The Encyclopedia Brown: I don't suppose I'll have to beg your forgiveness

CHAINED

1934

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Edgar Selwyn and John Lee Mahin

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: You're a real down-in-the-earth girl

SADIE MCKEE

1934

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by John Meehan, Bess Meredyth, E.A. Woolf, Carey Wilson, and Vicki Baum (based on "Pretty Sadie McKee" by Viña Delmar)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: Those magnificent men in their flying machines

NIGHT FLIGHT

1933

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Oliver H.P. Garrett, John Monk Saunders, and Wells Root (based on the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: How about a little Service?

LOOKING FORWARD

1933

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Bess Meredyth and H.M. Harwood (based on the play Service by Dodie Smith)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: Hey, that's pretty progressive for... oh

THE SON-DAUGHTER

1932

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by John F. Goodrich, Claudine West, and Leon Gordon (based on the play by George Scarborough and David Belasco)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: But we are together, aren't we? And I doubt that you will scream, or alarm the neighbors

LETTY LYNTON

1932

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Wanda Tuchok and John Meehan (based on the novel by Marie Belloc Lownes and the play Dishonored Lady by Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes)

Spoilers: highish, inasmuch as I refer to the details of the real-life criminal case and the copyright infringement litigation resulting in this film's unusual legal status

Update 7/15/2023: I was way off on certain details of another film's legal status, which I have now corrected, though I find my initial error incredibly embarrassing

The Encyclopedia Brown: We'll be all alone in that big house—let's be alone together

EMMA

1932

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Frances Marion, Leonard Praskins, and Zelda Sears

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: Anything's easy for a woman

POSSESSED

1931

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Lenore J. Coffee (based on the play The Mirage by Edgar Selwyn)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: My mother was a saint

THIS MODERN AGE

1931

Directed by Nick Grindé and Clarence Brown

Written by John Meehan, Sylvia Thalberg, and Frank Butler (based on the short story "Girls Together" by Mildred Cram)

Spoilers: mild

The Encyclopedia Brown: Ace attorney

A FREE SOUL

1931

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by John Meehan and Becky Gardiner (based on the play by Willard Mack based on the book by Adela Rogers St. Johns)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: The room at the top of the stairs

INSPIRATION

1931

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Gene Markey (based on the novella Sappho by Alphonse Daudet)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: Isn't there anyone whose memory is very dear—and sort of holy?

ROMANCE

1930

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Edwin Justus Mayer and Bess Meredyth (based on the play by Edward Sheldon)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: Garbo talks

ANNA CHRISTIE

1930

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Frances Marion (based on the play by Eugene O'Neill)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: She was the male of the species that is more fearless than mankind

A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS

1928

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Bess Meredyth, Marian Ainslee, and Ruth Cummings (based on the novel The Green Hat by Michael Arlen)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: But we're supposed to work for the tsar

THE COSSACKS

1928

Directed by George Hill and Clarence Brown

Written by Frances Marion (based on the novel by Lev Tolstoy)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: There's gold in them thar hills

THE TRAIL OF '98

1928

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Benjamin Glazer, Joseph Farnham, and Waldemar Young (based on the novel by Robert W. Service)

Spoilers: well, it certainly doesn't last, does it? (moderate)

The Encyclopedia Brown: An Early Clarence Brown Compendium

In which we file away The Blue Bird (1918), The Last of the Mohicans (1920), "The Light of Faith" (1922), The Signal Tower (1924), Smouldering Fires (1925), The Goose Woman (1925), The Eagle (1925), and Kiki (1926), plus—talkie bonus!—Navy Blues (1929)

One should not have to "discover" Clarence Brown, but that's the way it is in the year 2022, and the way it has been since, probably, the mid-1950s, when he retired on his own terms to go live on a ranch for the next three decades.  Maybe the word "discover" does too much: he's only as obscure as any Old Hollywood studio man, but such a person can get pretty obscure, after all, because it sometimes feels like so much of the fullness and flavor of Old Hollywood's legacy was lost to the grimly-streamlined Boomer cinematic canon, which became the dull, conformist framework for communicating and teaching film history for the next sixty years.  In any case, discovery is what it felt like to me, when I noticed over the course of about a year that the guy who did The Rains Came was the guy who did The Yearling was the guy who did Flesh and the Devil and I said, "okay, show me" when National Velvet made its rounds on HBOMax and I saw that this, too, was Brown, leading to the statistically-startling and hugely-tantalizing realization that I had seen four Brown movies at more-or-less random but had also seen four masterpieces.

And then, as I do, I got really enthusiastic and burned through Brown's 1941-1947 stretch for no reason but I felt like it, since "what I feel like" is the long and short of my critical ethos here, and as I've gotten a better grasp of the director, it turns out that for whatever reason that stretch in the third decade of his career saw Brown hit not only his stride (just great movie after great movie in the middle of that decade) but also many of his highest peaks, which means that were I to, say, decide upon a more systematic overview of his career, it would be almost guaranteed to be a bit of a let-down.  After all, nobody, not nobody—at least not nobody who had to do what Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer told him to once or twice or three times a year, whether he wanted to do it or not—was likely to have managed to keep that level of superlative quality up.  That's something that his tossed-off second film of 1941, They Met In Bombay, indicates powerfully, despite coming in between Come Live With Me and The Human Comedy.  That's just the business—even beyond the studio system, you should expect even the greatest filmmakers to have fallow periods and the occasional dud—but you know, Brown's late 1920s and 1930s aren't wastelands either.  They absolutely have some peaks of their own, and not just a few, either.

A boy and his deer

THE YEARLING

1946

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Paul Osborn and John Lee Mahin (based on the novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings)

Spoilers: moderate

Days of thunder

NATIONAL VELVET

1944

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Theodore Reeves, Helen Deutsch, and Howard Dimsdale (based on the novel by Enid Bagnold)

Spoilers: high

I, not forgetting, "Till death do us part," was outrageously happy, with death in my heart

THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER

1944

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Claudine West, Jan Lustig, George Froeschel, and Robert Nathan (based on the verse novel by Alice Duer Miller)

Spoilers: moderate