In the Presence of a Clown (1997)
It Happened One Night (1934)
It Happened to Jane (1959)
It Happens Every Spring (1949)
City Girl (1929)
Factory Mask (2002)

In the Presence of a Clown (1997)

Ingmar Bergman delighted in taking us into the otherwise unspoken corners of ordinary people’s minds. His movie’s characters usually have ordinary lives, but talk about their fears and feelings and memories and dreams — their existence — more than in anyone else’s movies. It’s more interesting than ordinary life, or ordinary movies.

This flick is Bergman, late in his career, and the neat trick here is that he skips the ordinary part of people’s lives by setting the story in a mental hospital. Nobody has to pretend at being normal, so we cut straight into their inner selves! Also, fart jokes.

Unfortunately, the film leaves the mental hospital after a while, and gets less interesting. The main patient, guy named Akerblom, discharges himself from the hospital so’s he can make the world first talking film, the ultimate accomplishment of cinema. (Did I mention, this is set in the 1920s?) And the movie he makes isn’t really a talkie, it’s a fake talkie.

The film Bergman makes is interesting, but it’s stronger in the first act, in the mental hospital, than after it leaves, and takes these characters into the ordinary world.

The film is Swedish and subtitled, of course, though for some stupid reason it doesn’t translate its opening Shakespeare quote. No worries. Like most Shakespeare, you can do fine without it.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

It Happened One Night (1934)

Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) is freshly eloped, but her domineering and disapproving father is holding her prisoner to keep her away from her husband.

That’s illegal, of course, but the family is crazy rich (meaning both crazy and rich). They’re Hearst-level wealthy, so it’s nationwide news when Ellie jumps into the water and swims away from her father’s yacht, and every paper in the country wants the scoop on where the missing heiress might be.

Don’t tell anyone, but she’s riding a Greyhound bus headed for New York City. She’s almost out of money, though, and didn’t bring any credit cards, which haven’t been invented yet.

Seated next to her on the bus is Peter Warne (Clark Gable), a cocky reporter who quickly figures out who she is, and that her story could be the big scoop that makes him famous.

Ellie is accustomed to having her way in everything, and I think I’d hate her for that, but I’d hate Warne more. He’s an arrogant prick with a superiority complex, who offers condescending instructions on how to dunk a donut or ride piggy-back. By the movie’s end, though, I was almost as in love with him as Ellie was.

From Frank Capra and imbued with a thousand zippy zingers, this is a perfect screwball romantic comedy. There’s even half a hint of a message, about Ellie’s class and wealth advantages, Warne’s false up-from-the-gutter pride, and the dignity and decency of ordinary people riding the bus.

Yeah, Warne gets mad and makes a few allusions to beating Ellie, but hey, it’s the 1930s. Let’s assume he’s just kidding, OK?

It Happened One Night swept all the major Oscars, for best picture, script, direction, and the actors, Colbert and Gable. The Oscars are often bullshit, of course, but these were earned and deserved.

Hollywood doesn’t make movies like this any more, and didn’t make many this good, even then.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

It Happened to Jane (1959)

Doris Day plays a Maine lobster lady, not a lawyer, but she’s a better lawyer than her lawyer. Her lawyer is Jack Lemmon, in what must’ve been one of his last supporting roles before major stardom made him a leading man.

You don’t watch Doris Day movies expecting much, but this had the potential to be kinda good. All the ingredients for a satisfying story are here — Day plays a strong woman who won’t compromise when she’s in the right, so she sues the train company that let a shipment of her lobsters die in transit. She wins in court, but the company appeals, and its owner launches a personal vendetta against Doris and her town.

The railroad magnate is a penny-pinching gazillionaire, whose orders to reduce staffing led directly to the dead lobsters. He’s worth hating, and this could’ve been a feel-good movie about a plucky dame against a filthy capitalist.

Weirdly, though, the story’s resolution gives the bad guy an unexplained change of heart, and lets him get away with all his illegal outrageousness, which makes the entire hour and a half even more pointless than most Doris Day movies.

Ernie Kovacs plays the rich bastard, but despite being Kovacs he’s not allowed to be funny.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

It Happens Every Spring (1949)

Physics professor Ray Milland accidentally invents an ointment that repels wood, and since he’s a baseball fan he immediately tries out for the local team. Big League baseball bats are wooden, see, so nobody will be able to hit his pitches.

Milland, 42 when this was made, is far too old and anti-athletic to be a big league rookie, but nobody notices, perhaps because every player on every team in the league seems to be in their 40s or 50s, pudgy and wrinkly.

This movie was probably made just because someone invented the bouncy special effect of a ball jumping away from a bat, and that does look kinda cool, but it’s not enough. It Happens Every Spring has no real jokes, no drama, and no knowledge of how baseball actually works, leaving this baseball fan mostly bored.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

City Girl (1929)
a/k/a Our Daily Bread

In an early scene, the father, a wheat farmer, scolds his young daughter for playing with a stalk of wheat, a waste which might diminish the family’s hoped-for profits by a tenth of a penny.

Dad’s a real butt-head, obviously. He sends his eldest son to the Board of Trade, to negotiate a price for the year’s crop, sternly warning the young man to accept no less than $1.15 per ton. When the son returns, though, he’s bearing a contract for $1.12 per ton, and that three-cent shortfall across many tons could bankrupt the farm and family. You’ll be un-surprised to learn that Dad is not understanding about this.

In addition to the money-losing contract, the son also brings home a woman he met and married on this road trip. She’s a city girl, which causes much laughter and whispers along the farmhands, but what’s worse is that she’s unwilling to take her father-in-law’s daily insults, resulting in believable silent-film dramatics.

Soon, the grumpy old wheat farmer goes from insulting and demeaning his daughter-in-law to smacking her across the face. Her husband, though, was raised to fear and respect his old man, and can’t confront him about this, or about anything. And if you can’t confront your father when he’s plainly wrong, are you really a man at all?

There is nothing ‘mellow’ about this melodrama, and I haven’t even mentioned the hailstorm that’s coming, and might destroy the entire season’s crop. It’s a furiously high-stakes situation, and something, someone is going to bend or be broken like a stalk of wheat.

The film is based on a play called The Mad Turtle, by Elliott Lester, though no turtles of any disposition made it into the final cut. Directed by F W Murnau, who made the original Nosferato, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas. This isn’t quite another Murnau masterpiece, but it’s close, and excellent.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Factory Mask (2002)

This is by David Lynch, so it’s weird. It’s a very short short, 47 seconds, set in a steampunk-style factory and filmed in black-and-white. Very nearly nothing happens, but it’s weird and it’s Lynch and I liked it.

Verdict: YES.

11/19/2025

If you can’t find a movie I’ve mentioned, or you have a recommendation, please drop me a note.

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.

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