The Horror of Party Beach (Iselin-Tenney Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I trotted out the most recent Mystery Science Theatre 3000 tape, The Horror of Party Beach, a movie from either 1958 or 1964 (I’d thought it was the earlier date but the Medved brothers’ book The Golden Turkey Awards gives the later one; since it’s such an anachronistic film it’s hard to credit it as late as 1964 but there were a few cars in it that looked later than 1958) featuring a spectacularly untalented rock group called the Del-Aires (doing their big non-hit, “The Zombie Stomp”) and a large group of nubile teens of both genders (there was more cheesecake than beefcake in this movie, alas, but there were still a few hot-looking guys with nice baskets) who were getting killed and eaten alive by monsters created when an unscrupulous garbage disposal company dumped barrels of radioactive waste on the ocean floor and the waste came into contact with the bodies of sailors who had drowned in a shipwreck off the shore of Stamford, Connecticut (where the whole film was shot).

Besides the mild (very mild) environmentalist political commentary here, The Horror of Party Beach might actually have been frightening (as the similarly plotted Night of the Living Dead, made either four or 10 years later, was despite its own set of crudities) except for the ridiculous appearance of the monsters, with finned, sea-horse heads; mouths with multiple tongues that look like they’re about to swallow a 10-pack of frankfurters whole; eyes that look like golf balls with pupils painted on (and which roll around in their sockets in one deliciously absurd scene, suggesting that the monster might actually rape the woman he’s about to kill except his hunger momentarily outstrips his lust) and bodies covered with triangular objects that seem intended to represent scales but actually look more like leaves.

It doesn’t help that there’s the usual expert scientist, who we know is an expert because he smokes an impossibly long pipe and bears a surprising resemblance to Alan Greenspan; his daughter, whose distaste for what the other teenagers in the movie call “fun” (at least we’re supposed to take it on faith that she’s a teenager, even though the actress playing her looks in her early 30’s) leads her to avoid going to a slumber party whose 20 attendees are murdered en masse by the Horrors of Party Beach (yes, there are more than one of them!); and the scientist’s assistant (played by John Saxon, the closest thing this movie has to a “star”), a hunky young teenager whose sluttish girlfriend leaves him to get eaten by a monster and who, naturally, ends up with the boss’s daughter (she may be skinny and her eyes are like water, but she looks way too shopworn to be a virgin, with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein).

There’s also a Black maid named Eulabelle — which, at least according to the credits, also happens to be the first name of the woman playing her — who thinks it’s all voodoo and who inadvertently lets all the other “brains” around know how to kill the monsters when she upsets a beaker full of sodium over a tissue sample of one of the beasts, thereby incinerating it. Now, there are a lot of questions you may be asking here — like what sodium was doing in a beaker when, in its pure elemental form, it’s a metal (albeit a highly unstable metal that has to be kept in oil because it catches fire spontaneously in either water or air); or how the monsters can survive in sea water when sea water is full of sodium chloride (a.k.a. salt); or how, in the climactic scene (in which John Saxon and the rest of the intrepid band of lab researchers throw sodium at the monsters with the kind of motion they would use if they were pitching baseballs at them so the monsters could take batting practice), they can safely handle the sodium (which Saxon brought back from New York, since nobody in Connecticut sells it, in a garbage can in the passenger seat of his MGA sports car) without any sign of using gloves or any other protective material — but the answer to all of them is that this is a fundamentally absurd movie that the MST3K crew didn’t need to work hard to lampoon … — 9/8/97

•••••

When Charles finally arrived home from work at 9 p.m. he brought over the 28th disc in the series of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 downloads, from which I selected The Horror of Party Beach. We’d seen this film in MST3K form before — one day we took the tape over to Cat Ortiz’s place and ran it for her — and it’s one of those delightfully inept movies that were just right for the MST3K “treatment.” It was directed by one Del Tenney and shot at the Gutzon Borglum Studios in Stamford, Connecticut (why a movie studio should have been named after the guy who got the idea to carve the faces of the Presidents into Mount Rushmore is one of the odder little mysteries of this film), and its plot attempted to combine the horror and teen-musical genres. The fact that a film so lame could still be made in 1964 — when American International was already making the beach-party movies, which had their own set of problems but were at least fully professional productions (and in color!) — and that Tenney could get a distribution deal for it with a major studio (20th Century-Fox) and have a major hit from it is even more of a mystery.

Basically, it’s a lot of teenagers doing a lot of dancing on the titular “party beach” (and showing a lot of eye candy for all genders and orientations, though the many undulating shots of bikini-clad women’s butts indicate that horny young straight guys was Tenney’s target audience and anything of interest to the Queer boys in the audience — or the straight girls, for that matter — was purely incidental: there was one nice shot of a guy in a white swimsuit that revealed a most impressive basket, but almost as soon as it registered a girl got her backside into the frame and covered him). Overlaid over all of this is a plotline by which sloppy people hired to dump radioactive waste from the local nuclear power plant (the MST3K crew joked that they were obviously working for Exxon) threw the drums labeled “CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE WASTE” overboard over the skeletons of drowned sailors, and in the one scene in the movie that at least approached a genuinely impressive special effect, the waste and the sailors’ remains combine and form a radioactive sea monster.

Unfortunately, once the monsters finally emerge from this process they’re people encased in monster suits of such transparent phoniness the Ultra-Man people would have been embarrassed by them: the monsters have sea-horse heads and gaping mouths with about 10 hot dogs stuck in each one (I joked later that a sympathetic French critic would probably have analyzed these as a phallic symbol and tied it in with the monsters’ urge to annihilate women), and first they kill a black-haired girl who’s just jilted the movie’s male lead, Hank Green (John Scott); then they kill over 20 girls at a slumber party the film’s female lead, Elaine Gavin (Alice Lyon), had the good sense to duck out of. (The scene is a parody of a Greenwich Village folk get-together, with a bad Joan Baez wanna-be singing a traditional ballad about the miserable state of women’s lives just before the monsters come in and confirm it.) Elaine is the daughter of Dr. Gavin (Allan Laurel, who in his dorky self-absorbed scientist way is almost as funny as his namesake, Stan), who’s charged with figuring out what the monsters are, where they come from and how — if at all — they can be killed. There’s this utterly hilarious and looney-tunes exchange during that process:

“Dr. Gavin: Of course! This creature needs the ordinary necessities of human life — proteins, fats, sugars and so forth. But since his organs are so decomposed it needs the only food which can keep it alive.

“Hank Green: Blood?

“Dr. Gavin: Human blood. If a human body — a drowned person — were attacked by tiny sea plants which became parasites and completely infiltrated that human body before it had a chance to decompose, would the body be considered dead or alive?

“Hank Green: Dead?

“Dr. Gavin: No — it’s still alive. But it’s changed into a — well, is it a plant or an animal?

“Hank Green: It’s both?

“Dr. Gavin: It’s a giant protozoa!”

— but in the end it’s Eulabelle (Eulabelle Moore), Dr. Gavin’s Black mammy maid (who, like Hattie McDaniel’s role in Gone With the Wind — which The Horror of Party Beach in no other way resembles — is pretty obviously the smartest person in the fiim), who figures out the solution by accidentally spilling a beaker of sodium over the severed hand of the monster (which Dr. Gavin and Hank had been analyzing in the above-quoted scene), whereupon it bursts into flame. This is the biggest scientific howler in a script (by Richard Hilliard, with “additional dialogue” by Ronald Gianettino and Lou Binder) that has more than its share of them, from the use of radiocarbon-14 dating to establish the genetic makeup of a sample to the intimation that the dead sailors on whose chassis the monsters were built hadn’t yet decomposed when we’ve seen them starting out as skeletons. Pure sodium is an unstable metal that spontaneously combusts when exposed to water (the writers had that right) but also when exposed to air — which is why it’s shipped in a suspension of oil or gasoline, certainly not as loose metal lumps in a steel drum, which is how Hank purchases it from a New York chemical supply house.

It’s hard to decide which part of this film is sillier — the endless dancing by the hordes of teenagers at Party Beach, the lameness of the music they’re dancing to (wimp-rock by a four-piece band called the Del-Aires who are repeatedly shown on screen with no apparent source of power for their amplified instruments — their only distinction is a lead singer who obviously thought that wearing Buddy Holly’s style of glasses would give him the same talent: it didn’t), or the sheer tackiness of the monsters and the plot lines involving them, particularly the final scene, in which Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss, the authors of The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, described the actions of Hank and the other good guys in hurling sodium pellets at the monsters as if they were attending a mass wedding and throwing rice on all the happy new monster couples. Funny: it looked to me more like they were pitching the sodium as a way of enabling the monsters to take batting practice. The Horror of Party Beach is a delightfully bad movie which the MST3K interjections only manage to make even more fun. — 10/30/08

3 More Universal Invisibles

"The Invisible Man Returns" (Universal, 1940)

"Invisible Agent" (Universal, 1942)

"The Invisible Woman" (Universal, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

For The Invisible Man Returns John P. Fulton was back as the special-effects wizard, and the effects were even better, with none of those telltale black rings (optical printers improved remarkably between 1933 and 1940). Alas, none of the other elements work as well here as they did in the original film. Vincent Price is the new invisible man (a sympathetic coal-mine owner who was framed for the murder of his brother and sentenced to hang), and John Sutton (a staff researcher at the coal mine and the brother of the character Claude Rains played in the original film) uses the invisibility formula to help Price escape from prison on the morning he is to be hanged. The rest of the film is a race — can Price find out who really murdered his brother before the side effects of his invisibility formula drive him crazy? Interestingly, this film — made just two years after Price’s film debut in Service De Luxe in 1938 — was his first horror film; but he would not make another one until House of Wax 13 years later, and that was the one that really started his reputation as a horror actor.

Also, the drug on which the invisibility formula is based is called Monocaine in the original film and Duocaine in The Invisible Man Returns — and a 1940 moviegoer with a long memory could have readily been forgiven the assumption that in the third film of the series it would be called Tricaine. (H. G. Wells wrote his book in the 1890’s, when cocaine was still legal but already proving highly toxic — and no doubt his nomenclature was inspired by that example.) The Invisible Man Returns has a strong cast (headed by Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Alan Napier as the real murderers, who killed Price’s brother and framed Price so they could get rid of both of them and control the mine themselves), a decent if unspectacular script (by Curt Siodmak and future Hollywood Ten blacklistee Lester Cole — I presume Cole is responsible for the hints of anti-capitalism in the portrayal of the mine and the way it’s being run under the dastardly manager Hardwicke and his foreman Napier) and atmospheric but sluggishly paced direction by German expatriate Joe May. It’s an O.K. movie but it’s indicative (as was Son of Frankenstein the previous year) of how far horror movies at Universal fell in quality (losing the charming quirkiness of directors like James Whale, Robert Florey and Edgar Ulmer) when the Laemmles lost control of the studio in 1936. — 8/30/97

•••••

Charles and I settled in our room where I ran him two more movies from the Universal Invisible Man Legacy box: The Invisible Man Returns (1940) and Invisible Agent (1942). The Invisible Man Returns is a competent, workmanlike sequel with few of the thrills of the original but a certain amount of good-natured good-timeliness and a script that at least hints at a social critique of capitalism. (Curt Siodmak has a co-credit on the original story with the film’s director, fellow German expat Joe May, and a co-credit on the actual screenplay with future Hollywood Ten member Lester Cole — and imdb.com lists another card-carrying Communist, Cedric Belfrage, as an uncredited additional writer.)

Geoffrey Radcliffe (Vincent Price) is about to be hanged for the murder of his brother Michael. The Radcliffe family owns a coal company in Wales that, since the death of one Radcliffe brother and the incarceration of the other, has been run by manager Richard Cobb (Sir Cedric Hardwicke, top-billed) and the drunken miner he’s promoted to foreman, Willie Spears (Alan Napier). Cobb has deliberately set aside all the safety measures the Radcliffes ordered and is sending the miners down a shaft that’s known to be unsafe.

Unable to get anyone in the British government to sign on for clemency, on the eve of Geoffrey’s hanging the Radcliffe family and Geoffrey’s fiancée, Helen Manson (Nan Grey), send the Radcliffe company’s official physician, Dr. Frank Griffin (John Sutton), to see him — and Frank, whose brother Jack Griffin was the character played by Claude Rains in the 1933 Invisible Man who invented the invisibility serum in the first place, brings along a dose of it and turns Geoffrey invisible in the cell, allowing him to escape. (There are a couple of amusing inconsistencies between this and the first film: the key ingredient of the drug, called “monocaine” in the original film, is “duocaine” here — which once led me to joke that in the third film in the series they were going to call it “tricaine” — and whereas the original serum took several injections over a period of weeks in order to work, this version takes effect immediately upon a single injection.)

The Invisible Man Returns is a bit on the dull side and hardly as great a film as its predecessor, but it has its appeal. There’s some marvelously atmospheric cinematography by Milton Krasner — a lot of dollying around the standard Universal “outdoor” horror sets (actually done inside a soundstage with some pretty obvious painted backdrops) and great rolling banks of fog — which, as anyone who recalls Claude Rains’ description of the perils of invisibility from the first film (most of it taken directly from the H. G. Wells novel) will remember, means that the invisible man would become visible after all, appearing as a bubble in fog or rain.

There’s a great performance by Cecil Kellaway as the Scotland Yard inspector who, recalling the events of the original film, figures out almost immediately that Geoffrey Radcliffe has become invisible and the original invisible man’s brother has made him so — he spends a lot of time puffing on a cigar to create an aura of smoke around him hoping that the invisible man will materialize inside it. There are also some quite amusing slapstick gags in which the invisible man torments the various people he suspects of framing him — and, not at all to our surprise, Cobb turns out to be the real killer of Michael Radcliffe; he shoved him down a mineshaft and framed Geoffrey for the crime, but Spears witnessed the whole thing and blackmailed Cobb into giving him the job as mine foreman.

At least this film preserved one of the key plot elements of the original — the whole gimmick that a side effect of the invisibility drug was to drive its user insane — and Vincent Price gets to deliver some of the same kinds of megalomaniac utterances Claude Rains hurled at us so vividly in the original film. Alas, where Rains sounded genuinely scary in these speeches, Price does them in high, florid tones that already — at the very beginning of his career as a horror actor (this was his first horror film and, unless you count the 1946 Gothic melodrama Dragonwyck, he didn’t do another one until House of Wax, from 1953, which “typed” Price as a horror star) he’s already playing scenes like this as high camp (which he did more blatantly as his career went on until in the late 1960’s and 1970’s he was obviously relishing the camp aspect of his roles and realizing that audiences were going to see his films precisely to watch him camp it up). It’s much like the difference between his performance in House of Wax and Lionel Atwill’s richer, more sensitive one in the earlier version of that story, Mystery of the Wax Museum (which I still think is a better movie all around!).

Still, there are nice compensations from The Invisible Man Returns, including a more adventurous than usual score from the Bobbsey Twins of Universal horror music in the 1940’s, Frank Skinner and Hans J. Salter; a good suspense ending in which Radcliffe and Cobb wrestle on a trestle car dumping coal from the mine down a runway into a bin (they both get caught and fall down, and Cobb uses his dying breath to confess to Michael’s murder); and a climax in which Geoffrey nearly dies but is brought back to life and to visibility by transfusions of healthy blood from visible people: “Blood was the antidote after all” says John Sutton as the film ends. — 10/28/08

••••••••••

I bypassed the next film in the sequence, Invisible Woman — which wasn’t really a series entry at all; it was an out-and-out comedy with John Barrymore cast as a quirky mad scientist who tests out his invisibility process (an electrical machine rather than a drug this time) on put-upon model Virginia Bruce, who uses her new-found power to drive her oppressive boss crazy — and then showed Invisible Agent, one of the rare Universal horror films from this period I’d never seen before. At least this one is a literal sequel to The Invisible Man and The Invisible Man Returns, but it’s also a World War II drama and it’s really more a combination espionage and science-fiction film than a horror piece.

Frank Griffin (Jon Hall) runs a printing shop in New York City under the alias “Frank Raymond” because he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s really the grandson of Frank Griffin, the man who invented the invisibility serum in the first place. (Actually, as you can readily tell if you’re watching the films in sequence from the same DVD box, it was Jack Griffin who invented the serum; Frank Griffin was his brother, who used it on someone else in The Invisible Man Returns.)

A group of Axis agents from both Germany and Japan, led by Conrad Stauffer (Sir Cedric Hardwicke, playing a different character than he did in The Invisible Man Returns but still cast as a villain) and Baron Ikito (Peter Lorre, who as usual practically steals this movie — he doesn’t wear any “slant-eye” makeup to resemble an Asian, but then he didn’t as Mr. Moto either, and nobody cared), crashes into his shop and threatens to torture him by cutting off his hand in his own paper-cutting machine if he doesn’t tell them where he’s hiding the last supply of his granddad’s invisibility formula. (Making Jon Hall’s character the grandson of Claude Rains’ character in the original film would have made sense if the 1933 Invisible Man had been set in the 1890’s, when H. G. Wells wrote the source novel, but it doesn’t given that the film had been set in 1933 — and it also begs the question of when Jack Griffin would have found the time to father a child, and whom he would have fathered one with since it’s clear from the first film that he’s never actually had sex with the one woman he’s genuinely interested in: his fiancée Flora, played by Gloria Stuart.)

Having successfully fought off the Axis agents who were trying to get his family secret, he’s then approached by the Allies in the person of John Gardiner (John Litel), who seems to be playing essentially the same character he did opposite Ronald Reagan in Warners’ Brass Bancroft films, to ask if he’ll let our side use the formula. He will, but on one condition: rather than administer it to a professional commando, he insists on doing the operation himself. The operation involves contacting the German anti-Nazi underground and finding out the plans for a German attack on the U.S. — which I originally thought meant the plot to infiltrate eight saboteurs into this country, which actually did occur (though they were caught almost immediately and ultimately all but two of them were tried in a special tribunal and executed, a precedent the Bush administration cited while setting up the secret courts at Guantánamo), though eventually it turned out the Germans were actually building a long-range bomber for an attack on New York. (One imdb.com poster noted that this was an impossible plot device since no plane in existence in 1942 had the range to cross the Atlantic Ocean with a full payload of bombs sufficient to attack an entire city.)

Invisible Agent actually starred (or at least top-billed) Ilona Massey, who had been brought to the U.S. by MGM in 1939 with great fanfare and put into the film Balalaika opposite Nelson Eddy (replacing Jeanette MacDonald when Louis B. Mayer and his staff realized the story — about the love between a Russian opera singer and a student radical in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg — needed a more exotic, and preferably foreign-born, actress than MacDonald) but within three years was at a second-tier studio like Universal doing parts in movies like this and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

Aside from some pretty clever slapstick bits — including a To Be or Not to Be-ish scene in which the invisible man torments reluctant Nazi Karl Heiser (J. Edward Bromberg) — and some quite moving playing from Albert Bassermann as anti-Nazi German Arnold Schmidt, Invisible Agent is much more a film of action and intrigue than sci-fi or horror. Scenarist Curt Siodmak (who had worked on The Invisible Man Returns and therefore should have known better) got rid of the invisible man’s stark appearance swathed in bandages; instead, when he encounters Ilona Massey (who’s playing a woman who appears to be an anti-Nazi German, then a Nazi posing as an anti-Nazi to entrap Our Hero, and finally is revealed to be a British agent the British Secret Service infiltrated into Berlin) and she hides him out, he reveals himself to her by dressing in her robe (what was she doing with a man’s robe?) and slathering his face with her cold cream, wearing a towel around his head and putting on dark shades to cover the invisible eyes. In a glitch in the special-effects department, he’s “outed” as a genuinely visible actor when he opens his mouth and we can see his teeth. (In general, the process work in this one is inferior to that in the first two films; around his “invisible” head later in the film we can distinctly see the outline of the velvet-wrapped head of Jon Hall on the screen.)

The original trailer (which was on the DVD edition and which we watched before seeing the actual film) promised a spectacular action scene in which the invisible agent would deliberately wreck a German air base — but the sequence turned out to be a bit of a cheat; in the actual film he accidentally sets the base on fire and blows up several fuel tanks while he and Massey’s character are trying to steal a plane to fly back to England with the secret information about the impending German attack on the U.S. The best scene in the movie is one in which the invisible man is actually caught — Baron Ikito and his associate, a Japanese surgeon played by Chinese actor Keye Luke, drop a net made of fishhooks (pretty large ones, too) on top of him, and the scene is staged to make it look like the Massey character entrapped him — and then there’s a sequence in which Ikito has the surgeon remove the fishhooks and the scene comes across as genuinely painful for Jon Hall even though he wasn’t really there.

Siodmak’s worst mistake is eliminating the plot device whereby the user of the invisibility drug goes insane and becomes megalomaniacal as a side effect — one could readily imagine a sequence in which he starts spouting off dreams of world conquest while in Axis captivity and the Hardwicke and Lorre characters would have said something like, “You sound like us! If that’s the sort of world you want, you’re fighting on the wrong side!” Invisible Agent is a good movie but hardly what it could have been with more sensitive writing that tied it in better with the first two films in the sequence, and though the producer and director — Frank Lloyd and Edwin L. Marin, respectively — were more prestigious “names” than usually made films like this, they don’t add that much. Marin stages the action competently enough but this is hardly on the level of A Study in Scarlet or A Christmas Carol, and only the most obvious invisibility gags (comic and otherwise) appear in the film. One wishes with a sigh that Val Lewton could have got to produce an invisible man film; a man whose reputation is for keeping the horrors invisible even when the characters perpetrating them weren’t would have seemed to be the right filmmaker to take the invisible-man character to a level beyond even what quirky James Whale pulled off in 1933! — 10/28/08

••••••••••

The Invisible Woman is a kind of horror/comedy it’s surprising Universal didn’t make more of, though in this case the “horror” wasn’t all that horrible — even The Mummy’s Tomb, made the same year and also light-hearted in its approach, pulled the plug on the comedy and replaced it with out-and-out horror in the last third, whereas Invisible Woman remained a comedy throughout, with overtones of both the slapstick and screwball styles. Director A. Edward Sutherland, a former Keystone Kop, was obviously more familiar with the former than the latter, and the Robert Lees/Frederick Rinaldo/Gertrude Purcell screenplay (from a story by Kurt Siodmak and Joe May) didn’t have the sophistication or the wit necessary for good screwball.

Still, the whole movie was a lot of fun, for John Barrymore’s hamminess, Virginia Bruce’s clear-eyed wit, John Howard’s good-naturedness (one tends to think of him as Ronald Colman’s brother in more ways than one — they were cast as brothers in Lost Horizon and Howard took over Colman’s role in the Bulldog Drummond series — but when Howard got out of his stuffed-shirt typecasting in movies like The Philadelphia Story and Father Takes a Wife, he could be an appealing second-string romantic lead) and charming character performances from Oscar Homolka (doing an Akim Tamiroff imitation), Ed Brophy, Shemp Howard and Charles Lane as a quartet of gangsters who try to steal Barrymore’s invisibility-making machine; also from Charles Ruggles, who almost steals the film as Howard’s put-upon butler; Margaret Hamilton, ditto as Barrymore’s housekeeper; and Maria Montez, in an almost invisible role as a cold-plagued model. — 12/7/94

•••••

Charles and I managed to squeeze in another movie before we crashed and, in the mood for something totally light after Slumdog Millionaire, I picked out The Invisible Woman from the Invisible Man Legacy box and ran it. It’s basically a screwball comedy rather than a horror or sci-fi film, and the big gimmick this time is that the invisibility machine is being developed by Prof. Gibbs (John Barrymore), an amiable crank — the delightfully dotty sort of mad scientist rather than the floridly insane kind — under the patronage of rich playboy Richard Russell (John Howard), who more or less inherited him from his father.

When the film opens Russell has just made a $100,000 breach-of-promise payment to his latest flame, only to learn from his attorney, Hudson (Thurston Hall), that this has bankrupted him. Assured by Prof. Gibbs that his newly perfected machine to turn people invisible will re-make his fortune, Russell decides to hang on a bit longer — much to the discomfiture of his put-upon butler, George (Charles Ruggles, superb as usual in this sort of role) — only the human guinea pig Gibbs recruited to test his process (which requires an initial chemical injection and then a bath in an electrical box that looks like a walk-in shower and bathes its occupant with electric rays generated from some of the leftover lab equipment from The Bride of Frankenstein), store model Kay Carroll (Virginia Bruce, top-billed), is more interested in using her newly gained invisibility to sneak back into the store where she worked (until she was fired for trying to organize the other models into a union, in a scene which quite strikingly prefigures Norma Rae!) and wreak her revenge on her martinet boss, Mr. Growley (Charles Lane), and the time clock with which he insisted the models punch in and out like factory workers.

Anxious to keep Russell away from women and from Gibbs, George hauls him off to his fishing lodge — where Gibbs follows them with the Invisible Woman in tow — and when she puts on her stockings so he can see her legs, naturally Russell is smitten with her instantly. Meanwhile, a trio of gangsters — including Donald MacBride from the Marx Brothers’ Room Service, Ed Brophy from Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman and Doughboys, and once-and-future Stooge Shemp Howard (for my money, the funniest of the lot!) — have stolen the invisibility machine and sneaked it across the border so their boss, “Blackie” Cole (Oscar Homolka), can return to the U.S. and visit his native Chicago before he gets caught or dies. All ends well with the gangsters apprehended, Russell and Kay together (and Kay regaining visibility — it turns out that alcohol consumption delays the return to visibility), and a final bizarre tag scene in which the happy couple’s first child is rubbed with alcohol — and disappears! (“Genetic,” says Barrymore as Gibbs as the scene fades out.)

There are some surprisingly racy gags here and also some great slapstick — notably a spectacular fall taken early on by Charles Ruggles (or, more likely, his stunt double) from a ladder — and while the second half is a bit dull and doesn’t quite sustain the high spirits of the first half, the director, A. Edward Sutherland, is an old Mack Sennett hand and absolutely right for the script. (Sutherland was almost exclusively a comedy director, though he did make Murder at the Zoo for Paramount in 1935 — a fine, envelope-pushing horror film with no laughs at all.) The Invisible Woman was quite obviously intended as a comedy from the get-go — though the original story was by German expats Curt Siodmak and Joe May (who also wrote the story for The Invisible Man Returns), the actual script was by Robert Lees, Frederick Rinaldo and Gertrude Purcell — and Lees and Rinaldo frequently wrote the Abbott and Costello movies for Universal (usually alongside A&C’s own private gag man, John Grant, who had written “Who’s on First?” and many of the other famous sketches for which they were known on radio before they ever made a film), while the producer, Burt Kelly, also worked on the early Abbott and Costello Universals.

Though not on the level of The Bride of Frankenstein, Ghost Breakers, Young Frankenstein or Ghostbusters as a horror spoof, The Invisible Woman is a quite charming film benefiting from a relatively restrained performance by John Barrymore (he could be a ham and a half, but either the script or director Sutherland calmed him down here — and given what happened to him, his solemn warnings to Virginia Bruce’s character not to drink alcohol are sadly ironic) and a finely honed one by Bruce. She should have been a major star — had it been made for a major studio instead of Monogram, the 1934 Jane Eyre would have probably been a star-making role (as it is, though the overall film isn’t as good as the far more famous 1943 Fox remake, Bruce far out-acts Joan Fontaine in the role); as it was, she got relegated to second leads in major productions and leads in movies like this (though, according to imdb.com, The Invisible Woman was budgeted at $300,000 — about twice what the usual Universal “B” cost and enough that it marked, for them, a major production). — 10/29/08

The Old Dark House (Universal, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as their joint follow-up to Frankenstein the year before, The Old Dark House is a magnificent movie, not especially frightening but full of Whale’s dry-wit comic touches and playing against cliché. Interestingly, an opening credit attached to the film assured audiences that the Karloff who played the mad, (almost) mute butler Morgan in this film was indeed the same actor who had played the Frankenstein monster in the earlier film — just in case you couldn’t recognize him through the heavy (and completely different) makeup, which made him look like a cross between a particularly hirsute longshoreman and an ape.

While Karloff didn’t get much chance to do pathos in this film — except towards the end, when he’s seen cradling the dead body of his one friend, the pyromaniac brother Saul Femm (Brember Wills) — Whale assembled probably the greatest all-star cast ever put together in a horror film, with Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey and Charles Laughton as the three men stranded at the titular “old dark house” overnight (there are also two women involved — Gloria Stuart as Massey’s wife and Lillian Bond as a chorus girl who transfers her affections from Laughton to Douglas during the evening) and Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore and Wills as the Femms (the craziest, most anti-social family ever created by a fiction writer — in this case J. B. Priestley, whose source novel for this film was called Benighted — since Edgar Allan Poe made up the Ushers).

Thesiger plays Horace Femm (we meet his father, Roderick Femm, whose nomenclatory similarity to Poe’s Roderick Usher is probably no coincidence, later in the film), a withdrawn aesthete. Thesiger was one of the great horror actors; when he says, “Have a potato,” it sounds as sinister as most actors do when they say, “I’m going to kill you.” Moore is his sister, Rebecca Femm, a religious fanatic (the constant gibes at Christianity throughout this film are probably no coincidence, either, given that the director was Gay) who points to Gloria Stuart’s filmy white dress — and then at her even filmier white skin — and tells her that age and sin will ruin them in time.

Even though all the Femms are senior citizens, their father is still alive; Roderick Femm, Sr. is 100 years old, bedridden — and, in an interesting streak of Whale casting, is actually played by a 102-year-old woman, Elspeth Dudgeon, whom Whale found in Britain and brought here especially for the role (although, to preserve her apparent maleness on screen, Whale credited the performance to “John Dudgeon”). It’s the father who explains to us that the brutish butler Morgan is on staff because his strength is needed to protect the house and its inhabitants against the even stronger evil brother Saul (the only Femm, it seems, who had a first name beginning with a letter other than “R”) — who turns out (surprise!) to be a seemingly harmless old man, who in fact (double surprise!) turns out to be a maniac who corners Douglas in his cell-like room (he’d been kept locked up for years, but on the night our guests arrived Morgan got drunk and, frustrated when his attempt to rape Gloria Stuart was foiled, let Saul out), quotes him the passage in the Bible about the original Saul’s murder attempt on David, throws a knife at him and sets fire to the top story of the house. Eventually the fire goes out (apparently put out by the driving rainstorm that led our heroes to seek shelter at Chez Femm in the first place), everybody finally falls asleep out of sheer exhaustion (except Saul, who is killed in a fight with Douglas, who is injured) and they all wake up in the morning to a bright, sunny English day.

The Old Dark House is one of Whale’s four horror masterpieces of the early 1930’s, and — at least in England — it was as popular as the other three (General Films, Universal’s British distributor, made it a regular Sunday night feature at theatres throughout Britain from 1932 to 1945). Somehow, it mysteriously disappeared, only to resurface in 1970 — I saw it for the first time at the San Francisco Film Festival of that year, at 1 a.m. in a darkened theatre (this is one movie that really should be seen at night in a theatre — it loses some of its nervous, nervy appeal on TV), and again in the late 1970’s at the UC Theatre in Berkeley (the northernmost outpost of the Landmark chain). It turned out to be one of those films whose copyright was grabbed by Raymond Rohauer, who did film buffs a great service by rescuing from oblivion some of the greatest movies of all time (including Buster Keaton’s silent masterpieces and Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr), but who also locked his treasures away from the world for years with the manic intensity of a Femm — only recently have the Keatons Rohauer controlled finally made it to home video, and one suspects it will be a while before The Old Dark House likewise surfaces on cassette. [In the mid-2000’s Kino on Video made The Old Dark House available on DVD. — M.G.C., 10/25/08]

A remake I’ve never seen from 1963 — which starred Tom Poston, and whose director, William Castle, offered Karloff a chance to repeat his original role, which Karloff turned down because the script was terrible and too far removed from the original — circulated on TV for years. MCA's unwillingness or inability to release The Old Dark House on video was a real pity, given how comprehensively they had been restoring so many of the Universal horror classics to well-deserved video circulation (including such oddities as the Spanish-language Dracula) — especially given the historical importance of The Old Dark House as Charles Laughton’s first American film (and Raymond Massey’s second, and first in the U.S. — its only predecessor was the 1931 British film The Speckled Band, in which he played Sherlock Holmes), though Laughton is almost unrecognizable with a full shock of dark hair and a thick Welsh accent! — 5/15/95

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I called Charles, made some pancakes and — as a Hallowe’en celebration — went over to see Charles with two of the quirkier horror films ever made by Hollywood, The Old Dark House (virtually a British picture in exile since the director, writer and most of the cast were British and it took place in the British countryside) and The Seventh Victim. Charles liked both movies, though he was a little put off by their abrupt endings — certainly James Whale’s spoof of all the old-house movies to that time (and, for that matter, since) and Val Lewton’s doom-laden tale of Satanism in contemporary New York hardly count as typical “horror movies” then or now (and one wonders what 1932 audiences made of The Old Dark House after being lured in to see it by ads stressing the participation of the star and director of Frankenstein!). — 11/1/96

•••••

Charles and I finally got to watch a movie, and I reached back to the early years of Universal’s talking horror films again and ran The Old Dark House, an unsung masterpiece James Whale made in 1932 that, since it doesn’t really have much of a plot, offers far more of a showcase for Whale’s quirky wit than just about any of his other films (though The Bride of Frankenstein remains his masterpiece in the genre). There’s really not much more story to it than a motley group of five travelers, in two cars — first Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart) and their friend Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas, second-billed); then self-made man Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton, in his first American film) and his (platonic) companion Gladys Duquesne, nèe Perkins (Lillian Bond) — are driving through the back country of Wales when a ferocious rainstorm forces them to stop for the night at the home of the sinister Femm family: brother Horace (Ernest Thesiger coming off as what Truman Capote would have been like if he’d made it to his 80’s), his religious-fanatic sister Rebecca (Eva Moore), their father Roderick (played by an actor who was billed as John Dudgeon but was really the centenarian British actress Elspeth Dudgeon, given outrageously phony whiskers and a male first name to pass herself off as a man) and their older brother Saul (Brember Wills), whom they keep locked up.

