George Stevens‘s self-produced Penny Serenade (1941) is a film about a happy marriage. A terrible contingency causes the marriage to nosedive, but maybe, just maybe, all will be well again. PS is lovely but, alas, sentimental. It ends up being a heart-warmer and nothing more. All the same, one admires Irene Dunne and Cary Grant for their likability and Stevens for his directorial control.

George Stevens‘s self-produced Penny Serenade (1941) is a film about a happy marriage. A terrible contingency causes the marriage to nosedive, but maybe, just maybe, all will be well again. PS is lovely but, alas, sentimental. It ends up being a heart-warmer and nothing more. All the same, one admires Irene Dunne and Cary Grant for their likability and Stevens for his directorial control.

The 1946 The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers is melodrama—tragic melodrama. Lewis Milestone did efficient work in directing it, and such actors as Van Heflin and Kirk Douglas are solid. Barbara Stanwyck is a bit less interesting and persuasive than they are, but the fetching feminine presence here subsists in Lizabeth Scott.

‘Tis Stanwyck who is the lead, even so, in this tale of a rebellious girl who gets away with murder before growing up to live the high life. Unfortunately, she is married to a childhood friend (Douglas) who drinks and whom she does not love. The man she does love, another childhood friend (Heflin), shows up for some legal assistance from the sottish husband (a lawyer), but is shortly roughed up by the man’s hired goons. Douglas wants Heflin’s eyes off his wife—Stanwyck’s Martha Ivers—but all Heflin wants is to be in the driver’s seat in the present circumstances.

This is another nasty-but-nice Old Hollywood flick which is heavily dependent on both violence and a positive ending. In a screenplay by Robert Rossen, it has intelligent dialogue and no humor (it’s grave). Incidents in the film don’t exactly leave a character smiling. I’d say, though, that Ivers in toto left me smiling.

Directed and co-scripted by Jean-Jacques Annaud, Enemy at the Gates (2001) contains the spot-on visuals that a movie about the Battle of Stalingrad ought to have. All the same, the film has been accused of desecrating the memory of those who fought and died in Stalingrad during the Forties. I agree with this, except that the history of this battle will be known (in Russia and elsewhere) long after Annaud’s movie is justly forgotten.

Enemy is well-made but unsophisticated. That’s the problem. Even an entertainment film needs more than two Russian men in the midst of war getting jubilant because, owing to the sharpshooting skill of one of them, both men will be “famous.” It needs more than a Russian mother seeming to readily accept that her very young son, Sacha, has forsaken the Soviet Union and gone to the other side. Too, there is a deplorable love story. Jude Law‘s Vassili and Rachel Weisz‘s Tania engage in odd, laughable sex, and it’s a real pity they don’t—can’t—use protection.

I like much of the cast, though, notwithstanding Bob Hoskins rants embarrassingly as military officer Nikita Khrushchev. I don’t know; maybe the Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov could have done something with Khrushchev. But Enemy at the Gates is not Bodrov, who directed Prisoner of the Mountains and Mongol. Those are the pictures to see.

Wow, what costumes!  When we first see Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe in 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, those glittering tomato red dresses they’re wearing assault the eye (in a good way).  And these are just the women to wear them!—so we are compelled to think.

Howard Hawks’s film is savory, one of the drollest and most attention-grabbing musicals of the ’50s.  In terms of personality and appeal Russell gives as good as she gets from Monroe, and Marilyn is more focused-on than in Niagara, also from ’53.  Though far from brilliantly sung, the songs are dandy.  “When Love Goes Wrong” is a ballad both bluesy and friendly.  “Bye Bye Baby” is a catchy pleasure.

A kiss on the hand might be quite Continental (as the movie’s song “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” puts it) but Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with its setting abroad, isn’t Continental, really.  Rather it seems all-American.

Cover of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes