The Ides of Ann Harding: Condemned

Note: Ann Harding was to the play the gallant lady many times in the first half of the Thirties. By 1935, soured by the Depression that had no end in sight, stoked by a press that didn’t like her not talking to reporters, a cynical America was sick of the self-sacrificing roles of brave Ann Harding. A movie-goer also wonders if what happened to Harding was what happened to Anne Hathaway: one gloomy day America decided they disliked Ann/Anne because she was too smart, too beautiful, too famous, too rich, too talented, over-staying her welcome among us homely fickle mortals. Perhaps due to feeling over-exposed by a nasty press corps and coupled with a rancorous custody battle, Harding went on a break in 1936 and didn’t return to movies until 1942 with Eyes in the Night, in which she was scolded by cruel Donna Reed for being so noble.

Condemned
1929 / 1:26
Tagline: “Ronald COLMAN As A Rough, Tough Convict Who'd Kill For A Kiss”
[internet archive]

Devil's island was a French penal colony in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana, demonstrating the diabolical talent of The Man to turn a tropical paradise into a hellhole. Set in the late 1920s, the warden Vidal (Dudley Digges) scolds his wife Mme. Vidal (Ann Harding) for having no sense of her high position as the wife of an important man in the colony.

Disrespecting her feelings and opinions as usual, he brings in the incarcerated individual Michel Oman (Ronald Colman) as a houseman. Michel is Parisian thief who took the fall for a bank robbery gone bad. But like Charles Boyer trapped in the Casbah in Algiers, Michel is debonaire and a dandy given the chance.  How Vidal justifies to himself having such a good-looking man spend days with his comely wife is left unexplained. Maybe he figures his peasant wife is so cowed by his blustering, that marriage vows are so sacred to her, and the power of gossip so over-powering among the expatriate women that the obvious and cynical predictions will never come to be.

Mme. Vidal warns her husband he’ll be sorry for bringing an incarcerated individual into the house. But in the end, as we would expect of a country woman who grew up with 13 brothers and sisters in a village in Alsace in the early 20^th century – now there are some onerous intersectionalities -  she is submissive to her sadistic buffoon of a husband with the caterpillar mustache and revolting soul patches. As Michel points out when they talk while shopping in the outside market, they are both prisoners.

Movie-goer, Mme. Vidal and Michel fall in love. Michel buys her a capuchin monkey on which she needs to lavish her love  and concern. This gesture pisses off the warden who is a pet-hater on top of being conceited. His tossing the simian out a window precipitates a crisis with a climactic chase after two escapees through a jungle swamp at night.

A movie-goer has to be patient when watching an early talkie. They tend to be stagey, with the actors motionless and intoning theatrical lines in front of a camera. But the experimentation with camera movement in this picture is cinematic and interesting. Many scenes are outdoors. The tossing ship at the opening, with water water everywhere, was totally unexpected  A fast tracking shot pictures the warden as he snarls his welcome address to a new batch of unlucky wretches, “Prison is a poor place to be proud.” The camera pans as we movie-goers take in silhouettes of the prisoners, some of whom we can guess are cognitively disabled, others acting out anger and hatred. Within and without solitary confinement is filmed like a nightmare of a French existentialist.

The light and camera make 27-year-old Ann Harding look about five years younger. She wears strange Romany makeup in the heart-to-heart conversation scene but this is balanced in another scene in which she lets down her ash blonde hair. Be still, O beating heart. This sight is almost as affecting as her looking into space with a worried look in which you can see her anxious thoughts racing each other. In the scene where she finally shucks the upbringing to keep your (female) opinions to yourself and tells the warden where to get off, she’s dynamite. I believed her when she said she would die for Michel. At the end, Harding stands on the ship as it pulls out and the light on the water does that bobbing thing light on water does and Harding gradually leaves the frame, holding back her tears. It’s emblematic of her intensity and her restraint in the entire picture.