In order to make sure Saul doesn’t get out, they need to have a fierce-looking butler, Morgan (Boris Karloff, top-billed but still under the title), who like the Frankenstein monster (at least in the first Universal Frankenstein) is mute except for inchoate grunts and moans. (When Penderel and the Wavertons arrive at the Femm manse and Morgan greets them at the door with such noises, Penderel says, “Even Welsh ought not to sound like that!”) About all that happens during the evening is that Morgan gets the hots for Margaret Waverton and tries to rape her, but Philip fortunately saves his wife by throwing an elaborate lantern at the butler; and later on Morgan lets Saul out of the locked room — and he turns out (surprise!) to be a mild-mannered little old man who’s really (double surprise!) a pyromaniac who attempts to set the Femm home on fire by lighting some of the heavy wall curtains with a log from the fireplace. (He tried to do this once before but this time around is stopped well short of causing any danger for the other people in the film.) Eventually one of the guests kills Saul in self-defense, Morgan gets a sad scene when he’s shown cradling his dead friend Saul in his arms (the one best bit of acting Karloff did in a film that otherwise really didn’t challenge him all that much), day breaks, the travelers leave — in the meantime Gladys has transferred her affections from Porterhouse to Penderel, and leaves with him — and the Femms go back to being the Mother of All Dysfunctional Families.

I can’t separate my feelings about The Old Dark House from the context in which I first saw it: at the end of a long day at the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival — I’d sneaked in and sat in the theatre as they ran movie after movie, culminating with this and Mystery of the Wax Museum. Both were recent rediscoveries at the time and hadn’t been seen publicly in decades — Mystery not since its initial release in 1933 and Old Dark House not since 1945, when Universal’s British distributor, General Film, withdrew it because all the prints had worn out — and I was sitting there in the Palace of Fine Arts theatre wondering how the hell I was going to get home since the last buses back to Marin County had long stopped running by the time the film ended. (I walked home about halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge and was apprehended by a police officer, who took me the rest of the way home and said he’d been inclined to let me go but I’d said something that made him feel like I was mocking him — that early in my life my tongue was already getting me into trouble with authority figures!)

It struck me then as the scariest film I’d ever seen, albeit in a low-keyed, un-obvious way — there aren’t any real horror sequences in it but it’s spooky as all get-out thanks to Whale’s superb direction, a marvelous script by Benn W. Levy (and an uncredited R. C. Sherriff) that leaves us almost totally at sea as to what’s going to happen next, wonderfully atmospheric cinematography by Arthur Edeson, almost Caligari-ish sets (Universal’s art department head, Charles D. Hall, is the only name credited) and an overall combination of spookiness and cheekiness that works surprisingly well. About the only disappointment in The Old Dark House is how little Boris Karloff has to do: he has surprisingly little screen time, the heavy hairpiece and beard he wears in character as Morgan gives him little room for facial expressiveness, he doesn’t get a chance to use his voice and a couple of his scenes — a quick succession of three ever-closer shots of his face and the attempted rape of Margaret — are all too obviously rehashes of his work in Frankenstein (there’s even a written prologue to the film explaining that the mad butler in this movie and the “mechanical monster” — sic; he was actually electrical — in Frankenstein were indeed played by the same actor), but the rest of the film is so good and the cast is probably the most stellar ever assembled for a horror film (Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey and Charles Laughton! Only The Ghoul, with Karloff, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Ernest Thesiger, even comes close). The Old Dark House is a first-rate film, easily on a par with Whale’s three better-known Universal horrors (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein) and worth being better known than it is. — 10/25/08

The Invisible Man (Universal, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I spent the evening with Charles running him the tape of The Invisible Man from 1933 and the immediate sequel, The Invisible Man Returns, from 1940. Charles liked the first film a lot better than the second — and rightly so; it has a finer story (it’s actually a very close adaptation of H. G. Wells’ original novel), James Whale’s marvelously quirky direction (including his penchant for strongly etched character roles — Una O’Connor is unforgettable and it’s fascinating to note how effective and authoritative Henry Travers is as the older scientist after getting to know him as the bumbling angel in It’s a Wonderful Life 13 years later) and a witty script by R. C. Sheriff (who wrote Whale’s first theatrical success, the play Journey’s End, that was also the basis of his first film) and an uncredited Philip Wylie.

Above all, it had Claude Rains, who is magnificent in the title role: his rich, fruity, well-modulated voice helps to make up for the fact that until the very end of the film he’s either wrapped up in bandages or totally invisible, just a voice on the soundtrack. (For me, the best moment in his superb performance is how he, at least briefly, softens his voice when he meets his girlfriend Flora, played by Gloria Stuart.) John P. Fulton’s special effects are among the most remarkable ever filmed — they were done by wrapping Rains’ body in black cloth and filming him against a black screen; if Rains were to appear partially dressed in the film sequence, or to take his clothes off, his clothes would be put on over the black wrappings; and if he were to manipulate an object with the final effect being one of him, say, lighting and smoking a cigarette with himself invisible and only the cigarette, the pack it came from, and the match visible on screen, he handled these objects against the black screen.

What emerged when this film was processed as negative was a clear strip of film in which only his clothes and the objects he was handling registered; and this strip, a reversal print in which the clothes and objects were darkened into black silhouettes, and the camera negative containing the rest of the scene’s action (including any other actors shown in the final scene) were optically printed together. Though a few of the more complicated scenes have the telltale black ring around the “invisible” figure that indicates the use of this technique and gives it away that this is a composite shot, for the most part the effects are marvelously convincing. — 8/30/97

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The Invisible Man is something else altogether: a James Whale masterpiece, faithfully adapted by R. C. Sherriff (author of the World War I play Journey’s End, which made Whale a star director on both stage and screen) from the H. G. Wells novel and successfully “bent” by both Sherriff and Whale to fit the latter’s weird camp sensibility that makes his films continue to work as off-the-wall melodramas even as familiarity has worn the edges off them and made them relatively unfrightening. Sherriff got the call from Whale to come out to Universal and write the script; when he got there he found a policy where the writers literally had to punch in on a time clock and work in a large, sterile office building. Whale told Sherriff that he should punch in, spend his days wandering around the lot and watching how films were made, and then return to his hotel room at night to do the actual writing.

Universal also provided Sherriff with about 14 “treatments” of The Invisible Man — all of them substantially altered from the original, including one set in Czarist Russia and one set on Mars — but they didn’t have a copy of the Wells novel he was supposedly adapting. Sherriff bought one after a long search through L.A.’s second-hand bookstores, and on reading it decided that it would make a great movie just as Wells had written it — which explains the fact that, unlike Whale’s Frankenstein (which uses little from Mary Shelley’s novel but its central premise, its Swiss setting and a few of the character names), The Invisible Man is actually a quite close adaptation of the text and many of the lines that seem most Whalian — including the title character’s famous lamentation on the disadvantages of being invisible — were actually Wells’s.

The Invisible Man holds up vividly, thanks to the marvelous performance of Claude Rains in the title role (in a story where he’s either swathed in bandages or not seen at all until the very end, in the great climax where he fades back in to visibility as he dies, his skill at modulating his voice and projecting the character’s mood swings through inflection alone is dazzling), the degree to which Whale’s camp sensibility matches the original material, the marvelously convincing special effects by John P. Fulton and the rich cast: Gloria Stuart playing the abandoned girlfriend of Jack Griffin (Rains) with utter sincerity, Henry Travers as Griffin’s former employer in a far different characterization from the rather fey one he’s best known for (as Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life 13 years later), William Harrigan as the genuinely conflicted Kemp, Griffin’s colleague and would-be betrayer (just because we’re rooting for him doesn’t mean we have to like him, and we don’t), Una O’Connor as the innkeeper’s wife in the opening scenes (as usual, she doesn’t walk; she scuttles, and the three doors and hinged shelves art director Charles Hall’s set required her to open to get out from behind the bar to go anywhere else in the inn are used quite effectively by Whale to underscore the level of panic in which her character seems to lives her entire life), and three actors who make an indelible impression even though unbilled: Walter Brennan as the man whose bicycle is stolen by the Invisible Man in an early scene, Dwight Frye as a reporter asking tough questions of the police during a press conference, and John Carradine as a tipster offering one of many dumb suggestions for catching the Invisible Man.

There are a few minor technical glitches — scenes in which the process work leaves a tell-tale black line around an object supposedly being manipulated by the Invisible Man, a few shots where if you look very closely Rains’ head appears as a faint bubble-like shadow on the screen, and some simple editing and technical mistakes (in one scene a radio announcer reporting on the events is still heard for a second or so after the Invisible Man has turned the radio off; in one scene in which Rains is supposed to be invisible the low camera angle picked by Whale and cinematographer Arthur Edeson shows his nostrils under the bandage, and there’s the big one Leslie Halliwell mentioned in The Filmgoer’s Companion: in the final scene, when the Invisible Man flees the burning barn and is shot down by police who can see his tracks through the snow, his footprints are those of a man wearing shoes even though he’s supposed to be barefoot) — but it’s an indication of how powerful this film really is that it takes a lot of viewings of this film to notice them.

Like King Kong, made the same year, The Invisible Man doesn’t sacrifice the other elements of good movie-making — creative direction, literate scriptwriting, fine acting — on the altar of dazzling effects, as good as the effects work is; though both The Invisible Man and King Kong could be remade today with digital effects, one can’t imagine either being done with the marvelous sensibilities of the originals: the quasi-documentary “you are there” feel of the original King Kong (made by filmmakers who had started out as documentarians and brainstormed how they would react being confronted by living dinosaurs and giant apes on an uncharted island, however unlikely and silly they knew that premise to be) and the curious campiness and identification with the outsider Whale brought to his greatest films (his homosexuality? Certainly camp is the default setting for Queer humor — though Whale’s subtle mocking of the conventions not only of society but of the horror genre itself is far more sophisticated than the dumb lampooning that passes for “camp” today — and the fascination with the private lives of his monsters that Carlos Clarens attributed to Whale might indeed have been his veiled plea for acceptance as a Gay man). — 10/36/04

•••••

I ran him another quirky movie set in England: The Invisible Man, the nonpareil 1933 masterpiece from Universal directed by James Whale at his near-quirkiest (The Bride of Frankenstein was him at his absolute quirkiest and the 1935 murder mystery Remember Last Night?, his offtake on the Thin Man series with the alcohol consumption ramped up even higher, also is noteworthy in that regard and particularly for how much of the iconography of his horror films Whale was able to get into a quite different kind of movie) from a screenplay by R. C. Sherriff (author of the play Journey’s End, which had established Whale as a “star” director both on stage and on film) that hewed surprisingly closely to the H. G. Wells novel on which the film was based — unlike the Universal adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein, which took little more from their originals than the basic premises and character names.

The closeness was more an accident than anything else; as Sherriff recalled years later, when he showed up at Universal he was not only confronted with a requirement that he clock in and out on a time clock (which appalled him until Whale suggested that he show up, clock in, wander around the studio and get a look at how films were made, then clock out again, go to the hotel room where he was staying in L.A. and do the actual writing in his room at night) but found to his astonishment that they didn’t have a copy of the book he was supposed to be adapting. Instead they had about 14 “treatments” by previous writers they’d assigned to the project, including one set in Czarist Russia and another set on Mars. Sherriff scoured the second-hand bookstores of L.A. for a copy of the Wells novel, finally found one, read it and decided the book would make an excellent film just as it stood — so he wrote a script that closely followed the novel and it did make a marvelous film. (Some of the touches that Carlos Clarens and others considered especially characteristic of Whale — notably the long speech in which the Invisible Man explains the perils of his condition, including that his food is visible until he digests it and he can’t go out in rain or fog because those conditions would give him away, it’s awkward for him to climb stairs because “we’re so used to watching our feet” and even dirt under his fingernails can give him away — were taken almost verbatim from the Wells novel.)

I probably wouldn’t have made this connection if I hadn’t been reading more of David Sheff’s memoir of his son’s drug addiction, Beautiful Boy, while in line at the screening (I’m reading it in counterpoint with the son’s own book about his experiences, Tweak), but in addition to all its other qualities The Invisible Man, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, seems powerfully metaphoric for substance abuse and the problems it creates not only for the abuser but for his or her loved ones. Both books were originally written towards the end of the 19th century, when morphine, heroin and cocaine were still legal and their horrendous adverse effects were only just becoming known — and I suspect both Stevenson and Wells were aware of the burgeoning awareness of the effects of drug addiction and consciously modeled their stories around it. The Invisible Man is the story of a person who takes a powerful drug and leaves his surrogate “family” to live in isolation and practice his habit in secret, and at least two aspects of the movie rang incredibly true to me in light of what both Sheffs were writing about in their books: the statement of Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains), the Invisible Man, that the drugs he was taking “seemed to clear my brain” (when in fact they were driving him crazy!) and the reaction of his surrogate “family” — his employer, Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers, in a serious and un-campy role almost unrecognizable as the same actor who played Clarence the guardian angel in It’s a Wonderful Life); his fiancée, Cranley’s daughter Flora (Gloria Stuart in a marvelous performance — she did say the three best directors she ever worked for were Whale, John Ford and James Cameron); and his colleague, Dr. Arthur Kemp (William Harrigan, such a singularly overbearing screen presence that instead of regarding it as tragedy when Griffin kills him, we’re thinking to ourselves, “Good riddance”), who’s also after Flora — when he turns up is to want to protect him and help “cure” him even though he’s actually confessed to them that he’s become a murderer and a terrorist.

The emotions ring true even in a film with a plot premise so fantastic as this one — and Whale’s love of eccentric characters shows through in the casting of Forrester Harvey and Una O’Connor as the husband and wife who manage the Lion’s Head pub in the tiny village of Iping where the story begins. Though there’s one major slip-up in the dressing of the Iping pub set I’d never noticed before (the dartboard is an American-style one instead of a British one), for the most part the atmosphere is flawlessly evoked and the three doors O’Connor’s character has to open to get from behind the bar to anywhere else in the building practically become a character in themselves. The film isn’t particularly scary — it’s really more of a science-fiction thriller than a horror movie — but it’s gripping throughout, well staged (I couldn’t help but wonder how Whale instructed his actors to double over and fall down when they were supposedly being punched by the Invisible Man), and Claude Rains’ performance is utterly convincing even though he gives it almost exclusively by voice alone. (According to imdb.com, many of the scenes showing Rains as the Invisible Man were done with a body double — they involved wrapping the actor in black velvet and filming him against a black backdrop, both of which became clear when the negative was developed and could be processed in — and for scenes in which he’s wearing only a shirt or smoking a cigarette, the props were the only objects in the scene that would register photographically; Rains did a lot of these scenes himself but one could readily imagine that he wouldn’t have wanted to put himself through a lot of the subsidiary action, and his double was apparently taller and had a more prominent nose than Rains.)

Little touches like how he softens his intonations when Flora’s name is mentioned — to show that, even though monocaine, the drug he’s used to make himself invisible (in the sequel, The Invisible Man Returns, the drug has become “duocaine” and I remember joking that for the third film in the series they were going to make it “tricaine”), has turned him into a megalomaniac, he still has enough of a soft side that he responds to the name of his lover. Like Whale’s other horror (broadly defined) films for Universal, Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man is a marvelously sophisticated film, capable of entertaining and even moving audiences even after the “horrific” images have become so familiar that they’re simply no longer scary.

Incidentally, the imdb.com “Trivia” section on this film has an account of how Rains got the part that differs from the ones I’d read before; the stories agree that Universal wanted to cast Boris Karloff as the Invisible Man, but imdb.com claims that Whale wanted Rains from the get-go because he thought Rains’ voice sounded “more intellectual” than Karloff’s (which seems hard to believe!). The version I’d heard before was that Karloff was offered the part but turned it down because the character would never be seen on screen until the very last scene (an interesting inversion of Bela Lugosi’s giving Karloff his big chance by turning down Frankenstein because the Monster had no dialogue!), and Whale sought out Rains because he’d never made a film before (actually, he had, but they’d all been small parts in minor English productions) and he liked the idea of casting the Invisible Man with an actor whose face was unknown to movie audiences so no one would have a mental image of what he looked like. — 10/24/08

The Mysterious Doctor (Warners, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the next film on the tape, The Mysterious Doctor, though far more sensibly plotted, was pretty much a mediocre wash — one of those films that just drains an hour out of your life without either being good enough to be memorable entertainment or bad enough to be actively displeasing. It’s a Warners “B” (just 56 minutes, though so sluggishly paced it seems 12 minutes longer than The Mask of Fu Manchu when in fact it’s 12 minutes shorter!), directed by Ben Stoloff in 1943 from a script by Richard Weil, set in the Welsh mining country in contemporary times, and within five minutes Weil has dropped us enough hints that we can tell the so-called “headless ghost” that’s terrorizing the village in which the thing takes place is going to turn out to be an all-too-natural human being and the plot will have something to do with the war.

The title character, played by Forrester Harvey (the father of the young girl the monster drowns in the original Frankenstein) [actually, he wasn’t, though Forrester Harvey IS in the movie — M.G.C., 10/23/08], is an agent of the British government sent to the Welsh town to reopen a tin mine whose products are needed for the war effort, only to find that a centuries-old superstition has made the local villagers determined never to work in the mine or allow it to produce again.

The star is John Loder, playing a (seemingly) beneficent aristocrat who turns out to be a German “sleeper” whose family settled in Wales in the time of King George I and opened the mine in the first place; according to the last-minute explanation he was called back to Germany by Hitler and ordered to make sure the mine never reopened. Eleanor Parker, playing the only significant female role (the girlfriend of a British army officer who’s determined to get the mine reopened), plays with the kind of authority that made it clear she deserved (and eventually got) better assignments than this, and Matt Willis (who played Bela Lugosi’s werewolf assistant in the Stoloff-produced, Lew Landers-directed Return of the Vampire at Columbia the following year) is genuinely moving as the local retarded man who helps Ms. Parker unravel the plot. Warners filmed it in all-out imitation of the Universal style — lots of on-set fog and gnarled tree trunks, shadowy lighting and characters wandering around either expressing or forestalling sinister motives — but at least at Universal the film would have had a stronger, more ambiguous plot! — 10/25/03

•••••

The movie was The Mysterious Doctor, the companion piece to The Return of Doctor “X” on the DVD I’d just recorded from TCM, and it was a pretty good piece even though it got boring after a while. It was a 57-minute Warners “B” set in Cornwall (which one imdb.com commentator made the mistake of putting in England instead of Wales), in which a mysterious man named Dr. Frederick Holmes (Lester Matthews) shows up at the town of Morgan’s Head while doing a “walking tour” of Cornwall — in 1943 (when this film was made), in the middle of World War II! Morgan’s Head gets its name from a legend that two families were squabbling over control of the local mine (the imdb.com synopsis identifies it as a tin mine but I don’t recall anything in Richard Weil’s “original” screenplay that stated exactly what mineral they had been mining there), the Morgans and the Lelands, and Leland killed and decapitated Morgan, but Morgan survived as a ghost and walked around in search of his missing head.

Ever since then, the townspeople have assumed the mine was haunted and have refused to work it — with the result that it’s been sitting idle — though it’s not at all clear how the townspeople have been surviving in the meantime except it does seem to involve the largesse of the surviving Leland heir, Sir Henry Leland (John Loder, top-billed). The one inn in Morgan's Head is owned by Simon Tewksbury (Frank Mayo), who dresses in an old-fashioned executioner’s hood — apparently because his own face is badly scarred underneath, though I couldn’t help but think it was because he was a member of a Wars of the Roses re-enactment society. There’s also a mysterious man who parachutes down from the sky near the town and is suspected of being an enemy agent infiltrated by the Germans, but he’s never found and the only purpose of this plot twist is to give the townspeople an excuse to suspect Dr. Holmes of being the enemy paratrooper.

Most of the film consists of a lot of aimless running around on a quite good studio soundstage-“exterior” set by Charles Novi with great, billowing banks of fog that made one wonder how Warners got so much dry ice diverted their way during the middle of the war. Director Ben Stoloff shows much more of a sense of atmosphere than he had in his previous low-level potboilers for RKO, moving his actors (including the young Eleanor Parker as the female lead, town girl Letty Carstairs, who inevitably falls for British lieutenant Christopher “Kit” Hilton, played by a personable fellow named Bruce Lester) efficiently around Novi’s stunning set, but it’s a pretty aimless movie all in all because all that seems to happen is that various people run around the sets, presumably either chasing each other or in search of some valuable secret. The eventual payoff, which was far less surprising than Richard Weil seemed to think it was, was that Sir Henry Leland was really a German agent assigned to keep the tin mine (or whatever it was) from reopening and thereby helping the British war effort, and in order to do so he had donned a costume making himself look like Morgan’s headless ghost — while Dr. Holmes (ya remember the mysterious doctor?) was really an agent of the British government there to get the mine reopened so it could contribute whatever it was to the war effort.

In the end, the real heir to the mine turns out to be the half-witted Bart Redmond (Matt Willis, who a year later would play the werewolf sidekick of Bela Lugosi’s Count Armand Tesla in Columbia’s The Return of the Vampire — and he was actually quite a good horror actor, expert at pathos and essentially channeling Dwight Frye in both those roles), and Letty, seemingly acting as trustee, gets him to reopen the mine and the workers sing a song and sound like they’re about to go all socialist-realist on us as they return to work it and extract … well, whatever. The Mysterious Doctor had the makings of a quite good little atmospheric quasi-horror film (one could imagine what Val Lewton could have done with a concept like this!) but too much of it seemed like aimless running-around and the actors, though personable, were nothing special — though I give John Loder points for being as credible as a villain as he’d been as a hero in Hitchcock’s Sabotage and other films! — 10/23/08

The Return of Doctor “X” (Warners, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

One was The Return of Doctor “X,” which despite its title is not a sequel to the original Doctor “X” from 1932. This was made in 1939 and was a Warner Brothers “B” which has the unusual distinction of being the only horror film Humphrey Bogart ever made. (Yes, that’s right — Alfred Hitchcock made a musical, Waltzes from Vienna, and Humphrey Bogart made a horror film.) Bogart plays Marshall Quesne (pronounced “Cain”), a mad surgeon who two years before the film’s action begins starved a baby to death to see how long it would take to die, was tried and convicted of murder, was executed and then was brought back to life by another mad surgeon, John Litel (so far this has less in common with Doctor “X” than it does with The Walking Dead, a 1936 film in which Boris Karloff was an execution victim who was similarly revived by scientific means — and Bogart’s makeup, including a white, pallid face and a grey streak through his hair, was patterned on Karloff’s in the earlier film).

The good guys are reporter Wayne Morris and junior surgeon Dennis Morgan, who stumble onto a series of murders in which the victims, all with Type One blood (in this movie the blood types have numbers instead of the familiar letters A, B, AB and O), are drained of their blood — by Humphrey Bogart, who needs Type One blood to prolong his already artificially prolonged existence. Bogart actually acts the part with an odd dignity and grace, but that’s about the only positive thing about this ridiculous movie, which is directed by Vincent Sherman (who later went on to direct — and sleep with — both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis) with almost none of the horrific atmosphere required to make such a silly storyline even halfway credible. (Just about any director on the contract list at Universal could have done it better — but then Universal specialized in this sort of movie.) — 1/20/98

•••••

The film was The Return of Doctor “X,” which I’d recorded earlier this week and for which I’ve always had a kind of twisted affection even though it’s not a very good film. It was made at Warner Bros. in 1939 and features Humphrey Bogart in his only horror role — as the mysterious Dr. Marshall Quesne (pronounced “Cain”), pasty-faced, white-streaked sidekick to blood specialist Dr. Francis Flegg (John Litel) at Jules Memorial Hospital. Curiously, Bogart is billed third in the opening credits but first in the closing ones, though in terms of on-screen time the film’s real principals are Wayne Morris as hotshot New York Morning Dispatch reporter Walter “Wichita” Garrett (the nickname is his home town, where he previously worked) and Dennis Morgan as Dr. Mike Rhodes, Dr. Flegg’s open assistant (as opposed to Quesne, whom he keeps hidden and only works with at home).

The action of this film, written by William J. Makin (“original” story) and Lee Katz (script) and directed by Vincent Sherman with more verve and esprit than a pretty silly plot line called for, begins when Garrett shows up at a fancy hotel to interview star actress Angela Merrova (Lya Lys, who looks pretty cadaverous even before the script tells us she is!), who’s just come from Europe to be featured in a big Broadway production — only when he gets to her room, she’s been stabbed just under the heart and all her blood is gone. Accordingly, Garrett phones a big scoop into the Morning Dispatch that Merrova is dead — only the next morning she turns up alive and ready to sue the paper for $100,000.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rhodes is supposed to be assisting Dr. Flegg at the hospital in an operation for which they need a transfusion of Type One blood (for some reason the blood types in this movie have numbers instead of the letters — A, B, AB and O — we’re familiar with today). They plan to call in professional blood donor Stanley Rodgers (John Ridgely) but can’t reach him on the phone — and later they find out that he has been murdered in his room, and his blood, too, has been entirely drained from his body. Dr. Rhodes finds a blood sample at the scene of Rodgers’ murder and examines it under a microscope — and to his astonishment it’s like no blood he’s ever seen before, neither human nor animal.

It turns out that Dr. Flegg has been conducting experiments with the intent of developing a synthetic form of blood that can be used in place of the real thing for transfusions and operations, and after Merrova was murdered he used his synthetic blood to revive her — only it didn’t work for more than about a day or two. It also turns out that the mysterious Marshall Quesne is really Maurice Xavier, who two years earlier did an experiment in which he deliberately starved a child to see how long it would take to die. For this he was arrested, convicted and executed — only Dr. Flegg claimed the body, had an empty coffin buried in his place, and brought him back to life with his blood substitute and various Frankenstein-esque electronic gizmos. However, Dr. Flegg’s synthetic blood was no more able to keep Quesne, a.k.a. Xavier, alive than it had been for Angela Merrova — and as a result he had to go out and kill people (including Merrova and Rodgers) to obtain genuine Type One blood to keep himself alive.

It’s a silly movie for Bogart to have done at this point in his career, and he’s pretty obviously miscast (imdb.com claims the part was actually intended for Boris Karloff, who’d done the similarly plotted The Walking Dead at Warners three years earlier and in 1939 was defying the studio system by maintaining non-exclusive contracts at four studios: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram; and Bogart said of the film, “I had a part that somebody like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff should have played. I was this doctor, brought back to life, and the only thing that nourished this poor bastard was blood. If it had been Jack Warner’s blood, or Harry’s, or Pop’s, maybe I wouldn’t have minded as much. The trouble was, they were drinking mine and I was making this stinking movie”), but he’s enough of a professional that not only does he manage to come through without embarrassment but he actually brings true pathos to the role.

Though he has surprisingly few scenes, he plays the part as a wounded man of science, genuinely upset and unable to conceive of why people would disapprove of his actions, alienated from the world around him but still wanting to be part of it, and going about his high-tech vampirism with a grim determination not all that different from the Bogart of the gangster films that were his stock in trade at the time: neither enjoying murder nor being repulsed by it but simply accepting it as a grim necessity for his own survival. It’s a remarkable and unforgettable performance even though Bogart hated making this movie and, not surprisingly, never dabbled in the horror genre again — and the title is a “cheat,” promising a sequel to Doctor “X,” the far more accomplished Warners horror production of 1932 with a true horror cast (headed by Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray!) and brilliantly eerie direction by Michael Curtiz (also helped by two-strip Technicolor) but delivering a far less original and interesting movie. Still, The Return of Doctor “X” is a likable movie revealing that Bogart’s acting skills could extend to horror. — 10/23/08

Kabluey (Whitewater Films, 2007)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film turned out to be something I hadn’t expected — a comedy masterpiece: Kabluey, a 2006 (that’s the copyright date; imdb.com lists it as from 2007, though come to think of it the movie has to be more recent than 2006 because the Iraq War “surge” is a plot element) laff-riot written, directed by and starring Scott Prendergast, who had he been born in 1900 instead of 1970 would probably have had a great career in silent comedy. Here he plays Salman (“as in ‘Rushdie,’” he helpfully explains when another character in the film stumbles over his name), the ne’er-do-well brother of Noah (Phil Thoden), a National Guardsman who was tapped for duty in Iraq and whose tour there has just been extended as part of the “surge.” Noah’s wife Leslie (Lisa Kudrow, top-billed) is about to lose health insurance coverage for herself and, more importantly, her two sons Lincoln (Landon Henninger) and Cameron (Cameron Wofford), unless she goes back to work immediately. Needing someone who can look after the kids while she’s away, she sends for brother-in-law Salman — whom we meet in Nevada, where his car (a used car he picked up for $250 — and you can readily imagine what $250 buys you in a car today!) has just caught fire and stranded him.

He shows up with one carry-on suitcase, explaining that all his other belongings are in storage either in Nevada or Vermont (the locale where the film takes place is unspecified but I think we’re meant to assume it’s Austin, Texas, where it actually was shot), and of course his nephews take an instant dislike to him — “I’m going to kill you,” Cameron mutters to him under his breath; and when Leslie insists that her boys are just wonderful kids an exasperated Salman says, “That’s spin!” But though there are a few good verbal gags in Kabluey, most of its laughs are visual — and Prendergast has somehow managed to recapture the seemingly lost silent-comedy art of building one gag on top of another to ever-increasing levels of hilarity.

Leslie arranges for Salman to take a job at the company she works for, BlueNextion, an Internet start-up that pretty much collapsed in the dot-com bust of 2000 and has a huge building which they’re trying to keep from losing by renting out office space. Salman’s job will be to hand out flyers, printed on crimson paper, advertising the office space for rent in the BlueNextion building. Then he finds out that he will have to do this in a costume representing the BlueNextion logo, which is a little blue man with a big head. The suit is not only excruciatingly uncomfortable and so confining Salman can’t put it on or take it off by himself, the visibility is so limited — just a narrow wire-mesh screen the wearer can see out of — that it seems from Prendergast’s P.O.V. shots that BlueNextion has invented the high-tech burka. What’s more, the arms of the suit don’t come with fingers — not even an opposable thumb — which means that it’s literally impossible for anyone to pass a leaflet to anyone else when they’re wearing it. The topper comes when Salman’s boss drives him out to where he’s supposed to be passing out the leaflets (she’s driving a convertible with the top down, which is mandatory because the huge head of the suit ensures that its wearer could not possibly fit into an enclosed car) — and it’s in the middle of farm country, with virtually no foot traffic whatsoever.

The first person he sees is a woman (Teri Garr) in a car who glares at him because she lost her life savings in BlueNextion stock and seeing a life-size version of the company’s logo on the road just freaks her out. Later Salman encounters a road crew who offer him a beer — and there are some great gag scenes of him attempting to grab and open the beer while he’s locked in the suit, until he realizes that he can open the bottom of its zipper just enough to stick his hand out (where, in the one gag in the film that’s in dubious taste, though as with the fart gags in Blazing Saddles it was so funny I didn’t really mind, it looks like he’s shitting out his own hand) — whereupon he drinks the beer and then realizes that he’s just created another problem for himself: now he has to pee.

Kabluey takes a slightly more serious turn in the second half: a friend of Leslie’s who’s planning an elaborate birthday party for her kid sees him by the roadside and offers $100 for him to entertain in the suit as the party’s clown. While he’s there, he realizes not only that Leslie is having an affair with Brad, the owner of BlueNextion (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), but Brad is also sleeping with Kathleen (Conchata Ferrell), a young woman whom he’s met on his daily bus rides to the BlueNextion headquarters and whom he’s overheard gossiping about her lover — indeed, Brad’s amorous antics are so extensive one gets the impression he should have named the company BlueSextion — and he plots revenge. His helpers are two people he met at the local grocery store, “CITY MARKET” (whose sign is in red lit letters, except the red covers have fallen off the beginning “C” and terminal “T” so that if we ever saw it at night — which we don’t — it would read “ITY MARKE”).

One is Betty (Christine Taylor), with whom Salman had one of the most diabolical meet-cutes in recent cinema history: he literally led Lincoln and Cameron there on leashes and tied them up outside the market next to the other customer’s dogs, and she came out with a Polaroid camera (an antediluvian bit of technology in the modern age, but the sight of that black box spitting out photos as fast as Betty can snap the shutter is a good deal funnier than the equivalent gag would have been with a digital camera) but whom it’s suggested he has a bit of mutual romantic (and possibly sexual) interest going with after that. Their co-conspirator is a character identified only as “The Cheese” (Rhoades Rader), who as part of a promotion the store is doing on Tillamook cheese is obliged to dress as a giant quarter-slice of cheese — though at least his costume, unlike Salman’s, has holes for his head, arms and legs, so he can walk, talk and manipulate objects normally.

The three of them charge into the motel room where Brad is about to do it with Kathleen, and as Betty fires away with her Polaroid Brad frantically calls out on his cell phone, “Help! I’m being attacked by a giant cheese!” Earlier there’s also a scene in which Cameron escapes from Salman while naked, and Salman and Lincoln — themselves wearing only bath towels — chase him down the residential streets while a neighbor gives them a knowing stare (this film is chock-full of knowing stares). Kabluey is a marvelously funny film that builds to a surprisingly poignant ending — Noah (ya remember Noah? Leslie’s husband and Lincoln’s and Cameron’s father? Actually, you haven’t been able to forget him in the film because, even though he isn’t there physically, a giant photo of him literally hangs over the action at his and Leslie’s house, and it appears to change expression, though that’s probably a trick of the angles at which Prendergast and cinematographer Michael Lohmann shoot it rather than an actually altered photo in each scene) finally returns home — he just shows up at their door, much to their disappointment because Leslie, Lincoln and Cameron had been counting on being able to meet him at the airport — and Salman takes a bittersweet, Chaplinesque departure, driving out of town in yet another on-its-last-legs used car (an old baby-blue Volkswagen Beetle which he got for $350 — “Runs Great!” says the scrawled writing on the rear window, and remembering what happened with Salman’s last used car we think, “Yeah, right … ”) — alone: we kind of hoped Betty would leave town with him but in a way this is better, truer both to Prendergast’s character and to the spirit of silent comedy to which this film owes so much. (I also found myself wondering if the two kids’ names were meant as an “in” joke — Lincoln after President Lincoln and Cameron after Simon Cameron, with whom Lincoln did the back-room deal that gave him the 1860 Republican Presidential nomination and who was rewarded by being appointed Secretary of War, at which job he was so corrupt that within a year Lincoln had fired him and replaced him with Edwin Stanton.)

