Sabrina (USA, 1954, Billy Wilder)

Billy Wilder's Sabrina has an explicit fairy-tale quality (it begins with the words "once upon a time") that betrays its Cinderella roots. Based on Samuel Taylor's stage play, the movie suffers occasionally from feelings of staginess and windiness. It is, at times, obviously formulaic and predictable, but, alas, such is the nature of most romantic comedies. Which is to say, Sabrina, much like its characters, follows conventions rather than challenges them.

Audrey Hepburn's naïf-like vulnerability and angelic beauty make her the perfect fit for the part; her natural elegance, playfulness, and intelligence have the audience cheerfully manipulated into applauding her elevation from rags to riches. Humphrey Bogart (in a part originally intended for Cary Grant) plays against type as the romantic lead who knows the price of everything, but has no concept of the value of love. His character, Linus Larrabee, not Sabrina, is the real protagonist of the piece, as it is his big decisions and personal growth that key the movie's action and resolution. William Holden is well cast as the debonair and wanton playboy.

Playing on opposing themes, such as commerce vs. love, cynicism vs. romanticism, sex vs. love, Sabrina casually gives class conflict and consciousness the Hollywood treatment, so we are led to see that nothing can keep true lovers apart. Billy Wilder doesn't hit us over the head with these themes, because they are all so deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious that he only needs to give us a wink and a nod.
 

While Bogie and Hepburn don't rank up there with Bogie and Bacall on the chemistry meter, both are incessantly charming. Sabrina is not as insightful or cutting as Wilder's best work, but the snappy and witty banter, which is marked by droll double entendres, help to elevate the film ever-so-slightly above standard entrants in this genre. I realize that this is to damn the film with faint praise, which is exactly my intention. Sabrina was nominated for six Academy Awards, but thankfully ended up winning only one, for Edith Head's costume design.

Used Cars (USA, 1980, Robet Zemeckis)

Director/writer Robert Zemeckis works with much of the same team that contributed to Steven Spielberg's bloated bomb 1941, as well as Zemeckis' own charming and wacky directorial debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand to produce Used Cars, a low-brow comedy boasting easy targets (used car salesmen) and irresistibly attractive cruelty.
 

Kurt Russell gives a deliriously wicked turn as an amoral Willy Loman who goes to work for a dealership run by the blandly decent and commercially unsuccessful Jack Warden, who clearly has a blast playing this part as well as that of hi chief competitor, his own devious twin brother. In a full out War of the Wardens, Used Cars is a gloves-off affair that leaves few wonderully tasteless and cynical gags untouched.
 
The film's incessant assault on its characters and their perverse quest for the American Holy Grail (money and power) has the pacing and energy of a 1930's zany screwball comedy, but is much darker in spirit. Russell, in a stunning break from his youthful Disney roles, epitomizes the archetypal unscrupulous salesman who will stop at nothing to rip off his customers and crush the competition. The entire cast, many of whom were plucked from such 1960's and '70's schlock as The Munsters, Laverne and Shirley, and The Gong Show, appear to be enjoying themselves immensely as they cavort through this ridiculously obnoxious material.
 

The anger at the heart of the humor, as well as the broadness of the comedy combined to limit the film's audience. Zemeckis, however, was able to springboard from Used Cars to the kinder, gentler Indiana Jones homage Romancing the Stone, the wildly successful Back to the Future trilogy, and, eventually, to the Oscar-winning and wildly overpraised Forrest Gump.

The Good Earth (USA, 1937, Victor Fleming)

An epic tale of love, duty, greed, and revolution, MGM's The Good Earth was an artistic and commercial success. The film's story is a stage adaptation of the successful Donald and Owen Davis production. The struggles of the empoverished farmers whose lives are constantly challenged by personal weaknesses, social pressure and natural disasters is epic in scope, though intimate in effect.

The Good Earth was the last film of legendary producer Irving Thalberg, and the only one to carry his name. The story's scope, following the fall and rise of a peasant family in pre-revolutionary China, was matched by a large scale production (costing an at-the-time astounding 3 million dollars) that included (literally) a cast of thousands, a 500-acre set, thousands of pieces of costume, equipment, and tools, and even buildings imported from China. The massive production, directed first by Victor Fleming, then by Sidney Franklin, includes a couple of classic scenes of epic grandeur: the mob rebellion scene in which the Imperial Palace is sacked, and the locust scene, a marvelous technical achievement in its own right.

Despite the grand scale, the human drama is never dwarfed. Stars Paul Muni and Luise Rainer, as the hardworking farmer and his long-suffering wife, offer sincere performances. Although neither was of Chinese descent, both found the right notes for these parts. Rainer won her second consecutive Academy Award, and soon thereafter dropped from sight in a prolonged feud with Hollywood executives. The great cinematographer Karl Freund, famous for his work in German Expressionist films of the 1920s, took home an Oscar as well, and the film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing.

Frankenstein (USA, 1931, James Whale)

James Whale's Frankenstein is a film that works in important ways that Todd Browning's Dracula, released earlier the same year, does not. While the two films were responsible for ushering in the Horror Era at Universal Studios,  the poignancy of Frankenstein's heartbreaking tragedy and it's consistency of tone help to separate it from its only intermittently engaging predecessor.

Because Frankenstein created much of the cinematic language of horror films, it has often been imitated (and parodied. See: Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks). Consequently (and ironically), viewers coming to the film today may mistake the conventions that it created for clichés. The mad scientist and his neo-gothic lab, comma-shaped assistant, and rigidly lurching monster were all creations of director James Whale, and all have become movie icons.

However, watching Frankenstein is more than simply an exercise in nostalgia. Despite moments of melodrama, the film is wonderfully economical, telling a complex and engaging tale in little more than one hour. There are more moments of quiet power (most of them involving the strikingly effective Boris Karloff as the monster who simply wants to be loved) than you'll find in a fistful of big-budget horror films. Whale knew his medium and didn't clutter the action with a lot of chatter. Instead, he filled the screen with images that would become part of our cultural lexicon. He builds the story to its tragically inevitable climax, interchanging moments of subtle beauty and dreadful horror.

Rather than simply adopt a conventional perspective (man should not play God), Whale emphasizes the human drama (Frankenstein should not have abandoned his creation), turning a horror film into an existential tale of man's fear of abandonment.