Matinee Musings: Ann Harding Turned Misery

Note: The sad girl trope in movies features a female protagonist who is profoundly melancholic, visibly traumatized, or emotionally fragile, often styled in an aesthetically pleasing or poetic way. Movie-goers have to decide for themselves whether this validates female grief and aggravation and fosters empathy or promotes passive heroines or reduces identity to pain. Me, I like how the sad girl trope rejects the societal expectation that women must always be put-together. It's okay to be a mess. It'll pass.

The Gallant Lady Weeps: How Ann Harding Turned Misery into Luminous Heartbreak

Ann Harding belongs to a brief moment in early sound cinema when a woman could be intelligent, self-aware, and fated to suffer beautifully. Projecting the modern "sad girl" trope backward into the 1930s, Harding emerges as a performer who turns emotional suffering into an aesthetic experience.

In the early talkie era, Hollywood prized actresses who combined beauty with vocal control. Harding's stage training allowed her screen persona to take rapid, unmistakable shape. By the early 1930s she was consistently cast as the "beautiful, virtuous, self-sacrificing woman," a type studios revisited with near ritual insistence. Across these roles, her characters absorb frustration, disappointment, and renunciation with a composure that approaches stylization.

In Paris Bound (1929), Jim and Mary begin their marriage with modern, permissive ideals, yet it is Harding’s Mary who pays the emotional cost when theory collapses. Left with a child and her suspicions, she becomes the film’s still center of suffering, waiting and doubting. Harding renders Mary's anguish with restraint. When she insists that marriage requires "vacations," her faltering voice reveals the strain beneath the pose.

In Her Private Affair (1929), Harding plays Vera, whose life is derailed by guilt, blackmail, and secrecy. Harding makes her suffering palpable through her expressive face and stage-trained voice, conveying anxiety, fear, and moral anguish. The film is static and stage-bound, but her performance gives it emotional weight and helped launch her stardom.

If Paris Bound establishes this pattern, East Lynne (1931) refines it into its purest form. As Lady Isabella, Harding portrays maternal loss and social disgrace not through melodramatic display but through restraint. Her face registers grief in subtle ways, lingering sadness in the eyes, hesitation in a glance, composure maintained at evident cost. The drama lies in watching her struggle to contain emotions that threaten to overwhelm her.

In Westward Passage (1932), Harding plays disillusionment as a state of suspended aftershock. Having left a failed marriage, she moves through her new life with composed restraint, even as the past intrudes. When her first husband returns, the emotional conflict sharpens: whether the past can ever be recovered.

The Animal Kingdom (1932) centers on a love triangle, but its emotional weight comes from Harding's Daisy. After Tom impulsively marries another woman, Daisy discovers too late how deeply she loves him. Harding gives the character a wounded tenderness that makes her heartbreak memorable. Her farewell, "Good-bye... 'til Doomsday," transforms loss into a form of grace.

In Double Harness (1933), Harding plays Joan, whose determination to reform the irresponsible John gradually turns into painful love. After tricking him into marriage, she is consumed by guilt and struggles to earn the affection she fears she does not deserve. Harding balances strength, vulnerability, and restraint, making Joan one of her most affecting heroines.

As film critic Molly Haskell has argued, Hollywood often turned female suffering into emotional spectacle, inviting identification while encouraging resignation. Harding’s films exemplify this tendency. They ask viewers to admire endurance - to value the woman who transforms loss into moral clarity and composure.

What distinguishes Harding is the intelligence she brings to this paradox. Her performances lend psychological credibility to roles that might otherwise seem same-old, yet their repetition across films exposed the limits of the type itself. Her performances are never trivial; they possess a psychological clarity that deepens even conventional roles. Yet that same clarity, repeated across films, lends the suffering a certain predictability. Press resentment - fueled by her reserve offscreen - hardened into sarcasm, dubbing her “Noble Ann Harding.”

With the stricter enforcement of the Production Code in the mid-1930s, Hollywood retreated from the kind of adult emotional material that sustained Harding’s* career. Her achievement endures: she demonstrated how cinema could render wounded feminine energy** as something formally persuasive and aesthetically compelling.

 +++++++++++++

* And the careers of Leila Hyams, Evelyn Brent, Mary Nolan, Genevieve Tobin, Marian Marsh, Madge Evans, Helen Twelvetrees and the wonderful Mae Clarke and Nancy Carroll.

