by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Vampyr (notice the spelling), based on an 1827 opera by German composer Heinrich Marschner, who because even in his own day he was considered a second-tier talent (for decades he was the resident composer in Hanover and never quite made it in Berlin) has largely been forgotten since even though opera historians consider him a significant figure, the most important German opera composer between Weber and Wagner. The story has one of the most convoluted textual histories of any opera: it began at that legendary soirée in Switzerland between George Gordon, Lord Byron; his traveling companion, John Polidori; Byron’s great rival Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary, during the weeks they spent on vacation at Lake Geneva and one night they decided they would each write a ghost story.
As Mary Shelley recounted in the preface to her 1831 revision of Frankenstein — her contribution to the group’s efforts and the only one that was actually finished — “the noble author [Byron] began a tale, a fragment which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery … commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole — what to see I forget — something very shocking and wrong, of course.”
Byron’s “fragment” was a story about a young man (the narrator) who became the traveling companion of a mysterious older man named Lord Darvell; they toured Greece together (as Byron and Polidori in fact had) and then Darvell mysteriously got sick and died, but just before his death he swore his companion to an oath of secrecy that he was not to divulge his existence or the manner of his death. Byron’s fragment never mentions vampirism, but Polidori recorded in his diary that Byron had told him the reason for Darvell’s actions was that he was a vampire and therefore could not really die, but also did not want his true identity revealed when he revived and set out in the world looking for fresh victims.
Polidori expanded on Byron’s fragment and published a story of his own, The Vampyre, in 1819, a gruesome tale in which the vampire, now called “Ruthven” (an in-joke since that was the name used for an unsympathetic character based on Byron in the novel Glenarvon by Byron’s former mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb), returns to life and starts courting the sister of his former traveling companion, here called Aubrey (he was nameless in the Byron fragment). Aubrey is torn between his oath to the vampire and his desire to save his sister from becoming his latest victim, and at the end Aubrey’s sister and Ruthven are married, Aubrey reveals the vampire’s identity but too late to stop the wedding, and eventually Aubrey goes mad and dies of a burst blood vessel from his grief while his sister becomes Ruthven’s latest victim. (To get his story published, Polidori hinted that Byron was the actual author, but the piece is so dreadfully written — especially by comparison to the eloquence of the fragment Byron actually wrote — that’s impossible to believe.)
The Vampyre was an instant sensation — it was translated into French at least three times and into German twice — and in 1820 a trio of French authors, François Adrien Carmouche, Charles Nodier and Achille de Jouffroy, did a stage adaptation of it, changing the story so that the vampire actually dies twice — first as in the Byron and Polidori versions, then posing as his brother, Count Marsden, in which guise he courts Aubrey’s sister Malwina and extracts the vow of secrecy from Aubrey after Aubrey recognizes him and a subsidiary character, Edgar (Malwina’s former boyfriend), shoots Ruthven out of jealousy (though Ruthven’s second “death” turns out to be as temporary as his first), but in this version there’s a happy ending in which both Aubrey and Malwina delay the wedding long enough so that Ruthven misses his 1 a.m. deadline to recruit his latest victim or return to hell forever; Malvina is saved, Ruthven is taken to hell (like Don Juan in a story Byron wrote as a poem after Mozart had done it as an opera to da Ponte’s libretto) and Aubrey lives.
Marschner’s opera was composed in 1827 and made a few significant changes to the story: Aubrey became Malwina’s boyfriend instead of her brother; Malwina’s father, Davenaut, arranges the marriage between her and Ruthven to get his hands on Ruthven’s fortune; instead of being attracted to Ruthven as in the French play, Malwina loathes and fears him from the first and the conflict is within her — between filial duty to her father and her own heart. Marschner’s librettist, Wilhelm August Wohlbrück (also his brother-in-law; and Wohlbrück’s sister/Marschner’s wife was also a diva who frequently took leading roles in his operas, like such other famous composer/singer couples as Gioacchino Rossini and Isabella Colbran, Giuseppe Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi, and Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears). In this version, there’s a prologue set in hell that spells out the conditions for Ruthven’s continued existence on earth; he must kill and drink the blood of three female victims in as many days, and if he fails he will be dragged down to hell forever.
The BBC took on this project in the early 1990’s when they decided they wanted to do an English-language modern-dress adaptation of an opera; they wanted the work to be something from the 19th century so it would sound like audiences expected an opera to sound, but they also wanted a work sufficiently obscure that almost nobody watching the program would have heard it before and therefore they wouldn’t be coming with preconceived notions as to what it should sound like and how it should be staged. They hired writer Charles Hart to do the English text, which I gather was not an attempt to translate Wohlbrück’s literally but to tell the same story in words which would fit both Marschner’s music and the updated modern-dress setting.
In this version, Hart changed the characters’ names but kept close to the sound of the originals: “Ruthven” is now Ripley (a reference to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley? The famous film of Highsmith’s novel didn’t come out until 1999, seven years after this movie, but the book was a well-regarded, popular work that had spawned at least four sequels and had previously been filmed in France, and like Highsmith’s Ripley, Hart’s is also a sinister villain with a young, basically decent but almost terminally naïve man in tow), and after being accidentally exhumed from his tomb when a construction crew disturbed his grave, he’s summoned to a Satanist gathering led by a Black high priestess (played by a woman identified only as “Winston” who I assume was a British supermodel) and given the three-victims-in-three-days-or-else instruction.
Previously he had used his unexpected resurrection to make himself a fortune in businesses both legitimate and otherwise, and Aubrey becomes his assistant Alex, who’s fought his way back from a drug habit Ripley gave him and is secretly dating Malwina, who’s here called Miranda but is still subject to pressure from his father, who lost his money through bad investments and sees Ripley’s fortune as his route back to good financial health — though the idea of a formerly rich man essentially selling his daughter into an arranged marriage to restore his financial standing dates badly in a 19th century London setting. The victims Ripley claims before he sets his sights on Miranda are changed from Janthe to Ginny, a young woman Ripley picks up after she’s left alone on the streets at night following an argument with her boyfriend; and from Emmy to Emma, an office assistant Ripley picks up in a singles bar.
It’s pretty clear that the BBC picked this of all operas to revive in this format because of the continued popularity of vampire stories and the iconography behind them — indeed, Hart rather uneasily grafted some of the Dracula iconography onto a vampire story that predates Bram Stoker’s, notably the way Ripley changes to a wolf (a quite effectively done digital effect) just before he actually attacks his victims — and for the most part Hart deserves points for writing English that’s intelligible even when sung to 19th century music (only in a few of the vocal ensembles — always the biggest trap for libretto writers — did the text disappear into the musical mass) and for translating Wohlbrück’s characterizations and situations into modern equivalents.
The one key point he blew is the vow of silence, which simply disappears from the story — Alex gets into his sports car and drives away from the wedding between Ripley and Miranda in disgust, then thinks better of it and drives back in a scene that rather jarringly resembles the end of The Graduate — a mistake because the twisted loyalties of the 19th century versions would have made Alex a more sympathetic character and his dilemma far more understandable. Director Nigel Finch applied an appropriately over-the-top visual style to this story, and though I’d heard of only one of the cast members before (bass Richard Van Allan, who plays Miranda’s father Davenant), the principals were excellent singing actors who also benefited from looking their parts: Omar Ebrahim is a dangerously charismatic presence as well as having a strong “belt” baritone that fits the music and Hart’s text well; Philip Salmon is a solid lyric tenor as Alex; and Fiona O’Neill is a bit more heavy-set than one would expect in the female lead in a 1992 horror film, she’s certainly curvaceous enough and her voice is also a good one, though she has a bit of a problem with Marschner’s coloratura.
About the only risible element was the narrator, Robert Stephens (Billy Wilder’s Sherlock Holmes), whom Charles thought came off too much like the criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and added an element of risibility to what was intended as straight blood-freezing horror. There was a rather quirky credit to the Stuttgart Opera — did they stage a modern-dress Vampyr and were some of the props and costumes from that production used here? For some reason called The Vampyr: A Soap Opera (though its only commonality with soap opera was that it was broadcast as a five-part serial — and whoever uploaded it to OperaShare was working from a videotape made off the air, and the fifth and last part had inferior reception to the others and frequently the colors faded out completely and the film became black-and-white), this is actually a quite appealing production, even though judging from what I’ve read about the Marschner/Wohlbrück original and the English translation of Wohlbrück’s libretto I’ve downloaded, Ruthven is a far more conflicted character than Ripley, wracked by guilt and wishing for a normal death, whereas Ripley is an amoral psychopath with no compunction about what he’s doing,
It makes me want to hear the German original (and apparently CD’s of this and Marschner’s other most popular opera, Hans Heiling — also about a supernatural being who makes a deal with the devil for the love of a woman, but ultimately loses her to a normal and decent human being — are readily available from the usual private sources), and it’s quite obvious where Der Vampyr fits into the evolution of German opera, neatly between Weber’s Der Freischütz (which also features a rustic German country setting, a wedding and a deal with the devil) and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (whose protagonist is similarly under a curse, though Wagner’s character is sympathetic and seeks the love of a woman, not her murder, to redeem him).
Monday, June 30, 2008
Robot Holocaust (Independent, 1986)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I started a movie for Charles and I, the next in sequence on his Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with episodes of the Republic serial Radar Men from the Moon (though this one abruptly broke off in the middle — there was even a slide reading “Film Break”! — to make room for the feature): Robot Holocaust, which since it was on the same disc as their take on Robot Monster seemed likely to be a sequel to it, and while the world hardly needed a sequel to Robot Monster, one would have been considerably more fun than Robot Holocaust actually turned out to be. The central premise of Robot Holocaust is that there was an enormous worldwide civil war between humans and their robot creations, and the robots kicked our butts, in the process making the above-ground atmosphere way too toxic for the surviving humans to breathe.
They’ve impressed some of the surviving homo sapiens into being “air slaves,” a job which consists mainly of throwing burlap sacks into giant holes in the floor which supposedly fuels the machines that give the robots their energy, while they’ve made others into gladiators who wrestle ceaselessly in loincloths — which if nothing else at least gave us some nice beefcake views of hot-looking young (or at least youngish) men who were nice fantasy objects. Meanwhile, a race of mutant humans lives out in what’s called the “Wasteland,” a particularly polluted part of Earth (called “New Terra” in this film for some reason, even though it looks like just a badly wrecked version of the same Old Terra to us), where they can dwell above the surface since their bodies have adapted to breathing the otherwise toxic air.
The writer and director is someone named Tim Kincaid (Thomas Kinkade’s black-sheep brother? Their visual senses are actually rather similar), the producers are Charles Band (uncredited) and Cynthia DePaula (the MST3K crew couldn’t resist the temptation to make a pun on her name and DePauw University) and the “V” designating this title on imdb.com makes it seem like this movie went straight to video (and didn’t stay there long; imdb.com lists it as available on VHS but not on DVD), the musical score is by Richard Band (presumably the producer’s brother) and Joel Goldsmith, and the cast is full of a bunch of people you never heard of — Norris Culf, Nadine Hartstein, J. Buzz Von Ornsteiner, Jennifer Delora, Andrew Howarth, Michael Downend, Rick Gianasi — whose boring non-acting throughout the entire film (we’re talking porn-star level incompetence here!) makes it all too clear why you never heard of them.
Aside from its possible influence on The Matrix — not only is the plot centered around a race of machines who have enslaved their human creators, but the protagonist is even named Neo! — about the only thing interesting about Robot Holocaust is one genuinely good performance, by Angelika Jager as Valeria, servant of “The Dark One,” the never-seen ruler of New Terra, who’s represented only by a glowing yellow light fixture on the wall and a deep, booming voice (sort of like what HAL would have become if he had survived the events of 2001). Despite her utter inability to say the letter “r” — a speech defect she’s shared with such genuinely talented performers as Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis and Barbara Walters (and for which the MST3K crew ribbed her mercilessly) — Jager is the one genuinely charismatic and appealing performer in the entire film, ably communicating both the character’s true belief in the Dark One’s system and her increasing exasperation as the Dark One starts threatening her for letting the resistance fighters (such as they are) get closer and closer to the “Power Station,” the central headquarters of the Dark One and his minions (and though it’s a cheap cardboard mockup the exterior of the “Power Station” at least looks like one).
There’s also an intriguing subplot of a race of Amazons who seem to embody the worst aspects of radical feminism’s wet dreams: they don’t permit men to enter the kingdom at all, and when one does they use him as a stud service just long enough to reproduce their race (after first cutting out his tongue because, as the leader of this tribe explains, “men talk too much”) and then kill him. The rest of it is just dull, with the various characters (some in human garb, some wearing ill-fitting and tacky-looking robot costumes) walking around, occasionally having at each other with cardboard swords and (except for Jager) delivering their lines with such total absence of expression your average porn performer sounds like Olivier by comparison — and by far the most risible scene is one in which the resistance fighters, on their way into the Power Station, have to go through an underground cave lined with pink serpent-like creatures who, though fixed to the wall, have lethal teeth and a sweet tooth for humans. With a director of Guillermo del Toro’s imagination (and budget!) this might actually have been frightening, but with Tim Kincaid at the helm and his props seemingly limited to what he and his crew could buy at a 99¢ store, the pink monsters are all too obviously sock puppets (though at least his film isn’t quite as tacky as that Sci-Fi Channel Alien ripoff I saw a bit of once, in which the “alien” that burst through the guy’s chest was so obviously a glove you could see the fingers of the person working it through the all too sheer material). Robot Holocaust was so relentlessly dull not even the MST3K crew’s clowning could make it interesting or entertaining!
I started a movie for Charles and I, the next in sequence on his Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with episodes of the Republic serial Radar Men from the Moon (though this one abruptly broke off in the middle — there was even a slide reading “Film Break”! — to make room for the feature): Robot Holocaust, which since it was on the same disc as their take on Robot Monster seemed likely to be a sequel to it, and while the world hardly needed a sequel to Robot Monster, one would have been considerably more fun than Robot Holocaust actually turned out to be. The central premise of Robot Holocaust is that there was an enormous worldwide civil war between humans and their robot creations, and the robots kicked our butts, in the process making the above-ground atmosphere way too toxic for the surviving humans to breathe.
They’ve impressed some of the surviving homo sapiens into being “air slaves,” a job which consists mainly of throwing burlap sacks into giant holes in the floor which supposedly fuels the machines that give the robots their energy, while they’ve made others into gladiators who wrestle ceaselessly in loincloths — which if nothing else at least gave us some nice beefcake views of hot-looking young (or at least youngish) men who were nice fantasy objects. Meanwhile, a race of mutant humans lives out in what’s called the “Wasteland,” a particularly polluted part of Earth (called “New Terra” in this film for some reason, even though it looks like just a badly wrecked version of the same Old Terra to us), where they can dwell above the surface since their bodies have adapted to breathing the otherwise toxic air.
The writer and director is someone named Tim Kincaid (Thomas Kinkade’s black-sheep brother? Their visual senses are actually rather similar), the producers are Charles Band (uncredited) and Cynthia DePaula (the MST3K crew couldn’t resist the temptation to make a pun on her name and DePauw University) and the “V” designating this title on imdb.com makes it seem like this movie went straight to video (and didn’t stay there long; imdb.com lists it as available on VHS but not on DVD), the musical score is by Richard Band (presumably the producer’s brother) and Joel Goldsmith, and the cast is full of a bunch of people you never heard of — Norris Culf, Nadine Hartstein, J. Buzz Von Ornsteiner, Jennifer Delora, Andrew Howarth, Michael Downend, Rick Gianasi — whose boring non-acting throughout the entire film (we’re talking porn-star level incompetence here!) makes it all too clear why you never heard of them.
Aside from its possible influence on The Matrix — not only is the plot centered around a race of machines who have enslaved their human creators, but the protagonist is even named Neo! — about the only thing interesting about Robot Holocaust is one genuinely good performance, by Angelika Jager as Valeria, servant of “The Dark One,” the never-seen ruler of New Terra, who’s represented only by a glowing yellow light fixture on the wall and a deep, booming voice (sort of like what HAL would have become if he had survived the events of 2001). Despite her utter inability to say the letter “r” — a speech defect she’s shared with such genuinely talented performers as Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis and Barbara Walters (and for which the MST3K crew ribbed her mercilessly) — Jager is the one genuinely charismatic and appealing performer in the entire film, ably communicating both the character’s true belief in the Dark One’s system and her increasing exasperation as the Dark One starts threatening her for letting the resistance fighters (such as they are) get closer and closer to the “Power Station,” the central headquarters of the Dark One and his minions (and though it’s a cheap cardboard mockup the exterior of the “Power Station” at least looks like one).
There’s also an intriguing subplot of a race of Amazons who seem to embody the worst aspects of radical feminism’s wet dreams: they don’t permit men to enter the kingdom at all, and when one does they use him as a stud service just long enough to reproduce their race (after first cutting out his tongue because, as the leader of this tribe explains, “men talk too much”) and then kill him. The rest of it is just dull, with the various characters (some in human garb, some wearing ill-fitting and tacky-looking robot costumes) walking around, occasionally having at each other with cardboard swords and (except for Jager) delivering their lines with such total absence of expression your average porn performer sounds like Olivier by comparison — and by far the most risible scene is one in which the resistance fighters, on their way into the Power Station, have to go through an underground cave lined with pink serpent-like creatures who, though fixed to the wall, have lethal teeth and a sweet tooth for humans. With a director of Guillermo del Toro’s imagination (and budget!) this might actually have been frightening, but with Tim Kincaid at the helm and his props seemingly limited to what he and his crew could buy at a 99¢ store, the pink monsters are all too obviously sock puppets (though at least his film isn’t quite as tacky as that Sci-Fi Channel Alien ripoff I saw a bit of once, in which the “alien” that burst through the guy’s chest was so obviously a glove you could see the fingers of the person working it through the all too sheer material). Robot Holocaust was so relentlessly dull not even the MST3K crew’s clowning could make it interesting or entertaining!
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Teen-Age Crime Wave (Clover/Columbia, 1955)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked was Teen-Age Crime Wave (the hyphen is part of the title on the original credits), a Sam Katzman production for Columbia in 1955, directed by Fred Sears from a script by Ray Buffum and Harry Essex — I’d never heard of Buffum before but Essex is a writer with some genuinely respectable genre pieces on his résumé: Kansas City Confidential, The Las Vegas Story, It Came from Outer Space and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them; it’s basically Rebel Without a Cause meets The Desperate Hours.
It opens in a sleazy bar where Freddy (George Cisar), a portly, middle-aged horndog who proves they didn’t break the mold after they made Guy Kibbee, is being cruised by Terry Marsh (Molly McCart), who’s supposed to be a teenager (though the actress, born on February 24, 1929, was already 24 when this film was made, and looked it); she gets him to leave with her and then, once he’s outside the bar, the other members of her gang, her boyfriend Mike Denton (Tommy Cook) and Mike’s friend Al (Jimmy Ogg), jump Freddy and steal his well-filled wallet — only to get caught almost immediately by the cops. Also arrested is Jane Koberly (Sue England), a nice girl who accepted a blind date to go to a movie with Al and proved she was a nice girl by resisting his post-cinematic advances: “Just because you took me to a movie doesn’t mean you own me!” Jane’s dad (James Bell) is willing to listen to her side of the story, but her mom (Helen Brown) washes her hands of her and calls her a “sinner.”
Jane is sentenced to one year in a dreary-sounding institution called the “industrial school,” and I was rather looking forward to seeing it because it sounded so much like something from a Charles Dickens nightmare — only we never get there; after a scene in county jail in which it looks as if Terry (whom the authorities have inexplicably allowed to room with Jane) is going to make a Lesbian pass at Jane and then laments that she’s been sentenced to stay in the “industrial school” until her 21st birthday (which quite frankly from Molly McCart’s appearance looked like ancient history!), Mike runs the car taking them there off the road, kills the sheriff’s deputy who was driving it and attempts to drown the prison matron who was guarding Terry and Jane by pushing the car into a lake — only she gets rescued in time and reports the escape to the police.
Needing a place to hide out pronto, Mike takes them to the farmhouse where Thomas and Sarah Grant (Guy Kingsford and Kay Riehl), a middle-aged couple, live; they’re awaiting the arrival of their son, war hero Ben (Frank Griffin) for Thanksgiving the next day. There follow several reels of the J.D.’s holding the Grants (including sonny boy, when he finally shows up — and seems just as dull, boring and offensive as the bad guys) hostage and terrorizing them, following which they manage to get word to their friend Al (ya remember Al?) to meet them there and take them away and over the border to Mexico, only Al is shot down by the police and the bad guys steal Ben’s car and end up at — of all the possible displays of chutzpah on the part of writers Buffum and Essex — the observatory at Griffith Park, famed as the site of two of the most important sequences in Rebel Without a Cause.
Mike and Ben confront each other in the observatory’s rotating dome (something Nicholas Ray and Stewart Stern never thought of!) and Terry gets shot down — with her dying breath she exonerates Jane, which was dreadfully nice of her — while Mike, who seems to have wanted to die a great big romantic death under a hail of police bullets, seems incredibly disappointed when he’s actually taken alive. The weird thing about Teen-Age Crime Wave is that there are isolated moments in which all the elements click — the dialogue (especially when Mike and Terry are talking about their backgrounds and Mr. Grant is concerned about his sick wife) occasionally hits notes of real pathos and the actors are good enough to make us feel for them — before the script carts them all right back into the familiar grooves of J.D. cliché and the movie takes on an air of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 badness (and I believe MST3K actually did do this one).
The film I picked was Teen-Age Crime Wave (the hyphen is part of the title on the original credits), a Sam Katzman production for Columbia in 1955, directed by Fred Sears from a script by Ray Buffum and Harry Essex — I’d never heard of Buffum before but Essex is a writer with some genuinely respectable genre pieces on his résumé: Kansas City Confidential, The Las Vegas Story, It Came from Outer Space and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them; it’s basically Rebel Without a Cause meets The Desperate Hours.
It opens in a sleazy bar where Freddy (George Cisar), a portly, middle-aged horndog who proves they didn’t break the mold after they made Guy Kibbee, is being cruised by Terry Marsh (Molly McCart), who’s supposed to be a teenager (though the actress, born on February 24, 1929, was already 24 when this film was made, and looked it); she gets him to leave with her and then, once he’s outside the bar, the other members of her gang, her boyfriend Mike Denton (Tommy Cook) and Mike’s friend Al (Jimmy Ogg), jump Freddy and steal his well-filled wallet — only to get caught almost immediately by the cops. Also arrested is Jane Koberly (Sue England), a nice girl who accepted a blind date to go to a movie with Al and proved she was a nice girl by resisting his post-cinematic advances: “Just because you took me to a movie doesn’t mean you own me!” Jane’s dad (James Bell) is willing to listen to her side of the story, but her mom (Helen Brown) washes her hands of her and calls her a “sinner.”
Jane is sentenced to one year in a dreary-sounding institution called the “industrial school,” and I was rather looking forward to seeing it because it sounded so much like something from a Charles Dickens nightmare — only we never get there; after a scene in county jail in which it looks as if Terry (whom the authorities have inexplicably allowed to room with Jane) is going to make a Lesbian pass at Jane and then laments that she’s been sentenced to stay in the “industrial school” until her 21st birthday (which quite frankly from Molly McCart’s appearance looked like ancient history!), Mike runs the car taking them there off the road, kills the sheriff’s deputy who was driving it and attempts to drown the prison matron who was guarding Terry and Jane by pushing the car into a lake — only she gets rescued in time and reports the escape to the police.
Needing a place to hide out pronto, Mike takes them to the farmhouse where Thomas and Sarah Grant (Guy Kingsford and Kay Riehl), a middle-aged couple, live; they’re awaiting the arrival of their son, war hero Ben (Frank Griffin) for Thanksgiving the next day. There follow several reels of the J.D.’s holding the Grants (including sonny boy, when he finally shows up — and seems just as dull, boring and offensive as the bad guys) hostage and terrorizing them, following which they manage to get word to their friend Al (ya remember Al?) to meet them there and take them away and over the border to Mexico, only Al is shot down by the police and the bad guys steal Ben’s car and end up at — of all the possible displays of chutzpah on the part of writers Buffum and Essex — the observatory at Griffith Park, famed as the site of two of the most important sequences in Rebel Without a Cause.
Mike and Ben confront each other in the observatory’s rotating dome (something Nicholas Ray and Stewart Stern never thought of!) and Terry gets shot down — with her dying breath she exonerates Jane, which was dreadfully nice of her — while Mike, who seems to have wanted to die a great big romantic death under a hail of police bullets, seems incredibly disappointed when he’s actually taken alive. The weird thing about Teen-Age Crime Wave is that there are isolated moments in which all the elements click — the dialogue (especially when Mike and Terry are talking about their backgrounds and Mr. Grant is concerned about his sick wife) occasionally hits notes of real pathos and the actors are good enough to make us feel for them — before the script carts them all right back into the familiar grooves of J.D. cliché and the movie takes on an air of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 badness (and I believe MST3K actually did do this one).
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Our Relations (Hal Roach Studios, 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My partner Charles and I finally settled in at about 10:50 and, after looking for a suitably short film, found it in Our Relations, a 1936 Laurel and Hardy comedy feature that was one of the two he made for Hal Roach that were billed as “Stan Laurel Productions.” (As is well known, Oliver Hardy took no creative role in their films — he was just a performer — but Laurel worked with the writing staff before the movies were filmed and also helped edit them afterwards, for which services he was paid twice as much as Hardy was.)
Loosely based on a story by W. W. Jacobs called “The Money Box,” which Felix Adler and Richard Connell turned into an “original” screen story, Jack Jevne and Charles Rogers adapted into a script and Laurel, Mauri Grashin, Clarence Henneke and Harrington Reynolds made uncredited contributions to (then as now, comedies were especially susceptible to the writing-by-committee process on the ground that jokes get funnier if a number of different people in a room are bouncing ideas off each other and offering “toppers” for each other’s gags), this one cast Laurel and Hardy in dual roles: as Stan and Ollie and their no-good twin brothers from Britain, Bert Hardy and Alf Laurel, who ran away to sea after cutting up and establishing themselves as no-goodniks in the small British town where all four were born (so this is one movie in which Stan Laurel is playing his true nationality and Oliver Hardy isn’t!).
Supposedly they were executed following a mutiny, but in fact they’re alive, well and ready to cruise for drink and girls in the small town where Stan and Ollie live with their wives Daphne Hardy (Daphne Pollard) and Betty “Bubbles” Laurel (Betty Healy). (In a nice casting touch, the actress playing Hardy’s wife is a diminutive woman and the one playing Laurel’s wife is a big battle-axe type who towers over him.) The film was directed by Harry Lachman, an obscure figure who was a friend of cinematographer Rudolph Maté, who’d come to the U.S. after shooting The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr for Carl Theodor Dreyer — and who for some reason got work here only because Lachman put him on his movies as a favor, and Maté acquitted himself magnificently in the photography of the Spencer Tracy vehicle Dante’s Inferno at Fox in 1935. Maté also shot Our Relations — a far more prestigious cinematographer than usually associated with Laurel and Hardy (though George Stevens had got his start photographing the early Laurel and Hardy shorts that Leo McCarey directed) — and he got a couple of unusual camera angles into it, including an interesting shot from above as Laurel, Hardy and Arthur Housman (an inebriated husband desperate to call his wife and tell her he’s bringing home some milk) crowd into a phone booth simultaneously in what appears to be Laurel and Hardy’s answer to the stateroom sequence in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera.
All the principals end up at Denker’s Beer Garden, where the manager of the establishment (Alan Hale) is trying to collect a bill Bert and Alf have run up lavishing food and drink on two gold-diggers they’ve picked up there, Alice (Iris Adrian) and Lily (Lona André). Bert and Alf can’t pay it because they’ve given their money for “safe-keeping” to Fin (James Finlayson), a fellow crewman on the S. S. Periwinkle who rips them off by saying that he’ll “invest” their money and make them both millionaires, and when they seek him out and try to get the money back he gets them to undress and traps them both in the room he’s rented at a boarding house — which they flee by dressing in blankets and towels and passing themselves off as Singaporean grandees.
Our Relations isn’t one of the most highly regarded Laurel and Hardy vehicles, and indeed it misses almost as many opportunities as it makes — the two Laurels and Hardys don’t even meet until the final scene, a neat slapstick sequence in which the two have been kidnapped by gangsters (Ralf Harolde and Noel Madison), taken to a dock and had their feet encased in concrete that for some reason developed a convex curve at the bottom so they look and act like those life-size inflatable pop-up dolls that pop back when you punch them. There’s a lot of business involving a pearl ring of appalling tastelessness which the captain of the Periwinkle (Sidney Toler, out of his “Asian” Charlie Chan makeup and almost unrecognizable) asked Bert and Alf to pick up from a delivery person at the ship and then take to Denker’s to give to him there — which, of course, they give to the manager as security for their bill — and of course when Stan and Ollie stumble into Denker’s with their wives, the two floozies accost them and the manager presents them with Bert’s and Alf’s bill and demand that they pay it, giving them the ring that Bert and Alf left for security and which really belongs to the captain.
It’s the sort of movie that has way too much plot to be funny, but the drunk scene with Housman is hilarious and the finale is at least amusing — though too little is made of the obvious mistaken-identity gimmick. (There is one nice shot of a cop doing a double-take when Stan and Ollie walk past him just seconds after the indistinguishable Bert and Alf have done so.) Still, second-rate Laurel and Hardy is still a lot funnier than first-rate just about anybody else (especially in 1936, when after the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields one didn’t have much in the way of great screen comedy — the Three Stooges? The Ritz Brothers? Give me a break! Undoubtedly, though, the funniest film released in the U.S. in 1936 was Chaplin’s masterpiece, Modern Times). It did occur to me that Stan Laurel’s naming his cinematic alter ego Alf might have been a tribute to Alf Goulding, the manager of Fred Karno’s comedy troupe when both Chaplin and Laurel worked for them (and him), and incidentally the brother of director Edmund Goulding.
My partner Charles and I finally settled in at about 10:50 and, after looking for a suitably short film, found it in Our Relations, a 1936 Laurel and Hardy comedy feature that was one of the two he made for Hal Roach that were billed as “Stan Laurel Productions.” (As is well known, Oliver Hardy took no creative role in their films — he was just a performer — but Laurel worked with the writing staff before the movies were filmed and also helped edit them afterwards, for which services he was paid twice as much as Hardy was.)
Loosely based on a story by W. W. Jacobs called “The Money Box,” which Felix Adler and Richard Connell turned into an “original” screen story, Jack Jevne and Charles Rogers adapted into a script and Laurel, Mauri Grashin, Clarence Henneke and Harrington Reynolds made uncredited contributions to (then as now, comedies were especially susceptible to the writing-by-committee process on the ground that jokes get funnier if a number of different people in a room are bouncing ideas off each other and offering “toppers” for each other’s gags), this one cast Laurel and Hardy in dual roles: as Stan and Ollie and their no-good twin brothers from Britain, Bert Hardy and Alf Laurel, who ran away to sea after cutting up and establishing themselves as no-goodniks in the small British town where all four were born (so this is one movie in which Stan Laurel is playing his true nationality and Oliver Hardy isn’t!).
Supposedly they were executed following a mutiny, but in fact they’re alive, well and ready to cruise for drink and girls in the small town where Stan and Ollie live with their wives Daphne Hardy (Daphne Pollard) and Betty “Bubbles” Laurel (Betty Healy). (In a nice casting touch, the actress playing Hardy’s wife is a diminutive woman and the one playing Laurel’s wife is a big battle-axe type who towers over him.) The film was directed by Harry Lachman, an obscure figure who was a friend of cinematographer Rudolph Maté, who’d come to the U.S. after shooting The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr for Carl Theodor Dreyer — and who for some reason got work here only because Lachman put him on his movies as a favor, and Maté acquitted himself magnificently in the photography of the Spencer Tracy vehicle Dante’s Inferno at Fox in 1935. Maté also shot Our Relations — a far more prestigious cinematographer than usually associated with Laurel and Hardy (though George Stevens had got his start photographing the early Laurel and Hardy shorts that Leo McCarey directed) — and he got a couple of unusual camera angles into it, including an interesting shot from above as Laurel, Hardy and Arthur Housman (an inebriated husband desperate to call his wife and tell her he’s bringing home some milk) crowd into a phone booth simultaneously in what appears to be Laurel and Hardy’s answer to the stateroom sequence in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera.
All the principals end up at Denker’s Beer Garden, where the manager of the establishment (Alan Hale) is trying to collect a bill Bert and Alf have run up lavishing food and drink on two gold-diggers they’ve picked up there, Alice (Iris Adrian) and Lily (Lona André). Bert and Alf can’t pay it because they’ve given their money for “safe-keeping” to Fin (James Finlayson), a fellow crewman on the S. S. Periwinkle who rips them off by saying that he’ll “invest” their money and make them both millionaires, and when they seek him out and try to get the money back he gets them to undress and traps them both in the room he’s rented at a boarding house — which they flee by dressing in blankets and towels and passing themselves off as Singaporean grandees.
Our Relations isn’t one of the most highly regarded Laurel and Hardy vehicles, and indeed it misses almost as many opportunities as it makes — the two Laurels and Hardys don’t even meet until the final scene, a neat slapstick sequence in which the two have been kidnapped by gangsters (Ralf Harolde and Noel Madison), taken to a dock and had their feet encased in concrete that for some reason developed a convex curve at the bottom so they look and act like those life-size inflatable pop-up dolls that pop back when you punch them. There’s a lot of business involving a pearl ring of appalling tastelessness which the captain of the Periwinkle (Sidney Toler, out of his “Asian” Charlie Chan makeup and almost unrecognizable) asked Bert and Alf to pick up from a delivery person at the ship and then take to Denker’s to give to him there — which, of course, they give to the manager as security for their bill — and of course when Stan and Ollie stumble into Denker’s with their wives, the two floozies accost them and the manager presents them with Bert’s and Alf’s bill and demand that they pay it, giving them the ring that Bert and Alf left for security and which really belongs to the captain.
It’s the sort of movie that has way too much plot to be funny, but the drunk scene with Housman is hilarious and the finale is at least amusing — though too little is made of the obvious mistaken-identity gimmick. (There is one nice shot of a cop doing a double-take when Stan and Ollie walk past him just seconds after the indistinguishable Bert and Alf have done so.) Still, second-rate Laurel and Hardy is still a lot funnier than first-rate just about anybody else (especially in 1936, when after the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields one didn’t have much in the way of great screen comedy — the Three Stooges? The Ritz Brothers? Give me a break! Undoubtedly, though, the funniest film released in the U.S. in 1936 was Chaplin’s masterpiece, Modern Times). It did occur to me that Stan Laurel’s naming his cinematic alter ego Alf might have been a tribute to Alf Goulding, the manager of Fred Karno’s comedy troupe when both Chaplin and Laurel worked for them (and him), and incidentally the brother of director Edmund Goulding.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Assignment — Paris (Columbia, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
What Charles and I finally ended up watching was Assignment — Paris (the imdb.com listing on the film separates the two words in the title with a colon, but the opening credit clearly indicates a dash, just as well because you can’t use a colon in a file name), a 1952 anti-Communist “thriller” (the word in quotes because one thing this movie was decidedly not was thrilling) made by Columbia from a short story called “Trial of Terror” by Paul and Pauline Gallico (who themselves had been threatened with being blacklisted and probably wrote this story to get themselves off the blacklist much the way Shostakovitch wrote his Fifth Symphony, and called it “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism,” to keep himself out of the gulag), adapted by Walter Goetz and Jack Palmer White with a screenplay by William Bowers — and yes, this seems like a textbook example of my general-field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers.
The central character — though he’s only billed third — is Nicholas Strang (George Sanders), editor of the international edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He’s an unusual Sanders character in that he’s on the side of good, at least politically, though that doesn’t stop him from hitting on the female help; he was formerly in a relationship with secretary Sandy Tate (the marvelous and here underused Audrey Totter) but dumped her when reporter Jeanne Moray (Märta Torén — that’s how imdb.com lists her; the actual credits strip her of her diacriticals) showed up and attracted his attentions instead, and she’s trying to get him to take her seriously as a reporter while he only wants to get in her pants. The top-billed performer in this movie is Dana Andrews, playing hotshot reporter Jimmy Race, newly arrived from the States, and of course he and Jeanne meet-cute when they’re both being kept waiting by the Hungarian ambassador to France and they don’t realize they’re working for the same news organization. They’re there to cover the fate of Paul Anderson, an American accused of espionage by the Hungarian government, whose premier, Andreas Ordy (Herbert Berghof) — the one fictional world leader in the story; all the other countries’ leaders mentioned have their real names — is in the process of breaking with the Soviet Union and allying himself with Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Nonetheless, Ordy is very much a chip off the old Stalinist bloc(k); when the movie opens he appears on Hungarian radio to announce that Anderson has confessed to espionage and been given a 20-year sentence, and the people at the New York Herald-Tribune even get to monitor the broadcast of Anderson’s taped confession, in which he says he’s giving the confession freely and without duress and Dana Andrews’ character snarls, “I’ll bet!” The film alternates between Paris and Budapest and centers around the Hungarian authorities’ search for the mysterious dissident Gabor Czeki (Sandro Giglio), whose miraculous escape from a Hungarian concentration camp while the Hungarian authorities thought he was dead recalls Victor Laszlo from Casablanca (which is about the only aspect of this movie that evokes a film of genuine quality). What neither the heroes nor the villains know until about three-quarters of the way through the movie is that Czeki is hiding in the New York Herald Tribune office as Grisha, the seemingly unimportant and ineffectual office assistant, factotum and comic-relief character — not that there’s much drama in this movie for you to want comic relief from.
Meanwhile, and despite the fact that his predecessor on this assignment was returned badly beaten and near death, Race volunteers to sneak into Budapest to see if he can find out what happened to Anderson (in one of the few interesting inventions of the writing committee, he sends back a coded message mentioning two cemeteries and a famous author of fairy tales, from which Nicholas and Jeanne deduce that Anderson is dead) and also to contact the Hungarian underground and collect a photo of Ordy meeting with Tito — which he does, though there’s no clue on the picture as to the date it was taken. (By now I was expecting them to pull the Call Northside 777 gimmick of having a newspaper in the photo yield the date on which it was taken.) Eventually a couple of Hungarian thugs come to Paris and start shoving people around, including holding Czeki’s children hostage, until they finally flush him out and take him back home — only they’re ambushed by the police and an exchange is arranged by which the Hungarians will get Czeki and the Herald Tribune will get back Race, who in the meantime has been arrested, brainwashed and forced to record his own “confession.” That’s right; though top-billed, Dana Andrews almost totally disappears for the last third of this film, reappearing only at the end and, when the Hungarian authorities turn him over, he looks either hypnotized, drugged or both — but the implication is that he’ll recover, and meanwhile the Western authorities have a piece of information they can hold over Ordy’s head to make sure he and his regime leave Czeki alone and allow him to get on with his life.
Assignment — Paris is one of the most plodding films ever made in its genre; the committee-driven script required the skills of Alfred Hitchcock and got Robert Parrish instead (though imdb.com credits Phil Karlson as second director, indicating that even the “suits” at Columbia realized that Parrish’s work wasn’t cutting the mustard); there are a few noir compositions of heart-stopping beauty that may represent Karlson’s contribution to the film, but other than that the film is quite plainly shot. Charles ridiculed the movie for making tape editing one of the keys to resolving the plot (I don’t recall that, but then I was nodding off on occasion) — which probably in 1952 had the high-tech patina that, say, the computer scene in the first Mission: Impossible movie had to audiences of our time, but also recalled David Sedaris’ comment on how he respected the use of computers to make digital effects shots but resented it when the computers themselves were shown on screen and became part of the plot. Like a lot of the other anti-Communist movies of the time, Assignment — Paris suffers from the fact that Hollywood knew only one way to depict contemporary urban evil: like their Nazi predecessors in World War II-era movies, the Communists in these films behave exactly like the gangsters of the 1930’s crime classics like Little Caesar and Public Enemy, shoving guns around, getting in people’s faces, looking brutal and intimidating and snarling out their lines. (Also, one weird quirk about this movie is that just about everyone playing a Hungarian has really bad hair.)
But what really sinks Assignment — Paris is how dull it is; whatever potentials for excitement and suspense exist in the story are muffed, and Parrish plods along at a soporific pace that plays against Dana Andrews’ acting style and offers George Sanders a chance to chew the scenery — which he does in that delightfully droll way of his that puts the scalp of this film on his well-filled wall of movies he easily stole from the rest of the cast — but doesn’t generate the thrills you expect from a thriller. Charles said that only the professional competence of the acting on this one raised it above Mystery Science Theatre 3000 level; I didn’t dislike it that much, but it was still a disappointment, the sort of bad movie that could easily have been quite good with a bit more coherence in the writing and care in the direction.
What Charles and I finally ended up watching was Assignment — Paris (the imdb.com listing on the film separates the two words in the title with a colon, but the opening credit clearly indicates a dash, just as well because you can’t use a colon in a file name), a 1952 anti-Communist “thriller” (the word in quotes because one thing this movie was decidedly not was thrilling) made by Columbia from a short story called “Trial of Terror” by Paul and Pauline Gallico (who themselves had been threatened with being blacklisted and probably wrote this story to get themselves off the blacklist much the way Shostakovitch wrote his Fifth Symphony, and called it “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism,” to keep himself out of the gulag), adapted by Walter Goetz and Jack Palmer White with a screenplay by William Bowers — and yes, this seems like a textbook example of my general-field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers.
The central character — though he’s only billed third — is Nicholas Strang (George Sanders), editor of the international edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He’s an unusual Sanders character in that he’s on the side of good, at least politically, though that doesn’t stop him from hitting on the female help; he was formerly in a relationship with secretary Sandy Tate (the marvelous and here underused Audrey Totter) but dumped her when reporter Jeanne Moray (Märta Torén — that’s how imdb.com lists her; the actual credits strip her of her diacriticals) showed up and attracted his attentions instead, and she’s trying to get him to take her seriously as a reporter while he only wants to get in her pants. The top-billed performer in this movie is Dana Andrews, playing hotshot reporter Jimmy Race, newly arrived from the States, and of course he and Jeanne meet-cute when they’re both being kept waiting by the Hungarian ambassador to France and they don’t realize they’re working for the same news organization. They’re there to cover the fate of Paul Anderson, an American accused of espionage by the Hungarian government, whose premier, Andreas Ordy (Herbert Berghof) — the one fictional world leader in the story; all the other countries’ leaders mentioned have their real names — is in the process of breaking with the Soviet Union and allying himself with Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Nonetheless, Ordy is very much a chip off the old Stalinist bloc(k); when the movie opens he appears on Hungarian radio to announce that Anderson has confessed to espionage and been given a 20-year sentence, and the people at the New York Herald-Tribune even get to monitor the broadcast of Anderson’s taped confession, in which he says he’s giving the confession freely and without duress and Dana Andrews’ character snarls, “I’ll bet!” The film alternates between Paris and Budapest and centers around the Hungarian authorities’ search for the mysterious dissident Gabor Czeki (Sandro Giglio), whose miraculous escape from a Hungarian concentration camp while the Hungarian authorities thought he was dead recalls Victor Laszlo from Casablanca (which is about the only aspect of this movie that evokes a film of genuine quality). What neither the heroes nor the villains know until about three-quarters of the way through the movie is that Czeki is hiding in the New York Herald Tribune office as Grisha, the seemingly unimportant and ineffectual office assistant, factotum and comic-relief character — not that there’s much drama in this movie for you to want comic relief from.
Meanwhile, and despite the fact that his predecessor on this assignment was returned badly beaten and near death, Race volunteers to sneak into Budapest to see if he can find out what happened to Anderson (in one of the few interesting inventions of the writing committee, he sends back a coded message mentioning two cemeteries and a famous author of fairy tales, from which Nicholas and Jeanne deduce that Anderson is dead) and also to contact the Hungarian underground and collect a photo of Ordy meeting with Tito — which he does, though there’s no clue on the picture as to the date it was taken. (By now I was expecting them to pull the Call Northside 777 gimmick of having a newspaper in the photo yield the date on which it was taken.) Eventually a couple of Hungarian thugs come to Paris and start shoving people around, including holding Czeki’s children hostage, until they finally flush him out and take him back home — only they’re ambushed by the police and an exchange is arranged by which the Hungarians will get Czeki and the Herald Tribune will get back Race, who in the meantime has been arrested, brainwashed and forced to record his own “confession.” That’s right; though top-billed, Dana Andrews almost totally disappears for the last third of this film, reappearing only at the end and, when the Hungarian authorities turn him over, he looks either hypnotized, drugged or both — but the implication is that he’ll recover, and meanwhile the Western authorities have a piece of information they can hold over Ordy’s head to make sure he and his regime leave Czeki alone and allow him to get on with his life.
Assignment — Paris is one of the most plodding films ever made in its genre; the committee-driven script required the skills of Alfred Hitchcock and got Robert Parrish instead (though imdb.com credits Phil Karlson as second director, indicating that even the “suits” at Columbia realized that Parrish’s work wasn’t cutting the mustard); there are a few noir compositions of heart-stopping beauty that may represent Karlson’s contribution to the film, but other than that the film is quite plainly shot. Charles ridiculed the movie for making tape editing one of the keys to resolving the plot (I don’t recall that, but then I was nodding off on occasion) — which probably in 1952 had the high-tech patina that, say, the computer scene in the first Mission: Impossible movie had to audiences of our time, but also recalled David Sedaris’ comment on how he respected the use of computers to make digital effects shots but resented it when the computers themselves were shown on screen and became part of the plot. Like a lot of the other anti-Communist movies of the time, Assignment — Paris suffers from the fact that Hollywood knew only one way to depict contemporary urban evil: like their Nazi predecessors in World War II-era movies, the Communists in these films behave exactly like the gangsters of the 1930’s crime classics like Little Caesar and Public Enemy, shoving guns around, getting in people’s faces, looking brutal and intimidating and snarling out their lines. (Also, one weird quirk about this movie is that just about everyone playing a Hungarian has really bad hair.)
But what really sinks Assignment — Paris is how dull it is; whatever potentials for excitement and suspense exist in the story are muffed, and Parrish plods along at a soporific pace that plays against Dana Andrews’ acting style and offers George Sanders a chance to chew the scenery — which he does in that delightfully droll way of his that puts the scalp of this film on his well-filled wall of movies he easily stole from the rest of the cast — but doesn’t generate the thrills you expect from a thriller. Charles said that only the professional competence of the acting on this one raised it above Mystery Science Theatre 3000 level; I didn’t dislike it that much, but it was still a disappointment, the sort of bad movie that could easily have been quite good with a bit more coherence in the writing and care in the direction.
The Slime People (Independent, 1963)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My partner Charles and I squeezed in a movie before we went to bed, only we quite frankly needn’t have bothered! It was the next in sequence on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 disc that included the latest Radar Men from the Moon serial episode (number 6, “Hills of Death” — one quickly gets the idea about the writers’ obsessions and the genre conventions from how often the word “Death” appears in serial chapter titles) from Republic and a really horrible movie called The Slime People from independent sources, produced by Joseph F. Robertson and directed by Robert Hutton, who also cast himself in the leading role of Tom Gregory, TV newscaster who allies himself with scientist Prof. Galbraith (Robert Burton) and his two pretty young daughters Lisa (Susan Hart) and Bonnie (Judee Morton) to fight the titular menace, a group of monsters that look sort of like a combination crawfish and lizard — though, since they’re being played by humans (Jock Putnam and Fred Stromsoe) in very bad monster suits, they walk upright and their human faces are all too visible through their monster makeup.
The gimmick is that these monsters came from beneath the earth and lived inside the ground — hence their (alleged) sliminess — and also they have the ability to harden water to the consistency of rock and get it to stay that way at normal, well-above-freezing temperatures (so the writers of this film, Blair Robertson and Vance Skarstedt, thought of something similar to “ice-nine” two years before Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. published Cat’s Cradle!). The film opens with a head-on shot of the monsters emerging from the bowels of the earth — a bit surprising in a film of this genre since we’re used to a slow build-up giving exposition and establishing suspense before we find what the monsters look like, but in this case it’s explained by the fact that another side effect of the Slime People’s attack strategy is to cover everything in dense fog, to the point where through most of this movie we’re looking at a basically grey screen in which vaguely shaped blobs — some human, some slimy — are moving about and doing actions discernible only with great difficulty.
The slime people have supposedly annihilated all of L.A. except for our central characters — the ones mentioned above; Cal Johnson (William Boyce), a U.S. Marine who’s been wandering around the countryside; and Norman Tolliver (Les Tremayne, second-billed), a prize-winning author who resolutely refuses to believe in the slime people — indeed, is planning to write a book about the mass delusion that they exist — until, predictably, they eat him in the course of the film. (It’s a pity to lose him because he’s the only interesting character in the film.) Eventually the slime people start dying for reasons as mysterious as the ones that launched their attack in the first place — all while the human characters are holed up in a TV studio, which is different, to say the least — and Tom and Lisa are paired off, as are Cal and Bonnie. This was one of those films that was so bad — so unutterably dull — that even the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew couldn’t work their magic on it; when one of the MST3K robots asked, “Why was this film made?,” that was our question exactly …
My partner Charles and I squeezed in a movie before we went to bed, only we quite frankly needn’t have bothered! It was the next in sequence on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 disc that included the latest Radar Men from the Moon serial episode (number 6, “Hills of Death” — one quickly gets the idea about the writers’ obsessions and the genre conventions from how often the word “Death” appears in serial chapter titles) from Republic and a really horrible movie called The Slime People from independent sources, produced by Joseph F. Robertson and directed by Robert Hutton, who also cast himself in the leading role of Tom Gregory, TV newscaster who allies himself with scientist Prof. Galbraith (Robert Burton) and his two pretty young daughters Lisa (Susan Hart) and Bonnie (Judee Morton) to fight the titular menace, a group of monsters that look sort of like a combination crawfish and lizard — though, since they’re being played by humans (Jock Putnam and Fred Stromsoe) in very bad monster suits, they walk upright and their human faces are all too visible through their monster makeup.
The gimmick is that these monsters came from beneath the earth and lived inside the ground — hence their (alleged) sliminess — and also they have the ability to harden water to the consistency of rock and get it to stay that way at normal, well-above-freezing temperatures (so the writers of this film, Blair Robertson and Vance Skarstedt, thought of something similar to “ice-nine” two years before Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. published Cat’s Cradle!). The film opens with a head-on shot of the monsters emerging from the bowels of the earth — a bit surprising in a film of this genre since we’re used to a slow build-up giving exposition and establishing suspense before we find what the monsters look like, but in this case it’s explained by the fact that another side effect of the Slime People’s attack strategy is to cover everything in dense fog, to the point where through most of this movie we’re looking at a basically grey screen in which vaguely shaped blobs — some human, some slimy — are moving about and doing actions discernible only with great difficulty.
The slime people have supposedly annihilated all of L.A. except for our central characters — the ones mentioned above; Cal Johnson (William Boyce), a U.S. Marine who’s been wandering around the countryside; and Norman Tolliver (Les Tremayne, second-billed), a prize-winning author who resolutely refuses to believe in the slime people — indeed, is planning to write a book about the mass delusion that they exist — until, predictably, they eat him in the course of the film. (It’s a pity to lose him because he’s the only interesting character in the film.) Eventually the slime people start dying for reasons as mysterious as the ones that launched their attack in the first place — all while the human characters are holed up in a TV studio, which is different, to say the least — and Tom and Lisa are paired off, as are Cal and Bonnie. This was one of those films that was so bad — so unutterably dull — that even the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew couldn’t work their magic on it; when one of the MST3K robots asked, “Why was this film made?,” that was our question exactly …
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Number Seventeen (British International, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Earlier in the evening, after I got back from the Rainbow Congress, I watched one of the Hitchcock videotapes I bought last week at the Wherehouse: Number Seventeen, an odd 1932 film from one of his rare career slumps, when he was burned out working for John Maxwell at British International and Maxwell shoved him this horrible old stage play as his next project just to be perverse. (Ironically, the movie Hitchcock wanted to direct at that particular time was a romantic drama, John van Druten’s London Wall, and not a thriller at all!)
According to the credits, Number Seventeen (the play) was written by J. Jefferson Farjeon and “presented” by Leon M. Lion (an interesting name, to be sure), who is also the star of the film and therefore presumably was an actor/manager who commissioned this dreadfully stagebound drama as a vehicle for himself. Number Seventeen might be described as Hitchcock’s The Old Dark House, with its similar old-house setting — though the reason the characters in Number Seventeen have gathered together in the deserted residence whose address gives the film its name, involving a stolen necklace which both the original thieves and a couple of detectives (one male and one female) are trying to recover, is a much more prosaic one than the oddly assorted motives guiding the marvelously eccentric characters in Whale’s film — and its similarly nervy imbalance between comedy and thrills. (Interestingly, on his next film, Lord Camber’s Ladies — Hitchcock’s last British International project — Hitchcock worked with Old Dark House screenwriter Benn W. Levy, on a film Hitch merely produced and Levy directed.) John Russell Taylor interpreted Number Seventeen as a comedy, an intentional spoof on this type of thriller in which Hitch, his wife Alma Reville and their friend, screenwriter Rodney Ackland:
“ … decided to get their own back by tearing the play apart and piling nonsense on nonsense until no one could take it seriously. The talky, stagy bit of the film … is actually shot with some enterprise and imagination — long moving-camera shots, a lot of chiaroscuro, dark shadows and flashing lights. Which all serves to highlight the general ludicrousness of the plot, where everybody is in the dark all the time, no one knows who are the good guys and who are the bad, and people keep saying things like, ‘Just like the pictures, isn’t it?’ as one melodramatic absurdity is piled on another. Gleefully elaborating, Hitch and Ackland decided that since the heroine in such stories is always pretty dumb anyway, they would go one stage further and make this heroine completely, literally dumb. And when at the end she suddenly proves able to speak, obviously no explanation is necessary other than the hero’s crisp dismissal of it as ‘some crook’s trick.’ Despite which, nobody it seemed noticed what Hitch was up to: the front office accepted the film as a routine thriller, no better or worse than most such, and no one else tumbled to the parodistic intent — a Hitchcock private joke which really remained private.”
If Number Seventeen was genuinely intended as a parody, the fact was Hitchcock simply wasn’t an assured enough director to pull it off at that time. The “enterprise and imagination” Taylor refers to seems less an organic part of Hitchcock’s approach to the story and more bits of high style grafted onto a story the director didn’t care a fig about just to relieve his boredom with the film as a whole. Also, the supposedly mute girl is not the heroine, but rather one of the villains, though she turns good at the end — and since she reveals her ability to speak midway through the movie instead of at its end, and given that it’s as much a surprise to the bad guys as to the good guys, it’s anybody’s guess what purpose her pose as a mute served her or anyone else.
This film looks backwards to such Old Dark House precursors as The Cat and the Canary and The Bat (and shamelessly copies The Bat’s ending, as the chief villain pretends to be a detective to escape capture — only to be caught by the real detective), but also forwards to such Hitchcock masterpieces as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. After running two-thirds of its length inside that dreadfully boring house at Number Seventeen (we’re never told what street it’s number 17 of) — a house which just happens to be located next to a major train station, which gave Hitch an excuse to cut from the heroine’s scream to a train whistle (as he did much more powerfully in The 39 Steps) — the film suddenly becomes a long chase sequence through the south of England, in which the villains are on a train to Germany (via a giant cross-Channel ferry large and massive enough to carry a whole train — such a ferry had just opened and Hitch capitalized on the novelty of it) and the hero commandeers a bus (with a full load of passengers) and has it chase the train. (Thus it turns out that Sabotage wasn’t the only Hitchcock movie the makers of Speed ripped off!)
Most of the chase is done with models (and quite obvious ones, at that), but it’s still easily the most exciting scene in the movie, and it evokes The Lady Vanishes not only in the by-play on and around the train but also in the way the woman involved in the villain’s plot shifts loyalties with a kind of bittersweet sadness that indicated she was pretty much a decent person after all. Eventually there’s an exciting climax as the speeding train (the crooks have shot the engineer and fireman, and have no idea how to run the train themselves) crashes into the cross-Channel ferry because it’s running far too fast to slow down and board the ferry the way it’s supposed to — and the hero’s dumb (not in the sense of unable to speak; more in the sense of unable to think) assistant turns out to have the stolen necklace (remember the stolen necklace?) literally on him (wearing it around his neck, under his coat, to conceal it from the villains). It’s a pretty good Hitchcock movie after all, though a far cry from the near-masterpieces of his early period (The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder, Rich and Strange) — something more like Stage Fright, actually, made 18 years later but at a time when Hitch was in a similar “holding pattern” in his career, working for a studio where he felt uncomfortable and “running for cover” with a conventional story in which he tried to insert some unconventional techniques. — 5/31/95
•••••
The film we watched was Number Seventeen, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s unhappiest assignments during one of the greatest mistakes of his career: his five-year (1927 to 1932) association with John Maxwell’s British International Pictures. Hitchcock made his first films as a director — including his breakthrough film, The Lodger (1926) — for Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough company, and after their success Maxwell lured Hitchcock away with a far better offer financially than Balcon could afford to pay him. Unfortunately, the big (at least by British standards) money came with severe restrictions on what Hitchcock could do and forced him to accept some highly uncongenial assignments, including dubious “comedies” like The Farmer’s Wife and highly theatrical filmed plays like Juno and the Paycock and The Skin Game.
