Given all we that are learning and all that we have always known about certain men in certain jobs, why oh why would anyone want to spend time watching a movie about an ambitious weakling who lends out his apartment to philandering executives for after-hours hookups? A movie that is billed as a romantic comedy and infuriatingly holds up as such? Why?!

I certainly didn't feel like it. In fact, I'm supposed to be writing about Baby Face (1933), a film about an ambitious man-trap who uses the corporate ladder to better her circumstances the only way she knows how. THAT movie's protagonist is steely, goal-directed. After a lifetime of sexual exploitation and poverty, Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) wants the kind of security that money and power provide and the fastest way to achieve that is to go where the money is and exploit men's weaknesses. She uses sex to get ahead because she learned early that her greatest skill was sizing up men: what they want to hear, how they want her to be, and how to make them feel powerful. I get Lily Powers: nobody pushes her around, not even the Hays Office.

But The Apartment kept intruding on me, with its gross premise and its many Academy Awards. It is a 57-year-old, irritatingly recognizable tale of a man who uses sex (if tangentially) to get ahead, who keeps his superiors' secrets, and compartmentalizes the sleaze of it enough to enjoy his advancement until someone he actually knows and likes is adversely affected. It is exactly the stuff that is supposedly shocking us all to our core today: that there are men in power who engage in sexual misconduct in the workplace as an expression of that power and hurt the less powerful in the process.

In The Apartment, Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a low-level employee at an insurance company who happens to have an apartment felicitously close to work. Some of the married executives learn about his bachelor pad and promise Baxter promotions and perks in exchange for the use of his place for adulterous hookups. Since this is a comedy, we only see the consensual liaisons and get to sniff at the callous, dreadful men who exploit their underling and string along their women. Baxter finds the arrangement distasteful and gross, but goes along, catching colds while he waits outside some nights and catching sidelong glances in the mornings from neighbors who think he is a sexual dynamo. When The Guys come through with a meager promotion, Baxter believes it's all paying off.

Meanwhile, news of The Apartment reaches the head of personnel, a Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), who decides to get in on the action, offering Baxter a meteoric promotion in exchange for exclusive access to the place. At first, Baxter thinks he's being noticed for his work, since he has been there for several years, but it's the key or no promotion. To complicate things further, Baxter learns that Sheldrake's office conquest is the smart, cute elevator operator, Fran Kubelick (Shirley MacLaine), the girl for whom Baxter has a Thing. This fact not only dashes his own hopes in that regard, but also makes working for Sheldrake and being in his own apartment all the more difficult.

Unfortunately, Sheldrake's most immediate past mistress (played beautifully by Edie Adams) clues Fran in on Sheldrake's pattern, laying out the history of his conquests, tracing his path from girl to girl, department to department. Fran and Sheldrake break up spectacularly in Baxter's apartment (which she still does not know is his) and Fran impulsively downs a bottle of sleeping pills she finds in the medicine cabinet. Baxter comes home to discover an unconscious Fran in his bed, leaps to her aid, and lets her recuperate there for several days. Fran makes clear that Baxter is too weak a man for her (the apartment set-up is gross), but they become friends nonetheless.

Eventually, of course, these two get together. It takes a smooth retaliatory act by Sheldrake's secretary, Sheldrake's own personality, and Baxter finally listening to that little voice to do it, but it happens.

