director
Mitchell Leisen as a young lady (Jean Arthur) has a fur coat fall on her one
day when walking by the office of a frustrated financier (Edward Arnold0 while
riding by in a double-decker bus with an open top. He has throw the sable out the window, but it
makes people think they know each other and he is married! Ray Milland, Mary Nash, Franklin Pangborn and
William Demarest are part of the supporting cast in this classy, charming
comedy romp that is Screwball enough to endure 61+ years later and going.
The Major & The Minor (1942) is one of Ginger Rogers’
starring roles and the one she took after landing her Academy Award for Kitty Foyle. Determined to show she was more than
continually viable outside of her legendary partnership with Fred Astaire, she
hired a smart writer to direct his first major feature film and she lucked out,
because it is Billy Wilder. Sick of the city, she
heads for the country, but meets a military man (Ray Milland) who wants to take
her to the armed forces instead! Wilder
and co-writer Charles Bracket get the most out of the Fanny Kilbourne/Edward
Childs Carpenter materials and many a current writer should make this mandatory
viewing.
Midnight (1939) shows Claudette Colbert at
the peak of her appeal and star power as a broke stage performer who pretends
to be rich and is set up to seem that rich by an eccentric (John Barrymore) and
used to make a cheating wife jealous.
Don Ameche also stars in this Mitchell Leisen-directed gem co-written by
Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder.
She Done Him Wrong (1933) is the kind of early
megahit that kept Paramount competitive for decades with the rest of the
Hollywood Studio system, featuring the racy Mae West as the sexually suggestive
saloon singer who knows no bounds and the film itself broke rules that
tightened censorship despite the remarkable reinvention the stage play was put
through so the film could be made. A
young Cary Grant in his first co-starring role is the one who will try to tamer/save
her, but it is not going to be easy.
Still influential and known today, it is also an early sound film
triumph and a must-see for any serious film fan.
The 1.33
X 1 black & white image on all four films are good with good Video Black
and Gray Scale for the DVD format, but Easy
needs some more work because it is a little softer than it ought to
be. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on all
the films show their age, but Major
and Wrong sound the best of the
four. We should not take the tracks here
as being representative of the best audio sources. Extras include introductions by film scholar
and TCM Network host Robert Osbourne, while Major & Midnight
have trailers and Wrong has a bonus
cartoon called She Done Him Right.
With all
those films, Universal should go bonkers and add them to a
must-restore/preserve list, but they do not want to promote a rival studio and
that could endanger the catalog and future waves of title releases. We can only hope the rediscovery of these key
films will change that.
- Nicholas Sheffo