Hitchcock did manage to make two first-rate films at BIP, Blackmail (1929) and the awesome Rich and Strange (1931), but for the most part he was laboring in the salt mines there and a number of his BIP credits (including the framing sequences for their 1930 musical revue Elstree Calling and the 1932 film Lord Camber’s Ladies, which Hitchcock produced and Benn W. Levy, usually a writer, directed) didn’t end up on his official résumé. After his masterpiece Rich and Strange was a box-office flop, Maxwell punished Hitchcock by taking him off the company’s prestige production of John Van Druten’s hit play London Wall and instead assigning him to make Number Seventeen, which at 63 minutes’ running time was little better than a “quota quickie” based on a stage play by J. Jefferson Farjeon that had been a vehicle for character actor Leon M. Lion, who had not only starred in the stage production but had produced it as well. (He’s credited as the stage producer in the film version, in which he repeats his on-stage role.)
Stuck with a story he didn’t want to do and which made virtually no sense — the title refers to a now-closed residence which a bunch of jewel thieves are using as a base of operations while they try to smuggle a stolen necklace out of the country, an undercover detective is after them and Ben (Leon M. Lion), a homeless tramp, ends up mixed up in it when he picks That House to squat in and he and a mysterious stranger (John Stuart) discover a (presumably) dead body on the house’s inside stairs — Hitchcock took refuge in sheer style. The opening sequence is pure Gothic, full of nighttime shadows and eerie lighting through banisters, with a camera in almost constant motion and the kind of rapid-fire cutting Hitchcock would make better use of in his later, greater films. There’s also an effective musical underscore by Adolph Hallis and virtually no dialogue — this film is seven minutes into its running time before any audible speech is heard.
Alas, once the people do start talking the film’s quality dips precipitously: Leon M. Lion’s role is clearly a comic-relief part inflated into the lead because (on stage, at least) he was paying the bills — and he’s so broad he’ll leave you wishing for the relative subtlety of Frank McHugh — and the rest of the males in the cast tend to look alike, not only making them difficult to tell apart (especially in the washed-out prints that have survived, despite the multiplicity of credits on the front of this version — the French Studio Canal, British Film Institute and Peiper-Heidseck champagne company all claimed partial credit for the restoration job, which sounds like a whole lot of cooks trying to resuscitate this weak broth) but also adding to the confusion Farjeon seems to have been out to foster deliberately, since his plot turns on us not knowing until the end quite who everyone is.
The “murdered” man in the opening, who’s supposedly the father of the heroine (Anne Grey), turns up alive midway through and is played by Garry Marsh; he claims to be Barton, the undercover detective after the jewel robbers, but he’s really Sheldrake, the mastermind of the theft, and he’s “outed” by John Stuart, whom we’ve first believed was an innocent bystander, then were led to believe was one of the gang and who turns out to be Barton himself. What’s more, one of the robbers, Mr. Ackroyd (Henry Caine), has a female companion with the same last name (wife or grown daughter? Farjeon and the film’s scenarists — Hitchcock himself, Alma Reville a.k.a. Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock, and Rodney Ackland — never bother to tell us) who spends a reel or two pretending to be mute before it’s revealed that she can actually talk, though what purpose her masquerade as a mute served either the criminals or anyone else remains a mystery.
Eventually all the principals end up on a German train that runs across the English Channel on a large ferry — apparently Number Seventeen, the house where all this started, connects to a train station in its basement so all the people have to do to catch the train is to walk downstairs and keep walking; and what’s more, the tickets to the train are elaborately decorated playing cards with “Number Seventeen” written on them in script (?) — and there’s a 20-minute chase sequence that’s genuinely exciting and well cut but would be more exciting if a) the closeups of people fighting on top of the train weren’t obviously process shots on a stationary set with the background moving behind the actors, b) the long shots of the train racing to the ferry and a bus the (real) detective has commandeered to give chase to it weren’t so obviously models — and bad models at that; it looks like they were made by a nine-year-old and when the train “crashes” at the end it’s clear they were made of balsa wood so they would break picturesquely, and c) Hitchcock had deployed composer Hallis to write music for this scene as well as for the opening (as it is, it looks like John Maxwell just ran out of money in his music budget and sent the poor composer home).
Number Seventeen actually has some germs of ideas Hitchcock used far better later — the shock cut of a train setting off as its whistle is heard on the soundtrack (The 39 Steps), the heart-stopping action climax of the catastrophic train crash (The Secret Agent), and even the gimmick later used so beautifully in Notorious of having the object everyone’s after be hidden in a wine bottle: here it’s in a shipment of wines Ben the homeless guy stumbles upon in the ferry’s hold, starts drinking and notices the necklace in one bottle like a Cracker Jack prize. It’s not much of a movie but it is dorky fun at times. — 6/18/08
Earlier in the evening, after I got back from the Rainbow Congress, I watched one of the Hitchcock videotapes I bought last week at the Wherehouse: Number Seventeen, an odd 1932 film from one of his rare career slumps, when he was burned out working for John Maxwell at British International and Maxwell shoved him this horrible old stage play as his next project just to be perverse. (Ironically, the movie Hitchcock wanted to direct at that particular time was a romantic drama, John van Druten’s London Wall, and not a thriller at all!)
According to the credits, Number Seventeen (the play) was written by J. Jefferson Farjeon and “presented” by Leon M. Lion (an interesting name, to be sure), who is also the star of the film and therefore presumably was an actor/manager who commissioned this dreadfully stagebound drama as a vehicle for himself. Number Seventeen might be described as Hitchcock’s The Old Dark House, with its similar old-house setting — though the reason the characters in Number Seventeen have gathered together in the deserted residence whose address gives the film its name, involving a stolen necklace which both the original thieves and a couple of detectives (one male and one female) are trying to recover, is a much more prosaic one than the oddly assorted motives guiding the marvelously eccentric characters in Whale’s film — and its similarly nervy imbalance between comedy and thrills. (Interestingly, on his next film, Lord Camber’s Ladies — Hitchcock’s last British International project — Hitchcock worked with Old Dark House screenwriter Benn W. Levy, on a film Hitch merely produced and Levy directed.) John Russell Taylor interpreted Number Seventeen as a comedy, an intentional spoof on this type of thriller in which Hitch, his wife Alma Reville and their friend, screenwriter Rodney Ackland:
“ … decided to get their own back by tearing the play apart and piling nonsense on nonsense until no one could take it seriously. The talky, stagy bit of the film … is actually shot with some enterprise and imagination — long moving-camera shots, a lot of chiaroscuro, dark shadows and flashing lights. Which all serves to highlight the general ludicrousness of the plot, where everybody is in the dark all the time, no one knows who are the good guys and who are the bad, and people keep saying things like, ‘Just like the pictures, isn’t it?’ as one melodramatic absurdity is piled on another. Gleefully elaborating, Hitch and Ackland decided that since the heroine in such stories is always pretty dumb anyway, they would go one stage further and make this heroine completely, literally dumb. And when at the end she suddenly proves able to speak, obviously no explanation is necessary other than the hero’s crisp dismissal of it as ‘some crook’s trick.’ Despite which, nobody it seemed noticed what Hitch was up to: the front office accepted the film as a routine thriller, no better or worse than most such, and no one else tumbled to the parodistic intent — a Hitchcock private joke which really remained private.”
If Number Seventeen was genuinely intended as a parody, the fact was Hitchcock simply wasn’t an assured enough director to pull it off at that time. The “enterprise and imagination” Taylor refers to seems less an organic part of Hitchcock’s approach to the story and more bits of high style grafted onto a story the director didn’t care a fig about just to relieve his boredom with the film as a whole. Also, the supposedly mute girl is not the heroine, but rather one of the villains, though she turns good at the end — and since she reveals her ability to speak midway through the movie instead of at its end, and given that it’s as much a surprise to the bad guys as to the good guys, it’s anybody’s guess what purpose her pose as a mute served her or anyone else.
This film looks backwards to such Old Dark House precursors as The Cat and the Canary and The Bat (and shamelessly copies The Bat’s ending, as the chief villain pretends to be a detective to escape capture — only to be caught by the real detective), but also forwards to such Hitchcock masterpieces as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. After running two-thirds of its length inside that dreadfully boring house at Number Seventeen (we’re never told what street it’s number 17 of) — a house which just happens to be located next to a major train station, which gave Hitch an excuse to cut from the heroine’s scream to a train whistle (as he did much more powerfully in The 39 Steps) — the film suddenly becomes a long chase sequence through the south of England, in which the villains are on a train to Germany (via a giant cross-Channel ferry large and massive enough to carry a whole train — such a ferry had just opened and Hitch capitalized on the novelty of it) and the hero commandeers a bus (with a full load of passengers) and has it chase the train. (Thus it turns out that Sabotage wasn’t the only Hitchcock movie the makers of Speed ripped off!)
Most of the chase is done with models (and quite obvious ones, at that), but it’s still easily the most exciting scene in the movie, and it evokes The Lady Vanishes not only in the by-play on and around the train but also in the way the woman involved in the villain’s plot shifts loyalties with a kind of bittersweet sadness that indicated she was pretty much a decent person after all. Eventually there’s an exciting climax as the speeding train (the crooks have shot the engineer and fireman, and have no idea how to run the train themselves) crashes into the cross-Channel ferry because it’s running far too fast to slow down and board the ferry the way it’s supposed to — and the hero’s dumb (not in the sense of unable to speak; more in the sense of unable to think) assistant turns out to have the stolen necklace (remember the stolen necklace?) literally on him (wearing it around his neck, under his coat, to conceal it from the villains). It’s a pretty good Hitchcock movie after all, though a far cry from the near-masterpieces of his early period (The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder, Rich and Strange) — something more like Stage Fright, actually, made 18 years later but at a time when Hitch was in a similar “holding pattern” in his career, working for a studio where he felt uncomfortable and “running for cover” with a conventional story in which he tried to insert some unconventional techniques. — 5/31/95
•••••
The film we watched was Number Seventeen, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s unhappiest assignments during one of the greatest mistakes of his career: his five-year (1927 to 1932) association with John Maxwell’s British International Pictures. Hitchcock made his first films as a director — including his breakthrough film, The Lodger (1926) — for Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough company, and after their success Maxwell lured Hitchcock away with a far better offer financially than Balcon could afford to pay him. Unfortunately, the big (at least by British standards) money came with severe restrictions on what Hitchcock could do and forced him to accept some highly uncongenial assignments, including dubious “comedies” like The Farmer’s Wife and highly theatrical filmed plays like Juno and the Paycock and The Skin Game.
Hitchcock did manage to make two first-rate films at BIP, Blackmail (1929) and the awesome Rich and Strange (1931), but for the most part he was laboring in the salt mines there and a number of his BIP credits (including the framing sequences for their 1930 musical revue Elstree Calling and the 1932 film Lord Camber’s Ladies, which Hitchcock produced and Benn W. Levy, usually a writer, directed) didn’t end up on his official résumé. After his masterpiece Rich and Strange was a box-office flop, Maxwell punished Hitchcock by taking him off the company’s prestige production of John Van Druten’s hit play London Wall and instead assigning him to make Number Seventeen, which at 63 minutes’ running time was little better than a “quota quickie” based on a stage play by J. Jefferson Farjeon that had been a vehicle for character actor Leon M. Lion, who had not only starred in the stage production but had produced it as well. (He’s credited as the stage producer in the film version, in which he repeats his on-stage role.)
Stuck with a story he didn’t want to do and which made virtually no sense — the title refers to a now-closed residence which a bunch of jewel thieves are using as a base of operations while they try to smuggle a stolen necklace out of the country, an undercover detective is after them and Ben (Leon M. Lion), a homeless tramp, ends up mixed up in it when he picks That House to squat in and he and a mysterious stranger (John Stuart) discover a (presumably) dead body on the house’s inside stairs — Hitchcock took refuge in sheer style. The opening sequence is pure Gothic, full of nighttime shadows and eerie lighting through banisters, with a camera in almost constant motion and the kind of rapid-fire cutting Hitchcock would make better use of in his later, greater films. There’s also an effective musical underscore by Adolph Hallis and virtually no dialogue — this film is seven minutes into its running time before any audible speech is heard.
Alas, once the people do start talking the film’s quality dips precipitously: Leon M. Lion’s role is clearly a comic-relief part inflated into the lead because (on stage, at least) he was paying the bills — and he’s so broad he’ll leave you wishing for the relative subtlety of Frank McHugh — and the rest of the males in the cast tend to look alike, not only making them difficult to tell apart (especially in the washed-out prints that have survived, despite the multiplicity of credits on the front of this version — the French Studio Canal, British Film Institute and Peiper-Heidseck champagne company all claimed partial credit for the restoration job, which sounds like a whole lot of cooks trying to resuscitate this weak broth) but also adding to the confusion Farjeon seems to have been out to foster deliberately, since his plot turns on us not knowing until the end quite who everyone is.
The “murdered” man in the opening, who’s supposedly the father of the heroine (Anne Grey), turns up alive midway through and is played by Garry Marsh; he claims to be Barton, the undercover detective after the jewel robbers, but he’s really Sheldrake, the mastermind of the theft, and he’s “outed” by John Stuart, whom we’ve first believed was an innocent bystander, then were led to believe was one of the gang and who turns out to be Barton himself. What’s more, one of the robbers, Mr. Ackroyd (Henry Caine), has a female companion with the same last name (wife or grown daughter? Farjeon and the film’s scenarists — Hitchcock himself, Alma Reville a.k.a. Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock, and Rodney Ackland — never bother to tell us) who spends a reel or two pretending to be mute before it’s revealed that she can actually talk, though what purpose her masquerade as a mute served either the criminals or anyone else remains a mystery.
Eventually all the principals end up on a German train that runs across the English Channel on a large ferry — apparently Number Seventeen, the house where all this started, connects to a train station in its basement so all the people have to do to catch the train is to walk downstairs and keep walking; and what’s more, the tickets to the train are elaborately decorated playing cards with “Number Seventeen” written on them in script (?) — and there’s a 20-minute chase sequence that’s genuinely exciting and well cut but would be more exciting if a) the closeups of people fighting on top of the train weren’t obviously process shots on a stationary set with the background moving behind the actors, b) the long shots of the train racing to the ferry and a bus the (real) detective has commandeered to give chase to it weren’t so obviously models — and bad models at that; it looks like they were made by a nine-year-old and when the train “crashes” at the end it’s clear they were made of balsa wood so they would break picturesquely, and c) Hitchcock had deployed composer Hallis to write music for this scene as well as for the opening (as it is, it looks like John Maxwell just ran out of money in his music budget and sent the poor composer home).
Number Seventeen actually has some germs of ideas Hitchcock used far better later — the shock cut of a train setting off as its whistle is heard on the soundtrack (The 39 Steps), the heart-stopping action climax of the catastrophic train crash (The Secret Agent), and even the gimmick later used so beautifully in Notorious of having the object everyone’s after be hidden in a wine bottle: here it’s in a shipment of wines Ben the homeless guy stumbles upon in the ferry’s hold, starts drinking and notices the necklace in one bottle like a Cracker Jack prize. It’s not much of a movie but it is dorky fun at times. — 6/18/08
Election Day (Arts Engine/PBS, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday I went to the San Diego Public Library for a showing of what turned out to be an uncommonly interesting documentary — a good deal better than I thought it was going to be from the promo — called Election Day, a story of the Presidential election day of November 2, 2004. The overall direction was by Katy Chevigny, though by the very nature of her project — a series of scenes taken on one day in widely varying locations (11 cities, towns and communities across the country — she could be involved in very little of the actual shooting and most of her “directorial” work was in post-production, picking out the most interesting shots and weaving them together in the kind of temporal tapestry she wanted.
The film isn’t hysterical and doesn’t get up on a soapbox screaming fraud about how the election (or American elections in general) was run, but Chevigny — who said in a director’s note on her Web site that when she began editing “I had become inspired by Spencer Overton’s book ‘Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression,’ which illuminates patterns in many of these devilish details that our footage, and now the film, reveals,” she manages to work some of this perspective into her movie. “A former member of the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, Spencer Overton explains how seemingly insignificant practices at the local level can control the outcome of elections and weaken the real power of voters.” Chevigny wrote. “As an advisor to Election Day, Spencer screened footage and threw ideas around with us, providing valuable insights into how our footage fit into a larger picture of the election system pressure points that are under scrutiny today.”
We see some fascinating insights into how the election system works — or doesn’t — including an insurgent African-American sheriff’s candidate in Gadsden County, Florida (site of some of the worst abuses in the 2000 election, including 12 percent of all the county’s ballots being rejected as defective) squeaking out a victory by 70 votes over a white-cracker type so perfect they might as well have ordered him from Central Casting; and a reservation in South Dakota where Democratic operatives (though the only way we know they’re Democrats is their literature urges a vote for Tom Daschle) encourage people to vote both in the national election and in their tribal election the same day, and one man says he’s only going to vote in the tribal election because he doesn’t trust anyone in Washington and if they were trustworthy the Native Americans would still own all the Black Hills.
The “star,” to the extent this film has one, is an almost maniacally determined Republican operative in Chicago named Jim Fuchs, who’s leading a squad of observers to pop into polling places and make sure the election is being conducted fairly. He nearly gets a Democratic poll watcher at one precinct arrested for sitting at the same table with the poll workers (apparently illegal under Illinois law) and has a hissy-fit at his own precinct when he becomes convinced that the Votomatic unit he’s been given is defective because his pin-pricker won’t go through to cast his vote for Bush. (One of the election officials later demonstrates that, whatever went wrong with it in Fuchs’ hands, when they do it the unit is working fine.) It's not at all surprising that the credit roll at the end informs us that Fuchs is now running for the Illinois State Senate himself.
Indeed, one genuine surprise in this movie is how, even though the Votomatic system was blamed for the abuses and failures in Florida in 2000 and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was designed, among other things, to phase them out completely, all but about two of the jurisdictions shown in the film were still using it (and nobody was using those paper-less touch-screens in-person voters had to deal with in this county, which in 2004 were being hailed as the wave of the future and by 2008 had been pretty well discredited).
The most chilling part of the film was hearing Fuchs and one other person — a matronly-looking woman who ran one of the polling places in the fabled “battleground state” of Ohio — describe voting as a “privilege,” not a right. They were quite explicit about this (the woman said she considered it a “privilege” to be a U.S. citizen as well), which was frightening given that the legal definition of a “privilege” is something the government bestows upon you and can take away under whatever circumstances they choose (driving a car is the classic legal example of a “privilege” in this sense), whereas a right is inalienable.
There are also characters such as the Australian (an aborigine? She looks awfully dark and flat-nosed to be white) who’s sent over from an international NGO to observe the balloting in Ohio (and comes away with the impression that the vote was more or less fair but there were things she was concerned about) and the African-American man in New York who’s a convicted felon who’s just completed his parole and is looking forward to voting for his first time in middle age — but whose vote isn’t counted because someone forgot to process his registration. (He’s contrasted to an even older African-American with a felony conviction who’s working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and is pissed that, as is well known, Florida never restores the voting rights of felons unless they make special application to the government and win an elaborate approval process.)
All in all, Election Day is an oddly moving film, sensitive to the power of the ritual of election day (which I somewhat miss since I’ve been voting by mail — it’s easier and surer but somehow the collective coming-together to exercise the franchise has important ritual significance; as Chevigny said in her notes, “Election Day is one of the few days in the United States on which so many Americans are collectively engaged in a common activity” — only, increasingly, they don’t) and managing to get us to care about a surprising number of people given what a wide canvas they’re depicting and what a short running time (84 minutes) they have to depict it.
Yesterday I went to the San Diego Public Library for a showing of what turned out to be an uncommonly interesting documentary — a good deal better than I thought it was going to be from the promo — called Election Day, a story of the Presidential election day of November 2, 2004. The overall direction was by Katy Chevigny, though by the very nature of her project — a series of scenes taken on one day in widely varying locations (11 cities, towns and communities across the country — she could be involved in very little of the actual shooting and most of her “directorial” work was in post-production, picking out the most interesting shots and weaving them together in the kind of temporal tapestry she wanted.
The film isn’t hysterical and doesn’t get up on a soapbox screaming fraud about how the election (or American elections in general) was run, but Chevigny — who said in a director’s note on her Web site that when she began editing “I had become inspired by Spencer Overton’s book ‘Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression,’ which illuminates patterns in many of these devilish details that our footage, and now the film, reveals,” she manages to work some of this perspective into her movie. “A former member of the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, Spencer Overton explains how seemingly insignificant practices at the local level can control the outcome of elections and weaken the real power of voters.” Chevigny wrote. “As an advisor to Election Day, Spencer screened footage and threw ideas around with us, providing valuable insights into how our footage fit into a larger picture of the election system pressure points that are under scrutiny today.”
We see some fascinating insights into how the election system works — or doesn’t — including an insurgent African-American sheriff’s candidate in Gadsden County, Florida (site of some of the worst abuses in the 2000 election, including 12 percent of all the county’s ballots being rejected as defective) squeaking out a victory by 70 votes over a white-cracker type so perfect they might as well have ordered him from Central Casting; and a reservation in South Dakota where Democratic operatives (though the only way we know they’re Democrats is their literature urges a vote for Tom Daschle) encourage people to vote both in the national election and in their tribal election the same day, and one man says he’s only going to vote in the tribal election because he doesn’t trust anyone in Washington and if they were trustworthy the Native Americans would still own all the Black Hills.
The “star,” to the extent this film has one, is an almost maniacally determined Republican operative in Chicago named Jim Fuchs, who’s leading a squad of observers to pop into polling places and make sure the election is being conducted fairly. He nearly gets a Democratic poll watcher at one precinct arrested for sitting at the same table with the poll workers (apparently illegal under Illinois law) and has a hissy-fit at his own precinct when he becomes convinced that the Votomatic unit he’s been given is defective because his pin-pricker won’t go through to cast his vote for Bush. (One of the election officials later demonstrates that, whatever went wrong with it in Fuchs’ hands, when they do it the unit is working fine.) It's not at all surprising that the credit roll at the end informs us that Fuchs is now running for the Illinois State Senate himself.
Indeed, one genuine surprise in this movie is how, even though the Votomatic system was blamed for the abuses and failures in Florida in 2000 and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was designed, among other things, to phase them out completely, all but about two of the jurisdictions shown in the film were still using it (and nobody was using those paper-less touch-screens in-person voters had to deal with in this county, which in 2004 were being hailed as the wave of the future and by 2008 had been pretty well discredited).
The most chilling part of the film was hearing Fuchs and one other person — a matronly-looking woman who ran one of the polling places in the fabled “battleground state” of Ohio — describe voting as a “privilege,” not a right. They were quite explicit about this (the woman said she considered it a “privilege” to be a U.S. citizen as well), which was frightening given that the legal definition of a “privilege” is something the government bestows upon you and can take away under whatever circumstances they choose (driving a car is the classic legal example of a “privilege” in this sense), whereas a right is inalienable.
There are also characters such as the Australian (an aborigine? She looks awfully dark and flat-nosed to be white) who’s sent over from an international NGO to observe the balloting in Ohio (and comes away with the impression that the vote was more or less fair but there were things she was concerned about) and the African-American man in New York who’s a convicted felon who’s just completed his parole and is looking forward to voting for his first time in middle age — but whose vote isn’t counted because someone forgot to process his registration. (He’s contrasted to an even older African-American with a felony conviction who’s working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and is pissed that, as is well known, Florida never restores the voting rights of felons unless they make special application to the government and win an elaborate approval process.)
All in all, Election Day is an oddly moving film, sensitive to the power of the ritual of election day (which I somewhat miss since I’ve been voting by mail — it’s easier and surer but somehow the collective coming-together to exercise the franchise has important ritual significance; as Chevigny said in her notes, “Election Day is one of the few days in the United States on which so many Americans are collectively engaged in a common activity” — only, increasingly, they don’t) and managing to get us to care about a surprising number of people given what a wide canvas they’re depicting and what a short running time (84 minutes) they have to depict it.
Robot Monster (Independent, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles had brought another download disc from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 — this one still with series creator Joel Hodgson as the host but during the show’s era on the Comedy Central channel, when Joel and his writing staff had honed their approach and were supplying genuinely funny lines to ridicule the movies instead of the rather dull ones from the show’s early days as a local program in Minneapolis. This episode featured two more of the Radar Men of the Moon episodes, which were really just more of the same, and as the feature it included Robot Monster, the legendarily and almost surrealistically bad film made by director Phil Tucker in 1953 and famously featuring his friend George Barrows in the title role(s).
With too small a production budget to make or rent a robot costume for his robot monster, Tucker (who was his own producer as well, though someone else wrote the script — more on that later) called on Barrows, whose regular gig was wearing a gorilla costume to impersonate a great ape. Tucker had Barrows wear his gorilla suit, and his only concession to “roboticity” was replacing the gorilla head with a deep-sea diving helmet and a body stocking over his head under it. A few wires were stuck on the outside of the helmet to make it look like Barrows, as “Earth Ro-Man” — the on-earth representative of an interplanetary invasion force whose weapon, the “Calcinator Death-Ray,” is so powerful that with a few waves of his arms (and a few reversals of the image into negative film and back) he has annihilated all of humanity except the six members of the on-screen cast — is in constant communication with “Great Guidance” (also Barrows, though both characters are voiced by radio announcer John Brown), his controller back on his home planet, which is variously referred to as the moon, Mars and a planet called Ro-Man in another solar system.
The film is full of gimmicks, including the fact that the entire movie is shot outdoors, ostensibly as part of a system the father of the family at the center of the action, “The Professor” (JohnMylong), has rigged up to protect himself and his loved ones from the fearsome calcinator death rays, but actually so Tucker and his cinematographer, former PRC stalwart Jack Greenhalgh (a pity that after PRC went out of business he had to get even tackier jobs to stay alive!), wouldn’t have to rent lights — and that the entire story is presented as a dream of the Professor’s pre-pubescent son, Johnny (Gregory Moffett), who wakes up at the end — only after that there are three, count ’em, three, glimpses of Ro-Man coming out of the cave where he’s been headquartered for the entire duration of the film.
The closest thing this film has to a “star” is actor George Nader (whose presence here puts George Barrows one degree of separation from Hedy Lamarr!), who plays “The Professor”’s assistant and also the main squeeze of the Professor’s post-pubescent daughter Alice (Claudia Barrett) — who, in an all too obvious rip-off of King Kong, is the object of a crush from Ro-Man as well. When I first saw this film I looked at the outrageously fake-seeming name of the credited screenwriter, “Wyott Ordung,” with its references to “dung” and “Ordnung” (“order” in German), and assumed it was a pseudonym for director Tucker, but when Charles and I were watching an episode of the 1950’s TV series Dangerous Assignment there was an actual person named Wyott Ordung serving as an actor in the cast. Robot Monster is a grandly silly movie, and Tucker’s rather plodding direction has nothing in common with the crude vitality Ed Wood brought to his equally stupid scripts, but what makes the film worth considering (sort of) is the sheer bizarre incongruity of the monster’s appearance.
Had Phil Tucker made his robot monster look like the ordinary conception of a monster robot, his film might have done better when new but wouldn’t have acquired the cult audience it has from the sheer, outrageous risibility of the sight of George Barrows in a gorilla suit topped by an old-fashioned diving helmet waving his arms in the air and pretending to be able thereby to destroy virtually the entire human race — or, for that matter, the added bit of madness that Tucker spliced in old clips of dinosaurs from the Hal Roach production One Million B.C. (a go-to film for people needing dinosaur action for their movie and lacking the special-effects money to stage any themselves) for reasons that died with him on December 1, 1985.
Charles had brought another download disc from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 — this one still with series creator Joel Hodgson as the host but during the show’s era on the Comedy Central channel, when Joel and his writing staff had honed their approach and were supplying genuinely funny lines to ridicule the movies instead of the rather dull ones from the show’s early days as a local program in Minneapolis. This episode featured two more of the Radar Men of the Moon episodes, which were really just more of the same, and as the feature it included Robot Monster, the legendarily and almost surrealistically bad film made by director Phil Tucker in 1953 and famously featuring his friend George Barrows in the title role(s).
With too small a production budget to make or rent a robot costume for his robot monster, Tucker (who was his own producer as well, though someone else wrote the script — more on that later) called on Barrows, whose regular gig was wearing a gorilla costume to impersonate a great ape. Tucker had Barrows wear his gorilla suit, and his only concession to “roboticity” was replacing the gorilla head with a deep-sea diving helmet and a body stocking over his head under it. A few wires were stuck on the outside of the helmet to make it look like Barrows, as “Earth Ro-Man” — the on-earth representative of an interplanetary invasion force whose weapon, the “Calcinator Death-Ray,” is so powerful that with a few waves of his arms (and a few reversals of the image into negative film and back) he has annihilated all of humanity except the six members of the on-screen cast — is in constant communication with “Great Guidance” (also Barrows, though both characters are voiced by radio announcer John Brown), his controller back on his home planet, which is variously referred to as the moon, Mars and a planet called Ro-Man in another solar system.
The film is full of gimmicks, including the fact that the entire movie is shot outdoors, ostensibly as part of a system the father of the family at the center of the action, “The Professor” (JohnMylong), has rigged up to protect himself and his loved ones from the fearsome calcinator death rays, but actually so Tucker and his cinematographer, former PRC stalwart Jack Greenhalgh (a pity that after PRC went out of business he had to get even tackier jobs to stay alive!), wouldn’t have to rent lights — and that the entire story is presented as a dream of the Professor’s pre-pubescent son, Johnny (Gregory Moffett), who wakes up at the end — only after that there are three, count ’em, three, glimpses of Ro-Man coming out of the cave where he’s been headquartered for the entire duration of the film.
The closest thing this film has to a “star” is actor George Nader (whose presence here puts George Barrows one degree of separation from Hedy Lamarr!), who plays “The Professor”’s assistant and also the main squeeze of the Professor’s post-pubescent daughter Alice (Claudia Barrett) — who, in an all too obvious rip-off of King Kong, is the object of a crush from Ro-Man as well. When I first saw this film I looked at the outrageously fake-seeming name of the credited screenwriter, “Wyott Ordung,” with its references to “dung” and “Ordnung” (“order” in German), and assumed it was a pseudonym for director Tucker, but when Charles and I were watching an episode of the 1950’s TV series Dangerous Assignment there was an actual person named Wyott Ordung serving as an actor in the cast. Robot Monster is a grandly silly movie, and Tucker’s rather plodding direction has nothing in common with the crude vitality Ed Wood brought to his equally stupid scripts, but what makes the film worth considering (sort of) is the sheer bizarre incongruity of the monster’s appearance.
Had Phil Tucker made his robot monster look like the ordinary conception of a monster robot, his film might have done better when new but wouldn’t have acquired the cult audience it has from the sheer, outrageous risibility of the sight of George Barrows in a gorilla suit topped by an old-fashioned diving helmet waving his arms in the air and pretending to be able thereby to destroy virtually the entire human race — or, for that matter, the added bit of madness that Tucker spliced in old clips of dinosaurs from the Hal Roach production One Million B.C. (a go-to film for people needing dinosaur action for their movie and lacking the special-effects money to stage any themselves) for reasons that died with him on December 1, 1985.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Mr. and Mrs. North (John W. Loveton; TV, 1952-54)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Over the last two nights my partner Charles and I watched all four episodes of the early 1950’s TV series Mr. and Mrs. North on “volume three” of Critics’ Choice’s reissue of these shows. (In my last order from them I bought volumes three through seven, since I’ve always liked mystery shows.) Mr. and Mrs. North were a married couple who got involved in criminal investigations — sort of The Thin Man lite, very lite (as Charles pointed out after the first two shows on this disc, they make The Thin Man seem like Tolstoy by comparison!) — and they were created by Richard and Frances Lockridge and first filmed in a 1941 movie from MGM with William Post, Jr. as Mr. North and Gracie Allen as Mrs. North (to my knowledge, the only time Gracie was ever cast as the wife of someone other than her real husband, George Burns).
The TV cast was Richard Denning (tall, blond and a hunk to die for! I hadn’t realized he was this good-looking, and the TV producers gave him ample changes to appear in swimsuits to show off his hot bod) as Mr. North and Barbara Britton (Edmond O’Brien’s girlfriend/secretary back home in the 1949 D.O.A.) as Mrs. North, and the writers of this series (who included some semi-major names: the “Nosed Out” episode was co-written by Mary Orr, whose story “The Wisdom of Eve” was the basis for the film All About Eve, and “Target” was written by M. Coates Webster, who wrote Strange Confession for the Universal “Inner Sanctum” film series in 1945) generally had Mrs. North either figure out the case or actually bop the villain and subdue him (or her — the writers also had a penchant for female baddies), giving her a more active role than most women in 1950’s TV shows.
The first episode on this disc was “Nosed Out,” an interesting choice to be the next item we watched together after the 1937 film "Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry" since it also dealt with horse racing, and specifically with a jockey who got a syndicate of gamblers mad at him because he refused to throw a big race. Only in this version, instead of getting him thrown off the track, they just kill him and stuff the body in Mr. and Mrs. North’s car because it happens to be parked next to the jockey’s own car and be the same make, model and color. They also stick gasoline-soaked rags in it and set it on fire, hoping to burn up the body, but a security person at the track notices the car smoldering and the Norths are alerted and able to get to their car in time to save it. (Mr. North is depicted as regularly parking his car and leaving its windows wide open — a real sign of how much the times have changed!) The immediate suspect is the jockey’s wife, an ex-circus acrobat played by the marvelous Veda Ann Borg (I like her as an actress and I love the sound of her name) who was planning to divorce him to marry a much older man, a Texas oil millionaire who owned some of the horses her husband rode, but the Norths trace the crime to a syndicate and prove that the owner of their garage is part of it. “Nosed Out” was the best of the episodes we watched over the last two nights.
•••••
The second show on the disc was “The Third Eye” — the title refers to a miniature camera with which an unscrupulous model is taking pictures of the garments she’s modeling for Suzi’s haute couture salon so she can sell them to someone else for knock-off purposes. This wasn’t as much fun because, typically for Hollywood when they’re dealing with the fashion world, they ramped up the camp factor: the owner of the salon whose designs are getting ripped off (and whose clothes actually look both pleasing and functional, a far cry from the ridiculously impractical garments that get shown at high-fashion shows today!) is a woman with a very bad fake French accent, and the victim is the go-between between the model who was shooting the knock-off photos and the people paying her for them — and the photographer, whom the Norths put up because she formerly lived with the victim and made a big show about not wanting to go back to that apartment, turns out to be the real killer.
•••••
Last night’s episodes were “The Frightened Night” — another campfest, a haunted-house story with all the trimmings, including a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style author who came to the deserted house to write a book (the Norths enter the story because the owner is the aunt of one-half of a honeymooning couple and she offered the house to them, and the Norths accompanied them there to see they got there safely in a storm as nasty as the producers’ limited effects budget could make it) and a crazy rustic who’s out to shoot as many people as possible out of some twisted sort of revenge of which the writers don’t bother to give us much of an explanation.
•••••
“Target” was from a later season of the series, and their print had the original commercials (for Revlon, whose products were actually integrated into the series’ action and shown on screen with the stars — Barbara Britton had to do a pitch for one) whereas the others had had the commercials spliced out (I suspect that in the interim the show acquired a sponsor and a network berth instead of just being syndicated); it was fun not only for the choice glimpses it gave us of Richard Denning in swimwear (I said it before and I’ll say it again: the man was hot!) but also because it had a good story: the Norths are sunbathing at a local beach when from out of nowhere a sniper tries to pick them off. Mr. North sees the man escapes but catches only a glimpse of him and his car, and the rest of the show features a cat-and-mouse game between the Norths and their police homicide inspector friend (a continuing character) to find out just who is trying to kill them and why.
The killer crashes their apartment in the guise of a grocery delivery man (another sign of how much the times have changed!) and the finale is suspenseful, though otherwise the direction by Paul Landres (who eventually became house director fot the Sam Katzman-Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll movies at Columbia) is pretty flat, as the Norths and the hidden killer confront each other and the Norths hope they can stay alive long enough for the cops to arrive and arrest the guy. Mr. and Mrs. North isn’t one of the great series of 1950’s television, and given his druthers Richard Denning would probably have preferred to do the TV version of his hit radio sitcom My Favorite Husband with Lucille Ball (instead, as everyone knows, she insisted on changing the title to I Love Lucy and the actor playing her husband to her real one, Desi Arnaz) but he’s quite good in the role even though most of the stories make him the butt of the humor and require her to save him — a surprisingly proto-feminist conception for 1950’s television! — 2/6/08
•••••
I showed two more episodes in the Mr. and Mrs. North series. One was called “Million Dollar Coffin” and was a quite inventive tale about a rather seedy old man who claims to be the direct descendant of a Revolutionary War hero who was buried with a packet of letters from the Founding Fathers that would be worth a bundle to an enterprising publisher like Jerry North — only the cemetery where he’s buried also happens to be the locus where a gang of bank robbers, whose plot included burying the money in an out-of-the-way place and not divvying it up until three years later, once the statute of limitations had run out, buried the money inside a coffin along with the body of a person they murdered on the beach simply to supply a corpse. (Since this episode was made in 1953, pre-dating the original Ocean’s Eleven by seven years, they didn’t realize the obvious danger of hiding the “take” from a big robbery in a coffin.)
One member of the gang gets his girlfriend to pose as the murdered man’s daughter and get the authorities to exhume the body (she’s played by Veda Ann Borg, and she deliberately adopts a wooden, porn-like line delivery when she’s playing her character attempting to act and failing miserably), and another gang member sneaks into the action and switches the tombstones (which are properly heavy and ponderous-looking when he tries to lift them — this isn’t an Ed Wood movie where the “tombstones” are clearly made of light wood), so the bad guys dig up the coffin of the Revolutionary War hero (what happens to the letters is never made clear, though since Jerry North warned us earlier that they’d evaporate if exposed to light too suddenly we’re evidently supposed to think these historical treasures are lost forever) and the good guys dig up the coffin with the more recent corpse and the bank robbery proceeds — which they conveniently open in the vault of the very bank from which the money was stolen in the first place, making it easy to return. This improbable tale was told with a delightfully insouciant air that suited the Thin Man-lite premise of the show, and Richard Denning and Barbara Britton are personable in the leads even though this one didn’t show him topless or in swim trunks (I hadn’t realized until I saw the episodes in volume three what a hot hunk Denning was!).
•••••
The other episode we watched, “Dead Man’s Tale,” was mopier, dealing with a Mafioso who calls in a death threat to the Norths — only it turns out he’s dialed wrong and really means to kill somebody entirely unrelated. Needless to say, the Norths immediately get dressed (the phone call had disturbed them while they were just about to go to sleep) and go to the cigar store where the murder is supposed to take place — and the murder duly happens, after a false alarm in which the victim fakes his own shooting because he thinks the Norths are the gangster’s hit people.
Eventually the gangster is proven innocent — of the murder, anyway — and the writers alter him from a figure of menace to a charming Runyon-esque lowbrow, while establishing that the owner of the cigar store actually committed the killing, which had something to do with his wife’s bookie debts to the victim (the writers of these 25-minute crime shows were often more concerned with simply explaining whodunit than delving into whydunit; obviously if you’re strapped for running time, the easiest thing to leave on the cutting-room floor is the discussion of motive). It was an O.K. episode but the character of the threatening gangster got pretty oppressive and it didn’t have the charm of the “Million Dollar Coffin” episode or some of the other shows we’ve watched (I bought five DVD’s of this show — 20 episodes in all — mainly because on the Critics’ Choice list they were $4 apiece). — 2/10/08
•••••
Afterwards Charles and I settled in and ran the remaining two episodes of Mr. and Mrs. North from volume four of the Critics’ Choice collection (I got volumes three through seven). One was called “Dying to Live” and was quite intriguing even though at times it seemed like the screenwriter was trying to see how many noir clichés he could crowd into a 25-minute show: it’s all about George Tuttle, an accountant who’s just been diagnosed with a fatal disease and told he has only a few more weeks to live. He decides to use this knowledge to blackmail his boss (Alan Mowbray), who embezzled $76,000 from the company to support the expensive tastes of his wife (Lee Patrick). For $10,000, Tuttle offers his boss, he will sign a confession naming himself as the embezzler and it will be found on his body.
To get back his money, the boss and his wife hire an adventuress (Ann Savage, the marvelous femme fatale from Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour) to meet up with him in a fancy bar, seduce him, get him drunk and steal back the money — which she does, only when the boss confronts the drunken Tuttle he kills Tuttle and then helps himself to a bottle of Napoleon brandy Tuttle had bought as his final thrill in life. Mr. and Mrs. North enter the action because in addition to his regular job, he also works on their taxes (the original air date of this episode was March 13, 1953 and back then the IRS deadline was March 15, not April 15 — at least according to this script), and he happens to drop his phony confession on their floor. They discover it and confront the principals, and in the end it turns out that Tuttle had spiked that bottle of Napoleon brandy with poison and therefore the Mowbray character unintentionally killed himself: a neat, chilling ending to a quite well-written, well-done episode whose only flaw is that the Norths, nominally the show’s leads, seem almost totally irrelevant to it.
•••••
After that, the last show on the disc, “The Man Who Came to Murder,” seemed anticlimactic; set at a honeymoon lodge where Mr. and Mrs. North take a vacation every year, it involves a county sheriff who gets murdered; a former racketeer who says he’s quit the criminal life; his fiancée, who backs out of their planned marriage at the last minute because she’s not so sure that he’s really quit (especially when she learns he’s deposited a good chunk of his ill-gotten gains in their joint safe deposit box, fueling her paranoia that his activities will get her arrested as an accessory); and a French cook with a really bad accent who’s married four women without bothering to divorce any of them in between. The gangster killed the sheriff, it turns out totally unsurprisingly in a dull episode with too many suspects and too few motives, and once again too little of Mr. and Mrs. North — though at least in “Dying to Live” (a show that in addition to its macabre plot twists also brought to Tuttle some of the pathos of the Lionel Barrymore plot line in Grand Hotel) that didn’t matter so much because the rest of the episode was so good. — 2/12/08
•••••
I ran the next episode in sequence from the Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s: “Breakout,” an unusually good one in which the Norths (Richard Denning and Barbara Britton) visit a prison where a famous gangster who was busted for income-tax evasion is ready to discuss writing his memoirs. Two other convicts use the Norths’ presence as the excuse to break out and use them as hostages, and the show (directed by Ralph Francis Murphy, whose name consistently appears on their best episodes) turns into a quite exciting suspense drama in which the Norths vanquish the bad guys by feeding them coffee spiked with a sleeping pill Mrs. North had previously bought for her husband. Interestingly, the gangster whose memoirs the Norths were going to publish (and who is killed by the other cons before the final denouement) was played by a padded and virtually unrecognizable Lyle Talbot (the one degree of separation between Bette Davis and Ed Wood!), — 3/8/08
•••••
It was even more ironic, after watching such a thought-provoking but mostly anti-war movie, to come home and (after I nebulized John P. and Charles and I had ice cream for dessert), that the film we showed as a nightcap was a Mr. and Mrs. North TV episode, “Salt in the Blood,” featuring a story about a young man who joins the Navy because he’s so anxious to serve his country in the Korean war (which was just lurching to a close when this episode aired on May 29, 1953), only to be mustered out when his mother reports him for being underage. Thinking that if he can get hold of $150 he can go to the West Coast and re-enlist under another name, he goes to a sailor’s bar where the bartender is a man who calls himself “Boats” and gets into an argument with a drunken sailor, Sloan, who is flashing around a big bankroll and loudly and drunkenly proclaiming his intention of spending it.
Sloane is ultimately found mortally wounded in an alley near the bar (as Mr. and Mrs. North walked down the representation of the alley I couldn’t help but joke, “Down these cheap sets a man must go … ”) and Our Hero, Chuck Walker, is naturally wanted and ultimately arrested for the crime, but the Norths find a ferrule (the metal band at the base of a walking stick) and with that Mrs. North finds out that the real assailant (who ultimately killed Sloane) was the tattoo artist who hangs out at the bar and who clubbed him with his cane. It’s a nice show that was well written and, for the budget, reasonably well directed by Ralph Francis Murphy, and with a good performance by Dick Jones as the sailor (even though he looked well over 18 and therefore more than old enough to serve!), and some interesting members in the rest of the cast: Sara Haden, all-purpose mother type, as Chuck’s mom; Claudia Barrett from Robot Monster as his girlfriend Dorothy (who looks even older than he does!), old silent-era star Monte Blue as Boats, Phil Tully as Sloan, John Gallaudet as Eddie Pink (Sloan’s business partner — in a mysteriously unstated “business” — and briefly a suspect in his own right), and Percy Helton as Needles, the tattoo artist who turns out to be the real killer (did writer Herbert Purdum have to give all his characters such obvious names?). — 3/11/08
•••••
It was the next in sequence on volume 5 of the Mr. and Mrs. North series on Critics’ Choice, and this episode, called “Reunion” and first aired February 9, 1954, in which Jerry North (Richard Denning) returns to his alma mater and meets up with his old roommate “Stuffy” Barton (Douglas Kennedy in a very tough performance reminiscent of Fred MacMurray’s in Double Indemnity), who’s now an atomic scientist. The university, under the leadership of professor Nielsen (Leonard Mudie) — who puffs away so enthusiastically on his pipe he looks radioactive — has developed an atomic bomb so small it can fit into a suitcase, and Barton — horrified at what this could mean to world peace — has made a duplicate version and planted it in the college gym, set to go off when the big basketball game is scheduled to start as a way of dramatizing his cause.
He’s also given himself radiation sickness from trying to build a bomb on his stony lonesome and having to handle the fissile material without help, and when he’s captured he claims to have made three other bombs and planted them in New York City and Washington, D.C. (the fact that this fictional character picked the same target cities as the real 9/11 plotters was probably pretty obvious but still struck me), though he finally agrees to disarm the bomb (with two seconds to spare!) and admits that the additional bombs didn’t really exist and were just a bluff. This was a very tough, well-done melodrama, expertly directed by Gordon Blair and with a script by Donn Mullally and Lee Erwin that was particularly noteworthy for avoiding the obvious Cold War tropes: the villain was crazy but sympathetic (much like the socially conscious mad scientists Boris Karloff played in the Columbia films we’d been watching recently) and the writers did not take the easy route (for the time) of making him a closet Communist deliberately trying to destroy America. — 3/14/08
•••••
Charles and I crashed and I ran him the final Mr. and Mrs. North episode on Critics’ Choice DVD volume 5: “Loon Lake” (inescapably associated for me with E. L. Doctorow’s rather grim novel of that title), aired the week after “Reunion” (February 16, 1954) and a chilling suspense tale of the Norths being held hostage in a mountain cabin by outlaws Matt Weber (Jack Elam), who’s just escaped from jail (the escape is shown in an appealingly noir-ish wordless opening in which he’s smuggled out in a coffin-like box, which made me joke, “Dr. Frankenstein, call your office”), Doc Randall (Ross Elliott) and Clay (John Doucette), the usual mentally retarded triggerman associated with stories like this. (The “Breakout” episode, also on this DVD, in which the Norths were held hostage by escaping convicts in prison, also featured a retarded triggerman who constantly had to be coddled and psychologically stroked by the ringleader.)
The gimmick is that Randall has been brought in to do plastic surgery on Weber, who accordingly goes through most of the episode wearing bandages on his face — only Randall is also attempting to seduce Weber’s girlfriend Bonnie (Pamela Dumcan, doing a good hard-bitten portrayal), and judging from the surprisingly (for 1950’s television) passionate open-mouthed kissing Mrs. North catches Randall and Bonnie doing in the kitchen, he’s got considerably farther than first base with her. Apparently Randall (or at least the show’s writer, Lee Erwin) had seen the 1935 RKO gangster film Let ’Em Have It, in which gangster Bruce Cabot similarly (stupidly) inveigled a plastic surgeon with a grudge against him to change his appearance, for Randall has carved scars with the letter “M” into both of Weber’s cheeks the way the surgeon in Let ’Em Have It did with Cabot — so he’d be easier, not harder, for the cops to identify.
Erwin also borrowed a plot gommick from an earlier Mr. and Mrs. North episode, “Dying to Live,” in having the principal villain essentially murdered by someone who was already dead — this time Weber kills Randall and Bonnie and then drinks a cup of coffee Bonnie had made before he shot her, spiked with rat poison in hopes of killing him so she could run off with Randall. Despite an odd and inappropriate comic tag scene, this Mr. and Mrs. North episode — directed with unusual élan by “B”-movie veteran Lew Landers — was one of their best, and proved that even the rather superficial premise of this show could be used as an excuse for good suspense drama. — 4/15/08
•••••
I screened another episode of Mr. and Mrs. North, “The Silent Butler,” in which Gerald North (Richard Denning), tired of being mistakenly awakened on Sunday mornings by the Norths’ maid Millie, decides to hire a male servant instead and end up with Oliver (Edgar Barrier, coming across very much as a graduate of the Arthur Treacher School of How to Play a British Butler), not realizing that Oliver is taking the job only to get away from a decidedly unrequited crush on him from Mrs. Bentley, owner of the employment agency that referred him. Oliver is also having an affair with the maid working for the Wentworths next door, even though the Wentworths have a maid and a butler as well, the two are married to each other and the Wentworths hired them as a couple. By pretending to be Gerald’s private secretary, Mrs. Bentley lures Oliver down to the basement of the Norths’ (and the Wentworths’) apartment building and stabs him — only it turns out Oliver is very much alive and she’s really killed Edgar by mistake. It takes about half the show’s running time before the crime actually materializes, and until then it’s a nice, sprightly domestic comedy, and the whole thing is a lot of fun — Mr. and Mrs. North was obviously derivative of The Thin Man (as was the 1980’s TV show Hart to Hart) but at least it was well derived, and it was a treat to see the writing credit at the end and find George Oppenheimer’s name at the top for a change! — 4/18/08
•••••
I also managed to squeeze in the final episode on volume six of the Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s. It was called “Stranger than Fiction” — which couldn’t help but remind us (me, anyway) of that marvelous recent film with Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson, written by Zach Helm and touchingly directed by Marc Forster — though about all this had in common was that it was also about a writer. Since the print Critics’ Choice mastered from was missing the show’s closing credits, I wasn’t able to do a cast list, though I’ll say the acting was quite good all around. The plot deals with an excessively macho writer who’s made his mark with a grittily realistic novel about World War II (the show originally aired on February 20, 1953) — I was wondering just who the screenwriters were modeling the character after (Hemingway and Mailer were my two main guesses) — who’s spending an alcohol- and bitterness-fueled weekend with his trophy wife, an old Army buddy from his own war service and his soft-spoken “secretary,” whom he continually browbeats and has made into a house servant, who it turns out actually wrote the best-selling war novel Gerald North (Richard Denning) published.
He’s the only likable character in the bunch, which no doubt is why he’s dispatched after the first act — the other people in that house are all so hateful he’s sorely missed in the rest of the program — and the Norths not surprisingly find that the writer killed him, especially since he lusted after the writer’s trophy wife (who was actually, natch, having an affair with the war buddy). I didn’t realize while we were watching it how clichéd this plot was, but the story was genuinely fun and enjoyable and the actor playing the writer made him properly loathsome. — 4/23/08
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I trotted out the last of the five Critics’ Choice DVD’s I ordered of the Mr. and Mrs. North show and we watched the first episode, “Trained for Murder,” a far less exalted mystery than the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode I’d screened for myself earlier but a good one even though this was one 1950’s TV episode that suffered from the brevity of the half-hour drama format. This was a story about a mean-spirited boxer, Vince McKay (a good slimeball performance by Hal Baylor) — a sort of white version of Mike Tyson — whose avocations are womanizing and pissing off everybody in his circle, from his manager Whitey Malone (Ray Roberts) to his sparring partner to his manservant Joe (Christopher Dark), whose girlfriend Ruth (Gloria Henry) has got the hots for Vince. Joe is poisoned and drops dead in the ring during a practice session for his upcoming fight that would put him one bout away from the championship in his weight class, and for a moment we’re led to believe that one of the women in the cast — either Ruth or Art’s blonde-bimbo wife Edna (Nancy Valentine), who’s also succumbed to Vince’s dubious charms — by spiking a pie they were baking him with rat poison, but the killer turns out to be Joe, who in addition to his own jealousies over Ruth hates Vince because one of the women Vince seduced and abandoned previously was Joe’s sister Sharon.
The Norths get there through a plot gimmick this series used several times — the Norths are given a proposal for a book about Vince to be written by sportswriter Art Davis (Robert Carson) and they come to spend the weekend at a remote house in the country where Vince and his entourage are holing up in preparation for his big fight — indeed, I think this was the same remote-house-in-the-country set they’d used previously for stories like this (all they did to make it look like a prizefighter’s training camp was to put a ring up on the backlot and hang a heavy bag in the living room) — and writer Erna Lazarus went out of her way to give the various dramatis personae motives for knocking Vince off, though the show’s 25-minute running time (not counting the original commercials, left off of this edition) was way too short to build much suspense about the revelation, especially since Vince didn’t even get killed until 16 minutes in.
This was the first Mr. and Mrs. North we’d seen that contained an actual sponsor’s announcement (for Colgate toothpaste, lather shaving cream and a spray-on deodorant called Veto — and what was the Colgate marketing department thinking when they came up with that name?) as well as plugs for next week’s episode (“Murder on the Midway”) and other shows Colgate was sponsoring then — and it can be fun to watch these old TV shows with the original commercials (if only to remember how tacky they were compared to the production values of TV ads today!) even though the gimmick of Martin Kane, Private Eye — where the sponsors, U.S. Tobacco (now just a chewing and pipe tobacco manufacturer but then a cigarette company as well) actually worked their spots into the plots of the shows — was more than a bit excessive. — 5/23/08
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I ran him a nice Mr and Mrs. North episode called “The Placid Affair.” This was considerably better than the usual run of these programs in that it featured a genuinely terrifying villain, Mills (John Hoyt), a tubercular clerk at the Brewster company who cracks the company safe and steals $150,000 in payroll money, then tells his live-in nurse/lover/slave Betty (Hillary Brooke) the he embezzled a considerably smaller amount but didn’t get away with the money. She finds out differently when she sees a newspaper headline about the theft while the two are on their way to Lake Placid (so the title turned out to be geographical, not emotional), where they end up in a cabin next door to the Norths, who recognize Betty because she once nursed Jerry North (Richard Denning) through an illness.
Directed by Lew Landers from a script by Mortimer Braus, this one turned out to be one of the tightest and most convincingly noir-ish episodes of this series, which was generally interesting but sometimes turned too campy for its own good. This time, though, the only trace of camp was the bizarre conceit that because Mrs. North (Barbara Britton) breaks the heel of her high-heeled shoe running down the stairs while Betty was presumably fleeing in the elevator (but actually set it to go down while she herself remained on the fourth floor where the apartment she shared with Mills was located), she discovers her and they have a quite graphically staged fight on a table and a bed before the men in the cast — series regulars Denning as her husband and Francis de Sales as a cop — figure out what happened, take the stairs up (why they didn’t take the elevator up only Mortimer Braus would know!) and come in the nick of time to take Betty into custody. The years had been hard on Hillary Brooke — she was now pretty hatchet-faced instead of the alluring femme fatale she’d played in the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green — but her marvelous ability to play thinly controlled menace remained vividly intact, and Landers actually directed this with more care than he showed in a lot of his features! — 6/5/08
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I showed him our next-to-last Mr. and Mrs. North episode, “Mark of Hate,” directed by Lew Landers (again!) from a script by Lee Erwin and featuring actor Willis Bouchey in an absolutely chilling performance as Gordon Lane, an old friend of the Norths who two years earlier was involved in an automobile accident that left him crippled and bedridden. The Norths still think he’s the kind man who became their friend years before, and are impressed at how well he seems to have adapted to life without mobility — but in fact he’s become bitter and filled with hatred, directed partly at himself but mainly at his wife Marion (Eve Miller), who was drifting away from him even before the accident and since then has started an affair with Barry Weston (Harry Lauter), the art director at the magazine Gordon owns and Marion worked for when they met. Bouchey’s depiction of this role — particularly the vicious crabbiness with which he orders around the people supposedly taking care of him and the bitterness perched on the thin edge between wanting to take his own life and lashing out at the people near him — was absolutely accurate.
The gimmick is that, unbeknownst to everybody else, Gordon has actually regained enough of his ability to walk that he’s able to take down a gun from the gun rack on his bedroom wall, load it with a bullet and use it to shoot and kill Barry and frame Marion for the crime — and when Mrs. North, all smiles and innocence, comes in to look after him, she catches on when a newspaper she was reading to him has mysteriously moved from the end table where she rested it to his bed. It was ironic that this disc (volume 7 of the Critics’ Choice series of Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s) should contain two consecutive episodes about deathly ill individuals who lash themselves and summon up their last reserves of energy to commit crimes and screw over the women in their lives (though in fact the two shows originally aired four weeks apart, “The Placid Affair” on April 27, 1954 and “Mark of Hate” on May 18), and once again this was a solid thriller with the comedy aspects of the formula well under control this time. — 6/6/08
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We ended up playing the last of our 20 episodes of the early-1950’s Mr. and Mrs. North series, “Climax” — which, even though the script by Herbert Purdum (a name otherwise unknown to me) doesn’t bother to explain the title, turned out to be perhaps the best of all 20 episodes on these five Critics’ Choice DVD’s, a neat, taut half-hour mini-drama about a serial killer who particularly targets sailors — not for sexual reasons but because he’s a Navy vet himself, he spent 10 years in the brig for a carefully unspecified crime, and he’s decided that the deaths of six naval officers will be appropriate payback for the decade of his life they cost him. The actual central character, though, is “Clipper” Hale (Steve Brodie), yet another old friend of the Norths the writers on this show introduced willy-nilly as needed, whose lifelong friend and fellow sailor Doug Parrish (Russ Conway) is lured into a trap and becomes victim number five of the killer, Carl Denver (Paul Richards).