Billy Wilder, the co-writer and director of the film, does a masterful job of making us care for both Baxter and Miss Kubelick, who are required to navigate some difficult moral terrain: he is the social climber making dubious professional choices; she is a regular girl who falls in love with a married man. Jack Lemmon is marvelous at conveying pangs of conscience in his face and body; you can see this likable weakling register the sordid situation he's enabling, quickly rationalize it, then continue down his path. Shirley MacLaine can play vulnerable with incredible strength of character and natural humor: unlike Baxter, Fran Kubelick is fully aware of the consequences of her actions and chooses to meet them head on. (Like Lily in Baby Face, which I swear to god I'll get back to, but with more introspection.) Fred MacMurray, despite all the nonsensical hand-wringing over this role ruining his "good guy" image, has always been superb at playing a smooth-talking heel.*

It irritates me that this is a great romantic comedy, because it is. I hate that I had to steel myself to watch it again because I was worried that my memory of it would be wrong -- wrong in the way you might think "Oh look, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is on. I love that movie. I bet it's not rapey at all." I feared that the sexual politics in The Apartment would be too broadly drawn, that Baxter might be less aware that not every encounter there would be consensual (Ray Walston is super sketchy); that he wouldn't see his bosses for who they were or be disgusted with himself. I worried that Shirley MacLaine's character would have less self-awareness or that we'd be asked to sympathize somehow with the adulterous executives. The film is better than my concerns and I'm so relieved.

But I *hate* that The Apartment is nearly sixty years old and is probably the only film to date that makes us look at workplace sexual misconduct from the point of view of one of the "nice" guys -- a guy who didn't think too hard about what he was doing to get ahead and enjoyed his perks with vague unease until he just couldn't do it anymore.

Here's what finally tips the scales for Baxter: he had just come into his boss's office with a bunch of charts and stats about personnel and a plan to improve retention. He was positively giddy about it. Sheldrake waves the work away and tells Baxter that his wife has kicked him out and he and Fran are back together, so hand over the key. In that moment, Baxter realizes that as a newly promoted junior executive, not only will he have to be OK with the object of his affection sleeping with his boss in Baxter's bed, but none of the work he will ever do in that office will be taken seriously. Ever. His success in the company will always be whispered about and his merits never fully acknowledged no matter what he does -- as if he were one of the girls, instead of one of the boys.

So he says no.

And loses his job. As did Miss Kubelick. As does Sheldrake's secretary, fired by her boss and former lover.

But you know who's still head of Personnel*?

And that, boys and girls, is why we can't have nice things, like pay equity or a woman president.

The Plot
Standard fare for early Warner Bros. talkies, Night Nurse takes an unsentimental look at the life of a student nurse learning the ropes in a big city hospital. Young Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) befriends kindly Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger) and streetwise classmate, Maloney (Joan Blondell) to become a professional health care worker to all walks of life, from immigrant mothers to bootleggers to society dames.

Naturally, this involves a lot of undressing.

After graduation, Nurse Hart takes a position in a private home to look after two young girls who are suffering from malnutrition. The doctor on the case, Dr. Ranger (Ralf Harolde), is a shady sort who twitches like a drug addict (which, now that I think about it, may be why the actor kept doing that) and forbids Hart from deviating from his strict feeding regimen. To complicate matters, the children's mother is a terrible drunk, who seems to be in a romance with both another terrible drunk, and a sober, but equally terrible chauffeur (Clark Gable), who has taken over the household. The children's rich father is long dead (we know not why, but have Suspicions) and a sister of theirs was killed in an automobile accident (see terrible chauffeur). Dr. Ranger and Clark Gable are plotting to starve the children to death and split their trust fund, presumably after getting drunk mom to walk off a building or something.

Lora and her boyfriend (Ben Lyon), an affable bootlegger she once treated for a gunshot wound in the ER on the down-low, foil the plan and save the girls.

A 71 minute picture about half-naked nurses harassed by interns, drunken playboys, evil doctors, and wooed by bootleggers...

...becomes a wholesome tale of a plucky, fully-clothed nurse, her equally wholesome friend, and her milkman beau helping an invalid mother rescue her children from an evil servant. It should clock in at just under an hour.

This post is my contribution to The Great Breening Blogathon, hosted by the Pure Entertainment Preservation Society.

There's a lot of moral protection going on over there, so I suggest you head over for a thorough cleansing pronto.

Sugarpuss: [After asking the biology professor to  check her throat]  SLIGHT rosiness! It's as red as the Daily Worker and just as sore!