Village of the Giants (Embassy, 1965)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran Charles an item in the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 box: one with Mike Nelson instead of Joel Hodgson as the host but still on the Comedy Central channel: the 1965 film Village of the Giants, producer-director-co-writer Bert I. Gordon’s first “take” on the H. G. Wells novel The Food of the Gods. (Eleven years later, Gordon would make a version of The Food of the Gods under Wells’ own title — and it wouldn’t get any better reviews than this one.) This is an uneasy mixture of teen exploitation movie and horror film, and interestingly the teen exploitation parts are better than the so-called horror, which would be unlikely to scare anybody: it starts in a muddy ditch by the side of a road, where a blue Thunderbird has run off the highway and lost a wheel and its teenage occupants — all of whom seem to be wearing polyester pants that have literally been molded on their bodies — get out and have a hot necking party in the mud that, quite frankly, is one of the two best things in the film. (The other is a song by the Beau Brummels — there were five of them and they were Americans, but they still come across as Beatles wanna-bes, though at least pretty good Beatles wanna-bes, good enough that I got annoyed that the MST3K crew were talking through their song.) Then for some reason they realize that the town of Haileyville is only three miles away, and in their muddy polyesters they all walk thither for no apparent reason.

We then cut to Haileyville itself, and Mike (Tommy Kirk) and his girlfriend Merrie (Joy Harmon) are doing some heavy necking of their own on Mike’s parents’ couch (we never actually see any of these kids’ parents at any time during the film!) when there’s an explosion, and it turns out Mike’s younger brother “Genius” (Ronny Howard — and, predictably, the MST3K crew made the obvious jokes about his presence, looking both backward to his stint as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and forward to his directorial career) has mixed yet another of his exploding chemicals. The H. G. Wells connection comes in when “Genius” makes a pink custard that enlarges anything that eats it to giant size, and Mike is instantly struck by the enormous commercial possibilities in artificially enlarged livestock. (The fact that the artificially enlarged meat animals would require equally enlarged quantities of food doesn’t seem to occur to anybody in this film.) The family cat and dog end up enlarged by the magic custard, as do two ducks that happen by — one of whom gets roasted over an open spit and eaten at the teenagers’ latest picnic — and the bad teens from the road crash worm the secret out of “Genius,” enlarge themselves and terrorize the town, sort of (at least they stand around, look intimidating and boss the townspeople around by threatening to hurl telephone poles at them), until “Genius” saves the day and comes up with an antidote in the form of a gas, which he administers from a can billowing orange smoke that he straps on to the back of his bike to launch his gas attack. The terrible giant teens are shrunk to normal size, the good teens make short work of them and this incredibly dorky movie stumbles to an end.

The process work in the movie is so terrible I’m surprised Farciot Edouart, Paramount’s long-time trick-photography whiz, took credit for it — and the script is also silly, but the movie has a certain je ne sais quoi charm and some of the hot teens of both genders are nice eye candy — and it’s also worth noting that Beau Bridges plays the lead teen villain, though it ranks alongside Michelle Pfeiffer’s female lead in Grease II among the most embarrassing credits ever by an actor who went on to an important career. The MST3K people had a lot of fun with this one, especially when Jack Nitzsche’s music director credit went on and they made the inevitable joke, “That which does not kill me makes me … more musical!”

Cry-Baby (Universal, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie at the library was Cry-Baby, John Waters’ immediate follow-up to Hairspray and his first film following the death of his iconic Transgender star, Divine (though one of the parents in this send-up of 1950’s juvenile-delinquency films is played by someone named Mink Stole, so even though Divine was dead Waters was still recruiting heavy-set drag queens to be in his films) and his first film with a major star, Johnny Depp, perfectly cast as Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker, leader of a gang of party-boys and party-girls called “The Drapes” in 1954 Baltimore. The story is basically a Romeo-and-Juliet tale of romance between Walker and Allison Vernon-Williams (Amy Locane), “square” granddaughter of grande dame Mrs. Vernon-Williams (a practically movie-stealing Polly Bergen), and how he manages to steal her away from her “square” boyfriend Baldwin (Stephen Mailer) despite getting himself and his whole gang arrested for a gang fight the Squares actually started, which gives Waters the chance to throw in a production number pretty obviously based on the title song of Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock.

The plot of this one isn’t all that important, and though there’s an undercurrent of racial comment (especially in the raunchy Black R&B the Drapes listen to — a surprising amount of it rocked-up versions of 1920’s and 1930’s songs like “Cherry” and “Jungle Drums” — versus the bleached-up white rock like “Sh-Boom ,” “A Teenage Prayer” and “Mr. Sandman” the Squares like) it’s clearly not as important a plot element as it was in Waters’ immediately preceding film, Hairspray. Cry-Baby struck both Charles and I as a total delight, full of Waters’ “gimmick” casting (including Patricia Hearst as one of the Drapes’ mothers and former porn star Traci Lords as her daughter — I read Lords’ memoir and she said Waters was very kind and patient with her as he guided her through her, uh, acting debut, and that Johnny Depp was kind enough when they actually performed together but he had the usual formidable entourage keeping them apart when she wasn’t actually acting in a scene with him) and with some marvelous gimmicks, including a long scene that seemed like a parody of the infamous tunnel-with-rats sequence in El Norte (Depp has been imprisoned in a reformatory and he’s attempting to escape through the sewer pipes; he runs into rats and one of the rats seems to be guiding him, only he emerges still in the prison and the rat who led him there is shown visibly and audibly laughing at him on screen), an odd film to be parodied in a movie whose other meta-cinematic references include more predictable ones like Jailhouse Rock, Grease and Rebel Without a Cause (the film ends with a chickie-run, though not the drive-off-a-cliff kind of Rebel but the otherwise better-known version in which two cars barrel towards each other and the first driver that swerves away is the “chicken” — which doesn’t stop Waters from quoting the famous shot from Rebel in which the other cars’ headlights light up to illuminate the scene).

Though it’s not at all a realistic film, Waters’ evocation of the period is generally right (judging from the movies of the time), and I give him points for digging up such obscure early 1950’s R&B records that there was only one song representing the Drapes’ side of the film that I could recall having heard before (Esther Phillips’ “Bad Girl”). Indeed, there are enough original songs in this film it would seem on that ground alone, at least, to be a better candidate for musical adaptation than Hairspray, and both Johnny Depp (who comes off much like the young Elvis in the sort of movie Elvis should have been making all along — though no doubt if Elvis had still been alive when Cry-Baby was filmed Waters would have wanted him for some weird cameo) and Amy Locane had voice doubles, Depp’s being someone named James Intveld and Locane’s being Rachel Sweet, who also co-wrote many of the songs written especially for the film. Charles and I richly enjoyed the movie, finding it as funny as just about anything made in the last 20 years (there’s also a delightful scene in which the inmates of the reform school are made to recite a litany of prayers, starting with blessings to the people who put them there and are guarding them and ending, “God bless Dwight D. Eisenhower, God bless Roy Cohn. God bless Richard Nixon” — though I didn’t recognize him, the guard leading this litany was Willem Dafoe),though Ralph DeLauro’s opinion was clearly different. Ralph did something I’ve never seen him do in years of library filmgoing — instead of giving an introduction he just switched off the lights and hit the play button — and on my way out when I told him how much we’d enjoyed the film, he sniffed, “Not his best.”

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Universal, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I ran another from the classic Universal horror collections: Murders in the Rue Morgue, one of the unsung masterpieces of the Universal cycle and one of Bela Lugosi’s two best-ever starring vehicles (along with White Zombie, made the same year, also filmed at Universal but for an independent producer who was just renting the space). Oddly, the film began as a consolation prize for its star, Lugosi, and its director, Robert Florey (an actual Frenchman directing a story about Paris — what a novelty!) because Lugosi had turned down the original Frankenstein (supposedly because he didn’t want to play a part without any actual dialogue — a claim supported by the fact that when he finally did play the Frankenstein monster, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, he signed for the film on the basis of a script in which the monster does speak, though the monster’s lines were erased from the final release) and Florey had been taken off the project in favor of James Whale, the British wunderkind who had had hits with Journey’s End (which he’d previously directed on stage) and the 1931 version of Waterloo Bridge.

Florey originally wrote a script for the film that stuck closely to the original 1843 story by Edgar Allan Poe (which was actually an episode in his detective-mystery series featuring the hero, C. Auguste Dupin — called “Pierre Dupin” in the film and played by Leon Waycoff, later known as Leon Ames, who as I once joked to Charles was the one degree of separation between Lugosi and Judy Garland!), but the “suits” at Universal turned it down because they wanted a horror film rather than a mystery, so Florey and his credited writers, Tom Reed, Dale Van Every, Richard Schayer and John Huston (credited with “additional dialogue” — he’d got a screenwriting job at Universal because his father, Walter Huston, was making two films there and wanted him on the writing staff, and this was the first film on which John Huston was credited that did not involve his dad), came up with a mélange of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Dr. Mirakle (Lugosi) is operating a concession in a carnival sideshow that features an ape called “Erik” (Charles Gemorra, doubled in some scenes by Joe Bonomo and in others by a real chimpanzee, even though the character is supposed to be a gorilla), whom he is exhibiting as proof positive of the theory of evolution. (The setting is 1845, two years after Poe published the original story and 14 years before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.) Mirakle wants to mingle Erik’s blood with that of a human woman in order to prove his theory, but so far he’s experimented with two women, unsuccessfully, and disposed of their corpses via a Sweeney Todd-ish trap door under his experimental setup — which actually involves chaining the unfortunate women to an X-shaped cross that looks more like something you’d find in an S/M dungeon than in a scientific laboratory. The film opens with a series of traveling shots through a Caligari-esque Paris (this film is probably the closest a mainstream Hollywood producer ever came to the Caligari look; the art directors, Charles D. Hall and an uncredited Herman Rosse, went all-out to suggest the Expressionist sets of Caligari), with buildings that slant and hang uncomfortably over the people who walk by them, before we discover the carnival and see Dupin there with his girlfriend, Camille L’Esplanaye (Sidney Fox, top-billed — according to Bette Davis, she and studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. were having an affair, which meant she got quite a few parts that were beyond her abilities, including the lead in Strictly Dishonorable for which Davis had been brought to Hollywood and Universal in the first place), his comic-relief roommate Paul (Bert Roach, who unlike most of the “comic relief” figures in these movies is actually genuinely funny) and his girlfriend Mignette (Edna Marion). Not surprisingly, when Dupin and Camille see the gorilla, the beast takes a shine to Camille (even taking the bonnet off her head and cradling it) and an instant aversion to Dupin, “planting” a Beauty and the Beast-like attraction between the two that almost exactly mirrors the plot of the as-yet-unmade King Kong.

In the next scene, Mirakle picks up a character identified only as “Woman of the Streets” (a truly bizarre credit for Arlene Francis — and, aside from a part in Orson Welles’ never-released filmed inserts for the play Too Much Johnson in 1938, she didn’t make another movie until All My Sons, also for Universal, in 1948!) and, right after two men have killed each other over her (it’s that kind of movie, getting its shocks as much from the amorality of the overall setting as from any specific scene), Mirakle takes her to his dungeon, straps her to the S/M cross and gets ready to perform his experiment, only first he looks at her blood under his microscope and declares it unsuitable: “Your BLOOD is as BLACK as your SINS!” Lugosi thunders in his most hysterically anguished tones (obviously, in this “pre-Code” film, we’re supposed to read this as an infection with syphilis or some other similarly intractable STD), and just then the “Woman of the Streets” expires and Lugosi’s manservant Janos (Noble Johnson) throws the switch on the trap door and pitches her body into the Seine. In this version, Pierre Dupin is a medical student who bribes the coroner to get interesting specimens from the morgue so he can study them, and he’s the one who makes the connection between the latest victim and the previous two; he sees the injection marks (which serve the same purpose in this film as the throat punctures in Dracula) and realizes, once he examines the victims’ blood under his microscope, that they died from a reaction from the ape’s blood injected into them.

Meanwhile, Camille receives a replacement bonnet from Mirakle — indicating, since she’d refused to tell him where she lived, that he’s been stalking her — and one night Mirakle sends Erik to kill Camille’s mother (Betty Ross Clarke) and abduct her. In the one major incident of the film actually taken from Poe’s story, Camille’s mother is shoved up the chimney of her room and three witnesses, having heard the chatter of an ape, insist that the killer spoke Italian, Danish and German, respectively. Dupin has to fight off a stupid police prefect (Brandon Hurst) who wants to arrest him, but eventually he figures out that Camille has been kidnapped and taken to Mirakle’s redoubt in the Rue Morgue, whereupon he chases him there with a squad of gendarmes in tow, and Dupin rescues Camille just before Mirakle can inject her with the ape serum, Erik kills Mirakle, Dupin kills Janos and Erik and, in the end, Mirakle’s body is received by the coroner.

Murders in the Rue Morgue is notable not only for its audacity — its links of sexual perversion and murder are pretty strong stuff now and an indication of some of the things Hollywood’s kinkier directors could get away with in the early 1930’s — but also the other, later films it influenced: King Kong (in this one the ape is normal-sized, but certainly the theme of an ape who runs wild through a city and can only be tamed by a woman is common to both films!), The Mummy and Mystery of the Wax Museum (also about demented geniuses who kidnap women and not only put them through procedures that will kill them but seem convinced that they're doing these women a favor by doing so!), as well as all those dreary mad-scientist movies Lugosi would ultimately make at PRC, Monogram and even cheaper studios. Though somewhat hamstrung by the lack of a music score, Murders in the Rue Morgue is a far better film than the 1931 Dracula: the writing is sharper and wittier, the direction more assured (Florey keeps the camera in almost constant motion, propelling us into the action instead of forcing us to watch it at a distance) and Lugosi’s performance — perhaps because he wasn’t playing a part he’d done on stage for two years — fresher and more vital.

Moulin Rouge! (Twentieth Century-Fox, 2001)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Moulin Rouge! (note the exclamation point), Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 musical extravaganza and a quite peculiar movie, alternately dazzling and numbing, a geyser of songs (mostly recognizable rock and dance hits from the 1970’s and 1980’s — mostly all too recognizable, quite frankly) staged with barely adequate singers on a sumptuous dance floor with splendiferous sets, dazzling colors (I’ve got a bright spot — no pun intended — for any movie that offers us more than dirty browns and greens these days!), excellent choreography and one of those modern ADHD editing styles from a director and an editor (Jill Bilcock) who seem convinced that if they ever hold a shot on the screen longer than three seconds, the audience will get horrendously bored.

The plot, not that it matters, concerns writer Christian (Ewan McGregor), who escapes his Victorian prude father in 1899 Britain and makes his way to Paris, where he falls in with a bunch of Bohemians including artist Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo). They engage (I can’t really say “hire” since they can’t afford to pay him) him to write a super-show called Spectacular Spectacular, and prevail on the owner of the Moulin Rouge, Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent), to stage it as a vehicle for his on-stage star and off-stage courtesan, Satine (Nicole Kidman, top-billed). We already know Satine is doomed from the start because the story is introduced in a flashback by Christian, who’s writing it as a book a year after it occurred and his narration is supposedly what he’s writing. Satine and Christian are paired by Zidler (who appears to be her pimp) when he mistakenly gets them together because he thinks Christian is the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), whom he’s trying to get to invest in the show.

From then on the plot (by director Luhrmann and Chris Pearce) turns into an inventive but still readily discernible reworking of Camille, complete with the idyllic time for the lovers, its sudden end (the Duke has demanded that Zidler promise him sexual exclusivity with Satine in exchange for the money to put on the show), the scene (enacted not at a casino but on stage at the Moulin Rouge during the performance of Christian’s script) in which a hurt Christian throws money at Satine’s feet and explains to the shocked audience that he’s paid the whore off; and her final death from tuberculosis — prefigured by an early shot of her coughing tiny spots of blood into a handkerchief that’s the most heart-stoppingly beautiful shot in the film, one Guy Maddin would have been proud of.

Alas, most of Moulin Rouge! is simply an elaborate set of song cues, in which modern-day pieces of bathos like Elton John’s “Your Song” (which was just barely tolerable when he recorded it initially and simply doesn’t carry the emotional weight in this story the script tells us it does) and “Up Where We Belong” intermix awkwardly (and, at times, brilliantly — as when a duet between Satine and Christian segues from David Bowie’s “Heroes” to “I Will Always Love You” and the bridge actually works!) with edgier material like Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” (sung as a duet by Broadbent and Roxburgh in the most entertaining sequence in the film, even if it comes off like a middle-aged Gay male couple whose members are both getting in touch with their inner Madonnas) and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (the notes to this film on imdb.com state that Courtney Love was briefly considered for Satine and, while she wasn’t cast, she did allow them to use her late husband’s song even though she usually turns such requests down).

Much of the fun of Moulin Rouge! lies in the sheer outrageousness of its song cues, its sense of, “They’re not going to perform that here, are they?” Some of the songs work quite well — Paul McCartney’s “Silly Love Songs” actually comes off better as a duet than it did when he sang it solo — but most of them seem artificially torn from their original contexts and flung willy-nilly into this one, and the most moving parts of the film were when the songs being performed weren’t pieces I know (only one original song was used, and even that was one that had been written for a previous Luhrmann film but not used there).

Moulin Rouge! almost begs comparison with John Huston’s similarly titled film of 1952, which had an even more artistic (though less openly spectacular) use of color and shared the turn-of-the-century Paris setting and Toulouse-Lautrec as a character, but was made with warmth and heart — qualities lacking in this lumbering spectacle except in very brief moments, in which the acting skill of Nicole Kidman actually puts some flesh on the bones of her character and makes one wonder how she would do in a come scritto version of Camille. (The two stories are close enough that Richard Roxburgh even adopts Henry Daniell’s slimy vocal inflections in his role as the Duke.)

The modern Moulin Rouge! is an impressive movie on one level — Charles suggested it was what Busby Berkeley would be doing if he were alive and active today, and indeed Luhrmann copied some of Berkeley’s classic kaleidoscopic dance shots — but its plot is as pretextual as that of a porn movie and the film suffers from an excess of “cool,” from the damnable emotional distance between us and the characters modern-day directors like to create just to show us how “hip” they are. (To be sure, that bothers me less in a film like this, in which the story is obviously only a pretext for the songs and dances, than in a film like Brokeback Mountain which was intended to be a great love story and, for me, failed because I never really felt for the people in the film.) It’s fun in a dorky, rather lumbering way (how appropriate that Satine should live inside a plaster elephant — a prop at the real Moulin Rouge but not anybody’s residence in real life!) but one wishes for more heart.

Dracula (English version; Universal, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ended up breaking open the Universal Legacy collection of the Dracula movies with the intent of watching the original 1931 Dracula with Tod Browning directing and Bela Lugosi as star. Alas, the disc containing the English-language version of Dracula in our copy of the Legacy set had got badly scratched due to poor packing at the factory (it had been allowed to jiggle around the hub of the package instead of being firmly fastened to it) and therefore there was a run of scratches in a circle on the disc, spoiling the film at about 48 minutes in (fortunately I still had my copy of the 1999 DVD release, which also contains the simultaneously-filmed Spanish-language version — which is in the Legacy set, too, but on another disc — and I played us the remaining 27 minutes from that source). Also, as important as this is as Universal’s first out-and-out horror film of the sound era and the only record we have of Lugosi’s performance in his most famous role (though in the next two years he’d make two films that were even better, Murders in the Rue Morgue and White Zombie, before sinking into the rut of cheap “B”’s that marked most of the rest of his career), it simply isn’t good.

One report in the imdb.com “Trivia” section said that director-of-record Tod Browning — whose best films had been made at MGM during the silent era with Lon Chaney, Sr. as star (Chaney had originally been planned to play Dracula in this film and MGM had agreed to loan him to Universal for this project, but he died of throat cancer in 1930 before he could make this movie) — was thoroughly unprofessional during the shoot, tearing out pages of the script he thought were redundant and frequently disappearing altogether and leaving his cinematographer, Karl Freund (who would briefly become a director himself, helming the marvelous 1932 version of The Mummy with Boris Karloff and Zita Johann and the almost-as-good Mad Love in 1935 with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive), to direct. The big mistake Universal made was to abandon its plans to base the film directly on Bram Stoker’s source novel — Louis Bromfield, a major novelist in his own right (best known in the film world as the author of the novel The Rains Came, on which the 1939 film was based), was hired to adapt the novel and wrote a complete script, which the studio abandoned because they were worried it would be too expensive and not attract enough moviegoers in the middle of the Depression to turn a profit — and instead they drew the film from Hamilton Deane’s creaky London stage adaptation, further worked over by John L. Balderston for the U.S. premiere in New York in 1927. Universal considered a dizzying array of actors to play Dracula, including William Powell (which would have been ridiculous!), Conrad Veidt (who would have been good), Ian Keith (maybe), William Courtenay (a British actor who didn’t have much of a subsequent career), John Carradine (who finally did play Dracula in two later Universal movies in the mid-1940’s and would have been good but nowhere near as right as Lugosi) and Paul Muni (who might have pulled it off) before finally grabbing Lugosi, who was so anxious to repeat his star-making role on film that he took a low (even by 1930 standards!) salary of $500 per week for seven weeks.

It also doesn’t help that the film has no background underscoring — just the opening of Act II of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake under the opening credits and snatches of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony and Wagner’s Meistersinger prelude during a concert at Covent Garden the principals attend shortly after the film’s action shifts from Transylvania to London. What’s good about this movie are the performances of Lugosi and Dwight Frye (especially Dwight Frye; he delivers a beautifully balanced reading of Renfield that manages to suggest madness even in his sane moments and sanity even in his maddest ones — and he’s particularly impressive by comparison to Pablo Alvarez Rubio in the simultaneously shot Spanish version, who just screams maniacally from start to finish) and the pleasantly Gothic flavor of the early scenes in Transylvania. What’s not so good about it is everything else: Browning’s stiff and uncinematic direction (what happened to this first-rate silent filmmaker when sound came in? My guess is he was traumatized by the death of his friend and frequent star, Lon Chaney, and never recovered from the blow), the stagy conception of the script and many of the gestures (particularly the outrageously phony move Lugosi makes when Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing flashes the crucifix in his face) and the dullness of the supporting cast: Van Sloan overacts relentlessly, David Manners and Helen Chandler are just dull as the romantic leads (Barry K. Norton and the marvelous Lupita Tovar play these parts far more effectively in the Spanish version) and only Frances Dade as Lucy Weston (called “Westenra” in the novel — apparently one of those script changes made to give the actors something easier to pronounce) suggests something of the allure of the vampire mythos. Why film veteran Browning turned in so stagy a movie while James Whale, making the original Frankenstein as only his third film, came up with something fully fluid and cinematic remains a mystery to me.

The better Draculas seem to have been adapted for radio; I still think Orson Welles’ live Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast of July 11, 1938 is the best version of Stoker’s novel in any other medium — Welles captured all the kinky twists and turns of the story that its film adapters missed, he had a superb cast (headed by himself as Dracula and Agnes Moorehead as Mina Harker) and produced dazzling moments like the wicked parody of the Christian communion ritual he had Dracula intone as he gets Mina (temporarily) under his spell, telling her she will be “flesh of my flesh … blood of my blood!” Once again, what a pity Welles never got to make a film version of Dracula, especially early on when he would still have been young and (relatively) slim enough to play the part himself! Recently Charles and I played what appeared to be a British radio program from the 1950’s, an 83-minute adaptation called Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, essentially a mash-up in which Holmes (John Moffatt) and Watson (Timothy West) were written into Stoker’s tale, with David March as Dracula and Aubrey Woods as Van Helsing; yes, this would have been a lot more fun with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Lugosi as Dracula (the two made at least three movies together, Son of Frankenstein in 1939, the second Black Cat in 1941 and The Black Sleep in 1956), but in its own right it was a relatively faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel (certainly a lot closer to what Stoker wrote than the film!) and a lot of fun.

On With the Show! (Warners, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was On With the Show! (the opening credit has the exclamation point in the title, though most of the promotional material didn’t), yet another early musical and Warner Brothers’ (the “Brothers” is spelled out fully on the end credit) answer to the success of The Broadway Melody from MGM. It’s a far less interesting movie than The Broadway Melody even though the plot is distinctive and in more subtle hands would have made a great premise for a film. Unlike most backstage stories, which take place over a period of weeks and cover the entire genesis of a show, from its auditions and opening rehearsals to its opening night, On With the Show! (based on an unproduced play by Humphrey Pearson called Shoestring) takes place all in one night, during the final make-or-break performance of The Phantom Sweetheart in its out-of-town tryouts.

The premise is that this performance will either be the show’s last ever or will get it a berth on Broadway — and throughout the film, which takes place in real time, scenes from the actual performance being given for the audience within the story (if I wanted to sound like a real film critic I’d say “in the diegesis”) are intercut with scenes taking place backstage or elsewhere in the theatre or its vicinity, representing events that are happening while the show is being performed. Arlene Croce once called the film 42nd Street a remake of On With the Show!; Richard Barrios points out that it isn’t — about the only similarity is they both are backstage stories (though 42nd Street is the more conventional type of backstage story which happens over several weeks and takes place over the entire rehearsal process) and they share two plot devices: a rich man has bankrolled the show in an unsuccessful attempt to get a star to go to bed with him, and an unknown replaces an indisposed star and becomes an overnight success.

On With the Show! as it exists now is a pretty pathetic remnant of the film that wowed audiences on its initial release (according to Richard Barrios, in some parts of the country it was an even bigger hit than The Broadway Melody); it was shot entirely in two-strip Technicolor but only exists in black-and-white, and to make matters even worse one-tenth of the image on the left side of the screen has also disappeared. (The problem was the film was originally made in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, and when it was converted to sound-on-film that one-tenth of the image on the left side had to be erased to make room for the film soundtrack.) This leads to such bizarre solecisms as the appearance of the Four Covans (a two-man, two-woman African-American dance team that are among the best acts in the film), who thanks to the missing part of the picture mostly turn into the Three (or at best the Three-and-One-Half) Covans. It also suffers from an extraordinarily weak cast — about the only people in it who were heard of afterwards were Joe E. Brown, making his film debut as the show-within-the-show’s comic; and Ethel Waters, making her film debut as a performer who turns up twice, does one song each time, and departs.

Sally O’Neil plays Kitty, the hat-check girl who takes over in mid-show after Nita (Betty Compson), the star, has a fit of temperament and withdraws. Barrios calls her performance “appalling … one of the very worst of the era,” and while I think he’s exaggerating (she’s no worse than Dorothy Lee was in the Wheeler and Woolsey films, and not that far below Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street) there’s no question that, though her character is supposed to be the focus of the film the way Billie Dove’s was in The Broadway Melody, she’s far below the level of Dove’s incandescence. (Then again, Dove had far more to work with; On With the Show!’s writer, Robert Lord, gave O’Neil’s character virtually no depth and it’s not surprising she fell back on whining and pouting through the role to disguise its lack of emotional affect.) Her boyfriend, the head usher, is William Bakewell; the male lead in the show is Arthur Lake (later Dagwood in the Blondie films); Louise Fazenda has a comic part but isn’t used to her potential either (and the loss of the two-strip has cost us the views of her bright-red hair — anticipating Lucille Ball’s famous look — that the original reviewers noted and disliked); Sam Hardy is the harried producer who worries how he’s going to pay the performers; Purnell Pratt is the man who wants to attach the scenery (there always seems to be a man who wants to attach the scenery) until Fazenda successfully vamps him; and Josephine Houston, virtually the only white person in this movie who can sing, is wasted as the character in the show whom Lake jilts for his “phantom sweetheart,” who’s encased in miles of chiffon so that O’Neil can take over the part from Compson mid-show and nobody will notice.

Despite its deficiencies — Lord’s writing was considered dated even then (one reviewer called it “snappy comebacks, 1910 variety”) and the musical numbers are clunkily staged by Larry Ceballos and shot from immobile cameras at far distances — On With the Show! still packs a punch, though like The Broadway Melody it seems more effective when the characters aren’t singing and dancing. (Lord and director Alan Crosland do deserve credit for making the film hang together without the scene-setting intertitles Harry Beaumont and Norman Houston fell back on in The Broadway Melody.) The African-American performers — Waters, the Four Covans and four unidentified Black men who sing backup for Waters during “Am I Blue?” (the big hit song from this film and the only one to become a standard) — come off better than the whites for a peculiar reason: given the way the “look” of two-strip Technicolor became murky and dull when printed down to black-and-white, their dark faces stand out a lot better from the murk than the other actors’ white ones. Waters is also the only singer in the cast who actually knows how to project, an important skill in the earliest musicals because they were still recording the songs and instrumental backing “live” while the scenes were being shot; whereas the white voices tend to get swallowed up by the backing band and the stage noises, Waters’ voice booms out powerfully and one can hear every word of her songs (at least until her backup singers come on during “Am I Blue?”). It’s a shame more musicals weren’t made with this interesting device — about the only later film I can think of that used it was an RKO “B” from the late 1930’s called Forty Naughty Girls, a mystery that takes place during the performance of a show, and in that case the budget was so strangulation-tight they weren’t able to show the actual show!

The Circus Queen Murder (Columbia, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Wednesday night Charles and I watched an interesting Columbia “B” movie from 1933: The Circus Queen Murder, the second and last of a projected three-film series dealing with the detective character Thatcher Colt (Adolphe Menjou), created by Fulton Oursler under the pen-name “Anthony Abbott” (I’ve also seen the final name spelled with just one “t,” but on the credits here there are the usual two). Colt was the New York City Police Commissioner, but on his “off” time he would investigate cases personally — as here, when he and his long-suffering secretary and (it’s hinted) fiancée Miss Kelly (Ruthelma Stevens — a quite personable and effective actress who should have got a new name and a star buildup) go on vacation to the upstate New York town of Gilead. There they find a circus, the Greater John T. Rainey Shows, which is so dowdy I couldn’t help but wonder what the lesser John T. Rainey Shows looked like; Rainey (George Rosener) has sold most of his interest in the circus to a scheming investor, Lubbell (Clay Clement), whose interest is trying to get in the pants of aerialist Josie La Tour (Greta Nissen), who owns the other half of the circus and whose act is virtually its only commercially appealing attraction.

As usual with movie circuses (including the one from Frank Capra’s film Rain or Shine, made three years earlier — I suspected the wagons and tents came from that film, and according to imdb.com I was right), this one is on its last legs financially, but the main intrigue comes from Josie La Tour and the three men who are interested in her: Lubbell, her lover Sebastian (a quite hot-looking Donald Cook) and her (understandably) jealous husband Flandrin (Dwight Frye), The circus also features an act of 13 cannibals, ostensibly straight from Africa — there were 14 originally, a fact the ringmaster announces to the audiences and leaves them to guess at the most dire conclusion possible, though one of them actually died of the flu earlier in the tour — which gives the director, Roy William Neill (who’d later helm Boris Karloff’s melodrama The Black Room at Columbia, lose the directorship of the British film The Lady Vanishes when his work permit ran out and he had to return to the U.S., and ultimately direct all but the first of Universal’s 12 modern-dress Sherlock Holmes films from 1942 to 1946 with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson), plenty of chances for quite exciting Gothic effects that make this look much more like a Universal than a Columbia product and provide an effective setting for Dwight Frye’s typically twitchy performance.

Surprisingly, the story is not a whodunit; Frye’s character, Flandrin, fakes his own death but is found out quickly when the blood left behind when he disappears (it really looked like chocolate syrup, which I suspect the Columbia prop department actually used!) turns out to be dog’s blood. Colt quickly realizes that Flandrin is still alive and is targeting Josie and Sebastian — and in some surprisingly Phantom of the Opera-ish scenes he’s shown above the big tent cutting ropes so Josie will fall to the ground during her act and die. This is actually quite an engaging movie, and it’s a bit surprising the third Thatcher Colt film Columbia projected was never made — at least not by them; in 1942 PRC put out the film The Panther’s Claw with Sidney Blackmer as Colt — since this is a good thriller at a time in Hollywood history when (as I’ve mentioned in these pages before) few really good thrillers were being made; Hollywood made great gangster movies in the early 1930’s but seemed at sea dealing with other sorts of crimes (the best American thrillers of the early 1930’s were the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and the 1934 The Thin Man, both based on novels by Dashiell Hammett, though the 1931 Maltese Falcon was overshadowed by the classic Huston/Bogart remake 10 years later) — though the associations with Gothic horror, the performances by a surprisingly good cast (Nissen was the German beauty cast by Howard Hughes in the silent version of Hell’s Angels and then replaced by Jean Harlow in the sound version because Nissen’s Dietrichesque accent would have been unbelievable coming from someone who was supposed to be English — though, quite frankly, Harlow’s nasal Midwestern English wasn’t that much more credible!) and above all the snappy pace of Neill’s direction make this a considerably better-than-usual suspense film for the period.

Torturing Democracy (Washington Media Associates, National Security Archive, PBS, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other show I watched yesterday morning was Torturing Democracy, a PBS documentary by Sherry Jones which for some quirky reason KPBS actually ran ahead of most of the PBS network (it was scheduled to air in New York October 16 but it was shown here October 10), a grim hour and a half that’s mostly a typical PBS talking-heads fest but contains some grim dramatizations of interrogations at Guantánamo (faked with actors, based on the surviving logs of the actual interrogations, because the real videos were destroyed by the CIA) and an overall tack that savored the irony that the techniques being used by U.S. interrogators came originally from the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training given to U.S. servicemembers starting in the 1950’s to keep them from breaking under enemy torture (it was inspired by the so-called “brainwashing” of U.S. prisoners held by the North Koreans during the Korean War). Colin Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage (you remember, the person who after all was said and done turned out to be the one who really outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent), said he even recognized the techniques as ones he’d been subjected to by U.S. interrogators during practice sessions in his own SERE training.