The main dramatic issue becomes whether “Clipper” will yield to his killer instincts and murder his friend’s murderer or whether he’ll step aside and let the law take care of him — and at one point the series regular who usually represented the police, homicide inspector Wigan (Francis De Sales), gets so worried that “Clipper” will turn vigilante he arrests him and holds him as a material witness until the Norths agree to be responsible for him if he’s released — whereupon he gives Jerry North the slip and traces the killer to the dirty-spoon restaurant where he’s a dishwasher. The episode is effectively staged by director Lew Landers, who along with cinematographer Kenneth D. Peach (who did a peach of a job photographing this — bad joke) sets the scene with a strikingly noir-ish shot, though the next scene — inside the restaurant, introducing Denver (though we’re not yet aware he’s the killer) and his co-worker and friend (girlfriend, maybe?) Katie (Monica Keating) — is photographed all too flatly in what would become the standard “look” of black-and-white television.
Still, this is an excellent show and one which ably caught the balance between drama and comedy that often eluded producer John W. Loveton and his directors and writers on this show (usually the trap was they overdid the comedy and produced shows that only worked as camp, but not this time), and an excellent finish to our travel through 20 episodes of this very interesting and often entertaining program. — 6/15/08
Over the last two nights my partner Charles and I watched all four episodes of the early 1950’s TV series Mr. and Mrs. North on “volume three” of Critics’ Choice’s reissue of these shows. (In my last order from them I bought volumes three through seven, since I’ve always liked mystery shows.) Mr. and Mrs. North were a married couple who got involved in criminal investigations — sort of The Thin Man lite, very lite (as Charles pointed out after the first two shows on this disc, they make The Thin Man seem like Tolstoy by comparison!) — and they were created by Richard and Frances Lockridge and first filmed in a 1941 movie from MGM with William Post, Jr. as Mr. North and Gracie Allen as Mrs. North (to my knowledge, the only time Gracie was ever cast as the wife of someone other than her real husband, George Burns).
The TV cast was Richard Denning (tall, blond and a hunk to die for! I hadn’t realized he was this good-looking, and the TV producers gave him ample changes to appear in swimsuits to show off his hot bod) as Mr. North and Barbara Britton (Edmond O’Brien’s girlfriend/secretary back home in the 1949 D.O.A.) as Mrs. North, and the writers of this series (who included some semi-major names: the “Nosed Out” episode was co-written by Mary Orr, whose story “The Wisdom of Eve” was the basis for the film All About Eve, and “Target” was written by M. Coates Webster, who wrote Strange Confession for the Universal “Inner Sanctum” film series in 1945) generally had Mrs. North either figure out the case or actually bop the villain and subdue him (or her — the writers also had a penchant for female baddies), giving her a more active role than most women in 1950’s TV shows.
The first episode on this disc was “Nosed Out,” an interesting choice to be the next item we watched together after the 1937 film "Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry" since it also dealt with horse racing, and specifically with a jockey who got a syndicate of gamblers mad at him because he refused to throw a big race. Only in this version, instead of getting him thrown off the track, they just kill him and stuff the body in Mr. and Mrs. North’s car because it happens to be parked next to the jockey’s own car and be the same make, model and color. They also stick gasoline-soaked rags in it and set it on fire, hoping to burn up the body, but a security person at the track notices the car smoldering and the Norths are alerted and able to get to their car in time to save it. (Mr. North is depicted as regularly parking his car and leaving its windows wide open — a real sign of how much the times have changed!) The immediate suspect is the jockey’s wife, an ex-circus acrobat played by the marvelous Veda Ann Borg (I like her as an actress and I love the sound of her name) who was planning to divorce him to marry a much older man, a Texas oil millionaire who owned some of the horses her husband rode, but the Norths trace the crime to a syndicate and prove that the owner of their garage is part of it. “Nosed Out” was the best of the episodes we watched over the last two nights.
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The second show on the disc was “The Third Eye” — the title refers to a miniature camera with which an unscrupulous model is taking pictures of the garments she’s modeling for Suzi’s haute couture salon so she can sell them to someone else for knock-off purposes. This wasn’t as much fun because, typically for Hollywood when they’re dealing with the fashion world, they ramped up the camp factor: the owner of the salon whose designs are getting ripped off (and whose clothes actually look both pleasing and functional, a far cry from the ridiculously impractical garments that get shown at high-fashion shows today!) is a woman with a very bad fake French accent, and the victim is the go-between between the model who was shooting the knock-off photos and the people paying her for them — and the photographer, whom the Norths put up because she formerly lived with the victim and made a big show about not wanting to go back to that apartment, turns out to be the real killer.
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Last night’s episodes were “The Frightened Night” — another campfest, a haunted-house story with all the trimmings, including a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style author who came to the deserted house to write a book (the Norths enter the story because the owner is the aunt of one-half of a honeymooning couple and she offered the house to them, and the Norths accompanied them there to see they got there safely in a storm as nasty as the producers’ limited effects budget could make it) and a crazy rustic who’s out to shoot as many people as possible out of some twisted sort of revenge of which the writers don’t bother to give us much of an explanation.
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“Target” was from a later season of the series, and their print had the original commercials (for Revlon, whose products were actually integrated into the series’ action and shown on screen with the stars — Barbara Britton had to do a pitch for one) whereas the others had had the commercials spliced out (I suspect that in the interim the show acquired a sponsor and a network berth instead of just being syndicated); it was fun not only for the choice glimpses it gave us of Richard Denning in swimwear (I said it before and I’ll say it again: the man was hot!) but also because it had a good story: the Norths are sunbathing at a local beach when from out of nowhere a sniper tries to pick them off. Mr. North sees the man escapes but catches only a glimpse of him and his car, and the rest of the show features a cat-and-mouse game between the Norths and their police homicide inspector friend (a continuing character) to find out just who is trying to kill them and why.
The killer crashes their apartment in the guise of a grocery delivery man (another sign of how much the times have changed!) and the finale is suspenseful, though otherwise the direction by Paul Landres (who eventually became house director fot the Sam Katzman-Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll movies at Columbia) is pretty flat, as the Norths and the hidden killer confront each other and the Norths hope they can stay alive long enough for the cops to arrive and arrest the guy. Mr. and Mrs. North isn’t one of the great series of 1950’s television, and given his druthers Richard Denning would probably have preferred to do the TV version of his hit radio sitcom My Favorite Husband with Lucille Ball (instead, as everyone knows, she insisted on changing the title to I Love Lucy and the actor playing her husband to her real one, Desi Arnaz) but he’s quite good in the role even though most of the stories make him the butt of the humor and require her to save him — a surprisingly proto-feminist conception for 1950’s television! — 2/6/08
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I showed two more episodes in the Mr. and Mrs. North series. One was called “Million Dollar Coffin” and was a quite inventive tale about a rather seedy old man who claims to be the direct descendant of a Revolutionary War hero who was buried with a packet of letters from the Founding Fathers that would be worth a bundle to an enterprising publisher like Jerry North — only the cemetery where he’s buried also happens to be the locus where a gang of bank robbers, whose plot included burying the money in an out-of-the-way place and not divvying it up until three years later, once the statute of limitations had run out, buried the money inside a coffin along with the body of a person they murdered on the beach simply to supply a corpse. (Since this episode was made in 1953, pre-dating the original Ocean’s Eleven by seven years, they didn’t realize the obvious danger of hiding the “take” from a big robbery in a coffin.)
One member of the gang gets his girlfriend to pose as the murdered man’s daughter and get the authorities to exhume the body (she’s played by Veda Ann Borg, and she deliberately adopts a wooden, porn-like line delivery when she’s playing her character attempting to act and failing miserably), and another gang member sneaks into the action and switches the tombstones (which are properly heavy and ponderous-looking when he tries to lift them — this isn’t an Ed Wood movie where the “tombstones” are clearly made of light wood), so the bad guys dig up the coffin of the Revolutionary War hero (what happens to the letters is never made clear, though since Jerry North warned us earlier that they’d evaporate if exposed to light too suddenly we’re evidently supposed to think these historical treasures are lost forever) and the good guys dig up the coffin with the more recent corpse and the bank robbery proceeds — which they conveniently open in the vault of the very bank from which the money was stolen in the first place, making it easy to return. This improbable tale was told with a delightfully insouciant air that suited the Thin Man-lite premise of the show, and Richard Denning and Barbara Britton are personable in the leads even though this one didn’t show him topless or in swim trunks (I hadn’t realized until I saw the episodes in volume three what a hot hunk Denning was!).
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The other episode we watched, “Dead Man’s Tale,” was mopier, dealing with a Mafioso who calls in a death threat to the Norths — only it turns out he’s dialed wrong and really means to kill somebody entirely unrelated. Needless to say, the Norths immediately get dressed (the phone call had disturbed them while they were just about to go to sleep) and go to the cigar store where the murder is supposed to take place — and the murder duly happens, after a false alarm in which the victim fakes his own shooting because he thinks the Norths are the gangster’s hit people.
Eventually the gangster is proven innocent — of the murder, anyway — and the writers alter him from a figure of menace to a charming Runyon-esque lowbrow, while establishing that the owner of the cigar store actually committed the killing, which had something to do with his wife’s bookie debts to the victim (the writers of these 25-minute crime shows were often more concerned with simply explaining whodunit than delving into whydunit; obviously if you’re strapped for running time, the easiest thing to leave on the cutting-room floor is the discussion of motive). It was an O.K. episode but the character of the threatening gangster got pretty oppressive and it didn’t have the charm of the “Million Dollar Coffin” episode or some of the other shows we’ve watched (I bought five DVD’s of this show — 20 episodes in all — mainly because on the Critics’ Choice list they were $4 apiece). — 2/10/08
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Afterwards Charles and I settled in and ran the remaining two episodes of Mr. and Mrs. North from volume four of the Critics’ Choice collection (I got volumes three through seven). One was called “Dying to Live” and was quite intriguing even though at times it seemed like the screenwriter was trying to see how many noir clichés he could crowd into a 25-minute show: it’s all about George Tuttle, an accountant who’s just been diagnosed with a fatal disease and told he has only a few more weeks to live. He decides to use this knowledge to blackmail his boss (Alan Mowbray), who embezzled $76,000 from the company to support the expensive tastes of his wife (Lee Patrick). For $10,000, Tuttle offers his boss, he will sign a confession naming himself as the embezzler and it will be found on his body.
To get back his money, the boss and his wife hire an adventuress (Ann Savage, the marvelous femme fatale from Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour) to meet up with him in a fancy bar, seduce him, get him drunk and steal back the money — which she does, only when the boss confronts the drunken Tuttle he kills Tuttle and then helps himself to a bottle of Napoleon brandy Tuttle had bought as his final thrill in life. Mr. and Mrs. North enter the action because in addition to his regular job, he also works on their taxes (the original air date of this episode was March 13, 1953 and back then the IRS deadline was March 15, not April 15 — at least according to this script), and he happens to drop his phony confession on their floor. They discover it and confront the principals, and in the end it turns out that Tuttle had spiked that bottle of Napoleon brandy with poison and therefore the Mowbray character unintentionally killed himself: a neat, chilling ending to a quite well-written, well-done episode whose only flaw is that the Norths, nominally the show’s leads, seem almost totally irrelevant to it.
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After that, the last show on the disc, “The Man Who Came to Murder,” seemed anticlimactic; set at a honeymoon lodge where Mr. and Mrs. North take a vacation every year, it involves a county sheriff who gets murdered; a former racketeer who says he’s quit the criminal life; his fiancée, who backs out of their planned marriage at the last minute because she’s not so sure that he’s really quit (especially when she learns he’s deposited a good chunk of his ill-gotten gains in their joint safe deposit box, fueling her paranoia that his activities will get her arrested as an accessory); and a French cook with a really bad accent who’s married four women without bothering to divorce any of them in between. The gangster killed the sheriff, it turns out totally unsurprisingly in a dull episode with too many suspects and too few motives, and once again too little of Mr. and Mrs. North — though at least in “Dying to Live” (a show that in addition to its macabre plot twists also brought to Tuttle some of the pathos of the Lionel Barrymore plot line in Grand Hotel) that didn’t matter so much because the rest of the episode was so good. — 2/12/08
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I ran the next episode in sequence from the Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s: “Breakout,” an unusually good one in which the Norths (Richard Denning and Barbara Britton) visit a prison where a famous gangster who was busted for income-tax evasion is ready to discuss writing his memoirs. Two other convicts use the Norths’ presence as the excuse to break out and use them as hostages, and the show (directed by Ralph Francis Murphy, whose name consistently appears on their best episodes) turns into a quite exciting suspense drama in which the Norths vanquish the bad guys by feeding them coffee spiked with a sleeping pill Mrs. North had previously bought for her husband. Interestingly, the gangster whose memoirs the Norths were going to publish (and who is killed by the other cons before the final denouement) was played by a padded and virtually unrecognizable Lyle Talbot (the one degree of separation between Bette Davis and Ed Wood!), — 3/8/08
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It was even more ironic, after watching such a thought-provoking but mostly anti-war movie, to come home and (after I nebulized John P. and Charles and I had ice cream for dessert), that the film we showed as a nightcap was a Mr. and Mrs. North TV episode, “Salt in the Blood,” featuring a story about a young man who joins the Navy because he’s so anxious to serve his country in the Korean war (which was just lurching to a close when this episode aired on May 29, 1953), only to be mustered out when his mother reports him for being underage. Thinking that if he can get hold of $150 he can go to the West Coast and re-enlist under another name, he goes to a sailor’s bar where the bartender is a man who calls himself “Boats” and gets into an argument with a drunken sailor, Sloan, who is flashing around a big bankroll and loudly and drunkenly proclaiming his intention of spending it.
Sloane is ultimately found mortally wounded in an alley near the bar (as Mr. and Mrs. North walked down the representation of the alley I couldn’t help but joke, “Down these cheap sets a man must go … ”) and Our Hero, Chuck Walker, is naturally wanted and ultimately arrested for the crime, but the Norths find a ferrule (the metal band at the base of a walking stick) and with that Mrs. North finds out that the real assailant (who ultimately killed Sloane) was the tattoo artist who hangs out at the bar and who clubbed him with his cane. It’s a nice show that was well written and, for the budget, reasonably well directed by Ralph Francis Murphy, and with a good performance by Dick Jones as the sailor (even though he looked well over 18 and therefore more than old enough to serve!), and some interesting members in the rest of the cast: Sara Haden, all-purpose mother type, as Chuck’s mom; Claudia Barrett from Robot Monster as his girlfriend Dorothy (who looks even older than he does!), old silent-era star Monte Blue as Boats, Phil Tully as Sloan, John Gallaudet as Eddie Pink (Sloan’s business partner — in a mysteriously unstated “business” — and briefly a suspect in his own right), and Percy Helton as Needles, the tattoo artist who turns out to be the real killer (did writer Herbert Purdum have to give all his characters such obvious names?). — 3/11/08
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It was the next in sequence on volume 5 of the Mr. and Mrs. North series on Critics’ Choice, and this episode, called “Reunion” and first aired February 9, 1954, in which Jerry North (Richard Denning) returns to his alma mater and meets up with his old roommate “Stuffy” Barton (Douglas Kennedy in a very tough performance reminiscent of Fred MacMurray’s in Double Indemnity), who’s now an atomic scientist. The university, under the leadership of professor Nielsen (Leonard Mudie) — who puffs away so enthusiastically on his pipe he looks radioactive — has developed an atomic bomb so small it can fit into a suitcase, and Barton — horrified at what this could mean to world peace — has made a duplicate version and planted it in the college gym, set to go off when the big basketball game is scheduled to start as a way of dramatizing his cause.
He’s also given himself radiation sickness from trying to build a bomb on his stony lonesome and having to handle the fissile material without help, and when he’s captured he claims to have made three other bombs and planted them in New York City and Washington, D.C. (the fact that this fictional character picked the same target cities as the real 9/11 plotters was probably pretty obvious but still struck me), though he finally agrees to disarm the bomb (with two seconds to spare!) and admits that the additional bombs didn’t really exist and were just a bluff. This was a very tough, well-done melodrama, expertly directed by Gordon Blair and with a script by Donn Mullally and Lee Erwin that was particularly noteworthy for avoiding the obvious Cold War tropes: the villain was crazy but sympathetic (much like the socially conscious mad scientists Boris Karloff played in the Columbia films we’d been watching recently) and the writers did not take the easy route (for the time) of making him a closet Communist deliberately trying to destroy America. — 3/14/08
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Charles and I crashed and I ran him the final Mr. and Mrs. North episode on Critics’ Choice DVD volume 5: “Loon Lake” (inescapably associated for me with E. L. Doctorow’s rather grim novel of that title), aired the week after “Reunion” (February 16, 1954) and a chilling suspense tale of the Norths being held hostage in a mountain cabin by outlaws Matt Weber (Jack Elam), who’s just escaped from jail (the escape is shown in an appealingly noir-ish wordless opening in which he’s smuggled out in a coffin-like box, which made me joke, “Dr. Frankenstein, call your office”), Doc Randall (Ross Elliott) and Clay (John Doucette), the usual mentally retarded triggerman associated with stories like this. (The “Breakout” episode, also on this DVD, in which the Norths were held hostage by escaping convicts in prison, also featured a retarded triggerman who constantly had to be coddled and psychologically stroked by the ringleader.)
The gimmick is that Randall has been brought in to do plastic surgery on Weber, who accordingly goes through most of the episode wearing bandages on his face — only Randall is also attempting to seduce Weber’s girlfriend Bonnie (Pamela Dumcan, doing a good hard-bitten portrayal), and judging from the surprisingly (for 1950’s television) passionate open-mouthed kissing Mrs. North catches Randall and Bonnie doing in the kitchen, he’s got considerably farther than first base with her. Apparently Randall (or at least the show’s writer, Lee Erwin) had seen the 1935 RKO gangster film Let ’Em Have It, in which gangster Bruce Cabot similarly (stupidly) inveigled a plastic surgeon with a grudge against him to change his appearance, for Randall has carved scars with the letter “M” into both of Weber’s cheeks the way the surgeon in Let ’Em Have It did with Cabot — so he’d be easier, not harder, for the cops to identify.
Erwin also borrowed a plot gommick from an earlier Mr. and Mrs. North episode, “Dying to Live,” in having the principal villain essentially murdered by someone who was already dead — this time Weber kills Randall and Bonnie and then drinks a cup of coffee Bonnie had made before he shot her, spiked with rat poison in hopes of killing him so she could run off with Randall. Despite an odd and inappropriate comic tag scene, this Mr. and Mrs. North episode — directed with unusual élan by “B”-movie veteran Lew Landers — was one of their best, and proved that even the rather superficial premise of this show could be used as an excuse for good suspense drama. — 4/15/08
•••••
I screened another episode of Mr. and Mrs. North, “The Silent Butler,” in which Gerald North (Richard Denning), tired of being mistakenly awakened on Sunday mornings by the Norths’ maid Millie, decides to hire a male servant instead and end up with Oliver (Edgar Barrier, coming across very much as a graduate of the Arthur Treacher School of How to Play a British Butler), not realizing that Oliver is taking the job only to get away from a decidedly unrequited crush on him from Mrs. Bentley, owner of the employment agency that referred him. Oliver is also having an affair with the maid working for the Wentworths next door, even though the Wentworths have a maid and a butler as well, the two are married to each other and the Wentworths hired them as a couple. By pretending to be Gerald’s private secretary, Mrs. Bentley lures Oliver down to the basement of the Norths’ (and the Wentworths’) apartment building and stabs him — only it turns out Oliver is very much alive and she’s really killed Edgar by mistake. It takes about half the show’s running time before the crime actually materializes, and until then it’s a nice, sprightly domestic comedy, and the whole thing is a lot of fun — Mr. and Mrs. North was obviously derivative of The Thin Man (as was the 1980’s TV show Hart to Hart) but at least it was well derived, and it was a treat to see the writing credit at the end and find George Oppenheimer’s name at the top for a change! — 4/18/08
•••••
I also managed to squeeze in the final episode on volume six of the Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s. It was called “Stranger than Fiction” — which couldn’t help but remind us (me, anyway) of that marvelous recent film with Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson, written by Zach Helm and touchingly directed by Marc Forster — though about all this had in common was that it was also about a writer. Since the print Critics’ Choice mastered from was missing the show’s closing credits, I wasn’t able to do a cast list, though I’ll say the acting was quite good all around. The plot deals with an excessively macho writer who’s made his mark with a grittily realistic novel about World War II (the show originally aired on February 20, 1953) — I was wondering just who the screenwriters were modeling the character after (Hemingway and Mailer were my two main guesses) — who’s spending an alcohol- and bitterness-fueled weekend with his trophy wife, an old Army buddy from his own war service and his soft-spoken “secretary,” whom he continually browbeats and has made into a house servant, who it turns out actually wrote the best-selling war novel Gerald North (Richard Denning) published.
He’s the only likable character in the bunch, which no doubt is why he’s dispatched after the first act — the other people in that house are all so hateful he’s sorely missed in the rest of the program — and the Norths not surprisingly find that the writer killed him, especially since he lusted after the writer’s trophy wife (who was actually, natch, having an affair with the war buddy). I didn’t realize while we were watching it how clichéd this plot was, but the story was genuinely fun and enjoyable and the actor playing the writer made him properly loathsome. — 4/23/08
•••••
I trotted out the last of the five Critics’ Choice DVD’s I ordered of the Mr. and Mrs. North show and we watched the first episode, “Trained for Murder,” a far less exalted mystery than the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode I’d screened for myself earlier but a good one even though this was one 1950’s TV episode that suffered from the brevity of the half-hour drama format. This was a story about a mean-spirited boxer, Vince McKay (a good slimeball performance by Hal Baylor) — a sort of white version of Mike Tyson — whose avocations are womanizing and pissing off everybody in his circle, from his manager Whitey Malone (Ray Roberts) to his sparring partner to his manservant Joe (Christopher Dark), whose girlfriend Ruth (Gloria Henry) has got the hots for Vince. Joe is poisoned and drops dead in the ring during a practice session for his upcoming fight that would put him one bout away from the championship in his weight class, and for a moment we’re led to believe that one of the women in the cast — either Ruth or Art’s blonde-bimbo wife Edna (Nancy Valentine), who’s also succumbed to Vince’s dubious charms — by spiking a pie they were baking him with rat poison, but the killer turns out to be Joe, who in addition to his own jealousies over Ruth hates Vince because one of the women Vince seduced and abandoned previously was Joe’s sister Sharon.
The Norths get there through a plot gimmick this series used several times — the Norths are given a proposal for a book about Vince to be written by sportswriter Art Davis (Robert Carson) and they come to spend the weekend at a remote house in the country where Vince and his entourage are holing up in preparation for his big fight — indeed, I think this was the same remote-house-in-the-country set they’d used previously for stories like this (all they did to make it look like a prizefighter’s training camp was to put a ring up on the backlot and hang a heavy bag in the living room) — and writer Erna Lazarus went out of her way to give the various dramatis personae motives for knocking Vince off, though the show’s 25-minute running time (not counting the original commercials, left off of this edition) was way too short to build much suspense about the revelation, especially since Vince didn’t even get killed until 16 minutes in.
This was the first Mr. and Mrs. North we’d seen that contained an actual sponsor’s announcement (for Colgate toothpaste, lather shaving cream and a spray-on deodorant called Veto — and what was the Colgate marketing department thinking when they came up with that name?) as well as plugs for next week’s episode (“Murder on the Midway”) and other shows Colgate was sponsoring then — and it can be fun to watch these old TV shows with the original commercials (if only to remember how tacky they were compared to the production values of TV ads today!) even though the gimmick of Martin Kane, Private Eye — where the sponsors, U.S. Tobacco (now just a chewing and pipe tobacco manufacturer but then a cigarette company as well) actually worked their spots into the plots of the shows — was more than a bit excessive. — 5/23/08
•••••
I ran him a nice Mr and Mrs. North episode called “The Placid Affair.” This was considerably better than the usual run of these programs in that it featured a genuinely terrifying villain, Mills (John Hoyt), a tubercular clerk at the Brewster company who cracks the company safe and steals $150,000 in payroll money, then tells his live-in nurse/lover/slave Betty (Hillary Brooke) the he embezzled a considerably smaller amount but didn’t get away with the money. She finds out differently when she sees a newspaper headline about the theft while the two are on their way to Lake Placid (so the title turned out to be geographical, not emotional), where they end up in a cabin next door to the Norths, who recognize Betty because she once nursed Jerry North (Richard Denning) through an illness.
Directed by Lew Landers from a script by Mortimer Braus, this one turned out to be one of the tightest and most convincingly noir-ish episodes of this series, which was generally interesting but sometimes turned too campy for its own good. This time, though, the only trace of camp was the bizarre conceit that because Mrs. North (Barbara Britton) breaks the heel of her high-heeled shoe running down the stairs while Betty was presumably fleeing in the elevator (but actually set it to go down while she herself remained on the fourth floor where the apartment she shared with Mills was located), she discovers her and they have a quite graphically staged fight on a table and a bed before the men in the cast — series regulars Denning as her husband and Francis de Sales as a cop — figure out what happened, take the stairs up (why they didn’t take the elevator up only Mortimer Braus would know!) and come in the nick of time to take Betty into custody. The years had been hard on Hillary Brooke — she was now pretty hatchet-faced instead of the alluring femme fatale she’d played in the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green — but her marvelous ability to play thinly controlled menace remained vividly intact, and Landers actually directed this with more care than he showed in a lot of his features! — 6/5/08
•••••
I showed him our next-to-last Mr. and Mrs. North episode, “Mark of Hate,” directed by Lew Landers (again!) from a script by Lee Erwin and featuring actor Willis Bouchey in an absolutely chilling performance as Gordon Lane, an old friend of the Norths who two years earlier was involved in an automobile accident that left him crippled and bedridden. The Norths still think he’s the kind man who became their friend years before, and are impressed at how well he seems to have adapted to life without mobility — but in fact he’s become bitter and filled with hatred, directed partly at himself but mainly at his wife Marion (Eve Miller), who was drifting away from him even before the accident and since then has started an affair with Barry Weston (Harry Lauter), the art director at the magazine Gordon owns and Marion worked for when they met. Bouchey’s depiction of this role — particularly the vicious crabbiness with which he orders around the people supposedly taking care of him and the bitterness perched on the thin edge between wanting to take his own life and lashing out at the people near him — was absolutely accurate.
The gimmick is that, unbeknownst to everybody else, Gordon has actually regained enough of his ability to walk that he’s able to take down a gun from the gun rack on his bedroom wall, load it with a bullet and use it to shoot and kill Barry and frame Marion for the crime — and when Mrs. North, all smiles and innocence, comes in to look after him, she catches on when a newspaper she was reading to him has mysteriously moved from the end table where she rested it to his bed. It was ironic that this disc (volume 7 of the Critics’ Choice series of Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s) should contain two consecutive episodes about deathly ill individuals who lash themselves and summon up their last reserves of energy to commit crimes and screw over the women in their lives (though in fact the two shows originally aired four weeks apart, “The Placid Affair” on April 27, 1954 and “Mark of Hate” on May 18), and once again this was a solid thriller with the comedy aspects of the formula well under control this time. — 6/6/08
•••••
We ended up playing the last of our 20 episodes of the early-1950’s Mr. and Mrs. North series, “Climax” — which, even though the script by Herbert Purdum (a name otherwise unknown to me) doesn’t bother to explain the title, turned out to be perhaps the best of all 20 episodes on these five Critics’ Choice DVD’s, a neat, taut half-hour mini-drama about a serial killer who particularly targets sailors — not for sexual reasons but because he’s a Navy vet himself, he spent 10 years in the brig for a carefully unspecified crime, and he’s decided that the deaths of six naval officers will be appropriate payback for the decade of his life they cost him. The actual central character, though, is “Clipper” Hale (Steve Brodie), yet another old friend of the Norths the writers on this show introduced willy-nilly as needed, whose lifelong friend and fellow sailor Doug Parrish (Russ Conway) is lured into a trap and becomes victim number five of the killer, Carl Denver (Paul Richards).
The main dramatic issue becomes whether “Clipper” will yield to his killer instincts and murder his friend’s murderer or whether he’ll step aside and let the law take care of him — and at one point the series regular who usually represented the police, homicide inspector Wigan (Francis De Sales), gets so worried that “Clipper” will turn vigilante he arrests him and holds him as a material witness until the Norths agree to be responsible for him if he’s released — whereupon he gives Jerry North the slip and traces the killer to the dirty-spoon restaurant where he’s a dishwasher. The episode is effectively staged by director Lew Landers, who along with cinematographer Kenneth D. Peach (who did a peach of a job photographing this — bad joke) sets the scene with a strikingly noir-ish shot, though the next scene — inside the restaurant, introducing Denver (though we’re not yet aware he’s the killer) and his co-worker and friend (girlfriend, maybe?) Katie (Monica Keating) — is photographed all too flatly in what would become the standard “look” of black-and-white television.
Still, this is an excellent show and one which ably caught the balance between drama and comedy that often eluded producer John W. Loveton and his directors and writers on this show (usually the trap was they overdid the comedy and produced shows that only worked as camp, but not this time), and an excellent finish to our travel through 20 episodes of this very interesting and often entertaining program. — 6/15/08
Saturday, June 14, 2008
First Yank Into Tokyo (RKO, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was First Yank Into Tokyo, a 1945 production from RKO which Turner Classic Movies recently offered as part of their series on “Asian Images in Film.” In their introduction, Robert Osborne and his guest commentator, Peter X. Feng, pointed to this film as a successor to such previous RKO war-exploitation movies as Hitler’s Children, Behind the Rising Sun and The Master Race, and also as an interesting variation on the so-called “yellowface” practice of casting white actors in Asian roles (Warner Oland, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters as Charlie Chan; Oland and Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu; Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto and virtually the entire casts of MGM’s Pearl S. Buck-based epics The Good Earth and Dragon Seed) in that the story deals with a U.S. military pilot, Army Air Corps Major Steve Ross (Tom Neal, in the second-twitchiest performance of his career and probably his only other good movie besides Detour) who, because his father was an industrial engineer selling technology to Japanese companies, lived in Japan from age one until he was ready for college and therefore knew Japan’s language and customs intimately.
Because of this, he’s selected for a top-secret assignment to infiltrate a Japanese concentration camp and make contact with an American prisoner, Lewis Jardine (Marc Cramer), who has an all-important secret that could hasten the end of the war — and in order to “pass,” Ross is given plastic surgery to make him look Japanese as well. RKO had registered the title First Yank Into Tokyo in hopes that they would make a killing by releasing a film of that name at the same time the American armed forces actually invaded Japan — which, of course, they never did because in the meantime the U.S. developed the atomic bomb, used it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and thus induced the Japanese to surrender without having to launch a war of conquest on the Japanese homeland. No problem: RKO merely called a few of their actors back and reshot a couple of expository scenes to make the atom bomb (or at least the triggering mechanism for it) the precious secret Ross has to get out of Jardine before the Japanese either torture or kill him.
It’s a really kinky movie in ways I suspect its writers, J. Robert Bren and Gladys Atwater, didn’t intend, from the almost kabuki-like appearance of Neal’s Asian drag (RKO’s makeup artist, Maurice Seiderman — who’d done Orson Welles’ age makeup in Citizen Kane but hadn’t yet joined the movie makeup union so he couldn’t be credited on screen — succeeds in making Neal look non-white but at the cost of slathering so much makeup and tape on his face he loses the ability to act with his expressions and has to convey emotion through voice and body language alone) to the bizarre coincidences with which they powered their plot. We’re supposed to believe that when the Pearl Harbor attack happened Ross was stationed in Hawai’i and dating an Army nurse, Abby Drake (Barbara Hale, later Della Street on the Perry Mason TV show, who here has such perfectly plucked eyebrows it’s hard to believe in her as a nurse), who’s shipped out to Bata’an before the two can get married and who is presumably killed there — only she wasn’t really killed, she survived and was impressed by her Japanese captors into serving as a nurse at the concentration camp Ross has been sent to infiltrate, whose commandant just happens to be Ross’s old college roommate, Col. Hideko Okanura (Richard Loo, here acting even more than usual like an Asian version of Erich von Stroheim), who in the big scene at the end recognizes and “outs” Ross because he saw him run through the camp’s grounds when a dog was chasing him and display the same broken-field running skills he’d used as a star football player back in college.
Bren and Atwater are even inventive enough to work a romantic triangle into their film — thinking that Ross was dead (as he did with her as well — what were they going to say to each other? “We’ll always have Honolulu”), Abby fell in love with Jardine while she was nursing him to health in the prison camp — and by far their quirkiest invention was the character of Haan-Soo (Keye Luke), a Korean and part of an underground resistance movement who’s also stationed in the camp (this is a very claustrophobic movie — once Ross makes it into the camp the film never leaves it until the very end) and is helping Ross, indeed is the only other person there who’s supposed to know his real identity. Even the ending is more than a bit Casablancan: Ross sends Abby and Jardine to the British submarine that’s parked off the Japanese coast to take Jardine to safety and back to the Manhattan Project and tells her she belongs with Jardine now — at least partly because he’s been warned the plastic surgery is irreversible and he’ll look like an Asian the rest of his life — while he and Haan-Soo use a couple of captured machine guns to hold off the Japanese hordes long enough for the sub to submerge and escape, thereby giving up their own lives for the mission.
First Yank Into Tokyo has its share of the racist conventions of war films of the period — the Germans were occasionally shown as cultured brutes but the Japanese were just animals, what we hear of their own language reduced to almost guttural growls (much the way Michael Cimino did with the Viet Namese characters in The Deer Hunter 33 years later, without even the excuse that the war was still going on!) while about all they talk about in English is greed (just about everyone in the camp administration is stealing supplies from the prison hospital and mess and selling them on the black market) and lust (just about everyone in the camp administration has the hots for pretty little Abby and her nubile white body) — but it’s also a good deal more complex than its makers intended, at least partly because of the Production Code and what it forced them to leave out. The details of Abby’s ordeal on Bata’an, especially the “comfort woman” aspects it probably involved, were strictly (to borrow a word from one of Japan’s wartime allies) verboten, and so was any suggestion that Haan-Soo’s services to the Japanese (his cover while he’s really resisting them) involved anything (homo)sexual — yet Keye Luke plays the character as a screaming queen and a sort of prototype for the Sal Mineo role in Exodus (“They used me like a woman!”). Certainly you’d be hard pressed to realize that this bizarrely mincing man is the same actor who played Number One Son in the Warner Oland Charlie Chans!
First Yank Into Tokyo — a film I’d seen only once before, on commercial TV in the 1970’s — holds the interest for its sheer kinkiness and quirkiness (including the obviousness with which the references to the atomic bomb were spliced in, and the almost orgasmic tone the announcer assumes at the end when describing the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and suggesting it was what the Japanese deserved for killing off poor Tom Neal), as well as galvanic direction by Gordon Douglas, who was clearly destined for biggers and betters (his best-known credit is probably the 1954 Young at Heart, wth Frank Sinatra and Doris Day). It’s not a great movie but it’s better than a cheap war exploitation film with a hideously racially stereotyped script and a no-name (white) cast had a right to be!
The film was First Yank Into Tokyo, a 1945 production from RKO which Turner Classic Movies recently offered as part of their series on “Asian Images in Film.” In their introduction, Robert Osborne and his guest commentator, Peter X. Feng, pointed to this film as a successor to such previous RKO war-exploitation movies as Hitler’s Children, Behind the Rising Sun and The Master Race, and also as an interesting variation on the so-called “yellowface” practice of casting white actors in Asian roles (Warner Oland, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters as Charlie Chan; Oland and Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu; Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto and virtually the entire casts of MGM’s Pearl S. Buck-based epics The Good Earth and Dragon Seed) in that the story deals with a U.S. military pilot, Army Air Corps Major Steve Ross (Tom Neal, in the second-twitchiest performance of his career and probably his only other good movie besides Detour) who, because his father was an industrial engineer selling technology to Japanese companies, lived in Japan from age one until he was ready for college and therefore knew Japan’s language and customs intimately.
Because of this, he’s selected for a top-secret assignment to infiltrate a Japanese concentration camp and make contact with an American prisoner, Lewis Jardine (Marc Cramer), who has an all-important secret that could hasten the end of the war — and in order to “pass,” Ross is given plastic surgery to make him look Japanese as well. RKO had registered the title First Yank Into Tokyo in hopes that they would make a killing by releasing a film of that name at the same time the American armed forces actually invaded Japan — which, of course, they never did because in the meantime the U.S. developed the atomic bomb, used it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and thus induced the Japanese to surrender without having to launch a war of conquest on the Japanese homeland. No problem: RKO merely called a few of their actors back and reshot a couple of expository scenes to make the atom bomb (or at least the triggering mechanism for it) the precious secret Ross has to get out of Jardine before the Japanese either torture or kill him.
It’s a really kinky movie in ways I suspect its writers, J. Robert Bren and Gladys Atwater, didn’t intend, from the almost kabuki-like appearance of Neal’s Asian drag (RKO’s makeup artist, Maurice Seiderman — who’d done Orson Welles’ age makeup in Citizen Kane but hadn’t yet joined the movie makeup union so he couldn’t be credited on screen — succeeds in making Neal look non-white but at the cost of slathering so much makeup and tape on his face he loses the ability to act with his expressions and has to convey emotion through voice and body language alone) to the bizarre coincidences with which they powered their plot. We’re supposed to believe that when the Pearl Harbor attack happened Ross was stationed in Hawai’i and dating an Army nurse, Abby Drake (Barbara Hale, later Della Street on the Perry Mason TV show, who here has such perfectly plucked eyebrows it’s hard to believe in her as a nurse), who’s shipped out to Bata’an before the two can get married and who is presumably killed there — only she wasn’t really killed, she survived and was impressed by her Japanese captors into serving as a nurse at the concentration camp Ross has been sent to infiltrate, whose commandant just happens to be Ross’s old college roommate, Col. Hideko Okanura (Richard Loo, here acting even more than usual like an Asian version of Erich von Stroheim), who in the big scene at the end recognizes and “outs” Ross because he saw him run through the camp’s grounds when a dog was chasing him and display the same broken-field running skills he’d used as a star football player back in college.
Bren and Atwater are even inventive enough to work a romantic triangle into their film — thinking that Ross was dead (as he did with her as well — what were they going to say to each other? “We’ll always have Honolulu”), Abby fell in love with Jardine while she was nursing him to health in the prison camp — and by far their quirkiest invention was the character of Haan-Soo (Keye Luke), a Korean and part of an underground resistance movement who’s also stationed in the camp (this is a very claustrophobic movie — once Ross makes it into the camp the film never leaves it until the very end) and is helping Ross, indeed is the only other person there who’s supposed to know his real identity. Even the ending is more than a bit Casablancan: Ross sends Abby and Jardine to the British submarine that’s parked off the Japanese coast to take Jardine to safety and back to the Manhattan Project and tells her she belongs with Jardine now — at least partly because he’s been warned the plastic surgery is irreversible and he’ll look like an Asian the rest of his life — while he and Haan-Soo use a couple of captured machine guns to hold off the Japanese hordes long enough for the sub to submerge and escape, thereby giving up their own lives for the mission.
First Yank Into Tokyo has its share of the racist conventions of war films of the period — the Germans were occasionally shown as cultured brutes but the Japanese were just animals, what we hear of their own language reduced to almost guttural growls (much the way Michael Cimino did with the Viet Namese characters in The Deer Hunter 33 years later, without even the excuse that the war was still going on!) while about all they talk about in English is greed (just about everyone in the camp administration is stealing supplies from the prison hospital and mess and selling them on the black market) and lust (just about everyone in the camp administration has the hots for pretty little Abby and her nubile white body) — but it’s also a good deal more complex than its makers intended, at least partly because of the Production Code and what it forced them to leave out. The details of Abby’s ordeal on Bata’an, especially the “comfort woman” aspects it probably involved, were strictly (to borrow a word from one of Japan’s wartime allies) verboten, and so was any suggestion that Haan-Soo’s services to the Japanese (his cover while he’s really resisting them) involved anything (homo)sexual — yet Keye Luke plays the character as a screaming queen and a sort of prototype for the Sal Mineo role in Exodus (“They used me like a woman!”). Certainly you’d be hard pressed to realize that this bizarrely mincing man is the same actor who played Number One Son in the Warner Oland Charlie Chans!
First Yank Into Tokyo — a film I’d seen only once before, on commercial TV in the 1970’s — holds the interest for its sheer kinkiness and quirkiness (including the obviousness with which the references to the atomic bomb were spliced in, and the almost orgasmic tone the announcer assumes at the end when describing the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and suggesting it was what the Japanese deserved for killing off poor Tom Neal), as well as galvanic direction by Gordon Douglas, who was clearly destined for biggers and betters (his best-known credit is probably the 1954 Young at Heart, wth Frank Sinatra and Doris Day). It’s not a great movie but it’s better than a cheap war exploitation film with a hideously racially stereotyped script and a no-name (white) cast had a right to be!
Friday, June 13, 2008
Stay (New Regency, 2005)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film at the San Diego Public Library June 9 was Stay, which I especially wanted to see because two of my favorite people in contemporary film were involved in it: Ryan Gosling played a leading role and Marc Forster was the director. Ralph DeLauro invoked The Twilight Zone as a comparison point in his introduction and certainly the parallels were there. The movie begins with a tire-less auto wheel working itself free from a burning car — at first I thought this was the logo for one of the multitude of production companies seemingly involved in producing any film that gets made today — and the auto belongs to Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), a suicidal, schizophrenic art student who burned it on purpose (at least we think that’s what happened — later we get other clues). He’s been seeing a female psychiatrist who has a nervous breakdown of her own (caused, it’s hinted later — a lot of dramatic issues in David Benioff’s script are merely hinted at instead of being spelled out for us — by Henry’s intractability as a patient), and one day he shows up for his appointment and she’s not there.
Instead there’s a “substitute shrink,” Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan MacGregor, top-billed), whose commonality with Henry has already been established visually by a match cut in which Gosling’s face so perfectly turns into MacGregor’s I was beginning to wonder either if the two were going to turn out to be the same person or one was going to be the delusion of the other à la The Sixth Sense. Dr. Foster’s real point of identification with his new patient is that his own live-in girlfriend, Lila Culpepper (Naomi Watts), is an artist who attempted suicide by slashing her arms (down the long way rather than the far less dangerous across the wrists). Henry is obsessed with a deceased artist who on his 21st birthday burned all his paintings and committed suicide as his ultimate artistic statement. He’s also obsessed with a lot of things — as are the writer and director who created him: we get a lot of shots of spiral staircases (a favorite movie image since the film of that title and, even more so, Hitchcock’s Vertigo — and it’s a testament to Forster’s and Benioff’s ability to create a mood that the visual quotes from Vertigo add to the mood instead of distracting us by seeming to say, “See how clever we are?”).
There are a lot of recurring images — including one of an engagement ring — and characters who may or may not be alive, including Dr. Foster’s mentor, Dr. Leon Patterson (Bob Hoskins), a blind man (until he mysteriously recovers his sight later in the film) with whom Dr. Foster plays chess, calling out his moves so Patterson can “see” them (an evocation of the chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal?), and whom Henry is convinced is his father even though he’s earlier told Dr. Foster (and us) that both his parents are dead. (Later we meet someone who may or may not be his mother as well.)
I usually can’t stand movies like this that are so disconnected from reality that anything can happen in their plots — as Dwight Macdonald wrote of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (a movie that really isn’t that disconnected at all, especially by comparison with what’s been made since!), “If all the cards are wild, you can’t play poker.” And you can’t play with audience expectations unless you first set up some to begin with. Nonetheless, though it didn’t strike me as in the same league as Finding Neverland or Stranger Than Fiction (which might almost be read as a parody of Stay), this is a remarkable film, visually stunning and powered by Gosling’s marvelously enigmatic performance — even though, as my partner Charles said when it was over (a thought that had occurred to me as well), one wonders if Gosling always has to play picturesquely doomed psychotics or people on the edge. Isn’t someone, someday going to cast him as a nice, ordinary, normal human being?
The film at the San Diego Public Library June 9 was Stay, which I especially wanted to see because two of my favorite people in contemporary film were involved in it: Ryan Gosling played a leading role and Marc Forster was the director. Ralph DeLauro invoked The Twilight Zone as a comparison point in his introduction and certainly the parallels were there. The movie begins with a tire-less auto wheel working itself free from a burning car — at first I thought this was the logo for one of the multitude of production companies seemingly involved in producing any film that gets made today — and the auto belongs to Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), a suicidal, schizophrenic art student who burned it on purpose (at least we think that’s what happened — later we get other clues). He’s been seeing a female psychiatrist who has a nervous breakdown of her own (caused, it’s hinted later — a lot of dramatic issues in David Benioff’s script are merely hinted at instead of being spelled out for us — by Henry’s intractability as a patient), and one day he shows up for his appointment and she’s not there.
Instead there’s a “substitute shrink,” Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan MacGregor, top-billed), whose commonality with Henry has already been established visually by a match cut in which Gosling’s face so perfectly turns into MacGregor’s I was beginning to wonder either if the two were going to turn out to be the same person or one was going to be the delusion of the other à la The Sixth Sense. Dr. Foster’s real point of identification with his new patient is that his own live-in girlfriend, Lila Culpepper (Naomi Watts), is an artist who attempted suicide by slashing her arms (down the long way rather than the far less dangerous across the wrists). Henry is obsessed with a deceased artist who on his 21st birthday burned all his paintings and committed suicide as his ultimate artistic statement. He’s also obsessed with a lot of things — as are the writer and director who created him: we get a lot of shots of spiral staircases (a favorite movie image since the film of that title and, even more so, Hitchcock’s Vertigo — and it’s a testament to Forster’s and Benioff’s ability to create a mood that the visual quotes from Vertigo add to the mood instead of distracting us by seeming to say, “See how clever we are?”).
There are a lot of recurring images — including one of an engagement ring — and characters who may or may not be alive, including Dr. Foster’s mentor, Dr. Leon Patterson (Bob Hoskins), a blind man (until he mysteriously recovers his sight later in the film) with whom Dr. Foster plays chess, calling out his moves so Patterson can “see” them (an evocation of the chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal?), and whom Henry is convinced is his father even though he’s earlier told Dr. Foster (and us) that both his parents are dead. (Later we meet someone who may or may not be his mother as well.)
I usually can’t stand movies like this that are so disconnected from reality that anything can happen in their plots — as Dwight Macdonald wrote of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (a movie that really isn’t that disconnected at all, especially by comparison with what’s been made since!), “If all the cards are wild, you can’t play poker.” And you can’t play with audience expectations unless you first set up some to begin with. Nonetheless, though it didn’t strike me as in the same league as Finding Neverland or Stranger Than Fiction (which might almost be read as a parody of Stay), this is a remarkable film, visually stunning and powered by Gosling’s marvelously enigmatic performance — even though, as my partner Charles said when it was over (a thought that had occurred to me as well), one wonders if Gosling always has to play picturesquely doomed psychotics or people on the edge. Isn’t someone, someday going to cast him as a nice, ordinary, normal human being?
Law of the Tropics (Warners, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles and I got home I was already pretty dog-tired but I ended up running him another film: Law of the Tropics, which I’d stumbled on in the DVD collection wondering if I should bother recording the similarly titled Lady of the Tropics — and which turned out to be a 1941 Warners’ “B” that was an uncredited remake of Oil for the Lamps of China, with the setting moved from China to an unspecified South American country (probably Brazil), the oil changed to rubber, and Constance Bennett top-billed in the role of Joan Madison, a down-and-out woman who fled the U.S. because of a murder charge against her and ended up singing in a sleazy nightclub and looking over her shoulder for the detective who’s been sent down to Wherever, South America to apprehend her and bring her back for trial.
She sees a way out in the person of Jim Conway (Jeffrey Lynn), assistant manager of Station 3 of the King Rubber Company, who’s come to the coast city to meet his future wife — only said future wife, Laura, has sent him a telegram saying she’s had second thoughts and isn’t about to join him and live in a country she’s never been to and has no idea whether she could stand. Unwilling to face the teasing of his co-workers and the natives if he returns without a wife, he proposes a sexless marriage to Joan as long as she impersonates Laura and answers to that name. Meanwhile, the owner of the King Rubber Company, Alfred King, Sr. (Paul Harvey) has been concerned about the slow growth rate of production in this country and plans to solve the problem by sending his no-account son to take over Station 3 from the beloved old foreman who’s been running it for a quarter-century, Frank Davis (Hobart Bosworth).
For the most part Law of the Tropics is played for screwball comedy more than anything else, and it’s a real shock when something sad and dramatic happens (Davis, broken by the news that the boss has fired him and replaced him with the boss’s son, shoots himself) — an accidental disorientation almost as jarring as the intentional ones in Stay! There are a few shards of anti-corporatism (apparently these were more important in the original film and the Alice Tisdale Hobart novel on which it was based) but for the most part Law of the Tropics is agreeable light entertainment that nails the clichés but doesn’t really do anything dramatic with them — and the title makes no sense at all since the only “law” involved comes very much from outside the tropics.
When Charles and I got home I was already pretty dog-tired but I ended up running him another film: Law of the Tropics, which I’d stumbled on in the DVD collection wondering if I should bother recording the similarly titled Lady of the Tropics — and which turned out to be a 1941 Warners’ “B” that was an uncredited remake of Oil for the Lamps of China, with the setting moved from China to an unspecified South American country (probably Brazil), the oil changed to rubber, and Constance Bennett top-billed in the role of Joan Madison, a down-and-out woman who fled the U.S. because of a murder charge against her and ended up singing in a sleazy nightclub and looking over her shoulder for the detective who’s been sent down to Wherever, South America to apprehend her and bring her back for trial.
She sees a way out in the person of Jim Conway (Jeffrey Lynn), assistant manager of Station 3 of the King Rubber Company, who’s come to the coast city to meet his future wife — only said future wife, Laura, has sent him a telegram saying she’s had second thoughts and isn’t about to join him and live in a country she’s never been to and has no idea whether she could stand. Unwilling to face the teasing of his co-workers and the natives if he returns without a wife, he proposes a sexless marriage to Joan as long as she impersonates Laura and answers to that name. Meanwhile, the owner of the King Rubber Company, Alfred King, Sr. (Paul Harvey) has been concerned about the slow growth rate of production in this country and plans to solve the problem by sending his no-account son to take over Station 3 from the beloved old foreman who’s been running it for a quarter-century, Frank Davis (Hobart Bosworth).
For the most part Law of the Tropics is played for screwball comedy more than anything else, and it’s a real shock when something sad and dramatic happens (Davis, broken by the news that the boss has fired him and replaced him with the boss’s son, shoots himself) — an accidental disorientation almost as jarring as the intentional ones in Stay! There are a few shards of anti-corporatism (apparently these were more important in the original film and the Alice Tisdale Hobart novel on which it was based) but for the most part Law of the Tropics is agreeable light entertainment that nails the clichés but doesn’t really do anything dramatic with them — and the title makes no sense at all since the only “law” involved comes very much from outside the tropics.
Gamera vs. Barugon (Daiei International, 1966)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • © Copyright 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My partner Charles had mentioned that he’d downloaded the fourth-ever episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and the earliest known to exist — no tapes of the very first shows (the ones done for local stations in Minneapolis) were preserved by the studio and the only ones extant are home VHS recordings made by fans. The film featured on it was Gamera vs. Barugon, a 1966 production of the Daiei International company in Japan (they seem to have been Toho’s biggest competitor; I think at one point or another Akira Kurosawa worked for both of them, in this quirky period in film history in which the Japanese were making some of the greatest films in the world and some of the absolute worst, and using the profits from the awful ones to finance the great ones), and I got the impression that Gamera — a giant-sized turtle with the ability to fly (to become airborne, it has four flame jets that spurt rocket blasts and revolve it so it lifts off like a flying saucer) — was Daiei’s attempt to come up with an ongoing giant-monster character to compete with the enormous success of Toho’s Gojira (Godzilla to us).
The imdb.com entry on Gamera vs. Barugon mentioned that it was the first Gamera film in color and the only one that did not feature a child as the main human character (the latter was just as well as far as I was concerned!), and the movie as a whole was one of those monster-fests with no redeeming qualities whatsoever (though the fact that we were watching an awful copy from a VHS tape in a context where the film was being mocked — though not especially well; given how brilliant the MST3K crew became later it’s amazing that there were few jokes during the movies in these early episodes, and the jokes there were were often embarrassingly lame and unfunny — certainly didn’t help). We get a few stock clips of Gamera in action, presumably from previous films in the series elaborately tinted to match a film that’s otherwise in color — and those are the most genuinely exciting moments in this film!
Then Gamera disappears from the movie and we get instead a dull tale of skullduggery involving three Japanese veterans of World War II (one of whom, which his slicked-back black hair and sunglasses, bears a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley) who in the middle of the war found what they thought was a humongous opal in a cave on one of the islands where they were fighting. They go back for it and discover it, though two of their number are killed by deadly scorpions and the one survivor uses an infrared lamp to treat his athlete’s foot. Needless to say, the “opal” is really a dinosaur egg and the infrared energy from the lamp is just the power source needed to induce it to hatch and generate Barugon, a pretty generic dinosaur-shaped monster with a flame-thrower tongue and an ability to emit a rainbow-like ray that’s a weapon of mass destruction.
A woman the lead explorer for the “opal” met on her home island (apparently either the daughter or the ward of a middle-aged man who’s “gone native” and seems to have stepped out of a story by W. Somerset Maugham — and would probably like to get back!) rigs up a diamond-powered laser to try to kill Barugon, but the attempt merely evaporates the diamond and returns millions of dollars’ worth of gem back to its original status as carbon atoms. Later they rig up an array of mirrors to try to get Barugon’s “rainbow” energy (lampooned by one of the MST3K crew singing the opening lines of the Sesame Street song “The Rainbow Connection,” their funniest gag in the film) turned back in on itself to destroy it, but Barugon survives even that and it’s left for Gamera to do his Seventh Cavalry impression and come in at the end of the film to destroy Barugon (in a surprisingly ill-staged action scene that the guys who did Ultra-Man probably could have done better) and then fly back into space without waiting for a thank-you, something like the Lone Ranger.
Gamera vs. Barugon was the sort of annoying bad movie that reminds you of all too many great ones — when the protagonists arrive on the South Pacific island and the natives greet them with undisguised hostility, one can’t help but recall King Kong and how once in the distant past someone actually made a masterpiece about an oversized animal monster.
My partner Charles had mentioned that he’d downloaded the fourth-ever episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and the earliest known to exist — no tapes of the very first shows (the ones done for local stations in Minneapolis) were preserved by the studio and the only ones extant are home VHS recordings made by fans. The film featured on it was Gamera vs. Barugon, a 1966 production of the Daiei International company in Japan (they seem to have been Toho’s biggest competitor; I think at one point or another Akira Kurosawa worked for both of them, in this quirky period in film history in which the Japanese were making some of the greatest films in the world and some of the absolute worst, and using the profits from the awful ones to finance the great ones), and I got the impression that Gamera — a giant-sized turtle with the ability to fly (to become airborne, it has four flame jets that spurt rocket blasts and revolve it so it lifts off like a flying saucer) — was Daiei’s attempt to come up with an ongoing giant-monster character to compete with the enormous success of Toho’s Gojira (Godzilla to us).
The imdb.com entry on Gamera vs. Barugon mentioned that it was the first Gamera film in color and the only one that did not feature a child as the main human character (the latter was just as well as far as I was concerned!), and the movie as a whole was one of those monster-fests with no redeeming qualities whatsoever (though the fact that we were watching an awful copy from a VHS tape in a context where the film was being mocked — though not especially well; given how brilliant the MST3K crew became later it’s amazing that there were few jokes during the movies in these early episodes, and the jokes there were were often embarrassingly lame and unfunny — certainly didn’t help). We get a few stock clips of Gamera in action, presumably from previous films in the series elaborately tinted to match a film that’s otherwise in color — and those are the most genuinely exciting moments in this film!
Then Gamera disappears from the movie and we get instead a dull tale of skullduggery involving three Japanese veterans of World War II (one of whom, which his slicked-back black hair and sunglasses, bears a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley) who in the middle of the war found what they thought was a humongous opal in a cave on one of the islands where they were fighting. They go back for it and discover it, though two of their number are killed by deadly scorpions and the one survivor uses an infrared lamp to treat his athlete’s foot. Needless to say, the “opal” is really a dinosaur egg and the infrared energy from the lamp is just the power source needed to induce it to hatch and generate Barugon, a pretty generic dinosaur-shaped monster with a flame-thrower tongue and an ability to emit a rainbow-like ray that’s a weapon of mass destruction.