                       *  *  *

Sugarpuss: [looking through Potts' books] Oh, "Greek philosophy!" I got a set like this with a radio inside.
​​
                       *  *  *

Prof. Potts: Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.

                       *  *  *
​
Prof. Potts: I made an ass of myself and I know it.
Prof. Jerome: Oh, well, we all have, Potts.
Prof. Potts: Yes, but I was the lead donkey.

What is it about a tough-talking girl with a good heart, great legs, and a healthy romantic appetite? If that girl has a sense of irony and enough self-confidence to floor a room full of academics, then I'm sunk. This is exactly how Barbara Stanwyck ruined me for other women as Katherine "Sugarpuss" O'Shea, bespangled nightclub singer, in the great Howard Hawks/Billy Wilder romp, Ball of Fire. 

In a Victorian mansion on the quiet side of town, eight rumpled academics are hard at work on a new encyclopedia. They are older, socially-awkward professors, each with his own area of specialty. The youngest among them is Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), a linguist who is charged with updating the "slang" section. Potts has been gathering regular Joes from around town to help with his research: taxi drivers, garbage men, you know, Allen Jenkins types (and he's one of them). He goes to a nightclub one evening in search of some really good words and tries to recruit the club's headliner, Sugarpuss (Shugie). She refuses point blank.

At that moment, however, Shugie's boyfriend, handsome mobster Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), has been up to something especially mobby and has to beat it out of town. Before she has time to rip up Prof. Pott's card, Lilac's goons, Pastrami (Dan Duryea) and Asthma (Ralph Peters), yank Shugie out of the club and tell her to lay low until things cool down. Ding! What better place to hide than a house full of Abercrombies?

Still in her costume, Shugie shimmies her way through the front door, and since none of these guys have ever seen spangles up close like this, they're completely on board, 

I mean...

So Shugie settles in and makes friends with all the fellas, teaching them how to dance and mix cocktails and such. She even helps Prof. Potts with his slang research on the regular and begins to take an interest in his work. For his part, Potts has begun to take an interest in her -- not just for the spangles, but on accounta because (that's a pleonasm) she is intelligent and curious. And he is young and healthy and not blind or dead.
​
Shugie also has eyes that see and has not failed to notice that Prof. Potts is one hot philologist. They develop feelings for one another: hers conflicted (she still has Dana Andrews in the wings, remember); his sincere and marriage-minded.

Speaking of the mobster boyfriend, Joe Lilac has been apprised of Shugie's doings and whereabouts by his goons -- who, by the way, are great goons. Dan Duryea is at his high, quiet slippery best and Asthma (the other one) looks like he was born with a machine gun in his hand. Lilac's lawyer advises him to marry Shugie so that she won't be able to testify against him in his upcoming racketeering trial. Posing as Shugie's father, Lilac phones the encyclopedia house to tell her to meet him in Jersey to get married. Potts takes the opportunity to ask "Mr. O'Shea" for his daughter's hand, which Lilac obviously grants, because now he can use the cover of eight professors to sneak Shugie out to meet him right under the cops' noses. 

Poor Shugie. If she refuses Lilac, he'll have everybody killed. Also, with a choice between a guy who "gets more bang outta you than any dame he ever knew" and another who quotes Shakespeare, she'd rather stick with Potts, with whom she has, in spite of herself, fallen in love:

She agrees to marry Potts, knowing she'll break his heart and humiliate him in front his colleagues, who are also her friends. He gives her the world's smallest ring with the world's sweetest inscription. Once they've safely delivered Shugie into Lilac's hands, however, Lilac tosses Shugie a million carat diamond ring, socks Potts in the eye, and sends them all packing back to their encyclopedia, Because he knows Shugie is actually in love with Potts, Lilac also sends Pastrami and Asthma along to guard them until the marriage is official.

