Reeling Backward: "When Willie Came Marching Home" (1950)

In 1950 John Ford was already a revered filmmaker, becoming the first person to win back-to-back Oscars for directing. But he was about to commence a darker and, I think, richer period of his career, marked by more pessimistic films that cast a gimlet eye at man's capacities for good and evil -- "The Searchers," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "Cheyenne Autumn," etc.

So what to make of this goofy piffle, starring largely forgotten comedian/song-and-dance man Dan Dailey, which came out the same year as "Rio Grande" and "Wagon Master?" Think of "When Willie Comes Marching Home" as the fruity apéritif before a sumptuous banquet. Though it's certainly a minor entry in the Ford oeuvre, it shows off his undervalued capacity for humor and warmth.

"Willie" was a war comedy at a time when American audiences were just getting enough distance from World War II to milk it for laughs. Dailey plays Bill Kluggs, a cutup in the finest Rodney Dangerfield "can't get no respect" tradition.

Celebrated for being the first man in Punxsutawney, West Virginia, to enlist after Pearl Harbor -- which is odd, since all he accomplished was being first in a line -- Bill becomes a punchline when he's assigned as a gunnery instructor at the local airfield.

The guy who was supposed to become a bona fide war hero essentially never leaves town, and is branded a coward as other boys go off to war, fight and die. There's even a running Chaplinesque gag of a scruffy little dog biting Bill's leg as he shambles away from his latest humiliation.

I kept expecting the movie to grow more serious. We know Bill is eventually going to get his chance to get into the fighting, so I assumed we'd see him get bloodied and grim, the goofball become savior. But even when he finally goes overseas, Bill's adventures are decidedly of the slapstick variety.

His B-17 is prevented from landing in Britain by thick fog and low fuel, so the crew is ordered to bail out and ditch the brand-new plane in the English Channel. Asleep in the belly turret after the long flight, Bill doesn't hear the command and only parachutes out over occupied France. There he's captured by French resistance, led by the lovely and flirty Yvonne (Corinne Calvet).

Bill is tasked with carrying home some film the Frenchies shot of German rockets being tested in advance of D-Day. (The film's fidelity to the historical record is shaky, at best.) This kicks off a long sequence where he's transported to and fro, by boat and plane, questioned by doctors and generals, kept awake and plied with liquor the whole time.

Dailey basically spends the last third of the movie playing drunk, and he's pretty good at it. The audience is rewarded with several google-eyed reaction shots as the curly-headed Kluggs labors to keep his bearings.

Rounding out the cast are Colleen Townsend as Marge Fettles, Bill's wholesome next-door neighbor and betrothed, and crusty character actor William Demarest as his father, who shares in his son's mortification. Jimmy Lydon plays Marge's kid brother, a gangly type who goes on to become a famed Air Force dogfighter, adding to Bill's grief.

(He isn't credited so I can't be sure about this, but I believe Hardy Krüger has a small non-speaking role as a German soldier who waltzes into the French cafe where Bill is posing as Yvonne's newly christened husband. If so, this would make it his first appearance in a Hollywood film.)

"When Willie Comes Marching Home" is more interesting as a time capsule than as a standalone film. It's so different from John Ford's usual stuff that it bears a second peek.

Reeling Backward: "The Greaty McGinty" (1941)

Circa 1940 Preston Sturges was one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters who really yearned to direct. He was getting paid $2,500 a week -- that's north of $2 million a year in today's dollars -- to churn out screwball comedies and rehashed plots, hating every minute of it. So Sturges sold his script for "The Great McGinty" for $10 on the condition that he be allowed to direct it himself.

(Rather than hiding this fact, Paramount actually promoted it as part of the film's marketing push.)

In the short term Paramount seemed to get the better end of it, as "The Great McGinty" was a decent hint and Sturges won the Academy Award for Original Screenplay -- undoubtedly the lowest-paid Oscar-winning gig ever. But Sturges got what he wanted, a director's seat, and went on to a well-respected, if not particularly lengthy, career behind the camera ("Sullivan's Travels," "Unfaithfully Yours").

"McGinty" is interesting to me for three reasons. It's one of the few leading roles by Brian Donlevy, who usually played supporting parts as crooks and tough guys, most notably as the cruel Sergeant Markoff in "Beau Geste." He had one of those angled faces that, like Martin Landau, seemed almost cartoonishly villainous from a distance, but upon closer inspection was actually breathtakingly beautiful. He's effective and charming here as a lug who makes it big, then loses it all.

Second, the movie uses a storytelling framing device set many years after and thousands of miles away from the central plot, which was a pretty novel premise in 1940. ("Citizen Kane" would go on to employ it soon after.)

But most intriguingly, "McGinty" seems to fly in the face of the Production Code, which more or less mandated that reproachable behavior always be punished in the movies, and acts of goodness are invariably rewarded in the end, even if it takes awhile. ("It's a Wonderful Life" being the classic example.)