** Look it up! I can’t do everything for you. I give and I give….

Perry Mason 168: Godzilla

Note: Too heavy to be a leading man in the movies, Raymond Burr usually gave terrific performances in supporting roles, most often as villains, in the ten years after WWII. Many movie fans of all ages are still watching his turns with Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window) and George Stevens (A Place in the Sun). And hardcore fans of noir still watch Raw Deal (Anthony Mann), The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang), Horizons West (Budd Boetticher) and Great Day in the Morning (Jacques Tourneur).

 Godzilla, King of the Monsters
1956 / 1:20
Tagline: “Makes KING KONG look like a Midget!”
[internet archive]

The Japanese studio Toho (Treasure of the East) made the original Gojira in 1954. I think it is one of the few monster movies that transcends its genre because it makes me feel the horror and tragedy of the monster's rampage: the thousands killed and the destruction of infrastructure painstakingly rebuilt after the war. The waste of life and property is simply terrible.

Haunting too is that unforgettable roar – that combo of shriek and factory klaxon.

To make the film more accessible to American audiences, new scenes featuring Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin were shot and inserted into the Japanese original. Martin serves as a Western point-of-view character, our man in Tokyo, much like Edward Murrow reporting from London during the Blitz while a national catastrophe unfolds around him.

Nowadays it is easy to mock this narrow-mindedness, but I remember being a kid in the Sixties and hearing rude comments about the Japanese. Only twenty years had passed since World War II, about as long ago then as Hurricane Katrina is to us today. So only 11 years after the cessation of hostilities, in 1956 feelings must still have been raw.

Burr’s scenes are rather jarring in places, feeling disconnected from the original footage. He talks to characters in the original film but all we see are the backs of their heads. Scenes are of him listening at meetings, giving a voiceover to describe what’s going on. A Japanese American guy translates for him since Martin says, “My Japanese is a little rusty.” This is lame, since nobody would expect him to speak the Japanese of paleontology. A funnier line might have been: "My conversational Japanese is fine, but this geological and biological mumbo-jumbo is way over my head."

Burr, ever the professional, rises above the sometimes weak material and never gives the impression that he is merely collecting a paycheck. He gives a serious and stoic performance. Burr's best scene comes when he finds himself trapped in a vulnerable office building. Fighting back panic and maintaining his professional composure, he records what he believes may be his final report.

To my mind, there are two unintentionally amusing scenes.  One is a Japanese-American as an Odo Island peasant that speaks what even I know is kitchen Japanese. The other is seeing Burr so heavily bandaged that he looks as though a group of children had practiced first aid on him, calling to mind the funny scene in TCOT Grinning Gorilla.

Burr reportedly joked that he received a generous paycheck for only two days' work on Godzilla, but that claim seems doubtful. In the sequence on Odo Island that suspensefully leads up to the first sighting of the monster, there is a day scene and a night scene that would have taken at least a couple days to set up and film. In fact, Burr and crew worked six days to do his scenes.

The American version, I think, does not cut any of the monster’s depredations. So it feels just as grim as the original. For example, it retains the dreadful scene in which a mother is assuring her two little kids they will soon meet the father they lost in the war while the trio is cowering in a shop’s doorway as the monster is only steps down the street. Given moments like this, it is easy to understand why some countries initially restricted the film to adult audiences.

Matinee Musings: Conquest of Space

Note: To keep this blog's connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, I'm compelled to point out that Dr. Elsbach is played by Michael Fox who appeared in 25 episodes, usually as a doctor or forensic pathologist. Chinese guy playing a Japanese guy named Imoto, Benson Fong guest starred as the accused in TCOT Caretaker’s Cat. For some odd reason, William Hopper (Paul Drake) is billed higher than Fong though Hopper is in only two brief scenes and Fong is almost always in a scene. 

Conquest of Space
1955 / 1:20
Tagline: “Dramatic Effects Never Before Equaled - Or Even Imagined!”
[internet archive]

The Commander, a figure carved from the granite of military tradition, is a cinematic archetype - stern, rule-bound, and yet quietly aware of the psychological erosion that comes with prolonged duty in space. The Wheel, a rotating space station that doubles as a construction port and a fort, becomes a metaphor for the grinding monotony of interstellar vigilance. The crew, suffering from the tedium of their orbital tour of duty, begins to unravel: irritability, nausea, dizziness, and a creeping sense of existential dread permeate the mise-en-scène.