Back in their library under the watchful guns of Lilac's goons, the professors realize that the ring Shugie gave back to Potts was Lilac's ring. According to the psychology professor in their midst, this means she kept the one she truly wanted: the one Potts gave her. Emboldened by love and hope, Potts and his friends science their way past the gunmen and rescue Shugie just in time. 

And they lived happily ever after, see?

I love Sugarpuss O'Shea for the same reasons Professor Bertram Potts does: she's tough, sweet, smart, and sexy. ​She had us both at "yum-yum."

This post is my contribution to the Reel Infatuation Blogathon, hosted by Font & Frock and Silver Screenings.

Visit the blogathon pages to see how many ways a person can swoon. So many great posts and picks. 

It's impossible to watch this movie today without the miasma of a year's bitter primary campaigning oozing in around the edges of Frank Capra's bumpy tale of a forgotten but otherwise happy man tempted and victimized by cynics and optimists alike. There are too many parallels and sad reminders that not much has changed in our political discourse over the past 75 years, and like us I guess, the film can't quite commit to either cynicism or optimism.

John Doe isn't real. He's the product of the disgruntled imagination of Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), a sob sister columnist for the Bulletin, who has just been laid off by the paper's new management. The old Bulletin's motto was "A Free Press Means a Free People;" the New Bulletin is "A Streamlined Newspaper for a Streamlined Era." Ann's parting shot at the new paper was to invent a letter for her column from an unemployed Everyman (Doe) who vows to leap off City Hall on Christmas Eve to protest the sorry state of American civilization. Most people in the newspaper game suspect this is a hoax, but the public believes the story and floods the New Bulletin with offers to help and pleas for Someone to do Something.

In order to avoid exposure managing editor Henry Connell (James Gleason) hires Ann back to help manage the public's expectations and to figure out a way to cover up the fraud. Luckily, a stampede of tramps has descending on the offices claiming to be John Doe in order to get the work and other help offered by the citizenry. Ann persuades Connell to pick one of these men to pose as the "real" John Doe and use him as a front to write a column about the plight of downtrodden regular folks and to boost circulation.

They hire "Long" John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a strapping, kind of dopey ex-ballplayer who never goes anywhere without his friend, a professional hobo called The Colonel (Walter Brennan). The Colonel believes that anyone who keeps money of any amount for any length of time is bound to be corrupted. "When you become a guy with a bank account, they gotcha, " he says, Who's gotcha? Heelots (a lot of heels) gotcha, because when you have money people want to sell you stuff and then you're caught, "you're not the free and happy guy you used to be, then you become a Heelot* yourself."

Sheesh. Who is that guy, Bernie Sanders' dad?

So here's the score so far: Ann's original column is a cynical move but it stimulates the public's optimism and basic decency. Willoughby makes the cynical decision to pretend to be John Doe, but is optimistic that it will help him earn enough money to get his pitching arm fixed. The Colonel walks around calling everyone Heelots and threatening to redistribute any wealth coming his way, which is either extra-cynical or wildly optimistic, depending on who you're voting for this cycle.

​Pretty soon everyone starts getting in over their heads. Ann's column is a huge success, but it's ruffling political and journalistic feathers. The Bulletin's new publisher, D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold), makes a deal with Ann to put Willoughby on the radio as John Doe to put to rest suspicions that he's a fake (which he is), while providing Norton with a populist proxy for his political ambitions with Ann writing speeches at triple her former salary. Win-win.

Ann needs the money, by the way, because she is the breadwinner for her widowed mother (Spring Byington) and two school-aged sisters. Her mother has a habit of giving the leftover household money away on the needy, which Ann finds both irritating and inspirational. And at 62 cents on a man's 1941 dollar, a raise would come in handy. Mrs. Mitchell helps Ann past her speech-writing block by suggesting that "People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio... Why don't you let him say something simple and real. Something with hope in it?" So Ann writes a real barn burner and in the process, starts to believe in this John Doe stuff.

