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Tuesday’s Overlooked Film: Bachelor Mother

This week I selected another film that takes place in or around the holiday season. Bachelor Mother (1939) starts Ginger Rogers and David Niven is a nice lighthearted romantic comedy and marks one of the first film post-Astaire outing for Rogers.

SYNOPSIS

In a case of mistaken identity, Polly Parrish (Rogers) first sees a stranger leaving a baby on the steps of an orphanage. Fearing for the safety of the abandoned baby, Polly picks it up as the orphanage door opens. Of course she is assumed to be the mother, which gets her her job back as a result of management’s sympathy to her “plight” as an unwed mother.

David Niven is his usual urbane self (with playboy tendencies) and Charles Coburn (as J.B. Merlin) has many scene-stealing moments as his father and owner of the department store at the center of the story.

Let me know if you have seen this film in the comments section below. Also be sure to check out Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom for more overlooked titles.

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Tuesday’s Overlooked: Dead of Night (1945)

I have mentioned this post before but have not dedicated a whole post to my selection for this week’s overlooked film, Dead of Night. This film hails from Great Britain and is the product of the venerable Ealing Studios.

Basically it is a horror anthology that consists of six tales. The framing for these stories is set on a country estate where Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) arrives at a dinner party whose guests seem all too familiar. So much so, he is confident that he will know how all the subsequent events for the evening will proceed. What ensues next is sort of a parlor game, where the guests put Craig’s foresight to the test, interspersed with their own tales of the supernatural.

What makes this so impactful in my eyes is the fact that many of the segments (like in many such film anthologies) is done by different directors:

  • Alberto Cavalcanti (“Christmas Party” and “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy”)
  • Charles Crichton(“Golfing Story”)
  • Basil Dearden (“Hearse Driver” and “Linking Narrative”)
  • Robert Hamer (“The Haunted Mirror”)

At a swift 102 minute running time, each story is neatly told and packs the essential narrative punch. It was only upon a recent re-watch did I realize just how scary some of the stories were, and not just the most famous of the pieces – “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” featuring Michael Redgrave. It is definitely a precursor to the classic Cliff Robertson “Twilight Zone” episode.

Of course some of them work better than others – I am thinking of “Golfing Story”  which features Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (some may remember them as the cricket-obsessed duo from Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes); I suppose their bit was to add a humor and levity to the proceedings. But as a piece to send shivers down one’s spine, I would not say it was the most effective.

Even if you are not a horror or suspense fan, I recommend that you seek this film out. Although actually acquiring the title may present a bit of a challenge, as it is not listed as being available on DVD.

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Tuesday’s Overlooked Film: Suspicion (1941)

After receiving so many wonderful responses in last week’s post, today I am resuming regularly scheduled programming for Todd Mason’s ‘Overlooked Films’ internet meme … (be sure to visit his site for additional titles).

This week my fascination with Cary Grant continues with my selection – Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion from 1941.

The film is based on the English novel, Before the Fact written by English novelist Anthony Berkeley Cox (under the pen name of Frances Iles).

As the good folks at Fear.NET stated:

From the very beginning of this film, Cary Grant does an excellent job of being both charming and just off-balance enough to keep his beautiful wife Joan Fontaine (and the audience) guessing about his intentions, which may or may not be quite diabolical.

How true this statement is. While Suspicion is never considered in the upper ranks of his later masterpieces (principally from the 1950’s), this film is notable in that it was the director’s first of many collaborations with Mr. Grant. In giving Grant a charming yet fiendish streak, Hitchcock was taking a big risk with one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars.

In fact, it was long rumored that an “alternate” ending scripted in which Lina’s suspicions of Aysgarth proved correct, keeping in line with the source material. This however has been disputed by Hitchcock biographer Daniel Spoto in his book The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock.

 

 

For her performance, the lead actress (Joan Fontaine) was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress (although her performance in the previous year’s Rebecca has much more layers and gravitas).

 

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