Another point about early talkies, the veteran movie-goer expects the sound to be so-so unless it is a monster movie where they really get into tolling bells, creaking doors, and screams in the night. However, in the movie the soundtrack is excellent. In the opening there is a swirl of sound as the wind blows, water splashes, the ship creaks and the inmates jeer at each other and the guards. The inmates sing a mournful song as they march back from hard labor. The maniac boy screams when solitary drives him around the bend. The motor on the boat pursuing our heroes sounds like technology gone ape.

Anyway, this movie should also be seen for Ronald Colman. Besides that great voice, he puts in a fine reserved performance, one that got him a Best Actor nomination that year. Harding and Colman make an attractive couple. Dudley Digges’ warden was sometimes over the top, but he was pretty effective as the character that richly deserves his ultimate fate at the hands of Louis Wolheim as Colman's convict friend – he’s got a dotted line tattooed on this neck “cut here.”

Perry Mason 160: Murder Most Furry

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner was very much an outdoorsman. He wasn't just a courtroom author - he was a hunter, camper, archer, sportsman, and prolific travel photographer. Gardner documented extensive hunting trips, camping expeditions, bow‑hunting competitions, fishing trips, and yachting adventures across the Western U.S., Baja California, and even Alaska, Mexico and the Philippines. He was an animal lover.

Murder Most Furry: Three Perry Mason Tales with Animals

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952)
Perry Mason buys a dead woman’s diaries for five bucks and, naturally, all hell breaks loose. Helen Cadmus is missing, drowned, or just being difficult. Enter Nathan Fallon, a cousin with the ethics of a pickpocket, and Benjamin Addicks, a millionaire who dabbles in gorilla neurology - because why not? Addicks waves money; Mason waves him off. Mason hates lies more than unsound logic.

Paul Drake snoops, finds gorillas, and a mansion fortified like Fort Knox. Cue murder. Addicks ends up dead, stabbed with something sharp enough to make Freud blush. The housekeeper is accused, and she’s as talkative as a clam. Mason nearly dies twice, which is twice more than usual.

The case? Weird, wild, and worth every page.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)   
Published during WWII, this Perry Mason novel hums with wartime tension even though it never says so outright. The story pivots on identity: Komo insists he’s Korean, but everyone else calls him Japanese. In those days, truth didn’t matter - perception did. Gardner uses Komo as a quiet indictment of snap judgments.

The mystery begins with Franklin Shore, a banker who vanished a decade ago. Now he resurfaces - sort of. Mason arrives for a meeting and finds a corpse instead. What follows is eighteen hours of relentless motion: no trial theatrics, just Mason maneuvering while Della Street takes the fall and Burger grins like a cat in cream. There’s a kitten too - Amber Eyes -whose soft fur hides sharp claws and sharper consequences.

Gardner keeps it taut, brisk, and oddly poignant. Beneath the puzzle lies a hum of fear and suspicion, a reminder of what America looked like when trust was rationed.

The Case of the Fan Dancer's Horse (1947)
This Mason romp is pure Gardner in overdrive: two fan-dancers, one horse, and a murder in which the overbearing rancher is skewered with a samurai sword. It starts with a car wreck and a wardrobe that looks like it escaped from a burlesque revue. Mason runs an ad to return the goods, and suddenly the plot is juggling mistaken identities, borrowed names, and a timetable that eats half a page. There’s a victim, an ostrich burr on the blade, and a client who buries evidence like it’s a garden chore.

The courtroom scenes? Fireworks. Gardner doesn’t do character studies - he does detonations. Perry blows up a witness like a pinwheel on the Fourth of July. Sure, you can guess the killer, but who cares? The ride is the thing. If you want plausibility, read a tax manual. If you want fan-dancers, a horse, and a murder with style - step right up.

Matinee Musings: Lady of Burlesque

Lady of Burlesque
1943 / 1:31
Tagline: “Mirth! Murder! Melody! Mystery! and Girls! Girls! Girls!”
[internet archive]

Barbara Stanwyck slips into Dixie Daisy’s sequined skin with a verve that feels like liberation. Forget the noir siren or the ruthless schemer - here, Stanwyck is earthy, commonsensical, and unpretentious. Dixie is  shimmying her way to the top, armed with a grin and a gag. She sings, she dances, she cracks wise, and suddenly an opera house turned burlesque palace hums with her electricity.

