1939's "The Rains Came". Turner plays the predatory Lady Esketh, Burton the saintly Dr. Safti, Michael Rennie is Lord Esketh, while Fred MacMurray seems to have wandered away from the set of "My Three Sons" years before it began. He's not convincing as an alcoholic, and seems entirely too nice for this bunch of people.
While I was waiting for/watching the Oscar nominated Special Effects sequence(s), I noticed that- Turner gives one of her better late performances; Eugenie Leontovich's Maharani combines a Russian and British accent and sounds remarkably weird; when a character is told not to do something, they go ahead and ignore the advice (applies to five characters). Burton is very brown when his character is introduced; when the rains start, his makeup starts to come off, and after he's been submerged in a flooding river, he's almost as white as Lana Turner. In the films' last twenty minutes, the brown makeup doesn't reappear. Instead Burton just wears more mascara than Turner. Things were already falling apart a bit at Fox and mogul Darryl F. Zanuck hadn't even left for Europe yet.
The earthquake/flood/fire sequence is worth waiting for in spite of all of this. The Special Effects by Ray Kellogg were worth the Oscar nomination. To have seen the sequence in Cinerama must have been an experience.
While I was waiting for/watching the Oscar nominated Special Effects sequence(s), I noticed that- Turner gives one of her better late performances; Eugenie Leontovich's Maharani combines a Russian and British accent and sounds remarkably weird; when a character is told not to do something, they go ahead and ignore the advice (applies to five characters). Burton is very brown when his character is introduced; when the rains start, his makeup starts to come off, and after he's been submerged in a flooding river, he's almost as white as Lana Turner. In the films' last twenty minutes, the brown makeup doesn't reappear. Instead Burton just wears more mascara than Turner. Things were already falling apart a bit at Fox and mogul Darryl F. Zanuck hadn't even left for Europe yet.
The earthquake/flood/fire sequence is worth waiting for in spite of all of this. The Special Effects by Ray Kellogg were worth the Oscar nomination. To have seen the sequence in Cinerama must have been an experience.