Expectations ran high for The Soloist throughout 2008. Then the film was pulled by Paramount at the last minute and bumped to an April 2009 release date giving the impression there was something wrong with the film. There isn’t. What’s wrong is the proliferation of Oscar prognosticators on the internet who build up expectations for films sight unseen and then pounce on those very same films which can’t possibly live up to the high expectations they themselves brought to them.

Granted the true story of an L.A. Times reporter who befriends a schizophrenic genius homeless musician seems like something Oscar would embrace, but the film goes for authenticity, not heart-tugging melodramatics. Director Joe Wright (Atonement) cast hundreds of the 90,000 L.A. homeless as extras in the film, giving it a “you are there” feeling. Jamie Foxx, who gets top billing, nails a difficult role in which he has to act crazy yet play the violin and cello beautifully at the same time. The revelation, though, is Robert Downey Jr. who just keeps getting better with every role.

Downey, whose role is actually larger than Foxx’s, plays writer Steve Lopez who makes you feel he needs his friendship with musician Nathaniel Ayers more than Ayers needs him. It is very much an Oscar worthy performance that will probably be overlooked this year due to the lingering stench over Paramount’s marketing decision and the film’s resultant box office failure.

Catherine Keener as Downey’s ex-wife and current boss, and Marcia Gay Harden as Foxx’s estranged sister co-star. Blu-ray and DVD extras include a making-of documentary and interviews with the real Lopez, Ayers and Ayers’ sister.

Columbia has released two sets of classic comedies from the 1930s and 40s called Icons of Screwball Comedy – Volume One and Volume Two. Each features two films from each of a total of four of the screen’s greatest female stars of the era, a total of eight films overall retailing for $5-6 each. It’s the buy of the year.

The stars are Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne and Loretta Young.

Arthur and Young, whose film careers began in the silent era, both saw their last theatrical film released in 1953 while Dunne, whose first film was released in 1930, ended her big screen the a year earlier in 1952. While all three had some success in television, Young was the only one of the three whose award-winning post-film television career could be considered a major success. Russell, who made her first film in 1934, remained a major film star until her death in 1976.

Arthur is represented in the collection by 1935’s If You Could Only Cook, directed by William A. Seiter, and 1940’s Too Many Husbands, directed by Wesley Ruggles. Russell is represented by her Oscar-nominated performance in 1942’s My Sister Eileen, directed by Alexander Hall, and 1945’s She Wouldn’t Say Yes, also directed by Hall.

Dunne is represented by her Oscar-nominated performance in 1936’s Theodora Goes Wild, directed by Richard Bowleslawski, and 1944’s Together Again, directed by Charles Vidor. Young is represented by 1940’s The Doctor Takes a Wife, directed by Alexander Hall, and 1942’s A Night to Remember, directed by Richard Wallace.

Arthur is paired with Herbert Marshall in If You Could Only Cook, in which she plays an out-of-work girl who meets millionaire Marshall sitting on a park bench and assumes he’s also in need of work. The two become maid and butler to an affable gangster played by Leo Carrillo. The film is slight but pleasant. My big problem with it, though, is that Marshall, who only a few years later would become one of Hollywood’s most dependable character actors, is not my idea of a romantic leading man. Arthur was 35 at the time, but looked 25. Marshall was 45, but looked 55. It seems to me he should have been playing her father, not her eventual lover.

Arthur is showcased to much better advantage opposite Fred MacMurray and Melvyn Douglas in the naughty-but-nice Too Many Husbands from a play by Somerset Maugham, whom Marshall would ironically play as an old fogey in a few years’ time in The Razor’s Edge.

The plot of Too Many Husbands is similar to the same year’s My Favorite Wife in which Irene Dunne returns home after being presumed dead just as husband Cary Grant remarries. In Husbands, MacMurray, presumed dead, returns home six months after Arthur remarries his best friend and business partner, Douglas. Unlike Grant whose marriage to Gail Patrick in My Favorite Wife has not yet been consummated, Arthur’s marriage to Douglas clearly has. She has slept with both men and both men want to spend the rest of their lives sleeping with her. She can’t make up her mind which one she wants and even after a judge tells her which husband she is legally married to, she ends up dining and dancing with both of them, the film ending very much on an ambiguous note with a strong hint of a ménage-a-trois in the making.