I was surprised Thomas Frank didn’t mention this in his new book The Wrecking Crew (probably because he wasn’t concerned with foreign policy except as just another arena for corporations with well-connected lobbyists to profit off the U.S. taxpayer in a Right-wing government) but it seems to me that the Right’s obsession with torture reflects what Frank called the bullying nature of the radical Right: their idea that it isn’t enough to defeat their political enemies, but to “utterly destroy” them; their love of out-and-out terrorists like former Angola “freedom fighter” Jonas Savimbi (one of the best parts of The Wrecking Crew is Frank’s telling comparison of the Right’s idolatry of Savimbi with the American Left’s similarly misguided adulation for Huey Newton 15 years before); even the prominence of figures like Rush Limbaugh, who looks like a schoolyard bully who (like Harry Langdon) grew to manhood becoming larger but not achieving the definition of facial or body features that usually distinguishes adults from children. I couldn’t help but think of the debate tacked on to the end of the movie, with former liberal Alan Dershowitz desperately trying to explain how his idea for requiring “torture warrants” in case a captured terrorist has information that might lead to the so-called “ticking time bomb” which, if not defused in time, will obliterate a major U.S. city would actually reinforce the rule of law instead of utterly destroying it, without thinking of Bill O’Reilly (another one of those out-and-out thugs the Right so admires) saying that once you’d conceded that torture was acceptable in the “ticking time bomb” scenario, you’d conceded that it was acceptable, period, and the only remaining question was where do you draw the line.

Jennifer Harbury — who took up the subject after her husband was kidnapped, tortured and eventually murdered by the Latin American government his movement was rebelling against — gave the most convincing refutation I’ve heard to the “ticking time bomb” scenario, pointing out that any terrorist group sending an operative out to do such an important attack would first give him or her the well-known counterintelligence training to prevent them from “cracking” under torture — which includes withstanding as long as you can and then flooding your torturers with such a convincing blizzard of information and misinformation they won’t be able to sort out the truth from the lies until after the big bomb goes off. Ever Dershowitz’s claim that you shouldn’t let someone in this scenario off the hook until they physically lead you to the bomb is meaningless; any halfway competent terrorist would plant more than one bomb and be prepared, if necessary, to lead his or her torturers to a blind bomb instead of the real one, so while they’re energetically disarming the blind “bomb,” the real one goes off on schedule.

Shockproof (Columbia, 1948, rel. 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran Charles Shockproof, a 1948 film noir made at Columbia and directed by Douglas Sirk, who had been signed to a Columbia contract in 1942 but didn’t do any work at all for them for five years. During that time Sirk established a reputation making quirky independent films for producers Seymour Nebenzal, Hunt Stromberg and Edward Small — Hitler’s Madman, Summer Storm, A Scandal in Paris and Lured — before hitting the big time, more or less, with Sleep No More (a Mary Pickford production), a Gaslight knockoff with Claudette Colbert as the innocent young woman and Don Ameche as the sinister husband who’s trying to drive her crazy and ultimately knock her off.

Columbia’s president Harry Cohn, whose tenure as a studio head alternated between brilliant decisions (like giving Frank Capra his big break as a director and Rita Hayworth hers as a star) and idiotic mistakes (like firing Marilyn Monroe after her first six-month option in 1948), decided he’d finally give Sirk a Columbia assignment and made him do Slightly French, a screwball comedy (in 1947, when that genre was pretty well dead) in which Don Ameche plays a fired film director who tries to get his job back by passing off Dorothy Lamour as a Frenchwoman. (“I have no feeling for this picture at all,” Sirk told Jon Halliday in their book-length interview.) For Sirk’s next (and, as it turned out, last) Columbia film, Cohn offered him The Lovers, a story by Samuel Fuller (who hadn’t yet directed himself) about convicted murderess Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), who’s paroled into the custody of tough parole officer Griffin “Griff” Marat (Cornel Wilde, top-billed — a weird role for him reflecting how hard a time Cohn had casting him after his breakthrough as Chopin in A Song to Remember).

Marsh remains in love with gambler Harry Wesson (John Baragrey), who waited for her during her five-year prison stretch after she committed murder in the first place to protect him (the details of her previous crime are left powerfully unstated), but Marat declares him an “undesirable person” and insists that her parole will be revoked if she ever sees him. After she washes out on one job Marat has set up for her, Marat hires her as a maid in his home and caregiver for his blind mother (Esther Minciotti), and ultimately proximity works its magic and Marat falls in love with her himself. Wesson, whom she’s still seeing on the sly (they meet in a public library and are photographed speaking furtively to each other across the bookshelves in a shot Sirk seems to have ripped off the famous meeting between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in a supermarket in Double Indemnity), encourages her to vamp Marat and get him to marry her, which will immediately violate her parole restriction — she’s forbidden to marry anyone as a condition of parole — and get him in trouble.

Eventually Marat proposes marriage to Jenny, and she accepts — not as part of Wesson’s plot but because she’s now genuinely in love with him — and when she visits Wesson and he calls Marat threatening to blackmail him over the marriage, she shoots him. She and Marat escape, and there are quite a few powerful scenes showing them on the run and in particular underscoring the irony of how a man who’s always lived on the right side of the law makes a singularly inept fugitive. Meanwhile, their case becomes the subject of a barrage of newspaper stories, referring to them as “The Lovers” and underscoring the irony of a parolee wanted for murder and fleeing in the company of her parole officer/lover. Samuel Fuller planned to end the movie with a shoot-out between Marat and the police, in which either or both of the lovers would be killed (his comments to Halliday are ambiguous); but the producer, Helen Deutsch, pulled rank on both her director and writer and rewrote the script herself to create a “happy” ending: Marat and Jenny give themselves up, Wesson turns out to have been merely wounded (not killed), and they visit him in the hospital and he forgives them, decides not to press charges and blesses their union.

For all the compromising in the script (Sirk complained to Halliday that Deutsch’s revisions of the script leached out of the movie everything that had interested him and made him want to do it), the unbelievability of the ending and the woodenness of Cornel Wilde (who’s believable in the beginning as the representative of law and order but isn’t a good enough actor to make his transition to love-driven fugitive from justice believable), Shockproof comes off as a finely honed noir with some fascinating aspects, notably the Hitchcockian hero-heroine-villain love triangle and the fact that the villain seems more personable and even, in a way, more honorable than the hero. There’s an anticipation of The Magnificent Obsession in the use of a blind character and also a premonition of Fuller’s own directorial efforts in the use of the media and the contrast between the version of the story given in the newspapers and the “real” one we in the audience see (indeed, one could readily imagine Shockproof being made today with the fugitives’ story being dredged up, after they thought it had been forgotten, by being staged on America’s Most Wanted).

Wilde really isn’t a noir actor — the part cries out for someone more ambiguous, like Dick Powell — but Patricia Knight (then Mrs. Cornel Wilde) is, giving a unique spin on the femme fatale who vamps her man not because she’s evil and wants to destroy him for her own benefit but because she’s traumatized and genuinely torn. While I couldn’t help imagining what Shockproof might have been with the young Marilyn Monroe in the role (had Harry Cohn realized what he had in her, it’s entirely possible he would have cast her as boldly and creatively as he did Kim Novak later and she would have developed quite a different image from the dumb-blonde type she got stuck in at Fox), Knight’s performance is chillingly effective and should have led her to a major career — and John Baragrey also comes off as an unjustly forgotten actor, playing a character who’s been careful to avoid anything out-and-out illegal and, despite Marat’s conviction that it’s only a matter of time before he will break the law and involve Jenny in a situation that will lead her back to prison, Harry has a distinct code of honor which Baragrey communicates vividly.

As one of those good movies that could have been even better, Shockproof is worth watching but also a bit frustrating; afterwards Sirk briefly worked on a third Columbia project, Lulu Belle (another stupid comedy), then got Cohn to cancel his contract and left for Europe for about a year, did the comeback film The First Legion with Charles Boyer on his return and then signed with Universal-International and eventually made the big movies on which his reputation rests.

3 by Arch Hall, Sr. and Jr.: “Eegah,” “Wild Guitar,” “The Sadist”

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I finally ran a movie from the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 archives: Eegah, a 1962 non-classic from Fairway International, the movie company founded by Arch Hall, Sr. to promote the movie and rock ’n’ roll careers of his son, Arch Hall, Jr. The first film produced by this outfit was The Choppers (1961) and Eegah (some sources list the title with an exclamation point) was the second; it deals with a prehistoric throwback, the last of a race of cave people who are still living in one of the caves in Bronson Canyon near L.A. Arch Hall, Jr. plays Tom, aspiring young wimp-rocker — with a decent but rather pudgy body (when he goes shirtless we can see a broad expanse of hairless white chest, too broad for him to be seen as quite as sexy as the director, “Nicholas Merriweather” a.k.a. Arch Hall, Sr., obviously wants us to), a reasonably good but hardly exciting guitar technique (their next film was called Wild Guitar, obviously a misnomer as a description of Arch Hall, Jr.’s musicianship), and a decent but wimpy singing style that only in the era of Frankie Avalon and Fabian could have been considered a rock voice.

Tom has a girlfriend named Roxy Miller (played by Marilyn Manning, Arch Hall, Sr.’s secretary) whose dad, Robert Miller (played by someone billed as “William Watters” who is really — I hate to do this to you — Arch Hall, Sr., who looks dorky enough one has no doubt about Arch Hall, Jr.’s true parentage), gets lost while exploring the caves around Bronson Canyon looking for the “giant” his daughter Roxy swears she saw on the road. Miller père insists on hiring a helicopter to fly him into the cave country and begs off on Tom’s attempt to drive him there in his dune buggy (“Will you stop about the dune buggy already?” one of the MST3K robots pleaded as part of their commentary on the film), which turns out to be a hot rod based on what’s left of a Ford Model A body whose tires, Tom tells us repeatedly throughout the movie, are filled with water instead of air, which plays hell on him getting any speed on ordinary roads (his attempts to drive on normal surfaces resemble the ultra-slow “chase” scene in Moon Zero Two) but supposedly weights the vehicle down enough that most of the time he can get decent traction on sand.

The writers, “Nicholas Merriweather” (you-know-who again) and Bob Wehling, were obviously trying for King Kong-style pathos in their boy-girl-giant love triangle, but they weren’t literate enough to pull it off and the overall cheapness of the production and the idiocy of Eegah’s costume (he looks like the older brother of the Geico caveman and apparently the only reason Arch Hall, Sr. made this movie was that he met 7’ 2” Richard Kiel and wanted to use him for something: later he played a hit man in a James Bond movie and that’s his only other claim to fame) defeat any attempt at pathos … or anything else that might actually make this film entertaining. Like a lot of the movies MST3K picked on, the biggest sin of Eegah is that it’s dull: soporifically paced, seeming quite a bit longer than its actual running time, it just sort of drones on and on, and when Eegah (copying the plot construction of King Kong) escapes from his cave world and spends the last third of the movie plodding through the streets of L.A., the ordinary people — who, according to the script, are supposed to be scared out of their wits — just seem mildly annoyed.

Eegah himself (the Millers deduce that’s his name because it’s the word he repeats most often — one imdb.com commentator made fun of that conceit and wrote, “Why would you be wandering around growling your own name endlessly, anyway? Some sort of identity crisis?”) is a wimp as far as movie monsters are concerned: he doesn’t kill anybody, he doesn’t destroy anything except one plate-glass window in a store, and he doesn’t even get to rape the heroine, though I couldn’t help but wish he had: my vision of how it should have ended was, with the cops having plugged Eegah and him floating face down in a swimming pool like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Roxy rests her head on Tom’s shoulders and as Tom says it’s a pity Eegah’s race has finally died out, she looks at him and says, “No, it hasn’t — I’m having his baby!”

•••••

I looked for a movie from my backlog I didn’t think Charles would be interested in seeing and found it in Wild Guitar, the second of the two Arch Hall, Jr. films TCM had paired in their “Underground” series. This was the third in the series of six productions Arch Hall, Sr. made for his Fairway International studio in his ill-advised attempt to establish his son as a rock star and singing actor, released in December 1962 and a genuinely dreadful movie with only a few quirks to redeem it.

As a singer, Arch Hall, Jr. isn’t half-bad; Harry and Michael Medved dismissed him as “thoroughly and obviously without talent” but in fact he has a decent if not particularly rock ’n’ roll-ish voice — one appropriate for an age in which the biggest male “rockers” were boys like Frankie Avalon and Fabian (the early 1960’s, the interregnum between the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens and the advent of the Beatles, were among the most dismal periods of pop music ever: at least of the white artists of the period, only Ricky Nelson, who had genuine rockabilly chops, and Del Shannon of the solo artists, and the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons among the male groups, made enduring music in those years) — and his guitar playing, though hardly “wild,” is at least serviceable. (There were surprisingly few virtuoso rock guitarists in the early years — and the best ones, Duane Eddy and Dick Dale, recorded almost exclusively instrumentals; the era of guitar gods like Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix would come later, in the mid- to late-1960’s.) About the only truly annoying part of Arch Hall, Jr.’s vocalism is his occasional adoption of Buddy Holly’s hiccup — which only underscores the vast gulf between Holly’s genius and Hall’s mere serviceability.

Wild Guitar’s theme is the corruption of the music business — this is probably the darkest rock ’n’ roll movie made since Jailhouse Rock — and specifically the character of Mike McCauley, super-manager who signs young singers like vacuum cleaners, lets them live high off the hog while he’s establishing their careers, and then essentially turns them into musical sharecroppers, working them to the bone and giving them almost no money, until the musical fad changes and he abruptly drops them. What makes the on-screen relationship of McCauley and “Bud Eagle,” the character played by Arch Hall, Jr., is that McCauley is played by Arch Hall, Sr. under the pseudonym “William Watters” — and it’s impossible to watch this movie without wondering about the family dynamics of attempting to push your son into stardom while casting yourself in his movie as his unscrupulous and exploitative manager. McCauley also has an assistant, Stake, a tall, zombie-like young man who looks like he was stretched out on a torture rack and is played by the film’s director, the infamous Ray Dennis Steckler, using the same acting pseudonym, “Cash Flagg,” he used in his own auteur messterpiece The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. (I’ve seen that film only on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, but it was easier to forgive its silliness and tackiness because the title gave away that it was intended as a genre spoof.)

Aside from the bizarre family connections (which give this movie a patina of family dysfunction even though the multiple roles played by Arch Hall, Sr. — who also wrote the script and produced the film under still another pseudonym, “Nicholas Merriweather” — and Ray Dennis Steckler were clearly motivated only by cost-cutting needs), Wild Guitar is a campy mess. Arch Hall, Jr.’s weird appearance — particularly his perpetual sneer and his bizarre hairdo, which makes it look as if his ass has somehow migrated to the top of his head — worked, sort of, in The Sadist but it’s totally wrong for a hero we’re supposed to root for and genuinely like. What’s more, while The Sadist had two genuinely talented women in the cast, in Wild Guitar Hall’s leading lady, Nancy Czar (as Bud Eagle’s dancer girlfriend, Vickie Wills), is just as untalented as he is and it’s odd, to say the least, to watch them play what Arch Hall, Sr. clearly intended as major emotional scenes with all the passion and intensity of ordering a hamburger at McDonald’s. (Porn performers act this badly, but at least you get to see them having sex afterwards.)

The film wanders off its main plot for all sorts of digressions, some of which actually have some dramatic power — notably when one of McCauley’s former stars, Don Proctor (Robert Crumb), now a homeless, drunken derelict, comes to Bud Eagle’s apartment (which used to be his home when he was McCauley’s fair-haired young boy, and which he can get in because McCauley hasn’t even bothered to change the locks) and confronts Bud with what he’ll be in for career-wise if he continues to let McCauley run his life (and who’s quickly dispatched by Stake, who shoves him down a flight of stairs) — but most of which don’t, notably an unfunny scene in which three men who hang out at the coffee shop owned by Marge (Marie Denn, a sort of micro-budget Thelma Ritter) hit on the idea of kidnapping Bud and he eagerly goes along with it to find out just how much he’s worth to McCauley.

Wild Guitar has its moments — the kidnapping scene eerily anticipates the real-life kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr. (which was also portrayed in the media as a publicity stunt cooked up by Sinatra with his alleged kidnappers, one of whom certainly knew the Sinatras because he’d previously dated Nancy) and the sequences of Bud Eagle actually making music are quite a bit better technically than the rest of the film, with quick cuts and offbeat angles anticipating A Hard Day’s Night and quite likely the work of Vilmos Zsigmond, who was credited as director of photography for the second unit and was rewarded for his efforts on this film by being hired as the full-fledged d.p. on The Sadist. Nonetheless, Wild Guitar lumbers along to a predictable conclusion (Bud and his brother Ted — credited in the cast list to “Al Scott” but possibly a real-life brother to Arch Hall, Jr. and thereby also a son of Arch Hall, Sr. — get an embarrassing confession from McCauley on tape and therefore can blackmail him into being honest with them about their business dealing, and the film ends with a sequence on a beach that’s supposed to represent a scene from Bud Eagle’s first movie, complete with a song called “Twist Crazy” that’s actually a 12-bar blues) and expires in a kind of campy wretchedness that makes one wonder why one’s bothered spending 92 minutes watching this movie. Incidentally, this TCM showing had two introductions, one from Rob Zombie and one as part of a TV (or video) series called Teenage Classics hosted by Mamie van Doren — who at least got to make a cheap, exploitative teen movie with a genuinely great rock star, Jerry Lee Lewis. — 5/18/07

•••••

I wanted to run one of the TCM “cult” films before Charles came home at 9 — the one I picked was The Sadist, a 1963 production from Arch Hall, Sr.’s Fairway International studio that was the fourth in the sequence of six films Arch Hall, Sr. produced as vehicles for his son, rock ’n’ roll wanna-be Arch Hall, Jr. (The six films, in order, were The Choppers, Eegah! — which starred future James Bond villain Richard Kiel as a caveman brought back to life in 1960’s L.A. — Wild Guitar, The Sadist, The Nasty Rabbit and Deadwood ’76.) This is also the only one in which Arch Hall, Jr. doesn’t sing: a helpful introduction by rock semi-star Rob Zombie (whom TCM got rid of fairly quickly) noted that Arch Hall, Jr. had first picked up a guitar at age 11 and his budding talent had so impressed his dad that he got Jr. a contract with Steve Allen’s record label, for which he recorded a single which bombed.

Not to be denied — Arch Hall, Sr.’s devotion to advancing his son’s talents has been compared to the plot of Citizen Kane, probably as close as either of them got to a truly great movie — Sr. launched the Fairway International studio with the intent of promoting Jr. as an actor-singer-rock star in the manner of Elvis Presley. Not that he had the kinds of budgets available to him that Elvis’s producers, Hal Wallis and Sam Katzman, did — The Sadist was reportedly an unusually expensive Fairway International production at a budget of $37,000, and financial resources were tight enough that writer-director James Landis (any relation to John?) wrote his script so that all of it took place outdoors during daylight and therefore he didn’t need to rent lights.

The surprise is that The Sadist is actually pretty good: it opens much like your typical drive-in exploitation movie of the time, with a pair of eyes on a black field, an uncredited narrator (Arch Hall, Sr.) announcing the theme of the film — “The words of a sadist, one of the most disruptive elements in human society. To have complete mastery over another, to make him a helpless object, to humiliate him, to enslave, to inflict moral insanity upon the innocent. That is his objective, and his twisted pleasure!” — and a fade-in onto a grainy, low-contrast, washed-out black-and-white image of a black Chevrolet pulling up to a garage in the boonies in the desert between California and Arizona (a favorite location for Arch Hall, Sr.).

Its occupants, Carl Oliver (Don Russell), a fifty-something married man whose son is about to graduate from West Point in two weeks and who’s on his way to a Dodgers game because they’re playing the Reds from his former home town of Cincinnati; Ed Stiles (Richard Alden), a history teacher at a local high school; and Doris Page (Helen Hovey, Arch Hall, Jr.’s cousin), the math teacher colleague Stiles has a crush on, soon are confronted by the Sadist himself: Charlie Tibbs (Arch Hall, Jr.), along with his mentally retarded girlfriend Judy (Marilyn Manning). The characterizations were based on spree killers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate — who since have inspired more prestigious movies like Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers — though a later reissue of The Sadist under the title Sweet Baby Charlie seems to have been aimed at making audiences think it was really about Charles Manson — and at first Hall couldn’t be more repulsive, with his dirty blond hair combed up in what’s attempting to be an Elvis-style pompadour and looks more like a bouffant (there’s a reason why the naturally blond Elvis kept his hair dyed black his entire career!), his denim jacket and skin-tight blue jeans revealing an almost microscopic basket (are we supposed to think this guy went crazy because other kids teased him about the small size of his dick?) and his perpetual sneer that makes him look like he’s getting butt-fucked with an oil drill.

At first The Sadist seems like any other cheap exploitation film of the period, but as it goes on it gets surprising scope and power. Even its weakest element — the utter incompetence of Arch Hall, Jr.’s portrayal, his attempt to overplay the psycho role in the manner of James Cagney, Richard Widmark and Neville Brand (instead of adopting the cooler, twitchier approach to serial-killer acting pioneered by Anthony Perkins in Psycho) when he not only can’t overact, he can’t act at all — turns into a plus. The sheer weirdness of Hall’s appearance and aspect in the role sets him apart from the normal human beings he torments (though, aside from one chilling scene in which he forces Doris to stick her head in the ground and literally eat dirt, his actions are psychotic but not really sadistic); I found myself thinking of Herman Melville’s line in Billy Budd that to understand Claggart you had to cross “the deadly space between” his character and normal humanity.

James Landis’s script is weak when he tries to write dialogue — his attempts to get us to sympathize with the victims only makes them sound whiny and pathetic — but as the film progresses and relies less on dialogue and more on action, Landis emerges as a suspense director of real power and a plotter whose script is far enough away from the usual clichés that we’re really uncertain as to how it all comes out. At one point Doris openly boasts that the police are going to come and rescue them — and when two police duly arrive on motorcycles, Charlie takes them totally by surprise and calmly shoots them.

The plot centers around Charlie’s insistence that Ed fix the broken car so he and Judy can steal it — it’s the only consideration that keeps Charlie from killing him immediately as he does with Carl — and in an attempt to blind him long enough to escape Ed sprays Charlie in the face with gasoline, leading Charlie to swivel in a blind (in both senses) rage and ultimately inadvertently kill his girlfriend Judy, which sends him spiraling downward from street-smart, cunning killer to total madman. One expects from the usual clichés that Ed and Doris will both make it out of the film alive; instead Charlie guns down Ed and Doris flees in panic across the desert, finally hiding out in another picturesquely abandoned house — and just as you’re beginning to wonder whether Charlie is going to kill her too and get away, he falls down a disused well into a nest of rattlesnakes and nature finishes him off the way man couldn’t. (Landis was a good enough script constructionist that he set this sequence up with an early one in which Doris came upon a snakeskin left behind by a snake who shed it, and tells Ed and us how afraid she is of snakes; the irony, of course, is that snakes finally save her life.)

At least part of the unexpected quality of The Sadist comes from its cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (billed as “William” in the credits), making his U.S. debut as a director of photography after having fled Hungary following the defeat of the 1956 revolution; he’d signed on with Fairway as a second-unit cameraman on Wild Guitar and this was his first full d.p. credit: he subsequently made such other teeny-budget exploitation titles as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Rat Fink and Horror of the Blood Monsters before Robert Altman discovered him and gave him his first “A” assignment on McCabe and Mrs. Miller (though the prestige of working with Altman didn’t immediately enable him to quit the drive-in schlock; two years after McCabe and Mrs. Miller he shot something called Blood of Ghastly Horror, also known as Echo of Terror, Psycho a Go-Go and The Man with the Synthetic Brain), leading him to win an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and shoot prestige successes like The Deer Hunter as well as prestige flops like Heaven’s Gate and The Black Dahlia.

Here, despite being saddled with a micro-budget, lousy low-contrast film and no lights, Zsigmond actually manages to get in some creative camera angles and intense depth-of-field shots. But The Sadist is more than an exploitation film dressed up with some nice photography; the jumpy editing style, though probably also a function of the micro-budget (just about every transition is a jump cut because dissolves cost money), actually gives this movie a contemporary feel, and it’s also surprisingly well acted, at least by the women. Arch Hall, Jr. is a special case — as I said before, he’s untalented but he’s also sufficiently weird as a screen presence to be totally believable in his role (especially when he’s waving his guns up and down in the air, emphasizing the phallic nature of firearms — it’s been a staple of the psychological literature since Freud to comment on the fact that penises are long, cylindrical objects that shoot out things which create life and guns are long, cylindrical objects that shoot out things which destroy it) — and the other males are borderline incompetent, but the two actresses are genuinely good.

Marilyn Manning is chillingly effective, somewhat reminiscent of Carroll Baker in Baby Doll (but at least she doesn’t suck her thumb!) but achieving genuine pathos in her characterization of someone with so few resources of her own that she’s an easy mark for Charlie’s domination. Helen Hovey is a bit stuck-up at the beginning, but as the story progresses and its events break her down and force her to act on an instinctive level for sheer survival, the artifice comes off and we start to accept her not as an actress playing a part but as a woman driven to the limits by sheer terror, symbolized in a nice visual effect by the way her hair, tightly wrapped in a bun at the beginning, flows down haphazardly by the end.

Landis deserves credit for doing the civilized-man-driven-to-barbarism-by-the-barbarian trope far more subtly and effectively than Sam Peckinpah, whose pornographic love of photographing violence for its own sake got in the way of his feeble attempts at moralizing; I haven’t seen Straw Dogs since it was new, but I recall it as an offensive movie which pushed the we’re-all-barbarians-at-heart idea way beyond what I was willing to accept and made me feel like I was being manipulated to accept an essentially fascistic view of human nature. The Sadist seems to hold up as an unusually compelling movie despite the limits of its budget and its star, and it’s surprising that James Landis didn’t make it into the big leagues; perhaps he was ahead of his time, since it’s easy to imagine a director who could handle edgy violence and psychosis this well fitting in neatly to today’s film industry. — 5/17/07

The Death Kiss (KBS/World-Wide, 1932/33)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Anyway, we repaired to Charles’ place and I ran him two videos I’d recorded the night before from Turner Classic Movies. One of the movies we watched was The Death Kiss, a 1933 film from a studio that seemed to be almost terminally unsure of its name — and indeed it would close its doors due to the Depression within the year. The company was originally called Sono Art-World Wide, but in 1932 it took over another small studio called Tiffany — where The Death Kiss, which is actually set in a film studio, was in fact filmed. There’s also a triangular logo in the opening credits identifying it as a “KBS Production,” and a producer credit to Earle W. Hammons, who later became head of Educational Pictures (you remember them — they didn’t make educational pictures, but specialized in two-reel comedy shorts with up-and-comers like Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, the Ritz Brothers, Imogene Coca and June Allyson, all of whom made their film debuts in front of Educational’s cameras; as well as down-and-outers like Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon).

There are color tints in this movie — in a scene about midway through when a fire starts in a projection room (they’re watching a movie and it suddenly starts burning in the projector, and when they go to the projection room to check on it, the whole room is on fire and the projectionist has been knocked out), and again at the end in which the murderer’s gun blasts a red flash across the screen whenever it’s fired, and the good guys’ flashlights burn a bright orange every time they face the screen. It’s an interesting effect — this kind of highlighting, like overall tinting, was actually fairly common in the silent era but pretty much went out when sound came in — that enlivens an otherwise pretty mediocre, though not totally uninteresting, film.

The other surprise about The Death Kiss is that it reunites three cast members of the original 1931 Dracula — Bela Lugosi, David Manners and Edward Van Sloan — but there’s nothing supernatural or horrific about the film at all. Basically, it’s a murder mystery set in a film studio, in which a vain and much-hated actor is shot to death while filming a scene in which his character is supposed to be killed. Manners plays the hero, a screenwriter who eventually unravels the mystery — by proving that the fatal shot did not come from any of the guns used by the actors who were supposed to have “shot” the victim in the movie (all of their guns were loaded with blanks, as they were supposed to be, and they were the wrong caliber anyway).

Lugosi is the studio manager, and is carefully set up as a red-herring suspect — for a film built largely on the star appeal of his name, he gets surprisingly little footage (one suspects on a film with such a low budget and tight schedule, they couldn’t afford to give him too much dialogue and wait around for him to learn it phonetically — throughout his entire career in America Lugosi learned little more than the simplest English and did all his acting phonetically). But the real killer turns out to have been the film’s director, played by Van Sloan — it almost seems like wish-fulfillment for all those writers who can’t stand the auteur theory to have a movie in which the writer is the hero and the director is the villain! The Death Kiss is a solidly made little movie, decently directed by Edwin L. Marin (who the same year made the Sherlock Holmes film A Study in Scarlet, also for World Wide, with Adrienne Ames from the cast of The Death Kiss and Reginald Owen as Holmes — on the closure of World Wide he graduated to the major studios and filmed the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol at MGM, with Owen as Scrooge!) and well photographed by Norbert Brodine (who also moved up to major-studio assignments and did the marvelously atmospheric cinematography of the 1947 version of Kiss of Death) — it doesn’t achieve greatness but it’s perfectly good entertainment. — 2/9/05

•••••

I ran a download from archive.org of the 1933 thriller The Death Kiss from KBS productions via World Wide Pictures, which had taken over the Tiffany studios (where this film was shot) when Tiffany went bust due to the Depression — a fate that would befall World Wide itself later in 1933. (This, the Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet and the other movies World Wide had in or ready for release were picked up by Fox and distributed through their exchanges.) Alas, the downloaded version was without the marvelous tinted sequences that added a lot to the appeal of the original (the film was actually scheduled for release in December 1932 but was delayed a month to add the tinted scenes), included colored flames during a scene depicting a fire in a projection room and bright orange flashes from the guns used in the final shootout.

The Death Kiss reunites three of the cast members of the Universal Dracula — David Manners (top-billed), Bela Lugosi (billed third but having surprisingly little screen time — I guess producers got tired of the sheer length of time it took him to learn English dialogue phonetically so they gave him very few lines) and Edward Van Sloan — but cast them in a straightforward whodunit that had no horrific or supernatural elements. It was based on a novel by Madelon St. Denis published in 1932, and was written by Gordon Kahn and Barry Berringer and directed by Edwin L. Marin: his first feature film. The situation revolves around a clever opening in which a woman tells a car full of gangsters with guns that she’ll finger the person they mean to kill by giving him a kiss, Judas-style, and she does so and they blast away at him and he falls. Later the camera pulls back and reveals that this entire scene has merely been a film shoot, with actress Marcia Lane (Adrienne Ames) as the finger (wo)man and her ex-husband, actor Myles Brent (Edmund Burns), as the victim — only, natch, Brent turns out to be dead for real. (Charles pointed out to me that author Arthur B. Reeve, in one of his Craig Kennedy novels, The Film Mystery — published in 1921 — also used the device of having a person murdered when his, or in Reeve’s case her, character is supposed to be shot during the actual making of a film.)

The hero of The Death Kiss is “Tonart Pictures” screenwriter Franklyn Drew (David Manners), who’s in love with Marcia Lane and was hoping to marry her as soon as her divorce from Brent became final. When the bodies pile up — including that of a former gaffer at the studio, Chalmers (Alan Roscoe), who detected the ingenious concealment of the gun in a studio lamp — and both the negative and the positive of the death footage are destroyed, Drew becomes suspicious that someone is trying to frame Marcia for the killings, so he investigates himself, much to the annoyance of the official police officer in charge of the case, Detective Lieutenant Sheehan (John Wray), and after several reels of interest-keeping if not especially thrilling mystery, Drew traps the killer on the studio catwalks and, when the killer falls to the studio floor and dies instantly (Messrs. Kahn and Barringer didn’t even keep him alive long enough for a dying confession, which was a bit disappointing), he turns out to be the film’s director, Tom Avery (Edward Van Sloan), who was upset with Brent for having an affair with Mrs. Avery.

In case you’re wondering where Bela Lugosi fits into all of this, he plays Steiner, the studio manager, and is elaborately set up as a red herring when Drew discovers a torn-up check to a florist which she wrote for a bouquet for Brent’s funeral and then thought better of leaving her name and instead paid cash. The downloaded print was a bit glitchy and in some scenes you could really see the finite elements, but for the most part it was watchable even if hardly optimal, and the movie itself suffers from indifferent direction and the difficulty in accepting David Manners as a detective hero, but even without the tints it still has some appeal — and, as I pointed out the first time Charles and I watched it (from a videotape I recorded from TCM with the tints in place), for screenwriters there’s a sort of anti-auteur theory wish fulfillment about a movie in which the writer is the hero and the director is the villain! — 10/11/08

The Gay Divorcée (RKO, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran Charles The Gay Divorcée, the 1934 film that was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ first starring vehicle — and remains my favorite of their films, even though the dancing doesn’t quite have the élan of their later vehicles (“Let’s Face the Music and Dance” from Follow the Fleet and “Never Gonna Dance” from Swing Time are probably the greatest dance sequences they ever did) and the plot is pretty creaky, despite the finely honed wisecracks and the marvelous farceurs who dot the cast: Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes and Alice Brady. It seemed as if every screaming-queen type in Hollywood except Franklin Pangborn (who must have been busy elsewhere that week — or maybe he was cast as the desk clerk at the Bella Vista Hotel and his scene was cut from the release print) was in this movie, which prompted Arlene Croce in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book to suggest that as long as they were changing the noun in the title (the name of the stage musical it had been based on was Gay Divorce — which was also the title of the film in its British release), they should have done something about the adjective as well.

There are enough wisecracks from Samuel Hoffenstein (Rouben Mamoulian’s favorite writer and the scripter of Love Me Tonight two years earlier) to make one wonder what this film might have been with a true genius like Mamoulian directing instead of a talented hack like Mark Sandrich — certainly the film tries for the same easy integration of song, dance and story that Mamoulian and Hoffenstein achieved in Love Me Tonight, and while it’s hardly on that level it’s considerably smoother than the Busby Berkeley films at Warners which cut from dialogue scene to song cue to production number with all the severity of an old-fashioned opera seria moving from recitativo secco to recitativo accompagnato to aria.

