Son of Frankenstein: (1939. dir: Rowland V. Lee) This is a wonderful sequel! Why am I surprised? It's got Rathbone, Karloff and Lugosi: Rathbone is the titular, westernized son facing the infamy of returning to the spooky east to claim his inheritance, and inevitably succumbing to his dead father's obsession. Karloff is always superb, and Lugosi is in top form as the catalytic Ygor, looking like a sort of mutant son of Rasputin and the Wolfman, sporting pointy teeth and a broken neck. The tune he plays on his odd, homemade oboe to call the monster to do his bidding is mournfully eerie and the silence surrounding it is wonderful. There are big, strange, angular, Caligari-esque sets and extremes of chiaroscuro, and an inexplicable, boiling sulfur pit in the laboratory floor, always handy when you suspect there'll be monsters to destroy at some point.
Baby Face: (1933. dir: Alfred E. Green) It's one of the poster-children for Pre-Code Naughtiness: a young girl sleeps her way out of small-town poverty and across the country then into the upper echelons of big-city life. In her fifth year of speaking roles, Stanwyck is already a full-blown colossus. Look at the way she strolls down a street in Manhattan, straight off the boxcar floor and penniless, looking for all the world like royalty inspecting property she's about to buy. Already she can pull off even the most awful lines with aplomb. And a full eleven years before Double Indemnity, there's a lingering shot of her face while she listens to one of her lovers killing another in the next room, a shot every bit as magnificently enigmatic as the later, more celebrated one. This is also your chance to see John Wayne moping around as a lovesick office flunky wearing the boy-lipstick actors had to wear back then and looking pretty doggone silly. (If you want to see Gary Cooper looking silly in the boy-lipstick, check out his uncredited bit as a reporter in the 1927 Clara Bow monster-hit It.)
Night Nurse: (1931. dir: William Wellman) Another notorious pre-coder, this one is less concerned with telling a story than with letting us watch Stanwyck and Joan Blondell strip down to garters and slips multiple times as they climb in and out of their nursing gear. It's also got Gable from his pre-hero days as an SS-looking, black-clad, clean-shaven baddie who thinks nothing of socking Stanwyck across the jaw, although she's barely half his size. There's some simplistic suspense and unrealistic plot involving vulnerable kids and their nefarious parental figures, interesting because of the extreme depravity in which these rich no-gooders apparently live while their children quake fearfully in the arms of their nurse.
Night Must Fall: (1937. dir: Richard Thorpe) It's a great idea, but without the follow-through. According to IMDB, this was Thorpe's 107th full-length feature, including a disturbing number which had "g"s omitted from the titles (the Interferin' Gent, Roarin' Broncs, Trumpin' Trouble, to name just a few). The crucial thing he omitted from Night Must Fall was the sexual tension. Robert Montgomery is riveting, as he always is, as the smoothly ill-intentioned trickster who inveigles his way into the good graces of a clueless old lady (annoyingly written and annoyingly played by Dame May Whitty), but must somehow charm her more practical niece, played without her characteristic warmth and charm by Rosalind Russell. Smart as a whip, the niece at once suspects the intruder of being the sexual predator on the loose in the area, but can't bring herself to rat him out entirely. We assume this is because she's attracted to him, but since there is no chemistry between the two, her choices make little sense. Montgomery has summoned up a completely believable psychopath, a young man with charm and smarts who is constantly performing, constantly attentive to the reactions of others and adjusting his performance to suit. His sexual magnetism is not in question, although it is mired in that strange, impish androgyny which dead-ended Puers wield so consistently.
Suffering the back-drag of having been adapted from a play, the film never takes flight as it should, and Montgomery's performance is really the only thing to recommend it. It was remade in the swingin' sixties by Karel Reisz with the eternally un-charming Albert Finney as the psychopath, and I haven't brought myself to watch that one yet, although I'm certain that he's scary as hell, all subtlety has gone out the window, and there's sado-masochism a-plenty oozing up from beneath the tea-cozies.
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