When the mission is unexpectedly re-routed from the Moon to Mars, the Commander’s reaction is not rebellion but resignation - a classic gesture of the professional soldier, the kind of man who thinks “Mine is not to reason why.” His stoicism is not heroic in the sense Marcus Aurelius would endorse, but tragic: a man burdened by his unbending sense of duty, but also haunted by the dark implications of his own obedience. The stakes are high - Earth’s survival depends on the success of this mission - but the film’s true drama lies in the Commander’s internal conflict, his slow descent into metaphysical unease.

As the narrative unfolds, the film anticipates a familiar trope in science fiction cinema: the psychological breakdown of a crew member, the “madness in space” motif that would later be explored from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ren & Stimpy. But here, the breakdown is not merely personal - it’s philosophical. The Commander begins to question the very premise of the mission, suggesting that humanity’s reach into the cosmos may be a form of cosmic trespass, a violation of the divine order.

The supporting cast, while not given the depth of characterization one finds in Citizen Kane, nonetheless serves the themes the director explores. The members of the crew are unable to articulate the moral dimensions of space exploration to their CO and thus unable to dispute his religious and philosophical misgivings about the mission. Their inability to form and express an argument becomes a critique of technocratic culture - a reminder that scientific progress is a hollow, if not hazardous, enterprise without reflection about values and the ability to formulate and argue your point of view to unknowing or unsteady authority.

Visually, the film is a mixed bag. The Technicolor palette is both a strength and a liability: the close-ups, a staple of television aesthetics, sometimes betray the limitations of the medium, but the spacewalk sequences are genuinely striking. The Angry Red Planet, rendered in vivid hues, is a painterly abstraction - a hostile, beautiful terrain that reflects the inner turmoil of the characters.

Not wanting to oversell this picture, I grant that this is a film that lacks the polish of later sci-fi epics. But in the final analysis, it compensates with a sincerity of purpose and a thematic ambition that elevates it above its pulp origins with a meditation on duty, doubt, and the limits of human ambition.

Perry Mason 167: Pass the Gravy

Note: I like the Cool & Lam series and this 1959 outing is one of Gardner’s sturdier contraptions, the kind that looks at first like two unrelated annoyances and then reveals itself to be one of those infernal little boxes where every side folds into the next. 

Pass the Gravy – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Pass the Gravy (and you can already hear Bertha Cool snort at the title) is Gardner nudging a mess of details until they cry uncle and confess.

We begin, as usual, with PI Donald Lam being handed two problems that he is explicitly directed by partner Bertha not to combine. First: a fifteen‑year‑old girl with more anxiety than cash wants her Uncle Amos retrieved from his latest alcoholic orbit - except this time the orbit has widened past what the family can endure. Second: a far more remunerative proposition, courtesy of a sleek wife whose missing salesman husband has vanished into exactly the sort of fog Gardner enjoys. Bertha Cool, patron saint of billable hours, votes decisively for glamour over pathos. Lam, professionally a risk-taker all the way, declines to choose.

The miracle (or the trick, depending on your tolerance) is a pair of postcards from the same nowhere gas station, which Lam seizes on like a man on a mission. Off he goes, ricocheting through Sierras, Reno, and a parade of low‑rent America - hitchhikers, ex-cons, predators - each one offering a clue that mostly serves to make the previous clue look stupid. Gardner keeps the tone breezy, but the method is almost scientific: accumulate detail, distrust it, repeat.

Meanwhile Bertha looms - half partner, half thrower of Lam under busses - coiled like that famous spool of barbed wire, measuring morality in invoices. Lam, no one’s idea of a saint, nevertheless insists on helping the broke kid, as if he’s dimly aware that a detective who ignores the poor stops being a detective and turns into furniture. Secretary Elsie Brand thinks dark thoughts, looking askance at Lam's desire to assist a teenage girl - it was an age when literally millions of sixteen-year-old girls got married every year.

It is here that Lam can be read in light of Seneca’s observation that “the wise man is fortified against all inroads.” Lam is no Stoic adept - he is too ironic, too improvisational, too entangled in contingency - but he approximates Stoic flexibility and resilience in practice. He does not retreat before uncertainty, financial pressure, or physical danger; nor does he allow Bertha’s mercenary calculus to wholly dictate his course. Poverty (his own professional precarity), sorrow (the girl’s desperation), disgrace (his disbarred past), and pain, disability, and disfigurement (the ever-present threat of bodily harm to his small frame) all press upon him. Yet Lam persists, not with serene detachment, but with a dogged alertness and dedication that mirror Seneca’s ideal in a compromised, modern form.

