If George Arliss (1868-1946) is remembered at all these today, it’s most likely as the mentor to Bette Davis, whose faltering early Hollywood career he saved by persuading Warner Bros. to sign her to play his secretary in “The Man Who Saved God” (1933). Arliss, in fact, was the studio’s most popular male attraction before the arrival of James Cagney — though he was in his 60s, looked odd and sported a distinctly theatrical manner honed during decades on Broadway and in silent movies.
The delightful “The Working Man” (1933) — recently released by the Warner Archive Collection — his second film with Davis and his penultimate film for Warners, was in fact like several of Arliss’ talkies a remake of one of his silent successes (it would be remade again just three years later at Fox as “Everybody’s Old Man,” with humorist Irvin Cobb starring in what was intended as a vehicle for the recently deceased Will Rogers).
Often cast as historical characters (Disraeli, Alexander Hamilton and Voltaire), Arliss here plays a contemporary role — what we’d describe today as the workaholic, never-married head of a shoe business. Persuaded to take his first vacation in years, he happens to meet the children (Bette Davis and Theodore Newton) of his chief business rival and the love of his life. Both parents are now dead are the kids are squandering their inheritance on hard partying while allowing a swindler (Gordon Wescott) to run the family business into the ground.
Arliss tricks the kids (who have no idea who he is really is) into letting a judge appoint his as their guardians and sets about teaching them financialr responsibility. The son goes to work at the family shoe factor, while the daughter goes to “spy” on Arliss’ business, where she falls in love with the nephew (Hardie Albright) who’s running it in Arliss’ absence.
John Adolfi, a silent veteran who directed most of Arliss’ Warner films, gets one of the star’s most endearing performances; he’s very funny and touching as the self-deprecating foxy grandpa. Platinum-blonde ingenue Davis easily outclasses her young (and soon to be forgotten) co-stars.
Davis disliked the two films that bracketed “The Working Man” — it was followed by “Ex-Lady,” a recent WAC release that doesn’t look at all bad now — so much that she suggested clips be used in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” as examples of how Hollywood wrecked her character’s career. Now the Warner Archive has released a remastered version of the film that immediately preceded “The Working Man,” Alfred E. Green’s “Parachute Jumper” (1933).
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. has the title role, an ex-Marine who fall on hard times in Depression Era New York City. He and fellow veteran Frank McHugh move in with unemployed Davis, and their financial desperation leads Fairbanks to take a job working as a boy toy/chauffeur to Claire Dodd, who is also mistress to gangster Leo Carillo. Eventually all three of them end up working for Carillo, who tricks the guys into smuggling drugs into the U.S. from Canada.
There’s some nice aerial footage, and typically frank pre-Code treatment of the stars’ sex lives, including the suggestion that women were forced to submit to potential employers’ advances during the Depression. In short, not an embarrassment.
WAC has also released one of the odder entries in Fairbanks’ pre-Code reign as billed-over-the-title star as Warners. William Wellman’s “Love is a Racket” (1932) finds Fairbanks somewhat miscast as one of the era’s many screen characters inspired by Broadway columnist Walter Winchell.
Second-billed Ann Dvorak has little to do but wistfully wisecrack as the girl who loves Fairbanks while he pursues a dancer (Frances Dee) whose career he is trying to promote. Also wisecracking, but not at all wistfully, is Lee Tracy — who would play the definitive Winchell in “Blessed Event” later that year — unfortunately relegated to a supporting role as Fairbanks’ leg man.
Wellman does stage one remarkable sequence that makes this one very pre-code — Fairbanks tosses the corpse of gangster Lyle Talbot over the side of his penthouse balcony to cover up his murder. And nobody pays for the crime.
WAC has also released a trio of early James Stewart films (made at three different studios) to DVD for the first time. Clarence Brown’s “Of Human Hearts” (1938) was one of Stewart’s first significant roles at MGM, where he had played murderers in “The Thin Man” and “Rose Marie” during the early years of his contract. Though he doesn’t turn up until 41 minutes into the 102 minute movie (Gene Reynolds plays his character as a 10-year-old) Stewart is terrific as the rebellious son of a poor preacher (Walter Huston) and his wife (Beulah Bondi) in pre-Civil War Ohio.
