The Winter Olympics seem an appropriate occasion to revisit the film career of Sonja Henie, who won Gold medals for ice skating in the 1928, 1932 and 1936 games before giving up her amateur status and pursuing a Hollywood career. Henie became a top box-office attraction whose films played in heavy rotation on TV for decades. But these days she’s probably best known for “engagement” to Liberace, referenced as a quick joke in the TV movie “Behind the Candelabra.”
Six of the nine films that the Norwegian skating superstar made for Twentieth Century Fox between 1936 and 1943 have finally turned up on DVD — from the Fox Cinema Archives manufacture-on-demand program in better-than-decent transfers. They showcase Henie’s dazzling skills on the ice and her limitations as an actress (who occasionally sang a chorus or two) as well as the extremely formulaic nature of that studio’s musicals during this era.
Sidney Lanfield’s “One in a Million” (1936), her debut, is a charming quasi-autobiographical story in which Henie’s wide-eyed character nearly compromises her Olympic eligibility (as her trainer papa, Jean Hersholt, did long ago) at the behest of impresario Adolph Menjou. The skating sequences were Oscar nominated in the short-lived dance direction category. A singing Don Ameche provides love interest, with the forgotten Leah Ray as the lead female singer (the future Mrs. Sonny Werblin would serve the same function in Henie’s next two films), and comic turns by the Ritz Brothers and Borra Minevitch and his Harmonica Rascals.
Comedy specialist Lanfield was back at the helm of Sonja’s second film, “Thin Ice” (1937), for which she was able to command a $100,000 salary and the services of Fox’s top star and her then-paramour, Tyrone Power as her leading man (the only actor who was able to even slightly defrost her somewhat icy demeanor). He plays a prince who pretends to be a tourist at a hotel run by Sonja’s uncle Raymond Walburn — a story derived from a novel that had already inspired a Broadway play with Miriam Hopkins and an earlier Fox musical starring Germany’s Lilian Harvey. The incomparable comedienne Joan Davis has two novelty numbers, and another later TV fixture, Arthur Treacher (of Merv Griffith and fish and chips fame) also figures prominently as the prince’s butler.
Roy Del Ruth’s pleasant “Happy Landing” (1938) has bandleader Cesar Romero and his manager Don Ameche (who both sing) competing for lovely Sonja’s hand when their plane is forced down in Norway (where Hersholt is back as her father). Ameche has second billing, and Ethel Merman plays Romero’s girlfriend, so you do the math.
Henie’s other 1938 release is probably the easiest to take of the six for modern audiences. Del Ruth’s “My Lucky Star” (no relation to Frank Borzage’s “Lucky Star”) is basically a college musical, with sporting-goods salesgirl Henrie shipped off a New England institution of higher learning by Romero to promote the clothing line of his dad George Barbier’s NYC department store. She sparks with English professor Richard Greene (a year before he got top billing, over Basil Rathbone, in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”) while Romero is paired with Louise Hovick, aka Gypsy Rose Lee. Treacher and Davis are back from “Thin Ice,” the latter agreeably teamed with a pre-“Beverly Hillbillies” Buddy Ebsen, who shows off his dancing skill. It’s hard not to like a film where Elijah Cook Jr. not only sings (as does Henie, briefly) but appears in drag. The film’s finale is the title song by Arthur Freed and Herb Nacio Brown, licensed from MGM.
The Fox Cinema Archives series skips over her pair of 1939 releases — “Second Fiddle” and “Everything Happens at Night” — as well as the next Henie vehicle, “Sun Valley Serenade” (1941), which some aficionados consider her best.
Henie’s Hollywood career was already beginning to wane when we get to her last pair of Fox films, both now available on DVD. She was feuding with Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck not only over the generally declining quality of her movies but the fact that hers were the only major Fox musicals still being made in black-and-white (Fox’s bean counters calculated that the cost of Technicolor, added to her generous salary, would push them into the red).