In the end, the puzzle snaps shut neatly, Gardner having tidied the room with efficiency. But the aftertaste is better than that: beneath the wisecracks and coincidences, a faint, unfashionable idea - that decency may be impractical, but is nonetheless binding. Lam doesn’t win because he’s invulnerable. He wins because he refuses to take the sensible exit and he does not like seeing vulnerable people abused.

The Nones of Crime: Mystery House

Note: As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, Sheila Bromley was both a goody and a baddy in five episodes. Her most outstanding performance was in TCOT Nervous Neighbor in which she had amnesia, one of the very few credible instances I’ve seen of that “convenient for the script” condition. 

Mystery House
1938 / 56 minutes
Tagline: “A piece of wire...a toupee...a rifled safe..3 CLUES! 3 MURDERS! 3 TIMES The Thrills of Any Other Mystery Hit!”
[internet archive]

This Warner Brothers B-movie begins at an autopsy hearing where Gwen (Anne Nagel) insists her father was murdered - after all, he’d accused his business partners of shady dealings. But the evidence points to suicide: a locked room, a gun, and no sign of foul play. 

Gwen, unconvinced, vows to hire a private detective. Enter Sara (Ann Sheridan), nurse to Gwen’s cranky Aunt Lucy (Elspeth Dudgeon), who recommends her boyfriend, PI Lance O’Leary (Dick Purcell).

Gwen’s own beau is played by William Hopper - yes, Paul Drake from Perry Mason. Here he’s a society fop with an insipid smile and enough makeup to suggest he wandered in from a silent film. His main talent? Looking game for gin rummy even after a supposed suicide.

At Lance’s urging, Gwen gathers suspects for a weekend hunt at her country estate.

Tension simmers; secrets hover. One guest hints at explosive knowledge - then turns up dead, another “suicide.” The police? Never summoned. Lance inspects the body, pockets evidence, and deduces strangulation by a wire from the now-broken radio.

Purcell brings expected vigor to the role, his athletic ease lending the PI some presence. Sheridan, known as “The Oomph Girl,” does what she can with thin dialogue - though one longs for Technicolor to revel in her red hair. Ben Welden, in a toupee, plays against his usual lug type as a respectable if pushy exec.

Based on a mystery by Mignon Eberhart - once dubbed the “American Agatha Christie” - the film offers locked-room intrigue, country-house tension, and a dash of pulp charm. Forgotten today, it’s still a curious relic for fans of B-movie sleuthing.

As for clothes, the mystery is set in winter so the fur-trimmed coats are pretty nice. The cars are swanky; that might be a cool 1938 Ford Deluxe Tudor Sedan.  At only an hour, this works for a Saturday evening in winter.

Perry Mason 166: Respectability on Trial

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner came to Perry Mason with two useful educations. One was acquired in the small mining towns of his youth, where power rarely showcased itself but was understood through money, reputation, and long acquaintance. The other came from legal practice, where he saw how such informal arrangements could shape formal outcomes, particularly for outsiders. Together they help explain a recurring pattern in the Mason novels: tightly knit local elites, suspicion directed toward the socially vulnerable, and justice arriving only when an outsider breaks the circle.

Respectability on Trial: How the Rural Elite Rig the Game (Until Mason Shows Up)

Gardner's small towns often resemble a miniature version of what C. Wright Mills would later describe as a power elite. Property owners, professionals, and established families do more than possess wealth; they help determine what counts as common sense. Influence accumulates into networks. Families, attorneys, business associates, and dependents form interlocking circles whose judgments have a curious habit of aligning with their interests.

In The Case of the Golddigger's Purse (1945) and The Case of the Cautious Coquette (1949), reputation is a form of capital guarded as jealously as any stash of undeclared income. When scandal threatens, suspicion drifts toward those at the margins, often women whose social standing is uncertain. The machinery of law initially serves as a social reflex: protect the inner ring and export blame. Facts are smothered beneath more convenient interpretations.

The Case of the Lame Canary (1937) shows the same dynamic in a harsher key. Divorce law, social standing, and the threat of public scandal become tools of domination. The resulting violence grows from unequal power, while the impostures and misdirections that follow reveal how confidently privileged figures assume they can avoid scrutiny.