Astaire wasn’t as suave as he became later — there was a curious streak of meanness in his character that would have made him a great noir actor (he looked so much like Dashiell Hammett’s physical description of Sam Spade I’ve long wondered what The Maltese Falcon would have been like with Astaire and Barbara Stanwyck in the leads instead of Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor), and that makes his initial harassment of Rogers, and her initial distaste and disgust with him, credible even though we know that the plot is going to end with them together. And the dancing — especially the marvelous “Night and Day” sequence (the only one of Cole Porter’s songs from the stage show retained for the film version) — is magnificent, though Astaire and Rogers are so magical together that compared to the two of them (Croce noted that only 10 of this film’s 107 minutes are taken up with Astaire dancing either solo or with Rogers), Dave Gould’s massive faux-Berkeley ensembles in “The Continental” (a 17 1/2-minute production number that stood as the longest single number in a film until Gene Kelly gave us the 18 1/2-minute title number of An American in Paris 17 years later) seem decidedly beside the point. — 3/12/98

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I staged a mini-coup at the living-room TV and watched the Turner Classic Movies showing of The Gay Divorcée, the second of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies and the first in which they were the stars (and the first in which they played a romantically involved couple who were united at the end). It was based on Astaire’s 1932 stage show Gay Divorce — his first project without his sister Adele — though not only was the title changed (at least for the U.S. release) but all but one of the original songs by Cole Porter were thrown out of the film version. The one that was kept was “Night and Day,” done in a stunning dance sequence on the beach at the fictitious British resort town of “Brightbourne” in which Astaire and Claire Luce (the female star of the 1930 John Ford comedy Up the River) had danced a passionate adagio on stage and which he repeated with Rogers in the film. (Ironically, Astaire had wanted to drop “Night and Day” from the film because he thought the song had been overexposed; when the stage show was running in the U.S. and Britain he’d recorded it twice, backed each time with a different song from the rest of Porter’s score — “I’ve Got You on My Mind” and the almost as beautiful “After You, Who?” — either of which it would have been nice to hear in the film.)

The Gay Divorcée remains my favorite of the Astaire-Rogers films even though most critics write it off as a beta version of the masterpieces to come, Top Hat and Swing Time, and though the Astaire-Rogers dances to “Night and Day” and “The Continental” and his solos to “Don’t Let It Bother You” and “A Needle in a Haystack” are the high points of the film (“When one considers that only 10 minutes out of the total [107-minute] running time of The Gay Divorcée are taken up by the dancing of Astaire alone or with Rogers, the film’s enduring popularity seems more than ever a tribute to the power of what those minutes contain,” wrote Arlene Croce in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book), the rest of it is quite merry and charming feel-good entertainment. One of the sources of its charm is the marvelous gender-bending of the script, which Croce rather sneered about in her book — “It’s surprising in how many musical comedies and operettas of the 1920’s effeminacy was a comic’s stock in trade. In The Gay Divorcée, which had a retrogressive book, all the male comics seem queer. The title was changed to take the edge off that hard word ‘divorce.’ Perhaps something should have been done about the adjective” — but for me it adds a level of sophistication as well as making Fred Astaire, who for all his superb physicality and obvious control over his body was not the macho, athletic dancer Gene Kelly was, seem more butch by comparison.

I’m not sure why I like The Gay Divorcée better than the later, more highly regarded Astaire-Rogers vehicles, but perhaps it was because the people behind the camera (director Mark Sandrich and writer Dwight Taylor, who didn’t actually work on the film but had written the stage show on which it was based and was, once The Gay Divorcée was a hit, hired by RKO to rework the formula into the story and script for Top Hat) were still working out the bugs in the formula; partly because of the fascinating assemblage of guest stars (including Betty Grable and Lillian Miles — Grable, who gets a trivial but charming number called “Let’s K-nock K-neez” with Edward Everett Horton, would pass through RKO and Paramount on her way to stardom at Fox via the 1940 film Down Argentine Way; Miles would end up with a major role in Reefer Madness four years after she sang part of “The Continental” in this film) and a script that permitted Edward Everett Horton and Erik Rhodes to sing (they actually had pretty good comic voices even though Rhodes’ attempts at “La donna è mobile” are so wince-inducing that when Astaire says he’s worried that Rhodes’ character might be a tenor, a few lines of Verdi’s great aria out of Rhodes’ mouth and Astaire concedes to Rogers, “I was wrong”); and a script that though hardly laugh-out-loud funny does have a lot of amusing lines (my favorite: when Astaire has cornered Rogers in the countryside and his car is blocking hers, she says, “Will you move your car — or don’t you want it anymore?”); and that 17 1/2-minute production number on “The Continental” (the first ever Academy Award-winning best song) that was the longest single musical sequence ever put on film until Gene Kelly’s ballet to the title piece of An American in Paris 17 years later. I just love this movie! — 10/9/08

Twentieth Century (Columbia, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie we watched last night was a quite good one: Twentieth Century, a screwball comedy classic from Columbia Pictures in 1934 directed by Howard Hawks (and very much in his style even though both Lewis Milestone and Roy Del Ruth were sought for the director’s assignment before Hawks was hired) based on a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur that premiered in New York December 29, 1932 and was itself based on an unproduced play by Charles Bruce Millholland called Napoleon of Broadway (though the screen credits make it look like Hecht and MacArthur did a direct screen adaptation of Millholland’s play). The similarities to the Hecht-MacArthur play The Front Page (previously filmed by Howard Hughes with Lewis Milestone directing in 1931 and remade by Hawks at Columbia in 1940 with a gender-changed lead that brought the two stories even closer!) are readily apparent, though the world is that of Broadway theatrical production instead of newspapers and prisons.

Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore, top-billed) is a Broadway producer who sells his shows on his reputation alone — we see a poster for his latest effort, The Flame of Kentucky, and the name “OSCAR JAFFE” is all over the poster in huge letters, more than once, while the name of the playwright is in teeny-tiny type under the title (one wonders if this ever happened to Hecht and MacArthur themselves!) — and his latest effort is to take an underwear model from a local department store, Mildred Plotka (Carole Lonbard), and transform her into a great actress and his latest star. He outfits her with the new name “Lily Garland” without bothering to tell either her or anyone else in his organization except his press agent, who shows up with a reporter there to interview “Lily Garland” and is told, “There’s no one by that name here.” Needing a way to get his new star to scream on cue at the news that her father has killed her lover, Jaffe sticks her with a hat pin — and she preserves the pin as a relic as she goes on to a smash success and a three-year career as Jaffe’s on-stage star and off-stage lover until his antics, including repeated threats to commit suicide whenever Lily or anybody else in his organization threatens to do something that displeases him, finally lead her to bolt and light out for Hollywood. She’s a tremendous success in the movie capital while Jaffe’s next few shows — including an elaborate production of Joan of Arc — are mega-flops.

Sneaking out of Chicago in an elaborate disguise as an old man to avoid a sheriff with an attachment order, Jaffe boards the Twentieth Century train from Chicago to New York — where Lily Garland is also heading because she’s planning a stage comeback with Jaffe’s former protégé turned rival, Max Jacobs (Charles Levison). Jaffe’s $250,000 in debt and his only chance to salvage himself financially is to sign Lily for the lead in his next play — and for the second half of the film Jaffe and his associates, business manager Oliver Webb (Walter Connolly) and general assistant Oscar O’Malley (a delightfully dry-witted Roscoe Karns), battle Lily herself, her new boyfriend George Smith (the interesting Ralph Forbes, wasted in a Ralph Bellamy-style part), a harmless weirdo named Matthew J. Clark (Etienne Girardot) who sticks “Repent! The time is at hand!” stickers all over the train and pretends to be super-rich; and two actors (Herman Bing and Lee Kohlmar) from the Oberammergau Passion Play whose appearance leads Jaffe to a brainstorm to buy the rights for New York and produce it with Lily as Mary Magdalene. It ends about the way you think it will — with Jaffe faking his own death, Lily signing a contract with him as a noble gesture since she thinks he’s just about to croak anyway, and the two of them rehearsing another crappy play at the end with Jaffe being just as browbeating and generally impossible as before.

Twentieth Century (a title Columbia thought of changing because they didn’t think people outside of New York, Chicago or Los Angeles would know what it meant —when the show was turned into a musical in 1978 it was called On the Twentieth Century to give playgoers a clue that the title referred to a train) is an acknowledged classic but one it’s been unusually difficult to see lately — I think it was run once on the UCSD channel but otherwise I hadn’t had a chance to see it since it turned up on one of the early-morning movie shows in the Bay Area in the early 1970’s — and what makes it great entertainment is that the characters are so hammy one can overact to one’s heart’s content and not hurt the show at all. After just having listened to some of John Barrymore’s surviving broadcasts of scenes from Shakespeare, it was odd to have this fustian rhetoric being hurled at me in the context of a modern-dress comedy — though it’s arguable that Barrymore, at least on film, came off better as a comedian than as a dramatic actor, especially once (as had happened by 1934) his years of alcoholism and other self-abuse had caught up with him and ravaged his looks. And Lombard is just right for the female lead: ditsy, conceited, as diva-ish as Jaffe and resentful of the Svengali-and-Trilby comparisons continually being made about their relationship (all the more annoying since Barrymore had actually played Svengali to Marian Marsh’s Trilby four years earlier!).

While it’s a pity that Groucho Marx never put the role of Jaffe down on film (he played it in stock on stage during 1934, during a temporary break-up of the Marx Brothers, and his reading was probably less fustian, more cynical, less egomaniacal and more grounded and calculating), Barrymore is great in the part on his own terms (and it’s at least the second time in his film career, after Counsellor-at-Law, in which he played a Jew!), and Twentieth Century emerges as a perfectly wonderful laff-riot but with its heartwarming aspects as well.

Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict (Lifetime TV, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I managed to squeeze in a viewing of a Lifetime movie called Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict, based — or at least “inspired by,” which probably means screenwriter Maria Nation merely took the character names and basic situations and plot premises, and largely invented the rest with liberal doses of well-proved clichés — a memoir by Sue William Silverman (why did her parents give her a male middle name?) with the somewhat less hysterical subtitle One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction. It’s a production I hoped would provide lots of good, clean dirty fun: plenty of the sort of soft-core porn involving hot-looking men that makes a lot of Lifetime productions watchable even if the plot, writing, directing and acting don’t; lots of picturesque sequences of Our Heroine plumbing the depths of degradation and screwing guys in bars, fleabag hotels, under bridges and other sordid places; and an overall aura of sin for an hour and a half before it came time to swing the plot towards redemption.

Alas, Love Sick didn’t deliver on the promises of its title and central premise: heroine Sue Silverman (Sally Pressman, whom Lifetime was hyping based on her role in their successful series show Army Wives) is blonde and pretty in a rather nondescript fashion, and she has a knack of changing her appearance quite radically so she can look at home as the (presumably) perfect housewife in one scene and the down ’n’ dirty slut the next, but none of the guys seem all that appealing because for some reason the casting director of this film picked a whole bunch of male actors who were pretty indistinguishable physically: all tall, lanky, sandy-haired, clad in grey suits — the film opens at a party and aside from the two Black people there (a man and a woman, presumably together) all the men fit the above-mentioned physical type and all the women look pretty much like Sue except that some of them have dark hair. You wonder why she bothers having affairs with men who are almost completely indistinguishable from her husband!

The husband’s name is Andrew (Peter Flemming) and he’s what in the 1970’s we used to call a male-chauvinist pig, insisting that she upgrade her part-time job to full-time (and give up her ambitions of being a writer) and also that she do all the housework and keep everything impeccably organized to his specifications. She’s also got living parents Irwin (Ken Kramer, an actor with an intriguing resemblance to E. G. Marshall) and Fay (Sandra Timuss) Silverman (imdb.com also gives “Silverman” as her husband Andrew’s last name, so either Sue married a guy with the same family name as hers or the screenwriter screwed up), who celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary during the course of the movie at a joyless party in which Dad takes Sue aside and calls her “princess” and “puppy,” and makes her say, “I love you, Daddy” — which instantly had me thinking, “Are they going to explain her sex addiction by saying she was molested by her father? Or have I just been watching too many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit lately?”

It turns out about four commercial breaks later that she WAS regularly molested by her father, but that only comes out after we’ve seen her trick with three guys: Rick (David James Elliott), a friend of her husband’s; “Bar Guy” (Benjamin Easterday), a racially ambiguous pickup she meets in a biker bar (we know it’s an unsavory place because the music they’re playing is heavy metal); and Laurent Decker (Robert Gauvin), a guest architect from France who works on a project for the architectural firm that employs Sue and who romances her and even offers to marry her despite the inconvenient facts that not only does she has a husband, he has a wife (who fits the willowy blonde template of most of the women in this movie, only her hair is bobbed Jeanne Moreau-style to indicate that she’s French) who just happens to be with him when Sue sidles up and tells him flat-out she’s willing to accept his offer. This — and the break with her female confidante Jill (Medina Hahn) when Jill catches her making a pass at Jill’s husband Steve (Ari Cohen) — propels her to seek therapy with Dr. Robert Gardner (Roger Haskett), yet another tall, lanky, sandy-haired man in the dramatis personae — and it’s to Gardner that she finally confesses she’s a molestation victim and that she’s had “hundreds” of alternative sex partners, which is difficult to square with what we’ve seen on screen — which is a woman surprisingly diffident about adultery for someone who’s being presented as a sex addict.

Grant Harvey’s direction doesn’t help in this department; Charles once joked that all Lifetime movies fit into one of two genres, “disease-of-the-week” and “crime-of-the-week,” and in the scene in which Sue approaches the seedy motel room where Rick is waiting to give her her first extramarital sexual experience (at least the first one we’re going to be privy to) Harvey seems to have got his genres crossed; the suspense editing, the dark shadow from the open doorway and the doomy music give one the impression that she’s going to enter the room and find him murdered. (She enters, the door closes, the show breaks for a commercial, and when we return they’re already getting dressed post-coitally.)

Anyway, Dr. Gardner decides that what Sue needs is a stint in his “clinic,” which turns out to be a sex addicts’ boot camp in the hills, where they’re instructed that they won’t be able to have “sexual” clothing, lipstick, makeup, cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, laptops, cell phones or any of the accoutrements of modern life to which these upper-middle-class people are accustomed. The “clinic” is enlivened by two characters who prove to be the most interesting people in the movie: Karen (Sadie Lawrence), Sue’s roommate, who’s dressed in sexy underwear and is determined to resist the program and get in the pants of Gabriel (Brandon Jay McLaren), a hunky, dreadlocked African-American who is the only male in the place besides Dr. Gardner and who was certainly, at least by my standards, by far the hottest guy in the production — though in the long shots he looked so gender-ambiguous that the beard stubble on his cheeks was all that “outed” him as a man and I kept expecting it would turn out that the reason Dr. Gardner thought it safe to have him work in his female sex addicts’ boot camp was that he was Gay.

Instead, Gabriel actually sneaks into Sue’s room after Karen walks out of the program and offers to meet her on the grounds for a hot fuck session, and it’s only when Sue makes the date and then pulls away and says “no” before Gabriel can do it to her that she reaches the therapeutic breakthrough that will permit her to heal. This scene makes so little sense — why is Gabriel willing to risk his job doing this? Has he done it before? Is he doing this on purpose as part of Gardner’s therapeutic program, getting the women all hot and bothered to test their new-found ability to resist? — that when I saw Gabriel meet Sue while she was sleeping and press a key in her hand representing the room in which they were to meet, my first thought was that this was merely Sue’s dream. At the end the on-screen Sue Silverman, like the real one, has written a book about her experiences and is reading from it at an appearance on her book tour.

To my mind, Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love remains the best fiction about this situation — a middle-class married woman seeking a series of extramarital sexual encounters and drawing an emotional wall between her trysts and her home life -— and it succeeds where Love Sick fails not only in the vividness with which Nin depicts the appeal of the sexual underground she eloquently describes but also in her understanding of what might drive a person to seek “wholeness” through two such different lifestyles and her refusal to give her heroine such a blatant cop-out as “Daddy made me do it.” (At the end of Love Sick Lifetime flashes the statistic that one in four American women are sexually molested before their teens — a controversial assertion because Sigmund Freud originally offered the same statistic and then backtracked and wrote off his female patients’ accounts of such things as “fantasies,” for which he’s been criticized retrospectively as a male chauvinist who couldn’t bare the truth of what he’d found out about men and their proclivity to molest the pre-pubescent, so he lied his way out of it — and if true that statement is a really grim comment on human nature even though it also suggests that being molested might not be that bad since if it’s that common, there seem to be an awful lot of people able to rise above it.)

I’m tempted to seek out Silverman’s book to see if it’s more insightful than the rather stupid movie that got made of it (amazon.com listed it and also linked to some similarly themed works by or about multiple-partner women) and if she herself turned her story into an occasion for cheap moralizing the way Maria Nation and Grant Harvey did.

Up the Yangtze (EyeSteel Productions, National Film Board of Canada, PBS P.O.V., 2007)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Up the Yangtze, which I gathered from the promotional blurb (especially the comparison to a Robert Altman film) was a fiction film about the effect of the gigantic Three Gorges Dam project on the lives of the people it’s displacing. Surprise: it turned out to be a PBS P.O.V. documentary, though the comparison to Altman was apt and I also couldn’t help but think of the disastrous movie Northfork and how Up the Yangtze’s director, Yung Chang (whose opening narration mentions that he’s the grandson of a Chinese immigrant to Canada and one of the reasons he went to China was to check out the current state of the country against his grandfather’s reminiscences), got everything triumphantly right that the makers of Northfork got wrong.

The inspiration for Up the Yangtze was Chang’s visit to China in 2002 and his excursion aboard a tour boat taking a so-called “Farewell Tour” up the Yangtze River before the Three Gorges Dam is completed and floods the entire canyon, including the city of Fengdu where, according to Chinese tradition, all souls of dead people pass through the “Gates of Hell” before entering the afterlife. (The film is set mostly in and around the greater metropolitan area of Chongqing, formerly known as Chungking, which apparently is the largest city in China — not either Beijing or Shanghai, which would have been my guesses — and this incorporates Fengdu and a number of other communities which were going to be flooded by the dam and whose citizens were forced to relocate.)

The Three Gorges Dam was actually a product of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the desire of Mao Zedong to rejuvenate his revolution in the mid-1960’s by all manner of projects, from breaking the Chinese intelligentsia to demonstrating his own personal vitality by swimming the Yangtze (some archival footage of him doing this is shown) and promising the world’s largest dam project. Mao even wrote a poem about the project and it was set to music (a record of this song is heard in the film), and when completed the Three Gorges Dam promised to generate up to 10 percent of China’s total need for electricity. The project has been debated back and forth ever since, and Chang carefully avoids taking a position on it (most of the world’s environmentalists have declared it a disaster), instead using it to create a fascinating portrait of modern China and counterpointing two main characters, the Yu family (subsistence farmers who live in a lean-to in Fengdu and whose oldest of three children, 16-year-old daughter Yu Shui, laments that she doesn’t have the money to go to college and pursue her dreams) and 19-year-old Chen Bo Yu, only child of wealthy parents, who gets a job on one of the cruise boats but washes out after the three-year probation because of his superior attitude and says to the filmmakers (alternating between Chinese and quite good English) that his parents are well off and therefore he doesn’t need a job. (The fact that Chen Bo Yu is drop-dead gorgeous and has a killer stare that makes him look like a sort of Chinese James Dean just gives him one more reason to be arrogant.)

The film also takes a skewer to the ugly-American tourist — as when a middle-aged woman acknowledges Chen with a big tip and says she’s giving it to him because he’s been “less obtrusive” than the other waiters on the boat (I had visions of him going to his English tutor and asking, “What does ‘obtrusive’ mean?”), only to get him fired when she tells the cruise line officials that he extorted the money from her. The film is rich in quite a lot of ways; for example, it shows visually how total China’s transformation from a Communist to a capitalist country has been — the vast gaps in wealth and income are vividly dramatized and the Chinese urban environment is exactly like our own (only the presence of characters as well as alphabet in the street signs gives this away as an Asian country), down to a scene of a woman in a beauty parlor being given a makeover in the image of a model from a popular Chinese magazine that’s sort of their equivalent of Maxim. There’s even a gag in the film in which one Chinese is explaining that there’s a fork in the road with a sign saying “Road to Socialism” to the left and one saying “Road to Capitalism” to the right, and whereas an American would take the right fork, the Chinese are taking the right fork but signaling left.

Watching this film while I’m in the middle of reading Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew was a profoundly depressing experience that made me wonder if maybe, like it or not, the Right is right after all and advanced capitalism represents the final flowering of human nature in all its greed, acquisitiveness and individualism — and yet there were plenty of poignant moments as well: when old man Yu is carrying a large chest on his back and Mrs. Yu offers to help, he begs off and at that moment Charles and I started laughing and I’ll bet some other people in the audience wondered why were being so tasteless — it’s a private joke between us because when Charles thinks I’ve over-burdened myself and am carrying too much, he’ll offer to help and I’ll beg off and say, in an agitated tone of voice, “I’m fine! I’m fine!” Up the Yangtze is a rich film, full of the counterpoint between tradition and modernity — and it also reminded me of Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, and Caro’s argument that great public-works projects can be built only in a dictatorship (indeed, his “take” on Moses was that, due to his contacts and influence with the rich and powerful, he build a dictatorial fiefdom within a nominal democracy in which he had near-absolute power to build whatever he wanted to regardless of public opinion or however many people he displaced) — though Charles pointed out that Mao would never have tolerated the level of corruption associated with the Three Gorges Dam once it finally did get built, particularly the multitude of local officials who were skimming funds from it for their personal fortunes.

My Favorite Spy (Paramount, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When Charles and I went home I looked for something lighter we could screen and found it in My Favorite Spy, which I hadn’t marked with a year date and therefore didn’t know in advance whether the movie I’d recorded to DVD was the 1942 film with Kay Kyser (“How did we win the war with bandleader Kyser as spy?” asked Leonard Maltin about this film in his 2000 Movie and Video Guide) or the 1951 with Bob Hope. It turned out to be the Hope, directed by Norman Z. McLeod from a script by the usual committee — Edmund Beloin and Lou Breslow (story and adaptation). Edmund L. Hartmann and Jack Sher (screenplay), and Hal Kanter (additional dialogue) — and with Hedy Lamarr as his co-star in an obvious follow-up to previous Hope films My Favorite Blonde (1942, with Madeleine Carroll essentially playing a parody of her role in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps) and My Favorite Brunette (1947, with Dorothy Lamour essentially carrying through her role in the Hope-Crosby Road movies even though Bing Crosby appears only in a cameo, as an executioner at San Quentin visibly disappointed that Hope’s character has been found innocent and therefore Bing won’t get to pull the lethal-gas switch on him after all).

This time Hope is in a dual role: as burlesque comic “Peanuts” White and master spy (and James Bond prototype, especially in his irresistibility to women) Eric Augustine. When Augustine is shot and seriously wounded by New York police — against the wishes of U.S. intelligence, who wanted him taken alive -— “Peanuts” is drafted to impersonate him and take $1 million in cash (which he wears around his waist as a sort of utility belt) to Tangier to buy some secret microfilm. When he arrives the taxi that was supposed to take him from the airport to the hotel is blown up, and he meets chanteuse Lily Dalbray (Hedy Lamarr, amusingly introduced by Victor Young’s “Delilah” theme from the Cecil B. DeMille film Samson and Delilah, where of course it also related to her character), who sings a Dietrichesque number in a nightclub floor show with the dubbed voice of Martha Mears). She and the real Augustine had a love-hate relationship of long standing — they were always getting involved in bits of international intrigue together and one would leave the other to face the rap for the latest high-powered bit of espionage they were engaged in together — and it’s unclear moment-by-moment whether she’s on the side of Our Hero or of the villains who are trying to get their hands on the microfilm: Karl Brubaker (Francis L. Sullivan) and his boss, the mysterious Rudolf Hönig (Luis Van Rooten).

My Favorite Spy is a pretty mild comedy, hardly at the level of Hope’s previous “Favorite” films (or of The Great Lover, the astonishingly dark movie he made in 1949 which I’m inclined to think is the best film of his career) but with some clever and quite amusing scenes: the burlesque routine he’s shown doing at the beginning (written, on purpose, to be so excruciatingly awful it probably gave Hope some unpleasant memories of his pre-stardom days in which he actually had to work jobs like that to survive); the phone call from President Truman that finally convinces him to go along with the impersonation (he even asks the president how his daughter Margaret’s singing tour is going!); a great scene in the Tangier hotel where he inadvertently packs the telephone in his suitcase and then has to figure out how to answer it when it rings; a mistaken identity when the real Augustine, who’s escaped from the U.S. government hospital and made his own way to Tangier, ends up in Lily’s room and beats the shit out of her (or comes as close as he could in a Production Code movie), leaving “Peanuts” to wonder why Lily’s opinion of him has so suddenly and dramatically changed for the worst; and a vertiginous final scene (largely ripped off from Keystone slapstick by way of the famous ending of W. C. Fields’ Never Give a Sucker an Even Break) in which Lily is attempting to outrun the baddies and get herself and “Peanuts” to the Tangier airport in a fire truck, with “Peanuts” (Bob Hope’s stunt double, anyway) hanging from the end of its ladder as it speeds down the road. Though more could have been made of the real Augustine’s character (the idea of Bob Hope as a proto-James Bond could have been a delicious occasion for humor of a quite different sort than we expect from Hope!), on the whole My Favorite Spy is a nice, moderately amusing whose best scenes — unusually for such a verbally-oriented comedian as Hope — are slapstick and physical comedy.

The Captive City (Aspen/United Artists, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran a rather interesting if not entirely successful movie from 1952, The Captive City, made by the short-lived Aspen Productions company for United Artists release. Aspen was originally supposed to be a cooperative venture of producer Val Lewton and directors Robert Wise and Mark Robson, but at the last minute Wise and Robson froze Lewton out of the deal and replaced him with Theron Warth, who like Wise and Robson was a former RKO editor (his best-known credit in that department was on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious).

For their first production (there’d be only one other, Return to Paradise, from 1953, starring Gary Cooper in what was essentially a sequel to South Pacific) the three ex-RKO editors picked a story not only inspired by Senator Estes Kefauver’s famous televised hearings on organized crime but actually featuring him: the opening credits say that Kefauver was paid for his part but donated his fee to the Cordell Hull Foundation for World Peace, and The Film Noir Encyclopedia indicates that Kefauver spoke both at the beginning and the end of the film, but in the print we watched he only appeared at the end. I’d assumed we’d see the film end with a dramatization of the hearings in which Kefauver would play himself, but instead we see hero Jim Austin (John Forsythe, top-billed) entering the hearing room to testify and then there’s a cut to Kefauver sitting at a desk and orating directly at the camera like the on-camera narrators in the MGM Crime Does Not Pay shorts. (The Captive City was shot in February 1952 and released on March 26 of that year, and Kefauver probably thought and hoped it would help him in his presidential campaign.)

The film begins with a station wagon emblazoned with the logo of the Kennington Post newspaper speeding through a country road in the early morning, and a sedan chasing it and scaring its inhabitants, Jim Austin and his wife Marge (Joan Camden, with a surprisingly severe hairdo for a woman in a 1950’s movie; at times her hair looks shorter than his!), by thinking that they’re out to kill him — which, this being a movie about the Mafia, of course they are. He decides to hide out in the town of Warren, which is on his way, and he bursts into the police station, pleads with the cops to give him an escort to the state capital (the state itself is carefully unnamed) and, when he sees a tape recorder in the police station, asks to use it to dictate his story so in case the baddies do kill him there’ll be a record of what he meant to tell the Kefauver committee.

That sets the frame for an extended flashback in which it turns out that, as editor/publisher of the Kennington Post, Jim first stumbled onto the existence of the Mafia in his otherwise bucolic small-town community (the place is a perfect example of the instant suburbs that sprang up post-war after the commercial success of Levittown and were so famously ridiculed by Malvina Reynolds in her song “Little Boxes” — The Film Noir Encyclopedia specified the population of Kennington as 300,000 but it looks considerably smaller than that on screen) when he got a tip from a private detective, Clyde Nelson (Hal K. Dawson), that ever since he’d taken on the case of Mrs. Sirak (Marjorie Crossland) in her divorce from local insurance agent Murray Sirak (Victor Sutherland), he’d been harassed by the local police and given a succession of tickets as a form of intimidation to get him to lay off. It turns out that Sirak is running a bookmaking setup that started out as a sideline in his office but got to be big-time when the Mafia, in the person of Dominic Fabretti (Vic Romito), a suspected Mob killer from Florida, came to take it over. They rented space from Krug (Paul Newlan), a manufacturer and friend of Jim’s, and set up a multitude of telephones with which to do their dirty business.

The Captive City is listed in The Film Noir Encyclopedia even though it’s only marginally a film noir (how so many marginal noirs made it in there and a “B” noir masterpiece like Anthony Mann’s The Great Flamarion didn’t remains a mystery) and it’s weakened by over-bright cinematography by the usually reliable Lee Garmes and especially by a ridiculously bouncy and over-used score by Jerome Moross (who seems to have been under the misapprehension that he was writing music for a paean to suburbia instead of an exploration of its dark side);significantly, the most effective suspense scene in the film — the murder of Clyde Nelson, run down by a black Cadillac with Florida plates driven by two Mob enforcers under Fabretti’s direction, while Jim has brushed him off and returned to his meal at the country club he’s just been admitted to — is one of the few moments that is unscored.

What makes this film more interesting than its overbright look, inappropriate music, unimpressive cast (Forsythe and Martin Milner, playing a 19-year-old photographer on the Post, are the only people here I’d previously heard of, and both of them were mostly known for their later work in television), iffy characterizations (Wise directed from a story by Alvin H. Josephy and a script by Josephy and Karl Kamb) and rather cloying small-town atmosphere would indicate is the way it becomes essentially a modern-dress version of High Noon, as Jim Austin tries to involve the townspeople in his anti-Mafia crusade and they all beg off. It turns out that the major business leaders and even the ministers (his last hope!) have decided to look the other way on the theory that no matter whether it’s legal or not, people will find a way to gamble and therefore the Mafia is providing the service and if they weren’t doing it, some even crazier criminals might take over.

The film makes some interesting suggestions on the merits of whether to prohibit vice or regulate it — whether it’s more or less of a harm to society to have it provided in a relatively businesslike fashion — and why legitimate businesses would cooperate with the criminals infesting their community and try to shut down our journalist hero who was trying to flush the bad guys out, but the Josephy-Kamb script isn’t sophisticated enough to communicate much about these conflicts and the issues this film could have explored go pretty much untouched. The Captive City is also an interesting film from the technical standpoint, with Warth and Wise showing that they’d learned from the masters they’d previously worked with — Welles, Hitchcock, Lewton — in the ceilinged sets used for almost every interior, the sound cuts (notably one from Clyde Nelson’s dying scream to the high note played by the country-club trumpeter, shot dead-on with the bell of his instrument filling the screen in that eerie angle John Murray Anderson pioneered in The King of Jazz) and the overall enervation. With a tighter script, a stronger cast and a less obtrusive musical score, The Captive City could have been a stronger movie, though it still would have been a gangsters-take-over-a-town-and-one-crusader-tries-to-stop-them movie and there’d been all too many of those before 1952!

Critical Condition: The Human Cost of the U.S. Health Care System

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Sunday, October 5 at 10:30 p.m. KPBS-TV in San Diego (on-air channel 15, cable channel 11) will air Critical Condition, a documentary about the plight of Americans without health insurance. Produced and directed by Roger Weisberg for the PBS P.O.V. series, Critical Condition is a 10-hankie tear-jerker centering around four individuals:

• Joe Stornaiuolo, hotel doorman who gets diabetes and edema, can no longer do his job, then gets fired and loses his health coverage just before all the major conditions kick in;

• Karen Dove, who suspects she has cancer and spends several months just going from doctor to doctor looking for one who will see her even long enough to diagnose her instead of turning her away because she can’t pay for care, finally finds an oncologist willing to give her tests and finds — you guessed it — that in the meantime while she was going through the financial rigmarole the cancer spread from something that could have been treated relatively easy to one that has metastatized;

• Hector Cardenas, a warehouse manager in Los Angeles who gets diabetes and gangrene in his foot, tries desperately to hold on to his job because he knows that if he loses it he’ll lose health coverage, opts to have the foot amputated because his doctors promise him that if he does they’ll have him up and working in a month whereas if he lets them try to save his foot it’ll take several months and his boss will let him go in the meantime, only he loses the bet — he gets the foot cut off and still has to wait four or five months, loses his job and has to worry about the cost of his future care, including the succession of prostheses he needs to regain mobility (there’s a poignant scene in which he attends the wedding of his son — oddly, he’s a good-looking man and seems so much younger than he is that at first it’s a shock that he has a grown son — but in a wheelchair, so he can’t stand up for the ceremony or dance with the bride or his own wife); and

• Carlos Benitez, a documented immigrant from Mexico who’s taken U.S. citizenship and works in a restaurant but doesn’t get health insurance from his employer (actually he did originally, but he gave it up when all they were giving him was over-the-counter drugs and he figured he could save money by just buying them himself) and so is S.O.L. when the bones in his back start to fuse and put him in 15 years of unbearable pain (though not in so much pain that he can’t have sex: at the end of the program his wife is visibly pregnant), finds that the operation needed to fix him (he’s literally turning into a hunchback — the first real one I can ever recall seeing in the film — and losing several inches off his height) will cost over $150,000 and his doctors aren’t willing to perform it because his ability to pay is dubious; later he goes to Mexico and finds that there the drugs he needs costs about one-tenth of what they do on this side of the border and the operation would only cost $40,000 (which is still $40,000 more than he can spare for it, of course), and he finally gets the operation but only due to the persistence of a UCLA doctor he meets at a “health fair” and who finds two surgeons willing to do the operation on him for free as a community-service gesture.

Critical Condition is clearly propaganda for a single-payer health care system, though Weisberg is careful to keep it from being too in-your-face and only allow a couple of his subjects to hint that it would be nice if this country had a system where people were covered automatically as a right. He trots out the usual statistics that the U.S. spends more money on health care than any other country in the world but we do far worse in infant mortality, chronic disease rates and conventional measures of health outcomes than other countries that have single-payer or some other system (like the German “sickness funds,” which probably come closest of any country in the world to what Hillary Clinton infamously proposed in 1993-94) that ensures universal coverage and eliminates private profit.