Here, the main character is a lout and a thief who becomes a state governor through outright graft and corruption. Happiness and status accrue to him the more rotten he is, including a show marriage that turns into a genuine love affair and close ties with her adopted children. But when he goes straight and attempts to do something honest for the first time ever, his entire life immediately comes crashing down.

McGinty hightails it to a remote country and becomes a bartender at a seedy dive, pouring out cheap booze along with his own story to troubled pilgrims. The wife and kids? Utterly abandoned. If you're expecting a last-minute reunion where the woman walks into his gin joint to reassure the audience everything turned out OK in the end, you'll be waiting a long time.

What's the takeaway here? It's better to be honest, but if you're a crook you'd best stay a crook?

At a spare 81 minutes, "The Great McGinty" flies by at a breakneck pace. It almost seems like one minute Dan McGinty (Donlevy) is a street bum who earns a wad of cash by going from precinct to precinct to vote for the mayor dozens of times, to becoming the mayor himself and then the governor.

The best and funniest part is the second act as McGinty becomes the collections enforcer for the local mob boss (Akim Tamiroff) -- credited, simply, as "The Boss" -- who keeps the politicians in his pocket. The Boss is bemused by the pug-nosed nobody who dares to punch him back when punched. The two form an odd brotherly relationship, exchanging brash displays of masculinity and always ready to throw down in fisticuffs at any disagreement.

McGinty buys himself an outlandish striped suit and sets out to collect outstanding debts for The Boss. He uses his fists when provoked, but shows a gift of gab, talking an elderly female psychic out of $200 by pointing out the risks to her own future. This leads to a stint as city alderman, handing out contracts for bribes.

When the longtime Mayor (Arthur Hoyt) becomes outdated for the reform-minded times, McGinty is picked as the golden boy. Since women have recently gotten the vote -- an indication the main story is set in the 1920s -- McGinty needs to be a family man. His secretary, Catherine (Muriel Angelus), volunteers for the duty, pointing out it will mutually benefit each of them -- though she fails to mention her two urchins until after the wedding vows are sealed.

Of course, once McGinty feels he is "free" of The Boss' influence, he starts listening to Catherine's urging to shut down the tenements and pass new child labor laws. The Boss doesn't take kindly to the insurrection, leading to a throwdown right in the new governor's office.

I quite enjoyed "The Greaty McGinty," though it's obviously a minor work in the oeuvre of Preston Sturges. It's the rare movie that would have been better if it were longer and slower. Still, it got him through the studio's door, gave Donlevy one of his most memorable roles and delivered a subtle middle finger to the rigid filmmaking mores of the day.

Reeling Backward: "The Lady Eve" (1941)

I've been thinking about the Reeling Backward selections I've written about recently, as well as the piles of potential films to feature -- mostly in the form of DVDs/Blu-rays sitting on my desk, stuff I've DVR'd off Turner Classic Movies and titles filling up my Netflix queue (more than 100, counting both streaming and DVD lists).

Conservatively speaking, it'll take me two to three years to get through all the films. And that's not accounting for any flux in the lists, as titles available for streaming suddenly disappear (annoying) or my interests change and I add new movies as I come across them (frequent). But it gives me a good idea of what sorts of things I've been watching or planned to watch.

Anyway, I've noticed a possibly disturbing trend: Reeling Backward has become a very testosterone-laden space. Most of the recent columns and queues are dominated by war pictures, crime stories, sports dramas and Westerns. There hasn't been a whole lot of comedy, and there's been even less of the "chick flick" variety.

The irony, of course, is that back in Hollywood's Golden Age they didn't think to divide films into "women's pictures" or "children's movies" or such. It was assumed that more or less everybody was more or less interested in every genre of film, and that as long as they made good pictures people of all ages and genders would come to see them.

(They most definitely thought of a certain subset of movies as being for "colored people," and indeed there was a little-known subsystem of films produced for and even by black folks. But that's another story.)

Romantic comedies have been one of the mainstays of popular film going back to its silent days, and Preston Sturges was widely considered a master of the genre. "The Lady Eve" is one of his better-known examples. Technically it's best described as a screwball comedy, but since most screwballs were subsets of romantic films, the categorization still works.

What's most notable about the film is the way Barbara Stanwyck completely dominates the film, even with the considerable Henry Fonda as her leading man. Fonda plays Charles Pike, an ophiologist (snake expert) who also happens to be the heir to the Pike's Ale fortune. Charles, having just spent a year doing research in the Amazon, is a socially inept bumbler who seems uncomfortable around the hordes of women zeroing in on him.

Until, that is, he meets Stanwyck's Jean Harrington, a con woman and daughter of hoary card shark "Colonel" (a fictional title) Harrington (Charles Coburn). Jean is a schemer and a shyster, but isn't quite the total mercenary that her father is. She finds herself genuinely falling for the patsy.