In The Case of the Screaming Woman (1958), Gardner examines power at its most subtle. Credibility attaches itself to status before evidence has even entered the room. Property owners and professionals are presumed truthful; the lone dissenter is treated as suspect. Persistence itself becomes evidence of instability. Disbelief functions as social control.

Running through these novels is a quieter but revealing pattern. Trust circulates within a closed circuit. Legal representation, financial oversight, guardianship, and family interests often occupy the same social orbit. No grand conspiracy is necessary. Familiarity provides its own protection.

This is where Perry Mason becomes important. He acts as a detective who is a disruptive force. He insists that claims be tested by evidence rather than station, and he breaks the tacit agreements that shield respectable people from uncomfortable questions. His real offense is treating respectability not as proof but as background.

The larger implication of Gardner's fiction is that injustice rarely presents itself wearing a villain's cape. More often it arrives in a clean suit, sits on the chamber-of-commerce board, and speaks confidently about community standards. Wherever a cohesive local elite dominates the landscape, the danger is not merely corruption but a narrowing of perception itself. Truth becomes filtered through status. It takes an outsider, or at least an outsider's method, to pry it loose.

The Kalends of Crime: The Maltese Falcon

Note: Don't get your feathers up, as Sam Spade warns, but you won’t find comparisons with the John Huston’s 1941 version in this review of the 1931 version. Comparisons are odious  - they obscure a film’s own merits. Refusing to compare demands discipline: to judge a work on its own terms. I assume, despite industry pressures, the filmmakers aimed in good faith to make a solid movie. Besides, Una Merkel, Thelma Todd, and Bebe Daniels all turn up in the same movie. At that point, everything else is merely a formality.

The Maltese Falcon
1931 / 1:18
Tagline: “Hard as nails, leader of a crime ring, but still a woman.”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code version of the Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel kicks off with the implication that private detective Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) has just had intimate congress with a woman in his office. During working hours, no less. Spade and his secretary Effie (Una Merkel) exchange knowing looks as the woman leaves the office after adjusting her hosiery.

That the Spade character is quite the ladies’ man is confirmed as his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long) listens in on the extension to gather that Spade and his wife Iva Archer (Thelma Todd) are having an affair. The new client, a worried Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels), in a fur trimmed outfit, hires the two detectives to locate her missing sister.

In a beautifully filmed scene, a dark bedroom with the breeze blowing in the curtains, Spade is woken by his ringing telephone. The police inform him that apparently while on the job, Miles Archer was murdered, shot to death in an alley.  Near the scene of the crime, Spade speaks in Cantonese with a Chinese-American merchant. The police learn of Spade and Iva’s affair so they figure Spade as the perp.  The only way for Spade to get out from under police suspicion and scrutiny is to find the real killer, but his meeting with three manic collectors looking for the statuette of a black bird impedes his efforts to clear himself.

Near the beginning of the movie the lines are delivered in a kind of stagey way, as if they are being declaimed rather than spoken in a natural way. The delivery gets better as the movie unfolds. Bebe Daniels has limpid lamps, as wide and wet as the eyes of a Dandie Dinmont Terrier. Her femme fatale is persuasive: attractive and “using her charms to her great advantage.” “Don't you ever get lonesome” she asks Spade as if she could something about that. Daniels in the bubble bath is Pre-Code as is her being strip searched in the kitchen. Also, in Pre-Code fashion, it’s obvious that Spade and Wonderly sleep together.

Ricardo Cortez puts in a good, not great, performance as the satanic PI who only seems to be looking out for himself. Spade’s goat-like lechery is a creepy act to make people let down their guard by underestimating him. Robert Elliott and J. Farrell MacDonald as San Francisco police detectives are both excellent: tough as nails but too middle-aged weary to employ the rubber hose.

Dudley Digges (the heavy in Condemned) plays the Guttman character as jumpy on the outside but bleak on the inside. In Pre-Code fashion, it’s evident that Guttman and Wilmer (Dwight Frye, looking psycho) sleep together when Guttman strokes Frye’s cheek. Guttman sincerely regrets sending Wilmer over as the fall guy.

Spade becomes rather a flat character because his self-revealing monologue at the end of the novel is not persuasive. At least he says, “I'll get over it in time” which shows he’s philosopher enough to take the long view, which helps in run of the mill dilemmas like handing over to the law somebody one has slept with.

This picture has a final scene in which Spade visits Wonderly in jail. I thought it worked because the cell block was dismal beyond words, the incarcerated women deserted and hopeless. Just an amateur critic, I’m easy-going enough to march where the director points.