But success breeds venom. Enter Lolita La Verne, a redhead with a temper - how unusual -  and Princess Nirvena, a White Russian with hauteur to spare. Both rivals wind up strangled, and Dixie - our accidental femme fatale - must pivot from pirouettes to peril, sleuthing her way out of a noose of suspicion.

William Wellman directs with his trademark robustness, giving the backstage chaos a pulse that’s equal parts grit and glitter. Edith Head’s costumes - feathers, sequins, and audacity stitched into every hem - are practically characters themselves. Arthur Lange’s score, Oscar-nominated, swells and swoons like a knowing wink to the absurdity of it all. Yes, Michael O’Shea’s Biff Brannigan can grate - his wisecracks clang like cracked cymbals in 2026 - but maybe that’s the point: burlesque thrives on noise, on excess, on the gaudy collision of artifice and appetite.

The film’s pleasures are tactile: the authentic seediness of the setting, the backstage antics that teeter between silly and sly, the one-liners that land like water balloons. And those costumes - outlandish, unapologetic, a parade of fantasy. Really, what more could you want, even if you're a fashion ignoramus like me?

Perry Mason 159: Rear Window

Note: It is impossible to examine Raymond Burr’s Pre-Mason Oeuvre without a look at his most memorable movie part among the general public. By 1954, Burr had played an evil goon (I Love Trouble, Abandoned, M)  or sadistic gangster (Raw Deal, Red Light, Borderline, His Kind of Woman) or corrupt professional fixer (Unmasked, FBI Girl, Mara Maru) but he was also persuasively gruesome as a psycho private eye (Pitfall), commie spy (Walk a Crooked Mile, The Whip Hand), and serial date rapist (The Blue Gardenia). So Alfred Hitchcock figured Burr would be a natural as the heavy in this suspense movie.

 Rear Window
1954 / 1:52
Tagline: “YOU won't be able to tear your eyes away from this window!”
[internet archive]

In this movie Raymond Burr plays Lars Thorwald, a salesman of wholesale costume jewelry in the Big Apple. His wife is chronically ill. She is not patient in her suffering but seems ever demanding and never satisfied. Lars is a bad neighbor in that he tells people in the shared court to shut up and leave him alone. Nor is he a good husband because he apparently telephones his girlfriend, for which his wife mocks him. Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald bicker all the time because the “in sickness and in health” clause that they slip in when people are too young and dumb to know the serious implications of “in sickness” does not mean anything to Lars though with his curly grey hair you’d think he’d be old enough to know what an ageing couple have to deal with.

On one rainy night Lars is observed leaving his apartment three times, carrying something away in his sample case. He is also observed wrapping a butcher knife and small saw in newspapers. And his wife with the health challenges is nowhere to be seen in the apartment. Lars is also spotted wearing the look a man has when he's afraid he's being watched.

The observer of The Bickersons and this curious activity is a photo-journalist Jeff (James Stewart) who is laid up with a broken leg due to an on-the-job accident. His insurance nurse (Thelma Ritter) warns him not to be so curious about and observant of the people in the various apartment buildings around the court, because her trouble detector is flashing yellow.

But Jeff is rather a dumb guy so he ignores the nurse’s sensible advice. We movie-goers can safely conclude Jeff is dumb because he refuses to marry Lisa (Grace Kelly) who is smart, sympathetic, considerate, funny, steely, and looks movie-star bodacious in anything she wears. Lisa wants Jeff to move from photo-journalism to fashion and portrait photography because she loves him so much she doesn’t want to see him hurt again and wants him in the Big Apple where she works in the fashion industry. Jeff calls her vision of their future “nonsense,” which hurts her deeply but he doesn’t seem to notice. He is also unsympathetic to the loneliness of a middle-aged woman neighbor and the artistic frustrations of young composer. Jeff is also merely amused when he observes a ballet dancer doing what Lisa calls a woman’s hardest job, “juggling wolves.” Jeff has no respect for people, no feeling for the crosses other people have to bear.