Their seduction scenes are quite electric, especially in that the man is totally submissive to the woman in a way you don't usually see in this era of film. First she makes Charles remove her busted shoe and replace it with another, in a paean to foot fetishism that probably drove Quentin Tarantino crazy. Then she nudges him off the divan and and hovers over him, lustily stroking his hair, in a clear stand-in for another part of his anatomy. Her midriff-baring outfit is quite racy for the time.

Later Charles is wised up by his bodyguard/protector Muggsy (William Demarest) that Jean and her dad are con artists, and he gives them the heave-ho. Segue to a few months later, and Jean decides to pull his chain again. Posing as a bogus Brit noble, the Lady Eve, she inserts herself into the upper-crust Connecticut set, and wheedles an invitation to a party being thrown by Charles' father, Horace (Eugene Pallette, famous for his rotund carriage and gravely voice).

Of course, it's ludicrous that Charles wouldn't immediately recognize Eve as Jean. But he insists that someone trying to fool him would change their appearance, so the fact that she looks exactly the same is proof in his mind that they actually are two women. For a scientist, Charles seems pretty impervious to logic.

The dinner scene of Charles falling over himself as he is flummoxed by Eve remains a high point, with the doltish boy having to repeatedly change tuxedos when he keeps getting an array of food spilled on his duds.

In the end he falls for Eve just as he did Jean, and following a quickie marriage she extracts her revenge, fabricating a litany of former lovers (including at least one elopement) as part of the Lady Eve's backstory. Mortified, Charles literally jumps off the train they were riding to their honeymoon destination.

Eric Blore is a real treat as Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith, a fellow scam man who teams up with Jean to help her perpetrate her ruse as an English lady. I love how, when introducing himself to his fellow rascals, he prefaced his name with "at the moment" -- indicating that such things are as interchangeable as the hats he favors.

I liked a lot of little bits 'n' pieces about "The Lady Eve," though as a whole I found it somewhat disappointing. The best screwball/romantic comedies have a little heart to them as well as flimflam -- "It Happened One Night" being the classic example. "Eve" is straight go-go-go comedy, and in the end I felt more breathless than charmed.

Perhaps I'm just too used to manly flicks.

Reeling Backward: "Hail the Conquering Hero" (1944)

"Hail the Conquering Hero" is widely praised as one of Preston Sturges' best films, and it earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. But I found it tedious and mawkish -- the 1944 equivalent of a dopey sitcom.

Eddie Bracken -- who bore a startling resemblance to Donald O'Connor, another song-and-dance man who broke into movies -- plays Woodrow Truesmith, a Marine Corp washout who impersonates a war hero when he returns to his idyllic hometown.

It's one of those stories built on a lie, and somehow the lie keeps getting repeated and embellished, despite the perpetrator's best efforts to tell the truth. That's what I meant with the sitcom comparison: An entire plot built around a misunderstanding that could be solved with a few words of dialogue, but somehow the chance never presents itself.

Now think about that. How often has a misunderstanding reached such epic proportions in your own life? And even if it did, would you wait hours and days to correct it? Even if the notion didn't strain credulity, it's an overused comedy device.

The set-up is Woodrow buys some beers for a group of six destitute Marines. They're led by Sgt. Heppelfinger (William Demarest), a crotchety older soldier. They thank him for the drinks, and learn Woodrow's tale: The son of a Medal of Honor-winning Marine, he was bounced from the service after one month for chronic hay fever.

When Bugsy (boxer Freddie Steele, in his first screen role), the shell-shocked, slightly scary member of the group, learns that Woodrow has been lying to his mother for the past year, having a buddy send her letters from overseas so she'll think he's fighting in the war, he insists that Woodrow board the next train home.

The hi jinx continue from there. The sarge insists Woodrow put on one of their uniforms so his mother will be none the wiser. But she tells the whole town her son is returning a hero. When the group sees hundreds of people assembled at the train station to greet Woodrow, they hastily pin some of their medals on his chest, too.

It's off to the races from there. There's loud speeches, four marching bands (playing the title song, of course) and a contingent of local politicians looking to recruit Woodrow to run for mayor against the self-aggrandizing incumbent, Everett Noble (Raymond Walburn). Walburn has perhaps the only consistently funny role in the movie, since he's always either in the midst of giving a blowhard speech or composing his next one.

Woodrow had a girl, too: Libby, played by Ella Rain es. He broke it off with her during his year away, during which time she became engaged to the mayor's son, Forrest (Bill Edwards). She reasons that Forrest is tall, handsome, rich and has many prospects -- in other words, everything a girl could wish for. He is the jealous type, though, and soon it becomes clear he has good reason to be.

Even as Woodrow struggles to tell somebody that he's a phony, Libby keeps finding excuses not to tell him about her engagement. It all builds to a big finale in which they reunite, of course.

Sturges made a lot of great, smart comedies. But for me, "Hail the Conquering Hero" is false gold.

1.5 stars out of four