A woman the lead explorer for the “opal” met on her home island (apparently either the daughter or the ward of a middle-aged man who’s “gone native” and seems to have stepped out of a story by W. Somerset Maugham — and would probably like to get back!) rigs up a diamond-powered laser to try to kill Barugon, but the attempt merely evaporates the diamond and returns millions of dollars’ worth of gem back to its original status as carbon atoms. Later they rig up an array of mirrors to try to get Barugon’s “rainbow” energy (lampooned by one of the MST3K crew singing the opening lines of the Sesame Street song “The Rainbow Connection,” their funniest gag in the film) turned back in on itself to destroy it, but Barugon survives even that and it’s left for Gamera to do his Seventh Cavalry impression and come in at the end of the film to destroy Barugon (in a surprisingly ill-staged action scene that the guys who did Ultra-Man probably could have done better) and then fly back into space without waiting for a thank-you, something like the Lone Ranger.
Gamera vs. Barugon was the sort of annoying bad movie that reminds you of all too many great ones — when the protagonists arrive on the South Pacific island and the natives greet them with undisguised hostility, one can’t help but recall King Kong and how once in the distant past someone actually made a masterpiece about an oversized animal monster.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Gang War (Million Dollar Productions, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1940 movie Gang War, an all-Black “race” movie by the ridiculously misnamed “Million Dollar Productions” studio, which didn’t have anybody of any lasting importance in the cast — the only names are recognized were Ralph Cooper, the lead (and him I only knew because he’d previously starred in the film The Duke Is Tops with a female singer who did achieve lasting importance, Lena Horne) and Maceo B. Sheffield, who’d played the lead in one of the earliest all-Black Westerns (in which Herb Jeffries was the villain before they promoted him to hero status in the later films in the series). Surprise: the film actually turned out to be pretty good, afflicted with a poverty-row budget that made the studio name not only inappropriate but laughable and hissy sound (two sound men, Earl Cille and Lambert Day, are credited, but given the great fog of surface noise through which we hear this film’s dialogue, or try to, it’s anybody’s guess why anyone would want to take credit for recording it), Gang War was produced by Harry C. Popkin (who later made classic noir movies like D.O.A. and Impact) and directed by his brother Leo.
What separated this from other race movies we’ve seen was the competence of the cast — nobody here, with the possible exception of Jesse C. Brooks as police lieutenant Holmes, who both looked and sounded so much like James Earl Jones I found myself wondering if they were related, is a genuinely powerful actor, but they’re all fully competent; there aren’t any of the halting, porn-like deliveries we’ve seen in other race films — and the pace of the direction. Though there are way too many montages of newspaper headlines taking the place of scenes that should have been shown (and no doubt would have been had the filmmakers been able to afford it), there are a few genuine action scenes that do appear on screen, and Leo Popkin moves the film along at a smart, quick pace that helps zip us past the plot holes too fast to notice them and makes the film at least as entertaining as your average white movie from a studio like PRC or Monogram.
The plot is essentially a Black version of Little Caesar: aspiring gangster Bob “Killer” Meade (Ralph Cooper) aims to rise to the top of the Harlem rackets no matter how many people in his way he has to kill. First he gets the men of gangster “Bull” Brown (Maceo B. Sheffield) to throw in with him; they take the gang away from Brown and Meade murders Brown personally; the crime is witnessed but, much like the Black gang-bangers of today, Meade is acquitted because witnesses and jurors are intimidated by his omnipresent posse. After killing a few other small fry, Meade sets his sights on Lew Baron (Lawrence Creiner), and the bulk of the film consists of the brutal war between them in which each orders the other’s men knocked off at the slightest provocation, or none at all. Just how the gangs in Harlem make their money is only hinted at in this film — the only racket we actually see in operation is the sale of jukeboxes — but there’s a plot twist that, though not exactly original, gives this film a rather odd aura: Meade has a chorus-girl girlfriend, Maizie “Sugar” Walford (Gladys Snyder, probably the role Lena Horne would have played if she hadn’t moved out of the “race” world and into white showbiz by then, first as Teddy Wilson’s band singer and then at MGM), who is totally clueless about his gang involvement and heatedly denies that Meade has ever killed anyone.
Among the most interesting features of the movie is the actual footage of Harlem as it appeared in 1940, by both day and night — including glimpses of such legendary nightspots as Small’s Paradise and the Savoy Ballroom (where I think Jimmie Lunceford was playing at the time — that’s what it looked like during a brief shot of the marquee) — the use of real locations rather than studio fakes being one of the few good aspects of the limited budget on which this film was made. There’s also a very long production number that supposedly takes place at a nightclub where Meade takes Maizie on one of their dates — and it’s impressively produced, a deep-Congo sort of thing that looks surprisingly like one of the numbers from Josephine Baker’s musicals (and also is reminiscent of Marshall Stearns’ account in his book The Story of Jazz of what the Cotton Club productions Duke Ellington’s “jungle” music accompanied) — before the plot hurtles towards resolution: Maizie turns Meade in to the cops rather than let him murder Baron, and it seems as if he’s going to give himself up to Lieutenant Holmes — only at the last minute Meade knocks Holmes down and attempts an escape across the rooftops before he’s shot down and falls to the ground to his death.
Though hardly a great movie, this version of Gang War (a title that was used for some white gangster movies, too) is a pretty good one, a fast-moving piece that still holds up as entertainment (which most race movies don’t unless they have someone in the cast who either had been a major entertainment star earlier, like blues pioneer Mamie Smith, or would be one later, like Paul Robeson, Herb Jeffries and Lena Horne).
I ran the 1940 movie Gang War, an all-Black “race” movie by the ridiculously misnamed “Million Dollar Productions” studio, which didn’t have anybody of any lasting importance in the cast — the only names are recognized were Ralph Cooper, the lead (and him I only knew because he’d previously starred in the film The Duke Is Tops with a female singer who did achieve lasting importance, Lena Horne) and Maceo B. Sheffield, who’d played the lead in one of the earliest all-Black Westerns (in which Herb Jeffries was the villain before they promoted him to hero status in the later films in the series). Surprise: the film actually turned out to be pretty good, afflicted with a poverty-row budget that made the studio name not only inappropriate but laughable and hissy sound (two sound men, Earl Cille and Lambert Day, are credited, but given the great fog of surface noise through which we hear this film’s dialogue, or try to, it’s anybody’s guess why anyone would want to take credit for recording it), Gang War was produced by Harry C. Popkin (who later made classic noir movies like D.O.A. and Impact) and directed by his brother Leo.
What separated this from other race movies we’ve seen was the competence of the cast — nobody here, with the possible exception of Jesse C. Brooks as police lieutenant Holmes, who both looked and sounded so much like James Earl Jones I found myself wondering if they were related, is a genuinely powerful actor, but they’re all fully competent; there aren’t any of the halting, porn-like deliveries we’ve seen in other race films — and the pace of the direction. Though there are way too many montages of newspaper headlines taking the place of scenes that should have been shown (and no doubt would have been had the filmmakers been able to afford it), there are a few genuine action scenes that do appear on screen, and Leo Popkin moves the film along at a smart, quick pace that helps zip us past the plot holes too fast to notice them and makes the film at least as entertaining as your average white movie from a studio like PRC or Monogram.
The plot is essentially a Black version of Little Caesar: aspiring gangster Bob “Killer” Meade (Ralph Cooper) aims to rise to the top of the Harlem rackets no matter how many people in his way he has to kill. First he gets the men of gangster “Bull” Brown (Maceo B. Sheffield) to throw in with him; they take the gang away from Brown and Meade murders Brown personally; the crime is witnessed but, much like the Black gang-bangers of today, Meade is acquitted because witnesses and jurors are intimidated by his omnipresent posse. After killing a few other small fry, Meade sets his sights on Lew Baron (Lawrence Creiner), and the bulk of the film consists of the brutal war between them in which each orders the other’s men knocked off at the slightest provocation, or none at all. Just how the gangs in Harlem make their money is only hinted at in this film — the only racket we actually see in operation is the sale of jukeboxes — but there’s a plot twist that, though not exactly original, gives this film a rather odd aura: Meade has a chorus-girl girlfriend, Maizie “Sugar” Walford (Gladys Snyder, probably the role Lena Horne would have played if she hadn’t moved out of the “race” world and into white showbiz by then, first as Teddy Wilson’s band singer and then at MGM), who is totally clueless about his gang involvement and heatedly denies that Meade has ever killed anyone.
Among the most interesting features of the movie is the actual footage of Harlem as it appeared in 1940, by both day and night — including glimpses of such legendary nightspots as Small’s Paradise and the Savoy Ballroom (where I think Jimmie Lunceford was playing at the time — that’s what it looked like during a brief shot of the marquee) — the use of real locations rather than studio fakes being one of the few good aspects of the limited budget on which this film was made. There’s also a very long production number that supposedly takes place at a nightclub where Meade takes Maizie on one of their dates — and it’s impressively produced, a deep-Congo sort of thing that looks surprisingly like one of the numbers from Josephine Baker’s musicals (and also is reminiscent of Marshall Stearns’ account in his book The Story of Jazz of what the Cotton Club productions Duke Ellington’s “jungle” music accompanied) — before the plot hurtles towards resolution: Maizie turns Meade in to the cops rather than let him murder Baron, and it seems as if he’s going to give himself up to Lieutenant Holmes — only at the last minute Meade knocks Holmes down and attempts an escape across the rooftops before he’s shot down and falls to the ground to his death.
Though hardly a great movie, this version of Gang War (a title that was used for some white gangster movies, too) is a pretty good one, a fast-moving piece that still holds up as entertainment (which most race movies don’t unless they have someone in the cast who either had been a major entertainment star earlier, like blues pioneer Mamie Smith, or would be one later, like Paul Robeson, Herb Jeffries and Lena Horne).
Picture Palace (Warners/Vitaphone, 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Girls on Probation TCM showed one of those charming Hal LeRoy shorts from 1934, Picture Palace, about a young man (LeRoy) and a young woman (Dawn O’Day) who meet at the beach. It turns out they both work at the Grand Majestic movie theatre, he as an usher and she as a chorus dancer in the live shows that still regularly took place between film showings, only he makes it sound like he’s a big wheel in the theatre management and when she spots him from the stage in his usher’s uniform, she freaks out and interrupts the dance number, resulting in both of them getting fired. Undaunted, they devise a vaudeville act, become stars and in the final sequence take a nicely piquant revenge against the Grand Majestic’s manager when they’re booked to appear there as performers. It’s an extremely predictable movie but also a quite entertaining one, and why Warners didn’t pull Hal LeRoy out of shorts and make him their answer to Fred Astaire at RKO is beyond me.
After Girls on Probation TCM showed one of those charming Hal LeRoy shorts from 1934, Picture Palace, about a young man (LeRoy) and a young woman (Dawn O’Day) who meet at the beach. It turns out they both work at the Grand Majestic movie theatre, he as an usher and she as a chorus dancer in the live shows that still regularly took place between film showings, only he makes it sound like he’s a big wheel in the theatre management and when she spots him from the stage in his usher’s uniform, she freaks out and interrupts the dance number, resulting in both of them getting fired. Undaunted, they devise a vaudeville act, become stars and in the final sequence take a nicely piquant revenge against the Grand Majestic’s manager when they’re booked to appear there as performers. It’s an extremely predictable movie but also a quite entertaining one, and why Warners didn’t pull Hal LeRoy out of shorts and make him their answer to Fred Astaire at RKO is beyond me.
Girls on Probation (Warners, 1938)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I stayed up and watched a movie that’s an old quirky favorite of mine: Girls on Probation, a 1938 assembly-line “B” from Warners, written by silent-era veteran Crane Wilbur and directed by William McGann, who actually got a couple of genuinely creative-looking setups (Arthur Todd, whose best-known credit was probably the Marx Brothers’ film Monkey Business, was the cinematographer) into his otherwise coolly professional, workmanlike direction. The American Film Institute Catalog helpfully notes that previously Wilbur had written Alcatraz Island (men in prison) and Crime School (boys in prison), so he knew all the formulae for a girls-in-prison movie, and within the limits of a 64-minute running time and some surprisingly cheesy stock-music cues, he came up with a solid one: unbelievably innocent 22-year-old laundry bookkeeper Connie Heath (Jane Bryan, top-billed) gets mixed up on the wrong side of the law when her friend and co-worker Hilda Engstrom (Sheila Bromley) “borrows” a dress that they’ve cleaned for a customer so the two can go dancing one night.
Alas, at the “Hula Club” where they go, stuck-up society bitch Gloria Adams (Susan Hayward, in an early credit she probably forgot about completely by the time she became a star) notices Connie wearing her dress and goes ballistic to her date, rising young attorney Neil Dillon (Ronald Reagan) — who in the meantime has been instantly smitten with Connie and is unwilling to believe anything bad about her, like she filched herself a dress from the laundry just to party one night. As (bad) luck would have it, when Connie and Hilda get out of the cab taking them home, the cab door slams on the dress and it’s torn; Hilda tries her best to mend it, but when Gloria picks it up the next day the patchwork is all too obvious. What complicates matters is that not only is Connie still living with her parents — though she’s so goody-good she’s paying them board — but, though her mom Kate (Elisabeth Risdon) is understanding, her dad Roger (Sig Rumann) is a total fascist, viciously tearing into her whenever she wants to go out or do anything for herself, and tearing into everyone she tries to befriend as well.
Anyway, when Connie is busted for stealing the dress, thanks to Neil’s intervention she’s let off with a warning but her dad throws her out of their house and she’s forced to relocate to another small New York town 500 miles away. There she gets a secretarial job and makes regular payments to Neil to cover the cost of the ruined dress, until who should show up in town but bad ol’ Hilda Engstrom, in the company of her bad-news boyfriend Tony Rand (Anthony Averill), who’s there to rob the Union National Bank. Connie sees Hilda in the car and they get into an argument — Connie wants Hilda to write a letter declaring Connie innocent of the dress theft and Hilda, of course, wants no such thing, especially since at the moment she’s waiting behind the wheel of the getaway car while her boyfriend is inside the bank robbing it. The whole altercation is witnessed by a boy selling movie magazines, but he goes unremembered and unrecalled as Tony comes out of the bank, Hilda forces Connie into the car at gunpoint, the three of them lead the cops on a merry chase, Hilda breaks out the back window of the car while Tony drives and starts firing at the cops chasing them, Connie reaches for the gun (not that again!) and gets it away from Hilda, then holds it to Tony’s head and forces him to stop the car so all three will be arrested. Connie is convicted of being part of the robbery gang — since there’s no independent evidence to back up her story — and she’s put in the county jail for a year, where Hilda makes Connie into her virtual slave by threatening to write her dad and tell him she’s been convicted.
Eventually Connie is contacted by probation officer Jane Lennox (Dorothy Peterson), who digs up the newsboy and manages to get Connie probation, whereupon she does the thing she should have in the first place — she goes home and seeks out that nice young lawyer played by Ronald Reagan, who in the meantime has become a deputy district attorney and immediately hires Connie to be his secretary with, of course, no idea of her past. This lasts for about a year and a half, during which Neil and Connie start dating and end up engaged — until who should show up but sleazy young Hilda Engstrom, newly paroled and helping Tony, who’s just escaped from prison (a highly dramatic sequence but one probably padded out greatly with stock footage from previous Warners’ prison epics), by hiding him out and blackmailing Connie into pawning Neil’s engagement ring for a getaway nut — only Connie slips the pawnbroker a note explaining the situation and telling him to call Neil, who of course calls the police, with the result that Tony is shot trying to clamber down on the fire escape of Hilda’s building, and Hilda takes a bullet to save Connie and gets one of the great bad exit lines in the history of Hollywood: seeing a priest while she’s being loaded into an ambulance, she says, “Pretty soon I’ll be seeing your boss!”
By any normal standards Girls on Probation is a pretty mediocre movie — the title is an obvious misnomer since Connie is the only girl on probation we actually see (indeed, the title was such a stock one that Warners actually used it for another film just six months earlier, a teen drama with Bonita Granville, only they ended up calling that film The Beloved Brat instead and thereby freed up the Girls on Probation name for this one) and there are holes galore in the plot, notably Hilda’s abrupt transformation from man-crazy slacker ditz in the opening scenes to hardened gun moll later on. (Give Crane Wilbur a break; he only had a 64-minute running time to work with.) We also end up wondering how someone with so thick a German accent, and so Nazi-like a demeanor to go with it, as Sig Rumann’s character here ended up with so Anglo a character name as “Roger Heath” — though maybe we’re supposed to believe the family’s real name is Harzfeld or something and they changed it during World War I.
Nonetheless, its sheer overwroughtness makes this a haunting movie — that and Jane Bryan’s blithe innocence in the lead role; her very limited acting skills, particularly her utter inability to play anything other than sticky-sweet goodness (in her best-known role she was Bette Davis’s impossibly sweet kid sister in Marked Woman, whose murder at the hand of Davis’s gangland employers leads Davis to turn state’s evidence against them), make her oddly right for this part: we really believe in her fundamental decency as a human being despite the criminal things that happen to her, and at the same time we get frustrated that the rest of the people in the movie — particularly her dad and Hilda’s mom (Esther Dale), cut from the same cloth as Margaret Hamilton’s Miss Gulch persona in The Wizard of Oz (if Connie had had a dog Mrs. Engstrom would have tried to take it away from her), an interesting anticipation of the later J.D. movies that also made the parents the principal villains — can’t see her essential goodness like we can. Girls on Probation also has an interesting cast; Reagan and Hayward both went on to biggers and betters, and judging from her performance here Sheila Bromley should have too. Her performance, especially when she’s playing the cold-bitch sleazebag of the later reels, is entertainingly edgy and quite the best in the film. I remember when my partner Charles and I first watched this one, we were amused at the written foreword which, in the usual fustian tone of these things, said that for some women probation was the only thing “between happiness and degradation” — and we couldn’t decide whether being married to Ronald Reagan constituted happiness or degradation!
I stayed up and watched a movie that’s an old quirky favorite of mine: Girls on Probation, a 1938 assembly-line “B” from Warners, written by silent-era veteran Crane Wilbur and directed by William McGann, who actually got a couple of genuinely creative-looking setups (Arthur Todd, whose best-known credit was probably the Marx Brothers’ film Monkey Business, was the cinematographer) into his otherwise coolly professional, workmanlike direction. The American Film Institute Catalog helpfully notes that previously Wilbur had written Alcatraz Island (men in prison) and Crime School (boys in prison), so he knew all the formulae for a girls-in-prison movie, and within the limits of a 64-minute running time and some surprisingly cheesy stock-music cues, he came up with a solid one: unbelievably innocent 22-year-old laundry bookkeeper Connie Heath (Jane Bryan, top-billed) gets mixed up on the wrong side of the law when her friend and co-worker Hilda Engstrom (Sheila Bromley) “borrows” a dress that they’ve cleaned for a customer so the two can go dancing one night.
Alas, at the “Hula Club” where they go, stuck-up society bitch Gloria Adams (Susan Hayward, in an early credit she probably forgot about completely by the time she became a star) notices Connie wearing her dress and goes ballistic to her date, rising young attorney Neil Dillon (Ronald Reagan) — who in the meantime has been instantly smitten with Connie and is unwilling to believe anything bad about her, like she filched herself a dress from the laundry just to party one night. As (bad) luck would have it, when Connie and Hilda get out of the cab taking them home, the cab door slams on the dress and it’s torn; Hilda tries her best to mend it, but when Gloria picks it up the next day the patchwork is all too obvious. What complicates matters is that not only is Connie still living with her parents — though she’s so goody-good she’s paying them board — but, though her mom Kate (Elisabeth Risdon) is understanding, her dad Roger (Sig Rumann) is a total fascist, viciously tearing into her whenever she wants to go out or do anything for herself, and tearing into everyone she tries to befriend as well.
Anyway, when Connie is busted for stealing the dress, thanks to Neil’s intervention she’s let off with a warning but her dad throws her out of their house and she’s forced to relocate to another small New York town 500 miles away. There she gets a secretarial job and makes regular payments to Neil to cover the cost of the ruined dress, until who should show up in town but bad ol’ Hilda Engstrom, in the company of her bad-news boyfriend Tony Rand (Anthony Averill), who’s there to rob the Union National Bank. Connie sees Hilda in the car and they get into an argument — Connie wants Hilda to write a letter declaring Connie innocent of the dress theft and Hilda, of course, wants no such thing, especially since at the moment she’s waiting behind the wheel of the getaway car while her boyfriend is inside the bank robbing it. The whole altercation is witnessed by a boy selling movie magazines, but he goes unremembered and unrecalled as Tony comes out of the bank, Hilda forces Connie into the car at gunpoint, the three of them lead the cops on a merry chase, Hilda breaks out the back window of the car while Tony drives and starts firing at the cops chasing them, Connie reaches for the gun (not that again!) and gets it away from Hilda, then holds it to Tony’s head and forces him to stop the car so all three will be arrested. Connie is convicted of being part of the robbery gang — since there’s no independent evidence to back up her story — and she’s put in the county jail for a year, where Hilda makes Connie into her virtual slave by threatening to write her dad and tell him she’s been convicted.
Eventually Connie is contacted by probation officer Jane Lennox (Dorothy Peterson), who digs up the newsboy and manages to get Connie probation, whereupon she does the thing she should have in the first place — she goes home and seeks out that nice young lawyer played by Ronald Reagan, who in the meantime has become a deputy district attorney and immediately hires Connie to be his secretary with, of course, no idea of her past. This lasts for about a year and a half, during which Neil and Connie start dating and end up engaged — until who should show up but sleazy young Hilda Engstrom, newly paroled and helping Tony, who’s just escaped from prison (a highly dramatic sequence but one probably padded out greatly with stock footage from previous Warners’ prison epics), by hiding him out and blackmailing Connie into pawning Neil’s engagement ring for a getaway nut — only Connie slips the pawnbroker a note explaining the situation and telling him to call Neil, who of course calls the police, with the result that Tony is shot trying to clamber down on the fire escape of Hilda’s building, and Hilda takes a bullet to save Connie and gets one of the great bad exit lines in the history of Hollywood: seeing a priest while she’s being loaded into an ambulance, she says, “Pretty soon I’ll be seeing your boss!”
By any normal standards Girls on Probation is a pretty mediocre movie — the title is an obvious misnomer since Connie is the only girl on probation we actually see (indeed, the title was such a stock one that Warners actually used it for another film just six months earlier, a teen drama with Bonita Granville, only they ended up calling that film The Beloved Brat instead and thereby freed up the Girls on Probation name for this one) and there are holes galore in the plot, notably Hilda’s abrupt transformation from man-crazy slacker ditz in the opening scenes to hardened gun moll later on. (Give Crane Wilbur a break; he only had a 64-minute running time to work with.) We also end up wondering how someone with so thick a German accent, and so Nazi-like a demeanor to go with it, as Sig Rumann’s character here ended up with so Anglo a character name as “Roger Heath” — though maybe we’re supposed to believe the family’s real name is Harzfeld or something and they changed it during World War I.
Nonetheless, its sheer overwroughtness makes this a haunting movie — that and Jane Bryan’s blithe innocence in the lead role; her very limited acting skills, particularly her utter inability to play anything other than sticky-sweet goodness (in her best-known role she was Bette Davis’s impossibly sweet kid sister in Marked Woman, whose murder at the hand of Davis’s gangland employers leads Davis to turn state’s evidence against them), make her oddly right for this part: we really believe in her fundamental decency as a human being despite the criminal things that happen to her, and at the same time we get frustrated that the rest of the people in the movie — particularly her dad and Hilda’s mom (Esther Dale), cut from the same cloth as Margaret Hamilton’s Miss Gulch persona in The Wizard of Oz (if Connie had had a dog Mrs. Engstrom would have tried to take it away from her), an interesting anticipation of the later J.D. movies that also made the parents the principal villains — can’t see her essential goodness like we can. Girls on Probation also has an interesting cast; Reagan and Hayward both went on to biggers and betters, and judging from her performance here Sheila Bromley should have too. Her performance, especially when she’s playing the cold-bitch sleazebag of the later reels, is entertainingly edgy and quite the best in the film. I remember when my partner Charles and I first watched this one, we were amused at the written foreword which, in the usual fustian tone of these things, said that for some women probation was the only thing “between happiness and degradation” — and we couldn’t decide whether being married to Ronald Reagan constituted happiness or degradation!
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Michael Shayne: The Fox Box and Two TV Episodes
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
A lot of the "B" detective films — particularly the series with recurring characters (aside from Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan) — have been stepchildren in the home video and DVD markets, but 20th Century-Fox has been rectifying that with a series of boxed sets of their Chan, Mr. Moto and Michael Shayne films. Here are notes on all four films in the Fox box "Michael Shayne, Volume 1" as well as a Critics' Choice DVD of two episodes from the Michael Shayne TV series:
I ran my partner Charles a movie, the first film in the 20th Century-Fox box of Michael Shayne films — of which they made seven from 1940-1942, of which only the first, Michael Shayne, Private Detective was actually based on one of the Shayne novels by “Brett Halliday” (and I refuse to believe that was that writer’s real name — it sounds so transparently phony he might as well have called the detective character “Brett Halliday” and signed the books “Michael Shayne,” and I had joked to Charles that his real name was probably something like Isidor Weinstein, though according to the Wikipedia entry on him he was actually “Davis Dresser”!).
For the later films in the series they raided books by writers like Frederick Nebel (whose Sleepers East, a hit for Fox in 1932, was remodeled into the Shayne vehicle Sleepers West), Clayton Rawson and even Raymond Chandler (his third Philip Marlowe book, The High Window, was bought by Fox for the Shayne movie Time to Kill and then, like Farewell, My Lovely — originally bought by RKO for The Falcon Takes Over — was later remade as a Marlowe story). I haven’t been able to nail down which Dresser/“Halliday” book this film was based on; some sources say it was the first one, Dividend on Death (published in 1939 by Henry Holt four years after Dresser had finished it) and some (including some on the same Web site!) say it was the second, The Private Practice of Michael Shayne.
Whichever, it relocates Shayne from Florida (where he was based in the novels and on the short-lived — one season — Michael Shayne TV show on NBC from 1960-61, of which we saw two episodes recently on a Critics’ Choice DVD) to California and casts Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. Though Nolan’s hair photographs raven-black and it’s impossible to believe he’s a redhead (as Shayne was described in the books), he’s otherwise a quite good choice for a wisecracking private eye in a film made on the cusp of the noir cycle. William K. Everson was so impressed by Nolan’s performances in the Shayne films and as the crooked cop Degarmo in The Lady in the Lake (in which he stole the film right out from under the principals and gave a marvelously human reading to a character Raymond Chandler wrote as a stock villain) that he lamented that Nolan had never got a chance to play Marlowe or Sam Spade on film. Shayne certainly doesn’t have the depth of Spade or Marlowe, but Nolan could probably have done justice to either part: he has the world-weary alienation right (even though through most of this film he’s shepherding an irresponsible young rich girl at the behest of her father rather than mixing in the lowlife and going down those famously mean streets) and tossed off the wisecracks with the right tired air.
Michael Shayne, Private Detective opens at a horse race, in which flighty young Phyllis Brighton (Marjorie Weaver) loses a bundle of money on one race and then pleads with her dad, racing commission member Hiram P. Brighton (Clarence Kolb), to loan her $200 so she can bet on a 15-to-1 long-shot in the next race. When he says no, she offers her brooch worth $500 as security for the bet with an on-track but unofficial bookmaker, and Shayne comes along — he’s a friend of her father — and tells the bookie the brooch is a phony (it isn’t). She returns to her dad in a huff and gets even huffier when her horse comes in, so dad immediately orders an investigation on the assumption that such a lousy horse couldn’t have won a race unless he was drugged. Dad also hires Shayne to keep an eye on Phyllis and especially to keep her away from the gambling casino owned by Benny Gordon (Douglass Dumbrille — and after his villainy in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, letting him anywhere near a racetrack was asking for trouble!) and from Harry Grange (George Meeker), the boyfriend who takes her there and lends her money to feed her gambling jones.
The plot is one of those mind-numbingly complicated travesties of mystery tropes, with so many suspects and motives it’s easy to imagine screenwriters Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Connor totally losing it trying to keep track of them all (and maybe that’s the reason none of the other Shaynes made at Fox used Dresser’s writings as story sources!). Suffice it to say that in order to scare Phyllis away from him, Shayne fakes a scene to make it look like Grange has been murdered — and while he’s passed out in Shayne’s car with ketchup dripping from his shirt front, someone actually does shoot him. Among the suspects are Gordon; his daughter Marsha (played by Joan Valerie, an actress who looked so old I thought we were supposed to believe she was Gordon’s wife instead of his daughter), who’d been after Grange herself and resented Phyllis for taking him away from her; Elliott Thomas (Walter Abel), another gambler and boyfriend of Phyllis; and Larry Kincaid (Robert Emmett Keane), who in an early scene offered Shayne a job strong-arming Grange on behalf of Gordon.
Eventually it turns out that Thomas secretly imported a horse from Australia and substituted it for the real horse, so it won fair and square but not under its real identity (had the writers seen Charlie Chan at the Race Track, which also used that gimmick — as, in a way, did A Day at the Races?), and he killed Grange because Grange was blackmailing him about this. It’s a good, if overly convoluted, story, and for once in one of these “B” detective movies the comic relief is actually funny — especially the marvelous Elizabeth Patterson as Phyllis’s Aunt Grace, who’s a devotee of mystery fiction and keeps comparing the real murder case that’s unfolding around her to the ones in her “Baffle Book,” particularly the one about a victim found under a piano, strangled with piano wire and with his head severed from his body. There are some surprisingly tame gags about Shayne’s alleged nakedness — we see Lloyd Nolan in his baggy underwear in a few scenes and we’re supposed to believe he’s put out at both Phyllis and Aunt Grace seeing him in Production Code-hailing distance of the altogether (“Don’t worry, I’ve taken art classes,” Grace assures him in the funniest line in the film) — and there’s also one sequence in which Nolan as Shayne is searching one of the suspects’ home that actually comes close to noir even though this film lacks the moral ambiguity required for noir. (Film noir didn’t really begin until John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon, made a year later, and though there are a few precursors to the noir spirit in the 1930’s this really isn’t one of them — though as I said earlier it’s on the cusp.)
The director is Eugene Forde — which may be part of the problem; Fox didn’t give this series their best directors (not even their best “B” directors!) and as this film plodded on from situation to situation I found myself liking H. Bruce Humberstone a whole lot better all of a sudden — and the cinematographer is the great George Schneiderman, who photographed most of John Ford’s silents for Fox in the 1920’s and, though he probably lamented that he was working with the wrong Ford(e) on this film, was almost certainly responsible (far more responsible than his director!) for the vivid anticipations of noir in some of the visuals. Michael Shayne, Private Detective is probably best seen as a transitional film between the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s and the noir private-eye movies of the 1940’s, with Shayne (especially as interpreted by Nolan) catching some of the world-weariness of Spade or Marlowe but hamstrung by a script that really didn’t require them; still, it’s a better-than-average mystery, and the official police are shown as dull and unimaginative (homicide captain Painter is played by Donald MacBride — another actor with a Marx Brothers movie, in his case Room Service, in his past) but not as the utterly stupid ninnies they usually were in 1930’s private-eye films. I’m looking forward to seeing the other three films in the box and hoping Fox will release the remaining three (including the Chandler adaptation!) in a second DVD boxed set. — 3/13/08
•••••
I ran Sleepers West, a 1941 20th Century-Fox “B” and the second in the Michael Shayne series featuring Lloyd Nolan as the raven-haired (red-haired in the books) Irish detective (you see, on my St. Patrick’s Day journal entry I’d finally get around to mentioning something Irish!) created by Davis Dresser under the pen name “Brett Halliday.” Oddly, only the first of the seven Fox Michael Shayne films actually adapted a Dresser/“Halliday” novel; the others all were adapted from other detective novels featuring other characters and were adapted into Shayne stories by the Fox writing staff. (The most intriguing transposition in this group was undoubtedly Time to Kill, based on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel The High Window and remade by Fox as a Marlowe film, The Brasher Doubloon, in 1947, five years after the Shayne version).
For Sleepers West, a mystery set on a train, they took a novel by Frederick Nebel called Sleepers East which Fox had already filmed successfully in 1932 and simply reversed the title to reflect the reversed direction of travel. Shayne is assigned to protect a secret witness in a murder case in San Francisco; the defendant, Callahan (whom we never see as an on-screen character), is an habitual criminal — Shayne knows this because years before he busted him for robbery — but is innocent of this particular charge, but is being railroaded by the political machine promoting gubernatorial candidate Wentworth (also an unseen character) because Callahan can blow the whistle on Wentworth’s machine and destroy his chances.
The witness is vampy B-girl Helen Carlson (Mary Beth Hughes, whose later femme fatale performance in The Great Flamarion rivals Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour among the greatest embodiments of this particular cliché and who shows signs of that promise here), whom Shayne sneaks on board wearing a dark wig and being carried on a stretcher — his idea was that she would pretend to be an invalid and lock herself in her room through the entire ride from Denver to San Francisco, but Helen was way too willful for that: she ends up in a relationship with mystery man Everett Jason (Louis Jean Heydt in a performance that made me think, “I know I’ve seen this actor before,” though here he was playing a stronger characterization and bringing more power to his part than usual), who has $10,000 in cash in an attaché case. The film is full of sinister people on the train, some of whom are there to protect the heroine, some are there to kill her and some are there for agendas of their own that have nothing to do with her — and also on board is Denver reporter and former Shayne girlfriend Kay Bentley (Lynn Bari, who as usual looks sultry enough but doesn’t act), who wants to get to Helen Carlson so her paper can scoop the world on the story and who’s using Shayne’s continued interest in her to accomplish that — despite the presence of her fiancé, Tom Linscott (Donald Douglas), who works for Wentworth’s organization and therefore has a vested interest in making sure Carlson does not turn up in South America to testify.
There also is a railroad engineer who’s on his last run and is obsessed with getting his final train to its destination on time — and in the film’s most spectacular scene (though it’s clearly done with models that look all too obvious), an oil tanker gets stuck on the tracks and the train crashes into it and catches fire, forcing everyone else off the train while the railroad sends a fire-fighting crew and getting Shayne, Kay, Helen and Tom to flee by car to a nearby farmhouse whose owner is played by Ferike Boros, a fascinating character actress we’ve encountered before. Sleepers West is an intriguing thriller that’s rather daringly staged with almost no background music — odd for a 1941 film in an era in which even far better thrillers like The Maltese Falcon were going out relentlessly overscored — and it’s entertaining, though it could have been a lot more exciting and more fun with a better director than Eugene Forde. By then H. Bruce Humberstone, who brought so much to the three Charlie Chan films he made at Fox, had graduated to “A” films like I Wake Up Screaming and Pin-Up Girl, both with Betty Grable; Norman Foster was off working with Orson Welles on the unfinished It’s All True; and it’s hard to think who else on the Fox “B’ list could have done this better, though if they’d reached outside the way Columbia did for Robert Florey on the first Lone Wolf series film with Warren William they could have had a more interesting product. It also makes me curious to see the original Sleepers East sometime! — 3/17/08
•••••
We eventually ran a movie: Blue, White and Perfect, the fourth and last film in the Michael Shayne boxed set from 20th Century-Fox — and, like the others, a disappointing film in that it wasted a potentially thrilling story and an appealingly authoritative star, Lloyd Nolan, on a workmanlike but rather dull production. Part of the problem was the director, Herbert I. Leeds — as we learned watching all those detective “B” films from Columbia, never trust a director whose name looks as if it should have the initials “D.D.S.” after it! — and though Glen MacWilliams (an American despite his Scottish name and his fame in British films, notably most of Jessie Matthews’ star vehicles) was the cinematographer, his lighting is quite competent but mostly undramatic; a story that cries out for noir effects and compositions doesn’t get them, and suffers by their lack.
The story: Michael Shayne returns to L.A. (where the Fox films relocated him from Florida, his home in the original novels by “Brett Halliday,” t/n Davis Dresser) from a case that took him to San Francisco and Seattle, to find that his girlfriend, beauty-shop owner Mavis Garland (a recurring role for Mary Beth Hughes, disappointingly used in these films as a good girl when she was so much better three years after this film as a femme fatale in the 1945 Republic thriller The Great Flamarion, co-starring Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea and vividly directed by the young Anthony Mann), has jilted him and accepted the proposal of smarmy Continental Alexis Fournier (Ivan Lebedeff). Shayne looks him up and finds Fournier is a con artist and a bigamist (!) as well as selling Mavis’s beauty shop a wart removing cream that doesn’t work — as Mavis’s sidekick Ethel (an good and way too short comic performance by Marie Blake) explains after she tells Shayne that the authentic pronunciation of his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend is “fonay,” “He sells us the Fournier One-Minute Wart Remover. And, boy, is it fo-nay!”
Told by Mavis (after Fournier’s arrest on the steps of the building where they were supposed to get their marriage license) that she’ll only marry him if he quits detective work and finds a real job (“I want to be your wife, not your widow!” she says), he agrees to go to work for the Thomas Aircraft Company, telling her he’s going to be a riveter (he even fakes a phone call to make it appear as if he’s phoning her from the shop floor, in a scene reminiscent of Groucho Marx’s pose as the Florida Medical Board representative in A Day at the Races) but really signing on as an undercover security officer investigating who stole $100,000 in industrial diamonds from the company’s safe. (The film’s title turns out not to be a patriotic reference; at the very end Nolan as Shayne uses the phrase to demonstrate that the stolen diamonds are not gem-quality.) The person in charge of the safe actually was part of the gang — a band of saboteurs anxious to make sure the Axis gets hold of the diamonds and uses them in their war production — which was easy enough to guess because his name was Vanderhoefen and he was played by Steven Geray (let’s see, we have a Russian playing a Frenchman and a Frenchman playing a Dutchman) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Geray movie in which he wasn’t a bad guy!
The diamonds are being smuggled to Hawai’i aboard an ocean liner and, in order to get the money to get on it, Shayne embezzles $1,000 from Mavis (she thinks the money is going to buy them a ranch where’ll they’ll live as a couple) and ends up in a shipboard romance with an old flame, Helen Shaw (Helene Reynolds), who’s also being chased by a half-Latino, improbably named Juan Arturo O’Hara and even more improbably played by future Superman George Reeves, decked out with a moustache and a lot of shoe polish in his hair to make him look appropriately swarthy and dark. The overall tenor of this film isn’t that different from the Saint and the Falcon movies RKO was churning out at the same time, but it seems wrong because Michael Shayne isn’t a debonair, romantic character; he’s a grungier sort of guy being played by an American actor and this rather superficial style of mystery film doesn’t really play to the strengths either of Brett Halliday’s (t/n: Davis Dresser) character or Nolan’s performance. Still, I hope 20th Century-Fox reissues the rest of their Michael Shayne movies on DVD if only so I can see Time to Kill, which their writers based on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel The High Window and which just might bring some depth to the series the way RKO’s appropriation of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely did to their 1942 film The Falcon Takes Over. — 6/8/08
•••••
Afterwards Charles and I went straight (pardon the expression) home and ended up running another movie: The Man That Wouldn’t Die, which despite the title is a Michael Shayne mystery (albeit one with a Frankenstein-like subplot) rather than a horror film and seemed to me to be the best of the ones we’ve seen so far. While its director, Herbert I. Leeds, is a hack about on the level of Eugene Forde, he does get some appealingly Gothic shots into the film — and the script, written by Arnaud d’Usseau based on the novel No Coffin for the Corpse by Clayton Rawson (one of his Merlini the Great series about a stage magician who was also an amateur detective: one of his other books, Death from a Top Hat, became the basis of Tod Browning’s last film, Miracles for Sale, in 1939), is genuinely charming and largely evocative of The Thin Man even though Michael Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) is merely posing as the husband of his client, Catherine Wolff (Marjorie Weaver), not actually married to her.
The film begins with a peculiar scene in which a group of men sneak out of a large mansion in the dead of night, dig a grave on the grounds and bury a body — or at least a body-shaped parcel — in it. The mansion belongs to tycoon Dudley Wolff (Paul Harvey), who’s under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee for allegedly defrauding the government on war contracts (remember when people in the government actually cared whether or not it was being defrauded on war contracts?), who’s married to trophy wife Anna (Helene Reynolds) — Catherine is his daughter by a previous wife — and is giving house room to mad scientist Dr. Haggard (Henry Wilcoxon), who’s outfitted his basement with lab equipment similar to Kenneth Strickfaden’s great props for the Frankenstein films in an experiment Dudley Wolff is bankrolling in hopes Dr. Haggard will figure out a way to make him immortal.
One night, while staying at the mansion, Catherine is fired at by an apparition who sneaks into her bedroom with glowing eyes and a gun; she calls it a “ghost” but the gun, and the bullet it fired that lodged into one of her bedposts, are both indisputably real. Eventually it turns out that the “ghost” is magician Zorah Bey (LeRoy Mason), the only person besides Houdini who ever mastered the trick of getting himself buried alive and being able to slow down his breathing so much that he could pass the “mirror test” (when they determined whether a person was alive or dead by holding a pocket mirror under their nose and seeing if vapor from breath formed on it) and survive living burial long enough to figure out how to get the coffin and grave open and escape.
Old man Wolff’s trophy wife was formerly Zorah Bey’s assistant and his wife; she married Wolff thinking that Zorah Bey was dead but later he turned up alive and blackmailed her, and as a result she and her husband killed him — or at least they thought their blow to his head had killed him — and buried him in the opening scene, except he wasn’t dead at all and when he regained consciousness he used his skills as an escape artist to get out of his own grave. There’s also a complication straight out of French farce when Catherine’s real husband, Roger Blake (Richard Derr), turns up and “outs” Shayne as an impostor. The Man Who Wouldn’t Die gains points as a genre-bender and is overall a marvelously entertaining film, a good deal better than the earlier two Shaynes we’d seen (Michael Shayne, Private Detective and Sleepers West), gaining strength from the horror trappings (even though they don’t add much to the plot) and from a whole series of characters running the mental gamut from mildly eccentric to totally bonkers — making Lloyd Nolan’s laconicism as Shayne all that much more appealing! — 4/8/08
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I ran the first of two Michael Shayne: Detective episodes on a Critics’ Choice DVD, “Shoot the Works,” from 1960 with a puffy-looking Kent Smith as one of three partners owning the Medallion Publishing company and looking to make a killing because another publisher is about to acquire them. Unfortunately, one of the partners is killed literally — discovered at home by his wife when she returns a day earlier than expected from an out-of-town trip — and Michael Shayne, a Florida-based detective who unlike most hard-boiled private eyes has a pretty substantial entourage (they include a young reporter, a secretary/girlfriend and his younger brother, whose main interest in life is getting to sit in on bongos with a jazz quartet that plays at the Montmartre nightclub, a favorite hangout of Shayne’s posse and also one that figures importantly in the plot), gets retained by the widow to investigate.
At first I thought she was going to be the prime suspect because she and the nephew were having an affair (the body language between the two actors certainly suggested this), but as it turns out the murdered man was supposedly having an affair of his own — the maître d’ at the Montmartre saw him with a dark-haired woman who turned out to be one of the cover models for the publishing company (there’s a great scene in which Shayne walks into a photographer’s studio and sees another model being menaced by a sinister-looking figure with a knife, and it’s only later that a camera pull-back shows this is just a pose being photographed for the cover of a pulp mystery Medallion is publishing), whose ferociously jealous husband threatens to beat up Shayne (and even goes after him with a broken bottle!) and anyone else he thinks is having sex with her — which, since she’s your typical movie slut (you can tell by the jazz on the soundtrack as she’s introduced, not the nice Nat “King” Cole Trio-ish chamber jazz heard at the Montmartre but something sleazier-sounding and saxophone-driven), is just about any male in the cast she can get.
It turns out that it was actually the third partner in Medallion that this woman was having an affair with, and Kent Smith’s character committed the original murder with the idea of framing one of his fellow partners for the murder of the other, thereby getting rid of both of them and getting the company’s sale price all for himself — only the early return of the victim’s wife upset his plan and later forced him to kill the model to shut her up. Richard Denning played Shayne, considerably older than he was as Mr. North (in which he was the publisher and the detective!) but still easy on the eyes even though, in this episode at least, we don’t get to see him in the exciting states of near-undress he frequently appeared in in Mr. and Mrs. North. Maybe it wasn’t as good a subsequent career as playing Lucille Ball’s husband (they’d done a radio sitcom together called My Favorite Husband, but instead of just transferring the radio show to TV Lucy insisted on having her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, co-star, changed the title to I Love Lucy and made history), but at least it was a living — though the most interesting names on this show weren’t the actors or the director (a hack-of-all-work named Gerald Mayer) but the writers, Richard Levinson and William Link — who would later go to work for Universal and create many of their most memorable TV mysteries, including Columbo.
Here they were adapting one of the published Shayne novels, written by “Brett Halliday” (who was also credited as story consultant on the TV show; I can’t believe either that “Brett Halliday” is his real name or, considering the longevity of the Shayne novels, that there’s only been one person writing under that name: in fact, “Brett Halliday, Private Eye” might have had even more of an appeal, and maybe they should have swapped the character name and the author’s pseudonym), and it was an appealing TV mystery with bits of the noir look, not especially exciting but fun. [Later I looked him up on the Internet and found that “Brett Halliday” was really writer Davis Dresser, who wrote in many different pulp genres and cooked up a different pseudonym for each type of story he wrote.] — 2/19/08
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I played the other Michael Shayne, Detective episode on the Critics’ Choice “volume one” DVD, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” — which turned out to be surprisingly good, much better than “Shoot the Works” even though its writer, Don Brinkley, didn’t go on to biggers and betters the way Richard Levinson and William Link did — and this episode was an original story, not an adaptation of one of the Brett Halliday Shayne novels. Directed effectively by Walter Doniger and photographed with some real noir flair by Keith Smith, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” is centered around the death watch over multimillionaire Fred Endicott, who as the episode opens has just suffered a heart attack and is hanging on death’s door (he’s never actually shown as an on-screen character). His wastrel son Freddie (Robert Harland, in a performance actually owing quite a lot to Robert Walker’s portrayal of a similar character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) can’t wait to get his hands on the old man’s money, but there’s a catch: evidently having seen Buster Keaton’s film Seven Chances in his youth, the elder Endicott put a proviso in his will stipulating that in order to inherit anything from his estate, sonny boy has to be married on the theory that having a wife to support will shape him up and tie him down to some sort of respectability.
This drives Freddie to try to find a prospective wife, pronto — which leads him to a quick proposal to blonde bimbo barfly Topaz McQueen (played by Barbara Nichols in a blatant imitation of Marilyn Monroe, but one that approaches the pathos of the original in roles like Bus Stop and The Misfits), only quick-tempered family servant Vinnie Pico (Michael Forrest) catches Freddie and punches him out to make sure he stands Topaz up instead of marrying her. The same will that gives Freddie a vested interest in finding a wife fast gives his bimbo stepmother Laura (Patricia Barry) an equal interest in stopping him from marrying — if Freddie is still single when his dad croaks, Laura will get all the money and she can share it with Vinnie, with whom it’s strongly intimated she’s having an affair (so it’s the Anna Nicole Smith story grafted onto Strangers on a Train). In one great scene, Freddie confronts stepmom and stepmom’s boyfriend at the Endicott home, and when stepmom says she can’t allow him to sully the family image by marrying a tramp, Freddie fires back, “It runs in the family. My father married one, too.”
Freddie’s next target of marital opportunity is Connie Pico (Nancy Rennick), Vinnie’s sister and also a servant at the Endicott home, and they actually do tie the knot (flying on Freddie’s private plane to Alabama, where “quickie” marriages were available as they weren’t in Florida at the time), only when Freddie lets slip the real reason why he married Connie, she flees from him in disgust. Later Freddie is shot at his beach house, and Shayne — who entered the case when Laura sent Vinnie over with a blank check, trying to hire him to stop Freddie from marrying — investigates. Though Vinnie, a hot-tempered young man with a criminal record (for murder!) and an obvious motive, is the prime suspect, it turns out Connie is the real killer — she hid out in the beach house and shot Freddie as revenge for betraying her dream by marrying her not for love, but for purely mercenary reasons. Driven by the chillingly effective performances of Robert Harland and Barbara Nichols, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” is a nicely done TV series episode with more depth to the format than usual, then or now. — 2/20/08
A lot of the "B" detective films — particularly the series with recurring characters (aside from Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan) — have been stepchildren in the home video and DVD markets, but 20th Century-Fox has been rectifying that with a series of boxed sets of their Chan, Mr. Moto and Michael Shayne films. Here are notes on all four films in the Fox box "Michael Shayne, Volume 1" as well as a Critics' Choice DVD of two episodes from the Michael Shayne TV series:
I ran my partner Charles a movie, the first film in the 20th Century-Fox box of Michael Shayne films — of which they made seven from 1940-1942, of which only the first, Michael Shayne, Private Detective was actually based on one of the Shayne novels by “Brett Halliday” (and I refuse to believe that was that writer’s real name — it sounds so transparently phony he might as well have called the detective character “Brett Halliday” and signed the books “Michael Shayne,” and I had joked to Charles that his real name was probably something like Isidor Weinstein, though according to the Wikipedia entry on him he was actually “Davis Dresser”!).
For the later films in the series they raided books by writers like Frederick Nebel (whose Sleepers East, a hit for Fox in 1932, was remodeled into the Shayne vehicle Sleepers West), Clayton Rawson and even Raymond Chandler (his third Philip Marlowe book, The High Window, was bought by Fox for the Shayne movie Time to Kill and then, like Farewell, My Lovely — originally bought by RKO for The Falcon Takes Over — was later remade as a Marlowe story). I haven’t been able to nail down which Dresser/“Halliday” book this film was based on; some sources say it was the first one, Dividend on Death (published in 1939 by Henry Holt four years after Dresser had finished it) and some (including some on the same Web site!) say it was the second, The Private Practice of Michael Shayne.
Whichever, it relocates Shayne from Florida (where he was based in the novels and on the short-lived — one season — Michael Shayne TV show on NBC from 1960-61, of which we saw two episodes recently on a Critics’ Choice DVD) to California and casts Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. Though Nolan’s hair photographs raven-black and it’s impossible to believe he’s a redhead (as Shayne was described in the books), he’s otherwise a quite good choice for a wisecracking private eye in a film made on the cusp of the noir cycle. William K. Everson was so impressed by Nolan’s performances in the Shayne films and as the crooked cop Degarmo in The Lady in the Lake (in which he stole the film right out from under the principals and gave a marvelously human reading to a character Raymond Chandler wrote as a stock villain) that he lamented that Nolan had never got a chance to play Marlowe or Sam Spade on film. Shayne certainly doesn’t have the depth of Spade or Marlowe, but Nolan could probably have done justice to either part: he has the world-weary alienation right (even though through most of this film he’s shepherding an irresponsible young rich girl at the behest of her father rather than mixing in the lowlife and going down those famously mean streets) and tossed off the wisecracks with the right tired air.
Michael Shayne, Private Detective opens at a horse race, in which flighty young Phyllis Brighton (Marjorie Weaver) loses a bundle of money on one race and then pleads with her dad, racing commission member Hiram P. Brighton (Clarence Kolb), to loan her $200 so she can bet on a 15-to-1 long-shot in the next race. When he says no, she offers her brooch worth $500 as security for the bet with an on-track but unofficial bookmaker, and Shayne comes along — he’s a friend of her father — and tells the bookie the brooch is a phony (it isn’t). She returns to her dad in a huff and gets even huffier when her horse comes in, so dad immediately orders an investigation on the assumption that such a lousy horse couldn’t have won a race unless he was drugged. Dad also hires Shayne to keep an eye on Phyllis and especially to keep her away from the gambling casino owned by Benny Gordon (Douglass Dumbrille — and after his villainy in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, letting him anywhere near a racetrack was asking for trouble!) and from Harry Grange (George Meeker), the boyfriend who takes her there and lends her money to feed her gambling jones.
The plot is one of those mind-numbingly complicated travesties of mystery tropes, with so many suspects and motives it’s easy to imagine screenwriters Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Connor totally losing it trying to keep track of them all (and maybe that’s the reason none of the other Shaynes made at Fox used Dresser’s writings as story sources!). Suffice it to say that in order to scare Phyllis away from him, Shayne fakes a scene to make it look like Grange has been murdered — and while he’s passed out in Shayne’s car with ketchup dripping from his shirt front, someone actually does shoot him. Among the suspects are Gordon; his daughter Marsha (played by Joan Valerie, an actress who looked so old I thought we were supposed to believe she was Gordon’s wife instead of his daughter), who’d been after Grange herself and resented Phyllis for taking him away from her; Elliott Thomas (Walter Abel), another gambler and boyfriend of Phyllis; and Larry Kincaid (Robert Emmett Keane), who in an early scene offered Shayne a job strong-arming Grange on behalf of Gordon.
Eventually it turns out that Thomas secretly imported a horse from Australia and substituted it for the real horse, so it won fair and square but not under its real identity (had the writers seen Charlie Chan at the Race Track, which also used that gimmick — as, in a way, did A Day at the Races?), and he killed Grange because Grange was blackmailing him about this. It’s a good, if overly convoluted, story, and for once in one of these “B” detective movies the comic relief is actually funny — especially the marvelous Elizabeth Patterson as Phyllis’s Aunt Grace, who’s a devotee of mystery fiction and keeps comparing the real murder case that’s unfolding around her to the ones in her “Baffle Book,” particularly the one about a victim found under a piano, strangled with piano wire and with his head severed from his body. There are some surprisingly tame gags about Shayne’s alleged nakedness — we see Lloyd Nolan in his baggy underwear in a few scenes and we’re supposed to believe he’s put out at both Phyllis and Aunt Grace seeing him in Production Code-hailing distance of the altogether (“Don’t worry, I’ve taken art classes,” Grace assures him in the funniest line in the film) — and there’s also one sequence in which Nolan as Shayne is searching one of the suspects’ home that actually comes close to noir even though this film lacks the moral ambiguity required for noir. (Film noir didn’t really begin until John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon, made a year later, and though there are a few precursors to the noir spirit in the 1930’s this really isn’t one of them — though as I said earlier it’s on the cusp.)
The director is Eugene Forde — which may be part of the problem; Fox didn’t give this series their best directors (not even their best “B” directors!) and as this film plodded on from situation to situation I found myself liking H. Bruce Humberstone a whole lot better all of a sudden — and the cinematographer is the great George Schneiderman, who photographed most of John Ford’s silents for Fox in the 1920’s and, though he probably lamented that he was working with the wrong Ford(e) on this film, was almost certainly responsible (far more responsible than his director!) for the vivid anticipations of noir in some of the visuals. Michael Shayne, Private Detective is probably best seen as a transitional film between the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s and the noir private-eye movies of the 1940’s, with Shayne (especially as interpreted by Nolan) catching some of the world-weariness of Spade or Marlowe but hamstrung by a script that really didn’t require them; still, it’s a better-than-average mystery, and the official police are shown as dull and unimaginative (homicide captain Painter is played by Donald MacBride — another actor with a Marx Brothers movie, in his case Room Service, in his past) but not as the utterly stupid ninnies they usually were in 1930’s private-eye films. I’m looking forward to seeing the other three films in the box and hoping Fox will release the remaining three (including the Chandler adaptation!) in a second DVD boxed set. — 3/13/08
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I ran Sleepers West, a 1941 20th Century-Fox “B” and the second in the Michael Shayne series featuring Lloyd Nolan as the raven-haired (red-haired in the books) Irish detective (you see, on my St. Patrick’s Day journal entry I’d finally get around to mentioning something Irish!) created by Davis Dresser under the pen name “Brett Halliday.” Oddly, only the first of the seven Fox Michael Shayne films actually adapted a Dresser/“Halliday” novel; the others all were adapted from other detective novels featuring other characters and were adapted into Shayne stories by the Fox writing staff. (The most intriguing transposition in this group was undoubtedly Time to Kill, based on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel The High Window and remade by Fox as a Marlowe film, The Brasher Doubloon, in 1947, five years after the Shayne version).
For Sleepers West, a mystery set on a train, they took a novel by Frederick Nebel called Sleepers East which Fox had already filmed successfully in 1932 and simply reversed the title to reflect the reversed direction of travel. Shayne is assigned to protect a secret witness in a murder case in San Francisco; the defendant, Callahan (whom we never see as an on-screen character), is an habitual criminal — Shayne knows this because years before he busted him for robbery — but is innocent of this particular charge, but is being railroaded by the political machine promoting gubernatorial candidate Wentworth (also an unseen character) because Callahan can blow the whistle on Wentworth’s machine and destroy his chances.
The witness is vampy B-girl Helen Carlson (Mary Beth Hughes, whose later femme fatale performance in The Great Flamarion rivals Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour among the greatest embodiments of this particular cliché and who shows signs of that promise here), whom Shayne sneaks on board wearing a dark wig and being carried on a stretcher — his idea was that she would pretend to be an invalid and lock herself in her room through the entire ride from Denver to San Francisco, but Helen was way too willful for that: she ends up in a relationship with mystery man Everett Jason (Louis Jean Heydt in a performance that made me think, “I know I’ve seen this actor before,” though here he was playing a stronger characterization and bringing more power to his part than usual), who has $10,000 in cash in an attaché case. The film is full of sinister people on the train, some of whom are there to protect the heroine, some are there to kill her and some are there for agendas of their own that have nothing to do with her — and also on board is Denver reporter and former Shayne girlfriend Kay Bentley (Lynn Bari, who as usual looks sultry enough but doesn’t act), who wants to get to Helen Carlson so her paper can scoop the world on the story and who’s using Shayne’s continued interest in her to accomplish that — despite the presence of her fiancé, Tom Linscott (Donald Douglas), who works for Wentworth’s organization and therefore has a vested interest in making sure Carlson does not turn up in South America to testify.
