Phillips Holmes, an uncommonly beautiful leading man of early talkies, got killed in a plane during WWII and today is largely forgotten. He’s very good in this bit of small-town Americana as Mike Bolton, the freshly graduated son of the town barber. The father (quietly masterful character actor Grant Mitchell) has just been paroled from prison after 18 years for killing a man. “He was right to kill him,” says one of the father’s friends, for the man had killed the barber’s brother in a drunken fight. Be that as it may, the son bursts with confidence and sauvity when nobody knows who he is, but turns bashful and self-conscious in his home town. He’s especially awkward and strained around the father he’s never known. This will be tested during the crisis over two thousand dollars that goes missing from the bank where Mike works.

Early talkies have a reputation for stagey-ness that’s unfair, at least with certain directors. Veteran Allan Dwan and photographer Ira Morgan use what I’d call a sophisticated simplicity, generating visual interest with a variety of angles, traveling shots, and deep compositions, with at least half the movie occurring outdoors in picturesque, even lovely locations. There’s an excellent early moment when Mike is “parking” with his college girl by a railroad bridge and tells her about his father’s murder conviction, the rumor of which is scotching his chance at being class president. Shocked, she pulls away and says of course it won’t make any difference to her, and then Dwan cuts to a longshot of the train rushing above them, visually crushing them. In the next scene, Mike rides inside that train looking out upon the passing image of the girl parked with another boy in another car.

During the 1930s, Tennessee belle Gwen (Carroll Baker) is swept off her feet by the handsome, courtly, yet in many ways alien Terry Terasaki (James Shigeta), a Japanese diplomat on assignment in Washington DC. He too is attracted by her alien-ness as well as her beauty and spirit, and at first tries to remake her into a proper Japanese wife—at which she’s lousy. While they overcome their personal prejudices and misjudgments and negotiate those of others, Terry’s political conscience is tried by his country’s imperial aggressions. After the attack on Pearl Harbor leads to America’s declaration of war in December 1941, this couple faces a new set of trials and the suspicions of all sides.

This remarkable story is true, or as true as a movie can get. Charles Kaufman adapted it from Gwen Terasaki’s autobiographical novel, which made a splash and presumably got optioned early by MGM. That’s the best explanation for why a French company, Cité Films, made this movie as a US co-production shot in Japan. Only 15 years after the war, it seems unlikely that a major Hollywood studio would have initiated a sympathetic project from the Japanese point of view (actually Gwen’s conflicted view) in which love is the only thing preventing this “bridge” of cultures (materialised in their daughter) from tearing apart.

The Shrine is about an ambitious resourceful heroine who’s so focused on her journalism career that she doesn’t pay sufficient attention to her boyfriend, and she’s made to pay for this. She catches wind of a potential story of tourists who disappear in a remote Polish village and drags her photog-boyfriend there; they take along an intern—a younger, perkier version of herself—because they need a spare. They all determinedly do the opposite of whatever they should.

This begins as another xenophobic horror in post-commie Eastern Europe, touching on the atavistic fears of modern city folk when confronted with rural folk, and then turns frankly into a variation on The Exorcist. The boyfriend gets to hear her break down in tears and apologize (“It’s all my fault”) when things go south, but she won’t get off that easily. Women like her are clearly possessed by the devil, and the boyfriend must finally collude with the male society that fights evil. Thus do horror movies tap into social fears—in this case, the fears of insecure young men who feel threatened by go-getting women.

The woodsy locales are effective, and the highpoint is the lengthy wordless scene in the mist where the women discover a terrifying statue. That moment is creepy, well paced and visualized, with perhaps a nod to Lovecraft or Arthur Machen. I like that it’s never fully explained, except for one local who shrugs and says “It’s our curse.”

There are two reasons to watch this film: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. As in Hollywood Party (another recent release in the Warner Archive made-on-demand line), they drop by late in the proceedings and steal the show, not that the rest of the show isn’t perfectly enjoyable in its own light-headed way. There’s a brainless, unimportant heroine (Rosina Lawrence) who wins a beauty contest and wants to go to Hollywood to be a star. There’s her brainless boyfriend (Jack Haley) who tries to make it happen by working as a busboy. There’s a sassy gal-pal (top-billed Patsy Kelly) who’s around to make caustic comments, and there’s a stuck-up star (Mischa Auer) who pitches woo to the heroine but turns out to be all right for a sleazy masher.

And then there’s Laurel and Hardy, playing “themselves” while behaving exactly the same behind the scenes as in front of the cameras. In their first bit, they act in a bar fight sequence for a movie and then discuss the breakaway prop bottles. In their second and last scene, they’re sitting around behind the set in a sequence that might be called “duelling harmonicas”. Their mastery of timing and schtick in unquestionable; Hardy’s exasperated, complicit glances at the audience still feel modern. The entire movie is a loosely strung collection of genial absurdities from the small town to the big city, and it has no goal or function besides raising a few smiles and laughs. In that, it works.

She’s the last remaining vestige of ‘80s pop culture preeminence. Michael Jackson is dead. So is Whitney Houston. Along with some one hit wonders and a few significant stragglers from previous decades (Bruce Springsteen, Prince), she defined what was cool, what was hip, and heaven help us, what was sexy. Her larger than life persona guided many a grrrl power wannabe through a narrow minded mall dynamic while her pushing of the envelope saw subjects like religion, teen pregnancy, and eros soar to the top of the charts. Today, she’s an amalgamation of leftovers, pieces of popularity and personal choices (she’s a twice married/divorced mother of four) toned and honed into a pre-senior citizen gristle. For most, she remains the Mighty Mad. For others, she’s simply Madonna.

If you weren’t alive then, if you didn’t know the publicity stink this dancer turned singer turned superstar could stir up with a simple straying from the mainstream, you’ll never fully appreciate her impact. Fashioned turned on her iconic fetishism. Pop would pirouette around her every sonic blast. For vague Valley Girls looking for life after Moon and Frank, the girl from Detroit turned holidays and lucky stars into runs past the borderline of Billboard chart dominance. By 1991, she was no longer ‘just’ a performer. She was royalty, a newsworthy headline doing everything she could to rewrite the role of women in rock ‘n’ roll. It was a process she had begun the year before with the release of the racy single “Justify My Love” and would end with the Blond Ambition tour, and the perverse picture book, Sex.