Because of his observations of Lars’ odd nocturnal activities, Jeff comes to think Lars knocked off his poor afflicted wife. Jeff persuades Lisa and his nurse that he’s on to something, like murder. Jeff is not so successful convincing his war buddy Doyle (Wendell Corey) who is a police detective. At least until the climax.

It’s really daring of Hitchcock to make a huge indoor set of apartment buildings around a court, but make us movie-goers feel we are watching a tiny little claustrophobic world consisting of Jeff’s apartment and Lars’ apartment. We see most of the action across the court but sigh with relief when we can see action a bit closer through Jeff’s telephone lens, called a “portable keyhole” by the nurse.

It is also daring to trust the audience that they will understand in mime a cranky disabled person (Irene Winston) making demands and needing constant care. As the couple mimes incessant quarrels, we can see Burr’s body language express impatience, frustration, and the contempt the hale and hearty feel for the weak and fragile. Burr of the heavyset stature has the physical bulk that’s communicative but his facial expressions tell volumes too. We agree with the nurse when she says that he gave “an expression such that he'd never get a loan at the bank.” We can also see Lars thinking, calculating, trying to control his anxiety about being caught and brought to account. And when he confronts Jeff, he croaks in a tight desperate voice, “You want money? I don’t have any money! Tell me what you want.”

Reviewers have said many times how great the acting is so I don’t need to do that again here since the focus here is on Brother Ray. It’s not illogical that this non-Mason part is the for which Raymond Burr is best remembered since Rear Window was probably the most popular picture he appeared in as the heavy. That he worked with other famous directors – Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Andre De Toth, Jacques Tourneur – is known nowadays only to buffs of film noir like us. One wonders if nowadays Burr would be remembered only by we happy few if William Hopper had won the part of Perry Mason or Fred MacMurray, who was offered the part of Our Favorite Lawyer, decided he didn’t want to deal with the grind of a TV series making 30 episodes a year.

As for the connection with the Perry Mason TV series, Wendell Corey appeared as the victim, an obnoxious oil man, in TCOT Unwelcome Well, one of the better episodes in the last season, which did not have many good outings.

Pre-Mason Raymond Burr
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive] [my review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Sleep My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Raw Deal (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Station West (1948) [my review]
Red Light (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Abandoned (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Borderline (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
Unmasked (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
The Whip Hand (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Bride of the Gorilla (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
M (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
His Kind of Woman (1951) [internet archive] [my review]                
FBI Girl (Nov 1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Mara Maru (April 1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Horizons West (1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Blue Gardenia (1953) [internet archive] [my review]
Gorilla at Large (1954) [internet archive] [my review]
Rear Window (1954) [internet archive] [my review]

The Nones of Ann Harding: Her Private Affair

Note: Mary Astor said nice things about Ann Harding in her autobiography, calling her a “vital woman” and a “fighter.” Joan Crawford said “I cherish Ann's companionship more than any other person I have ever known," raving about Ann's "radiance," "beautiful soul", and "lack of pretense." Barbara Stanwyck said in 1934, “I have always hoped that my own work showed the same degree of sincerity.”

Her Private Affair
1929 / 1:15
Tagline: “Her guilt will either destroy her or set her free”
[internet archive]

This early talkie opens with Ann Harding’s restless hands and her melancholy distressed look as she talks on the phone. Got me hypnotized?

Totally. Tell me anything. I can believe anything Ann Harding for an hour and change.

Vera is on the telephone with a former love interest Arnold (Lawford Davidson). Arnold is a womanizer that wants money from Vera for a bundle of indiscreet letters. Tonight. Vera goes to her husband (Harry Bannister) for the money but doesn’t tell him why she wants it. He can’t come up with it at such short notice so Vera decides to see Arnold in person to tell him he’s going to have to wait until the next day. When Vera skips out of Carmen between acts and finally meets Arnold, a terrible accident happens, proving once again that just keeping a handgun in the house is bad medicine.