There also is a railroad engineer who’s on his last run and is obsessed with getting his final train to its destination on time — and in the film’s most spectacular scene (though it’s clearly done with models that look all too obvious), an oil tanker gets stuck on the tracks and the train crashes into it and catches fire, forcing everyone else off the train while the railroad sends a fire-fighting crew and getting Shayne, Kay, Helen and Tom to flee by car to a nearby farmhouse whose owner is played by Ferike Boros, a fascinating character actress we’ve encountered before. Sleepers West is an intriguing thriller that’s rather daringly staged with almost no background music — odd for a 1941 film in an era in which even far better thrillers like The Maltese Falcon were going out relentlessly overscored — and it’s entertaining, though it could have been a lot more exciting and more fun with a better director than Eugene Forde. By then H. Bruce Humberstone, who brought so much to the three Charlie Chan films he made at Fox, had graduated to “A” films like I Wake Up Screaming and Pin-Up Girl, both with Betty Grable; Norman Foster was off working with Orson Welles on the unfinished It’s All True; and it’s hard to think who else on the Fox “B’ list could have done this better, though if they’d reached outside the way Columbia did for Robert Florey on the first Lone Wolf series film with Warren William they could have had a more interesting product. It also makes me curious to see the original Sleepers East sometime! — 3/17/08
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We eventually ran a movie: Blue, White and Perfect, the fourth and last film in the Michael Shayne boxed set from 20th Century-Fox — and, like the others, a disappointing film in that it wasted a potentially thrilling story and an appealingly authoritative star, Lloyd Nolan, on a workmanlike but rather dull production. Part of the problem was the director, Herbert I. Leeds — as we learned watching all those detective “B” films from Columbia, never trust a director whose name looks as if it should have the initials “D.D.S.” after it! — and though Glen MacWilliams (an American despite his Scottish name and his fame in British films, notably most of Jessie Matthews’ star vehicles) was the cinematographer, his lighting is quite competent but mostly undramatic; a story that cries out for noir effects and compositions doesn’t get them, and suffers by their lack.
The story: Michael Shayne returns to L.A. (where the Fox films relocated him from Florida, his home in the original novels by “Brett Halliday,” t/n Davis Dresser) from a case that took him to San Francisco and Seattle, to find that his girlfriend, beauty-shop owner Mavis Garland (a recurring role for Mary Beth Hughes, disappointingly used in these films as a good girl when she was so much better three years after this film as a femme fatale in the 1945 Republic thriller The Great Flamarion, co-starring Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea and vividly directed by the young Anthony Mann), has jilted him and accepted the proposal of smarmy Continental Alexis Fournier (Ivan Lebedeff). Shayne looks him up and finds Fournier is a con artist and a bigamist (!) as well as selling Mavis’s beauty shop a wart removing cream that doesn’t work — as Mavis’s sidekick Ethel (an good and way too short comic performance by Marie Blake) explains after she tells Shayne that the authentic pronunciation of his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend is “fonay,” “He sells us the Fournier One-Minute Wart Remover. And, boy, is it fo-nay!”
Told by Mavis (after Fournier’s arrest on the steps of the building where they were supposed to get their marriage license) that she’ll only marry him if he quits detective work and finds a real job (“I want to be your wife, not your widow!” she says), he agrees to go to work for the Thomas Aircraft Company, telling her he’s going to be a riveter (he even fakes a phone call to make it appear as if he’s phoning her from the shop floor, in a scene reminiscent of Groucho Marx’s pose as the Florida Medical Board representative in A Day at the Races) but really signing on as an undercover security officer investigating who stole $100,000 in industrial diamonds from the company’s safe. (The film’s title turns out not to be a patriotic reference; at the very end Nolan as Shayne uses the phrase to demonstrate that the stolen diamonds are not gem-quality.) The person in charge of the safe actually was part of the gang — a band of saboteurs anxious to make sure the Axis gets hold of the diamonds and uses them in their war production — which was easy enough to guess because his name was Vanderhoefen and he was played by Steven Geray (let’s see, we have a Russian playing a Frenchman and a Frenchman playing a Dutchman) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Geray movie in which he wasn’t a bad guy!
The diamonds are being smuggled to Hawai’i aboard an ocean liner and, in order to get the money to get on it, Shayne embezzles $1,000 from Mavis (she thinks the money is going to buy them a ranch where’ll they’ll live as a couple) and ends up in a shipboard romance with an old flame, Helen Shaw (Helene Reynolds), who’s also being chased by a half-Latino, improbably named Juan Arturo O’Hara and even more improbably played by future Superman George Reeves, decked out with a moustache and a lot of shoe polish in his hair to make him look appropriately swarthy and dark. The overall tenor of this film isn’t that different from the Saint and the Falcon movies RKO was churning out at the same time, but it seems wrong because Michael Shayne isn’t a debonair, romantic character; he’s a grungier sort of guy being played by an American actor and this rather superficial style of mystery film doesn’t really play to the strengths either of Brett Halliday’s (t/n: Davis Dresser) character or Nolan’s performance. Still, I hope 20th Century-Fox reissues the rest of their Michael Shayne movies on DVD if only so I can see Time to Kill, which their writers based on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel The High Window and which just might bring some depth to the series the way RKO’s appropriation of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely did to their 1942 film The Falcon Takes Over. — 6/8/08
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Afterwards Charles and I went straight (pardon the expression) home and ended up running another movie: The Man That Wouldn’t Die, which despite the title is a Michael Shayne mystery (albeit one with a Frankenstein-like subplot) rather than a horror film and seemed to me to be the best of the ones we’ve seen so far. While its director, Herbert I. Leeds, is a hack about on the level of Eugene Forde, he does get some appealingly Gothic shots into the film — and the script, written by Arnaud d’Usseau based on the novel No Coffin for the Corpse by Clayton Rawson (one of his Merlini the Great series about a stage magician who was also an amateur detective: one of his other books, Death from a Top Hat, became the basis of Tod Browning’s last film, Miracles for Sale, in 1939), is genuinely charming and largely evocative of The Thin Man even though Michael Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) is merely posing as the husband of his client, Catherine Wolff (Marjorie Weaver), not actually married to her.
The film begins with a peculiar scene in which a group of men sneak out of a large mansion in the dead of night, dig a grave on the grounds and bury a body — or at least a body-shaped parcel — in it. The mansion belongs to tycoon Dudley Wolff (Paul Harvey), who’s under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee for allegedly defrauding the government on war contracts (remember when people in the government actually cared whether or not it was being defrauded on war contracts?), who’s married to trophy wife Anna (Helene Reynolds) — Catherine is his daughter by a previous wife — and is giving house room to mad scientist Dr. Haggard (Henry Wilcoxon), who’s outfitted his basement with lab equipment similar to Kenneth Strickfaden’s great props for the Frankenstein films in an experiment Dudley Wolff is bankrolling in hopes Dr. Haggard will figure out a way to make him immortal.
One night, while staying at the mansion, Catherine is fired at by an apparition who sneaks into her bedroom with glowing eyes and a gun; she calls it a “ghost” but the gun, and the bullet it fired that lodged into one of her bedposts, are both indisputably real. Eventually it turns out that the “ghost” is magician Zorah Bey (LeRoy Mason), the only person besides Houdini who ever mastered the trick of getting himself buried alive and being able to slow down his breathing so much that he could pass the “mirror test” (when they determined whether a person was alive or dead by holding a pocket mirror under their nose and seeing if vapor from breath formed on it) and survive living burial long enough to figure out how to get the coffin and grave open and escape.
Old man Wolff’s trophy wife was formerly Zorah Bey’s assistant and his wife; she married Wolff thinking that Zorah Bey was dead but later he turned up alive and blackmailed her, and as a result she and her husband killed him — or at least they thought their blow to his head had killed him — and buried him in the opening scene, except he wasn’t dead at all and when he regained consciousness he used his skills as an escape artist to get out of his own grave. There’s also a complication straight out of French farce when Catherine’s real husband, Roger Blake (Richard Derr), turns up and “outs” Shayne as an impostor. The Man Who Wouldn’t Die gains points as a genre-bender and is overall a marvelously entertaining film, a good deal better than the earlier two Shaynes we’d seen (Michael Shayne, Private Detective and Sleepers West), gaining strength from the horror trappings (even though they don’t add much to the plot) and from a whole series of characters running the mental gamut from mildly eccentric to totally bonkers — making Lloyd Nolan’s laconicism as Shayne all that much more appealing! — 4/8/08
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I ran the first of two Michael Shayne: Detective episodes on a Critics’ Choice DVD, “Shoot the Works,” from 1960 with a puffy-looking Kent Smith as one of three partners owning the Medallion Publishing company and looking to make a killing because another publisher is about to acquire them. Unfortunately, one of the partners is killed literally — discovered at home by his wife when she returns a day earlier than expected from an out-of-town trip — and Michael Shayne, a Florida-based detective who unlike most hard-boiled private eyes has a pretty substantial entourage (they include a young reporter, a secretary/girlfriend and his younger brother, whose main interest in life is getting to sit in on bongos with a jazz quartet that plays at the Montmartre nightclub, a favorite hangout of Shayne’s posse and also one that figures importantly in the plot), gets retained by the widow to investigate.
At first I thought she was going to be the prime suspect because she and the nephew were having an affair (the body language between the two actors certainly suggested this), but as it turns out the murdered man was supposedly having an affair of his own — the maître d’ at the Montmartre saw him with a dark-haired woman who turned out to be one of the cover models for the publishing company (there’s a great scene in which Shayne walks into a photographer’s studio and sees another model being menaced by a sinister-looking figure with a knife, and it’s only later that a camera pull-back shows this is just a pose being photographed for the cover of a pulp mystery Medallion is publishing), whose ferociously jealous husband threatens to beat up Shayne (and even goes after him with a broken bottle!) and anyone else he thinks is having sex with her — which, since she’s your typical movie slut (you can tell by the jazz on the soundtrack as she’s introduced, not the nice Nat “King” Cole Trio-ish chamber jazz heard at the Montmartre but something sleazier-sounding and saxophone-driven), is just about any male in the cast she can get.
It turns out that it was actually the third partner in Medallion that this woman was having an affair with, and Kent Smith’s character committed the original murder with the idea of framing one of his fellow partners for the murder of the other, thereby getting rid of both of them and getting the company’s sale price all for himself — only the early return of the victim’s wife upset his plan and later forced him to kill the model to shut her up. Richard Denning played Shayne, considerably older than he was as Mr. North (in which he was the publisher and the detective!) but still easy on the eyes even though, in this episode at least, we don’t get to see him in the exciting states of near-undress he frequently appeared in in Mr. and Mrs. North. Maybe it wasn’t as good a subsequent career as playing Lucille Ball’s husband (they’d done a radio sitcom together called My Favorite Husband, but instead of just transferring the radio show to TV Lucy insisted on having her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, co-star, changed the title to I Love Lucy and made history), but at least it was a living — though the most interesting names on this show weren’t the actors or the director (a hack-of-all-work named Gerald Mayer) but the writers, Richard Levinson and William Link — who would later go to work for Universal and create many of their most memorable TV mysteries, including Columbo.
Here they were adapting one of the published Shayne novels, written by “Brett Halliday” (who was also credited as story consultant on the TV show; I can’t believe either that “Brett Halliday” is his real name or, considering the longevity of the Shayne novels, that there’s only been one person writing under that name: in fact, “Brett Halliday, Private Eye” might have had even more of an appeal, and maybe they should have swapped the character name and the author’s pseudonym), and it was an appealing TV mystery with bits of the noir look, not especially exciting but fun. [Later I looked him up on the Internet and found that “Brett Halliday” was really writer Davis Dresser, who wrote in many different pulp genres and cooked up a different pseudonym for each type of story he wrote.] — 2/19/08
•••••
I played the other Michael Shayne, Detective episode on the Critics’ Choice “volume one” DVD, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” — which turned out to be surprisingly good, much better than “Shoot the Works” even though its writer, Don Brinkley, didn’t go on to biggers and betters the way Richard Levinson and William Link did — and this episode was an original story, not an adaptation of one of the Brett Halliday Shayne novels. Directed effectively by Walter Doniger and photographed with some real noir flair by Keith Smith, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” is centered around the death watch over multimillionaire Fred Endicott, who as the episode opens has just suffered a heart attack and is hanging on death’s door (he’s never actually shown as an on-screen character). His wastrel son Freddie (Robert Harland, in a performance actually owing quite a lot to Robert Walker’s portrayal of a similar character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) can’t wait to get his hands on the old man’s money, but there’s a catch: evidently having seen Buster Keaton’s film Seven Chances in his youth, the elder Endicott put a proviso in his will stipulating that in order to inherit anything from his estate, sonny boy has to be married on the theory that having a wife to support will shape him up and tie him down to some sort of respectability.
This drives Freddie to try to find a prospective wife, pronto — which leads him to a quick proposal to blonde bimbo barfly Topaz McQueen (played by Barbara Nichols in a blatant imitation of Marilyn Monroe, but one that approaches the pathos of the original in roles like Bus Stop and The Misfits), only quick-tempered family servant Vinnie Pico (Michael Forrest) catches Freddie and punches him out to make sure he stands Topaz up instead of marrying her. The same will that gives Freddie a vested interest in finding a wife fast gives his bimbo stepmother Laura (Patricia Barry) an equal interest in stopping him from marrying — if Freddie is still single when his dad croaks, Laura will get all the money and she can share it with Vinnie, with whom it’s strongly intimated she’s having an affair (so it’s the Anna Nicole Smith story grafted onto Strangers on a Train). In one great scene, Freddie confronts stepmom and stepmom’s boyfriend at the Endicott home, and when stepmom says she can’t allow him to sully the family image by marrying a tramp, Freddie fires back, “It runs in the family. My father married one, too.”
Freddie’s next target of marital opportunity is Connie Pico (Nancy Rennick), Vinnie’s sister and also a servant at the Endicott home, and they actually do tie the knot (flying on Freddie’s private plane to Alabama, where “quickie” marriages were available as they weren’t in Florida at the time), only when Freddie lets slip the real reason why he married Connie, she flees from him in disgust. Later Freddie is shot at his beach house, and Shayne — who entered the case when Laura sent Vinnie over with a blank check, trying to hire him to stop Freddie from marrying — investigates. Though Vinnie, a hot-tempered young man with a criminal record (for murder!) and an obvious motive, is the prime suspect, it turns out Connie is the real killer — she hid out in the beach house and shot Freddie as revenge for betraying her dream by marrying her not for love, but for purely mercenary reasons. Driven by the chillingly effective performances of Robert Harland and Barbara Nichols, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” is a nicely done TV series episode with more depth to the format than usual, then or now. — 2/20/08
"Humanoid Woman": From MST3K to Restoration
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I ended up with was Humanoid Woman, as a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation on one of those very early episodes of the show when it was still a really cheap, cheesy local-TV outing in Minnesota. The film was an American release (by Sandy Frank) of a bizarre Ukrainian sci-fi movie from 1981 called Cherez ternii k zvyozdam — and no, I have no idea what the literal meaning of the original title is, though among the alternative titles in English were To the Stars by Hard Ways (there’s also the Latin title Per Aspera Ad Astra and the French — for Canadian release — À travers les ronces vers les étoiles). Directed by Richard Viktorov (though, not surprisingly, his last name was spelled “Victor” on this English-dubbed print) from a script he co-wrote with Kir Bulychyov, Humanoid Woman is a severely edited version of a flim that ran 148 minutes on its initial release (though the “restored” version, prepared by Voktorov’s son Nikolai in 2001, runs only 123 minutes — apparently, as with the similarly cut-and-pasted Lang Metropolis, some footage was permanently lost in the shuffle and outtakes had to be used to fill in some of the scenes).
Slow-paced and very confusing at times, the film deals with a spaceship crew that comes across the derelict wreckage of another spacecraft containing adult-sized human clones; most of them are dead but one, the titular humanoid woman Niya (Yelena Metyolkina, an appealingly androgynous actress who looked to me like Sinéad O’Connor in drag as David Bowie, though an imdb.com commentator compared her to Annie Lennox in her Eurythmics days; I couldn’t shake the feeling that the casting director of this film cruised the Lesbian bars of Kiev until s/he finally came across Ms. Metyolkina and thought, “That’s her!”), survives and is brought home to live with members of the crew of the rescue ship in an apartment building of surpassing ugliness (an all too vivid reminder of what decades of Soviet domination did to Russia’s housing stock, though similarly tacky buildings are being put up right and left in this city right now as overpriced condo projects). The paterfamilias of this household is Sergei Lebedev (Uldis Lieldidz), who has a tall, very skinny and dorky-looking teenage son, Cadet Stepan Lebedev (Vadim Ledogorov, who was too gangly to do much for me aesthetically until the camera gave us a crotch shot and showed his impressively well-packed basket, after which I had a crush on him big-time!), who predictably gets a big case of the adolescent hots for Niya and takes her cliff-diving (some impressive dives here by the actors’ stunt doubles) despite her initial reluctance to go into the water because it reminds her too much of her natal fluid.
In a series of confusingly edited flashbacks we learn that Niya was pre-programmed for obedience by her creator/father, a leader of the planet Dessa which had been virtually destroyed, presumably by nuclear war, since whatever the catastrophe was it left behind — stop me if you’ve heard this before — a race of ugly mutants who go about in wax-like face masks that not only shield each other’s eyes from their ugliness (though when the masks finally crumble they look no worse than badly treated burn victims) but also allow them to breathe the planet’s otherwise toxic air. Niya stows away on a spaceship and hijacks it to Dessa — blowing up an entire other planet with her telekinetic powers (did I mention that she has telekinetic powers?) when an order from Starfleet Command or whatever it’s called in this movie threatens to divert the spaceship to rescue an earth party stranded there — where the earthlings have such amazing technology that just by beaming some sort of energy source at the planet they can counteract the effects of radioactivity (or whatever) and make the place bloom again — only the undergrounders are hyper-paranoid and think the earthlings have come to their planet not to save but to destroy it. Somehow or other a giant foam monster that looks like what would emerge if the Woolite warehouse blew up gets loose and starts eating the bad guys, including the principal villain, a little person with a striking resemblance to Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies, and Niya either sacrifices herself for the good of her planet or stays behind to help the not-so-nasty Dessans rebuild — whatever happened, the movie ends with a tearful farewell between her and Stepan as Stepan rejoins his dad and their comrades on the ship home.
Some of the movies Mystery Science Theatre 3000 lampooned — including Cosmic Princess, the one they’d shown the previous week, which was spliced together none too convincingly from two Space: 1999 episodes — showed genuine promise in their premises but failed in the execution. This one is just dull, spliced together from tropes that had been done a lot better in other people’s movies. The slow pace doesn’t help; both Charles and I noticed the similarity between the visual style of this film and that of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris — the plodding pace, the lingering shots of the mystery woman, the attempt by the very slowness of the piece to bring depth and emotional resonance to what would otherwise be a pretty ordinary piece of adolescent sci-fi — but whereas Tarkovsky uses this style to draw us into the story and make it heartbreaking, Viktorov only manages to bore us out of our skulls with it until he gets to the final action scene, and somehow if they had to rip off another movie to provide themselves with a climax I do wish it had been something a little heavier than The Blob.
Indeed, the main problem with this film (judging it from a poor-quality VHS copy of a dubbed print and realizing that it may have lost a lot in translation, in more ways than one, in a context of deliberate mockery) seems to have been that Viktorov and his writing partner Bulychyov had too many good ideas: the “stranger in a strange land” gimmick of the alien on earth adjusting to a very different physical and cultural environment; the quest narrative of the lost traveler who needs to go home; the battle royal on the home planet as the traveler desperately tries to pick up the pieces of the doomed world (a trope far better done in the 1955 American film This Island Earth, also a movie that got the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 “treatment” but didn’t deserve it), the action climax, the tearful parting — all of these gimmicks had been done better elsewhere and after a while we were merely counting the minutes until this dreadful movie ended and thinking that later, when the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 concept went national, they got movies that came closer to the ideal balance they needed for their act: not too good that we wouldn’t want to see them lampooned, not so bad that even with the MST3k “treatment” they remained doggedly unentertaining.
The jokes themselves also got better later on in the series; this time, aside from a nicely funny wisecrack about one of the crew members on the spaceship that discovers Niya in the first place having a moustache resembling Hitler’s, their best gags was when they started singing songs Aleksei Rybnikov’s dirge-like electronic music score reminded them of, including Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” and Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.” Surprisingly, they didn’t do the parody of Harry Belafonte’s “Coconut Woman” that occurred to me (“Humanoid woman is calling out/And everywhere on Dessa they can hear her shout … ”), but maybe that would have been too obscure a cultural reference in 1989. They did use the film's title in song to the tune (more or less) of the Guess Who’s “American Woman,” and at one point they said Niya looked like the negative image of Arsenio Hall — they seem to have been particularly partial to Arsenio Hall jokes just then since there were some on the Cosmic Princess show as well.
The film I ended up with was Humanoid Woman, as a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation on one of those very early episodes of the show when it was still a really cheap, cheesy local-TV outing in Minnesota. The film was an American release (by Sandy Frank) of a bizarre Ukrainian sci-fi movie from 1981 called Cherez ternii k zvyozdam — and no, I have no idea what the literal meaning of the original title is, though among the alternative titles in English were To the Stars by Hard Ways (there’s also the Latin title Per Aspera Ad Astra and the French — for Canadian release — À travers les ronces vers les étoiles). Directed by Richard Viktorov (though, not surprisingly, his last name was spelled “Victor” on this English-dubbed print) from a script he co-wrote with Kir Bulychyov, Humanoid Woman is a severely edited version of a flim that ran 148 minutes on its initial release (though the “restored” version, prepared by Voktorov’s son Nikolai in 2001, runs only 123 minutes — apparently, as with the similarly cut-and-pasted Lang Metropolis, some footage was permanently lost in the shuffle and outtakes had to be used to fill in some of the scenes).
Slow-paced and very confusing at times, the film deals with a spaceship crew that comes across the derelict wreckage of another spacecraft containing adult-sized human clones; most of them are dead but one, the titular humanoid woman Niya (Yelena Metyolkina, an appealingly androgynous actress who looked to me like Sinéad O’Connor in drag as David Bowie, though an imdb.com commentator compared her to Annie Lennox in her Eurythmics days; I couldn’t shake the feeling that the casting director of this film cruised the Lesbian bars of Kiev until s/he finally came across Ms. Metyolkina and thought, “That’s her!”), survives and is brought home to live with members of the crew of the rescue ship in an apartment building of surpassing ugliness (an all too vivid reminder of what decades of Soviet domination did to Russia’s housing stock, though similarly tacky buildings are being put up right and left in this city right now as overpriced condo projects). The paterfamilias of this household is Sergei Lebedev (Uldis Lieldidz), who has a tall, very skinny and dorky-looking teenage son, Cadet Stepan Lebedev (Vadim Ledogorov, who was too gangly to do much for me aesthetically until the camera gave us a crotch shot and showed his impressively well-packed basket, after which I had a crush on him big-time!), who predictably gets a big case of the adolescent hots for Niya and takes her cliff-diving (some impressive dives here by the actors’ stunt doubles) despite her initial reluctance to go into the water because it reminds her too much of her natal fluid.
In a series of confusingly edited flashbacks we learn that Niya was pre-programmed for obedience by her creator/father, a leader of the planet Dessa which had been virtually destroyed, presumably by nuclear war, since whatever the catastrophe was it left behind — stop me if you’ve heard this before — a race of ugly mutants who go about in wax-like face masks that not only shield each other’s eyes from their ugliness (though when the masks finally crumble they look no worse than badly treated burn victims) but also allow them to breathe the planet’s otherwise toxic air. Niya stows away on a spaceship and hijacks it to Dessa — blowing up an entire other planet with her telekinetic powers (did I mention that she has telekinetic powers?) when an order from Starfleet Command or whatever it’s called in this movie threatens to divert the spaceship to rescue an earth party stranded there — where the earthlings have such amazing technology that just by beaming some sort of energy source at the planet they can counteract the effects of radioactivity (or whatever) and make the place bloom again — only the undergrounders are hyper-paranoid and think the earthlings have come to their planet not to save but to destroy it. Somehow or other a giant foam monster that looks like what would emerge if the Woolite warehouse blew up gets loose and starts eating the bad guys, including the principal villain, a little person with a striking resemblance to Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies, and Niya either sacrifices herself for the good of her planet or stays behind to help the not-so-nasty Dessans rebuild — whatever happened, the movie ends with a tearful farewell between her and Stepan as Stepan rejoins his dad and their comrades on the ship home.
Some of the movies Mystery Science Theatre 3000 lampooned — including Cosmic Princess, the one they’d shown the previous week, which was spliced together none too convincingly from two Space: 1999 episodes — showed genuine promise in their premises but failed in the execution. This one is just dull, spliced together from tropes that had been done a lot better in other people’s movies. The slow pace doesn’t help; both Charles and I noticed the similarity between the visual style of this film and that of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris — the plodding pace, the lingering shots of the mystery woman, the attempt by the very slowness of the piece to bring depth and emotional resonance to what would otherwise be a pretty ordinary piece of adolescent sci-fi — but whereas Tarkovsky uses this style to draw us into the story and make it heartbreaking, Viktorov only manages to bore us out of our skulls with it until he gets to the final action scene, and somehow if they had to rip off another movie to provide themselves with a climax I do wish it had been something a little heavier than The Blob.
Indeed, the main problem with this film (judging it from a poor-quality VHS copy of a dubbed print and realizing that it may have lost a lot in translation, in more ways than one, in a context of deliberate mockery) seems to have been that Viktorov and his writing partner Bulychyov had too many good ideas: the “stranger in a strange land” gimmick of the alien on earth adjusting to a very different physical and cultural environment; the quest narrative of the lost traveler who needs to go home; the battle royal on the home planet as the traveler desperately tries to pick up the pieces of the doomed world (a trope far better done in the 1955 American film This Island Earth, also a movie that got the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 “treatment” but didn’t deserve it), the action climax, the tearful parting — all of these gimmicks had been done better elsewhere and after a while we were merely counting the minutes until this dreadful movie ended and thinking that later, when the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 concept went national, they got movies that came closer to the ideal balance they needed for their act: not too good that we wouldn’t want to see them lampooned, not so bad that even with the MST3k “treatment” they remained doggedly unentertaining.
The jokes themselves also got better later on in the series; this time, aside from a nicely funny wisecrack about one of the crew members on the spaceship that discovers Niya in the first place having a moustache resembling Hitler’s, their best gags was when they started singing songs Aleksei Rybnikov’s dirge-like electronic music score reminded them of, including Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” and Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.” Surprisingly, they didn’t do the parody of Harry Belafonte’s “Coconut Woman” that occurred to me (“Humanoid woman is calling out/And everywhere on Dessa they can hear her shout … ”), but maybe that would have been too obscure a cultural reference in 1989. They did use the film's title in song to the tune (more or less) of the Guess Who’s “American Woman,” and at one point they said Niya looked like the negative image of Arsenio Hall — they seem to have been particularly partial to Arsenio Hall jokes just then since there were some on the Cosmic Princess show as well.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Nineteen Charlie Chans! The Fox Boxed Sets
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After years of neglect — at least partly conditioned by Asian-American activists who’ve condemned the films as racist, less due to their actual content than that the hero was always played by white actors — 20th Century-Fox has reissued most of its surviving Charlie Chan films in DVD boxed sets, four films to a package with a couple of intriguing bonuses: the 1929 early talkie Behind That Curtain (the first Chan film to survive) and Eran Trece, the surviving Spanish-language version of Charlie Chan Carries On, the lost debut of Warner Oland in the role. This is a survey of all the films released so far as my partner Charles and I have gone through the boxed sets and watched them. — M.G.C., 6/4/08
•••••
Behind That Curtain is a 1929 Fox production that’s the first Charlie Chan movie produced at that studio, the first Chan talkie and the earliest Chan movie that survives. That’s about all it has going for it, though. It was based on the third Chan novel written by the character’s creator, Earl Derr Biggers, who structured his book much the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear: a mystery prologue involving the “sleuth” character, a long backstory flashback indicating who the murder victim was, who the murderer was and the entire history that led this person to kill that other person, and a short epilogue in which the sleuth returns to tie up the loose ends. Fox’s scenarists, George Middleton (credited with the adaptation, so this was presumably his idea) and Sonya Levien & Clarke Silvernail (script), decided to lop off the introductory passage with the sleuth and just tell the backstory, bringing Chan in at the end as a sort of deus ex machina.
William Fox, who when this film was made still headed the studio that bore his name (and who picked Upton Sinclair, of all people, to write his authorized biography, which makes me wonder what he’d think of the way the studio’s current owner, Rupert Murdoch, has made his last name synonymous with Right-wing news and political commentary), obviously saw this film as a follow-up to In Old Arizona, since he reunited that hit movie’s director, Irving Cummings, and star, Warner Baxter, and took advantage of all the opportunities for location work. A good chunk of the story takes place in what was then called “Persia” (modern-day Iran), even though it’s “played” by all too familiar Western locations and the “Persian desert” is obviously Hollywood’s all-purpose stand-in for deserts anywhere, the big sand dunes outside Yuma, Arizona.
Baxter plays British explorer Col. John Beetham, who’s just returned from a four-month trip to China to find that private investigator Hilary Galt (Edgar Norton, for once not playing an alcoholic) has dug up some derogatory information about him and threatens to reveal that to his client, Sir George Mannering (Claude King), which will jeopardize his chances of marrying Mannering’s niece Eve (Lois Moran, second-billed). Only it turns out that during his Chinese expedition Eve has met and fallen in love with no-good bounder Eric Durand (Philip Strange) and it’s Eric that Galt plans to dis to Sir George (who doesn’t need any persuasion since he already hates him and bitterly opposes Eve marrying him) — and, in order to prevent this from happening, Eric elopes with Eve, kills Galt and leaves a pair of Chinese slippers at the scene of the crime (gifts from the Chinese emperor to Col. Beetham) to frame Beetham for the crime.
Beetham flees by embarking on his planned expedition to Iran, and who else should turn up there but Mr. and Mrs. Durand. By then Eric is openly carrying on with his native servant, Nuna (Mercedes De Valasco) — even screwing her in what was supposed to be Eric’s and Eve’s marital bed — and Eve decides to separate from him but not divorce him because that would cause a scandal that would embarrass Col. Beetham, whom she’s decided she loves after all. Eve and Beetham run into each other when he’s about to set off into the Persian desert on his way to India, and the two of them ride into the desert and vibrate with mutual sexual frustration for several reels before they finally yield to the obvious temptation. Just then Sir Frederick Bruce (Gilbert Emery) of Scotland Yard turns up in Tehran, on the trail of Beetham for murdering Galt, and he meets Eric.
The two of them charter a plane to fly on ahead of Beetham’s caravan, and of course run into Beetham and narrowly miss Eve — who overhears them and rides back to Tehran, then leaves the area altogether. A year passes, and the principals all end up in San Francisco, where Bruce and police inspector Charlie Chan (E. L. Park) attempt to catch the killer. Eric corners Eve in an elevator in a San Francisco hotel and demands a letter she received from Alf Pornick (John Rogers), Galt’s assistant, which is the only physical evidence tying Eric to the murder — he tells Eve and us that he’s already killed Pornick to shut him up and plans to do the same to Eve. Beetham is scheduled to give a lecture in the hotel ballroom and show films of his expedition, and during the showing Eric attempts to shoot Beetham from the audience, Bruce blocks the shot and takes the bullet himself (though he survives), and Chan shoots and kills Eric, thereby allowing the case to be solved without the scandal of a public trial. Of course, Beetham and Eve end up together.
Behind That Curtain is a quirky story that could have made a good movie, but unfortunately this film is a virtual compendium of all that went wrong with the early talkies, especially the ones whose directors were too weak to stand up to the insane demands of the sound men that everyone … talk … really … slowly … and … distinctly, and … … pause … between … hearing their … cue line … and deliver- … -ing their own. The action is staged almost entirely in two-shots between the people presumably conversing, and though Fox was the pioneering studio in developing sound-on-film technology this film is as stiff, and its cameras as immobile, as anything Warners was making at the time with the handicap of the cumbersome (and soon obsolete) Vitaphone sound-on-disc equipment.
The films from 1929 that stand up as entertainment today — Vidor’s Hallelujah!, Mamoulian’s Applause, Lubitsch’s The Love Parade, Wyler’s Hell’s Heroes, Capra’s Ladies of Leisure — are the ones that ignored the ostensible strictures of sound shooting and featured actors conversing normally, cameras that actually moved, and creative uses of sound. Behind That Curtain is all too typical of the common run of early sound films, stiff and boring, and though William K. Everson seems far too patronizing about the later Fox Chans with Warner Oland (“There was never much mystery about any of the ‘hidden killers’ in the Chan movies, nor much variety in their unmasking,” he wrote — a comment belied by Charlie Chan in Paris, with its gimmick of having the killer wear such a heavy disguise that it turns out two separate people are committing the murders, taking turns wearing the disguise and thereby alibi-ing each other, though this particular gimmick would have worked better if the two actors had been the same height; as it was, one was noticeably taller than the other and that should have given the game away; or Charlie Chan on Broadway, in which the obnoxious reporter we expect to be the romantic lead turns out to be the killer), he’s right on about this one:
“The film itself, while it goes out of its way to exploit different kinds of sound effects and a variety of languages, is dull and plodding. The desert locales do nothing but emphasize the space in which nothing happens and also limits the number of characters involved, so that the interchange of dialogue is lengthened into tedium by long delays and reactions. The whole film is much more pedestrian than its basically good story and cast (including Boris Karloff) would indicate.”
As for Karloff — making his sound-film debut and billed only as “Hindu servant” (which explains how he can get away at one point with pretending he speaks neither English nor Farsi) — he’s Beetham’s manservant (there’s an unintentionally funny scene in which, inside a desert tent, he’s serving Beetham, Bruce, and Eric drinks) and he gets very little more to say than, “Yes, Sahib” — though in a film like this that’s something of an advantage (and it’s worth remembering that two years later Karloff would become a star from Frankenstein, in which aside from a few pre-verbal cries, grunts and moans his character was mute). The rest of the film just plods along and wastes some potentially interesting actors — including Moran, who didn’t have much of a career after sound came in even though she gets the two genuinely emotional moments in this one: the scene in which she’s debating whether to have sex with Beetham (in which she’s a lot more subtle than Baxter, who’s attempting to figure out how to do the Valentino schtick in a sound film) and the good suspense scene in which Eric traps her in the hotel elevator.
Warner Baxter had a tendency, even in better films than this, to seem unnecessarily overwrought (in his good films, like 42nd Street and The Prisoner of Shark Island, he was able to harness that to create effective characterizations), but in this one he seems determined to leave no stick of scenery unchewed — and at one point he audibly stumbles over a line, the kind of mistake one forgives in a stage play but in a movie makes one ask, “Why didn’t they retake?” I couldn’t help thinking that Behind That Curtain might have been a great movie, even in 1929, if Fox could have borrowed Josef von Sternberg from Paramount to direct; with Sternberg’s mastery of exotic atmosphere and his ability to get his actors to underplay (not just Dietrich but even 100 percent cured, smoked hams like Emil Jannings), and the control-freak tendencies that would have made him read the riot act to those stupid sound people, a Sternberg Behind That Curtain could have been a real gem.
There are elements in this film of some interest — Karloff’s glowering screen presence; E. L. Park’s Chan (he was a British actor but he was considerably more convincingly “alien” than the Chans to follow); the use of source music to take the place of underscoring (sound mixing was still in its infancy and the use of non-source background music under dialogue was a considerably later development, around 1931 or so) — though the virtually forgotten Hamilton MacFadden does a much better job in that department in the 1931 film The Black Camel, also in the current Chan box and the only survivor among the first five Oland Chans (and one of the very best films in the series, thanks to MacFadden’s creative direction and the welcome presence of Bela Lugosi in a key supporting role) and an overall story that could have made a good (if not great) movie — but they’re lost in … a welter of … badly delivered … dialogue and … flatly photographed … scenes that add … up to an excruciatingly … boring film. — 9/2/07
•••••
There was one film in the DVD packages I’d just got that I particularly wanted to see: Eran Trece (“There Were Thirteen”), made by Fox in 1931 as the Spanish-language version of Fox’s first Charlie Chan film with Warner Oland, Charlie Chan Carries On (the fifth of Earl Derr Biggers’ six Chan novels). Through one of the bizarre vagaries of film preservation, the English-language version with Oland has been lost (indeed, of Oland’s first five Chan films, only the second, The Black Camel, survives) but this Spanish-speaking version, shot (like the Spanish Dracula, the German Anna Christie and the Spanish and French versions of Laurel and Hardy’s first feature, Pardon Us) simultaneously with the English version (Lupita Tovar, the female lead of the Spanish Dracula, recalled that the Spanish version was shot at night on the same sets as the English version had been shot on during the day, and the director was instructed to block the action the same way as the director of the English version so they could use the same “marks,” the lines taped on the floor of the set instructing the actors where to stop so the camera will photograph them properly).
The American Film Institute Catalog credits David Howard as the director of Eran Trece (Hamilton MacFadden helmed the English-language version) and doesn’t list the translator of the script (the English version was written by Philip Klein and Barry Connors). The film opens with the murder of Isaac Potter, fabulously wealthy American, in a hotel room in London, and suspicion falls on the other 12 members of his tour group — he was on a round-the-world tour sponsored by Dr. Lofton (Julio Villarreal) — including his daughter Ellen (Ana María Custodio), Chicago gangster Max Minchin (Raul Roulien, who later played Gene Raymond’s rival for Dolores Del Rio’s affections in Flying Down to Rio — thereby putting everyone else in this cast one degree of separation from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers!) and his wife Peggy (Bianca de Castejón), playboy and fantasist Walter Decker (Carlos Diaz de Mendoza) and his estranged wife, actress Sybil Conway (Lia Torá) — she wasn’t part of the tour group of trece but she was filming in San Remo and he was planning to join her when the tour reached there — as well as elderly attorney Paul Nielson (Antonio Vidal) — who in one sequence has a heart attack and his attendant saves his life using an amyl nitrite “popper” — and various assorted hangers-on.
For the first three-fifths of the film Chan doesn’t appear at all — the lead detective is Inspector Duff (Rafael Calvo) of Scotland Yard, who gets involved in the first place because the initial murder (there are others, and while the first victim is strangled with a luggage strap the rest are shot by an unseen gunman who has an amazing ability to pick off people while firing through open windows) took place in his jurisdiction and who follows the tour group around the world (established through some generic sets on the Fox backlot and ghastly silent-era stock footage of the Pyramids and Sphinx to let us know they’re supposed to be in Egypt) until he himself is picked off through the open window of Charlie Chan’s office in Honolulu; he eventually recovers, but meanwhile Charlie Chan “carries on” with the case and ultimately uncovers the real murderer in San Francisco along with the motive — something about smuggling diamonds out of South Africa (we don’t leave the film with too clear an idea of what the crime was all about or why the killer, the usual peripherally involved character, picked these particular people to eliminate: maybe all was clearer in Biggers’ novel).
On one level, Eran Trece is a surprisingly good movie: director Howard uses a surprisingly mobile camera and there are even some bits of background underscoring, unusual in a 1931 talkie, that make much of the film (especially the middle reels) look more like 1935 than 1931. But it’s still workmanlike rather than inspired, and given the superb atmospherics director MacFadden achieved in the second Fox Chan film, The Black Camel, I can’t help but think that the English version was probably better (unlike the Spanish Dracula, which despite the absence of Bela Lugosi and the mere competence of the actor who replaced him actually comes off, on balance, as a better film) — and by the way, why wasn’t The Black Camel included in the first Chan boxed set? Because it doesn’t have a title that begins with Charlie Chan in … ? Because of the myth that it’s unshowable today because one reel has poor sound quality (the bootleg tape I got from Canada contained the entire 72-minute film and the sound quality, though nothing to write home about, was consistent throughout and good enough that one could understand the dialogue and follow the plot)?
It’s a pity, and one can only hope 20th Century-Fox Home Video includes it in the next Chan boxed set (and they’re calling this one Volume 1 so there’s a strong possibility that there will be a Volume 2) [actually they included it in Volume 3 — M.G.C., 6/4/08] because, along with Charlie Chan at the Opera, it’s the best film in the series, with MacFadden’s proto-noir compositions and superb use of “source” Hawai’ian music instead of orchestral backing (and a great performance by horror icon Bela Lugosi as a fake swami, though it takes real suspension of disbelief to accept Lugosi’s Magyar tones as coming from someone who’s supposed to be British).
Like a lot of other later Chans, Eran Trece is sluggish (as I’ve pointed out often in these pages, it’s quite surprising that the early 1930’s produced so many great gangster films but, with virtually only two exceptions — the 1931 Maltese Falcon and 1934 Thin Man, both based on Dashiell Hammett novels — 1930’s filmmakers turned flat, leaden and dull when they tried to dramatize other sorts of crime), and the actor playing Chan, Manuel Arbó, is clearly modeling his performance on Oland’s long before Oland’s became iconic; also the famous Chan aphorisms literally lose a lot in translation (reading them in subtitles, they just sound stupid) — and Charles informed me that in Mexico people tell “Chinese jokes” the way Americans told “Polish jokes” and that Arbó was doing a lot of “l” and “r” switches that made Chan more of a buffoon than the serious character Biggers intended and Oland (and Sidney Toler after him) played. Eran Trece is a good movie, and I’m glad it survived and is back in circulation, but it’s hardly a long-lost gem. — 10/8/06
•••••
The movie I wanted to run when we got home was the 1931 film The Black Camel, the main reason I had bought the Charlie Chan, volume 3 DVD boxed set from 20th Century-Fox. I’d seen it before in a mediocre-quality bootleg tape from Vortex Video in Canada and it was nice to see it in an “official” DVD transfer that was quite beautiful, doing full justice to director Hamilton MacFadden’s atmospherics and the chiaroscuro effects cinematographers Joseph August and Daniel Clark (more prestigious names than usually got to do Chan films) got for him. The film is a quite close adaptation of the fourth Chan novel by Earl Derr Biggers — though it opens when movie star Shelah Fane (Dorothy Revier) and her film company reach Honolulu, Hawai’i and omits the long prologue Biggers wrote detailing the action on ship on their way there, during which Fane started a shipboard romance with millionaire Alan Jaynes (William Post, Jr.). He wants to marry her, but she’s concerned that he may learn her role in the death, three years earlier, of fellow movie actor Denny Mayo.
Shelah sends for Tarneverro (Bela Lugosi), her favorite fortune-teller, and he arrives in Honolulu and not only tells her she can’t marry Alan but induces her to confess to the murder of Mayo. Shortly thereafter, Shelah is found stabbed to death on the floor of the pavilion of the Royal Hawai’ian Hotel — and Chan, who has already been investigating Tarneverro while posing as a humble Chinese merchant, is on the case. There’s the usual pool of suspects, including Shelah’s personal assistant, Julie O’Neil (Sally Eilers, second-billed) — who’s dating her own rich young man, Jimmy Bradshaw (Robert Young, looking like he just got out of high school) — Robert Fyfe (Victor Varconi), actor and Shelah’s former husband; Smith (Murray Kinnell), an artist-turned-beachcomber; his native girlfriend Luana (Rita Rozelle); Thomas and Anna MacMaster (J. M. Kerrigan and Mary Gordon), foster parents of the late Denny Mayo and his brother Arthur; Shelah’s maid Anna (Violet Dunn); Jessop (Dwight Frye, reunited with Lugosi from the Dracula cast), butler at the hotel; and Van Horn (whose connection to the others is unclear but who looks sinister enough if only because C. Henry Gordon is playing him).
About the only false note in the story is the appearance of a comic sidekick for Chan, Kashimo (Otto Yamaoka), who like the Number One and Two Sons in the later Chan films is always causing trouble — at one point he bursts into the room where Chan is holding the suspects and slams a door, causing the bits and pieces of Denny Mayo’s torn photo Chan is trying to reassemble to fly about the room — but the rest of the film is so good this pointless character can’t hurt it much.
I was impressed this time around with most of the same things I’d liked about the movie the first time: MacFadden’s sure command of atmosphere, the benefit of footage actually shot in Hawai’i (something Fox hyped a good deal back in the day, though it’s clear the only Hawai’ian footage was shot by a second unit and used as process-screen backgrounds or cut in for “authenticity”), Ben Carré’s spectacular sets (another far more prestigious name than usually got associated with the Chan films); Warner Oland’s typically imperturbable performance as the detective (it was only his second performance as Chan — and the only one of the first five Oland Chans that survives — and he isn’t bored with the role, as he became later in the series); a considerably more emotionally intense and rangy performance from Lugosi than he usually gave in his horror films; the marvelous use of Hawai’ian source music as a substitute for orchestral underscoring (the effect of “native” music was also used in Behind That Curtain, but far less effectively) — especially in a cruelly ironic scene in which a high-school glee club has assembled outside the hotel pavilion to serenade Shelah while she is dead inside — and the sheer mobility of the film.
This was made just two years after Behind That Curtain, but the technology of the talkies had improved so dramatically it seems more like 10 years later; MacFadden and the cinematographers take what could have been an extraordinarily dull film and liven it up with swooping camera movements, dramatic lighting and almost claustrophobic interiors, especially in the scene in which Tarneverro drives Shelah to confess to having killed Denny Mayo shortly before she is killed herself, and the later sequences in which Chan holds the various suspects in a hotel ballroom and forces them to remain while he investigates the case.
The Black Camel is also superbly plotted; the backstory murder of Denny Mayo hangs over everything (someone is so determined to obliterate his memory that when Chan goes to the Honolulu library to look through back issues of the Los Angeles Times to see his photos, all of them have been cut out of the library copies — though one would think that since he was supposed to have been a movie star in his own right somebody would have remembered what he looked like) and the denouement, though far-fetched, at least hinges on a motive that makes sense instead of the arbitrary climaxes of some of the later Chan films (particularly the ones that weren’t based on actual Biggers stories): Tarneverro turns out to be Arthur Mayo, Denny’s brother (their strong physical resemblance was the reason for their attempt to destroy all Denny’s photos); and maid Anna turns out to be Denny Mayo’s widow.
The two were convinced that Shelah had killed Denny from the time it happened (which she had; Shelah was desperately in love with Denny but he refused to marry her because he was already married to Anna, so she killed him), and hatched a long-term revenge plan; Tarneverro would establish a reputation as a psychic and use background information supplied by Anna to make Shelah think he had genuine mystic powers; he would worm his way into her confidence and make her confess to the murder; and then they would turn her in to the police — only just after her session with Tarneverro, Shelah tore up the autographed photo Denny had given her shortly before she killed him, and Anna was so upset she lost control and stabbed Shelah on the spot. Smith, the homeless artist, attempted to blackmail one of the others and then was killed by Jessop, who was in unrequited love with Anna and wanted to shield her from being exposed by the critical piece of evidence (a diamond pin of Shelah’s which Anna had stomped on the night of the murder, not realizing that a piece of it had lodged in the high heel of her own shoe) Smith had discovered.
The Black Camel is so good one wishes MacFadden’s other Chan films, Charlie Chan Carries On (an adaptation of Biggers’ fifth and next-to-last Chan novel from 1930 and the first time Oland played Chan) and Charlie Chan’s Greatest Case, survived (he also began the direction of Charlie Chan in Paris in 1935 but was mysteriously fired after just one week of shooting and replaced by the dull hack Lewis Seiler — “a real pity,” I wrote after Charles and I saw that film, “since MacFadden’s sense of atmosphere could have benefited this film, and I suspect the almost Gothic scenes in and around the sewers of Paris (‘Sing, my angel of music!’ Charles couldn’t help but joke, an allusion that wasn’t lost on me either) and some nearby exteriors were MacFadden’s work.”
The collapse of MacFadden’s directorial career after 1937 (he had only two other directorial credits, Inside the Law from 1942 and Youth for the Kingdom, which he also wrote, in 1945) is a real mystery — after that he was mostly reduced to being an actor (he’s in The Black Camel as, appropriately enough, the director of the film Shelah Fane is shooting; and when Fox changed the setting and remade The Black Camel as Charlie Chan in Rio with Sidney Toler in 1941 MacFadden was in the film in the Robert Young role) and did no work in films after 1945 (though he lived until 1977). One wishes MacFadden could have made a directorial comeback in the mid-1940’s since on the strength of his work here he would seem ideally suited for the film noir genre; as it is, his most famous directorial credit was probably Stand Up and Cheer, the 1934 musical starring Behind That Curtain star Warner Baxter and introducing the little girl who would become the biggest movie star of the 1930’s, Shirley Temple. — 9/3/07
•••••
Afterwards I reached into the Charlie Chan boxed set and dug out the earliest of the four films represented (not counting Eran Trece, which was formally only a supplement to the Charlie Chan in Shanghai disc): Charlie Chan in London. I think Charles and I had actually screened this one before after we watched Gosford Park, where it was mentioned, but neither of us had any recollection of it. It’s one of those frustrating movies that takes a potentially great plot premise and accomplishes all too little with it.
Having exhausted all other possibilities, including a judicial appeal and a petition to the Home Secretary, Pamela Gray (Drue Leyton) corners Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) in London and pleads with him to save the life of her brother, murder convict Hugh Gray (Douglas Walton), just three days before he is to be hanged. That gives Chan three days to find the real murderer, since he and we both believe he’s innocent even though Pamela’s boyfriend, attorney Neil Howard (Ray Milland — on the trailer he’s billed as “Ray” but on the actual film’s credits he’s still using the longer form of his first name, “Raymond”), blurts out to Pamela that he’s now convinced her brother was guilty even though he represented Hugh at trial (no wonder he lost!).
The original murder victim was a man named Hamilton, a captain in the Royal Air Force, who was killed in the stable of the country home of Geoffrey Richmond (Alan Mowbray) in the decidedly fictional English county of “Retfordshire.” The usual motley crew of suspects is also staying there, and Chan — after a charming sequence in which he’s shown climbing through Pamela’s window to get in to see her after an overprotective butler has denied him admittance (and a maid goes into racist overdrive and thinks he’s a diabolical Chinaman who’s going to hack them all to bits in their beds!) — reunites everyone who was there that weekend when Hamilton was killed.
Two other people get killed in the three days available and Chan finally traces the murder to an invention Hamilton worked on for the RAF, a way of silencing military aircraft to make them undetectable by an enemy, and reveals that the killer was actually Geoffrey Richmond himself, who in a plot twist screenwriter Philip MacDonald obviously borrowed from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story “His Last Bow,” is revealed actually to be a foreign spy named Frank (that’s his last name) — his country of origin is unspecified but it’s not too difficult to tell what a 1934 audience would have guessed it to be — who was after Hamilton’s secret and was willing to murder him to get it.
Charlie Chan in London is not an especially well-made movie: director Eugene Forde’s pacing is almost soporific in its slowness, there’s no background music underscoring (a surprise since there was underscoring in Eran Trece, made three years earlier) and, as silly as the comic-relief device of having one of Chan’s sons (Keye Luke as Number One Son in the Oland Chans and Victor Sen Yung as Number Two Son in the Fox Tolers) attempt to help his father solve the case and only screw it up, at least that gimmick provided energy and action in the later films in the series; without it, this one seems dull.
What gives Charlie Chan in London its entertainment value is some of the supporting cast — Drue Leyton, whoever she may have been, is excellent, powerfully expressing her torment over the impending execution of her brother, and though I don’t think anyone watching this film would have necessarily predicted future stardom for Ray Milland he’s also quite good as the attorney/boyfriend exasperated by the conflict between his role as Hugh’s attorney and his doubts about his innocence (the scene in which he blurts out his belief that Hugh is guilty and Pamela goes ballistic on him, slapping him and then tearing off his engagement ring and hurling it at his feet, is utterly convincing and far more intense emotionally than one expects from this sort of genteel whodunit), though Douglas Walton can’t decide whether to underact or hysterically overact as the innocent victim facing a date with the hangman — and above all, Oland’s performance. Sidney Toler may have been more credible as a man of action (the point most of the Chanatics who prefer him to Oland cite) but neither he nor any of the other Chans ever matched Oland in portraying Chan’s alienness, his heritage from another culture with a very different philosophical view of time and human nature from those of the West. — 10/9/06
•••••
Charlie Chan in Paris, the next in sequence in the Fox Charlie Chan box after Charlie Chan in London, is actually one of the better entries in the series. For some reason, Hamilton MacFadden started as this film’s director but was replaced in mid-shoot (after one week of a three- to four-week schedule) by Lewis Seiler, a long-time hack mostly known for his work in Warners’ “B” unit — a real pity, since MacFadden’s sense of atmosphere could have benefited this film, and I suspect the almost Gothic scenes in and around the sewers of Paris (“Sing, my angel of music!” Charles couldn’t help but joke, an allusion that wasn’t lost on me either) and some nearby exteriors were MacFadden’s work. (Dan Clark was the cinematographer on MacFadden’s sequences, and Ernest Palmer replaced him when Seiler came in as director.)
At least Seiler’s approach gave the film speed, and the film also benefited by the use of a background score and the debut in the series of Keye Luke as Chan’s Number One Son, Lee — not only because Luke was a fast-paced, energetic performer who added excitement to the film but also because his assimilation to Western culture contrasted markedly with Charlie Chan’s resolute alienness, his heritage from a different culture with a very different philosophical sense of time (the part of the Chan character, as I pointed out in my comments on Charlie Chan in London, that Oland caught better than any actor who’s played him since) — and it helped that the script for this one (by Edward T. Lowe, later a Universal horror writer, and Stuart Anthony based on a story by Philip MacDonald) was a good deal better than most of the Chans and was genuinely mysterious.
The plot deals with a scandal involving the Lamartine Bank of Paris and a scheme to counterfeit its bonds — which must have at least one “inside” player because the bank’s actual CEO, M. Lamartine (Henry Kolker), is signing the fake bonds as well as the real ones. Chan is assigned to investigate, though he has to pretend to be in Paris merely on a vacation, and he’s supposed to contact a fellow agent, a woman named Nardi (Dorothy Appleby) whose cover identity is as an apache dancer in a local café — only Nardi is stabbed by a weird apparition in a tousled wig, thick shades and walking with a cane, who’s supposedly a shell-shocked and doubly disabled (lame and blind) World War I veteran.
The payoff is that the two conspirators in the counterfeit bond racket, “insider” Henri Latouche (Murray Kinnell) and “outsider” Max Corday (played by the fine farceur Erik Rhodes, best known for his comic-relief parts in the Astaire-Rogers films The Gay Divorcée and Top Hat, and surprisingly good as a serious suspect), took turns wearing this disguise and eliminating the people who might threaten their counterfeit bond scheme (though since Rhodes was at least a head taller than Kinnell one would think the changes in the height of the fake “veteran” would have tipped Chan and the other characters off well before the end) while providing each other with alibis for the murders. This is certainly one Chan film for which William Everson’s rather snotty remark about the series as a whole (especially in Oland’s years) — “There was never much mystery about any of the ‘hidden killers’ in the Chan movies, nor much variety in their unmasking” — definitely does not apply! — 10/11/06
•••••
The film was Charlie Chan in Egypt, hailed as the best of the Warner Oland Chans by William K. Everson — he called it “one notable exception to the rather disappointing overall quality of the series” and hailed it for having genuinely suspenseful and even horrific moments, including “some genuinely nightmarish sequences which are still chilling today” — and while I think he overrated it a bit and that some of the other films in the series (notably the rarely seen The Black Camel and the far better known Charlie Chan at the Opera) are even better, it’s still a good entry even though it’s somewhat derivative not only of previous films in the Chan series (Charlie Chan in London in particular) but of other things Hollywood was putting out at the time, especially The Mummy (almost inevitably for a film set in Egypt and dealing with archaeology in the tombs of the Pharoahs and their closest advisors).
Charlie Chan in Egypt is also one of those movies that’s especially intriguing from a degrees-of-separation perspective, since the cast includes not only Warner Oland but also Rita Hayworth (using her original name, Rita Cansino, and playing a rather anonymous Egyptian maidservant — she’s O.K. but no one seeing this film would have been likely to predict that in less than a decade this woman would be a superstar) and Stepin Fetchit, the most unwatchable Black comedian of the 1930’s. At least Mantan Moreland and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson were able to play streetwise as well as stupid, and Willie Best — as put-upon as he was by the same shuffling dumb-Black stereotype — was able to put a little genuine wit in the characterization; Fetchit (it’s noteworthy that, unlike Best, who fought back against producers who wanted to bill him under the equally demeaning sobriquet “Sleep ’n’ Eat,” Fetchit proudly accepted such a ridiculous name) has become emblematic of the whole stereotype and his shaved head, whiny voice and shaky acting skills even within the bizarre limits of his characterization make him awfully hard to take today (though he’s at least dressed appealingly, in a white linen shirt and white shorts, and one can imagine a bulked-up version of his basic physical type on a “Naked Black Men” calendar today).