After a series of escalating conflicts with the old man, Stewart leaves to attend medical school in Baltimore and then goes off to war as a surgeon. He neglects the now-widowed mother who’s sacrificed for him — at least until he gets lectured by Abraham Lincoln (an unrecognizably made-up John Carradine) in a truly risible sequence. Charles Coburn also has his first significant screen role as Stewart’s alcoholic medical mentor and there’s some expert scene-stealing by the likes of Guy Kibbee and Gene Lockhart.
Bondi, who’s wonderful (the same year she made “Make Way For Tomorrow”) played Stewart’s mom for the first of four times (plus once on TV) in “Of Human Hearts” and netted the second of her two Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations (she had been previously nominated for Brown’s “The Gorgeous Hussy” (1936) with Stewart in one of his odder supporting roles).
George Stevens’ “Vivacious Lady” (1938), the best of the three new Stewarts on DVD, actually began shooting before “Of Human Hearts” but was shut down when Stewart became ill 10 days into production. Such was the clout of Ginger Rogers — RKO’s biggest female star and Stewart’s real-life girlfriend at the time who had insisted on his casting in the first place — that the film was restarted from scratch, with a different supporting cast, after Stewart completed “Of Human Hearts.”
Stewart is perfectly cast as a shy chemistry professor at an upstate New York College who instantly falls for and marries Ginger’s night club dancer. Their romantic chemistry is so palpable that it’s not hard to accept this at all.
The problem is breaking the news to his very conservative father (Charles Coburn, replacing the originally cast Donald Crisp), who is also the president of the college. Such is Coburn’s temper that his wife (Bondi repeating as Stewart’s mom because the originally-cast Fay Bainter was unavailable) feins heart trouble whenever he starts up. She’s also a closet smoker, and it’s this habit she bonds with Rogers over.
Basically the humor stems from the couple’s inability to consummate their marriage — fairly racy stuff for the Production Code era. Stewart executes some fairly adroit physical comedy under Stevens’ direction, but the funniest scene is a wrestling match between secret-bride Rogers and her husband’s unsuspecting “fiancee” Frances Mercer. Erstwhile Hopalong Cassidy sidekick James Ellison gets laughs as Stewart’s alcoholic cousin — who is making his own play for Rogers — and there’s excellent comic support by Grady Sutton, Franklin Pangborn and Willie Best.
Stewart oddly never worked with Rogers again, nor was he ever reteamed with Rosalind Russell, his less felictious co-star in the last of the WAC trio, “No Time for Comedy” (1941). Directed by William Keighley from a script by Julius and Philip Epstein, this is a very dated adaptation of a stage comedy by S.N. Behrman that had starred Katherine Cornell and Laurence Olivier.
Reissued in 1952 as “Guy With a Grin,” it’s been turned into a vehicle for Stewart, who was loaned to Warner Bros. by David O. Selznick (the producer had acquired Stewart’s services from MGM for two pictures but only used him in “Made For Each Other”). Stewart plays the grandly named Gaylord Esterbrook, the first-time author of an English drawing-room comedy starring Russell. When he arrives for rehearsal on Broadway, the play’s director (the always welcome Allyn Joslyn) is stunned to discover Stewart is actually a hick (surprise, surprise) from Indiana.
Despite their often strenous effects, Stewart and Russell — never teamed during their five busy years together at MGM — never quite convince as lovers who almost instantly marry. Stewart’s character churns out a series of comedy smashes, but then he meets the wife (Genevieve Tobin, the wife of director Keighley, in her last and arguably best screen role) of a wealthy man (Charles Ruggles), who convinces Stewart to try drama with supposedly comic results. By this point, Russell is jealous and a promising beginning has deterioriated into a noisy farce that not even its stars can save.
Besides a previously announced Blu-ray upgrade of “Billy Rose’s Jumbo,” today’s Warner Archive Collection releases include a brace of Paramount reissues, among them “Elephant Walk” with Elizabeth Taylor, “The World of Suzie Wong” starring William Holden, “Funeral in Berlin” with Michael Caine and “The Carpetbaggers” featuring the final performance of Alan Ladd.
Two long-awaited titles — Frank Borzage’s “Little Man What Now?” (1935) starring Margaret Sullivan and Julien Duvivier’s all-star “Flesh and Fantasy” (1943) have quietly debuted on DVD via the Universal Vault Collection (sold exclusively through Amazon). Other titles now availale include “You Can Never Tell” (1951) with Dick Powell, “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” (1958) with William Reynolds and “For Love or Money” (1963) starring Kirl Douglas and Mitzi Gaynor.