Willoughby, meanwhile, is offered $5,000 from a rival newspaper to read an alternate speech on the night of the broadcast confessing to the hoax. Gary Cooper does a masterful job conveying his internal conflict while deciding what to do​: admit the hoax, ease his conscience, and get the operation he needs, or do right by Ann, with whom is is falling in love, and read her speech about tearing down fences, loving your neighbor, and being decent. He decides to go ahead with Ann's speech, but bolts with The Colonel immediately afterward to slip back into a life of poor but honest obscurity.

But Willoughby can't hide for long from Norton's media machine. While he and Bernie's dad have been out riding the rails, "John Doe Clubs" have been popping up all over; just regular citizens picking up his call to be nice to one other. And No Politicians Allowed. He is recognized at a local diner, corralled by "fans" and convinced by a local John Doe Club in one of the more tedious, Capra-esque, aw-shucks, cornfields of a speech to go back on the radio and spread the word.

Soon John Doe Clubs are spreading like wildfire. D.B. Norton is thrilled, because it's an election year and he has plans to make Willoughby announce the formation of a new political party and endorse Norton as The John Doe Party candidate for president. But John Doe Clubs are specifically apolitical, Ann and Willoughby remind Norton, and that would be wrong. Oh wise up, kids. Besides, Norton explains, he could very easily expose the whole racket that Ann concocted in the first place and ruin them both.

The kids don't back down; Norton exposes Willoughby on national radio and steps in as the savior of the movement. John Doe's once adoring fans are heartbroken and angry and they turn on him It isn't pretty. A despondent Willoughby disappears. Months go by and around Christmas time the main characters start to wonder whether he'll make his way to City Hall and make good on the original plan: throw himself off the roof in protest over how horrible people are.

Sure enough, that's where he winds up. He almost does it too, but a feverish Ann, a less cranky Colonel, and Bulletin editor Connell are there to stop him. Even Norton is there to convince him, in his sincere but Scroogey way, that it would be pointless to kill himself, because he'd just remove all traces of John's existence (come on, he's trying). What does the trick ultimately, is the cornball members of the first John Doe club -- also on the roof, at midnight, in the snow -- telling him they don't care if he's a fake, the message was a good one and whaddyasay? Ann faints from illness; Willoughby carries her off the roof (the regular way).

Is this a happy ending? I don't know, does Ann die of fever? This is the trouble with conservative Capra directing the script of liberal Robert Riskin: the tone is all over the place. The Heelot stuff is meant to be annoying, but Ann's mother is just as free with other people's money, and somehow she's more sympathetic. Why is the Colonel a crackpot and Mrs. Mitchell the heart of the people?

In the end it all goes to pieces HARD and big money wins again: that one rich bad apple probably became president for all we know. At the beginning of the picture, Long John Willoughby's is broke and can't afford an operation that will save his baseball career, but he has a friend and a harmonica and freedom. At the end, he's just as broke, still can't pitch, his friends love him, but now he wants to jump off the roof. Why? Because he had hope? Because no one turns on a savior faster than his disappointed followers?

That's bleak, man. No wonder It's a Wonderful Life  is the Christmas picture.

This post is my contribution to the CMBA Spring Blogathon: Words! Words! Words!

There's a lot going on over there, so please catch up and read all the entries in this wordfest.

Well, it's an Elvis movie.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that this isn't one of the better ones: the story slogs, the songs are (mostly) forgettable, the dialog's predictable, and "cynical drifter" is kind of a stretch for Elvis, artistically. He has the sneer already, but it's cute on his face, not in his voice.

Nevertheless, Charlie Rogers (Elvis) starts out as a lone wolf singer in a groovy teahouse, run by Jack Albertson. One night, a bunch of frat boys come in with their girlfriends (two of whom are uncredited ​Teri Garr and Raquel Welch) for beer and cokes. Charlie don't truck with no snobs, so he sings a song ("Poison Ivy League") to make his point, then loses his job for brawling with the boys out back.

