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Category:    Home > Reviews > Comedy > Screwball > Universal Cinema Classics - Third Wave featuring Easy Living/The Major & The Minor/Midnight (1939)/She Done Him Wrong

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


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