Charlie Chan in Egypt has lost its original titles and the ones it has now, probably shot for a TV release in the 1950’s, Latino-ize the first name of its director, Louis King, as “Luis” (!). King and cinematographer Daniel Clark manage to evoke the mood of The Mummy in some quite good scenes set in and around ancient Egyptian tombs, including an arresting opening shot in which one member of a party of archaeologists led by Professor Arnold (George Irving) is overcome by fumes as they open the tomb of the high priest Ameti, a major advisor to the Pharoahs of the 20th (or was it the 21st?) dynasty. Then the film cuts to the unlikely sight of Warner Oland as Charlie Chan flying into Egypt in a two-seater plane (obviously used as an excuse to use some aerial stock footage of the Pyramids and Sphinx) and the plot kicks off with Arnold’s daughter Carol (Pat Paterson) and her fiancé, Tom Evans (Thomas Beck), worried that they haven’t heard from Arnold père in over a month, and the only clue they have as to his whereabouts is a letter he allegedly sent them from his next dig site.
From that point on Charlie Chan in Egypt follows the blueprint of Charlie Chan in London pretty closely (the scenarists this time were Robert Ellis and Helen Logan) with a bit of admixture of King Solomon’s Mines (the daughter worried about her dad’s disappearance in the middle of an exotic African country). Most of the film takes place in and around the lavish home of Arnold’s archaeological partner, Professor Thornton (Frank Conroy) — a quite impressive set that may have been recycled from a previous Fox epic set in ancient Egypt (and the tomb sets also looked way too lavish to have been constructed especially for this film) — and the writers introduce a motive for the murder (a French archaeological society that originally underwrote the Arnold-Thornton expedition and later withdrew their financial support nonetheless claims that all the finds not retained by the Egyptian government should go to their own museum, and has assigned Chan to investigate once relics from Ameti’s tomb start turning up in other musea and private collections).
The film also includes a wide gallery of other potential suspects, including Carol Arnold’s brother Barry (James Eagles), who seems to do nothing but get himself photographed Sternberg-style behind the gratings and lattices in the house and play morbid Egyptian melodies on the violin; Dr. Anton Racine (Jameson Thomas), an Egyptian physician who’s been lacing Carol’s cigarettes with a drug called mapouchari, supposedly discovered by the ancient Egyptians and in use since; Racine’s delivery person, Edfa Ahmad (the cadaverous-looking Nigel de Brulier), who when he isn’t running prescriptions for the doc is denouncing Western interlopers digging up the tombs and stealing the national treasures that should belong to Egypt (he sounds awfully modern to me!); and Thornton himself, who to no particular surprise turns out to be the murderer, having discovered a cache of treasure inside Ameti’s tomb and determined to knock off Arnold so he can keep it for himself. There’s also an intriguing scene in which Barry dies suddenly in the middle of his violin solo and Chan finds a hole drilled into the soundboard of his instrument, through which the murderer introduced a vial of poison gas in a thin glass ampule that shattered and delivered the gas full-force into Barry’s nose once he played a note of the right frequency to break it.
The tomb scenes are still genuinely suspenseful and frightening, though Fetchit’s “comedy” — he’s supposedly in Egypt seeking his ancestors (almost 40 years before Alex Haley!), though why he thought his ancestors would have come from an Arab country remains a mystery in the heads of Robert Ellis and Helen Logan — and the leads (personable enough but no match for Ray Milland and Drue Leyton in the almost identical roles in Charlie Chan in London) take this one down a couple of notches despite Clark’s marvelously atmospheric cinematography and the visual magnificence of the sets — and the intriguing battle of wits between Chan and the local Egyptian detective, Fouad Souetda (Paul Porcasi, who usually portrayed the sympathetic owner of the Italian restaurant at which the romantic leads were regulars), who unlike most of the local cops in the Chan adventures not only doesn’t want him involved in helping solve the case but can’t wait to get rid of him. When Chan told him that they had a lot in common, I couldn’t help but joke, “That’s right! We’re both portly First World actors playing Third World policemen!” — 10/15/06
•••••
The film I picked was Charlie Chan in Shanghai, fourth and last of the Warner Oland Chan movies included on the recent 20th Century-Fox DVD box. Dully directed by James Tinling from an original script by Edward T. Lowe (on his way up from Monogram to Universal) and Gerard Fairlie, Charlie Chan in Shanghai took a potentially fascinating pair of premises — the most famous fictional Chinese of the time visiting his homeland in the real China (though, unsurprisingly, the real China is represented here only by some pretty grainy stock footage and process work) and trying to break a worldwide opium smuggling ring — and did all too little with them.
The Chan movies were already hardening into formula (the fact that of the first five Oland Chans all we have are number two, The Black Camel, and the Spanish-language version of number one, Eran Trece a.k.a. Charlie Chan Carries On, makes it virtually impossible to judge the series from its beginnings, though if The Black Camel is indicative of the quality of the first five generally, all of which were based on Earl Derr Biggers’ Chan novels instead of other writers riffing on Biggers’ character, the remaining films are sorely missed): the young couple, with the male (secretary to the heroine’s father, who’s the murder victim in the first reel) being the unjustly accused suspect; the various suspects, most of them rather venerable; and the sinister figure who at first seems an agent of good but ultimately ends up revealed as the mastermind behind the whole plot.
The unjustly accused young man is played by Charlie Locher, who later (like Ray Milland from Charlie Chan in London and Rita Cansino, later Rita Hayworth, from Charlie Chan in Egypt) became a major star, in his case after a name change to Jon Hall and a showcase role in Sam Goldwyn’s 1937 special-effects extravaganza The Hurricane, but all too often he looks like he just stumbled in from the Harbor Inn in his other pre-Hall role in the serial The Clutching Hand. The Lowe-Fairlie script makes too little of the exoticism of the location (a far cry from the work of Robert Ellis and Helen Logan on Charlie Chan in Egypt, which for all its deficiencies at least tapped into the strangeness — to a Western audience — of both ancient and then-modern Egypt) and offers too few chances for Oland to speak Chinese and interact with Chinese characters (other than Keye Luke, providing reliable comic relief as his Number One Son), at least partly because Shanghai in the 1930’s apparently still was largely governed extraterritorially: much of the movie takes place in the British enclave and the police officials Chan works with in solving the case are British, not Chinese.
What makes this film less interesting than it could have been is partly the elaborateness of the gimmicks (the initial victim is killed when he opens a box in which a gun has been placed, set so that the act of opening the box fires the trigger — but the fatal heart wound suffered by the victim depended on his being hunched over the box when he opened it, and if he’d opened it any other way the shot would either just have wounded him or missed him completely) but mainly the dullness of Tinling’s direction; he gets some nice atmospheric shots of the villain’s secret hideout but he’s utterly unable to bring any excitement or pace to the film.
It’s reliable series entertainment, and some of the other Chans around this time are even duller (notably Charlie Chan’s Secret) — and at least it has the quirky appeal of both Warner Oland (with his own voice, presumably — in his role as Al Jolson’s father in The Jazz Singer Oland has the odd distinction of having been the first actor in history whose singing voice was doubled) and Keye Luke singing (for a while it seemed to be turning into Charlie Chan: The Musical), but a lot more could have been done with this concept and even with this script. Incidentally, there’s a quirky mistake in the film: on board the ship to Shanghai Chan receives a note telling him not to get off the ship, or else — but when we see the note again it’s in a different handwriting. — 10/23/06
•••••
I chose the DVD of Charlie Chan’s Secret, a 1936 series entry which the last time I was involved with the Chan movies en masse — when American Movie Classics showed most of the Fox Chans in the early 1990’s and I taped them — had struck me as one of the duller films in the cycle. It still does, despite the promise of its haunted-house setting. It begins in the waters off Chan’s home town of Honolulu, with a team of divers (represented mostly by stock footage) searching a wrecked boat for the remains of Alan Colby, who seven years previously had left his comfortable life as the heir to a fortune in San Francisco to join the French Foreign Legion, had been held prisoner by the Riffs (in other words, he was a member of an occupation coalition in the Middle East who had been apprehended by the resistance!) and had just escaped and was making his way home to reclaim his family’s fortune from his aunt, Henrietta Lowell (Henrietta Crossman, the star of John Ford’s marvelous 1933 film Pilgrimage), and her family: her daughter Alice Lowell (Rosina Lawrence), Alice’s fiancé Dick Williams (Charles Quigley), her accountant Fred Gage (Edward Trevor), his wife Janice (Astrid Allwyn), Henrietta’s long-suffering butler Baxter (Herbert Mundin) and a husband-and-wife team of mediums (media?), Professor Bowan (Arthur Edmund Carewe, who played the undercover cop, “The Persian,” in the silent Phantom of the Opera) and Carlotta (Gloria Roy).
The conceit of this film’s writing committee — Robert Ellis and Helen Logan are credited with the story and co-credited with Joseph Hoffman on the script — is that she’s a genuine medium unknowingly being exploited by her husband, who’s a fake. Another conceit is that the Lowell house is clean, modern and well-maintained, while the Colby house is your standard-issue Universal-style haunted house — decayed, crumbling, full of sinister shadows and secret passages. A Universal director like James Whale could have made something of this setting; alas, the director of Charlie Chan’s Secret, Gordon Wiles, gets one actually effective suspense scene (when Alan Colby returns to the family manse only to be killed when a knife is thrown at him) but otherwise just plods through the filming, wasting the marvelous haunted-house atmospherics of cinematographer Rudolph Maté (a surprisingly prestigious name to see on the credits of a Chan film!). Both Charles and I were having trouble staying awake for this one, no matter how stunning some of Maté’s shots were, and by the time this film lurched to its end and Fred Gage turned out to be the murderer (he’d been cooking the books of the Colby estate and was worried Alan would catch him if he inherited), neither of us really cared. — 8/30/07
•••••
The film I picked was Charlie Chan at the Circus, the first in sequence of the four Chans with Warner Oland in the volume 2 boxed set I just ordered. (I also got volume 4, containing the first four Chan films with Sidney Toler, and given their format of including four films in each box I’m not sure how they’ll manage the rest of the Tolers, since there are only seven of them remaining!) It turned out to be a pretty good movie, a comfortable and well-done whodunit even though “who” dun it wasn’t especially mysterious (indeed, my one doubt over whether the snake-charmer character played by J. Carrol Naish would turn out to be the murderer was a suspicion that writers Robert Ellis and Helen Logan wouldn’t make it that obvious — but they did!), and directed by Harry Lachman, who in a sense was revisiting the territory he’d explored the year before in a more prestigious Fox release, Dante’s Inferno, since the film begins in Dante’s Inferno territory — with a barker hawking the carnival side show at the circus.
Chan arrives with his wife and 12 children (one of the few times we got to see Chan’s entire famously huge family on screen all at once — the only other time I can recall is in The Black Camel, which used the Chan family the way Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers had: as an audience while Chan explained his progress with the case and gave us the exposition needed to keep us abreast of the plot) to a circus merged by the previous owners Joe Kinney (Paul Stanton) and John Gaines (Francis Ford, John Ford’s older brother making one of his rare appearance as an actor in a film not directed by his more famous sibling!). The personnel of the circus come mostly from Gaines’ old show, and recall that they were treated respectfully and paid on time until Kinney bought into the enterprise two years previously, and Kinney holds some of Gaines’ notes and is threatening to foreclose on Gaines’ half of the circus and take the show over completely after the current season.
In an interesting Ellis-Logan variation on the locked-room mystery, Kinney (who had actually been the partner to consult Chan based on some threatening letters he had received — though after Kinney’s death the letters are not found and this part of the plot just gets dropped) is killed inside the locked railroad car that contains the circus’s business office, and it turns out the killer is Caesar, an ape who was falling so far out of control that the circus’s animal trainer, Hal Blake (John McGuire), had recommended that he not be allowed to perform in the big top — which Kinney, of course, ignored.
There are an awful lot of plots and counter-plots going on, including Kinney’s attempt to marry aerialist Marie Norman (Maxine Reiner) despite the fact that he’s already married to the circus’s wardrobe woman, Nellie Farrell (Drue Leyton, playing a disappointingly small role after the marvelous impression she made as the ingénue in Charlie Chan in London), and the motive turns out to be that on May 30, 1935 Kinney witnessed a murder in El Paso committed by Holt (J. Carrol Naish), which was also the date Kinney married Nellie in Ciudad Juárez — and since both claims can’t be true, Chan deduces that Kinney really didn’t marry Nellie and that Holt shot through the trapeze bar from which Marie was performing her act, causing her to fall and get seriously injured (since she was performing without a net), in order to shut her up.
Chan announces that Marie needs an immediate operation and they can’t wait for her to be moved to a hospital, so they have to perform it then and there — and lo and behold, Caesar the ape crashes the impromptu operating room and tries to kill Marie, only the “patient” is a dummy and the whole thing a sham designed by Chan to flush out the killer — who turns out to be, not Caesar the ape, but Holt dressed in an ape costume (an interesting authorial reflection on the fact that the “ape” is pretty obviously a man in an ape suit even in the scenes in which we’re supposed to believe it’s a real ape! Incidentally, did J. Carrol Naish play the “real” ape as well? No other actor is listed for the ape role) — while the real Marie is alive, well and undergoing the operation she needs in a real hospital.
Charlie Chan at the Circus also has some other quite delicious divertissements, including a quite good tango done by real-life little-person couple George and Olive Brasno (who actually get billing on the main title card along with Oland and Keye Luke; Olive Brasno looked enough like Shirley Temple I wondered if she’d been one of the little people who stood in for Temple and thereby sparked the urban legend, which persisted for years, that Temple had actually been an adult little person posing as a child) in the roles of “Col. Tim” and “Lady Tiny,” a nice scene in which Lee Chan (Keye Luke) traces a couple of the baddies by disguising himself in drag and posing as the mother of an “infant” played by Col. Tim (whose cigar smoking gives them away — had Ellis and/or Logan seen the Laurel and Hardy film Sailor, Beware!, which also had a little person, Harry Earles, disguised as a baby and blowing it by smoking a cigar?), and a young Chinese contortionist, Su Toy (Shia Jung), to provide a love (or at least lust) interest for Luke (though we never actually see her contort herself, meaning she was an actress and not an actual circus performer, unlike some of the other cast members recruited from the A. G. Barnes Circus, whose tents, cars and equipment were used while the circus was laying off for the winter), who got to perform a stronger action role than usual in the series.
Charlie Chan at the Circus is also noteworthy for the better-than-usual direction by Lachman, who got some nice atmospheric effects into it (the opening scene shows the shadows of three of the sideshow performer while in the front the barker is hawking their acts) and moving-camera shots (Daniel Clark was the cinematographer), though he couldn’t do much about the script or the performance by Warner Oland, who by this point in the series (it was the11th of his 16 appearances as Chan) had pretty much hardened into clichéd schtick. — 2/28/08
•••••
When we got home Monday night I ran Charles the next Charlie Chan movie from volume 2 of the Fox boxed-set series with Warner Oland: Charlie Chan at the Race Track. Noting that the next one in the box was Charlie Chan at the Opera, Charles noted the coincidence that Chan went to the same two destinations that the Marx Brothers had in their adjoining movies from the same period — though the Marxes went to the opera before they went to the race track.
It was also the first Chan film directed by H. Bruce Humberstone (the “H.” — as Carol Easton found out when she interviewed him for her biography of Sam Goldwyn, for whom he directed Wonder Man — stood for “Harry”) and, though it didn’t have any major guest stars (no established horror icons like Bela Lugosi in The Black Camel or Boris Karloff in Charlie Chan at the Opera and no stars-to-be like Ray Milland in Charlie Chan in London or Rita Hayworth in Charlie Chan in Egypt) it turned out to be one of the better entries in the series, less of a whodunit than usual (there is a typical “puzzle” but for much of the action our attention is kept off the whodunit aspect and on the known baddies, a gang of gamblers stretching nationwide who are involved in a plot to fix a big horse race at “Santa Juanita” — just take the first two letters off the last name and you have the real racetrack where the racing scenes were shot!) and a flatly directed but well-paced, exciting thriller in which Chan is surrounded by a swirl of activity.
The story (by Lou Breslow and Saul Elkins, adapted into a script by Robert Ellis, Helen Logan and Edward T. Lowe) begins in Australia, where horse breeder Major Gordon Kent (George Irving) has just sold his star horse, Avalanche, to his son-in-law, George Chester (Alan Dinehart). Avalanche is scheduled for a big race in Australia and is favored to win, but loses when his jockey, “Tip” Collins (Frankie Darro, who seemed to be playing nothing but crooked jockeys during this period: he was one in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races and in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry), deliberately fouls another horse because the gambling syndicate has paid him $5,000 to do so. He’s caught, ruled out of racing for two years, and stiffed by the gamblers; understandably miffed at having lost his livelihood for nothing, he threatens to go to the authorities and they quietly kill him (indeed, his fate is disposed of in a few lines of dialogue and he never gets within hailing distance of Charlie Chan or anybody else who might actually have been interested in his story).
Meanwhile, Major Kent, George Chester, his wife (Kent’s daughter) Catherine (Gloria Roy) and assorted hangers-on Warren and Alice Fenton (Jonathan Hale and Helen Wood), Bruce Rogers (Thomas Beck), Bagley (Gavin Muir), and Denny Burton (G. P. Huntley, Jr., who had played in Fred Astaire’s stage show Gay Divorce in the part Edward Everett Horton played in the movie) take an ocean liner that stops in Honolulu on its way to Los Angeles — where Charlie Chan receives a ship-to-shore telegram from Kent that he fears for his life and hopes Chan will investigate. By the time the ship docks in Honolulu, Kent is already dead, apparently kicked by Avalanche in the horse’s stall — but Chan goes on board and dedices Kent was murdered by a human being who clubbed him with a winch that would heave a horseshoe-shaped imprint on his body.
From then on the film features a lot of skullduggery on board the ship, including a plot to swap Avalanche for another horse, Gallant Lad (the idea is for the gamblers to bet on Gallant Lad and make a killing when the faster Avalanche, running under Gallant Lad’s name, wins the big handicap at Santa ‘Ju’anita) which Chan sees through when the pet monkey belonging to the Black stable boy, “Streamline” Jones (John Henry Allen, who was obviously being groomed by Fox to take over the Stepin Fetchit roles in case the original started demanding too much money), reacts violently to the supposed Gallant Lad. (It’s previously been established that the monkey was friends with Gallant Lad and it was Avalanche the primate hated.)
There’s also a series of threatening notes, all typed with the same typewriter (its “e” is filled in and its “r” hits above the baseline) and dropped seemingly at random in the laps of all the principals — later it’s revealed that Chan wrote all the notes but the first one, in an effort to find out who wrote the original by how they reacted when they got them — and a final fillip involving the camera mechanisms at the track that give the results in so-called “photo-finish” races, Director Humberstone was apparently given to explanations of the high-tech of his day — there’s a brief (half-hour) documentary on him as the “special feature” on the Charlie Chan at the Opera disc and his daughter explains that he was a gadget freak and loved to stop his films in their tracks to insert an account of the workings of some new high-tech gizmo — though in this movie the gimmick also relates to the plot: one of the guys operating the camera is in the pay of the gamblers and he’s substituted a drugged dart in the camera at the three-quarter mark so if Avalanche, despite the crooks’ best efforts, is leading then the baddies can shoot him and render him unconscious before the finish line.
There’s also a kidnapping in which the gamblers (led by director Humberstone in a cameo) hold Chan in a hotel room, but he escapes in time to get to the track for the big race and, using his son Lee (Keye Luke, who has more to do than usual in this movie — including carrying on long conversations with Chan in Chinese so the others around them can’t understand) as a distraction (he has Lee fill a laundry truck with fireworks and sets them off so he can sneak into the paddock and switch Avalanche and Gallant Lad back to their real identities), Chan witnesses the race. Jockey Eddie Brill (Frank Coghlan, Jr.), sidelined from racing by a previous injury, emerges to ride Avalanche after all the other jockeys at the track are scared away by the death threats, Avalanche gets stuck with the dart but still wins, and in the end Chan establishes that Major Kent was killed by his son-in-law George Chester, who was in cahoots with the gamblers (he went along with switching the horses because then he could bet on his own horse under the underdog’s identity and get a bigger payoff) and had to kill Kent because he would have instantly recognized which horse was which.
Charlie Chan at the Race Track is actually one of the better series entries; though not a particularly atmospheric director (Humberstone’s daughter said he particularly loved film noir and I Wake Up Screaming was his favorite of his films, but the movie is plodding and not alive to the potential of the marvelous story and cast), at least knew how to keep a story moving, and Charlie Chan at the Race Track, though it lacks the wonderful atmospherics of The Black Camel, also isn’t as dull as some of the other entries in the series (notably Charlie Chan’s Secret) and, as Charles pointed out, offered a large enough pool of suspects so the denouement was genuinely mysterious — though I had my suspicions about the husband through much of it and should have been able to nail it down, if only because Alan Dinehart’s portrayal was at his most unctuous! — 3/5/08
•••••
Last night Charles and I followed up Charlie Chan at the Race Track with Charlie Chan at the Opera, which was long my favorite film in the series partly because Boris Karloff was in it and partly because of its operatic setting. It was the only one I actually purchased on VHS (as opposed to recording off cable), in an edition by a short-lived Fox subsidiary called Key Video that was actually better packaged than the current DVD, with a clever fold-out cover listing the whodunit elements of the movie — “The Case,” “The Suspects,” “The Motives,” “The Clues” and “The Questions” — to challenge the viewer to solve the mystery ahead of the characters. (When I searched for it on imdb.com, the image illustrating their page on it was from the Key Video VHS edition, not the current DVD.)
Scripted by Charles Belden and Scott Darling from a story by Bess Meredyth (a somewhat more prestigious writer than usually represented in the Chan series), Charlie Chan at the Opera begins by a direct reference to Charlie Chan at the Race Track — the head of the Los Angeles Police Department personally thanks Chan for busting the gambling syndicate behind the killings there — though the actual opening scene takes place in the sort of weather Karloff’s movies usually began in, the proverbial dark and stormy night, at a sanitarium in which a patient who was suffering from amnesia and has never revealed (or himself discovered) his own identity in the seven years he was there is suddenly jogged back into consciousness of who he is by the sight of a picture of prima donna Lilli Rochelle (Margaret Irving) in a newspaper announcing her coming Los Angeles appearances with the touring San Carlo Opera Company. (At the time touring opera companies actually existed in the U.S. and made enough money at least to stay in business and pay their personnel.)
Before that we see the (presumed) madman — Boris Karloff, of course — sitting at a piano in the asylum’s rec room and singing in a baritone voice (Karloff’s own, according to his biographers) that, though it wouldn’t have kept Nelson Eddy awake at nights worrying about the competition, was not only competent but surprisingly strong. The police, headed by Sergeant Kelly (William Demarest, thinner and lankier than we remember him from his later films or My Three Sons but still a quite effective comic foil for Chan) and Inspector Regan (Guy Usher), can’t figure out what story in the paper set off the escapee, but Chan figures it out and hangs out at the San Carlo Opera Company, which is performing a piece called Carnival (written especially for the film by Oscar Levant, with a libretto by William Kernell — the text was written in English but is sung in the film in Italian, and Levant said he never found out who did the translation) when its personnel aren’t engaging in enough off-screen intrigues that their private lives could be turned into an effective opera themselves. Rochelle is having an affair with baritone Enrico Borelli (Gregory Gaye), whose wife Anita (Nedda Harrigan, later Mrs. Joshua Logan) is understandably miffed — as is Lilli’s husband, Whitely (Frank Conroy).
Seven years previously, Rochelle had been married to another company baritone, Gravelle; she and Enrico Borelli had plotted to kill him by locking him inside a burning building — only he was rescued in time, alive and well physically but with no memory of who he was. Naturally, this is Karloff’s character. During the night’s performance of Carnival, Gravelle dresses up in the costume of his old role — as the Devil! — intending to put Barelli out of commission, take over the role himself and thereby shock Lilli into confessing her role in his attempted murder. Both Lilli and Barelli are murdered during the course of the first act, and not surprisingly the rest of the cast wants to call it a night and go home, but the police announce that they’re not letting anyone leave the theatre and the performers might as well go on to finish the opera since both they and the audience (who, peculiarly, are never seen or heard from during the film!) are literally captive.
There’s a scene featuring one of the technological gizmos director H. Bruce Humberstone was so fond of — this time a detailed explanation of how a wire photo is transmitted and developed — as Chan sends to a Chicago newspaper for a photo of Gravelle and thereby establishes the identity of the Karloff character. (Interestingly, 12 years later another 20th Century-Fox mystery film, Call Northside 777, prominently featured a wire photo transmission in its climax.) The second act goes on with Anita Borelli filling in for Lilli Rochelle and Gravelle singing his original role, and when it concludes with the investigation still inconclusive Chan ends up asking the company to sing the first act again. The police shoot Gravelle but fortunately the bullet only grazes him — fortunately because Chan deduces that the real killer of Lilli Rochelle and Enrico Borelli was Anita Borelli, who had never forgiven them for their affair and saw a way to knock them both off and frame the “escaped lunatic” for the crime. Gravelle ends up on the road to recovery, both physical and mental, and reunited with his daughter Kitty (Charlotte Henry), who had been hanging around most of the movie with her on-screen boyfriend without us having a clear idea who she was or why she was there.
Charlie Chan at the Opera has some intriguing connections with other films; it’s a “doubles” movie, for one (both Warner Oland and Boris Karloff had played Dr. Fu Manchu); and at least two of the cast members put everybody else in the film one degree of separation from several superstar comics: Margaret Irving had portrayed Margaret Dumont’s social rival in the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers and Charlotte Henry had acted with W. C. Fields in the 1933 Paramount Alice in Wonderland (a much better film than its reputation and an obvious precursor to The Wizard of Oz) and with Laurel and Hardy in the 1934 Babes in Toyland. Interestingly, the title card actually bills the lead actors as “Warner Oland vs. Boris Karloff in Charlie Chan at the Opera,” but there’s no real confrontation between the two: they don’t appear together until 52 minutes into this 72-minute movie and they can hardly be said to be at cross purposes since the denouement is Chan proving Gravelle innocent of the murders.
It’s a reliable Karloff performance rather than a brilliant one (he certainly doesn’t add as much to this movie as Lugosi did to The Black Camel!), but he acts with his usual power and authority — and his singing voice is quite good, far better than the one belonging to Boretti (whether Gregory Gaye’s or a double’s). Oscar Levant’s faux opera is also quite entertaining — certainly a lot better than the Tchaikovsky pastiches Nelson Eddy got stuck with in several of his films (for Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald the MGM music department had to come up with fake operas because almost no real ones feature romantic duets for soprano and baritone!) — and director Humberstone actually gets some nice atmospherics into the dark-stormy-night scene of Karloff’s escape before settling into his sprightly slovenliness.
The “special feature” mini-doc on Humberstone on this DVD did its best to establish him as at least a major second-tier director (wisely they didn’t try to put him on the pedestal along with his former employer, John Ford!) but it was hard for them to get away with that: Humberstone’s movies are always entertaining and rarely dull, but William K. Everson said of him that “through his career [he] was always to be too relaxed when handed a murder mystery, even so heady a one as I Wake Up Screaming” (given the marvelous performance Josef von Sternberg got out of Victor Mature the same year in The Shanghai Gesture, it’s fascinating to imagine I Wake Up Screaming with Sternberg as director!), and Carol Easton was even harder on him in her Goldwyn bio:
“Actors who have been directed by Humberstone contend that he hustled them so hard that they didn’t know what they were doing. His pictures were assembly-line productions from start to finish. Which is precisely why he was in such demand. There was an enormous market for low-budget ‘B’ pictures, companion features for the biggies, and somebody had to direct them. Who? John Ford wasn’t about to, not for any amount of money — nor was Willy Wyler or King Vidor or any other aesthetically oriented director. But more often than anyone cares to admit, artistic talent was subsidized by the commercially profitable hack work of the Lucky Humberstones, who could turn out a feature-length picture using less than 200,000 feet of film, retakes and all [though John Ford made How Green Was My Valley, a prestigious ‘A’ picture that beat out Citizen Kane for the Academy Award, with only 100,000 feet of film — which astonished his cinematographer, Arthur Miller, when the Fox lab informed him after the shoot that he had drawn so little raw stock on the project — M.G.C.] — as opposed to a George Stevens, whose artistic discrimination might require a million.
“’I don’t know why they call him Lucky,’ a producer said to me. ‘He’s always been such a loser.’ The nickname took hold after Humberstone miraculously survived a horrendous car accident. But on reflection, it’s not at all inappropriate. For a man of average intelligence, without noticeable talent or charm, to have directed six-figure productions starring Betty Grable and other household words — what better name than Lucky? … I did not have the courage to ask H. Bruce Humberstone whether he considers himself a success, or what he did with all that money, or even how he spends his time. I did ask, as he stood there expectantly with that terrible two-o’clock-in-the-morning look in his eyes, what the H. stands for.
“It stands for Harry.” — 3/5/08
•••••
When we returned I ran him the final Warner Oland Charlie Chan DVD we hadn’t screened previously, Charlie Chan at the Olympics, a 1937 release that used official footage of the 1936 Berlin Olympics provided by the German government (which meant that H. Bruce Humberstone essentially had Leni Riefenstahl as his second-unit director!) for the climax of a tale involving a robotic control mechanism for airplanes whose inventor, Cartwright (John Eldredge), expresses the hope that the device would enable future wars to be fought entirely by machinery without the loss of actual human life.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of skullduggery surrounding the invention, including sinister arms dealer Arthur Hughes (C. Henry Gordon); his vampy girlfriend Yvonne Roland (Katherine DeMille, you-know-who’s niece); Richard Masters (Allan Lane), the fine, upstanding test pilot and Olympic athlete she was assigned to seduce; Richard’s understandably jealous girlfriend, Betty Adams (Pauline Moore); Hopkins (Jonathan Hale), owner of the airplane company testing the device; Edwards (David Horsley), the pilot who takes up the plane with the robot device on the test flight in which it’s hijacked and he’s killed; and Miller (O. G. “Dutch” Hendrian), the hijacker who is eventually killed himself, his body found in Yvonne’s room, which kicks off Chan’s investigation.
Chan’s son Lee (Keye Luke) is a swimmer on the U.S. Olympic team and so he’s sailing to Berlin on the S.S. Manhattan with the other principals, and Chan charts out a way to catch up with them by flying from Hawai’i to the U.S. mainland on the China Clipper, then on another airliner from San Francisco to New York and finally on the Hindenburg (which had already crashed and burned on its infamous final flight by the time this film was released) to Germany. While there Chan allies with sympathetic Captain Strasser (Fredrik Vogeding) of the Berlin police (he’s dressed in a Kaiser-era dress uniform and presented as a good guy, a surprise to anyone who’s seen the film Casablanca, in which the character named Strasser was a black-hearted Nazi villain played by Conrad Veidt in his last role!) to trace the sinister Charles Zaraka (Morgan Wallace), who’s after the device and who himself gets killed.
There are a lot of bullets fired through the windows of the people who presumably hold the device, and a plot in which Chan supposedly recovers the device but in fact keeps it and fakes a package to send to Zaraka as a trap — and the ridiculous denouement reveals that Cartwright, the inventor, is the killer (if he wanted to sell the invention on the open market and make himself a killing — which was supposedly his motive — why didn’t he simply do so instead of going through the whole rigmarole of supposedly offering it to the U.S. government through Hopkins’ company?).
Despite that lapse, the script by veteran Chan scenarists Robert Ellis and Helen Logan (from a story by Paul Burger) is exciting and keeps the interest, and Humberstone was a stronger director than anyone assigned to the Chan films since Hamilton MacFadden; though he lacks a sense of atmosphere and doesn’t have much of a flair for composition (when the film starts cutting in some of the stunning images from Riefenstahl’s Olympia towards the end the gulf between the two directors in terms of visual imagination is all too apparent), he does know how to keep a script like this moving and maintain excitement instead of letting the film degenerate into a dull talk-fest the way some of the Oland Chans (notably Charlie Chan’s Secret) did — and there’s a cute but still reasonably astringent performance by Layne Tom, Jr. as Chan’s second son (a part that would be played by Victor Sen Yung in the Sidney Toler Chans to come).
Overall, the Humberstone-directed Chans do seem to stand a cut above some of the others in the Oland series (the way the Toler Chans directed by Norman Foster did above his others), and as Charles pointed out it was probably because he took them quite a bit more seriously than the other Chan directors did: though he wasn’t an especially creative director (not even an especially creative “B” director the way Robert Florey or Edgar G. Ulmer were!), he did have a real sense of commitment to his films and a flair for a kind of insouciant approach to action and thrills that stood him well in the Chan assignments. — 3/9/08
•••••
I picked out Charlie Chan on Broadway, a relatively late (1937) entry in the Warner Oland phase of the series and a pretty good movie. The writing committee on this one — Art Arthur, Robert Ellis and Helen Logan, story; Charles Belden (later The Strange Mr. Gregory and House of Wax) and Jerry Cady, script — actually gave it a flavor of screwball comedy as well as murder mystery, and whoever cast it did so majorly against type — one of the thugs, Buzz Moran, is played by paternal Leon Ames; while Harold Huber, usually cast as a gangster, this time plays a cop, Inspector Nelson, the white guy who makes all the mistakes and has to rely on Chan to find the killer.
The victim this time around is Billie Bronson (Louise Henry), a Broadway entertainer who was jilted by a gangster, Hottentot Club owner Johnny Burke (Douglas Fowley) and paid by him to leave the country, only she’s sneaked back — on the same ship as Chan and his number-one son Lee (Keye Luke) — and a rat-faced man (Marc Lawrence) locks her in her bathroom on board ship and searches her room frantically for a diary which, if it becomes public, will expose the major organized criminals in New York City. Needless to say, she gets killed, though not before she’s hidden the diary in Lee Chan’s trunk. There’s a wide variety of gangster characters and also a couple of ingénues, aggressive reporter “Speed” Patten (Donald Wood) and paparraza Joan Wendall (Joan Marsh), who got a picture of Billie sneaking off the boat when she was supposed to be out of the country, and Patten’s editor Murdock (J. Edward Bromberg) — an ironic character name indeed for a newspaper editor in a movie now owned by media über-tycoon Rupert Murdoch!
In the end it turns out that “Speed” is the murderer — he wanted to kill Billie before her diary exposed his practice of shaking down the rich and famous — an ending which certainly gives the lie to William K. Everson’s claim that there was never any particular mystery about whodunit in these films. I probably would have liked Charlie Chan on Broadway better if I’d been more awake and alert (as it was it kept me up until midnight), but as it was it seemed appealing even though a bit routine. Incidentally, the print we were watching was prefaced with a warning that it had been pieced together from the best available sources, and both Charles and I groaned in grim anticipation of what that usually means. Surprise: aside from a couple of scenes that showed just the beginning of nitrate dissolution, the film as a whole was crisp and clear, an impeccable transfer of a 1937 original in remarkably good shape. — 8/29/07
•••••
The film we picked was the last one in the Charlie Chan boxed set, volume 3 (and, interestingly, this and its two predecessors contain all 12 of the Chans with Warner Oland known to exist): Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, a 1937 production (released 1938) and not only Warner Oland’s last Charlie Chan film but his last film, period. (He began production on another Chan, Charlie Chan at the Ringside, in January 1938 but had a dispute with Twentieth Century-Fox, quit the film, went to his native Sweden and died there in August 1938 as he was scheduled to return to Hollywood. Charlie Chan at the Ringside was later rewritten as a Mr. Moto vehicle, Mr. Moto’s Gamble, and after Oland’s death Fox revived the series a year later with Charlie Chan in Honolulu, casting Sidney Toler in the role after having tested Leo Carrillo — who would have been terrible — and Cy Kendall, who’d already played Chan on a radio series and would have been great.
Incidentally, Oland and Toler both appear in Josef von Sternberg’s films with Marlene Dietrich: Oland as an Austrian in Dishonored and a Chinese in Shanghai Express and Toler as a detective in Blonde Venus — and Shanghai Express also features the wife of a third Chan, Sojin.) William K. Everson, who didn’t think much of the Oland Chans in general, called Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo “by far the weakest of his group, possibly due to his own ill health, but largely because of the excessive footage given to the overacted French [sic] policeman of Harold Huber, and perhaps too because the old team was getting a little bored,” but I found the film quite engaging and enjoyable even though the comic relief — not only Huber’s foofiness as Joubert, chief of the Monaco police, but Keye Luke’s stumbles with the French language and Louis Mercier’s comic taxi driver whose cab is given to minor explosions that stall it completely — seems at times to overwhelm the mystery plot.
Also, precious little is made of the potential of Monte Carlo as a location — the casino looks like they simply used one of Fox’s standing sets of a high-class restaurant and moved in one table each for roulette and baccarat (one wishes they could have done what RKO did for the ending of Stingaree and rented from Universal the spectacular set of the Monte Carlo casino Erich von Stroheim had had built for Foolish Wives) and the intrigue doesn’t have anything to do with gambling, as Charles had (not surprisingly) expected. It opens at the baccarat table, surely enough, but it’s really about finance as two of Europe’s greatest stock speculators, Paul Savarin (Edward Raquello) and Victor Karnoff (Sidney Blackmer), are equally vicious rivals at the card table and in the market.
The plot hinges on Karnoff’s plan to dump his $1 million worth of “metallurgical bonds” on the market and therefore drive the price down so Savarin’s holdings of the same investment become virtually worthless, and the murder — which Chan and his Number One Son Lee stumble on while walking through the Monegasque countryside after their cab has broken down (again) — is of Karnoff’s bank messenger, who was transporting the bonds to the stock market in Paris for sale. Naturally, the bonds themselves are stolen — though Karnoff files an insurance claim and receives their value almost immediately — and they’re recovered in the hotel room of bartender Al Rogers (George Lynn), who’s been blackmailing Karnoff’s wife Joan (Kay Linaker) because they were actually married earlier; she assumed he had divorced her and therefore married Karnoff, but then he turned up, alive and still legally her husband, in Monaco and forced her to steal $25,000 in the metallurgical bonds for him as his pay-off.
Also among the red herrings is Evelyn Grey (Virginia Field), a gold-digger who has been dating Karnoff’s secretary, Gordon Chase (Robert Kent), but also seeing Savarin on the side. From the opening reel it was all too easy to peg Gordon as the murderer -— if only because he had his hair combed so differently from any of the other male characters and he presented an overbearing manner that made him seem capable of violence — though it’s not until the very end that the writing committee, Robert Ellis and Helen Logan (story) and Charles Belden and Jerry Cady (script), bother to explain his motive: at an earlier time he’d stolen $200,000 worth of the metallurgical bonds himself and sold them to lavish the money on Evelyn, only to have her desert him for the genuinely rich Savarin, so he stole the bonds and killed the bank messenger intending to replace the $200,000 worth he’d previously stolen from the issues Karnoff had marked for sale — only Karnoff still had the record of the issue numbers (which Gordon had tried to destroy by burning a trash can full of papers, which he thought contained that record but did not) and therefore the plot unraveled.
Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo isn’t especially mysterious, but much of the “comic relief” is genuinely funny (for a change), Joubert turns out to have a brain behind all the foofiness, and the final scene is a quite moving leave-taking in which Joubert says his good-byes to Chan … which, given that this was in fact Warner Oland’s last film, comes off as a heart-rending tribute to the actor as well as his character, a rare moment of frame-crossing beauty in a series that for the most part was enjoyable formula entertainment but little more. — 9/8/07
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Afterwards I told Charles I wanted to run us another movie just as a palate cleanser, and so I broke open the fourth Charlie Chan boxed set from 20th Century-Fox and brought out Charlie Chan in Honolulu, released January 13, 1939 and the first film in the Chan series in which Sidney Toler replaced the late Warner Oland as Chan. H. Bruce Humberstone returned as director, which helped (the much weaker Eugene Forde had done the last two Oland Chans, Charlie Chan on Broadway and Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo) and screenwriter Charles Belden ramped up the camp aspects of the series, replacing the usual dumb Black servant with dumb white servant Al Hogan (Eddie Collins), who’s in charge of a large shipment of animals bound for the San Francisco Zoo on the freighter Susan B. Jennings — including a lion named Oscar whom he not only lets runs loose but actually sleeps with.
Also ramping up the camp level are the long scenes in which Chan’s Number Two Son, Lee Chan (Sen Yung — in his other films he was usually billed as Victor Sen Yung but Fox generally left his Anglo first name off the credits of the Chans) impersonates Charlie Chan when he takes the call from police inspector Rawlins (Paul Harvey) to investigate a murder aboard the Susan B. Jennings of a man whose identification tags were systematically stripped from him after he was killed. Also on board the ship are Dr. Cardigan — a mad scientist who’s kept alive a severed human brain and is played by George Zucco as a parody of the roles he was usually associated with — as well as a pair of ingénues, Judy Hayes (Phyllis Brooks) and ship’s officer George Randolph (John King) and an unscrupulous widow, Carol Wayne (a dark-haired Claire Dodd), as well as a pair of crooks fleeing Chinese justice, one of whom (Richard Lane) is masquerading as the cop who’s arrested the other (Marc Lawrence).
The gimmick is that Judy was supposed to be carrying $300,000 in cash to be paid to a mysterious contact who’d be giving her a wedding ring as a signal, and the contact she was supposed to give the money to was the man who was later murdered — and turns out to be the still-alive husband of Carol Wayne, whose real name is Elsie Hillman and who is murdered before she can tell the secret. The secret is that the ship’s captain (Robert Barrat — we should have known!) was really the killer; he decided to steal the $300,000 by killing its rightful owner and then put back $10,000 of it in Judy’s room to frame her for the crime.
As usual in a Humberstone Chan, the villain is unmasked with a technological gimmick — Chan rigs up a camera to take a flash photo in the dark of the criminal reaching for a gun which supposedly contains fingerprints which will incriminate him or her (though the fingerprints were actually too smudged to be of use — which given the way we’ve seen Hogan handle the gun in an earlier scene is not at all hard to believe!) — and Cardigan emerges on the side of good when he helps Chan develop the incriminating photo. Charlie Chan in Honolulu was well received when it was new — audiences quickly found they could accept the new actors and not pine for the absences of the dead Warner Oland and the departed Keye Luke — and though at times it’s too funny for its own good, it’s a nice bit of casual entertainment and Toler, though not in Oland’s league at playing an alien from a different culture with a very different idea of time, is still a good Chan and well worth watching in the role. — 3/26/08
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I ran him the second 20th Century-Fox Charlie Chan movie with Sidney Toler, Charlie Chan in Reno, which had its moments but was hardly the film it could have been with a basically interesting (though way too convoluted) story and a good cast. Interestingly, three of the supporting cast members themselves played famous movie crimefighters: Ricardo Cortez was Sam Spadein the 1931 Maltese Falcon, Morgan Conway was Dick Tracy in the first two of RKO’s four mid-1940’s “B”’s (Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy vs. Cueball) and Robert Lowery was Batman in the second (and far inferior) of the two Columbia serials, The Adventures of Batman and Robin, in 1948.
The story draws Chan to America’s divorce capital, not because he’s jettisoning his own spouse (after she gave him 12 kids, I would hope not!) but to try to save Mary Whitman (Pauline Moore), wife of his friend and Honolulu resident Curtis Whitman (Republic serial veteran Kane Richmond — who, come to think of it, played the Spider and therefore adds yet another famous crimefighter to the résumés of this cast!), from the charge of murdering obnoxious drunk divorcée Jeanne Bently (Louise Henry) after Jeanne served notice on Mary that she planned to marry Curtis as soon as Mary’s divorce went through.
The story had its basis in a tale called “Death Makes a Decree” by a semi-major writer, Philip Wylie, but it rather plods along and the scenarists, Albert Ray, Frances Hyland and the ubiquitous Robert E. Kent (who got so many credits over the years I had no trouble believing the anecdote about him by cinematographer Richard Kline in the winter 2007/2008 issue of Films of the Golden Age: “As fast as he could type, that’s how fast the script came out. I’d walk by his little office, the door would be open, and he’d say, ‘Oh, hi, Richard!’ and we’d talk about [say] a ballgame from the night before, and he’d still keep typing while we were talking about the ballgame!”), throw us way too many characters and red herrings — including a man at the “Hotel Sierra” where most of the action (such as it is) takes place, who may or may not have killed Jeanne in the process of robbing her of her winnings at the hotel’s casino) — and cut to a plodding, ridiculous scene set inside a ghost town which gives director Norman Foster a chance at some night atmospherics but otherwise offers little and pretty much stops the plot dead in its tracks (its only point is to establish that one of the characters is a mining engineer and therefore has access to nitric acid, which one of the characters wanted to use to ruin another’s face and the other — Miss Vivian Wells, the hotel’s terminally chirpy social director, played well by Phyllis Brooks in an otherwise pretty anonymous cast — killed her to keep this from happening).
Charlie Chan in Reno spared us (for the most part) the camp that weakened the first Toler Chan, Charlie Chan in Honolulu, though it still offered an especially embarrassing introduction for Victor Sen Yung as Chan’s Number Two Son: he’s portrayed as a student at USC and, when he hears his father is coming to Reno, borrows a car from a classmate and drives it there — only to be robbed by two hitchhikers he made the mistake of picking up, who steal not only his money but his (borrowed) car and even his clothes, so he’s picked up by the police wearing nothing but his undies and Chan, sitting in on the lineups of the Reno police, suddenly recognizes his son and mumbles a Chanorism about how he is “embarrassed to admit same” when his son asks Chan to confirm his identity and their relationship. (Then a drunk in the same lineup who doesn’t look at all Chinese adopts a mincing pidgin voice and even pushes up his eyelids manually in an attempt to convince the dumb police that he’s Chan’s number three son.)
Charlie Chan in Reno has its moments — Toler, though not as good in the role as Warner Oland, is still good; Cortez has a wonderfully oily role as the hotel’s in-house doctor (who regards romancing the divorcèes-to-be as a perk of his job); Phyllis Brooks manages to do a credible scene at the end when she finally confesses; but the rest of the cast is pretty mediocre and the writers don’t even nail down completely whether the estranged Whitmans get back together at the fadeout or not. Fortunately, better was on the way: Fox’s next Chan film, Charlie Chan on Treasure Island, was by far the best of the Toler series, with Cesar Romero a powerful and charismatic villain. — 4/21/08
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I ran us the film Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, the next in sequence in volume four of 20th Century-Fox’s DVD reissues of the Chan movies and, to my mind, the best of the Sidney Toler Chans even though the first time I saw it I guessed the identity of the villain midway through. Directed by Norman Foster from an “original” story and script by John Larkin, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island was set against the backdrop of the 1939-40 World’s Fair in San Francisco, actually held on an artificial island built in San Francisco Bay between San Francisco and Oakland and accessible only via the recently completed San Francisco Bay Bridge. (During World War II the island was appropriated by the U.S. Navy for a base, and they’ve been on it ever since, so it’s been inaccessible to the general public.)
The characters begin the movie by flying in from Honolulu on the China Clipper — in a nice ironic touch, Charlie Chan is reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island during the flight — with Chan’s Number Two Son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung) alternately getting airsick and having dire thoughts of the plane crashing and taking them all down with it, and Larkin’s script effectively introducing us to the other principals on board the plane: Thomas Gregory (Douglass Dumbrille — billed here without the final “s” on his first name), an insurance actuary and quite obvious red herring; and Paul Essex (Louis Jean Heydt, whose blond good looks and interesting personality should have given him a bigger career than he had), a friend of Chan’s and a mystery novelist who’s just completed his latest book, an exposé of phony spiritualists in the guise of suspense fiction.
Essex receives a radiogram aboard the plane threatening him if he denounces San Francisco’s reigning fake psychic, “Dr. Zodiac” — and sure enough, he dies on board the plane and Chan has the task of breaking the news to his widow Stella (Sally Blane, real-life sister of Loretta Young) when they land. Gregory steals the attaché case in which Essex was carrying the manuscript of his novel (which he was actually shown finishing on a portable typewriter on the plane), Chan is the victim of a mock “kidnapping” by two of his old friends in the San Francisco Police Department, and the other dramatis personae include reporter Pete Lewis (Douglas Fowley, in what was probably the most sympathetic part he got until he played the male lead in Lady in the Death House), who’s also trying to expose Dr. Zodiac; and Rhadini the Great (Cesar Romero), a stage magician who performs at the Temple of Magic at the World’s Fair and, like his real-life namesake Houdini (obviously John Larkin’s inspiration for this character), has offered a large reward to any spiritualist who performs a feat Rhadini can’t duplicate with the skills and equipment of a stage magician.
Chan, Lewis and Rhadini (in disguise) visit Dr. Zodiac’s séance room — investigating the mysterious deaths of four of Zodiac’s clients, which Chan suspects are due to Zodiac’s having blackmailed them with revelations they gave him during their readings — and Chan eventually discovers that Zodiac’s costume is padded inside to make him look like a larger man than he really is. Meanwhile, though Rhadini is in the business of exposing fake mystics, his act includes his girlfriend Eve Cairo (Pauline Moore), a real mind-reader, and it all comes to a climax at the Temple of Magic, where Chan — having in the meantime raided Zodiac’s home and burned the files of information with which he was blackmailing people (apparently his reading has encompassed not only Stevenson but Dashiell Hammett’s “The Scorched Face,” which has a similar denouement) — stages a confrontation between Rhadini and Zodiac. The person in the Zodiac costume is killed and turns out to be Zodiac’s servant Abdul , and though Rhadini is supposedly wounded in the confrontation it turns out that he is Zodiac and had used Abdul to wear the Zodiac costume and thus make it seem as if they were two different people, then faked the wound with a knife concealed in his magic wand.
Charlie Chan at Treasure Island is way ahead of its two predecessors in the Toler Chan series for several reasons. First is Cesar Romero’s marvelous portrayal of the villain, even though he’s so smarmy and self-righteous throughout the whole movie that even when he’s being portrayed as a sympathetic character you still get the impression that he’s up to no good. It also helps that the director is Norman Foster (a cut above the hacks like Eugene Forde and Louis King that directed most of the Warner Oland Chans) and that most of the action takes place at night. There’s comic relief but at least it’s controlled — it doesn’t seem to take over the whole movie and turn it into a camp-fest the way it did in the scripts for Charlie Chan in Honolulu and Charlie Chan in Reno — and for once even Victor Sen Yung (a perfectly competent actor but hardly at Keye Luke’s level) is genuinely funny, especially when he assumes a preposterous disguise in a doomed effort to fool his dad as to his true identity.
My recollection of the rest of the Toler Chans is that they were quite entertaining even though they slipped into formula pretty quickly (especially Sen Yung’s antics) and they were probably better movies than the Oland Chans — certainly directors like Foster and H. Bruce Humberstone (who I believe was the only person who directed both Oland and Toler as Chan) made the films faster-moving and got the draggy exposition parts out of the way relatively quickly — though Oland remains the best Chan precisely because he was the most successful at creating the impression that he was a different sort of person from a very different culture with a different sense of time, and the clashes between him and Luke (between the immigrant and the U.S.-born and assimilated generation which followed) seem more effective than those between Toler (who simply doesn’t look or act as convincingly Asian as Oland had!) and Sen Yung.
The Chans have been raked over the coals for their stereotypical depictions of Asians and the refusal of Fox (and, later, Monogram) to cast an Asian actor in the role (though the two Chan films made in the silent era, The House Without a Key and The Chinese Parrot, did use Asian stars — Japanese actors George Kuwa and Kamiyama Sojin, respectively), but frankly they hold up quite well and it’s hard to accuse them of racism since in every film it’s the Asian detective who’s the smart one and the white cops who reach to the most obvious, but incorrect, conclusions about the cases. — 4/27/08
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The night before Charles and I had watched Charlie Chan in City in Darkness — that being what it said on the DVD box, a rather awkward title and not necessarily the best transcription of what the opening card actually said (“Charlie Chan in City in Darkness, with Sidney Toler”); the American Film Institute Catalog listed it simply as City in Darkness. It’s the last movie in the fourth volume of Charlie Chan DVD’s from 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment (and the first one with Toler rather than Warner Oland as Chan) and it’s a potentially interesting movie that could have been a lot better than it was.
Though not released until November 1939 — after World War II had started, which makes the supposedly prescient last line (the French police officials are high-fiving each other at how the agreement between Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich has averted war and Chan says, “A wise man once said, ‘Beware of spider who invites fly into his place for tea’”) not quite as prescient as it sounded; most likely it was added to an otherwise finished film after the war began, like the endings of The Four Just Men and Foreign Correspondent — the movie is actually pretty dramatic when it opens with newsreel footage of Hitler, Chamberlain, French president Edouard Daladier and others, along with scenes of the Sudetenland and the German tanks rolling in to occupy it. (After reading Leonard Mosley’s history of this period, On Borrowed Time, it was especially thrilling to see this footage, even in the ahistorical context of opening a Charlie Chan movie.)
The scene then shifts to a French hotel room, where villainess Charlotte Ronnell (Dorothy Tree) is arranging a delivery of French munitions to a German captain (Frederick Vogeding) — his national identity isn’t specified in the script but that accent is unmistakable — only they don’t have the official papers needed to allow their ship to sail, and the corrupt broker who’s promised to get them, Belescu (Noel Madison, at last getting to act in a major-studio film instead of independent crap like Cocaine Fiends and The Black Raven), has double-crossed them and given them blank pieces of paper instead. Among the plotters is a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work named B. Petroff (Douglass Dumbrille at his scheming-meanest), who’s falsely reported his former secretary, Tony Madero (Richard Clarke), as an embezzler to keep Tony from exposing his nefarious activities as a smuggler.
Chan gets into the case when, on a visit to Paris (the titular “city in darkness” — the film takes place before and during an air-raid drill in which the city’s residents are told to practice blacking out to protect against air raids — like a lot of movies around this time, this film depicts Britain and France as far better prepared for war than they actually were!) to see his friend, prefect of police J. Romaine (C. Henry Gordon, playing a good guy for once!), Petroff gets murdered and Madero and his girlfriend Marie Dubon (Lynn Bari, second-billed and offering her usual exotic non-performance) are the prime suspects. Also supposedly “assisting” the investigation but actually getting in its way is the “comic-relief” character of Marcel Spivak (Harold Huber, considerably more oppressive and less amusing than he was in Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo), prefect Romaine’s adopted son — one can readily imagine the writers thinking, “Instead of Chan, let’s have the other cop has the stupid son who screws things up!”
There’s an exciting action climax in which Charlotte and the captain escape in a plane, only it gets a flat tire before it can become airborne and ultimately crashes and burns, killing both the plotters — only it turns out that the real killer is Antoine (Pedro de Cordoba), Petroff’s butler (so this is one whodunit in which the butler did do it!), who’d lost a leg in combat in World War I and had just seen his son off in a troop train when he realized that his employer was working for the other side, and killed him to derail the smuggling operation and thereby protect France from having her own arms used against her. Scenarists Robert Ellis and Helen Logan (Chan series regulars) drew this story from an unproduced play by Ladislas Fodor (a name we’ve seen before on Tampico and other stories of wartime intrigue) and Gina Kaus, and I suspect the original play did not include Charlie Chan as a character and Ellis and Logan had the rather awkward task of writing him in. The director was Herbert I. Leeds, a hack who’s on most critics’ love-to-hate lists, but though he isn’t especially exciting he and cinematographer Virgil Miller manage a quite nice atmosphere — and the plot devices almost at times make this film seem a forerunner of Casablanca.
Turner Classic Movies is in the middle of a series on Asians in films, and the Asians they’re interviewing (modern-day actors and writers like Amy Tan) make a big to-do about how Chan was always played by non-Asian actors (true, if you don’t count the now-lost silent Chans The House Without a Key and The Chinese Parrot, both of which cast Japanese actors as Chan — George Kuwa and Kamiyama Sojin, respectively) and they had to have their eyes taped to look Asian (not true — both Warner Oland and Sidney Toler had naturally slanted eyes, not to the degree of actual Asians but enough that between their natural slants and relocating their eyebrows, they could look convincingly Asian without tape) — and while there certainly were authentic Asians around Hollywood in the 1930’s who could have played the part (judging from his detective role in the 1929 talkie The Unholy Night, Sojin would have made a quite good sound-film Chan; and Philip Ahn would also have been eminently qualified for the part), Oland in his way was a marvelous Chan and Toler was serviceable, though far less charismatic as a performer: scenes in this film in which Oland would have shined seem dull and flat with Toler in the role. Still, this is a nicely atmospheric film and a good ending to the 18-film Chan survey on Fox (though presumably the seven remaining Tolers will be issued on DVD boxed sets of their own to fill out the series). — 6/4/08
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And just in case you’re not totally sick of reading about Charlie Chan at the moment, here’s an old comment of mine about a later Chan film, Charlie Chan in Rio (the 1941 remake of The Black Camel):
I ran Charles the last film on the Murder on a Honeymoon/Trouble in Paradise tape: Charlie Chan in Rio, a 1941 series entry from 20th Century-Fox (a year before they abandoned the series and sold the rights to star Sidney Toler, who in turn sold them to Monogram Pictures two years later) that, though the official credits stated was written by Samuel G. Engel and Lester Ziffren and merely “based on the character ‘Charlie Chan’ created by Earl Derr Biggers,” was actually a fairly exact remake of the second Fox Chan film, The Black Camel, which in turn was based on one of Biggers’ actual Chan novels. (Actually The Black Camel was the third Fox film to use the character of Charlie Chan, but the first — Behind the Curtain (1929), though based on a Biggers Chan novel, only used him in a very minor bit at the end.)
The locale was changed (the original took place in Chan’s stomping grounds of Honolulu), Biggers’ elaborate shipboard prologue was jettisoned (as it had been in the script for the 1931 film, credited to Hugh Stange, Barry Conners and Philip Klein and with some uncredited continuity contributions by Dudley Nichols, of all people), the first murder victim was demoted from movie star Shelah Fane to nightclub entertainer Lola Dean (Jacqueline Dalya) and the phony mystic, called “Tarneverro” in Biggers’ novel (and played superbly by Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film), was rechristened “Marana” and played by Victor Jory (which made the payoff that he was really the brother-in-law of the murder victim in the backstory more believable even though Jory was hardly the charismatic screen presence Lugosi was!). Indeed, all the character names except Chan’s were changed.