“Iceland” (1943) brought back the director (H. Bruce Humberstone) and two stars (John Payne and Jack Oakie, this time as Marines) of the popular “Sun Valley Serenade” for Henie’s first World War II movie, set in the titular country during its occupation by allied forces. Sammy Kaye and his orchestra are also on hand for this patriotic attempt to make audiences forget rumors that Henie — who had been photographed with Hitler before the war — was a Nazi sympathizer.
Even more enervating is Sonja’s Fox finale, “Wintertime” (1943), directed by Fox’s gothic melodrama expert John Brahm (“The Lodger,’ “Hangover Square”). This time, Sonja and papa S.Z. Sakall are refugees stranded at a a Canadian resort run by Oakie and Cornell Wilde by the outbreak of World War II. Romero offers to helps with an immigration marriage. With Woody Herman and his orchestra.
By this point, Henie’s major source of income was a series of live touring ice shows (Radio City’s lCentre Theatre, the former RKO Roxy demolished in 1954, was the flagship) that continued into the early 1950s. She finally got Technicolor for her first post-Fox film, “It’s a Pleasure” (1945) for the short-lived International Studios (available for years on DVD from MGM), whose obligations for a second Henie film were picked up by Universal-International after a merger (though that black-and-white musical remake of “The Countess of Monte Cristo” has yet to surface on any video format).
That was Henie’s last movie, except for an appearance as herself in a CinemaScope pseudo-documentary called “Hello London” (1958) that was released by Fox in the United Kingdom but never seems to have crossed the Atlantic, even for TV release. She died of leukemia in 1969.
David Miller’s “Midnight Lace” (1960), a thriller starring Doris Day, Rex Harrison and Myrna Loy, will finally make its DVD debut on March 2 via the TCM Vault Collection. It’s the first standalone title in DVD only for the TCM program since “Remember the Night” in 2009; last month’s “Lady From Shanghai,” like the earlier “The Iron Petticoat,” was a DVD/Blu-ray combo.
The Warner Archive Collection has scheduled Roy Del Ruth’s “Winner Take All” for Feb. 25, probably along with at least one other James Cagney title (quite possibly “The Oklahoma Kid” co-starring Humphrey Bogart).
After months of focusing primarily on TV and Paramount re-issues, WAC has released a large group of Golden Age titles, including a pair of much-requested Norma Shearer vehicles, “Smilin’ Through” with Fredric March and Leslie Howard, and “The Barretts of Wimple Street” co-starring March and Charles Laughton. Also new are a couple of George Raft noris, “Nocturne” and “Red Light,” plus “Dear Heart” starring Glenn Ford and Geraldine Page.
After switching from separate DVD and Blu-ray editions to combos only in November, the Criterion Collection will now release some titles in both combo and DVD-only editions. Among them is Don Siegel’s “Riot in Cell Block 11” (1954), due on April 22. This Allied Artists release of a Walter Wanger production (licensed from MGM, which shares the AA library with Warner and Paramount) will be presented in 1:37, though some experts claim it was originally released in 1:66.
Frank Tashlin’s credited debut as a live-action feature director, “The First Time” (1952) with Robert Cummings and Barbara Hale, is making its DVD debut this month from the Sony Pictures Choice Collection MOD program. Also new to format is Gilbert Cates’ “Rings Around the World” (1966), showcasing circus acts in a spinoff of the TV series “International Showtime” hosted by Don Ameche.
Shout Factory!’s aggressive licensing of deep catalogue product continues apace with the April 22 release of “Mr. Magoo: The Theatrical Collection,’’ comprised of 53 theatrical shorts (12 seen in widescreen for the first time) and the feature “1001 Arabian Nights.’’
On the Blu-ray front, Universal has slated the Blu-ray debuts of Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” (1944) with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray for April 15, along with all three cuts of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958) starring Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh. For April 1, Universal has slated another bunch of BDs: “Joe Kidd” and “Two Mules for Sister Sara” starring Clint Eastwood, (the latter with Shirley MacLaine); the John Wayne vehicles “The War Wagon” and “Rooster Cogburn” (with Katharine Hepburn), “King Kong vs. Godzilla” and “King Kong Escapes”