After his waitress girlfriend bails him out of jail (like, right after), Charlie blows town on his comparatively wee motorcycle and heads for parts unknown. Somewhere in cow country, he sees a pretty girl, a crabby, hungover old man, and a stunningly beautiful woman in her late 50s riding in a Jeep. Charlie would like to pass this Jeep and flirt with the girl along the way, but the driver (the girl's father), refuses to let him pass, because you can't let hooligans take over the world or something. Eventually, Charlie is run off the road, his motorcycle wrecked and his guitar shattered. 

The Jeep people turn out to be carnival folk: Joe Lean (Leif Erickson), his daughter Cathy (Joan Freeman), and the owner of the carnival, Maggie Morgan (​Barbara Stanwyck). Maggie offers Charlie a job as a roustabout while he waits for his bike to get fixed, and he accepts, with every intention of hitting the road as soon as possible. If he can kiss a few girls along the way (Cathy in particular), all the better.

One afternoon, Charlie sings a song on the midway (as you do) and people start buying three throws for a dollar and candy apples and oh, just everything. Maggie decides to hire him as the opening act for the girlie show (it's called "Girlie Show" and one of the girls is uncredited Teri Garr...again) and Charlie becomes a local sensation. This is lucky, because Maggie's carnival is in a lot of financial trouble, thanks to an accident caused by Joe's drinking.

Joe doesn't like Charlie sniffing around Cathy, who in turn doesn't like Charlie sniffing around the fortune teller, Madame Mijanou (Sue Ane Langdon). The owner of a more profitable carnival (Pat Buttram) has also been sniffing around to see why Maggie's carnival has gotten so successful all of a sudden. He sees. 

Just as Charlie starts to feel almost at home, a huge misunderstanding takes place involving a jackass patron, a missing wallet, and a mean drunk (Joe) that prompts Charlie to leave Maggie's show and join the humungous, Vegas-like carnival of her principal rival.

Obviously, everything works out: Charlie quits the bigger show that pays more and offers tons more exposure to help his friend Maggie and her crummy show that has the girl of his dreams and her mean, drunk father.

In other words: not Barbara Stanwyck's best vehicle, but if ever there were proof needed of her consummate professionalism, Roustabout is it. The part is dull and thankless, but she does it great. Behind the scenes, Elvis was properly deferential and sweet to her, taking Miss Stanwyck for a ride on his motorbike and listening to everything she said with the respect due an actor of her caliber.

It might be worth it to see 18-year-old Teri Garr do some high kicks in the Girlie Show...that's pretty cool; otherwise, you can watch the best number in the show right here, right now:

This post is my contribution to the Remembering Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon, hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.

​You gotta read the other entries. You just gotta.

It's easy to picture Barbara Stanwyck as a torch-singing gangster's girl; not so a farmer's wife. And she feels exactly the same way in The Purchase Price, a pre-Code weirdie in which she plays Joan Gordon, nightclub singer and girlfriend to bootlegger, Eddie Fields (Lyle Talbot.)

After it's established that Joan has been singing up and down Broadway since she was a teenager, we see her give Eddie a very collegial brush-off, explaining that she's going to marry into society and leave all this thuggery behind. A few moments later, the chap in question calls off the wedding, because he has learned that she has been running around with Eddie, and that just won't do. So Joan grudgingly goes back to the gangster (who's already married), soon gets fed up and beats it to Montreal after seeing a picture of it in a newspaper. Unfortunately, Eddie's lackeys find her singing under an assumed name, and she has to find a way to skip town again. As it happens (and there being no handy newspaper clippings), Joan's maid is leaving to marry a Nebraska farmer whom she met through a marriage broker, but confesses that she sent Joan's picture instead of her own to sweeten the pot. Thus, with the same deliberation she gave to moving to Canada, Joan decides to trade places with the maid and marry this guy in Nebraska.