Though Charlie Chan in Rio was definitely a “B” movie (only 62 minutes long, 10 minutes shorter than the 1931 Black Camel), it still had the production polish of a major-studio film. Director Harry Lachman — a quirky and underrated filmmaker almost totally forgotten today even though he established Rudolf Maté’s career in Hollywood by using him on the visually spectacular Dante’s Inferno — and cinematographer Joseph P. MacDonald gave the film an atmospheric look rivaling that of Hamilton MacFadden’s direction in the original (ironically MacFadden was involved in this version as well — as an actor, playing the nerdy character of Bill Kellogg, boyfriend of one of the key suspects), though this film had a conventional background music score that was far less evocative than the marvelous use of Hawai’ian source music MacFadden had concocted for the original (at a time when most filmmakers believed background music in general was an outdated holdover from silent films that would fall into disuse in the sound era).
In this version Marana concocted a mixture of caffeine and a special herb he used to spike cigarettes, so when he gave his clients coffee and one of his special smokes they went into what the script described as a “semi-comatose state” and spilled their deepest, darkest secrets at his command — and the ultimate revelation of the murderer (Marana’s sister Barbara, using the name “Helen Ashby” [Kay Linaker], who was out for revenge against Lola Dean for having killed her husband when he refused to divorce Barbara and marry Lola) was dependent on Marana, her confederate, doing a reading of her in front of everybody but giving her a normal cigarette instead of one of his spiked ones, and having her fake a trance in which she denied all knowledge of the murder. (Charles said he’d seen this film as a kid and somehow that plot twist had stuck in his consciousness for 30 years!)
The fact that the Chan series had held up for over a decade and could still produce a film this good (not great, mind you — with the possible exceptions of The Black Camel and Charlie Chan at the Opera, it would be hard to describe any of the Chan films as “great” — and those two only stand out because of the presence of major horror stars, Lugosi and Karloff respectively, as well as MacFadden’s atmospheric direction and highly creative scoring of the former) was pretty remarkable. — 2/16/03
After years of neglect — at least partly conditioned by Asian-American activists who’ve condemned the films as racist, less due to their actual content than that the hero was always played by white actors — 20th Century-Fox has reissued most of its surviving Charlie Chan films in DVD boxed sets, four films to a package with a couple of intriguing bonuses: the 1929 early talkie Behind That Curtain (the first Chan film to survive) and Eran Trece, the surviving Spanish-language version of Charlie Chan Carries On, the lost debut of Warner Oland in the role. This is a survey of all the films released so far as my partner Charles and I have gone through the boxed sets and watched them. — M.G.C., 6/4/08
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Behind That Curtain is a 1929 Fox production that’s the first Charlie Chan movie produced at that studio, the first Chan talkie and the earliest Chan movie that survives. That’s about all it has going for it, though. It was based on the third Chan novel written by the character’s creator, Earl Derr Biggers, who structured his book much the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear: a mystery prologue involving the “sleuth” character, a long backstory flashback indicating who the murder victim was, who the murderer was and the entire history that led this person to kill that other person, and a short epilogue in which the sleuth returns to tie up the loose ends. Fox’s scenarists, George Middleton (credited with the adaptation, so this was presumably his idea) and Sonya Levien & Clarke Silvernail (script), decided to lop off the introductory passage with the sleuth and just tell the backstory, bringing Chan in at the end as a sort of deus ex machina.
William Fox, who when this film was made still headed the studio that bore his name (and who picked Upton Sinclair, of all people, to write his authorized biography, which makes me wonder what he’d think of the way the studio’s current owner, Rupert Murdoch, has made his last name synonymous with Right-wing news and political commentary), obviously saw this film as a follow-up to In Old Arizona, since he reunited that hit movie’s director, Irving Cummings, and star, Warner Baxter, and took advantage of all the opportunities for location work. A good chunk of the story takes place in what was then called “Persia” (modern-day Iran), even though it’s “played” by all too familiar Western locations and the “Persian desert” is obviously Hollywood’s all-purpose stand-in for deserts anywhere, the big sand dunes outside Yuma, Arizona.
Baxter plays British explorer Col. John Beetham, who’s just returned from a four-month trip to China to find that private investigator Hilary Galt (Edgar Norton, for once not playing an alcoholic) has dug up some derogatory information about him and threatens to reveal that to his client, Sir George Mannering (Claude King), which will jeopardize his chances of marrying Mannering’s niece Eve (Lois Moran, second-billed). Only it turns out that during his Chinese expedition Eve has met and fallen in love with no-good bounder Eric Durand (Philip Strange) and it’s Eric that Galt plans to dis to Sir George (who doesn’t need any persuasion since he already hates him and bitterly opposes Eve marrying him) — and, in order to prevent this from happening, Eric elopes with Eve, kills Galt and leaves a pair of Chinese slippers at the scene of the crime (gifts from the Chinese emperor to Col. Beetham) to frame Beetham for the crime.
Beetham flees by embarking on his planned expedition to Iran, and who else should turn up there but Mr. and Mrs. Durand. By then Eric is openly carrying on with his native servant, Nuna (Mercedes De Valasco) — even screwing her in what was supposed to be Eric’s and Eve’s marital bed — and Eve decides to separate from him but not divorce him because that would cause a scandal that would embarrass Col. Beetham, whom she’s decided she loves after all. Eve and Beetham run into each other when he’s about to set off into the Persian desert on his way to India, and the two of them ride into the desert and vibrate with mutual sexual frustration for several reels before they finally yield to the obvious temptation. Just then Sir Frederick Bruce (Gilbert Emery) of Scotland Yard turns up in Tehran, on the trail of Beetham for murdering Galt, and he meets Eric.
The two of them charter a plane to fly on ahead of Beetham’s caravan, and of course run into Beetham and narrowly miss Eve — who overhears them and rides back to Tehran, then leaves the area altogether. A year passes, and the principals all end up in San Francisco, where Bruce and police inspector Charlie Chan (E. L. Park) attempt to catch the killer. Eric corners Eve in an elevator in a San Francisco hotel and demands a letter she received from Alf Pornick (John Rogers), Galt’s assistant, which is the only physical evidence tying Eric to the murder — he tells Eve and us that he’s already killed Pornick to shut him up and plans to do the same to Eve. Beetham is scheduled to give a lecture in the hotel ballroom and show films of his expedition, and during the showing Eric attempts to shoot Beetham from the audience, Bruce blocks the shot and takes the bullet himself (though he survives), and Chan shoots and kills Eric, thereby allowing the case to be solved without the scandal of a public trial. Of course, Beetham and Eve end up together.
Behind That Curtain is a quirky story that could have made a good movie, but unfortunately this film is a virtual compendium of all that went wrong with the early talkies, especially the ones whose directors were too weak to stand up to the insane demands of the sound men that everyone … talk … really … slowly … and … distinctly, and … … pause … between … hearing their … cue line … and deliver- … -ing their own. The action is staged almost entirely in two-shots between the people presumably conversing, and though Fox was the pioneering studio in developing sound-on-film technology this film is as stiff, and its cameras as immobile, as anything Warners was making at the time with the handicap of the cumbersome (and soon obsolete) Vitaphone sound-on-disc equipment.
The films from 1929 that stand up as entertainment today — Vidor’s Hallelujah!, Mamoulian’s Applause, Lubitsch’s The Love Parade, Wyler’s Hell’s Heroes, Capra’s Ladies of Leisure — are the ones that ignored the ostensible strictures of sound shooting and featured actors conversing normally, cameras that actually moved, and creative uses of sound. Behind That Curtain is all too typical of the common run of early sound films, stiff and boring, and though William K. Everson seems far too patronizing about the later Fox Chans with Warner Oland (“There was never much mystery about any of the ‘hidden killers’ in the Chan movies, nor much variety in their unmasking,” he wrote — a comment belied by Charlie Chan in Paris, with its gimmick of having the killer wear such a heavy disguise that it turns out two separate people are committing the murders, taking turns wearing the disguise and thereby alibi-ing each other, though this particular gimmick would have worked better if the two actors had been the same height; as it was, one was noticeably taller than the other and that should have given the game away; or Charlie Chan on Broadway, in which the obnoxious reporter we expect to be the romantic lead turns out to be the killer), he’s right on about this one:
“The film itself, while it goes out of its way to exploit different kinds of sound effects and a variety of languages, is dull and plodding. The desert locales do nothing but emphasize the space in which nothing happens and also limits the number of characters involved, so that the interchange of dialogue is lengthened into tedium by long delays and reactions. The whole film is much more pedestrian than its basically good story and cast (including Boris Karloff) would indicate.”
As for Karloff — making his sound-film debut and billed only as “Hindu servant” (which explains how he can get away at one point with pretending he speaks neither English nor Farsi) — he’s Beetham’s manservant (there’s an unintentionally funny scene in which, inside a desert tent, he’s serving Beetham, Bruce, and Eric drinks) and he gets very little more to say than, “Yes, Sahib” — though in a film like this that’s something of an advantage (and it’s worth remembering that two years later Karloff would become a star from Frankenstein, in which aside from a few pre-verbal cries, grunts and moans his character was mute). The rest of the film just plods along and wastes some potentially interesting actors — including Moran, who didn’t have much of a career after sound came in even though she gets the two genuinely emotional moments in this one: the scene in which she’s debating whether to have sex with Beetham (in which she’s a lot more subtle than Baxter, who’s attempting to figure out how to do the Valentino schtick in a sound film) and the good suspense scene in which Eric traps her in the hotel elevator.
Warner Baxter had a tendency, even in better films than this, to seem unnecessarily overwrought (in his good films, like 42nd Street and The Prisoner of Shark Island, he was able to harness that to create effective characterizations), but in this one he seems determined to leave no stick of scenery unchewed — and at one point he audibly stumbles over a line, the kind of mistake one forgives in a stage play but in a movie makes one ask, “Why didn’t they retake?” I couldn’t help thinking that Behind That Curtain might have been a great movie, even in 1929, if Fox could have borrowed Josef von Sternberg from Paramount to direct; with Sternberg’s mastery of exotic atmosphere and his ability to get his actors to underplay (not just Dietrich but even 100 percent cured, smoked hams like Emil Jannings), and the control-freak tendencies that would have made him read the riot act to those stupid sound people, a Sternberg Behind That Curtain could have been a real gem.
There are elements in this film of some interest — Karloff’s glowering screen presence; E. L. Park’s Chan (he was a British actor but he was considerably more convincingly “alien” than the Chans to follow); the use of source music to take the place of underscoring (sound mixing was still in its infancy and the use of non-source background music under dialogue was a considerably later development, around 1931 or so) — though the virtually forgotten Hamilton MacFadden does a much better job in that department in the 1931 film The Black Camel, also in the current Chan box and the only survivor among the first five Oland Chans (and one of the very best films in the series, thanks to MacFadden’s creative direction and the welcome presence of Bela Lugosi in a key supporting role) and an overall story that could have made a good (if not great) movie — but they’re lost in … a welter of … badly delivered … dialogue and … flatly photographed … scenes that add … up to an excruciatingly … boring film. — 9/2/07
•••••
There was one film in the DVD packages I’d just got that I particularly wanted to see: Eran Trece (“There Were Thirteen”), made by Fox in 1931 as the Spanish-language version of Fox’s first Charlie Chan film with Warner Oland, Charlie Chan Carries On (the fifth of Earl Derr Biggers’ six Chan novels). Through one of the bizarre vagaries of film preservation, the English-language version with Oland has been lost (indeed, of Oland’s first five Chan films, only the second, The Black Camel, survives) but this Spanish-speaking version, shot (like the Spanish Dracula, the German Anna Christie and the Spanish and French versions of Laurel and Hardy’s first feature, Pardon Us) simultaneously with the English version (Lupita Tovar, the female lead of the Spanish Dracula, recalled that the Spanish version was shot at night on the same sets as the English version had been shot on during the day, and the director was instructed to block the action the same way as the director of the English version so they could use the same “marks,” the lines taped on the floor of the set instructing the actors where to stop so the camera will photograph them properly).
The American Film Institute Catalog credits David Howard as the director of Eran Trece (Hamilton MacFadden helmed the English-language version) and doesn’t list the translator of the script (the English version was written by Philip Klein and Barry Connors). The film opens with the murder of Isaac Potter, fabulously wealthy American, in a hotel room in London, and suspicion falls on the other 12 members of his tour group — he was on a round-the-world tour sponsored by Dr. Lofton (Julio Villarreal) — including his daughter Ellen (Ana María Custodio), Chicago gangster Max Minchin (Raul Roulien, who later played Gene Raymond’s rival for Dolores Del Rio’s affections in Flying Down to Rio — thereby putting everyone else in this cast one degree of separation from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers!) and his wife Peggy (Bianca de Castejón), playboy and fantasist Walter Decker (Carlos Diaz de Mendoza) and his estranged wife, actress Sybil Conway (Lia Torá) — she wasn’t part of the tour group of trece but she was filming in San Remo and he was planning to join her when the tour reached there — as well as elderly attorney Paul Nielson (Antonio Vidal) — who in one sequence has a heart attack and his attendant saves his life using an amyl nitrite “popper” — and various assorted hangers-on.
For the first three-fifths of the film Chan doesn’t appear at all — the lead detective is Inspector Duff (Rafael Calvo) of Scotland Yard, who gets involved in the first place because the initial murder (there are others, and while the first victim is strangled with a luggage strap the rest are shot by an unseen gunman who has an amazing ability to pick off people while firing through open windows) took place in his jurisdiction and who follows the tour group around the world (established through some generic sets on the Fox backlot and ghastly silent-era stock footage of the Pyramids and Sphinx to let us know they’re supposed to be in Egypt) until he himself is picked off through the open window of Charlie Chan’s office in Honolulu; he eventually recovers, but meanwhile Charlie Chan “carries on” with the case and ultimately uncovers the real murderer in San Francisco along with the motive — something about smuggling diamonds out of South Africa (we don’t leave the film with too clear an idea of what the crime was all about or why the killer, the usual peripherally involved character, picked these particular people to eliminate: maybe all was clearer in Biggers’ novel).
On one level, Eran Trece is a surprisingly good movie: director Howard uses a surprisingly mobile camera and there are even some bits of background underscoring, unusual in a 1931 talkie, that make much of the film (especially the middle reels) look more like 1935 than 1931. But it’s still workmanlike rather than inspired, and given the superb atmospherics director MacFadden achieved in the second Fox Chan film, The Black Camel, I can’t help but think that the English version was probably better (unlike the Spanish Dracula, which despite the absence of Bela Lugosi and the mere competence of the actor who replaced him actually comes off, on balance, as a better film) — and by the way, why wasn’t The Black Camel included in the first Chan boxed set? Because it doesn’t have a title that begins with Charlie Chan in … ? Because of the myth that it’s unshowable today because one reel has poor sound quality (the bootleg tape I got from Canada contained the entire 72-minute film and the sound quality, though nothing to write home about, was consistent throughout and good enough that one could understand the dialogue and follow the plot)?
It’s a pity, and one can only hope 20th Century-Fox Home Video includes it in the next Chan boxed set (and they’re calling this one Volume 1 so there’s a strong possibility that there will be a Volume 2) [actually they included it in Volume 3 — M.G.C., 6/4/08] because, along with Charlie Chan at the Opera, it’s the best film in the series, with MacFadden’s proto-noir compositions and superb use of “source” Hawai’ian music instead of orchestral backing (and a great performance by horror icon Bela Lugosi as a fake swami, though it takes real suspension of disbelief to accept Lugosi’s Magyar tones as coming from someone who’s supposed to be British).
Like a lot of other later Chans, Eran Trece is sluggish (as I’ve pointed out often in these pages, it’s quite surprising that the early 1930’s produced so many great gangster films but, with virtually only two exceptions — the 1931 Maltese Falcon and 1934 Thin Man, both based on Dashiell Hammett novels — 1930’s filmmakers turned flat, leaden and dull when they tried to dramatize other sorts of crime), and the actor playing Chan, Manuel Arbó, is clearly modeling his performance on Oland’s long before Oland’s became iconic; also the famous Chan aphorisms literally lose a lot in translation (reading them in subtitles, they just sound stupid) — and Charles informed me that in Mexico people tell “Chinese jokes” the way Americans told “Polish jokes” and that Arbó was doing a lot of “l” and “r” switches that made Chan more of a buffoon than the serious character Biggers intended and Oland (and Sidney Toler after him) played. Eran Trece is a good movie, and I’m glad it survived and is back in circulation, but it’s hardly a long-lost gem. — 10/8/06
•••••
The movie I wanted to run when we got home was the 1931 film The Black Camel, the main reason I had bought the Charlie Chan, volume 3 DVD boxed set from 20th Century-Fox. I’d seen it before in a mediocre-quality bootleg tape from Vortex Video in Canada and it was nice to see it in an “official” DVD transfer that was quite beautiful, doing full justice to director Hamilton MacFadden’s atmospherics and the chiaroscuro effects cinematographers Joseph August and Daniel Clark (more prestigious names than usually got to do Chan films) got for him. The film is a quite close adaptation of the fourth Chan novel by Earl Derr Biggers — though it opens when movie star Shelah Fane (Dorothy Revier) and her film company reach Honolulu, Hawai’i and omits the long prologue Biggers wrote detailing the action on ship on their way there, during which Fane started a shipboard romance with millionaire Alan Jaynes (William Post, Jr.). He wants to marry her, but she’s concerned that he may learn her role in the death, three years earlier, of fellow movie actor Denny Mayo.
Shelah sends for Tarneverro (Bela Lugosi), her favorite fortune-teller, and he arrives in Honolulu and not only tells her she can’t marry Alan but induces her to confess to the murder of Mayo. Shortly thereafter, Shelah is found stabbed to death on the floor of the pavilion of the Royal Hawai’ian Hotel — and Chan, who has already been investigating Tarneverro while posing as a humble Chinese merchant, is on the case. There’s the usual pool of suspects, including Shelah’s personal assistant, Julie O’Neil (Sally Eilers, second-billed) — who’s dating her own rich young man, Jimmy Bradshaw (Robert Young, looking like he just got out of high school) — Robert Fyfe (Victor Varconi), actor and Shelah’s former husband; Smith (Murray Kinnell), an artist-turned-beachcomber; his native girlfriend Luana (Rita Rozelle); Thomas and Anna MacMaster (J. M. Kerrigan and Mary Gordon), foster parents of the late Denny Mayo and his brother Arthur; Shelah’s maid Anna (Violet Dunn); Jessop (Dwight Frye, reunited with Lugosi from the Dracula cast), butler at the hotel; and Van Horn (whose connection to the others is unclear but who looks sinister enough if only because C. Henry Gordon is playing him).
About the only false note in the story is the appearance of a comic sidekick for Chan, Kashimo (Otto Yamaoka), who like the Number One and Two Sons in the later Chan films is always causing trouble — at one point he bursts into the room where Chan is holding the suspects and slams a door, causing the bits and pieces of Denny Mayo’s torn photo Chan is trying to reassemble to fly about the room — but the rest of the film is so good this pointless character can’t hurt it much.
I was impressed this time around with most of the same things I’d liked about the movie the first time: MacFadden’s sure command of atmosphere, the benefit of footage actually shot in Hawai’i (something Fox hyped a good deal back in the day, though it’s clear the only Hawai’ian footage was shot by a second unit and used as process-screen backgrounds or cut in for “authenticity”), Ben Carré’s spectacular sets (another far more prestigious name than usually got associated with the Chan films); Warner Oland’s typically imperturbable performance as the detective (it was only his second performance as Chan — and the only one of the first five Oland Chans that survives — and he isn’t bored with the role, as he became later in the series); a considerably more emotionally intense and rangy performance from Lugosi than he usually gave in his horror films; the marvelous use of Hawai’ian source music as a substitute for orchestral underscoring (the effect of “native” music was also used in Behind That Curtain, but far less effectively) — especially in a cruelly ironic scene in which a high-school glee club has assembled outside the hotel pavilion to serenade Shelah while she is dead inside — and the sheer mobility of the film.
This was made just two years after Behind That Curtain, but the technology of the talkies had improved so dramatically it seems more like 10 years later; MacFadden and the cinematographers take what could have been an extraordinarily dull film and liven it up with swooping camera movements, dramatic lighting and almost claustrophobic interiors, especially in the scene in which Tarneverro drives Shelah to confess to having killed Denny Mayo shortly before she is killed herself, and the later sequences in which Chan holds the various suspects in a hotel ballroom and forces them to remain while he investigates the case.
The Black Camel is also superbly plotted; the backstory murder of Denny Mayo hangs over everything (someone is so determined to obliterate his memory that when Chan goes to the Honolulu library to look through back issues of the Los Angeles Times to see his photos, all of them have been cut out of the library copies — though one would think that since he was supposed to have been a movie star in his own right somebody would have remembered what he looked like) and the denouement, though far-fetched, at least hinges on a motive that makes sense instead of the arbitrary climaxes of some of the later Chan films (particularly the ones that weren’t based on actual Biggers stories): Tarneverro turns out to be Arthur Mayo, Denny’s brother (their strong physical resemblance was the reason for their attempt to destroy all Denny’s photos); and maid Anna turns out to be Denny Mayo’s widow.
The two were convinced that Shelah had killed Denny from the time it happened (which she had; Shelah was desperately in love with Denny but he refused to marry her because he was already married to Anna, so she killed him), and hatched a long-term revenge plan; Tarneverro would establish a reputation as a psychic and use background information supplied by Anna to make Shelah think he had genuine mystic powers; he would worm his way into her confidence and make her confess to the murder; and then they would turn her in to the police — only just after her session with Tarneverro, Shelah tore up the autographed photo Denny had given her shortly before she killed him, and Anna was so upset she lost control and stabbed Shelah on the spot. Smith, the homeless artist, attempted to blackmail one of the others and then was killed by Jessop, who was in unrequited love with Anna and wanted to shield her from being exposed by the critical piece of evidence (a diamond pin of Shelah’s which Anna had stomped on the night of the murder, not realizing that a piece of it had lodged in the high heel of her own shoe) Smith had discovered.
The Black Camel is so good one wishes MacFadden’s other Chan films, Charlie Chan Carries On (an adaptation of Biggers’ fifth and next-to-last Chan novel from 1930 and the first time Oland played Chan) and Charlie Chan’s Greatest Case, survived (he also began the direction of Charlie Chan in Paris in 1935 but was mysteriously fired after just one week of shooting and replaced by the dull hack Lewis Seiler — “a real pity,” I wrote after Charles and I saw that film, “since MacFadden’s sense of atmosphere could have benefited this film, and I suspect the almost Gothic scenes in and around the sewers of Paris (‘Sing, my angel of music!’ Charles couldn’t help but joke, an allusion that wasn’t lost on me either) and some nearby exteriors were MacFadden’s work.”
The collapse of MacFadden’s directorial career after 1937 (he had only two other directorial credits, Inside the Law from 1942 and Youth for the Kingdom, which he also wrote, in 1945) is a real mystery — after that he was mostly reduced to being an actor (he’s in The Black Camel as, appropriately enough, the director of the film Shelah Fane is shooting; and when Fox changed the setting and remade The Black Camel as Charlie Chan in Rio with Sidney Toler in 1941 MacFadden was in the film in the Robert Young role) and did no work in films after 1945 (though he lived until 1977). One wishes MacFadden could have made a directorial comeback in the mid-1940’s since on the strength of his work here he would seem ideally suited for the film noir genre; as it is, his most famous directorial credit was probably Stand Up and Cheer, the 1934 musical starring Behind That Curtain star Warner Baxter and introducing the little girl who would become the biggest movie star of the 1930’s, Shirley Temple. — 9/3/07
•••••
Afterwards I reached into the Charlie Chan boxed set and dug out the earliest of the four films represented (not counting Eran Trece, which was formally only a supplement to the Charlie Chan in Shanghai disc): Charlie Chan in London. I think Charles and I had actually screened this one before after we watched Gosford Park, where it was mentioned, but neither of us had any recollection of it. It’s one of those frustrating movies that takes a potentially great plot premise and accomplishes all too little with it.
Having exhausted all other possibilities, including a judicial appeal and a petition to the Home Secretary, Pamela Gray (Drue Leyton) corners Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) in London and pleads with him to save the life of her brother, murder convict Hugh Gray (Douglas Walton), just three days before he is to be hanged. That gives Chan three days to find the real murderer, since he and we both believe he’s innocent even though Pamela’s boyfriend, attorney Neil Howard (Ray Milland — on the trailer he’s billed as “Ray” but on the actual film’s credits he’s still using the longer form of his first name, “Raymond”), blurts out to Pamela that he’s now convinced her brother was guilty even though he represented Hugh at trial (no wonder he lost!).
The original murder victim was a man named Hamilton, a captain in the Royal Air Force, who was killed in the stable of the country home of Geoffrey Richmond (Alan Mowbray) in the decidedly fictional English county of “Retfordshire.” The usual motley crew of suspects is also staying there, and Chan — after a charming sequence in which he’s shown climbing through Pamela’s window to get in to see her after an overprotective butler has denied him admittance (and a maid goes into racist overdrive and thinks he’s a diabolical Chinaman who’s going to hack them all to bits in their beds!) — reunites everyone who was there that weekend when Hamilton was killed.
Two other people get killed in the three days available and Chan finally traces the murder to an invention Hamilton worked on for the RAF, a way of silencing military aircraft to make them undetectable by an enemy, and reveals that the killer was actually Geoffrey Richmond himself, who in a plot twist screenwriter Philip MacDonald obviously borrowed from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story “His Last Bow,” is revealed actually to be a foreign spy named Frank (that’s his last name) — his country of origin is unspecified but it’s not too difficult to tell what a 1934 audience would have guessed it to be — who was after Hamilton’s secret and was willing to murder him to get it.
Charlie Chan in London is not an especially well-made movie: director Eugene Forde’s pacing is almost soporific in its slowness, there’s no background music underscoring (a surprise since there was underscoring in Eran Trece, made three years earlier) and, as silly as the comic-relief device of having one of Chan’s sons (Keye Luke as Number One Son in the Oland Chans and Victor Sen Yung as Number Two Son in the Fox Tolers) attempt to help his father solve the case and only screw it up, at least that gimmick provided energy and action in the later films in the series; without it, this one seems dull.
What gives Charlie Chan in London its entertainment value is some of the supporting cast — Drue Leyton, whoever she may have been, is excellent, powerfully expressing her torment over the impending execution of her brother, and though I don’t think anyone watching this film would have necessarily predicted future stardom for Ray Milland he’s also quite good as the attorney/boyfriend exasperated by the conflict between his role as Hugh’s attorney and his doubts about his innocence (the scene in which he blurts out his belief that Hugh is guilty and Pamela goes ballistic on him, slapping him and then tearing off his engagement ring and hurling it at his feet, is utterly convincing and far more intense emotionally than one expects from this sort of genteel whodunit), though Douglas Walton can’t decide whether to underact or hysterically overact as the innocent victim facing a date with the hangman — and above all, Oland’s performance. Sidney Toler may have been more credible as a man of action (the point most of the Chanatics who prefer him to Oland cite) but neither he nor any of the other Chans ever matched Oland in portraying Chan’s alienness, his heritage from another culture with a very different philosophical view of time and human nature from those of the West. — 10/9/06
•••••
Charlie Chan in Paris, the next in sequence in the Fox Charlie Chan box after Charlie Chan in London, is actually one of the better entries in the series. For some reason, Hamilton MacFadden started as this film’s director but was replaced in mid-shoot (after one week of a three- to four-week schedule) by Lewis Seiler, a long-time hack mostly known for his work in Warners’ “B” unit — a real pity, since MacFadden’s sense of atmosphere could have benefited this film, and I suspect the almost Gothic scenes in and around the sewers of Paris (“Sing, my angel of music!” Charles couldn’t help but joke, an allusion that wasn’t lost on me either) and some nearby exteriors were MacFadden’s work. (Dan Clark was the cinematographer on MacFadden’s sequences, and Ernest Palmer replaced him when Seiler came in as director.)
At least Seiler’s approach gave the film speed, and the film also benefited by the use of a background score and the debut in the series of Keye Luke as Chan’s Number One Son, Lee — not only because Luke was a fast-paced, energetic performer who added excitement to the film but also because his assimilation to Western culture contrasted markedly with Charlie Chan’s resolute alienness, his heritage from a different culture with a very different philosophical sense of time (the part of the Chan character, as I pointed out in my comments on Charlie Chan in London, that Oland caught better than any actor who’s played him since) — and it helped that the script for this one (by Edward T. Lowe, later a Universal horror writer, and Stuart Anthony based on a story by Philip MacDonald) was a good deal better than most of the Chans and was genuinely mysterious.
The plot deals with a scandal involving the Lamartine Bank of Paris and a scheme to counterfeit its bonds — which must have at least one “inside” player because the bank’s actual CEO, M. Lamartine (Henry Kolker), is signing the fake bonds as well as the real ones. Chan is assigned to investigate, though he has to pretend to be in Paris merely on a vacation, and he’s supposed to contact a fellow agent, a woman named Nardi (Dorothy Appleby) whose cover identity is as an apache dancer in a local café — only Nardi is stabbed by a weird apparition in a tousled wig, thick shades and walking with a cane, who’s supposedly a shell-shocked and doubly disabled (lame and blind) World War I veteran.
The payoff is that the two conspirators in the counterfeit bond racket, “insider” Henri Latouche (Murray Kinnell) and “outsider” Max Corday (played by the fine farceur Erik Rhodes, best known for his comic-relief parts in the Astaire-Rogers films The Gay Divorcée and Top Hat, and surprisingly good as a serious suspect), took turns wearing this disguise and eliminating the people who might threaten their counterfeit bond scheme (though since Rhodes was at least a head taller than Kinnell one would think the changes in the height of the fake “veteran” would have tipped Chan and the other characters off well before the end) while providing each other with alibis for the murders. This is certainly one Chan film for which William Everson’s rather snotty remark about the series as a whole (especially in Oland’s years) — “There was never much mystery about any of the ‘hidden killers’ in the Chan movies, nor much variety in their unmasking” — definitely does not apply! — 10/11/06
•••••
The film was Charlie Chan in Egypt, hailed as the best of the Warner Oland Chans by William K. Everson — he called it “one notable exception to the rather disappointing overall quality of the series” and hailed it for having genuinely suspenseful and even horrific moments, including “some genuinely nightmarish sequences which are still chilling today” — and while I think he overrated it a bit and that some of the other films in the series (notably the rarely seen The Black Camel and the far better known Charlie Chan at the Opera) are even better, it’s still a good entry even though it’s somewhat derivative not only of previous films in the Chan series (Charlie Chan in London in particular) but of other things Hollywood was putting out at the time, especially The Mummy (almost inevitably for a film set in Egypt and dealing with archaeology in the tombs of the Pharoahs and their closest advisors).
Charlie Chan in Egypt is also one of those movies that’s especially intriguing from a degrees-of-separation perspective, since the cast includes not only Warner Oland but also Rita Hayworth (using her original name, Rita Cansino, and playing a rather anonymous Egyptian maidservant — she’s O.K. but no one seeing this film would have been likely to predict that in less than a decade this woman would be a superstar) and Stepin Fetchit, the most unwatchable Black comedian of the 1930’s. At least Mantan Moreland and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson were able to play streetwise as well as stupid, and Willie Best — as put-upon as he was by the same shuffling dumb-Black stereotype — was able to put a little genuine wit in the characterization; Fetchit (it’s noteworthy that, unlike Best, who fought back against producers who wanted to bill him under the equally demeaning sobriquet “Sleep ’n’ Eat,” Fetchit proudly accepted such a ridiculous name) has become emblematic of the whole stereotype and his shaved head, whiny voice and shaky acting skills even within the bizarre limits of his characterization make him awfully hard to take today (though he’s at least dressed appealingly, in a white linen shirt and white shorts, and one can imagine a bulked-up version of his basic physical type on a “Naked Black Men” calendar today).
Charlie Chan in Egypt has lost its original titles and the ones it has now, probably shot for a TV release in the 1950’s, Latino-ize the first name of its director, Louis King, as “Luis” (!). King and cinematographer Daniel Clark manage to evoke the mood of The Mummy in some quite good scenes set in and around ancient Egyptian tombs, including an arresting opening shot in which one member of a party of archaeologists led by Professor Arnold (George Irving) is overcome by fumes as they open the tomb of the high priest Ameti, a major advisor to the Pharoahs of the 20th (or was it the 21st?) dynasty. Then the film cuts to the unlikely sight of Warner Oland as Charlie Chan flying into Egypt in a two-seater plane (obviously used as an excuse to use some aerial stock footage of the Pyramids and Sphinx) and the plot kicks off with Arnold’s daughter Carol (Pat Paterson) and her fiancé, Tom Evans (Thomas Beck), worried that they haven’t heard from Arnold père in over a month, and the only clue they have as to his whereabouts is a letter he allegedly sent them from his next dig site.
From that point on Charlie Chan in Egypt follows the blueprint of Charlie Chan in London pretty closely (the scenarists this time were Robert Ellis and Helen Logan) with a bit of admixture of King Solomon’s Mines (the daughter worried about her dad’s disappearance in the middle of an exotic African country). Most of the film takes place in and around the lavish home of Arnold’s archaeological partner, Professor Thornton (Frank Conroy) — a quite impressive set that may have been recycled from a previous Fox epic set in ancient Egypt (and the tomb sets also looked way too lavish to have been constructed especially for this film) — and the writers introduce a motive for the murder (a French archaeological society that originally underwrote the Arnold-Thornton expedition and later withdrew their financial support nonetheless claims that all the finds not retained by the Egyptian government should go to their own museum, and has assigned Chan to investigate once relics from Ameti’s tomb start turning up in other musea and private collections).
The film also includes a wide gallery of other potential suspects, including Carol Arnold’s brother Barry (James Eagles), who seems to do nothing but get himself photographed Sternberg-style behind the gratings and lattices in the house and play morbid Egyptian melodies on the violin; Dr. Anton Racine (Jameson Thomas), an Egyptian physician who’s been lacing Carol’s cigarettes with a drug called mapouchari, supposedly discovered by the ancient Egyptians and in use since; Racine’s delivery person, Edfa Ahmad (the cadaverous-looking Nigel de Brulier), who when he isn’t running prescriptions for the doc is denouncing Western interlopers digging up the tombs and stealing the national treasures that should belong to Egypt (he sounds awfully modern to me!); and Thornton himself, who to no particular surprise turns out to be the murderer, having discovered a cache of treasure inside Ameti’s tomb and determined to knock off Arnold so he can keep it for himself. There’s also an intriguing scene in which Barry dies suddenly in the middle of his violin solo and Chan finds a hole drilled into the soundboard of his instrument, through which the murderer introduced a vial of poison gas in a thin glass ampule that shattered and delivered the gas full-force into Barry’s nose once he played a note of the right frequency to break it.
The tomb scenes are still genuinely suspenseful and frightening, though Fetchit’s “comedy” — he’s supposedly in Egypt seeking his ancestors (almost 40 years before Alex Haley!), though why he thought his ancestors would have come from an Arab country remains a mystery in the heads of Robert Ellis and Helen Logan — and the leads (personable enough but no match for Ray Milland and Drue Leyton in the almost identical roles in Charlie Chan in London) take this one down a couple of notches despite Clark’s marvelously atmospheric cinematography and the visual magnificence of the sets — and the intriguing battle of wits between Chan and the local Egyptian detective, Fouad Souetda (Paul Porcasi, who usually portrayed the sympathetic owner of the Italian restaurant at which the romantic leads were regulars), who unlike most of the local cops in the Chan adventures not only doesn’t want him involved in helping solve the case but can’t wait to get rid of him. When Chan told him that they had a lot in common, I couldn’t help but joke, “That’s right! We’re both portly First World actors playing Third World policemen!” — 10/15/06
•••••
The film I picked was Charlie Chan in Shanghai, fourth and last of the Warner Oland Chan movies included on the recent 20th Century-Fox DVD box. Dully directed by James Tinling from an original script by Edward T. Lowe (on his way up from Monogram to Universal) and Gerard Fairlie, Charlie Chan in Shanghai took a potentially fascinating pair of premises — the most famous fictional Chinese of the time visiting his homeland in the real China (though, unsurprisingly, the real China is represented here only by some pretty grainy stock footage and process work) and trying to break a worldwide opium smuggling ring — and did all too little with them.
The Chan movies were already hardening into formula (the fact that of the first five Oland Chans all we have are number two, The Black Camel, and the Spanish-language version of number one, Eran Trece a.k.a. Charlie Chan Carries On, makes it virtually impossible to judge the series from its beginnings, though if The Black Camel is indicative of the quality of the first five generally, all of which were based on Earl Derr Biggers’ Chan novels instead of other writers riffing on Biggers’ character, the remaining films are sorely missed): the young couple, with the male (secretary to the heroine’s father, who’s the murder victim in the first reel) being the unjustly accused suspect; the various suspects, most of them rather venerable; and the sinister figure who at first seems an agent of good but ultimately ends up revealed as the mastermind behind the whole plot.
The unjustly accused young man is played by Charlie Locher, who later (like Ray Milland from Charlie Chan in London and Rita Cansino, later Rita Hayworth, from Charlie Chan in Egypt) became a major star, in his case after a name change to Jon Hall and a showcase role in Sam Goldwyn’s 1937 special-effects extravaganza The Hurricane, but all too often he looks like he just stumbled in from the Harbor Inn in his other pre-Hall role in the serial The Clutching Hand. The Lowe-Fairlie script makes too little of the exoticism of the location (a far cry from the work of Robert Ellis and Helen Logan on Charlie Chan in Egypt, which for all its deficiencies at least tapped into the strangeness — to a Western audience — of both ancient and then-modern Egypt) and offers too few chances for Oland to speak Chinese and interact with Chinese characters (other than Keye Luke, providing reliable comic relief as his Number One Son), at least partly because Shanghai in the 1930’s apparently still was largely governed extraterritorially: much of the movie takes place in the British enclave and the police officials Chan works with in solving the case are British, not Chinese.
What makes this film less interesting than it could have been is partly the elaborateness of the gimmicks (the initial victim is killed when he opens a box in which a gun has been placed, set so that the act of opening the box fires the trigger — but the fatal heart wound suffered by the victim depended on his being hunched over the box when he opened it, and if he’d opened it any other way the shot would either just have wounded him or missed him completely) but mainly the dullness of Tinling’s direction; he gets some nice atmospheric shots of the villain’s secret hideout but he’s utterly unable to bring any excitement or pace to the film.
It’s reliable series entertainment, and some of the other Chans around this time are even duller (notably Charlie Chan’s Secret) — and at least it has the quirky appeal of both Warner Oland (with his own voice, presumably — in his role as Al Jolson’s father in The Jazz Singer Oland has the odd distinction of having been the first actor in history whose singing voice was doubled) and Keye Luke singing (for a while it seemed to be turning into Charlie Chan: The Musical), but a lot more could have been done with this concept and even with this script. Incidentally, there’s a quirky mistake in the film: on board the ship to Shanghai Chan receives a note telling him not to get off the ship, or else — but when we see the note again it’s in a different handwriting. — 10/23/06
•••••
I chose the DVD of Charlie Chan’s Secret, a 1936 series entry which the last time I was involved with the Chan movies en masse — when American Movie Classics showed most of the Fox Chans in the early 1990’s and I taped them — had struck me as one of the duller films in the cycle. It still does, despite the promise of its haunted-house setting. It begins in the waters off Chan’s home town of Honolulu, with a team of divers (represented mostly by stock footage) searching a wrecked boat for the remains of Alan Colby, who seven years previously had left his comfortable life as the heir to a fortune in San Francisco to join the French Foreign Legion, had been held prisoner by the Riffs (in other words, he was a member of an occupation coalition in the Middle East who had been apprehended by the resistance!) and had just escaped and was making his way home to reclaim his family’s fortune from his aunt, Henrietta Lowell (Henrietta Crossman, the star of John Ford’s marvelous 1933 film Pilgrimage), and her family: her daughter Alice Lowell (Rosina Lawrence), Alice’s fiancé Dick Williams (Charles Quigley), her accountant Fred Gage (Edward Trevor), his wife Janice (Astrid Allwyn), Henrietta’s long-suffering butler Baxter (Herbert Mundin) and a husband-and-wife team of mediums (media?), Professor Bowan (Arthur Edmund Carewe, who played the undercover cop, “The Persian,” in the silent Phantom of the Opera) and Carlotta (Gloria Roy).
The conceit of this film’s writing committee — Robert Ellis and Helen Logan are credited with the story and co-credited with Joseph Hoffman on the script — is that she’s a genuine medium unknowingly being exploited by her husband, who’s a fake. Another conceit is that the Lowell house is clean, modern and well-maintained, while the Colby house is your standard-issue Universal-style haunted house — decayed, crumbling, full of sinister shadows and secret passages. A Universal director like James Whale could have made something of this setting; alas, the director of Charlie Chan’s Secret, Gordon Wiles, gets one actually effective suspense scene (when Alan Colby returns to the family manse only to be killed when a knife is thrown at him) but otherwise just plods through the filming, wasting the marvelous haunted-house atmospherics of cinematographer Rudolph Maté (a surprisingly prestigious name to see on the credits of a Chan film!). Both Charles and I were having trouble staying awake for this one, no matter how stunning some of Maté’s shots were, and by the time this film lurched to its end and Fred Gage turned out to be the murderer (he’d been cooking the books of the Colby estate and was worried Alan would catch him if he inherited), neither of us really cared. — 8/30/07
•••••
The film I picked was Charlie Chan at the Circus, the first in sequence of the four Chans with Warner Oland in the volume 2 boxed set I just ordered. (I also got volume 4, containing the first four Chan films with Sidney Toler, and given their format of including four films in each box I’m not sure how they’ll manage the rest of the Tolers, since there are only seven of them remaining!) It turned out to be a pretty good movie, a comfortable and well-done whodunit even though “who” dun it wasn’t especially mysterious (indeed, my one doubt over whether the snake-charmer character played by J. Carrol Naish would turn out to be the murderer was a suspicion that writers Robert Ellis and Helen Logan wouldn’t make it that obvious — but they did!), and directed by Harry Lachman, who in a sense was revisiting the territory he’d explored the year before in a more prestigious Fox release, Dante’s Inferno, since the film begins in Dante’s Inferno territory — with a barker hawking the carnival side show at the circus.
Chan arrives with his wife and 12 children (one of the few times we got to see Chan’s entire famously huge family on screen all at once — the only other time I can recall is in The Black Camel, which used the Chan family the way Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers had: as an audience while Chan explained his progress with the case and gave us the exposition needed to keep us abreast of the plot) to a circus merged by the previous owners Joe Kinney (Paul Stanton) and John Gaines (Francis Ford, John Ford’s older brother making one of his rare appearance as an actor in a film not directed by his more famous sibling!). The personnel of the circus come mostly from Gaines’ old show, and recall that they were treated respectfully and paid on time until Kinney bought into the enterprise two years previously, and Kinney holds some of Gaines’ notes and is threatening to foreclose on Gaines’ half of the circus and take the show over completely after the current season.
In an interesting Ellis-Logan variation on the locked-room mystery, Kinney (who had actually been the partner to consult Chan based on some threatening letters he had received — though after Kinney’s death the letters are not found and this part of the plot just gets dropped) is killed inside the locked railroad car that contains the circus’s business office, and it turns out the killer is Caesar, an ape who was falling so far out of control that the circus’s animal trainer, Hal Blake (John McGuire), had recommended that he not be allowed to perform in the big top — which Kinney, of course, ignored.
There are an awful lot of plots and counter-plots going on, including Kinney’s attempt to marry aerialist Marie Norman (Maxine Reiner) despite the fact that he’s already married to the circus’s wardrobe woman, Nellie Farrell (Drue Leyton, playing a disappointingly small role after the marvelous impression she made as the ingénue in Charlie Chan in London), and the motive turns out to be that on May 30, 1935 Kinney witnessed a murder in El Paso committed by Holt (J. Carrol Naish), which was also the date Kinney married Nellie in Ciudad Juárez — and since both claims can’t be true, Chan deduces that Kinney really didn’t marry Nellie and that Holt shot through the trapeze bar from which Marie was performing her act, causing her to fall and get seriously injured (since she was performing without a net), in order to shut her up.
Chan announces that Marie needs an immediate operation and they can’t wait for her to be moved to a hospital, so they have to perform it then and there — and lo and behold, Caesar the ape crashes the impromptu operating room and tries to kill Marie, only the “patient” is a dummy and the whole thing a sham designed by Chan to flush out the killer — who turns out to be, not Caesar the ape, but Holt dressed in an ape costume (an interesting authorial reflection on the fact that the “ape” is pretty obviously a man in an ape suit even in the scenes in which we’re supposed to believe it’s a real ape! Incidentally, did J. Carrol Naish play the “real” ape as well? No other actor is listed for the ape role) — while the real Marie is alive, well and undergoing the operation she needs in a real hospital.
Charlie Chan at the Circus also has some other quite delicious divertissements, including a quite good tango done by real-life little-person couple George and Olive Brasno (who actually get billing on the main title card along with Oland and Keye Luke; Olive Brasno looked enough like Shirley Temple I wondered if she’d been one of the little people who stood in for Temple and thereby sparked the urban legend, which persisted for years, that Temple had actually been an adult little person posing as a child) in the roles of “Col. Tim” and “Lady Tiny,” a nice scene in which Lee Chan (Keye Luke) traces a couple of the baddies by disguising himself in drag and posing as the mother of an “infant” played by Col. Tim (whose cigar smoking gives them away — had Ellis and/or Logan seen the Laurel and Hardy film Sailor, Beware!, which also had a little person, Harry Earles, disguised as a baby and blowing it by smoking a cigar?), and a young Chinese contortionist, Su Toy (Shia Jung), to provide a love (or at least lust) interest for Luke (though we never actually see her contort herself, meaning she was an actress and not an actual circus performer, unlike some of the other cast members recruited from the A. G. Barnes Circus, whose tents, cars and equipment were used while the circus was laying off for the winter), who got to perform a stronger action role than usual in the series.
Charlie Chan at the Circus is also noteworthy for the better-than-usual direction by Lachman, who got some nice atmospheric effects into it (the opening scene shows the shadows of three of the sideshow performer while in the front the barker is hawking their acts) and moving-camera shots (Daniel Clark was the cinematographer), though he couldn’t do much about the script or the performance by Warner Oland, who by this point in the series (it was the11th of his 16 appearances as Chan) had pretty much hardened into clichéd schtick. — 2/28/08
•••••
When we got home Monday night I ran Charles the next Charlie Chan movie from volume 2 of the Fox boxed-set series with Warner Oland: Charlie Chan at the Race Track. Noting that the next one in the box was Charlie Chan at the Opera, Charles noted the coincidence that Chan went to the same two destinations that the Marx Brothers had in their adjoining movies from the same period — though the Marxes went to the opera before they went to the race track.
It was also the first Chan film directed by H. Bruce Humberstone (the “H.” — as Carol Easton found out when she interviewed him for her biography of Sam Goldwyn, for whom he directed Wonder Man — stood for “Harry”) and, though it didn’t have any major guest stars (no established horror icons like Bela Lugosi in The Black Camel or Boris Karloff in Charlie Chan at the Opera and no stars-to-be like Ray Milland in Charlie Chan in London or Rita Hayworth in Charlie Chan in Egypt) it turned out to be one of the better entries in the series, less of a whodunit than usual (there is a typical “puzzle” but for much of the action our attention is kept off the whodunit aspect and on the known baddies, a gang of gamblers stretching nationwide who are involved in a plot to fix a big horse race at “Santa Juanita” — just take the first two letters off the last name and you have the real racetrack where the racing scenes were shot!) and a flatly directed but well-paced, exciting thriller in which Chan is surrounded by a swirl of activity.
The story (by Lou Breslow and Saul Elkins, adapted into a script by Robert Ellis, Helen Logan and Edward T. Lowe) begins in Australia, where horse breeder Major Gordon Kent (George Irving) has just sold his star horse, Avalanche, to his son-in-law, George Chester (Alan Dinehart). Avalanche is scheduled for a big race in Australia and is favored to win, but loses when his jockey, “Tip” Collins (Frankie Darro, who seemed to be playing nothing but crooked jockeys during this period: he was one in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races and in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry), deliberately fouls another horse because the gambling syndicate has paid him $5,000 to do so. He’s caught, ruled out of racing for two years, and stiffed by the gamblers; understandably miffed at having lost his livelihood for nothing, he threatens to go to the authorities and they quietly kill him (indeed, his fate is disposed of in a few lines of dialogue and he never gets within hailing distance of Charlie Chan or anybody else who might actually have been interested in his story).
Meanwhile, Major Kent, George Chester, his wife (Kent’s daughter) Catherine (Gloria Roy) and assorted hangers-on Warren and Alice Fenton (Jonathan Hale and Helen Wood), Bruce Rogers (Thomas Beck), Bagley (Gavin Muir), and Denny Burton (G. P. Huntley, Jr., who had played in Fred Astaire’s stage show Gay Divorce in the part Edward Everett Horton played in the movie) take an ocean liner that stops in Honolulu on its way to Los Angeles — where Charlie Chan receives a ship-to-shore telegram from Kent that he fears for his life and hopes Chan will investigate. By the time the ship docks in Honolulu, Kent is already dead, apparently kicked by Avalanche in the horse’s stall — but Chan goes on board and dedices Kent was murdered by a human being who clubbed him with a winch that would heave a horseshoe-shaped imprint on his body.
From then on the film features a lot of skullduggery on board the ship, including a plot to swap Avalanche for another horse, Gallant Lad (the idea is for the gamblers to bet on Gallant Lad and make a killing when the faster Avalanche, running under Gallant Lad’s name, wins the big handicap at Santa ‘Ju’anita) which Chan sees through when the pet monkey belonging to the Black stable boy, “Streamline” Jones (John Henry Allen, who was obviously being groomed by Fox to take over the Stepin Fetchit roles in case the original started demanding too much money), reacts violently to the supposed Gallant Lad. (It’s previously been established that the monkey was friends with Gallant Lad and it was Avalanche the primate hated.)
There’s also a series of threatening notes, all typed with the same typewriter (its “e” is filled in and its “r” hits above the baseline) and dropped seemingly at random in the laps of all the principals — later it’s revealed that Chan wrote all the notes but the first one, in an effort to find out who wrote the original by how they reacted when they got them — and a final fillip involving the camera mechanisms at the track that give the results in so-called “photo-finish” races, Director Humberstone was apparently given to explanations of the high-tech of his day — there’s a brief (half-hour) documentary on him as the “special feature” on the Charlie Chan at the Opera disc and his daughter explains that he was a gadget freak and loved to stop his films in their tracks to insert an account of the workings of some new high-tech gizmo — though in this movie the gimmick also relates to the plot: one of the guys operating the camera is in the pay of the gamblers and he’s substituted a drugged dart in the camera at the three-quarter mark so if Avalanche, despite the crooks’ best efforts, is leading then the baddies can shoot him and render him unconscious before the finish line.
There’s also a kidnapping in which the gamblers (led by director Humberstone in a cameo) hold Chan in a hotel room, but he escapes in time to get to the track for the big race and, using his son Lee (Keye Luke, who has more to do than usual in this movie — including carrying on long conversations with Chan in Chinese so the others around them can’t understand) as a distraction (he has Lee fill a laundry truck with fireworks and sets them off so he can sneak into the paddock and switch Avalanche and Gallant Lad back to their real identities), Chan witnesses the race. Jockey Eddie Brill (Frank Coghlan, Jr.), sidelined from racing by a previous injury, emerges to ride Avalanche after all the other jockeys at the track are scared away by the death threats, Avalanche gets stuck with the dart but still wins, and in the end Chan establishes that Major Kent was killed by his son-in-law George Chester, who was in cahoots with the gamblers (he went along with switching the horses because then he could bet on his own horse under the underdog’s identity and get a bigger payoff) and had to kill Kent because he would have instantly recognized which horse was which.
Charlie Chan at the Race Track is actually one of the better series entries; though not a particularly atmospheric director (Humberstone’s daughter said he particularly loved film noir and I Wake Up Screaming was his favorite of his films, but the movie is plodding and not alive to the potential of the marvelous story and cast), at least knew how to keep a story moving, and Charlie Chan at the Race Track, though it lacks the wonderful atmospherics of The Black Camel, also isn’t as dull as some of the other entries in the series (notably Charlie Chan’s Secret) and, as Charles pointed out, offered a large enough pool of suspects so the denouement was genuinely mysterious — though I had my suspicions about the husband through much of it and should have been able to nail it down, if only because Alan Dinehart’s portrayal was at his most unctuous! — 3/5/08
•••••
Last night Charles and I followed up Charlie Chan at the Race Track with Charlie Chan at the Opera, which was long my favorite film in the series partly because Boris Karloff was in it and partly because of its operatic setting. It was the only one I actually purchased on VHS (as opposed to recording off cable), in an edition by a short-lived Fox subsidiary called Key Video that was actually better packaged than the current DVD, with a clever fold-out cover listing the whodunit elements of the movie — “The Case,” “The Suspects,” “The Motives,” “The Clues” and “The Questions” — to challenge the viewer to solve the mystery ahead of the characters. (When I searched for it on imdb.com, the image illustrating their page on it was from the Key Video VHS edition, not the current DVD.)
Scripted by Charles Belden and Scott Darling from a story by Bess Meredyth (a somewhat more prestigious writer than usually represented in the Chan series), Charlie Chan at the Opera begins by a direct reference to Charlie Chan at the Race Track — the head of the Los Angeles Police Department personally thanks Chan for busting the gambling syndicate behind the killings there — though the actual opening scene takes place in the sort of weather Karloff’s movies usually began in, the proverbial dark and stormy night, at a sanitarium in which a patient who was suffering from amnesia and has never revealed (or himself discovered) his own identity in the seven years he was there is suddenly jogged back into consciousness of who he is by the sight of a picture of prima donna Lilli Rochelle (Margaret Irving) in a newspaper announcing her coming Los Angeles appearances with the touring San Carlo Opera Company. (At the time touring opera companies actually existed in the U.S. and made enough money at least to stay in business and pay their personnel.)
Before that we see the (presumed) madman — Boris Karloff, of course — sitting at a piano in the asylum’s rec room and singing in a baritone voice (Karloff’s own, according to his biographers) that, though it wouldn’t have kept Nelson Eddy awake at nights worrying about the competition, was not only competent but surprisingly strong. The police, headed by Sergeant Kelly (William Demarest, thinner and lankier than we remember him from his later films or My Three Sons but still a quite effective comic foil for Chan) and Inspector Regan (Guy Usher), can’t figure out what story in the paper set off the escapee, but Chan figures it out and hangs out at the San Carlo Opera Company, which is performing a piece called Carnival (written especially for the film by Oscar Levant, with a libretto by William Kernell — the text was written in English but is sung in the film in Italian, and Levant said he never found out who did the translation) when its personnel aren’t engaging in enough off-screen intrigues that their private lives could be turned into an effective opera themselves. Rochelle is having an affair with baritone Enrico Borelli (Gregory Gaye), whose wife Anita (Nedda Harrigan, later Mrs. Joshua Logan) is understandably miffed — as is Lilli’s husband, Whitely (Frank Conroy).
Seven years previously, Rochelle had been married to another company baritone, Gravelle; she and Enrico Borelli had plotted to kill him by locking him inside a burning building — only he was rescued in time, alive and well physically but with no memory of who he was. Naturally, this is Karloff’s character. During the night’s performance of Carnival, Gravelle dresses up in the costume of his old role — as the Devil! — intending to put Barelli out of commission, take over the role himself and thereby shock Lilli into confessing her role in his attempted murder. Both Lilli and Barelli are murdered during the course of the first act, and not surprisingly the rest of the cast wants to call it a night and go home, but the police announce that they’re not letting anyone leave the theatre and the performers might as well go on to finish the opera since both they and the audience (who, peculiarly, are never seen or heard from during the film!) are literally captive.
There’s a scene featuring one of the technological gizmos director H. Bruce Humberstone was so fond of — this time a detailed explanation of how a wire photo is transmitted and developed — as Chan sends to a Chicago newspaper for a photo of Gravelle and thereby establishes the identity of the Karloff character. (Interestingly, 12 years later another 20th Century-Fox mystery film, Call Northside 777, prominently featured a wire photo transmission in its climax.) The second act goes on with Anita Borelli filling in for Lilli Rochelle and Gravelle singing his original role, and when it concludes with the investigation still inconclusive Chan ends up asking the company to sing the first act again. The police shoot Gravelle but fortunately the bullet only grazes him — fortunately because Chan deduces that the real killer of Lilli Rochelle and Enrico Borelli was Anita Borelli, who had never forgiven them for their affair and saw a way to knock them both off and frame the “escaped lunatic” for the crime. Gravelle ends up on the road to recovery, both physical and mental, and reunited with his daughter Kitty (Charlotte Henry), who had been hanging around most of the movie with her on-screen boyfriend without us having a clear idea who she was or why she was there.