Ann Harding plays a decent person who is so refined that she is too good but the unhelpful guilt over the terrible accident puts her under strain. Not telling her husband, not coming clean, and not clearing up the legalities from the get-go put her under more strain. With no music in this early talkie, Ann Harding conveys with her voice Vera’s marital, ethical and legal anguish and the subsequent changes, good and bad, to her character and behavior. Life being the funny, funny riddle it is, after the terrible accident, she becomes a kinder, more humane person.

Harding’s voice - trained for the stage - was an attraction to an industry that suddenly needed gorgeous actresses that could deliver a line properly. Harding’s precise diction is a tad old-fashioned and theatrical in our 2026. Good actresses salvage iffy lines and so she persuasively manages histrionic lines like “I can't make you happy. I must go away. I must leave you.” She’s faltering and afraid but not making a scene. Her voice gets across Vera’s unquiet heart and sheer bewilderment this whole incident has happened to her, who’s never done anybody any harm ever. At the New Year’s Eve party, perfect is her voice with its quaver of agitation, haunted by guilt.

For me, a beguiled movie-goer with enthralled tolerance for Ann Harding’s thespian decisions, Harding seldom overacts in this picture. And when she does overdo it, it’s not showing off. Ann Harding is never false. Your milage of course will vary. The call depends on the degree to which a movie-goer is hypnotized by Ann Harding. For me, the answer is “Totally.” I can do anything Ann Harding for an hour and change.

This movie was based on a Broadway play that flopped. Nevertheless, Hollywood was hoovering up talky dramas with sophisticated people in ritzy surroundings. This movie was shot in a stagey, staid way so actors could stay close to microphones. I thought the courtroom scene and the New Year’s Eve Party were shot with some vague sense that they were making a movie, and so was the opening shot, which features only Harding’s hands. But the intention of giving The Folks the illusion this is how the people who go see Carmen live and love is more important here than cinematic values.

This movie, Harding’s second film, was a success with the audiences and served as a foundation of her stardom. Maybe in the early talkie days, one strong performance in a picture was enough to satisfy audiences.

Perry Mason 158: TCOT Demure Defendant

Note: From 1956 in the 50^th Perry Mason novel receptionist Gertie finally gets described in Chapter Seven. She looks like Connie Cezon! Stand-in for Bette Davis! Meanwhile, the big clue shows up fashionably late, so readers have zero chance of beating Mason to the punch. He barely gets it himself before springing the solution like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

The Case of the Demure Defendant – Erle Stanley Gardner

Nadine Farr is beautiful, but beauty doesn’t stop the nightmares. The dread. The guilt that coils in her gut like a live wire. For professional help, she goes to Dr. Logbert Denair - a name that sounds like it belongs in the year I was born. He prescribes talk therapy under sodium pentothal. Truth serum. Nadine talks. Too much. She says she poisoned her uncle. She says she tossed the cyanide bottle into a lake. Denair records every word on reel-to-reel tape.

Now he’s sitting on a confession that could ruin lives. He doesn’t want to hand it to the cops. He doesn’t want to bury it either. So he calls Perry Mason. Mason listens, calm as a surgeon. He tells Denair patient statements are privileged - but evidence of a crime? That’s another story. Mason warns him: truth serum can twist reality. Delusion isn’t admissible. Before anyone runs to the police, someone needs to dig deeper. Denair hires Mason to do the digging.

From there, the ground shifts. This 1956 case is a maze of secrets and sharp turns. Mason ends up accused of fabricating evidence - Hamilton Burger grinning like a wolf while he says it. Mason gives advice to hapless fools unwary enough to consider selective spilling:

Get this straight. You’re dealing with a murder case. No matter how awkward the truth is, you can’t fabricate a situation that will meet all of the requirements. You can’t get a falsehood that will dovetail with all of the facts. Sooner or later all of the other facts will be known. If your story doesn’t dovetail you’ll have to change it. If you change it under pressure the truth will then be ten times more awkward.

For a few chapters, it looks bad. Real bad. Gardner pushes Mason to the edge before pulling him back in the final pages.

