TO PLEASE A LADY/JEOPARDY (MGM 1950-53) Warner Home Video

Warner Home Video has brought together two rather run-of-the-mill movies for a Barbara Stanwyck Double Feature; 1950’s To Please a Lady, and, 1953’s Jeopardy. At the time of its release, the former was seen as a means to resurrect the sagging prospects of Clark Gable’s movie career at MGM. Gable had been Metro’s king at the box office for decades. But the fifties were not particularly kind to his he-man image. Indeed, Gable was getting older. Even legends pass their prime. And if the story of an over-the-hill race car driver and his ‘lady’ never exactly rattled the rafters or rang cash registers, it now seems like vintage high art compared to Jeopardy – a movie made on the fly at the studio, under Dore Schary’s auspices and, like all of Schary’s personally supervised gunk, meant to both de-glamorize MGM’s public image in the changing fifties while imbuing a message. There really is not much to recommend either picture here, apart from the fact they cumulatively represent a bit of cinema history best left on the bottom half of a double bill. First up: Clarence Brown’s To Please A Lady, a real second-tier melodrama for which Gable was reunited with Brown, who had been responsible for some of his biggest hits in the 1930’s. Gable, clearly past his roguish prime, is paunchy and middle-aged.  So, gone is that heartthrob status cultivated prior to WWII. In the intervening decade, Gable had gone through active service in the war, and, lost the great love of his life - comedian Carol Lombard. The cumulative effect of these two watershed events on his emotional psyche was enough to instill a world-wearier, less playful and somewhat less charming ghost flower of his former self, with a decided downturn in his box office appeal at war’s end.

Here, Gable is Mike Brannan, a butch race car driver who plays dirty on the track, using every trick he can to win his races. He is generally hated by fans and despised by newspaper maven, Regina Forbes (Barbara Stanwyck). After witnessing Mike cause, what she believes to be a deliberate pile up on the speedway, Regina vows to destroy Brannan’s reputation in print. The motion for Mike’s dismissal is seconded by the paper’s ruthless owner, Gregg (Adolphe Menjou). However, Regina gradually begins to understand Mike’s perspective on racing and life. She realizes he is not quite the demigod she envisioned and a quiet – if problematic – romance develops. Director, Brown offers nothing in either the spark or flare from his illustrious past. Indeed, he has grown a little older/wiser too. But the movie is both dull and uninspiring – a hideous hodgepodge of soppy melodrama inserted between badly-edited race car footage – most of it obviously shot in front of a process screen with cartoonish effect. Stanwyck delivers a complementary performance to match her costar. But she just does not seem to be able to get much mileage out of feeling low. Gable is bored with his character. He reads his lines as though he cannot wait to cash his check and move on to something else.

The other film in this double feature is John Sturges’ low budget pseudo-noir, Jeopardy (1953) – a wholly disengaged thriller without the thrills or enough plot to sustain even its scant 94-minute running time. The tale begins on a buoyantly uncharacteristic note with young married couple, Helen (Stanwyck) and Doug Stilwin (Barry Sullivan) and their young son Bobby (Lee Aaker) on route for a vacation in the wilds of Mexico. Finding a desolate spot on the beach, the screenplay by Mel Dinelli tries to kick it up a notch after Doug jams his leg between a slab of rotting wood from a nearby dilapidated boardwalk and a stone on the beach. With high tide only a matter of hours away, Doug encourages Helen to get in the car and drive for help at an isolated service center they passed about ten miles back. Unfortunately for Helen, she finds the station deserted, save psychotic criminal and prison escapee, Lawson (Ralph Meeker).

After commandeering the car, pawing at Jessie and presumably raping her in a remote and abandoned hacienda in the middle of nowhere, Lawson suddenly reforms. He drives Jessie back to the beach and rescues Doug from drowning, before escaping from the police across the beach head to freedom. At the time Jeopardy went before the cameras, Dore Schary was head of MGM. An ambitious executive, once responsible for most of RKO’s gritty noir thrillers, Jeopardy is just the sort of film he would have liked – a message picture with its mangled ‘don’t talk to strangers’ scenario. But the movie is woefully short on something to say and with an almost malignant abuse of its star power in favor of telling a tale that only a die-hard noir aficionado could love. Barry Sullivan is wasted in a thankless role, reduced to lying on his side in waist-high ocean surf while imbuing his son with warm-hearted platitudes about how he will have to be ‘the man’ of the family ‘if’ Jessie should fail to return. Stanwyck doesn’t quite know what to make of her part. At first, she’s the simple little woman; then, a rather voracious mother lioness, and finally, an emotionally-spent, aloof woman of the world. The gamut doesn’t quite come together as one finely-wrought performance, but rather samplings from various performances the great lady gave elsewhere in her career. Meeker’s is perhaps the worst served. He plays psychotic and crazy fairly well, but then shifts gears entirely to do the right thing and save this family. His early scenes crackle with a ravenous electricity that falls apart in the end and makes virtually no sense at all.

Probably owing Warner Home Video’s awareness these C-grade titles might sell better – or, at all – when lumped together, the company has done a rather outstanding job on transferring each film to DVD. The B&W image on both is beautifully contrasted with accurate grain and minimal age-related artifacts. The image is slightly more refined, revealing greater on Jeopardy. Process shots on To Please A Lady are obvious and distracting. But neither’s image quality will disappoint. The audio on both is Dolby Digital 1.0 mono. Extras include short subjects and theatrical trailers; adequate enough and satisfying nonetheless.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

To Please a Lady 2

Jeopardy 2

VIDEO/AUDIO

To Please a Lady 3.5

Jeopardy 3.5

EXTRAS

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