When Michael Moore made Sicko — also a pro-single payer film and one considerably more in-your-face than Critical Condition — the story broke that several health insurance companies were trying to get his interviewees to recant what they’d told him on camera and, as a lure for them to do so, offering them one year’s free health care — a truly disgusting illustration of how much health care has become a commodity, and one from which insurance companies and HMO’s profit from not providing. At a preview screening at the San Diego Public Library on September 7, Critical Condition was introduced by nurse Hugh Moore, representing the pro-single payer organization Health Care for All, and at one point he said that we don’t ration police or fire services on the basis of ability to pay, so why should we ration health care that way?

Alas, if anything the U.S. is moving in the direction of rationing police and fire protection by ability to pay, thanks to the relatively new phenomenon of firms selling security and firefighting services on an insurance basis — “Well, if there’s a crime or a fire at your house, we’ll come out; we’ll just ignore your neighbors who aren’t paying us.” The trend, at least in this country, is against society-wide solutions like single-payer and towards the commodification of everything — the idea that The Market should rule all and those who don’t have the financial resources to pay for the basic necessities of life should just go without and, if need be, die and decrease the surplus population. (The reference to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol — a story that, intriguingly, was just hijacked by Right-wing movie producer David Zucker of the Airplane! spoofs for An American Carol, the story of a Michael Moore-ish filmmaker who’s induced to “reform” after he proposes abolishing the Fourth of July holiday — was fully intentional.)

Many people at the library screening had horror stories of their own about the health-care system. While the film presented insurance as a sort of health-access panacea, anyone who’s had to battle with insurance companies and deal with their arbitrary denials of claims (sometimes after they’ve actually paid the service provider, so they seek reimbursement from the patient!) knows better. So do people like one woman in the audience who’s had exactly the opposite problem: she had such generous insurance that her doctors larded on procedure after procedure, some of them threatening to her health, just to worm more money out of the insurance companies. This is why it was it grimly amusing when John McCain said during his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. [Barack Obama’s] plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor” — as opposed to all the private bureaucrats who stand between insured patients and their doctors now!

TCM’s RKO Tribute, Day 1

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

A few notes on the major RKO pictures being shown today as part of Turner Classic Movies' five-week salute to the classic studio, which though chronically the weakest of the major companies in the 1930's ironically made some of the best movies and nurtured offbeat talents like Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Orson Welles.

•••••

One of the movies that was on TCM this time I actually watched while it was airing (for a change!): Street Girl, a 1929 musical featuring Betty Compson as Frederika Joyzelle, a homeless immigrant from the fictitious European (mittel-Europan, judging from the almost unlistenable accent Compson affected for her role) principality of Aregon (presumably not to be confused with the genuine Spanish province of Aragon — the film was based on a story by W. Carey Wonderly called “The Viennese Charmer,” indicating that in Wonderly’s imagination Frederika came from the very real country of Austria. Anyway, Frederika is on the streets in the opening scene when a piano player named Mike Fall (former D. W. Griffith leading man John Harron) drives off a masher who’s just made a pass at Our Heroine and, when he hears she hasn’t eaten in two days, invites her to come up to the flat he shares with the other members of his band, “The Four Seasons.”

Not only does their group name anticipate that of a famous rock band three decades later, but their individual names are also one of the seasons: clarinetist and dancer John Spring (Jack Oakie, who for some reason is cast in a part that gives him no comedy scenes — and of all the actors in the film he’s the most inept at actually suggesting to us that he can play his on-screen instrument), Ned Sparks as violinist Happy Winter (a nice in-joke given that in this role Sparks is every bit as sour as he was later) and Guy Buccola as guitarist Pete Summer. They’re playing at a cheap restaurant called Beef ’n’ Bean but Frederika is determined to manage them and get them more money to repay them for helping her, so she talks Keppel (Joseph Cawthorne), manager of an Aregonese restaurant in a nicer part of town, to take them on at considerably more money.

All goes surprisingly well until the ruling prince of Aregon (Ivan Lebedeff), who recalls Frederika from having heard her play for him at his palace years before (she’s a violinist who plays classical and Hungarian music, and Betty Compson is actually quite a bit better than the men in conveying the impression that she can really play) and whom Mike, who’s predictably fallen in love with Frederika, goes into several jealous hissy-fits that give this movie what little plot interest it has until the end, when at the opening night of a new club Keppel has financed from the notoriety of having the prince dine at his old one and kiss Frederika, in which he was photographed and his picture run in the newspapers, leading the Aregonians to depose him in absentia and make their country a republic (a plot twist that foreshadows the ending of The Prince and the Showgirl 28 years later), Mike is sent there in place of the prince and, after a big production number to a surprisingly infectious song called “Broken-Up Tune” that features Gus Arnheim and His Ambassadors (a band that, like many in the 1920’s, was named after where it principally played: the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and featured violinist Russ Columbo, later turned star singer with Arnheim for a meteoric career that ended with a bizarre and mysterious death in 1934) and which I suspect was originally filmed in two-strip Technicolor but only survives in black-and-white, Mike and Frederika make up and presumably go on to a long and happy personal and professional partnership together.

The writer is Jane Murfin and the director is Wesley Ruggles, who two years later would direct RKO’s only Best Picture winner, Cimarron (unless you count the 1946 Sam Goldwyn production The Best Years of Our Lives, which RKO distributed) and who already was reaching beyond the sluggishness of so many early talkies. The actors speak relatively naturalistically and don’t … stop … between every … line and … sometimes between … every word the way they sometimes did in early talkies, and Ruggles enlivens all the nightclub scenes with camera dollies and a level of mobility that makes this look more like a film from 1933 than 1929. But the pace is still slow, the story surprisingly conflict-less, the songs by Oscar Levant (he wrote quite a lot of songs for the earliest RKO musicals in his ongoing effort to challenge his friend George Gershwin on Gershwin’s pop-song turf; Levant wrote one truly great pop song, “Blame It on My Youth,” that became a standard, but otherwise his output in the genre is pretty well forgotten) and Sidney Clare serviceable (and one of them, “Lovable and Sweet,” a bit better than that, though it does get a bit tiresome when it’s heard three times and the same pre-recording is used all three times, featuring a Bix Beiderbecke-like legato passage on trumpet, supposedly being played by John Harron with his right hand while he’s still playing bass lines on piano with his left — did people really do that in 1929?) and the overall effect pretty soporific. — 10/1/08

•••••

Rio Rita turned out to be a pretty mixed movie — a film I’ve always been rather confused about because the original 1970 edition of Leonard Maltin’s book Movie Comedy Teams listed it as being in color all the way through, whereas all the other sources said the first half was in black-and-white and the second half in color (two-strip Technicolor). Also, there’s some uncertainty about the running time; Leslie Halliwell lists it as being 135 minutes long, Maltin as 127 minutes, and the version Turner Classic Movies showed was 102 minutes with the same proportions of black-and-white to color footage as the 1930 follow-up, Dixiana (also starring Bebe Daniels in the title role, comedians Bert Wheeler and Bob Woolsey for the comic relief and featuring a score by composer Harry Tierney, whose art definitely falls on the operetta end of the American musical spectrum, almost entirely devoid of syncopation or jazz influence) — the first 70 minutes (seven reels) in black-and-white, the last half-hour (three reels) in color. It’s also one of the best preserved samples of two-strip Technicolor I’ve ever seen; despite the absence of blue (and even there a lot of the women’s dresses are in the kind of bluish off-green that two-strip costume designers and art directors used to come as close to representing blue as the process could sustain), the colors are warm and rich, with little of the fading to brown characteristic of Technicolor prints in general; the flesh tones are appealing and the overall look of the two-strip scenes is subtle and harmonious, quite a different effect from the garishness and neon brightness associated with the later three-strip process (the look that usually comes to mind when you utter the word “Technicolor”).

So how is Rio Rita as a movie? I’m sorry you asked. It was the biggest-budget film of the first year of RKO’s existence as a studio (1929), yet director Luther Reed shot it in 24 days and for a major-studio release with major stars and a large budget it’s oddly sloppy at times. During one scene in which Bert Wheeler is doing a tap routine (and surprisingly well, too) with a group of chorus girls, the camera pans down to frame him and thereby cuts the girls’ heads off at the neck. Other sequences feature odd little twitches of the camera — it doesn’t really move, actually; it just jerks back and forth, as if the cameraman (locked in a soundproof booth, as was the general practice of the period) was trying his damnedest to follow the action and wasn’t all that sure he could. Reed’s direction is visually capable in the opening scene — in the Fremont Club night spot in a border town in Texas (the fact that a town in Texas, which fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, would hardly likely to be named after the legendary California abolitionist, wartime governor of occupied Missouri and first Republican Party Presidential nominee John C. Fremont didn’t seem to occur to anybody associated with this film) — in which he pans around the club and discovers two striking-looking people (striking because they’re both wearing Mexican serapés and look almost alike in their costumes), one of whom is the film’s hero, John Boles, and the other is supposed to be the heroine’s brother. The brother and the heroine — the title character, played by Bebe Daniels — live together at the Rio Rita Ranch across the border into Mexico, and the heroine (who for some strange reason bears the full name Rita Ferguson even though she’s represented as a Mexican and speaks all her lines with a thick — and patently fake — Spanish accent) is being amorously chased by an exiled Russian general who owns a gambling ship anchored on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande (where it’s perfectly legal).

It turns out Our Hero is actually a Texas Ranger working undercover to find the whereabouts of a mysterious bandit called “El Kinkajou,” and both he and Our Heroine suspect the brother of being “El Kinkajou,” but in the end it turns out that the nasty Russian general (George Renevant), who has the brother kidnapped midway through the story for reasons that never become quite clear, is the real “El Kinkajou” (well, he had to do something to support himself in the style to which he had become accustomed once he was driven out of Russia by the Revolution) and the brother is a secret agent of the Mexican police. Rio Rita was produced on the stage by Florenz Ziegfeld, and it shows in the elaborate pageantry and the rather static tableaux (particularly at the end, when all the cast members — Daniels and Boles, Wheeler and Dorothy Lee, and Woolsey with whoever the actress was who was playing Wheeler’s ex-wife — are appropriately paired off and everyone in the screen turns their back to the camera so their costumes can billow out picturesquely), though co-scenarists Reed and Russell Mack do deserve credit for “opening out” the piece. Much of the Western action takes place outdoors, and though the locations are familiar from thousands of RKO “oaters” at least they get us out of the stuffy interiors into which most musical films in the early days were kept well locked — and most, if not all, of the musical numbers were clearly pre-recorded and post-synchronized in the technique that would become the standard way of making musicals but was still unusual in 1929. (Interestingly, it’s not at all clear when this story is supposed to be taking place; the Fremont Club in the opening scene has a neon-lit sign and the streets of the town have streetlights, but there are no automobiles or telephones. When MGM remade Rio Rita in 1942 — with Kathryn Grayson and John Carroll in the leads and Abbott and Costello in the Wheeler and Woolsey roles — they made it definitely a story of the World War II present and made the Kinkajou a leader of a gang of saboteurs.)

And Tierney’s score, though very much of its time, at least has a lovely title song to carry it and decent, if not spectacular (and not always that well-recorded), voices to carry it. Mood-wise, Rio Rita is not all that different from Whoopee (another Ziegfeld stage success filmed a year later), though with the comedy a relief from an excruciatingly dull plot (instead of, as in Whoopee, the dull plot only marking time between Eddie Cantor’s dazzling comedy routines), and with far less experimentation in staging the dances (though dance director Pearl Eaton did include one overhead shot, in which the chorus girls in Wheeler’s tap number lie on the floor as he does a runaround and jumps over them). — 1/14/98

I finally got to Charles’ place at 2:30 or so and we watched the rest of the 1929 Rio Rita (which we’d stopped watching the night before at the point where it shifts from black-and-white to two-strip Technicolor) and all of the 1942 version of Rio Rita with Abbott and Costello (top-billed this time, not supporting players as Wheeler and Woolsey had been in the 1929 version) and Kathryn Grayson and John Carroll in the romantic leads. Charles found the two-strip in the 1929 version disappointing — it was mostly greens and oranges (the costume designer apparently favored these colors since the two-strip process handled them especially well) — though the film itself holds up fairly well as entertainment, even though Wheeler and Woolsey steal it right out from under the romantic leads. At least John Boles has a pleasant personality and a nice tenor voice — and since he’s playing a gringo (the head of the local company of Texas Rangers, who are chasing after the notorious bandit “The Kinkajou”), he doesn’t have to affect a Mexican accent.

The rest of the cast members seemed to have differing notions of what constituted an appropriate Mexican accent — Bebe Daniels loses her completely when she has her biggest emotional scene in the film (when she has to react to the — false, fortunately — report that John Boles has been killed) — though aside from her silly catch-as-catch-can accent (how a Mexican girl got the last name “Ferguson” is never quite explained in this film), her acting is actually quite good. (She proved in the next few years — notably in the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and the 1932 film Silver Dollar — that she actually could act very well, especially in parts that allowed her to be both sexy and dramatic.) But Wheeler and Woolsey have the most marvelous parts of the film to themselves, particularly an audacious scene in which they’re ostensibly courting women (Wheeler is courting Dorothy Lee, their frequent vis-a-vis who had an annoyingly squeaky speaking voice but a less offensive, if still childish, singing voice — after all, she was only 17 when she made this film! — and Woolsey is courting the wife Wheeler is trying to get rid of to marry Dorothy Lee) but actually give each other love-slaps and end up in each other’s arms! — 4/12/98

•••••

The movie I showed Charles was one of the short items I’d recently recorded from TCM, the 1929 version of Seven Keys to Baldpate that was one of RKO’s first productions (and a hit that made up for a lot of the flops they had in the early days). The story began as a novel by Earl Derr Biggers — known today, if at all, only as the creator of Charlie Chan — about a pulp writer who’s trying to do a serious book and makes a bet with his publisher that he can finish it in two months’ time if he’s allowed to stay in a place where there will be absolutely no visitors. So the publisher sends him to the Baldpate Inn, a summer resort in New England, in the middle of wintertime on the theory that a summer resort in winter is the most absolutely deserted place on earth — and assures him that his is the only key to the place that exists.

Only at least six other people have keys, and they let themselves in while the writer is trying to work and immerse him in a complicated bit of skullduggery involving a corrupt mayor, the head of a streetcar company who’s supposed to be trying to bribe him for the contract, various thugs on the mayor’s payroll, a young female reporter who’s out to expose the whole thing, a local hermit who the townspeople are convinced is a ghost, the vampy wife of the streetcar company head, a respectable widow who’s engaged to the mayor under the misapprehension that he is honest, and a bundle containing $200,000 in cash which is supposed to be the bribe money.

George M. Cohan bought the theatrical rights and made some typically Cohanesque changes: he cut the length of the wager from two months to 24 hours, he made all the participants in the criminal conspiracies plants — actors from a local theatre troupe hired to play all those roles in a scheme by the publisher to prove to his writer how ridiculous the plots of his novels are — and in a final twist he reveals that even that isn’t the real truth: the “actors” and the whole business about their being seven keys to Baldpate are simply the characters in the novel the protagonist has been writing for his 24 hours in the inn, and for which he wins the bet as well as the hand of the ingénue who’s the only other real person in the story besides the writer and his publisher.

The imdb.com Web site lists, appropriately, seven film versions of the story: one made in Australia in 1916 (which, since Alex C. Butler has the only writing credit, was likely based directly on Biggers’ novel rather than Cohan’s play); a film made in New York in 1917 starring Cohan himself as the writer (who, with Cohan’s usual sense of patriotism, he named “George Washington Magee”!) and filmed in a 70-day period along with two other Cohan-starring adaptations of Cohan plays (Broadway Jones and Hit-the-Trail Holliday were the other two) in an experience which left Cohan distinctly unimpressed with the movie medium (“I am stage-minded, not motion picture-minded,” he said predictably); another silent in 1925 produced by and starring Douglas MacLean as the protagonist (here called simply “William Magee”); subsequent remakes by RKO in 1935 (with William Hamilton and Edward Killy as directors and Gene Raymond as star) and 1947 (with Lew Landers as director and the third Mr. Joan Crawford, Philip Terry, as star) and a pioneering TV version from 1946 which, since it credits no other writer than Biggers and Cohan, must have been staged directly from the playscript.

The 1929 version (some sources give the date as 1930) is cleverly directed by Reginald Barker, who got enough camera movement (surprising for an early talkie), scripted by Jane Murfin and stars Richard Dix as the protagonist (also called William Magee). It’s a bit on the stagy side, inevitably, but at least the actors deliver their lines naturalistically and the pace Barker gets into the dialogue scenes is fast enough that this looks and sounds more like a mid-1930’s film than one from the early days of sound. The supporting cast consists of a bunch of people who were never heard of again (Lucien Littlefield, who plays one of the members of the conspiracy, had a long career as a character actor around this time; and Margaret Livingston, who plays the vampy wife of the streetcar company CEO, was the “bad girl” in Murnau’s Sunrise and Louise Brooks’ voice double in the sound version of The Canary Murder Case; she was also the last and longest-lasting wife of Paul Whiteman and actually got him to slim down a bit as a condition of marrying him, but they were the only other cast members besides Dix I’d heard of previously), including a pretty but rather dull leading lady named Miriam Seegar (she’s not bad, exactly, but she’s sufficiently colorless that it’s not hard to figure out why she didn’t become a star).

Dix is a rather odd choice for the lead; he’s certainly a competent actor and he has no problem projecting authority, but he’s not quite right for a rambunctious farce — but then it’s hard to see who would have been right other than Cohan himself or his cinematic avatar, James Cagney (who would have played it superbly, but was still working on Broadway when this was filmed and, when he did go to Hollywood, went to Warners — a studio which at least knew how to get the most out of his rapid-fire acting style, which RKO probably wouldn’t have). Seven Keys to Baldpate was an experimental film for RKO’s sound department, since (like most talkies of its vintage) it has no background music except for a brief theme under the main titles, and therefore it’s “scored” with sound effects — howling winds, banging shutters, blowing leaves, gun noises (guns were hard to do in early sound films because a real gunshot would paralyze the microphone, but the shots in this film are quite convincing and may have been recorded the same way the ones in All Quiet on the Western Front were — by using only half the normal powder charge in each bullet) and the like, with surprising effectiveness.

The final resolution(s) aren’t all that clear in Murfin’s script — about the only clue we get that the incidents of the main part of the film were supposed to be merely products of Dix’s imagination as a writer is that at the end we see him in the pullover sweater and pipe that were the stereotyped “uniform” of a male writer in films of the time, whereas through most of the main action we saw him in a suit and tie; that and the ingénue turns out to be single instead of married to his publisher (as he wrote in the manuscript which we saw dramatized throughout most of the film) — but at least Murfin kept Cohan’s final metafictional frisson whereas the writers of the later RKO versions eliminated it. Seven Keys to Baldpate creaks a bit but it’s a charming piece of entertainment, and the plot is sturdy enough that Cohan’s play still gets an occasional stage revival (and one could well imagine a modern version in which Magee would come to Baldpate with a laptop instead of a portable typewriter). — 10/3/06

•••••

I’d been watching AMC’s showing of the 1930 musical Dixiana, which I both had and hadn’t seen before. Some explanation is in order: Dixiana, in its original form, was a 10-reel (100-minute) movie, with the first seven reels in black-and-white and the last three in two-strip Technicolor. Unfortunately, when RKO’s films were sold to TV in the 1950’s, their owners decided that it would be too much trouble to reprint and restore the color sequences, so they took the first 70 minutes of the film, stuck an end title on it and released that — and it was this “aborted” version I had seen previously. Needless to say, I was dying of curiosity to see the rest of it in a newly restored print — especially since the color sequence contains a dance by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson that is generally considered the best thing in the movie. I got interrupted by two phone calls during the movie — though both were short (one was from Jeri Dilno and one from John) — and was not happy.

Still, I got to see most of the additional 30 minutes — and I had my VCR running so I would have a tape of the film in its complete form. I was startled to see blue, or at least a color awfully close to blue, in the two-strip Technicolor sequences — either they had worked out a grey-green that would photograph as blue with reasonable credibility, or the restorers at the UCLA Film and Television Archive have done some tasteful corrective colorization (significantly, none of the “blue” objects in the film were natural items — the sequence was supposed to be taking place outdoors, but it was clearly a studio interior and the camera angles carefully avoided showing sky, whether real or painted). Robinson’s dance wasn’t as spectacular as I had thought — the film takes place in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and I’d always assumed Robinson was featured in a big production number. Not so: he does a solo dance while ostensibly brushing the thrones on which the King and Queen of Mardi Gras will sit, and since the thrones are mounted at the top of a long stairway, he gets to do much the same staircase routine he did with Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel five years later. Even though his feet are annoyingly out of frame much of the time, however, it’s still the best thing in this whole rather pachydermous musical. — 3/17/93

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I went to see him, bringing two videos, one of the 1930 musical Dixiana and one of the Beatles (the compilation on Goodtimes Video featuring a 1963 BBC documentary, “The Mersey Sound,” a Pathé Newsreel segment on them that marked the first time they were filmed in color, and about half the Washington, D.C. concert that marked the Beatles’ first live appearance in the U.S.). Dixiana is a problematical movie, to say the least. It was actually the last link in a chain that began with a 1927 Ziegfeld stage hit, Rio Rita, which dealt with California during the days when it was still part of Mexico, and a woman (the title character) who’s afraid that her brother is really the notorious masked bandit “El Kinkajou.” The fledgling RKO studio bought the movie rights and put it on screen in 1929, starring ex-Paramount leading lady Bebe Daniels (in her first sound film), resident Universal tenor/actor John Boles and the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Bob Woolsey (whom Ziegfeld had put together in the stage production), assigning Luther Reed to direct and filming the first half in black-and-white and the second half in two-strip Technicolor.

The filmed Rio Rita was an enormous hit, so honoring the Great God Xerox which seems to so often rule Hollywood, RKO studio head William LeBaron assumed that if audiences liked it once, they’d like it again. So he hired the writer (Anne Caldwell) and composer (Harry Tierney) of Rio Rita to craft a new show that would feature the talents of Bebe Daniels and Wheeler and Woolsey in a similar period setting. The result was Dixiana — an impossible title that is also the name of Daniels’ character, and which at least lets us know when and where this story takes place: in ante bellum New Orleans, or more precisely, in Hollywood’s familiarly romanticized version of the pre-Civil War South, with happy, contented slaves singing their hearts out (in a song called “Mister and Mississippi,” Harry Tierney’s attempt at writing his own “Ol’ Man River” and a totally different song from the one with the same banal title that became a hit in the 1950’s) in front of a picturesque backdrop of palm trees and the ever-flowing river.

Daniels plays a circus performer (she emerges from a giant egg mounted on a platform drawn by two ostriches that turn out to be Wheeler and Woolsey in ostrich suits) who falls in love with the son of a plantation owner (Everett Marshall), leading to the traditional complications (his stepmother decides she’s not good enough to marry into their family, and an evil gambler, Ralf Harolde, wants Dixiana for himself and plots to break up their relationship even if he has to murder Marshall to do it) and — after seven dreary reels of black-and-white and three almost as dreary reels of two-strip Technicolor — Dixiana finally gets her man in the predictable happy ending.

Though it was never a stage production, Dixiana has the almost relentless heaviness of the period stage musicals of the time. Daniels — a marvelous actress in the right part (as the female lead in the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon, she completely surpassed Mary Astor’s performance in the same role in the much more famous 1941 remake) — seems completely lost this time, at ease only when she’s singing. In a 1969 interview, Daniels said Dixiana was “a film I hated making, but which they insisted I make. … [It] had another Harry Tierney score, but not as good as Rio Rita’s. [You can say that again; the songs in Dixiana are terrible, though the worst one, the title song, Tierney can’t be blamed for since Benny Davis wrote it.] … Wheeler and Woolsey were in it again, but my leading man was disastrous. He came from the opera stage, but he looked dreadful when he sang. I had wanted John Boles again.” That she can say again, too; Marshall looked like a barely animated tailor’s dummy (much like Nelson Eddy, in fact; one could easily imagine a remake of Dixiana as a Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy vehicle) and none of the other actors were such great shakes, either, though perhaps that had to do with the fact that on the set of Dixiana, the sound people were obviously still demanding that the actors enunciate their lines very c-l-e-a-r-l-y and s-l-o-w-l-y, and pause after the previous actor’s cue line before they spoke their own — and Luther Reed, unlike some other early talkie directors like Rouben Mamoulian and Lewis Milestone, wasn’t strong enough or willing enough to tell the sound people to go to hell and tell the actors to talk normally.

What’s still entertaining about Dixiana are the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy routines (notably one in which they fight a sabre duel inside a hotel room and end up destroying an ample supply of bric-a-brac before breaking for lunch and using the sabres to spread mayonnaise on their sandwiches) and a marvelous tap number by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson at the end (it’s his first film appearance and the only time he was ever filmed in color; interestingly, he does the same staircase dance — solo — he later did with Shirley Temple) — also the carefully restored two-strip Technicolor itself, which is hauntingly beautiful. (When Dixiana was first released to TV in the 1950’s, rather than spend money restoring the color sequence for a black-and-white medium, it was simply sliced off the film and an RKO end title was stuck onto the end of the black-and-white portion, which ended the film maddeningly inconclusively, to say the least.) — 9/22/96

•••••

I headed over to Charles’ place and ran him videos of the two versions of Girl Crazy. Girl Crazy began in 1930 as a stage musical starring Ginger Rogers, Allen Kearns and Ethel Merman, with songs by George and Ira Gershwin including “But Not for Me,” “Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm,” “Could You Use Me?” and “Bidin’ My Time.” Though Rogers played the female lead — and when she and Allen Kearns had to do a romantic dance number to “Embraceable You,” they called in Fred Astaire to choreograph it, making this the first Astaire-Rogers collaboration (three years before they actually danced together for the first time, in the film Flying Down to Rio) — it was Merman who became a star, making “I Got Rhythm” the show’s biggest hit with her brassy belting version of it (backed by a pit band led by Red Nichols and featuring three more stars-to-be, Benny Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers).

RKO bought the movie rights and filmed it in 1932, revamped as a comedy vehicle for Bert Wheeler and Bob Woolsey — and as a Wheeler and Woolsey comedy Girl Crazy was quite funny. Alas, as a musical it left a lot to be desired. Eddie Quillan and Arline Judge were cast as the romantic leads, with one Kitty Kelly (not the gossip biographer of today, who spells her last name “Kelley” anyway) doing the Merman role — and demolishing “I Got Rhythm” in a thoroughly awful performance that made Merman sound like Maria Callas by comparison. (Merman’s trademark was singing loud, and this early her loud vocals were still usually in tune — Kelly’s “I Got Rhythm” is neither loud nor in tune, and any resemblance between what Gershwin wrote and what Kelly sang is purely coincidental.) It’s a pity, because the number is staged quite creatively, with pinpoints of light playing on the people in an otherwise dark nightclub setting (in this version, Quillan as Danny Churchill has been sent out West to take over his father’s ranch, and he’s turned it into a dude ranch/nightclub/ casino).

The 1932 Girl Crazy was suppressed for years because MGM bought the movie rights from RKO to remake the film as a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland vehicle in 1943 — and the film was so obscure that even Leonard Maltin wasn’t able to get to see it for his Wheeler and Woolsey chapter in his book Movie Comedy Teams. And even the usually reliable Clive Hirschhorn got much of his information on the film wrong in his entry on it in the book The Hollywood Musical; he identifies frequent Wheeler and Woolsey vis-a-vis Dorothy Lee as “Woolsey’s contralto-voiced wife” — actually she’s playing Wheeler’s squeaky soprano-voiced girlfriend, and in that capacity she shares with Wheeler the one new song Gershwin wrote for the film, “You’ve Got What Gets Me” a cutesie-poo duet that’s a much more conventional song than the ones carried over from the stage play.

Mitzi Green (the delightful child impressionist, here cast as Wheeler’s sister) gets her two cents’ in during a duet between Eddie Quillan and Arline Judge on “But Not for Me,” one of Gershwin’s greatest songs that gets thoroughly mangled here — and manages to outsing them both (in fact, Green has by far the best singing voice of anyone in this film) while doing superb imitations of Bing Crosby (she makes a joke out of being unable to copy his whistling, but nails the soulful look he assumed while singing perfectly), George Arliss and Edna May Oliver. The only other song carried over from the stage version is “Bidin’ My Time,” sung as a scene-setter in the opening scene (a grimly amusing one in which a group of Western baddies who have taken over the town of Centerville, Arizona, where the film takes place are preparing a tombstone for the next sheriff, whom they are already planning to murder — in the next scene they do so on screen, this being a “pre-Code” Hollywood-glasnost movie in which both the sex and the violence are considerably more explicit than they were allowed to be after 1934); Hirschhorn lists “Could You Use Me?,” “Sam and Delilah,” and “Embraceable You” as being in the film, but they’re not heard. (Maybe they were filmed but not used; Maltin’s book said that contemporary reports in the trade papers indicated that this project was a victim of the turnover at RKO, since William LeBaron was fired as studio head in the middle of shooting and David O. Selznick was brought in to replace him; the result credits LeBaron as producer and Selznick as “in charge of production,” and reportedly several already-filmed songs were junked by Selznick when he reviewed the project after the takeover.) The 1932 Girl Crazy was a fine Wheeler and Woolsey comedy but a lousy musical, largely due to the absence of any great (or even decent) voices in the cast. — 10/5/98

•••••

I went home and ran a videotape of the 1932 version of Bird of Paradise, produced by David Selznick at RKO and directed by King Vidor, shot on location in Hawaii (even though the story takes place in Polynesia) with very extensive retakes at the RKO lot because, of the 24 days they spent on the Hawaiian location, only one was actually clear. The stars were Dolores Del Rio and Joel McCrea, in what is a sort of Tarzan of the Apes in reverse: McCrea lands on a Polynesian island and falls in love at first sight with Del Rio, who plays the chief’s daughter — who, naturally (this being Hollywood), is under a tabu and can only marry a prince of her own tribe. McCrea spirits her away to another island, only to find her anxious to return to her home island when the local volcano, which has been kept extinct for years (so the superstitious natives believe) by their regularly throwing a few human sacrifice victims into its mouth (one a year), starts to erupt. Eventually Del Rio gets the opportunity to come to “civilization” with McCrea, but — in truly altruistic fashion — she prefers to go back to her island and throw herself into the volcano to spare her people any further damage from the eruption.

Bird of Paradise is one of those uneven movies in which scenes of great beauty and strength alternate with scenes that are absolutely silly (notably when McCrea gives Del Rio her you-Tarzana, me-John lessons in English). The gorgeous photography (by Edward Cronjager) is appealing — though this is one old movie in which color is definitely missed — and Del Rio’s performance is quite good; unlike most Hollywood actresses cast as indigenous people, she really manages to suggest someone from an entirely different culture, nervously put off by her first contact with white men, and without any comprehensible dialogue to help her she manages to communicate her simultaneous attraction to McCrea’s character and fear for what this could mean to herself and her tribe. It’s a challenging and compelling performance in a movie which is otherwise quite ordinary in its acting. John P. remembered the 1951 remake, in which Louis Jourdan and Debra Paget played the McCrea and Del Rio roles, and color was used — though its director, Delmer Daves, was hardly a King Vidor! — 7/7/95

•••••

One was the original 1932 The Most Dangerous Game, which turned out to be much less interesting than its reputation suggested. First of all, the print (not a Madacy print, but from something called United American Video) was pretty bad: grainy, faded, with one whole reel in which the sound was incredibly murky and hard to understand (and it wasn’t a hi-fi stereo track either). Second, although the jungle set (the same one used in King Kong) was properly atmospheric and the last 20 minutes or so, containing the climactic hunting scene, were well-staged action, the long buildup to the action was pretty dully directed by Ernest Schoedsack and Irving Pichel. Third, the casting was way off; Fay Wray was good enough as a female lead if there really had to be one (there wasn’t in Richard Connell’s original story), but Joel McCrea hadn’t settled into an appreciation of the subtleties of film acting, and Leslie Banks was just way too overbearing and overacted as the villain, Count Zaroff. When one thinks of the actors who were around then who could have played this part to perfection — Stroheim, Veidt, Lugosi, Karloff and probably several others as well — one wonders how Banks got the job (and also how Alfred Hitchcock was able to calm him down enough to get that good performance out of him in the original The Man Who Knew Too Much two years later). Add a Max Steiner score that was just as overbearing as the performances, and the result is a sporadically interesting but not terribly important movie (amazing that this production team was working on a real masterpiece, King Kong, at the same time: a beautifully constructed, well written, well staged, well acted and well scored film!). — 7/28/93

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The other movie I ran for Charles last night, The Most Dangerous Game, was a derivative movie at the time it was made (1932, based on Richard Connell’s story published in 1924) and holds up as an exciting horror thriller, albeit uncomfortably reminiscent of other movies being made during the same time that hold up even better. The Most Dangerous Game featured the same jungle sets as Kong, the same producer/director (Cooper and Schoedsack, though since Cooper was busy with Kong Irving Pichel replaced him as Schoedsack’s co-director) and four of the same actors: Fay Wray as the damsel in distress, Robert Armstrong as her alcoholic brother and Noble Johnson and Steve Clemento as the mute servants of the mad Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks, a comic actor making his film debut as the villain — most of his movies were apparently “bad guy” roles, though ironically his other oft-seen film today is the first version of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which he’s the hero and Peter Lorre, in his first English-language role, is the principal villain).

Though there’s no supernatural element in the plot — Zaroff is a psychopathic villain (an expatriate Russian nobleman who has become bored with hunting and has established himself on a Caribbean island where he captures people and hunts them down) but one within the bounds of terrestrial reality — much of the setting and mannerisms seem to be drawn from the Universal horror films: Zaroff introduces himself to his unwelcome guests (and us) in a gigantic hall reminiscent of Castle Dracula, and in cultured tones similar to Lugosi’s in the 1931 Dracula film — and his butler Ivan (played by Noble Johnson, who was mixed-race and therefore could play either Blacks or whites) is straight out of The Old Dark House, with his ugly face, thick beard and muteness. Charles asked if there was some stipulation in the Butlers’ Union contract with the Mad Scientists’ Association that required that all butlers in these movies be mute — and I mentioned that the character was mute in Connell’s original story as well.

