Everything McCarey did in the ’30s is worth a look, even a pleasant doodle called THE MILKY WAY in which Harold Lloyd plays a milkman who accidentally becomes a prizefighter. And everything he did after the ’30s is bloated and maudlin — except for the social satire RALLY ’ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS!, his penultimate (1958) picture, which is bloated and desperately unfunny. What the hell did the war do to McCarey? You have your pick of his embarrassments here. There’s ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON, a tonal disaster with Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers (in surely her worst performance) that tries to mix overworked farce with anti-Nazi propaganda. There’s that Oscar-winning slab of whimsy GOING MY WAY, with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as young and old Irish priests, and its even worse sequel, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S, where Crosby finds his match in a cutesy-stern nun played by poor Ingrid Bergman. There’s MY SON JOHN, the most notorious of the anti-Commie melodramas of the Korean War period. And there’s AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER. I wouldn’t recommend the Crosby pictures (though he’s typically charming in them), and Once upon a Honeymoon is for masochists only. But the other two are rather fascinating — though perhaps you need to follow a viewing of My Son John by reading Robert Warshow’s splendid essay on the movie, which appears in his collection The Immediate Experience. An Affair To Remember is a study in the deterioration of an artist: everything that is lyrical and effortless in Love Affair becomes sodden and strained in the later film, and Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr seem as mismatched as Dunne and Boyer were ideal. The remake is half an hour longer — hard to understand, since the story is almost an exact replica of the first version. In the last two decades of his career, McCarey evidently forgot all the lessons he’d learned from Hal Roach, among them the one about economy and an even more important one: never take yourself too seriously.
Related:
Game faces, Mineral cinema, Tinkling symbols, More 
- Game faces
There’s something awe-inspiring about watching an ensemble in which everyone is performing at the top of his or her game.
- Mineral cinema
Luc Moullet is one of the pioneers of cinema.
- Tinkling symbols
That Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has become a worldwide phenomenon attests to the worldwide yearning for a better truth than the one we have.
- Doing the nasty
Ryan Landry swears that if there’s a more lavish musical extravaganza in town than his Cleopatra the Musical (at Machine through May 27), he’ll eat his negligee.
- The taste of sanctimony
Both the Maine Animal Coalition’s recent Vegetarian Food Festival and Mike White’s new film Year of the Dog explore the idea that the confinement and killing of animals is the great moral shame of our time.
- Crossword: ''And the last shall be first''
Or pretty close, anyway.
- Difficult people
As a reader of fiction, at this point in life I’m sort of in my late Imperial phase — a sensationalist, easily distracted, with a vulgar appetite for brilliance.
- Snakes on a Plane
I don’t know who had more fun at this Frankenfilm’s first showing: a fellow critic (who was frequently stomping his feet), the audience (who were frequently on their feet), or myself (my feet planted firmly in my mouth for ever doubting this film would fly). Watch the trailer for Snakes on a Plane (QuickTime)
- Crossword: 'Rounders'
7 Down: Studio whose early stars included Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn.
- Sooner or later?
While interviewing Paul Greengrass, I was determined not to ask the question that has dogged United 93 like a tag line: “Is it too soon?” It didn’t matter; within five minutes he would ask it himself.
- Flashbacks: May 19, 2006
These selections, culled from our back files, were compiled by Chris Brook and Ian Sands.
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Features
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, Entertainment, Movies, Movie Reviews, The Marx Brothers, Frank Capra, Movie Comedies, Charles Laughton, George Cukor, Bing Crosby, Deborah Kerr, Less