TCOT Demure Defendant isn’t cozy. It’s clinical, almost surgical, in how it dissects fear and guilt. Gardner plays with the ethics of psychiatry, the fragility of memory, and the law’s hunger for certainty.

Fans of Perry, Della, and Paul will love the ride. New readers? Maybe not. Gardner’s tricks with evidence can feel glib and pat, like sleight of hand. But if you want a Mason novel that flirts with psychological suspense, this one delivers.

The Kalends of Ann Harding: Paris Bound

Note: This 1929 movie asks the question whether married couples can have a relationship with other people outside the marriage but remain committed to the marriage. Apparently in our culture every generation for the last century has to hash this issue out, given we still see on Reddit stories like “I proposed an open marriage, but I regret it.” Maybe antique movies with enduring themes will still have relevance for us post-moderns: literature is news that stays news, said Ezra Pound.

Paris Bound
1929 / 1:16
Tagline: “Is Love Crushed by Marriage?”
[internet archive]

This is the film version of the 1927 play by Philip Barry. He was known for exploring the intersectionality of love, marriage, and sex among the young, healthy, and wealthy. This seems to be one of Barry’s lesser-known plays and Hollywood never re-made this film version like they re-made Holiday, The Animal Kingdom, and The Philadelphia Story.

The wedding ceremony of Mary (Ann Harding) and James (Fredric March) seems to be an event that no one wants to attend. The guests look dubious, as if they were wishing they were someplace else. James’ former GF Noel is so obviously repining that the other guests tell Jim to give her a talking to, to snap her out of her decline. Jim is always restrained with her but Noel tells Jim that she is his heart and soul. Theatrical Noel also tells Mary that Mary has the wisest eyes Noel has ever seen.

As I said, the guests look stricken, like they were digesting a frightening diagnosis. This is strange because in the opening scene, her first scene ever in a motion picture, in a wedding dress, Ann Harding looks stunning. Breath-taking. The headpiece and veil make her look like she has descended from the Empyrean to show us funny-looking mortals something … wonderful. After almost one hundred years, in a brutalized monochrome print Ann Harding’s oval face radiates timeless elegance, with luminous eyes, refined features, and a serene expression. Her classic beauty blends intelligence, warmth, grace, and quiet strength, leaving a memorable impression today. The only other entrance that made me gape and gabble like this was that shot of Grace Kelly alighting from a cloud before broken-legged Stewart in her first scene in Rear Window.

Anyway, enough babbling. Jim and Mary promise never to quit each other though they grant “sex attraction” for third parties will happen. This kind of open-mindedness is often expressed by Barry’s characters until the fat is in the fire and characters conclude keeping more traditional attitudes leads to less mess in personal relations. Barry’s claims, I think, are that monogamy means fewer hurt feelings and thus in the long run exclusivity is more conducive to peace of mind.

To continue, they have a child and Mary plays her piano looking soulful and thoughtful (and few actresses do sad and pensive better than Ann Harding). Every now and then Jim has to take the big boat to Europe for six weeks at a time. He works for a publisher who has a stable of expatriate American writers so he needs to visit the Riviera to confer with them.

Mary is decidedly not a soldier about these lengthy separations but stays home for the sake of their toddler son. Thunderheads appear when Mary gets inadvertent word from Jim’s sister that circumstantial evidence suggests Jim and Noel met on the Rivera for discreet adult play. Mary wretchedly works with composer Richard Parrish on their ballet. Without conviction, she lamely argues that married people need vacations from each other once in a while. Richard however falls in love with Mary and declares his love for Mary. Poor Mary - when it rains, it pours.

This is an early talkie, so the sound in the IA print sounds muddy in places, has drop-outs and random noise, and an annoying echo of various words and phrases. Also the staging is static, not cinematic at all. The acting is sometimes histrionic – emphatic, earnest, with diction to ensure that theatre-goers in the back rows will catch every word. I think Fredric March and Ann Harding, both stage-trained, are natural in this early all-talking movie - they both know how to deliver a line.