In fact, The Most Dangerous Game — except for the addition of the Fay Wray character — is a pretty close adaptation of the Connell story (at least as I remember it from high school), though I wish scenarist James A. Creelman (son of one of Hearst’s star turn-of-the-century reporters) had retained more of Connell’s sardonic dialogue. I particularly remember the scene in the Connell story in which Zaroff is coolly ticking off the most important attributes of a perfect game animal, and he says, “ … and, above all, it must be able to reason.” Rainsford (who has the ominously “bloody” first name of “Sanger” in the story but is simply called “Bob” in the film) says there isn’t any animal that can reason, and Zaroff says, “My dear, there is one that can.” Rainsford — in a scene that would have played beautifully on film — comes to the shocked realization of what Zaroff means, and says, “But surely you don’t mean — ” and Zaroff, still cool, replies, “Why not? I am speaking of hunting.” “Good Lord!” says Rainsford. “You are speaking of murder!”

But what didn’t get in this film via the script comes in through Banks’ performance; apparently the actor had been wounded in World War I and had had to have his face reconstructed, which gave him a right profile of leading-man attractiveness and a left profile of dark ugliness and villainy (and Schoedsack emphasizes this by giving him a scar on the left side of his forehead, which he rubs, ostensibly involuntarily, at his craziest moments). Though the video print we were watching (from United American Video) was of poor quality and much of the dialogue was hard to hear, the movie held up as a good thriller (aided by the authenticity of the jungle traps Joel McCrea as Rainsford builds to trap Zaroff, all of which were based on ones Schoedsack had seen natives build and use in the East Indies), though hardly at the level of originality of its companion piece, King Kong! Incidentally, it was remade twice — by Robert Wise as A Game of Death, with John Loder, Audrey Long and Edgar Barrier, in 1945, using the long-shot action footage from this version — and as Run for the Sun, with Richard Widmark (as the hero!), Jane Greer and Trevor Howard, in 1956 — and in both those versions the expatriate Russian aristocrat Zaroff became an expatriate Nazi (called Krieger in the 1945 version). — 11/4/96

I ran Charles the 1932 version of The Most Dangerous Game, a movie I hadn’t seen in 10 years (since the last time I ran my videotape for Charles) but which emerged as quite good. Produced by the same people who made King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack) and actually shot at the same time (King Kong was RKO Production 601 and Most Dangerous Game was Production 602) on some of the same sets and with some of the same actors (Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Steve Clemente, Noble Johnson), but released a year earlier because it didn’t require the elaborate dimensional animation and post-production work of Kong, The Most Dangerous Game was co-directed by Schoedsack and Irving Pichel (I suspect Pichel did the interiors and Schoedsack did most or all of the action) and written by James Ashmore Creelman based on Richard Connell’s popular 1924 short story of the same title.

The plot is familiar: internationally famous big-game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) — the character’s first name was “Sanger” in the original story but no doubt the change was to give the actors an easier name to pronounce — is on a private yacht that’s shipwrecked, thanks to deliberately misplaced buoy lights that cause ships to crash on a coral reef and sink. The island is owned by Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), a Russian aristocrat who fled the Revolution — cannily he had deposited most of his fortune in Swiss banks so he still had his money — and continued to hunt around the world until he realized that hunting was getting too easy and was beginning to bore him. At first he tried using a bow and arrow instead of firearms, then he hit upon the idea that what he needed was “not a new weapon, but a new animal.” So he bought the island in the middle of nowhere and arranged for boats to wreck themselves on its reefs so he and his servants, Ivan (Noble Johnson) and two characters identified only as “Tartar” (Steve Clemente) and “Scarface” (Oscar ‘Dutch’ Hendrian), can abduct the survivors and force them to be hunted like animals.

Brilliantly directed, written in a way that keeps most of the values of Connell’s original story intact (though, following traditional Hollywood practice, Creelman and his bosses couldn’t resist adding a woman to the dramatis personae), marvelously staged and given plenty of slithery jungle sets for Rainsford and Zaroff to play their game of “outdoor chess” (a term given this sickening “sport” by Zaroff in Connell’s story and retained for the film) as well as an almost nonstop score by Max Steiner that looks forward (for good and ill) to his later work, The Most Dangerous Game’s only real weakness is the casting of its villain. Leslie Banks is at least superficially right but he’s way too hammy in a part that is already so over-the-top in conception it needs restraint from the actor. Though Banks’ reputation was primarily for the kind of cultured villain he’s playing here, his best performance in a movie was as the hero in Alfred Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much — certainly from The Most Dangerous Game one would never guess that this actor would play a part that James Stewart would ultimately remake, but his neurotic excesses were channeled by Hitchcock into a legitimate expression of grief at the kidnapping of his daughter.

Banks is physically right for the villain — one side of his face was considerably homelier than the other, and Schoedsack, Pichel and cinematographer Henry Gerrard only had to shoot him from one side or the other to make him look either courtly or evil (and the RKO makeup department helped by giving him a deep forehead scar which he rubs in his nastiest moments — it almost seems to throb in sync to his moods) — but at a time when there were so many great character villains in Hollywood that would have been available, like Boris Karloff (the master of understated horror acting), Bela Lugosi (he would have been as hammy as Banks but at least his real Hungarian accent would have been more believable as a White Russian than Banks’ phony “Russian” one), Erich von Stroheim (who’d memorably played an evil White Russian expat in his own silent film Foolish Wives) or the actor who could probably have played it better in 1932 than anyone else, Lionel Atwill (I couldn’t help but imagine his ringing tones booming out Zaroff’s lines with more snap and real emotion than Banks managed, and that early he would have been at least as believable as a man of action in the jungle), Leslie Banks seems to have been cast from poverty instead of strength. — 9/12/06

Pirates of Tripoli (Columbia, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I ultimately showed was Pirates of Tripoli, a film I’d recorded earlier in the day as part of a two-film tribute on TCM to Paul Henried, who also appeared in The Scar (a.k.a. Hollow Triumph), an interesting film noir which casts Henried as a small-time crook who finds a psychiatrist who looks like him except for a scar on his face, kills the psychiatrist and impersonates him, only to find that the psychiatrist was also a compulsive gambler and was in hock to the Mob, so he’s in more trouble than he was in his old identity!).

This was a 1955 Sam Katzman production for Columbia starring Henried and Patricia Medina (Mrs. Joseph Cotten, who had also appeared in 1951’s The Magic Carpet, another cheapie Katzman/Columbia actioner set in the Middle East) in a pretty typical tale concocted by writer Allen March: Malek, Bey of Tunis (John Miljan), carries out his imperialist agenda to conquer all the north of Africa, including the fictitious principality of Misurata, ruled by Princess Karjan (Patricia Medina), which is so easily overrun by the Bey’s forces (especially after he infiltrates people inside the city to open its gates for him — I joked that they must have entered through a Trojan vole) that one half expects Miljan to pose in front of a banner containing the Arabic for “Mission Accomplished.”

Princess Karjan and her sidekick Sono (an almost unrecognizable Lillian Bond) don male drag (absurdly unconvincing male drag) and sneak out of the besieged palace and escape to Tripoli, where they hope to enlist the aid of the pirate captain Edri al-Gadrian (Paul Henried) to help get rid of the occupier and restore the princess to her throne. (This does begin to sound like Henried is playing Victor Laszlo again, only in a funny costume.) Karjan promises Gadrian half a million gold dinars for himself and his crew if her insurgency succeeds.

As preposterous as his overall plot is, and as freely as he borrows from other, older, better movies, Allen March does manage to construct a story full of exciting action scenes (even though he doesn’t manage to pull off the delicate balance between drama and camp David Mathews managed in his script for The Magic Carpet; this is one movie that takes itself way too seriously, including having a third-person narrator delivering rather clunky bits of exposition at intervals to make sure we understand the story) — including a plot by Karjan, Gadrian and Gadrian’s comic sidekick Hammid Khassan (Paul Newlan) to sneak back into the palace at Misurata to steal the royal jewels to buy new ships from Italy to replace the ones Malek’s men destroyed in a Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack on Tripoli (they get the jewels but then Malek’s men hijack the merchantman vessel that’s taking them along with Karjan to Italy; Gadrian and Hammid escape and plan the Princess’s rescue from torture and certain death) and a final confrontation in which Gadrian manages to reconquer Misurata for the princess by floating the one ship he has into its harbor flying the flag of a plague ship and thereby distracting Malek’s security forces while Gadrian’s ground troops sneak into the city and take it back.

There’s also a quite interesting character named Rhea (Maralou Gray), Gadrian’s blonde-bimbo girlfriend until he dumps her for Karjan, who gets her revenge by leaking his plans to one of Malek’s agents and gets stabbed (by Malek’s agent, who mutters, “Now only one of us will know the secret”) for her pains (a real pity, since she’s by far the most fascinating and multidimensional member of the dramatis personae until she gets knocked off midway through). In any event, the good guys win, the bad guy is beheaded when Paul Henried pushes him into a guillotine (one of the most inadvertently entertaining aspects of this movie is counting up all the anachronisms — not only is there a guillotine well before the time and place it was actually invented, but Hammid has an air pistol called “Gentle Mary” that fires a dagger and therefore can kill silently even though at the time this movie presumably takes place no one had any idea of how to compress air) and Gadrian is about to leave Karjan now that she’s been restored to the throne of Misurata when a whistle (a plot device carefully “planted” earlier with some awfully To Have and Have Not-ish dialogue) summons him back for a life as prince consort of Misurata (so this movie ends where The Love Parade begins).

Pirates of Tripoli is a cheap production (no fewer than nine composers, including Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Louis Gruenberg, are identified as contributing to the stock music cues from the Columbia library music director Mischa Bakaleinikoff — Charles jokes that the quality of a movie involving either Mischa Bakaleinikoff or his brother Constantine is inversely proportional to the fullness of their name in the credits — assembled to score this film), though at least this time they spent enough for Technicolor as opposed to the Cinécolor of The Magic Carpet and director Felix Feist (whose best-known credits are the 1936 MGM musical one-reeler with Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin, Every Sunday, and the 1953 version of Donovan’s Brain) keeps it in constant motion and never allows the movie to become boring — a far cry from some of those leaden so-called “action” pieces we’ve seen caricatured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000!

Eve Knew Her Apples (Columbia, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Eve Knew Her Apples, a 1944 Columbia “B” musical starring Ann Miller (imdb.com identifies the release date as April 12, 1945 but the copyright date is 1944) that — contrary to the dismissal by the usually reliable Don Miller in his book “B” Movies” (“a credit to no one involved”) — turned out to be a quite charming film, an uncredited remake of It Happened One Night (which got an “official” musical remake in 1956, You Can’t Run Away from It, with Jack Lemmon and June Allyson in the roles originally played by Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert). The major difference is that Eve Porter (Ann Miller) is not an heiress, but a radio singing star who for five years has been the headliner on the “Happy Cigarettes” program (she’s known, natch, as the “Happy Girl of Radio”), and she’s now demanding that she get her 13-week summer layoff as a real vacation while her manager, Steve Ormond (Robert Williams), and her press agent, George McGrew (Ray Walker), want her to work straight through the summer on guest radio spots, live appearances and a film deal with “Emperor Pictures” — a carrot they’ve been dangling in front of her for five years now.

She flees to Las Vegas — by bus, since this being the middle of World War II all space on planes and trains is taken — and holes up in a cheap hotel until she’s recognized and spots Ormond and McGrew coming after her. She trips them up with an outstretched phone cord and hides in an old jalopy that, unbeknownst to her, belongs to reporter Ward Williams (William Wright) of the Los Angeles Bulletin, on the outs with his city editor Joe Gordon (Charles D. Brown) and desperate to come up with a big story lest he get fired. At the same time, in a misunderstanding Rian James (“original” story) and Eddie Moran (script) added to the original by Samuel Hopkins Adams and Robert Riskin, some artfully contrived dialogue convinces Ward that his fugitive passenger is really Edith Porter, a serial killer that had just escaped from prison after being convicted of murdering at least seven people, the gimmick being that she had a professional-quality voice and sang to her victims just before knocking them off.

The film cops a lot of the most famous sequences from It Happened One Night, including the love scene in the hay bales after the leads get stranded in the middle of nowhere and the ending, in which Eve is about to go through with her long-planned marriage to useless rich guy Walter W. Walter, II (John Eldredge, who seems to have made a career out of these sorts of hapless/helpless roles!), when the city editor persuades the reluctant Ward to carry her off instead — they even cop Riskin’s funny bit of having the reporter ask only for the expenses he incurred in helping Eve flee, not the $5,000 Ormond and McGrew offered for her safe return in time to start the long-awaited movie deal with Emperor.

There are a few things James and Moran could have done to make their movie even more artful — like having Miller play a double role in which Eve Porter and Edith Palmer actually confront each other before the singing serial murderess is recaptured (as it is, once Ward realizes that his fugitive passenger is not a serial killer and is fleeing something less severe than a prison sentence, the Edith Palmer story line is dropped completely and we never find out what happened to her), and a metafictional Seven Keys to Baldpate-style ending in which the whole story is revealed to be the plot of Eve Porter’s movie (the last scene is of Ward and Eve driving off in his old car and we never find out if she makes her film or abandons her career to be Mrs. Ward Williams full-time), but for the most part this is a quite charming movie and it showcases Ann Miller in a rather surprising way: she doesn’t dance (offhand I can’t think of another Ann Miller musical in which she didn’t dance) and her four songs — “I’ll Remember April” by Don Raye, Gene DePaul and Pat Johnson (surprising to hear a Universal song in a Columbia movie!); “An Hour Never Passes” by Jimmy Kennedy; “I’ve Waited a Lifetime” by Edward A. Brandt; and “Someone to Love” by Robert Warren (interesting that director Will Jason, best known as a songwriter — his biggest hit and one real standard is “Penthouse Serenade” — didn’t include any of his own songs the way Victor Schertzinger, the only other songwriter-turned-director I can think of, regularly did in his films!) — are all romantic ballads and show that Miller had a far more beautiful, sensual voice than you’d think from all those rough, intense romps like “Shakin’ the Blues Away” in Easter Parade and “I’ll Be Hard to Handle” in Lovely to Look At.

Eve Knew Her Apples gets more It Happened One Night-like as it progresses — by the end of the movie William Wright is even spitting out his lines (written by Robert Riskin, not Eddie Moran!) in the staccato style of Clark Gable — and while it’s hardly a patch on the Capra classic it is a quite nice little “B” that reveals an unexpectedly subtle vocal side to its star.

The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (AIP, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran Charles a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 showing of a film given the title The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, released in the U.S. in 1962 but actually a crudely dubbed version of a 1953 Russian movie called Sadko, more or less based on the Rimsky-Korsakov opera: not an actual sung performance (several Russian movies of this period actually did put major Russian operas on film, including Vera Stroyeva’s marvelous 1954 Boris Godunov and a version of Eugen Onegin I once saw reviewed in The Opera Quarterly) but supposedly a dramatization of it, though Sadko a.k.a. Sinbad does almost nothing and goes almost nowhere in this movie. If U.S. audiences in 1962 expected anything like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad — a vividly imaginative movie with brilliant special effects by the legendary Ray Harryhausen — they would have been sorely disappointed; instead, this film is a quest in which Sadko/Sinbad ( S e r g e i S t o l y a r o v) spends the first half of this 80-minute movie in port in a fictitious country (the real Sinbad lived in Baghdad in what is now Iraq, but that’s merrily ignored by Francis Ford Coppola, who adapted the original Russian script into something that could be dubbed in English), where the people live under the yoke of a dictator and virtually all of them have been impoverished so a handful of people at the top can live in luxury. (Sounds familiar.)

Sadko/Sinbad is torn between his desire to finance a voyage to find the mysterious “Bird of Happiness” whose presence will restore happiness to the entire kingdom and his temptation, every time he actually raises enough money to go on the trip, to give it all away to the poor instead. (For a movie made by an ostensibly socialist country, this is a pretty unexpected plot twist; this film could be shown at an Ayn Rand fan-club meeting as an illustration of the perils of altruism!) Though he’s got a girlfriend back home, L y u b a v a ( A l l a L a r i o n o v a), he also meets up with the P r i n c e s s o f L a k e I l m e n (Y e l e n a M y s h k o v a), who gives him various magic objects that enrich him even faster than he can give the money away, and all she asks in return is that he sing to her and play on his magic harp (I’m not making this up, you know!) — which might actually have been moving if his song hadn’t been an ineptly written pop ballad sung by a voice clearly different from the one dubbing Stolyarov’s dialogue, and who sounds like a third-rate cocktail lounge Sinatra wanna-be.

I was hoping for something in the way of special effects — yes, I knew they wouldn’t have been able to get anyone to come close to Harryhausen’s genius, but they could have managed at least a creaky-looking roc on wires or something — but nothing happens except for a fight between Sinbad’s crew and some Vikings (at least they look like Vikings, and the MST3K crew referred to them as such) on an island the crew visit in their futile search for the bird, and when they find the bird it’s not the bird of happiness after all, but a phoenix (actually a human in an ineptly tailored bird suit) whose song puts people to sleep — though since she’s singing the “Song of India,” the one part of Sadko anybody actually knows, that seems quite unfair; she’s certainly more listenable than Sinbad was back at Lake Ilmen!

The princess also turns out to be the daughter of the Greco-Roman sea god Neptune ( S t e p a n K a y u k o v ), who in this incarnation looks an awful lot like Santa Claus and is saddled with a Mrs. Neptune (O l g a V i k l a n d) who in this dubbed version for some reason is given a voice that makes her sound like a Jewish mother … anticipating by four years American-International’s release of Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (Charles joked last night that a Japanese producer could have got revenge against Allen by buying the rights to Allen’s “serious” film Interiors, the one he deliberately made as a Bergmanesque tale of domestic angst, and dubbing a wise-cracking Japanese soundtrack on it and thereby turning it into a comedy.)

In the end Sinbad returns home, having accomplished absolutely nothing — sort of like the filmmakers themselves, though in fairness this movie might be a perfectly decent genre piece viewed in the original Russian, with English subtitles, and with restored color (as it is, it’s one of those movies that looks like a picture postcard that sat out in the sun way too long). I looked up the very brief plot synopsis of the opera Sadko in the Bravissimo Russian Opera boxed set, and their description — “The minstrel Sadko is shipwrecked. At the bottom of the sea, his sweet singing wins him the love of the Sea Princess; but when his wild gusli playing kicks up a storm, he is cast on land and the Princess is changed into a river” (which sounds like this would make a good companion piece for Daphne, in which the title character ends up as a tree) — reveals a story within hailing distance of the one in this movie, but not all that close.

The MST3K crew were at the top of their game on this one — it seems the shows they did just before Joel Hodgson left the series are consistently the best — and I especially liked the interstital sketch in which Joel’s and the robots’ contribution to the weekly “invention exchange” is a Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack chess set, in which the white pieces are Sinatra and his entourage and the black pieces are all Sinatra’s enemies (with Mitch Miller as the black king!), a quite amusing piece of writing whose author must have been very up on Sinatra trivia to do all those references correctly!

Allotment Wives (Monogram, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I picked last night was Allotment Wives, second in the trio of films with which Kay Francis concluded her movie career at Monogram in 1945-46 (the first one was Divorce, which I screened for Charles early on in our relationship and which was a pretty good soap opera, all things considered, though as I wrote about it at the time, “I found it amusing that the credits included acknowledgments for ‘Miss Francis’ Gowns’ (an intriguing throwback to La Francis’ days at Warners, when one of her films was advertised as, ‘See Kay Francis in 36 Beautiful Gowns!’) and ‘Miss Francis’ Hats,’ but no one ’fessed up to creating Miss Francis’ awful hairstyle.” Allotment Wives had the same writer (Sidney Sutherland, though this time he was teamed up with Harvey Gates, who wrote quite a few of the Bela Lugosi Monograms and was hailed by Tom Weaver as the worst writer Lugosi ever had to deal with until Ed Wood) and director (the almost terminally dull William Nigh), and was supposedly co-produced by Jeffrey Bernerd and Kay Francis — though from what I’ve read Francis’ production title was just nominal and Bernerd and Trem Carr (then head of Monogram, obviously an executive producer but billed as “executive director”!) really made the decisions.

Allotment Wives was a movie that was topical for the period, since it was released on November 8, 1945 — just after the end of World War II — and it opens with stock footage and documentary narration about the Office of Dependency Benefits (ODB). This was a part of America’s war effort that set up what was essentially a special, and more immediate, form of Social Security for U.S. servicemembers: they could contribute a portion of their salary for the support of their wives and children (if any) and the government would more than match it. The aggressive character of this organization and the way it saw its mission was exemplified in the film in a sign on the wall of the ODB office that reads, “Get ’Em PAID!”

The narrator goes on to explain that any pot of money that large and relatively easy to access is going to attract crooks, and then we see the office of Brigadier General H. N. Gilbert (Jonathan Hale), who’s called in former newspaper writer turned commissioned officer Major Pete Martin (Paul Kelly, second-billed) to go after a gang that has recruited young women to marry servicemembers, sign up for their dependency allotments and then collect handsomely from the ODB — including survivors’ benefits should the poor schnooks get killed in the war — as well as in lesser respects from selling the wedding gifts and such. Martin, reluctant at first, is convinced to join the effort when he learns that his own best friend in the service married such a woman (many of whom are married to three or four men at a time, under false names, and are constantly trolling for new servicemen they can put on the hook) before he shipped out, returned home after the war, found that their marriage was a sham and killed himself.

Martin gets sent to San Francisco, where the gang is supposedly headquartered, and is re-hired by the newspaper he used to work for as a cover for his investigations. He meets up with socialite Sheila Seymour (Kay Francis) and starts to date her, albeit in a decorous Production Code way, though we know that she’s the secret criminal mastermind of the allotment-graft conspiracy he’s looking to bust. Had Sutherland and Gates been willing to stop there, they would have had the potential for a moderately interesting thriller with a Maltese Falcon-style ending as Martin chooses duty over sex and turns her in; instead they filled out the dramatis personae with such oddball characters as a daughter, Connie (Teala Loring, who’s actually quite good in the role) whom Stella is insistent that she go to boarding school but who instead drops out and tries to live mom’s sort of high life; Gladys Smith (Gertrude Michael), an old friend from Stella’s poor days growing up who recognizes her as “Edna” and tries either to muscle in on the allotment racket or take it over; Spike Malone (Bernard Nedell), her confederate and the sort of portly middle-aged man with a pencil-thin moustache Monogram’s casting directors always liked for their villains; Whitey Colton (Otto Kruger at his most unctuous), Stella’s partner in crime; and others who fill this poor movie up with subplots too numerous to mention and make it virtually unfollowable.

At the same time William Nigh turns in one of his usual dull, plodding directorial jobs that leaches out any thrills from this supposed thriller. One commentator on imdb.com compared this film to Mildred Pierce but actually found it better — which is ridiculous; the antagonism between Kay Francis and her on-screen daughter recalls Mildred Pierce, as does her rise from hard-scrabble origins and her shame over that fact (and the fact that Joan Crawford and Kay Francis were both considered over-the-hill when they made these films), but overall there’s no context between Warners’ half-soap opera, half-film noir and Monogram’s dull, plodding melodrama which is so far from being film noir the best you could describe it as is with the French equivalent to “film off-white.”

Allotment Wives is the sort of frustrating bad movie that could have been good; with a tighter script that solved the biggest loose end of the film as it stands — what were the allotment crooks going to do with all the servicemen who married their girls and then did survive the war, at least some of whom would no doubt go to the police instead of conveniently knocking themselves off — a better director and a stronger supporting cast, this could have been a coolly entertaining exploitation thriller instead of just a yawn. At the same time it’s interesting not only for the films it rips off but the others it anticipates, including Orson Welles’ Confidential Report (the criminal boss trying to shield his — or, in this case, her — daughter from knowledge of her criminal past) and even The Grifters (when the daughter seems to want to be included in on mommy’s racket instead of recoiling from horror at the thought of it).

Dr. Monica (Warners, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I picked out was actually one of the Kay Francis films I’d recorded earlier that night: Dr. Monica, a quirky 1934 soap opera that started life as a play by a writer with one of those incomprehensible jumbles of letters that constitute Polish names, Maria Morozowicz-Szczepkowska. Even the American Film Institute Catalog wasn’t able to determine the production history of the Polish original, but a writer named Laura Walker Mayer (who’s billed on screen merely as Laura Walker) did an English translation that opened in New York on November 6, 1933. The movie was made between February and March 1934 (that’s how quickly things moved back then!) and released on June 23, 1934, just in time to get caught up in the furor over the Legion of Decency’s demand for stricter movie censorship and Hollywood’s response by more strictly enforcing the 1930 Production Code; indeed, when the so-called “pre-Code” era came to a skidding halt this movie had to be withdrawn from theatres by order of chief censor Joe Breen, and the extant print shown on TCM is only 53 minutes long, 12 minutes shorter than the original.

It’s still a pretty nervy story for the time: Dr. Monica Braden (Kay Francis) and her husband, writer John Braden (Warren William), are married and reasonably happy on the few occasions when they can actually see each other — which isn’t often because Dr. Monica, whose specialty is maternity care, keeps getting called into the hospital to attend to her latest pregnant patient and the baby said patient is about to bring into the world. For the first couple of reels the movie’s frank acceptance of the idea of a two-career couple makes it see surprisingly modern — only the clothes and the black-and-white photography give it away as a 1930’s movie — as if Woody Allen had done a film of The Women. Then the plot rears its soapy little head and we find that all those nights Dr. Monica has left her husband alone have led him to have an affair with Dr. Monica’s friend Mary Hathaway (Jean Muir).

The plot thickens when Monica and Mary are at a cocktail party and Mary, about to play the piano, gets out the opening bars of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor (imdb.com misnamed the piece as Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor) and then collapses at the piano, and in treating her Monica discovers that Mary is pregnant. She asks Mary, who tells her that the father is a married man whom she can’t tell, and when John Braden leaves for a solo vacation to Europe both women see him off. Monica offers to look after Mary and deliver her baby at a secluded country retreat (which makes this film sound like a precursor to The Great Lie), and it’s only at the very moment Mary is about to give birth that Monica overhears her making a frantic attempt to reach John (who’s returned from his trip early in the meantime) and realizes that her husband is the father of Mary’s child. She’s unwilling to go through with the delivery until the resident nurse, Mrs. Monahan (Emma Dunn), literally slaps some sense into her. The baby is born but nearly dies of neglect because Mary doesn’t want to take care of it, but eventually the plot issues get resolved when Mary takes her plane and flies it out to sea, an intriguing high-tech variation on the famous A Star Is Born suicide gimmick, and Monica adopts the child without telling her husband either that the kid is his biological daughter or that she knows about his affair.

Though it’s an out-and-out soap opera, it’s a quite remarkable movie in other ways; it’s possible it might have been a better film with the originally suggested cast, Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, but Francis acts the part of Dr. Monica with real subtlety and sensitivity (if not quite the heart-wrenching pathos Stanwyck could have given it) and the stuck-up William is probably a better fit for John than the more easy-going McCrea would have been. It’s nice to see a two-career couple accepted as a normal fact of life and even nicer to see a plot resolution that does not depend on the woman giving up her own work life to salvage her marriage; Charles Kenyon’s script avoids the Faith Baldwin gimmick of blaming the husband’s affair on the wife’s career and telling her she’s “unmanned” him and that’s why he was tricking around. AFI’s tantalizing description of Breen’s condemnation of the film for “identifying characters as a Lesbian, a nymphomaniac and a prostitute” makes me wish a copy of the longer version will turn up sometime in my lifetime, but even as it stands Dr. Monica — directed with unusual sensitivity by William Keighley (with, according to imdb.com, uncredited assistance from a far better director, William Dieterle) — is a minor but quite moving film and a better one than some of Francis’s later and even soapier vehicles.

You Must Remember This, parts 1 and 2 (PBS, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I knocked off and planted myself in the living room to watch an intriguing special on PBS, the first in a three-part series on the history of the Warner Bros. studio. Called You Must Remember This (after the opening line of the famous song from what’s probably the most famous movie Warners ever produced), the film was a production of Richard Schickel — which meant he had access to the interviews he’d done with famous filmmakers of the classic period in the 1970’s (including William Wellman, Mervyn LeRoy and Howard Hawks) and could therefore include people who are dead now but whom he caught on film talking about the great days of Warners while they were still alive.

These episodes dealt with the studio from its inception (the Warner brothers released their first film, My Four Years in Germany, in 1918 — bespeaking their tendency in later years to make movies based on current news events — but the studio didn’t become an ongoing operation until 1923) and hit the usual notes sounded in histories of Warners: that it was the “proletarian studio,” the one whose films acknowledged the Depression and depicted the struggles of the people victimized by it instead of pretending it wasn’t happening the way films made at MGM and Paramount did.

Schickel and his narrator, Clint Eastwood (a talent incubated at Universal and then lured away to Warners; Dirty Harry was his transitional film, released by Warners but actually shot either on location or at Universal) argued that this was due to the personal politics of the Warner brothers and their realization that they were filling a market niche the other studios were ignoring, but as I’ve pointed out in this pages before it had to do mostly with their acquisition of the First National company in 1928 and the sort of theatre chain they acquired thereby. First National had been a studio founded by theatre owners who were worried that Paramount was buying up so many production companies and so many theatres — and freezing out the ones they weren’t buying so those theatres wouldn’t have access to quality product involving major stars — so the theatres who weren’t part of the Paramount chain formed a chain of their own (the original First National logo was a picture of a chain ringing a map of North America) and pooled their resources to form a studio and hire major stars, including the two biggest names in film in 1918: Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin.

First National limped along throughout the 1920’s, building the Burbank studio Warners still uses today but quickly losing Pickford and Chaplin (who left to be even more independent by starting United Artists), and because their theatres were the ones Paramount and Loews (MGM’s parent company) hadn’t wanted, they tended to be in grungier neighborhoods of cities and in rural areas. So since the First National theatre audiences weren’t as affluent or as sophisticated as the upper-class big-city audiences who went to the flagship Paramount and Loews theatres, they wanted more working-class fare.

The show soft-pedaled the usual myth that The Jazz Singer saved Warners from bankruptcy but built up a few of its own, including making the statement that no one tried to imitate Busby Berkeley’s big production numbers (plenty of people tried — LeRoy Prinz, Sammy Lee, Dave Gould, Hermes Pan, Bobby Connolly, among others — though no one, with the possible exception of John Murray Anderson, did them anywhere nearly as well) and calling Mildred Pierce Warners’ first true film noir. (What about The Maltese Falcon? They depicted it, all right, in their segment on Bogart but had some surprisingly nasty things to say about it, including one odd quote from Martin Scorsese — he was a significant director at Warners in a more recent period but it also seems like every documentary about the history of film is legally obligated to have Scorsese in it somewhere — that the sequence in Falcon in which Bogart gives Peter Lorre back his gun and Lorre renews his demand to search Sam Spade’s office, and Bogart as Spade laughs, was so overacted on Bogart’s part “it seemed like John Huston was asleep that day” — when actually the sequence is in the book much the way it appears in the film, and I certainly find nothing objectionable or overacted in Bogart’s performance in the scene.)

The show also repeated the myth that Bette Davis became a big star only because she was under Warners contract — whereas I think Davis probably would have become a star no matter where she ended up: even her first studio, Universal, could have launched her had they given her the lead in the 1931 Waterloo Bridge instead of relegating her to a minor role where she had more screen time with her back to the camera than she had facing it. I’ve often wondered how Davis’s career might have gone if she’d ended up at MGM, which unlike Warners had an infrastructure able to make major stars out of women; at MGM Davis would have been competing for parts with Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, but she would also have been built up more carefully, she wouldn’t have had to do crappy pictures like Housewife and Satan Met a Lady that Jack Warner shoved her into, and she’d have had the advantage of a studio that specialized in the “women’s picture” instead of one where she had to fight her ass off for decent roles because the Warners machine was geared towards building male stars. (It’s pretty amazing that even after her walkout, her two Academy Awards and her incandescent performance under William Wyler’s direction in Jezebel — oddly, this documentary discussed Jezebel and The Letter, mentioned them as probably the two best films Davis made in her 18 years as a Warners contractee, but didn’t mention Wyler’s name once! — Jack Warner was still shoving her scripts like Garden of the Moon with a nothing female lead almost any actress with a face and a figure could have played.)

Overall, You Must Remember This — despite the myth-making — was a respectable documentary, handicapped by showing a lot of clips from a lot of films while offering very little context for them (there’s a sequence from William Wellman’s 1933 masterpiece Safe in Hell — for which a good case could be made as Warners’ first film noir — but it’s there only to illustrate the relative sexual freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” period) and also by rushing through the first three decades of Warners’ existence to get to the more recent periods that will feature people most television watchers today have actually heard of; but there’s also a lot of good stuff here and clips from some movies I’d love to see again, including the brilliant if also rather silly 1950 anti-Klan movie Storm Warning (with the kinky scene in which Doris Day, of all people, gets whipped by the Klansmen); they also showed the 1937 Black Legion but suggested that the “Legion” was simply code for the Klan, when in fact not only did the Black Legion actually exist (it was its organizers, not Warners’ writers, that copied the Klan in their regalia and rituals) but the writers actually used the real Black Legion oath in their script (something I didn’t realize until I ran across the text of the actual Black Legion oaths in one of Charles’ books about 1930’s fascist movements in the U.S. and remembered where I’d encountered it before: as the oath Humphrey Bogart and the other wanna-be Legionnaires take in the film!).

The 49th Man (Columbia, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched a movie, the first in a batch of four Columbia “B”’s directed by Fred F. Sears I’d recently recorded to DVD off TCM: The 49th Man, a 1953 thriller based on the then-current issue of atom-bomb spying in which a sinister foreign power (never named, though as with a lot of movies of this period you don’t need two guesses to guess which country 1953 audiences would have assumed the threat was from!) is attempting to smuggle an atom bomb that’s been cut up and put into suitcases so it can be reassembled inside the U.S. and used as a terrorist weapon of mass destruction. The investigation kicks off when a hot-rodder speeding down a mountain road in New Mexico (a mountain road in New Mexico?) crashes and burns, and the mushroom cloud that comes up as his car explodes automatically suggests all this has something to do with nuclear weapons even though we later learn that nothing nuclear actually contributed to the explosion.