Russell played many memorable characters over the years but is best remembered for two of them: Mame Dennis in Auntie Mame, of course, and years earlier as Ruth Sherwood in My Sister Eileen.

The play and later film were based on the real life Ruth McKenney’s adventures in 1935 Greenwich Village with her younger, more attractive sister. Shirley Booth originated the role on Broadway, but Russell played it on screen and reprised it in the 1953 Broadway musical, Wonderful Town, which she performed on live TV just as Auntie Mame was hitting the big screen in 1958.

Russell and Janet Blair in the title role are both in top form and are ably supported by Brian Aherne, George Tobias and the Three Stooges among others. Though the film ends hilariously, the real-life Eileen McKenney didn’t fare so well. She married acclaimed author Nathaniel West in 1937 and died with him in a fatal car crash in 1940.

Russell’s forté in the 40s was playing smart businesswomen who were eventually brought to heel by a man. In She Wouldn’t Say Yes, she’s a lady psychiatrist who’s seen too many women end up badly because of a man and wants no part of romance. Enter Lee Bowman as the cartoonist who won’t take no for an answer and with the help of Russell’s physician father (Charles Winninger) and wandering hobo-turned-butler (Harry Davenport) gets his way. It’s a pleasant time killer with a good Russell performance and amiable ones by the rest of the cast.

Dunne was best known in the early 1930s for her roles in tearjerkers such as Back Street and Magnificent Obsession and musicals like Roberta and Show Boat. Although she played comedic scenes in many of her films, it wasn’t known whether she could pull off an out-and-out comedy, but pull it off she did in her very first, the hilarious gem, Theodora Goes Wild.

As the niece of two prim spinsters, Theodora Lynn has to watch her step in her small Connecticut home town, but as Caroline Adams in the big city she could write a racy novel exposing small town hypocrisy and cause a scandal when the locals see themselves in her book.

Melvyn Douglas and Thomas Mitchell make fine comic foils, but best of all, next to Dunne, of course, is Spring Byington as the town gossip who is put to shame by Dunne in the film’s gut-busting finale.

Dunne and Charles Boyer, who made movie magic in Leo McCarey’s 1939 classic Love Affair, were reunited in the aptly titled Together Again. The title, though, is a play on words. It refers to putting the statue of the town’s former mayor back together after a bolt of lightning has severed its head. The catch: current mayor Dunne is the former mayor’s widow and she wants the statue put back together while Charles Coburn as the former’s mayor’s father would rather see Dunne together with sculptor Charles Boyer whom she hires to do the job.

Young and Ray Milland hate one another at first sight in The Doctor Takes a Wife but due to false reporting they are forced to pretend to be married in order to avoid scandal. Yes, I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s the premise of screwball comedy – preposterous situations made seemingly plausible by sharp writing, deft direction and charismatic star turns and that’s exactly what you get here. Reginald Gardiner and Gail Patrick co-star as the pair’s discarded lovers.

A breezy murder mystery-comedy in The Thin Man mold, A Night to Remember, not to be confused with the film about the sinking of the Titanic with the same name, pairs Young with Brian Aherne. The two are amiable together and the zany goings-on are mildly entertaining, but this is without question the weakest of the eight films.

On the TV front, the second season of Early Edition has been released. Kyle Chandler is still getting tomorrow’s news today in order to effect the outcome of some very perilous situations, but he no longer lives in a hotel room. He now has a pretty swank bachelor apartment over the restaurant he was given by a wealthy businessman for saving his life in the season opener.

Buddy-narrator Fisher Stevens has quit his job as a stock broker and become the manager of the restaurant and blind friend Sheenisia Davis-Williams assists in the running of the restaurant as well, thus allowing Chandler to perform his good deeds without worrying about where his next meal is going to come from.

-Peter J. Patrick (August 4, 2009)