Charlie Chan at the Opera has some intriguing connections with other films; it’s a “doubles” movie, for one (both Warner Oland and Boris Karloff had played Dr. Fu Manchu); and at least two of the cast members put everybody else in the film one degree of separation from several superstar comics: Margaret Irving had portrayed Margaret Dumont’s social rival in the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers and Charlotte Henry had acted with W. C. Fields in the 1933 Paramount Alice in Wonderland (a much better film than its reputation and an obvious precursor to The Wizard of Oz) and with Laurel and Hardy in the 1934 Babes in Toyland. Interestingly, the title card actually bills the lead actors as “Warner Oland vs. Boris Karloff in Charlie Chan at the Opera,” but there’s no real confrontation between the two: they don’t appear together until 52 minutes into this 72-minute movie and they can hardly be said to be at cross purposes since the denouement is Chan proving Gravelle innocent of the murders.
It’s a reliable Karloff performance rather than a brilliant one (he certainly doesn’t add as much to this movie as Lugosi did to The Black Camel!), but he acts with his usual power and authority — and his singing voice is quite good, far better than the one belonging to Boretti (whether Gregory Gaye’s or a double’s). Oscar Levant’s faux opera is also quite entertaining — certainly a lot better than the Tchaikovsky pastiches Nelson Eddy got stuck with in several of his films (for Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald the MGM music department had to come up with fake operas because almost no real ones feature romantic duets for soprano and baritone!) — and director Humberstone actually gets some nice atmospherics into the dark-stormy-night scene of Karloff’s escape before settling into his sprightly slovenliness.
The “special feature” mini-doc on Humberstone on this DVD did its best to establish him as at least a major second-tier director (wisely they didn’t try to put him on the pedestal along with his former employer, John Ford!) but it was hard for them to get away with that: Humberstone’s movies are always entertaining and rarely dull, but William K. Everson said of him that “through his career [he] was always to be too relaxed when handed a murder mystery, even so heady a one as I Wake Up Screaming” (given the marvelous performance Josef von Sternberg got out of Victor Mature the same year in The Shanghai Gesture, it’s fascinating to imagine I Wake Up Screaming with Sternberg as director!), and Carol Easton was even harder on him in her Goldwyn bio:
“Actors who have been directed by Humberstone contend that he hustled them so hard that they didn’t know what they were doing. His pictures were assembly-line productions from start to finish. Which is precisely why he was in such demand. There was an enormous market for low-budget ‘B’ pictures, companion features for the biggies, and somebody had to direct them. Who? John Ford wasn’t about to, not for any amount of money — nor was Willy Wyler or King Vidor or any other aesthetically oriented director. But more often than anyone cares to admit, artistic talent was subsidized by the commercially profitable hack work of the Lucky Humberstones, who could turn out a feature-length picture using less than 200,000 feet of film, retakes and all [though John Ford made How Green Was My Valley, a prestigious ‘A’ picture that beat out Citizen Kane for the Academy Award, with only 100,000 feet of film — which astonished his cinematographer, Arthur Miller, when the Fox lab informed him after the shoot that he had drawn so little raw stock on the project — M.G.C.] — as opposed to a George Stevens, whose artistic discrimination might require a million.
“’I don’t know why they call him Lucky,’ a producer said to me. ‘He’s always been such a loser.’ The nickname took hold after Humberstone miraculously survived a horrendous car accident. But on reflection, it’s not at all inappropriate. For a man of average intelligence, without noticeable talent or charm, to have directed six-figure productions starring Betty Grable and other household words — what better name than Lucky? … I did not have the courage to ask H. Bruce Humberstone whether he considers himself a success, or what he did with all that money, or even how he spends his time. I did ask, as he stood there expectantly with that terrible two-o’clock-in-the-morning look in his eyes, what the H. stands for.
“It stands for Harry.” — 3/5/08
•••••
When we returned I ran him the final Warner Oland Charlie Chan DVD we hadn’t screened previously, Charlie Chan at the Olympics, a 1937 release that used official footage of the 1936 Berlin Olympics provided by the German government (which meant that H. Bruce Humberstone essentially had Leni Riefenstahl as his second-unit director!) for the climax of a tale involving a robotic control mechanism for airplanes whose inventor, Cartwright (John Eldredge), expresses the hope that the device would enable future wars to be fought entirely by machinery without the loss of actual human life.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of skullduggery surrounding the invention, including sinister arms dealer Arthur Hughes (C. Henry Gordon); his vampy girlfriend Yvonne Roland (Katherine DeMille, you-know-who’s niece); Richard Masters (Allan Lane), the fine, upstanding test pilot and Olympic athlete she was assigned to seduce; Richard’s understandably jealous girlfriend, Betty Adams (Pauline Moore); Hopkins (Jonathan Hale), owner of the airplane company testing the device; Edwards (David Horsley), the pilot who takes up the plane with the robot device on the test flight in which it’s hijacked and he’s killed; and Miller (O. G. “Dutch” Hendrian), the hijacker who is eventually killed himself, his body found in Yvonne’s room, which kicks off Chan’s investigation.
Chan’s son Lee (Keye Luke) is a swimmer on the U.S. Olympic team and so he’s sailing to Berlin on the S.S. Manhattan with the other principals, and Chan charts out a way to catch up with them by flying from Hawai’i to the U.S. mainland on the China Clipper, then on another airliner from San Francisco to New York and finally on the Hindenburg (which had already crashed and burned on its infamous final flight by the time this film was released) to Germany. While there Chan allies with sympathetic Captain Strasser (Fredrik Vogeding) of the Berlin police (he’s dressed in a Kaiser-era dress uniform and presented as a good guy, a surprise to anyone who’s seen the film Casablanca, in which the character named Strasser was a black-hearted Nazi villain played by Conrad Veidt in his last role!) to trace the sinister Charles Zaraka (Morgan Wallace), who’s after the device and who himself gets killed.
There are a lot of bullets fired through the windows of the people who presumably hold the device, and a plot in which Chan supposedly recovers the device but in fact keeps it and fakes a package to send to Zaraka as a trap — and the ridiculous denouement reveals that Cartwright, the inventor, is the killer (if he wanted to sell the invention on the open market and make himself a killing — which was supposedly his motive — why didn’t he simply do so instead of going through the whole rigmarole of supposedly offering it to the U.S. government through Hopkins’ company?).
Despite that lapse, the script by veteran Chan scenarists Robert Ellis and Helen Logan (from a story by Paul Burger) is exciting and keeps the interest, and Humberstone was a stronger director than anyone assigned to the Chan films since Hamilton MacFadden; though he lacks a sense of atmosphere and doesn’t have much of a flair for composition (when the film starts cutting in some of the stunning images from Riefenstahl’s Olympia towards the end the gulf between the two directors in terms of visual imagination is all too apparent), he does know how to keep a script like this moving and maintain excitement instead of letting the film degenerate into a dull talk-fest the way some of the Oland Chans (notably Charlie Chan’s Secret) did — and there’s a cute but still reasonably astringent performance by Layne Tom, Jr. as Chan’s second son (a part that would be played by Victor Sen Yung in the Sidney Toler Chans to come).
Overall, the Humberstone-directed Chans do seem to stand a cut above some of the others in the Oland series (the way the Toler Chans directed by Norman Foster did above his others), and as Charles pointed out it was probably because he took them quite a bit more seriously than the other Chan directors did: though he wasn’t an especially creative director (not even an especially creative “B” director the way Robert Florey or Edgar G. Ulmer were!), he did have a real sense of commitment to his films and a flair for a kind of insouciant approach to action and thrills that stood him well in the Chan assignments. — 3/9/08
•••••
I picked out Charlie Chan on Broadway, a relatively late (1937) entry in the Warner Oland phase of the series and a pretty good movie. The writing committee on this one — Art Arthur, Robert Ellis and Helen Logan, story; Charles Belden (later The Strange Mr. Gregory and House of Wax) and Jerry Cady, script — actually gave it a flavor of screwball comedy as well as murder mystery, and whoever cast it did so majorly against type — one of the thugs, Buzz Moran, is played by paternal Leon Ames; while Harold Huber, usually cast as a gangster, this time plays a cop, Inspector Nelson, the white guy who makes all the mistakes and has to rely on Chan to find the killer.
The victim this time around is Billie Bronson (Louise Henry), a Broadway entertainer who was jilted by a gangster, Hottentot Club owner Johnny Burke (Douglas Fowley) and paid by him to leave the country, only she’s sneaked back — on the same ship as Chan and his number-one son Lee (Keye Luke) — and a rat-faced man (Marc Lawrence) locks her in her bathroom on board ship and searches her room frantically for a diary which, if it becomes public, will expose the major organized criminals in New York City. Needless to say, she gets killed, though not before she’s hidden the diary in Lee Chan’s trunk. There’s a wide variety of gangster characters and also a couple of ingénues, aggressive reporter “Speed” Patten (Donald Wood) and paparraza Joan Wendall (Joan Marsh), who got a picture of Billie sneaking off the boat when she was supposed to be out of the country, and Patten’s editor Murdock (J. Edward Bromberg) — an ironic character name indeed for a newspaper editor in a movie now owned by media über-tycoon Rupert Murdoch!
In the end it turns out that “Speed” is the murderer — he wanted to kill Billie before her diary exposed his practice of shaking down the rich and famous — an ending which certainly gives the lie to William K. Everson’s claim that there was never any particular mystery about whodunit in these films. I probably would have liked Charlie Chan on Broadway better if I’d been more awake and alert (as it was it kept me up until midnight), but as it was it seemed appealing even though a bit routine. Incidentally, the print we were watching was prefaced with a warning that it had been pieced together from the best available sources, and both Charles and I groaned in grim anticipation of what that usually means. Surprise: aside from a couple of scenes that showed just the beginning of nitrate dissolution, the film as a whole was crisp and clear, an impeccable transfer of a 1937 original in remarkably good shape. — 8/29/07
•••••
The film we picked was the last one in the Charlie Chan boxed set, volume 3 (and, interestingly, this and its two predecessors contain all 12 of the Chans with Warner Oland known to exist): Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, a 1937 production (released 1938) and not only Warner Oland’s last Charlie Chan film but his last film, period. (He began production on another Chan, Charlie Chan at the Ringside, in January 1938 but had a dispute with Twentieth Century-Fox, quit the film, went to his native Sweden and died there in August 1938 as he was scheduled to return to Hollywood. Charlie Chan at the Ringside was later rewritten as a Mr. Moto vehicle, Mr. Moto’s Gamble, and after Oland’s death Fox revived the series a year later with Charlie Chan in Honolulu, casting Sidney Toler in the role after having tested Leo Carrillo — who would have been terrible — and Cy Kendall, who’d already played Chan on a radio series and would have been great.
Incidentally, Oland and Toler both appear in Josef von Sternberg’s films with Marlene Dietrich: Oland as an Austrian in Dishonored and a Chinese in Shanghai Express and Toler as a detective in Blonde Venus — and Shanghai Express also features the wife of a third Chan, Sojin.) William K. Everson, who didn’t think much of the Oland Chans in general, called Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo “by far the weakest of his group, possibly due to his own ill health, but largely because of the excessive footage given to the overacted French [sic] policeman of Harold Huber, and perhaps too because the old team was getting a little bored,” but I found the film quite engaging and enjoyable even though the comic relief — not only Huber’s foofiness as Joubert, chief of the Monaco police, but Keye Luke’s stumbles with the French language and Louis Mercier’s comic taxi driver whose cab is given to minor explosions that stall it completely — seems at times to overwhelm the mystery plot.
Also, precious little is made of the potential of Monte Carlo as a location — the casino looks like they simply used one of Fox’s standing sets of a high-class restaurant and moved in one table each for roulette and baccarat (one wishes they could have done what RKO did for the ending of Stingaree and rented from Universal the spectacular set of the Monte Carlo casino Erich von Stroheim had had built for Foolish Wives) and the intrigue doesn’t have anything to do with gambling, as Charles had (not surprisingly) expected. It opens at the baccarat table, surely enough, but it’s really about finance as two of Europe’s greatest stock speculators, Paul Savarin (Edward Raquello) and Victor Karnoff (Sidney Blackmer), are equally vicious rivals at the card table and in the market.
The plot hinges on Karnoff’s plan to dump his $1 million worth of “metallurgical bonds” on the market and therefore drive the price down so Savarin’s holdings of the same investment become virtually worthless, and the murder — which Chan and his Number One Son Lee stumble on while walking through the Monegasque countryside after their cab has broken down (again) — is of Karnoff’s bank messenger, who was transporting the bonds to the stock market in Paris for sale. Naturally, the bonds themselves are stolen — though Karnoff files an insurance claim and receives their value almost immediately — and they’re recovered in the hotel room of bartender Al Rogers (George Lynn), who’s been blackmailing Karnoff’s wife Joan (Kay Linaker) because they were actually married earlier; she assumed he had divorced her and therefore married Karnoff, but then he turned up, alive and still legally her husband, in Monaco and forced her to steal $25,000 in the metallurgical bonds for him as his pay-off.
Also among the red herrings is Evelyn Grey (Virginia Field), a gold-digger who has been dating Karnoff’s secretary, Gordon Chase (Robert Kent), but also seeing Savarin on the side. From the opening reel it was all too easy to peg Gordon as the murderer -— if only because he had his hair combed so differently from any of the other male characters and he presented an overbearing manner that made him seem capable of violence — though it’s not until the very end that the writing committee, Robert Ellis and Helen Logan (story) and Charles Belden and Jerry Cady (script), bother to explain his motive: at an earlier time he’d stolen $200,000 worth of the metallurgical bonds himself and sold them to lavish the money on Evelyn, only to have her desert him for the genuinely rich Savarin, so he stole the bonds and killed the bank messenger intending to replace the $200,000 worth he’d previously stolen from the issues Karnoff had marked for sale — only Karnoff still had the record of the issue numbers (which Gordon had tried to destroy by burning a trash can full of papers, which he thought contained that record but did not) and therefore the plot unraveled.
Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo isn’t especially mysterious, but much of the “comic relief” is genuinely funny (for a change), Joubert turns out to have a brain behind all the foofiness, and the final scene is a quite moving leave-taking in which Joubert says his good-byes to Chan … which, given that this was in fact Warner Oland’s last film, comes off as a heart-rending tribute to the actor as well as his character, a rare moment of frame-crossing beauty in a series that for the most part was enjoyable formula entertainment but little more. — 9/8/07
•••••
Afterwards I told Charles I wanted to run us another movie just as a palate cleanser, and so I broke open the fourth Charlie Chan boxed set from 20th Century-Fox and brought out Charlie Chan in Honolulu, released January 13, 1939 and the first film in the Chan series in which Sidney Toler replaced the late Warner Oland as Chan. H. Bruce Humberstone returned as director, which helped (the much weaker Eugene Forde had done the last two Oland Chans, Charlie Chan on Broadway and Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo) and screenwriter Charles Belden ramped up the camp aspects of the series, replacing the usual dumb Black servant with dumb white servant Al Hogan (Eddie Collins), who’s in charge of a large shipment of animals bound for the San Francisco Zoo on the freighter Susan B. Jennings — including a lion named Oscar whom he not only lets runs loose but actually sleeps with.
Also ramping up the camp level are the long scenes in which Chan’s Number Two Son, Lee Chan (Sen Yung — in his other films he was usually billed as Victor Sen Yung but Fox generally left his Anglo first name off the credits of the Chans) impersonates Charlie Chan when he takes the call from police inspector Rawlins (Paul Harvey) to investigate a murder aboard the Susan B. Jennings of a man whose identification tags were systematically stripped from him after he was killed. Also on board the ship are Dr. Cardigan — a mad scientist who’s kept alive a severed human brain and is played by George Zucco as a parody of the roles he was usually associated with — as well as a pair of ingénues, Judy Hayes (Phyllis Brooks) and ship’s officer George Randolph (John King) and an unscrupulous widow, Carol Wayne (a dark-haired Claire Dodd), as well as a pair of crooks fleeing Chinese justice, one of whom (Richard Lane) is masquerading as the cop who’s arrested the other (Marc Lawrence).
The gimmick is that Judy was supposed to be carrying $300,000 in cash to be paid to a mysterious contact who’d be giving her a wedding ring as a signal, and the contact she was supposed to give the money to was the man who was later murdered — and turns out to be the still-alive husband of Carol Wayne, whose real name is Elsie Hillman and who is murdered before she can tell the secret. The secret is that the ship’s captain (Robert Barrat — we should have known!) was really the killer; he decided to steal the $300,000 by killing its rightful owner and then put back $10,000 of it in Judy’s room to frame her for the crime.
As usual in a Humberstone Chan, the villain is unmasked with a technological gimmick — Chan rigs up a camera to take a flash photo in the dark of the criminal reaching for a gun which supposedly contains fingerprints which will incriminate him or her (though the fingerprints were actually too smudged to be of use — which given the way we’ve seen Hogan handle the gun in an earlier scene is not at all hard to believe!) — and Cardigan emerges on the side of good when he helps Chan develop the incriminating photo. Charlie Chan in Honolulu was well received when it was new — audiences quickly found they could accept the new actors and not pine for the absences of the dead Warner Oland and the departed Keye Luke — and though at times it’s too funny for its own good, it’s a nice bit of casual entertainment and Toler, though not in Oland’s league at playing an alien from a different culture with a very different idea of time, is still a good Chan and well worth watching in the role. — 3/26/08
•••••
I ran him the second 20th Century-Fox Charlie Chan movie with Sidney Toler, Charlie Chan in Reno, which had its moments but was hardly the film it could have been with a basically interesting (though way too convoluted) story and a good cast. Interestingly, three of the supporting cast members themselves played famous movie crimefighters: Ricardo Cortez was Sam Spadein the 1931 Maltese Falcon, Morgan Conway was Dick Tracy in the first two of RKO’s four mid-1940’s “B”’s (Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy vs. Cueball) and Robert Lowery was Batman in the second (and far inferior) of the two Columbia serials, The Adventures of Batman and Robin, in 1948.
The story draws Chan to America’s divorce capital, not because he’s jettisoning his own spouse (after she gave him 12 kids, I would hope not!) but to try to save Mary Whitman (Pauline Moore), wife of his friend and Honolulu resident Curtis Whitman (Republic serial veteran Kane Richmond — who, come to think of it, played the Spider and therefore adds yet another famous crimefighter to the résumés of this cast!), from the charge of murdering obnoxious drunk divorcée Jeanne Bently (Louise Henry) after Jeanne served notice on Mary that she planned to marry Curtis as soon as Mary’s divorce went through.
The story had its basis in a tale called “Death Makes a Decree” by a semi-major writer, Philip Wylie, but it rather plods along and the scenarists, Albert Ray, Frances Hyland and the ubiquitous Robert E. Kent (who got so many credits over the years I had no trouble believing the anecdote about him by cinematographer Richard Kline in the winter 2007/2008 issue of Films of the Golden Age: “As fast as he could type, that’s how fast the script came out. I’d walk by his little office, the door would be open, and he’d say, ‘Oh, hi, Richard!’ and we’d talk about [say] a ballgame from the night before, and he’d still keep typing while we were talking about the ballgame!”), throw us way too many characters and red herrings — including a man at the “Hotel Sierra” where most of the action (such as it is) takes place, who may or may not have killed Jeanne in the process of robbing her of her winnings at the hotel’s casino) — and cut to a plodding, ridiculous scene set inside a ghost town which gives director Norman Foster a chance at some night atmospherics but otherwise offers little and pretty much stops the plot dead in its tracks (its only point is to establish that one of the characters is a mining engineer and therefore has access to nitric acid, which one of the characters wanted to use to ruin another’s face and the other — Miss Vivian Wells, the hotel’s terminally chirpy social director, played well by Phyllis Brooks in an otherwise pretty anonymous cast — killed her to keep this from happening).
Charlie Chan in Reno spared us (for the most part) the camp that weakened the first Toler Chan, Charlie Chan in Honolulu, though it still offered an especially embarrassing introduction for Victor Sen Yung as Chan’s Number Two Son: he’s portrayed as a student at USC and, when he hears his father is coming to Reno, borrows a car from a classmate and drives it there — only to be robbed by two hitchhikers he made the mistake of picking up, who steal not only his money but his (borrowed) car and even his clothes, so he’s picked up by the police wearing nothing but his undies and Chan, sitting in on the lineups of the Reno police, suddenly recognizes his son and mumbles a Chanorism about how he is “embarrassed to admit same” when his son asks Chan to confirm his identity and their relationship. (Then a drunk in the same lineup who doesn’t look at all Chinese adopts a mincing pidgin voice and even pushes up his eyelids manually in an attempt to convince the dumb police that he’s Chan’s number three son.)
Charlie Chan in Reno has its moments — Toler, though not as good in the role as Warner Oland, is still good; Cortez has a wonderfully oily role as the hotel’s in-house doctor (who regards romancing the divorcèes-to-be as a perk of his job); Phyllis Brooks manages to do a credible scene at the end when she finally confesses; but the rest of the cast is pretty mediocre and the writers don’t even nail down completely whether the estranged Whitmans get back together at the fadeout or not. Fortunately, better was on the way: Fox’s next Chan film, Charlie Chan on Treasure Island, was by far the best of the Toler series, with Cesar Romero a powerful and charismatic villain. — 4/21/08
•••••
I ran us the film Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, the next in sequence in volume four of 20th Century-Fox’s DVD reissues of the Chan movies and, to my mind, the best of the Sidney Toler Chans even though the first time I saw it I guessed the identity of the villain midway through. Directed by Norman Foster from an “original” story and script by John Larkin, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island was set against the backdrop of the 1939-40 World’s Fair in San Francisco, actually held on an artificial island built in San Francisco Bay between San Francisco and Oakland and accessible only via the recently completed San Francisco Bay Bridge. (During World War II the island was appropriated by the U.S. Navy for a base, and they’ve been on it ever since, so it’s been inaccessible to the general public.)
The characters begin the movie by flying in from Honolulu on the China Clipper — in a nice ironic touch, Charlie Chan is reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island during the flight — with Chan’s Number Two Son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung) alternately getting airsick and having dire thoughts of the plane crashing and taking them all down with it, and Larkin’s script effectively introducing us to the other principals on board the plane: Thomas Gregory (Douglass Dumbrille — billed here without the final “s” on his first name), an insurance actuary and quite obvious red herring; and Paul Essex (Louis Jean Heydt, whose blond good looks and interesting personality should have given him a bigger career than he had), a friend of Chan’s and a mystery novelist who’s just completed his latest book, an exposé of phony spiritualists in the guise of suspense fiction.
Essex receives a radiogram aboard the plane threatening him if he denounces San Francisco’s reigning fake psychic, “Dr. Zodiac” — and sure enough, he dies on board the plane and Chan has the task of breaking the news to his widow Stella (Sally Blane, real-life sister of Loretta Young) when they land. Gregory steals the attaché case in which Essex was carrying the manuscript of his novel (which he was actually shown finishing on a portable typewriter on the plane), Chan is the victim of a mock “kidnapping” by two of his old friends in the San Francisco Police Department, and the other dramatis personae include reporter Pete Lewis (Douglas Fowley, in what was probably the most sympathetic part he got until he played the male lead in Lady in the Death House), who’s also trying to expose Dr. Zodiac; and Rhadini the Great (Cesar Romero), a stage magician who performs at the Temple of Magic at the World’s Fair and, like his real-life namesake Houdini (obviously John Larkin’s inspiration for this character), has offered a large reward to any spiritualist who performs a feat Rhadini can’t duplicate with the skills and equipment of a stage magician.
Chan, Lewis and Rhadini (in disguise) visit Dr. Zodiac’s séance room — investigating the mysterious deaths of four of Zodiac’s clients, which Chan suspects are due to Zodiac’s having blackmailed them with revelations they gave him during their readings — and Chan eventually discovers that Zodiac’s costume is padded inside to make him look like a larger man than he really is. Meanwhile, though Rhadini is in the business of exposing fake mystics, his act includes his girlfriend Eve Cairo (Pauline Moore), a real mind-reader, and it all comes to a climax at the Temple of Magic, where Chan — having in the meantime raided Zodiac’s home and burned the files of information with which he was blackmailing people (apparently his reading has encompassed not only Stevenson but Dashiell Hammett’s “The Scorched Face,” which has a similar denouement) — stages a confrontation between Rhadini and Zodiac. The person in the Zodiac costume is killed and turns out to be Zodiac’s servant Abdul , and though Rhadini is supposedly wounded in the confrontation it turns out that he is Zodiac and had used Abdul to wear the Zodiac costume and thus make it seem as if they were two different people, then faked the wound with a knife concealed in his magic wand.
Charlie Chan at Treasure Island is way ahead of its two predecessors in the Toler Chan series for several reasons. First is Cesar Romero’s marvelous portrayal of the villain, even though he’s so smarmy and self-righteous throughout the whole movie that even when he’s being portrayed as a sympathetic character you still get the impression that he’s up to no good. It also helps that the director is Norman Foster (a cut above the hacks like Eugene Forde and Louis King that directed most of the Warner Oland Chans) and that most of the action takes place at night. There’s comic relief but at least it’s controlled — it doesn’t seem to take over the whole movie and turn it into a camp-fest the way it did in the scripts for Charlie Chan in Honolulu and Charlie Chan in Reno — and for once even Victor Sen Yung (a perfectly competent actor but hardly at Keye Luke’s level) is genuinely funny, especially when he assumes a preposterous disguise in a doomed effort to fool his dad as to his true identity.
My recollection of the rest of the Toler Chans is that they were quite entertaining even though they slipped into formula pretty quickly (especially Sen Yung’s antics) and they were probably better movies than the Oland Chans — certainly directors like Foster and H. Bruce Humberstone (who I believe was the only person who directed both Oland and Toler as Chan) made the films faster-moving and got the draggy exposition parts out of the way relatively quickly — though Oland remains the best Chan precisely because he was the most successful at creating the impression that he was a different sort of person from a very different culture with a different sense of time, and the clashes between him and Luke (between the immigrant and the U.S.-born and assimilated generation which followed) seem more effective than those between Toler (who simply doesn’t look or act as convincingly Asian as Oland had!) and Sen Yung.
The Chans have been raked over the coals for their stereotypical depictions of Asians and the refusal of Fox (and, later, Monogram) to cast an Asian actor in the role (though the two Chan films made in the silent era, The House Without a Key and The Chinese Parrot, did use Asian stars — Japanese actors George Kuwa and Kamiyama Sojin, respectively), but frankly they hold up quite well and it’s hard to accuse them of racism since in every film it’s the Asian detective who’s the smart one and the white cops who reach to the most obvious, but incorrect, conclusions about the cases. — 4/27/08
•••••
The night before Charles and I had watched Charlie Chan in City in Darkness — that being what it said on the DVD box, a rather awkward title and not necessarily the best transcription of what the opening card actually said (“Charlie Chan in City in Darkness, with Sidney Toler”); the American Film Institute Catalog listed it simply as City in Darkness. It’s the last movie in the fourth volume of Charlie Chan DVD’s from 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment (and the first one with Toler rather than Warner Oland as Chan) and it’s a potentially interesting movie that could have been a lot better than it was.
Though not released until November 1939 — after World War II had started, which makes the supposedly prescient last line (the French police officials are high-fiving each other at how the agreement between Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich has averted war and Chan says, “A wise man once said, ‘Beware of spider who invites fly into his place for tea’”) not quite as prescient as it sounded; most likely it was added to an otherwise finished film after the war began, like the endings of The Four Just Men and Foreign Correspondent — the movie is actually pretty dramatic when it opens with newsreel footage of Hitler, Chamberlain, French president Edouard Daladier and others, along with scenes of the Sudetenland and the German tanks rolling in to occupy it. (After reading Leonard Mosley’s history of this period, On Borrowed Time, it was especially thrilling to see this footage, even in the ahistorical context of opening a Charlie Chan movie.)
The scene then shifts to a French hotel room, where villainess Charlotte Ronnell (Dorothy Tree) is arranging a delivery of French munitions to a German captain (Frederick Vogeding) — his national identity isn’t specified in the script but that accent is unmistakable — only they don’t have the official papers needed to allow their ship to sail, and the corrupt broker who’s promised to get them, Belescu (Noel Madison, at last getting to act in a major-studio film instead of independent crap like Cocaine Fiends and The Black Raven), has double-crossed them and given them blank pieces of paper instead. Among the plotters is a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work named B. Petroff (Douglass Dumbrille at his scheming-meanest), who’s falsely reported his former secretary, Tony Madero (Richard Clarke), as an embezzler to keep Tony from exposing his nefarious activities as a smuggler.
Chan gets into the case when, on a visit to Paris (the titular “city in darkness” — the film takes place before and during an air-raid drill in which the city’s residents are told to practice blacking out to protect against air raids — like a lot of movies around this time, this film depicts Britain and France as far better prepared for war than they actually were!) to see his friend, prefect of police J. Romaine (C. Henry Gordon, playing a good guy for once!), Petroff gets murdered and Madero and his girlfriend Marie Dubon (Lynn Bari, second-billed and offering her usual exotic non-performance) are the prime suspects. Also supposedly “assisting” the investigation but actually getting in its way is the “comic-relief” character of Marcel Spivak (Harold Huber, considerably more oppressive and less amusing than he was in Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo), prefect Romaine’s adopted son — one can readily imagine the writers thinking, “Instead of Chan, let’s have the other cop has the stupid son who screws things up!”
There’s an exciting action climax in which Charlotte and the captain escape in a plane, only it gets a flat tire before it can become airborne and ultimately crashes and burns, killing both the plotters — only it turns out that the real killer is Antoine (Pedro de Cordoba), Petroff’s butler (so this is one whodunit in which the butler did do it!), who’d lost a leg in combat in World War I and had just seen his son off in a troop train when he realized that his employer was working for the other side, and killed him to derail the smuggling operation and thereby protect France from having her own arms used against her. Scenarists Robert Ellis and Helen Logan (Chan series regulars) drew this story from an unproduced play by Ladislas Fodor (a name we’ve seen before on Tampico and other stories of wartime intrigue) and Gina Kaus, and I suspect the original play did not include Charlie Chan as a character and Ellis and Logan had the rather awkward task of writing him in. The director was Herbert I. Leeds, a hack who’s on most critics’ love-to-hate lists, but though he isn’t especially exciting he and cinematographer Virgil Miller manage a quite nice atmosphere — and the plot devices almost at times make this film seem a forerunner of Casablanca.
Turner Classic Movies is in the middle of a series on Asians in films, and the Asians they’re interviewing (modern-day actors and writers like Amy Tan) make a big to-do about how Chan was always played by non-Asian actors (true, if you don’t count the now-lost silent Chans The House Without a Key and The Chinese Parrot, both of which cast Japanese actors as Chan — George Kuwa and Kamiyama Sojin, respectively) and they had to have their eyes taped to look Asian (not true — both Warner Oland and Sidney Toler had naturally slanted eyes, not to the degree of actual Asians but enough that between their natural slants and relocating their eyebrows, they could look convincingly Asian without tape) — and while there certainly were authentic Asians around Hollywood in the 1930’s who could have played the part (judging from his detective role in the 1929 talkie The Unholy Night, Sojin would have made a quite good sound-film Chan; and Philip Ahn would also have been eminently qualified for the part), Oland in his way was a marvelous Chan and Toler was serviceable, though far less charismatic as a performer: scenes in this film in which Oland would have shined seem dull and flat with Toler in the role. Still, this is a nicely atmospheric film and a good ending to the 18-film Chan survey on Fox (though presumably the seven remaining Tolers will be issued on DVD boxed sets of their own to fill out the series). — 6/4/08
•••••
And just in case you’re not totally sick of reading about Charlie Chan at the moment, here’s an old comment of mine about a later Chan film, Charlie Chan in Rio (the 1941 remake of The Black Camel):
I ran Charles the last film on the Murder on a Honeymoon/Trouble in Paradise tape: Charlie Chan in Rio, a 1941 series entry from 20th Century-Fox (a year before they abandoned the series and sold the rights to star Sidney Toler, who in turn sold them to Monogram Pictures two years later) that, though the official credits stated was written by Samuel G. Engel and Lester Ziffren and merely “based on the character ‘Charlie Chan’ created by Earl Derr Biggers,” was actually a fairly exact remake of the second Fox Chan film, The Black Camel, which in turn was based on one of Biggers’ actual Chan novels. (Actually The Black Camel was the third Fox film to use the character of Charlie Chan, but the first — Behind the Curtain (1929), though based on a Biggers Chan novel, only used him in a very minor bit at the end.)
The locale was changed (the original took place in Chan’s stomping grounds of Honolulu), Biggers’ elaborate shipboard prologue was jettisoned (as it had been in the script for the 1931 film, credited to Hugh Stange, Barry Conners and Philip Klein and with some uncredited continuity contributions by Dudley Nichols, of all people), the first murder victim was demoted from movie star Shelah Fane to nightclub entertainer Lola Dean (Jacqueline Dalya) and the phony mystic, called “Tarneverro” in Biggers’ novel (and played superbly by Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film), was rechristened “Marana” and played by Victor Jory (which made the payoff that he was really the brother-in-law of the murder victim in the backstory more believable even though Jory was hardly the charismatic screen presence Lugosi was!). Indeed, all the character names except Chan’s were changed.
Though Charlie Chan in Rio was definitely a “B” movie (only 62 minutes long, 10 minutes shorter than the 1931 Black Camel), it still had the production polish of a major-studio film. Director Harry Lachman — a quirky and underrated filmmaker almost totally forgotten today even though he established Rudolf Maté’s career in Hollywood by using him on the visually spectacular Dante’s Inferno — and cinematographer Joseph P. MacDonald gave the film an atmospheric look rivaling that of Hamilton MacFadden’s direction in the original (ironically MacFadden was involved in this version as well — as an actor, playing the nerdy character of Bill Kellogg, boyfriend of one of the key suspects), though this film had a conventional background music score that was far less evocative than the marvelous use of Hawai’ian source music MacFadden had concocted for the original (at a time when most filmmakers believed background music in general was an outdated holdover from silent films that would fall into disuse in the sound era).
In this version Marana concocted a mixture of caffeine and a special herb he used to spike cigarettes, so when he gave his clients coffee and one of his special smokes they went into what the script described as a “semi-comatose state” and spilled their deepest, darkest secrets at his command — and the ultimate revelation of the murderer (Marana’s sister Barbara, using the name “Helen Ashby” [Kay Linaker], who was out for revenge against Lola Dean for having killed her husband when he refused to divorce Barbara and marry Lola) was dependent on Marana, her confederate, doing a reading of her in front of everybody but giving her a normal cigarette instead of one of his spiked ones, and having her fake a trance in which she denied all knowledge of the murder. (Charles said he’d seen this film as a kid and somehow that plot twist had stuck in his consciousness for 30 years!)
The fact that the Chan series had held up for over a decade and could still produce a film this good (not great, mind you — with the possible exceptions of The Black Camel and Charlie Chan at the Opera, it would be hard to describe any of the Chan films as “great” — and those two only stand out because of the presence of major horror stars, Lugosi and Karloff respectively, as well as MacFadden’s atmospheric direction and highly creative scoring of the former) was pretty remarkable. — 2/16/03
Two More by Snub Pollard: “Mitt the Prince” and “The Doughboy”
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My partner Charles and I ran a couple of hilarious silent comedies he’d downloaded from public-domain Web sites, both featuring Harry “Snub” Pollard. One — though missing its opening title in the credits — was called Mitt the Prince, and was from the same 1927 series as Double Trouble, which we’d watched earlier. It also co-starred Pollard and his jumbo-sized sidekick, Marvin Loback, as “Snub and Fat,” a comedy team doing some of the same gags as Laurel and Hardy (who were also just coming together and starting out at a team at Hal Roach Studios around the same time as Pollard and Loback were making these independent films). In this one they’re itinerant job seekers who get thrown out of their apartment building after they predictably fail to complete the tasks their landlord has assigned them — Snub was supposed to sweep the sidewalk in front of the building (and his own feet kept tracking dirt over it faster than he could sweep it up) and Fat was supposed to wash the windows. Being silent comedians, naturally they get into a fight with each other, and it ends with Fat throwing the bucket with his soapy water for washing windows at Snub — and hitting their landlord instead.
Now both homeless and unemployed, they hit the city streets and run across a man who offers them money to borrow his car and do a delivery of five white boxes to a party being given by “Mrs. Woodby Noble” (Thelma Daniels), a Margaret Dumont type who’s counting on the arrival of a prince to make her party a social success — only newspaper headlines reveal that the “prince” is an impostor so, when Snub and Fat show up, she gets Snub to impersonate the prince and Fat to play his adjutant (which they do via a box of theatrical costumes left over from an amateur play once performed at the house — and the costumes emit a horde of moths when the hapless humans put them on), which Charles joked made them look like the Prince of Freedonia accompanied by Hermann Göring. Eventually the other guests get wind of the headlines announcing that the prince is a fake — at this point you want to take them aside and say, “No, he’s not the real fake prince — he’s the fake fake prince!” — but not before a blonde gold-digger has attempted to vamp Snub and he’s ended up in a swimming pool, where his clothes fall off and he’s worried about the exposure. (Snub Pollard seems to have done a lot of risqué jokes about being in various states of undress — earlier in this film his ornate pants tear down the seam on the bottom, and he attempts to sew them while he still has them on — and ends up sewing himself to a seat cushion and, when he attempts to extricate himself from the cushion, only rips the pants worse than they were earlier.)
This isn’t exactly world-beating silent comedy but it’s still hilarious — and how these old clowns, even workmanlike ones like Pollard rather than geniuses like Chaplin or Keaton, could manage far more laughs in two reels than today’s comedians can in entire features remains a mystery, albeit a delightful one. The Doughboy was made a year earlier (1926) and the imdb.com entry on it lists Mack Sennett as producer — though it also names it as a “Snub Pollard Comedies” production — and the film didn’t seem quite as uninhibitedly funny as Mitt the Prince, though it was still a lot of fun.
By then World War I had been a major subject for comedy for some time — it had already been done by Chaplin in Shoulder Arms and Langdon in Soldier Man and The Strong Man (and Keaton would tackle it as well in the 1930 talkie Doughboys, based largely on his own experiences in France — he made it too late for actual combat but spent a lot of time drilling and running amateur theatricals) — and Pollard’s entry is good, with the predictable incompetence gags (when his unit is drilling, he marches in one direction while everyone else goes the opposite way, and later when they’re doing the bit where they move the rifles around on cue he pleads with his sergeant, “Make up your mind!”) and a quite elaborate village set that must have been built for a major-studio feature on the war and some extensive stock footage of trench battles that probably also came from a feature film (it looked too good to be documentary footage of the actual war).
The highlight is a scene in which Pollard waves his own troops in to attack on the ground that he’s found a sector the Germans aren’t guarding — only as soon as he uses the field telephone to call in that information, the Germans pop up from where they’d been hiding — and another in which he disguises himself as a German officer, crashes a party and is discovered and declared to be a spy (which he wasn’t; all he was doing was looking for good food). He finds a woman hiding in a wine cellar — she’s literally secreted herself inside a barrel — and in a marvelously irreverent ending the two of them end up fleeing the war together in what at times seems like it could have been a spoof of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms except that this film was made three years before Hemingway published the book.
My partner Charles and I ran a couple of hilarious silent comedies he’d downloaded from public-domain Web sites, both featuring Harry “Snub” Pollard. One — though missing its opening title in the credits — was called Mitt the Prince, and was from the same 1927 series as Double Trouble, which we’d watched earlier. It also co-starred Pollard and his jumbo-sized sidekick, Marvin Loback, as “Snub and Fat,” a comedy team doing some of the same gags as Laurel and Hardy (who were also just coming together and starting out at a team at Hal Roach Studios around the same time as Pollard and Loback were making these independent films). In this one they’re itinerant job seekers who get thrown out of their apartment building after they predictably fail to complete the tasks their landlord has assigned them — Snub was supposed to sweep the sidewalk in front of the building (and his own feet kept tracking dirt over it faster than he could sweep it up) and Fat was supposed to wash the windows. Being silent comedians, naturally they get into a fight with each other, and it ends with Fat throwing the bucket with his soapy water for washing windows at Snub — and hitting their landlord instead.
Now both homeless and unemployed, they hit the city streets and run across a man who offers them money to borrow his car and do a delivery of five white boxes to a party being given by “Mrs. Woodby Noble” (Thelma Daniels), a Margaret Dumont type who’s counting on the arrival of a prince to make her party a social success — only newspaper headlines reveal that the “prince” is an impostor so, when Snub and Fat show up, she gets Snub to impersonate the prince and Fat to play his adjutant (which they do via a box of theatrical costumes left over from an amateur play once performed at the house — and the costumes emit a horde of moths when the hapless humans put them on), which Charles joked made them look like the Prince of Freedonia accompanied by Hermann Göring. Eventually the other guests get wind of the headlines announcing that the prince is a fake — at this point you want to take them aside and say, “No, he’s not the real fake prince — he’s the fake fake prince!” — but not before a blonde gold-digger has attempted to vamp Snub and he’s ended up in a swimming pool, where his clothes fall off and he’s worried about the exposure. (Snub Pollard seems to have done a lot of risqué jokes about being in various states of undress — earlier in this film his ornate pants tear down the seam on the bottom, and he attempts to sew them while he still has them on — and ends up sewing himself to a seat cushion and, when he attempts to extricate himself from the cushion, only rips the pants worse than they were earlier.)
This isn’t exactly world-beating silent comedy but it’s still hilarious — and how these old clowns, even workmanlike ones like Pollard rather than geniuses like Chaplin or Keaton, could manage far more laughs in two reels than today’s comedians can in entire features remains a mystery, albeit a delightful one. The Doughboy was made a year earlier (1926) and the imdb.com entry on it lists Mack Sennett as producer — though it also names it as a “Snub Pollard Comedies” production — and the film didn’t seem quite as uninhibitedly funny as Mitt the Prince, though it was still a lot of fun.
By then World War I had been a major subject for comedy for some time — it had already been done by Chaplin in Shoulder Arms and Langdon in Soldier Man and The Strong Man (and Keaton would tackle it as well in the 1930 talkie Doughboys, based largely on his own experiences in France — he made it too late for actual combat but spent a lot of time drilling and running amateur theatricals) — and Pollard’s entry is good, with the predictable incompetence gags (when his unit is drilling, he marches in one direction while everyone else goes the opposite way, and later when they’re doing the bit where they move the rifles around on cue he pleads with his sergeant, “Make up your mind!”) and a quite elaborate village set that must have been built for a major-studio feature on the war and some extensive stock footage of trench battles that probably also came from a feature film (it looked too good to be documentary footage of the actual war).
The highlight is a scene in which Pollard waves his own troops in to attack on the ground that he’s found a sector the Germans aren’t guarding — only as soon as he uses the field telephone to call in that information, the Germans pop up from where they’d been hiding — and another in which he disguises himself as a German officer, crashes a party and is discovered and declared to be a spy (which he wasn’t; all he was doing was looking for good food). He finds a woman hiding in a wine cellar — she’s literally secreted herself inside a barrel — and in a marvelously irreverent ending the two of them end up fleeing the war together in what at times seems like it could have been a spoof of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms except that this film was made three years before Hemingway published the book.
Monday, June 2, 2008
The Bell Boy (Comicque/Paramount, 1918)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I joined my partner Charles and watched the 1918 film The Bellboy complete. This was one of the films Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle made in New York for Joseph Schenck’s company (to make them — and woo Arbuckle away from Mack Sennett at a time when Arbuckle was second only to Chaplin in popularity among male comedians — Schenck organized an independent studio called Comicque Film Corporation and released through Paramount) and in which his sidekicks were Al St. John (a Sennett veteran who’d frequently starred with Arbuckle and Mabel Normand there) and Buster Keaton — a vaudevillian who’d had no particular interest in movies but who just happened to be curious enough to visit Arbuckle on the set of his first Comicque film, The Butcher Boy, and to be put to work improvising a gag with Arbuckle and a barrel of molasses.
Suddenly Keaton was a movie actor, and in The Bell Boy (imdb.com spelled the title as two words even though the print we were watching, copied from the Kino DVD release but with the soundtrack erased to avoid infringing on Kino’s copyright on the score) — which follows a quite similar formula, with Arbuckle and Keaton as bellboys and St. John as a desk clerk who’s also responsible for operating the hotel’s horse-drawn elevator. Yes, you heard that right: the elevator is connected by a long rope to a horse outside the hotel, and every time a guest wants to use the elevator St. John goes outside and signals to the horse to pull the rope and thereby make the elevator car go up. (Keaton is trapped inside the contraption, which nearly crushes his head, in the film’s most wince-inducing gag.) We’re told in a title that this hotel offers “third-rate service at first-rate prices” and from what we see of it, that sounds about right; there are the usual slapstick mix-ups (including one with a mop bucket on the lobby floor that predictably spills) and the efforts of the three males in the cast to ingratiate themselves with the new manicurist, “Miss Cutie Cuticle” (Alice Lake).
To impress her with his derring-do, Arbuckle has Keaton and St. John pose as bank robbers sticking up the “Last National Bank,” and of course — as any reasonably seasoned moviegoer even in 1918 could have guessed — a band of real bank robbers happens in at the same time (and their cavalier treatment of the money they’re presumably there to steal, which they allow to accumulate willy-nilly on the floor of the bank and make only a few desultory efforts to pick up, adds an unintentional sort of humor to a film that achieves most of the laughs the makers were trying to evoke) and the film ends in a weirdly modern sequence with Arbuckle coupled with Miss Cutie Cuticle and Keaton and St. John apparently consoling themselves with each other. Charles noticed that the hotel lobby set was merely a redressed version of the grocery-store set in which the opening reel of The Butcher Boy had taken place, though it was interesting that Arbuckle already seemed to have feature-film ambitions — this one ran over half an hour and was clearly originally released as a three-reeler instead of a two-reeler — and it does overstay its welcome a bit, but it’s still terrifically funny and a testament to Arbuckle’s all-around skills as a filmmaker.
He not only starred but was credited with the writing (though no doubt there were gag men who contributed) and direction, and his directing is considerably in advance of Chaplin’s technically, with a lot of quick-cutting to heighten the pace and keep the film moving from gag to gag. The horrible scandal that cut short Arbuckle’s career has made it almost impossible to view him objectively, but he’s an impressive performer — not as versatile as Chaplin or Keaton, but amazing in his physical dexterity and coordination, surprising in such a large man. Frank Capra recalled that Arbuckle not only invented the thrown pie, but he was ambidextrous and could throw two pies at once in two different directions.
I joined my partner Charles and watched the 1918 film The Bellboy complete. This was one of the films Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle made in New York for Joseph Schenck’s company (to make them — and woo Arbuckle away from Mack Sennett at a time when Arbuckle was second only to Chaplin in popularity among male comedians — Schenck organized an independent studio called Comicque Film Corporation and released through Paramount) and in which his sidekicks were Al St. John (a Sennett veteran who’d frequently starred with Arbuckle and Mabel Normand there) and Buster Keaton — a vaudevillian who’d had no particular interest in movies but who just happened to be curious enough to visit Arbuckle on the set of his first Comicque film, The Butcher Boy, and to be put to work improvising a gag with Arbuckle and a barrel of molasses.
Suddenly Keaton was a movie actor, and in The Bell Boy (imdb.com spelled the title as two words even though the print we were watching, copied from the Kino DVD release but with the soundtrack erased to avoid infringing on Kino’s copyright on the score) — which follows a quite similar formula, with Arbuckle and Keaton as bellboys and St. John as a desk clerk who’s also responsible for operating the hotel’s horse-drawn elevator. Yes, you heard that right: the elevator is connected by a long rope to a horse outside the hotel, and every time a guest wants to use the elevator St. John goes outside and signals to the horse to pull the rope and thereby make the elevator car go up. (Keaton is trapped inside the contraption, which nearly crushes his head, in the film’s most wince-inducing gag.) We’re told in a title that this hotel offers “third-rate service at first-rate prices” and from what we see of it, that sounds about right; there are the usual slapstick mix-ups (including one with a mop bucket on the lobby floor that predictably spills) and the efforts of the three males in the cast to ingratiate themselves with the new manicurist, “Miss Cutie Cuticle” (Alice Lake).
To impress her with his derring-do, Arbuckle has Keaton and St. John pose as bank robbers sticking up the “Last National Bank,” and of course — as any reasonably seasoned moviegoer even in 1918 could have guessed — a band of real bank robbers happens in at the same time (and their cavalier treatment of the money they’re presumably there to steal, which they allow to accumulate willy-nilly on the floor of the bank and make only a few desultory efforts to pick up, adds an unintentional sort of humor to a film that achieves most of the laughs the makers were trying to evoke) and the film ends in a weirdly modern sequence with Arbuckle coupled with Miss Cutie Cuticle and Keaton and St. John apparently consoling themselves with each other. Charles noticed that the hotel lobby set was merely a redressed version of the grocery-store set in which the opening reel of The Butcher Boy had taken place, though it was interesting that Arbuckle already seemed to have feature-film ambitions — this one ran over half an hour and was clearly originally released as a three-reeler instead of a two-reeler — and it does overstay its welcome a bit, but it’s still terrifically funny and a testament to Arbuckle’s all-around skills as a filmmaker.
He not only starred but was credited with the writing (though no doubt there were gag men who contributed) and direction, and his directing is considerably in advance of Chaplin’s technically, with a lot of quick-cutting to heighten the pace and keep the film moving from gag to gag. The horrible scandal that cut short Arbuckle’s career has made it almost impossible to view him objectively, but he’s an impressive performer — not as versatile as Chaplin or Keaton, but amazing in his physical dexterity and coordination, surprising in such a large man. Frank Capra recalled that Arbuckle not only invented the thrown pie, but he was ambidextrous and could throw two pies at once in two different directions.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Atlantic Adventure (Columbia, 1935)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a movie I’d recently recorded from TCM onto DVD: Atlantic Adventure, a 1935 Columbia film (while they were still using that marvelously tacky animated version of their Statue of Liberty logo) directed by Albert Rogell from a script by John T. Neville and Nat N. Dorfman based on a Cosmopolitan story by Diana Bourbon (Charles joked this was a pseudonym for Deanna Durbin and I said no, it was a surviving member of the former French royal family that had been overthrown in the Revolution) and starring Nancy Carroll as Helen Murdock, young daughter of a well-off (judging from the lavishness of their on-screen apartment) mother (Maidel Turner), who’s been dating the New York Chronicle’s star reporter, Dan Miller (Lloyd Nolan, the youngest I’ve ever seen him) and putting up with how often he stands her up because he, in the company of his photographer “Snapper” McGillicuddy (Harry Langdon), is off covering one story or another.
Dan’s absences are forcing Helen into the arms of the man her mom wants her to marry, stuck-up rich boy Douglas Stanton (Cornelius Keefe), and at one point he ducks out of a press conference called by the district attorney — so sure of what the D.A. will say he figures he can write the story without being there — to make a lunch date with Helen, only he’s late anyway, she jilts him and he gets fired for having missed the story of the year: at the press conference the D.A. was shot by a gangster he was about to indict, Mitts Coster (John Wray). On a tip, and hoping that if he can get to Coster before the police do he’ll have a scoop and the Chronicle will take him back, he boards the ocean liner Gigantic — as does Helen, who’s mistaken for a member of the jewel-robbing gang of Frank Julian (Arthur Hohl); he slips her $2,000 and says he’ll give her the “ice” as soon as he gets it.
The “ice” is a batch of diamonds originally stolen by the husband-and-wife jewel-thief team, the Van Diemans (Robert Middlemass and Nana Bryant); to get the secret knock with which Mr. Van Dieman plans to signal his wife — he’s told her to open the door for no one else — Julian bugs her room (probably one of the first instances of electronic eavesdropping as a plot gimmick in a film) and eventually, after her husband leaves, gets in her room, ties her up and steals the diamonds; only they’re in turn stolen from him by Spike Jones (Dwight Frye) — the character so-named before the real-life comedy bandleader of that period emerged — who’s working with Coster, who’s disguised himself as Jones’ father and been using a wheelchair (which, of course, he doesn’t really need) as a cover. Helen, Dan and “Snapper” all get on the ship and end up in the middle of the intrigue — after a while we get the impression that aside from our three heroes every passenger on the ship is a crook — and eventually all the criminals are apprehended in mid-ocean and Dan and Helen are about to be married by the captain when there’s a cry of “Man overboard!,” Dan’s journalistic instincts kick into high gear again, and he abandons his bride at the altar to cover the story.
Atlantic Adventure is basically a Columbia attempt to do a Warners film (and it wouldn’t be hard to guess how Warners would have cast this script in 1935: James Cagney as Dan, Joan Blondell as Helen and Frank McHugh as “Snapper”), and though it isn’t as relentlessly fast as a Warners version would have been it is charming, luminously photographed by John Stumar (for a cheap studio, Columbia took unusual care to achieve a quality visual look in their films, one reason they and they alone of the so-called “Poverty Row” companies attained and kept major-studio status) and with Carroll achieving a nice combination of winsomeness and spunkiness in her role (a year after she’d made Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, another crime thriller set at sea during an Atlantic crossing). Nolan turns in a competent performance but he’d get better at these sorts of parts later (especially when he did the Michael Shayne series at Fox in the early 1940’s); Langdon is utterly wasted in a quite ordinary comic-relief part that (unlike his role in A Soldier’s Plaything) doesn’t give him any opportunities for slapstick; Frye is a real treat even though he’s a bit too twitchy for what’s basically a “straight” crook role (and how many mid-1930’s crime “B”’s feature an actor Alice Cooper wrote a song about?). Atlantic Adventure is unpretentious fun; you can see the clichés coming a mile away, but it’s still a good movie and well worth the 67 minutes it runs.
I ran a movie I’d recently recorded from TCM onto DVD: Atlantic Adventure, a 1935 Columbia film (while they were still using that marvelously tacky animated version of their Statue of Liberty logo) directed by Albert Rogell from a script by John T. Neville and Nat N. Dorfman based on a Cosmopolitan story by Diana Bourbon (Charles joked this was a pseudonym for Deanna Durbin and I said no, it was a surviving member of the former French royal family that had been overthrown in the Revolution) and starring Nancy Carroll as Helen Murdock, young daughter of a well-off (judging from the lavishness of their on-screen apartment) mother (Maidel Turner), who’s been dating the New York Chronicle’s star reporter, Dan Miller (Lloyd Nolan, the youngest I’ve ever seen him) and putting up with how often he stands her up because he, in the company of his photographer “Snapper” McGillicuddy (Harry Langdon), is off covering one story or another.
Dan’s absences are forcing Helen into the arms of the man her mom wants her to marry, stuck-up rich boy Douglas Stanton (Cornelius Keefe), and at one point he ducks out of a press conference called by the district attorney — so sure of what the D.A. will say he figures he can write the story without being there — to make a lunch date with Helen, only he’s late anyway, she jilts him and he gets fired for having missed the story of the year: at the press conference the D.A. was shot by a gangster he was about to indict, Mitts Coster (John Wray). On a tip, and hoping that if he can get to Coster before the police do he’ll have a scoop and the Chronicle will take him back, he boards the ocean liner Gigantic — as does Helen, who’s mistaken for a member of the jewel-robbing gang of Frank Julian (Arthur Hohl); he slips her $2,000 and says he’ll give her the “ice” as soon as he gets it.
The “ice” is a batch of diamonds originally stolen by the husband-and-wife jewel-thief team, the Van Diemans (Robert Middlemass and Nana Bryant); to get the secret knock with which Mr. Van Dieman plans to signal his wife — he’s told her to open the door for no one else — Julian bugs her room (probably one of the first instances of electronic eavesdropping as a plot gimmick in a film) and eventually, after her husband leaves, gets in her room, ties her up and steals the diamonds; only they’re in turn stolen from him by Spike Jones (Dwight Frye) — the character so-named before the real-life comedy bandleader of that period emerged — who’s working with Coster, who’s disguised himself as Jones’ father and been using a wheelchair (which, of course, he doesn’t really need) as a cover. Helen, Dan and “Snapper” all get on the ship and end up in the middle of the intrigue — after a while we get the impression that aside from our three heroes every passenger on the ship is a crook — and eventually all the criminals are apprehended in mid-ocean and Dan and Helen are about to be married by the captain when there’s a cry of “Man overboard!,” Dan’s journalistic instincts kick into high gear again, and he abandons his bride at the altar to cover the story.
Atlantic Adventure is basically a Columbia attempt to do a Warners film (and it wouldn’t be hard to guess how Warners would have cast this script in 1935: James Cagney as Dan, Joan Blondell as Helen and Frank McHugh as “Snapper”), and though it isn’t as relentlessly fast as a Warners version would have been it is charming, luminously photographed by John Stumar (for a cheap studio, Columbia took unusual care to achieve a quality visual look in their films, one reason they and they alone of the so-called “Poverty Row” companies attained and kept major-studio status) and with Carroll achieving a nice combination of winsomeness and spunkiness in her role (a year after she’d made Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, another crime thriller set at sea during an Atlantic crossing). Nolan turns in a competent performance but he’d get better at these sorts of parts later (especially when he did the Michael Shayne series at Fox in the early 1940’s); Langdon is utterly wasted in a quite ordinary comic-relief part that (unlike his role in A Soldier’s Plaything) doesn’t give him any opportunities for slapstick; Frye is a real treat even though he’s a bit too twitchy for what’s basically a “straight” crook role (and how many mid-1930’s crime “B”’s feature an actor Alice Cooper wrote a song about?). Atlantic Adventure is unpretentious fun; you can see the clichés coming a mile away, but it’s still a good movie and well worth the 67 minutes it runs.
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