This is all in the first 10 minutes. It goes on in fits and starts from there.

The farmer turns out to be George Brent (miscast), awkward agricultural-school graduate Jim Glison, a man who expects to sleep with a woman on the first day he met and married her, then holds a grudge when she rebuffs him. Meanwhile, Joan makes a spectacular adjustment to the awful, awful circumstances, conditions, and people in her new community. She cooks, she cleans, she makes the wood stove work (see The Egg and I), and for some reason, falls in love with Sulky Jim.

There are ups. There are downs. There is an unpleasant local muckity muck who keeps trying to take over Jim's farm (and fondle Joan). Eddie turns up as well, but only to prove to the audience that Joan would have had way more fun with him. Oh, and an oddly-affecting scene in which Joan helps a neighbor woman newly-delivered of a baby and her terrified older daughter (the great Anne Shirley), who no doubt witnessed her mother giving birth. THAT's the movie I wish this had been.

The Purchase Price reminded me at times of The Canadian, the 1926 film about a city girl forced by circumstances to marry a farmer with no mod-cons (and precursor to the excellent Victor Seastrom/Lillian Gish picture, The Wind). Same 'wedding night' standoff. Same cross-cultural adjustment horrors. Same eventual reconciliation and marital harmony, if a more believable one. At other times, the film reminded me that 68 minutes can seem like four days.

All in all, an uneven, interesting picture that underscores Barbara Stanwyck's ability to make long-johns and work gloves unbelievably attractive. Also that unless the non-gangster is Gary Cooper, she should stick with the affable bootlegger.

George Brent was born in Ireland to an Irish mother and a British father, who was either in the British Army, a shopkeeper, or a newspaperman (mysterious inconsistency among the biographies). Brent was orphaned at the age of 11 and moved to New York to live briefly with an aunt. After returning to Dublin as a young man, he became an active member of the IRA where, during the Irish War of Independence, he got into some trouble and had to escape to Canada to avoid being arrested.

Brent got the acting bug while a student at the National University of Ireland and joined a Canadian theatre company while in exile. Eventually, he made his way to New York where he appeared in stock plays and early silent films, also picking up the first of five wives, actress Helen Campbell (1925-27). In 1930, Brent went to Hollywood to appear in minor supporting roles to the likes of Rin-Tin-Tin and Charlie Chan, and to fail a few screen tests. Thanks to actress Ruth Chatterton, who would become his second wife (1932-34), Brent landed a leading role in her film, The Rich Are Always With Us (1932). 

And the rest is leading man history. 

1932 would see George Brent play opposite some of the strongest leading ladies of the time: Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young, and Joan Blondell, Throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s, he was one of Hollywood's most durable leading men, playing opposite such heavy hitters as Kay Francis, Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, Merle Oberon, and Ann Sheridan (wife number four, 1942-43*). His most frequent co-star (11 pictures) was, of course, Bette Davis, with whom he also had a years'-long love affair.

By the late 1940s, an aging Brent found fewer romantic leads and spent a few years appearing in B pictures before retiring from film in 1953. He made a number appearances on television until retiring for good to his California horse ranch in 1960...with wife number five, model Janet Michaels (1947-1974) whom he survived. Brent died at the age of 80 of emphysema on May 26, 1979.

I like George Brent best when he's a rake or a playboy. His noble, long-suffering do-gooder parts tend to leave me cold, with the notable exception of his portrayal of Dr. Steele in Dark Victory, but only because he puts up with Humphrey Bogart's horrible Irish accent so effortlessly.

But I can watch him in Jezebel any day; he really is a perfect scoundrel.

• Weirdest, sweetest scene: Lillian Roth singing "If I Could Be With You" to a picture of Joe E. Brown, of all people.
  
  
• Great line: Pointing out a mannish, cigar-smoking woman in the ladies room, "Watch out for her; she likes to wrestle."