The person in charge of the inquiry is chief U.S. intelligence investigator Paul Reagan (the last name is prounounced “REE-gun,” not “RAY-gun,” by the way), played by hunky Richard Denning; he assigns agent John Williams (John Ireland) and Williams traces the bomb components and the suitcases themselves (unusual all-metal ones whose composition suggests European origin) to Marseilles, France, where Williams meets up with Pierre Neff, the man who made the unusual metal suitcases (and who’s the only person in the “French” scenes in this film who’s actually shown speaking French, though the cabaret scenes feature two numbers sung in French), and also visit a nice cabaret and hear a pretty good jazz band with an accordion-guitar-clarinet-bass lineup, at least two of whose members are American expatriates. Williams’ key interest in the cabaret is the band’s clarinetist, Buzz Olin (Richard Avonde), and two hangers-on at the club, Leo (Peter Marshall) and Margo (Suzanne Dalbert) Wayne. (One notes the coincidence that three of the characters in this film have the same last names as real-life Hollywood actors who were active in Right-wing politics.) Leo is an American expat and Margo is the Frenchwoman he married.

Williams traces a uranium shipment to a U.S. sub in Marseilles harbor, captained by Commander Jackson (Robert Foulk), and he realizes that one of the sub’s officers is in on the plot to smuggle enriched uranium into the U.S. by fastening it to the ship’s hull — and eventually Williams realizes that the man in charge of the plot is none other than Commander Jackson himself. What’s more, Jackson’s aide, Lt. Magrew (Touch Conners, who later changed his name to Mike Connors and starred in the private-eye TV series Mannix), overpowers Williams, drugs him and keeps him prisoner on the voyage back across the Atlantic. Then Magrew places a phone call to Paul Reagan and, just when we’re beginning to wonder just how far into the U.S. government the terrorist nuke plot extends and how far writers Ivan Tors (story) and Harry Essex (script) are going to indulge the radical-Right McCarthy-era fantasy that the government was honeycombed with anti-American Communists awaiting the signal from Moscow to bring the entire country down (a fantasy very much alive today in the form of talk-radio hosts and bloggers who continue to exist that Barack Obama is a sort of Muslim version of the Manchurian Candidate who’s running for President for the secret purpose of destroying America rather than actually governing it!), suddenly Tors and Essex heave their big plot twist at us with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: the entire thing has been a U.S. military exercise, aimed at seeing if they could smuggle fake nuclear components into the U.S. to see how vigilant our security systems would be at catching a genuine attempt to sneak in a portable bomb. (This is such a transparently unbelievable story device I kept waiting for the revelation that they were all in on a genuine plot to commit nuclear terrorism and were just giving Williams a cock-and-bull story to get him to lay off.)

Only Williams explains to them that in addition to the 48 suitcases containing fake nuclear weapons components that were part of the exercise, Neff made four additional suitcases that went to genuine nuclear terrorists — and suspicion falls on Buzz Olin and the Waynes because Olin used a similar suitcase as a music case for his clarinet (the giveaway being that the box was much larger than a normal clarinet case). Things get even more bizarrely far-fetched in this movie than that, as Williams — once he’s convinced that his American colleagues are legit after all — and Reagan join forces to trace the three missing nuclear terrorists. Buzz Olin and Margo Wayne are both found murdered and they track Leo Wayne to San Francisco, where he builds and arms the bomb.

After a lot more tracking around, the agents run down Leo and arrest him, only when they find the bomb it’s already set to go off and Jackson, who in addition to being a submarine commander is apparently also a whiz at disarming nuclear devices, is unable to turn it off in time, so they fly it over the Nevada nuclear test site and drop it there, where it goes off in a series of stock shots of nuclear weapons tests familiar to anyone who’s seen a far better movie Columbia made about nuclear war 11 years later, Dr. Strangelove. (As I recognized the weapons-test footage I couldn’t help but break out singing, MST3K-style, “We’ll meet again/Don’t know where, don’t know when … ”).

As silly as some of the plot twists are, The 49th Man is actually a pretty good thriller, lacking a director with much of a sense of pace (once again one can’t help but wish that a proven master of low-budget filmmaking like Robert Florey or Edgar G. Ulmer had been picked to helm this one instead of a dull hack like Fred F. Sears) but at least avoiding the unsubtle propaganda of films like Big Jim McLain and avoiding the mistake John Wayne and his pet writer, James Edward Grant, had made of trying to squeeze in every bit of Right-wing paranoia about the Communists and their intentions to do us all in.

Instead this one, like The Atomic City (a similar but considerably better film), at least latches on to one dastardly Communist plot for Our Heroes to foil, and is the stronger for that even though, as usual with the anti-Red films of the early 1950’s, the evil is incredibly generic. Hollywood’s dastardly Reds of the 1950’s behaved exactly like their dastardly Nazis of the 1940’s, who in turn had behaved exactly like their dastardly gangsters of the 1930’s — as if American filmmakers had only one way to depict a criminal plot and resorted to it again and again and again regardless of the ideological point they were trying to make.

Still, The 49th Man is a reasonably entertaining film, not what it could have been with a stronger director and a more sensible script but one that uses the A-bomb plot merely as a MacGuffin and is more effective as propaganda precisely because it doesn’t keep hitting the audience over the head with how awful this all is — even though a line early on in the movie about how the evil enemy agents “consider it a privilege to die” couldn’t help but evoke inevitable comparisons to the similar “anti-terrorist” propaganda of today and the depiction in the Right-wing media of all Muslims as unsmiling fanatics whose bloodthirsty religion promises them all 72 virgins in heaven if they’ll take out a few thousand infidels for Allah.

Hercules (Embassy, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles arrived home at 9 and we ran the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 take on the 1958 Hercules, the movie that became notorious because it was an Italian production (though the actor — if I may use the term loosely — playing the title role, Steve Reeves, was an American) that U.S. distributor Joseph E. Levine bought the American rights to and spent more money on its promotion than its original Italian producers had spent making it in the first place. This movie and its sequel, Hercules Unchained, were on screens and TV stations constantly during my boyhood — and though I can’t recall if I ever actually sat through this one start-to-finish either on TV or in the drive-ins where it seemed it was most commonly shown, I remember seeing movies like it and enjoying them back when my age was still in single digits.

Watching it now, it’s a surprisingly dull film, engagingly silly and with dubbed (actually fairly well dubbed) English dialogue that is so knotted in its attempts at a Shakespearean grandiosity that it achieves a charming accidental surrealism: after a while, one just grooves on the sounds of the words and ceases to expect them to make sense. What’s most amazing about this film is that, instead of tapping into the actual Hercules legends that were safely in the public domain, writers Ennio De Concini, Pietro Francisci (who also directed) and Gaio Frattini, working from a “poem” by Apollonios Rhodios, fashioned a very dull story about Hercules coming to the rescue of Princess Iole (Sylvia Koscina) when she’s about to drive her chariot off a cliff and crash onto the beach below (it was probably somewhere in Italy but it sure looked an awful lot like Malibu!), and then gets drafted to come to the aid of Iole’s father, King Pelias of Iolcus (Ivo Garrani) in his attempts to train his son (her brother) Iphitus (Mimmo Palmara) — whose name comes off on the soundtrack as “Effete-us,” reason enough for his dad to want him trained by a butch straight guy like Hercules! — to be fit to rule as his successor.

Midway through the movie Hercules is drafted to join Jason (Fabrizio Mioni) and his crew to search for the Golden Fleece — you remember — which, when it’s finally discovered (by a kid in Hercules’ posse named Ulysses, who’s played by Gabriele Antonini and, given what we know about the sexuality of the real ancient Greeks, comes off as Hercules’ boy-toy on the side when he isn’t dallying around with Iole), turns out to be a bit of mangy-looking wool dipped in gold paint hanging off a branch on a tree that appears to be planted on the head of a Godzilla-style monster Hercules is obliged to fight. (Later Jason’s crew, including Hercules, end up on an island fighting a tribe of ape-men in a scene so reminiscent of the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey a decade later that I joked, “I told you we shouldn’t have landed on the island where the space aliens dropped the monolith!”)

Hercules is a far more professional piece of filmmaking than most of the MST3K movies — the color, though faded (Eastmancolor was used), at least offers a wide-ranging palette instead of the narrow band of the visible spectrum filmmakers of today restrict themselves to, the sets are well appointed, and the actors, though not distinguished, are at least competent: they hit their marks and look like they’ve actually memorized a script and are following it professionally. Where it fails is, ironically, in the aspect you’d have expected them to care the most about: the action scenes. Most of the action is as dull as dishwater and moves about as fast; director Francisci seems to have no sense of pace at all, and virtually all of Steve Reeves’ feats as Hercules are shot in long shots that eat up surprisingly large chunks of screen time with few, if any, cuts between camera angles.

It’s hard to judge this movie in the MST3K context and even harder given that we’re seeing it panned-and-scanned — Mario Bava, who later made quite stylish evocations of the 1930’s Gothic horror films of Universal in his early-1960’s productions as a director, is the cinematographer here but it’s hard to believe that the original wide-screen version was as badly composed as this one is; and it’s also unfair to judge the performances of the actors when we don’t have their real voices (in virtually all European productions of the period — even prestigious ones by major directors like Visconti and Fellini — it was common to post-record the sound to accommodate actors who didn’t all speak the same language), but the irony is that Hercules fails at just the sort of Boy’s Own Story action-adventure one would expect it to excel at, and it’s certainly not literate enough to pull the double act the underrated American film The Magic Carpet did: appealing to pre-pubescent boys as “straight” adventure while subtly ridiculing its own genre so the adults who’d taken their kids to this movie could enjoy it as camp.

Nonetheless, a film that shows off this many bare-chested males (as well as a nice sequence of dancing girls for the straight men in the audience) couldn’t help but appeal to me on that level, if no other. The MST3K interjections achieved a kind of unmemorable but engaging merriment that added appeal to this surprisingly dull movie, though their best gag had nothing to do with the film: after it ended the crew encounter two hefty women (obviously portraying a Lesbian couple) driving a VW van in space and wearing T-shirts that identify them as Amazons, though of course they look nothing like the “Amazons” in the movie!

Women in the Wind (Warners, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When Charles and I finally got to be alone together I ran him Women in the Wind, a rather oddly titled 1939 Warners programmer that, according to Robert Osborne’s introduction on Turner Classic Movies, represented Kay Francis’s 54th film and her last as a Warners contract player (though she’d return to the studio in 1942 as a free-lancer for the film Always in My Heart). It’s pretty clear from the story — a woman aviator determines to win an all-female cross-country air race for the benefit of her sick brother, also a flyer, who needs a specialist with a four-figure price tag to save his ability to walk after a bad crash in the backstory — and the billing (Francis shares under-the-title billing on the title card with her leading man, the acceptable but colorless William Gargan) that Warners had about zero faith in her as a box-office attraction by then.

Surprise; Women in the Wind turns out to be a quite good movie, nothing special and at times almost a compendium of Warners clichés, but consistently fun to watch, with excellent special effects and none of the longueurs of the retread soap operas like Secrets of an Actress that were mostly what she was making at the tail end of her Warners career. Francis plays Janet Steele, who learned to fly from her pilot brother Bill (Charles Anthony Hughes) until a bad crash disabled him. Frantic to raise $4,000 for the operation he needs if he’s ever going to have any hope of walking, let alone flying, again, Janet learns of an air race for women from Burbank (probably not coincidentally the location of the Warners studio) to Cleveland, and she determines to enter it, win the $15,000 grand prize and use it to pay for her brother’s care.

The minor detail that she doesn’t actually own a plane doesn’t bother her; she determines to borrow the one her brother’s friend Ace Boreman (William Gargan) has just flown round the world on a record-breaking flight, and when she finally gets to him he agrees to lend her the plane and help her win the race. Ace also starts falling in love with her despite his playboy reputation and the inconvenient fact that he already has a wife, who was supposed to get a divorce in Mexico but has now decided to challenge the legality of it and claim she’s still married to him. Worse, Mrs. Frieda Boreman (Sheila Bromley) is a pilot herself and wants to grab Ace’s plane so she can enter and win the big race. Meanwhile, Ace’s record has already been broken by Denny Corson (Eddie Foy, Jr.) — a character whose resemblance to the real Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan was duly noted by the reviewers in 1939 — and, with Frieda Boreman in control of her husband’s plane due to California’s community-property law, Janet decides that the only way to beat Ace’s plane is to borrow Corson’s since it’s already proven its ability to go faster.

Needless to say, Janet is also really pissed at Ace for having neglected to tell her he was married — though he didn’t think he was still legally married to Frieda at the time he was romancing Janet so he’s in the clear ethically and according to the Production Code — and as if that weren’t plot enough for you, Frieda hires a saboteur to unscrew Janet’s gas cap at the start of the second leg of the race in Wichita — where Janet has already been delayed because her friend and roommate Kit Campbell (Eve Arden, given a nicely etched performance that makes one wish her role were larger), who was also in the race, crash-landed and Janet helped rescue her from the burning wreckage of her plane. Naturally, none of the obstacles can stop Our Heroine — not the sabotage (she coasts to a landing on a farm and buys gas from the farmer — which had both Charles and I shaking our heads because we thought planes ran on high-test aviation fuel, but maybe in 1939 even high-performance competition planes could run on regular automobile gas), not the delay to help Kit, not an accident to her plane in which one of its landing wheels was knocked off when she took off from the farm.

Indeed, at the end scenarists Lee Katz and Albert DeMond (adapting a 1935 novel by Francis Walton) even have Frieda turn into a good sport, giving up her own chance to win the race to point out to Janet that one of her landing wheels is no longer attached to her plane and therefore she’s going to have to do one of those fabled three-point landings — which she does. (At first I thought it was a stunt pilot but later I decided it was almost certainly staged with a model.)

The director is John Farrow (Mia’s father), and while his work isn’t particularly atmospheric (Farrow made back-to-back noir masterpieces, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in 1948 but most of the rest of his work, with the arguable exception of His Kind of Woman in 1951, is competent but undistinguished) it is exciting and rapidly paced in the best Warners manner, and he manages to get an intriguing performance from Francis that manages to convince us she’s an assertive woman without the relentlessness we would have got from Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck in the role. Women in the Wind isn’t a forgotten gem but it is a quite respectable piece of entertainment that succeeds on its own term, and as much as her last two years at Warners had been a “downer” it was an exit Kay Francis need not have been ashamed of — even if in later years she was convinced that One-Way Passage was the only film she’d ever made of which she was proud!

Secrets of an Actress (Warners, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Secrets of an Actress, which I’d actually recorded that very night as part of TCM’s Kay Francis marathon. I have a certain affection for this film if only because of its lurid title(according to the American Film Institute Catalog, among the working titles were Lovely Lady and The Woman Habit), even though the director is William Keighley (pronounced “KEE-lee,” by the way), the script is the usual committee product (three writers — Milton Krims, Roland Lee and Julius J, Epstein — are credited and two others, Charles Kenyon and Mary C. McCall, Jr. — also contributed) and her co-stars are Ian Hunter (misnamed “Ian Holm” in the AFI Catalog) and the almost terminally boring George Brent.

Basically, this one is I Found Stella Parish lite, lacking the earlier Francis vehicle’s melodramatic contortions but also much of its giddily insane spirit. Fay Carter (Francis) is the daughter of a now-deceased Broadway star who ran through all his money and was forced to make his living doing road companies, including one production of Othello in which he played the title role and his daughter played Desdemona (now that would have been kinky enough to be worth seeing!). She’s 30 years old and all too conscious of the biological clock ticking; she’s been working on the road since her dad’s death but this time around turns down another road-company offer because she’s determined either to be a star in New York or quit acting altogether — which leads her maid, Marian Plantagenet (a nice comic turn by British actress Isabel Jeans), to ask her what else she could possibly do, to which she replies, “Be a wardrobe mistress.” (That’ll get her out of the theatre, all right!)

She actually lands a starring role in a New York production, only to lose it again when the producer, Mr. Harrison (former silent-film star Hebert Rawlinson), decides he needs an established “name” in the role (“Even if I have to send to Hollywood for one!”) and lets Our Fay go. Just then she and Marian go out drinking (at 10 a.m.!) and meet up with architect Peter Snowden (Ian Hunter), who’d seen Fay in a play many years back and who has enough money — as well as a previously unsatisfied yen to be a theatrical producer — that he’s willing to back her in a play called Springboard that she happens to have sitting in her closet (the implication is she wrote it herself), which we find out very little about except that it has one act set in an astronomical observatory. Snowden’s partner, Richard Orr (George Brent), tries to talk him out of investing in Fay’s play, but he goes ahead anyway — though Orr does agree to design the scenery for it and both of them fall in love with Fay. Orr is clearly the front-runner — though neither of these people are among Hollywood’s most scintillating actors (I couldn’t help but imagine what this film could have been with, say, Herbert Marshall and Cary Grant in the male leads!), at least Brent is closer to Francis’s on-screen age — but he’s handicapped by having a gold-digging wife, Carla (Gloria Dickson), who won’t divorce him because she sees him as a future meal ticket even though she won’t live with him, either.

The plot goes through the usual soapy misunderstandings — Snowden lets slip to Fay that Orr is married (something Orr hadn’t, of course, bothered to tell her),which turns her against him for a couple of reels and leads her to accept Snowden’s proposal even though she doesn’t really love him; Snowden, in turn, tells Mrs. Orr he’s going to fire Mr. Orr and blacklist him from the industry, and convinced that there’s no material interest for her in staying married, she agrees to the divorce and there’s a finale in which Orr is about to board a ship for Norway and Fay frantically tries to signal him that she’s willing to marry him and can do so because his existing wife is going to divorce him after all. Fay does this by writing the words “Carla” and “Divorce” on two suitcases being loaded onto the ship, and at the very last possible minute Orr leaps off the gangplank just before the ship sails (I was expecting him to land in the water, but he doesn’t) and he and Fay end up together.

This isn’t exactly a world-beating movie, and its plot and situations virtually define the term “predictable,” but it’s saved by some nicely wisecracking Julius Epstein lines and a coolly professional performance from Kay Francis. At the time Jack Warner was seemingly going out of his way to ruin her professionally, mainly because she was the last embarrassment left from one of his costliest mistakes: in 1932 he’d staged a major talent raid on Paramount and lured Francis, Ruth Chatterton and William Powell to his studio. Powell stayed a year at Warners making movies with titles like Jewel Robbery and The Keyhole — though he and Francis did make one truly great film together at Warners, One-Way Passage — and then got dropped, fished around for a new contract, got a nibble at Columbia and used Columbia’s nibble to get MGM interested, where he did The Thin Man and had a major comeback.

Chatterton also lasted only a year or two at Warners, making marvelous “pre-Code” melodramas like The Rich Are Always With Us and Female (and, incidentally, marrying George Brent!) before moving on and making her big comeback at Goldwyn, as Walter Huston’s wife in Dodsworth. Francis doggedly stayed on, insisting that Warner fulfill her contract to the letter and pay her everything they owed her on it; she wouldn’t accept a release, she wouldn’t renegotiate and she kept doing script after awful script and collecting those fat paychecks until the contract finally expired in 1939 and left her career a wreck. (She made it back through the efforts of her friend Carole Lombard, who was about to make a major soap opera of her own called In Name Only at RKO — in which she played a woman in love with unhappily married Cary Grant — and demanded that RKO cast Francis as Grant’s bitchy wife, an interesting reversal of her casting in Secrets of an Actress.)

TCM host Robert Osborne, who usually shows the big studios the deference they demanded from reporters and announcers back then, turned unexpectedly bitchy himself when talking about what Warners did to Francis (who after all was dispensable once Bette Davis supplanted her as their biggest “women’s picture” star!), though at least this time they gave her a halfway decent script and Keighley’s almost nonexistent direction at least allowed Francis the chance to play her role with some dignity and suggest the proud, assertive “born in a trunk” theatre woman she was supposed to be playing — even though a lot of other Francis vehicles from her Warners years, including I Found Stella Parish (also with Ian Hunter) and Living on Velvet (also with George Brent), are more fun.

Child of Manhattan (Columbia, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran us a 1933 Columbia programmer called Child of Manhattan, a film with some potential but which turned out to be a rather dull soap opera despite its basis in a play by Preston Sturges premiered the year before. Sophie Jones (Clara Blandick, playing someone’s upper-class aunt six years before she was Dorothy Gale’s Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz), a relative of the Vanderkill family in New York, is shocked, shocked to find that one of the Vanderkill estates has been rented out to a promoter who’s turned it into the dime-a-dance ballroom Loveland. Paul Vanderkill (John Boles), her nephew, volunteers to investigate and while there meets and instantly falls in love with hostess Madeleine McGonigle (Nancy Carroll, top-billed). He offers to buy her expensive presents and set her up in an apartment — after Back Street and Forbidden this sort of role must have been all too familiar to Boles — but won’t actually marry her because he’s a widower and doesn’t want to embarrass the daughter he had with his first wife, who’s about the same age as Madeleine.

She takes him up on it, both out of real love for him and in order to get away from her family from hell, which includes a ferocious mother (Jane Darwell), an unemployed brother (Gary Owen) who mooches from her, and an almost as obnoxious sister (an almost unrecognizable Betty Grable). The inevitable happens and she ends up pregnant, which leads Paul to propose to her and marry her at last, but their baby dies after only a few hours of life and this causes her, for reasons only Preston Sturges and Gertrude Purcell (who adapted his play for the screen) could explain, to break up with him, go to Mexico for a divorce and take up with “Panama Canal” Kelly (cowboy star Charles “Buck” Jones). When her attorney, Carlos Spanoni Bustamante (Luis Alberni, whose usual Italian accent is being passed off as a Mexican one), inserts into the divorce agreement a provision that Paul pay her $100,000 per year in alimony until she gets married again — without her knowledge, since she didn’t want any money from him at all — he naturally writes her off as a gold-digger and she gets so upset she determines to marry Kelly immediately just to get Paul off the hook for all that money — and naturally the news gets to Paul in New York and he comes to Mexico just in time to keep her from marrying Kelly and [re]marry her himself, though not before getting involved in a barroom brawl that inadvertently “outs” him nationwide and links his name with public scandal in the way he’s been trying to avoid all movie.

This could have been a good basis for a movie, and at times Child of Manhattan looks genuinely stylish, but Purcell’s script presents Sturges’ play as 99 44/100ths percent pure soap opera and the director, Eddie Buzzell, doesn’t help either; his best-known credits are for two of the lesser Marx Brothers movies (At the Circus and Go West), which at least energized him. Here, he and cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff (later a director himself) get some quite pleasing compositions and an occasional atmospheric shot (though the film’s look is so generic New York and Mexico are visually indistinguishable), but Buzzell proves himself unable to get a credible performance out of Nancy Carroll. Through most of the movie she’s calculatedly winsome (no, that’s not a contradiction in terms), but when she’s got to react to the big moments like the death of her baby she overacts at such a level she’s virtually screaming at the camera, and while from someone like Joan Crawford we expect that sort of thing, it comes as a shock from a nice little 1920’s Kewpie doll like Carroll.

Child of Manhattan isn’t an outright bad movie; it’s just dull, and dull in a flat, conventional way one wouldn’t expect from something with Preston Sturges’ name on it. (According to the American Film Institute Catalog, Neil Hamilton played Paul for the first two weeks of production and then was replaced by Boles — and had Hamilton completed the role, this probably would have been an outright bad movie; Boles, though visibly older, brought a welcome gravitas and substance to an emptily written role.)

Brooklyn Orchid (Hal Roach/United Artists, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When Charles finally got home I ran him a Hal Roach “streamliner” I’d recently recorded from TCM: Brooklyn Orchid, a 1942 entry in the intriguing series featuring William Bendix and Joe Sawyer as two Brooklyn cab drivers who worked their way up from one rather broken down cab (in 1928 — we know the date because in the photo of them with the cab you can see a “Hoover for President” sign in the background) to a fleet of 600 drivers. The company’s president, Tim McGuerin (Bendix), has outfitted his office as a playpen complete with pool table and slot machines — which makes one wonder how he and his equally immature sidekick, Eddie Corbett (Joe Sawyer), ever concentrated long enough on building the business to expand it the way they had.

Tim is married to Sadie (Grace Bradley), an ex-stripper with social pretensions; and Eddie is in the middle of one of those long movie engagements to Mabel Cooney (Florine McKinney), whose very lack of pretensions makes Sadie despise her. Sadie is throwing a party for the social set at her home and has lured a high-class attendance by offering them a piano recital by Ignatz Rachkowsky (Leonid Kinskey, who’s actually shown with his fingers on the piano keys — though the soundtrack was almost certainly recorded by someone else, he’s good enough that he looks like he’s genuinely playing), who proceeds to bore his audience by playing through his own arrangement of all 15 of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. The expected complications arise when Tim and Eddie bail out of the party (which is supposed to be celebrating Tim’s and Sadie’s wedding anniversary) to play with their fishing rods in the river below — and they fish out of the water would-be suicide Lucy Gibbs (Marjorie Woodworth), whose life was just fine until a year before, when the Brooklyn orchid growers’ association made her Miss Brooklyn Orchid for that year — and from then on her life was miserable because she could no longer work as a secretary: all her bosses would hit on her and then, at the insistence of their wives, fire her. She insists that, now that they’ve saved her life, it belongs to her — which means she’s going to stick with them wherever they go.

They push her inside a Murphy bed and leave her there, then head out with their regular mates to a honeymoon lodge — and she follows him there and unknowingly tells Sadie and Mabel the story of the two men who rescued her and then treated her so shabbily. Meanwhile, ultra-rich playboy Tommy Lyman Goodweek (Skeets Gallagher) is also staying at the lodge, and she’s smitten with Lucy — and Our Heroes naturally try to palm her off on him to get rid of her. It’s not much of a plot (and it was done better in the 1931 Laurel and Hardy film Come Clean) but it’s a good excuse for writers Clarence Marks and Earle Snell, probably with the uncredited assistance of the usual wrecking crew of gag writers in the Roach green room, to get some laughs, notably in one sequence when six, count ’em, six would-be girlfriends of Tommy Lyman Goodweek come out of the same taxi, all expecting to have lunch with him. Like most of the Hal Roach “streamliners,” Brooklyn Orchid isn’t exactly laff-a-minute comedy but it’s pleasant and amusing.

Chicago 10 (PBS, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Charles and I were both anxious to see at the library (we met there, with he arriving after work) was Chicago 10, a marvelous movie by director/writer Brett Morgen reconstructing both the police riot during the Democratic National Convention and the MOBE/Yippie attempts to protest it in August 1968 and the conspiracy trial against eight of the organizers and activists in Chicago between October 1969 and January 1970. I have vivid memories of both events — the Chicago riots as they were shown on TV at the time (simultaneously with the riots in Prague protesting the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia that ended the “Prague spring” — which looked so similar that until the newscasters explained which was which it was hard to tell the two apart, something I commented on myself by singing “Chiprago” to the melody of Fred Fisher’s famous song and one of the protesters noted by carrying a sign reading, “Welcome to Prague,” shown in the film) and the conspiracy trial (since cameras weren’t allowed into the courtroom) by the Pacifica news reports and eventually by the paperback book The Tales of Hoffman that was published containing edited excerpts from the transcripts of the trial.

Morgen adopted a chancy strategy for making a film of the protests and the trial: he combined documentary technique (using actual footage of the protests in the streets and, in some cases, of the principals in the trial doing public speaking, which was their main way of earning money to fund their defense) and reconstructions of the trial using Rotoscoped animation and drawing on the transcripts for his script. Not surprisingly, he recruited an all-star cast to be his voice actors: Hank Azaria as Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg (the film shows Ginsberg in court attempting to calm down the proceedings by chanting “Ommmmmm … ” from the witness stand, and later an archival clip of a telecast features a square news reporter recording the chant as “Um”), Nick Nolte as prosecutor Thomas Foran, Mark Ruffalo as Jerry Rubin, Roy Scheider as Judge Julius Hoffman (who comes off less as the Avenging Angel of Justice and Traditional Values and more as a malevolent but ineffectual Charles Dickens figure) and Liev Schreiber as defense attorney William Kunstler. (The other defense attorney, Leonard Weinglass, voiced his own role, the only actual trial participant to play himself in non-documentary footage.)

The opening promised an absolutely dreadful movie — mostly due to the very loud music drowning out the original soundtracks of the archival clips, much to my frustration — but as the film progressed and found its groove (and Morgen mixed Jeff Danna’s original score down to a tolerable level) it turned into powerful drama and the intercuts between the actual convention events and the trial work surprisingly well. Danna’s music starts out as the kind of high-tension psychedelic rock ’n’ roll the defendants would have listened to at the time (when he wrote his book Woodstock Nation Abbie Hoffman even included a footnote listing all the albums he’d had on while he was writing) but soon goes into reggae and even rap, anachronistic genres for a film set in the late 1960’s but which work emotionally, especially when the rap song accompanies footage of the last doomed attempt by the Chicago peaceniks to march to the convention site and the determination of the police to prevent them.

The police-riot scenes look remarkably like the more recent footage of similarly militarized demonstration sites outside more recent conventions and international trade meetings — proof that the so-called “Miami Model” for suppressing dissent at major ruling-class events is nothing new — and the trial seems exactly the sort of unwitting theatre-of-the-absurd just about every other account of it has portrayed even though some of the best bits weren’t in the movie (like prosecutor Foran’s references in his opening statement to the “freaking fag revolution” the defendants were supposedly part of — all of them were heterosexual and in this pre-Gay Liberation Front era the Left was still residually hostile to homosexuals and homosexuality, but Foran couldn’t prosecute people for being transgressive revolutionaries without dragging in what to a man of his ilk in 1969 would have seemed to be the worst transgression of all — and Abbie Hoffman’s statement from the witness stand that from then on his name was just “Abbie” because, due to the coincidence that the hanging judge who was rigging the trial to convict them was also named “Hoffman.” “I don’t have a last name anymore; I lost it”) and the chaining and shackling of Bobby Seale in the courtroom, which actually happened a third of the way through the trial, is saved towards the end to form a dramatic and emotional climax. (At the same time, the depiction of Seale’s agony — he was chained and shackled because his attorney was too ill to represent him and, rather than accept being represented by the other two defense lawyers, he asked to be allowed to defend himself and the judge refused — here made it seem more than ever like the way slaves were treated on the Middle Passage.)

Some of the junctures between rotoscoped animation and documentary footage are awkward — especially in a few scenes in which rotoscoped figures of the defendants (particularly David Dellinger and Tom Hayden) are shown speaking to actual footage of the audiences that listened to them — but for the most part the mix of the two different kinds of footage works surprisingly well and communicates the bizarre aspects of the street theatre the trial turned into. In his introduction to the book The Tales of Hoffman, the edited excerpts from the trial transcripts, Dwight Macdonald quoted the old saw that judges were supposed to have “ice water in their veins” and said instead that Julius Hoffman had “aquavit, maybe.” He also noted that one of Tom Foran’s few correct observations about the trial was that the attorneys for the defense had come from the same radical world-view as their clients (which is very much a part of the film and why it’s called Chicago 10 instead of Chicago 8 or Chicago 7), and he made an interesting comparison to the sedition trial in 1918 that had broken the Industrial Workers of the World, in which whatever actions they had done to earn the disapproval of the government, they had dressed in suits, politely followed the dictates of the court and been model participants in the trial (fat lot of good it did them!), whereas the Chicago defendants had used the trial the way they used the convention — to follow the Yippie ethos that, in Godfrey Hodgson’s words, “when the might of a society is unassailable, strike at its myths.”

Alas, Charles and I didn’t really have a chance to discuss the film, since I’d be interested in getting his reactions since this is an artifact from the decade during which our perceptions don’t overlap. The nine-year difference in our ages means that for anything up to and including the 1950’s we both start at the same place (we’re experiencing that culture vicariously since neither of us really lived it) while anything in the 1970’s and after we both start at the same place (both of us were around then), but for the 1960’s the great political, social and cultural upheavals of the time are living memories for me and matters of history for him. It’s impossible to watch Chicago 10 without having the subsequent fates of its characters in mind — Abbie Hoffman, who (especially in his own footage here) comes off as a great stand-up comedian, the logical successor to Lenny Bruce, died by his own hand at age 52 on April 12, 1989 after a long history of manic depression (ironically he’d written an article in The Nation attacking Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign by saying that telling a drug addict “just say no!” makes about as much sense as telling a manic-depressive “just cheer up!”); Jerry Rubin making his fabled transformation from Yippie to yuppie, becoming a businessman and early investor in Apple Computer (!) and doing a nationwide “Yippie vs. yuppie” debate tour with Hoffman before Rubin also died young (victim of a traffic accident when a car hit him while he was jaywalking) in 1994; and the entire movement of which they were a part one of the most incredibly counterproductive in social-political history, since instead of empowering the Left its long-term effect was to spark a backlash that has put the Right in near-total control of American politics since.

Remember that 1968 was also the year Richard Nixon won the presidential election — and between them he and George Wallace got 57 percent of the vote to 43 percent for Hubert Humphrey, the sacrificial lamb nominated at that convention in Chicago under such high security that one delegate, protesting after going through three searches to enter the convention hall, cried out to the security guard, “I wasn’t sentenced to come here! I was elected!” — and that percentage of Right-to-Left votes in American presidential elections held constant until 1992 (when, between them, Bush and Perot got 57 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 43 percent, and Clinton won only because Perot’s votes were distributed nationwide instead of concentrated in the South, so Perot won no electoral votes but got high enough vote totals in several states to swing them to Clinton and thus “spoil” the election for Bush) and it’s still clear that the social and especially the cultural divisions of the 1960’s still hold sway over a majority of the American electorate. It’s what’s likely to keep the presidency firmly in Republican hands this year despite the abysmal record of the Bush II administration — a “war on terror” that turned Iraq into a bottomless pit and now a virtual vassal state of Iran (against which John McCain has saber-rattled to the tune of “Barbara Ann”), turned Afghanistan into such a cauldron of “collateral damage” that the Taliban are almost certainly coming back for the same reason they got the support of the Afghan people in the first place (their promises to restore order and “protect women”), shattered both America’s standing with the rest of the world and our overall economy, destroyed what was left of our industrial base after the previous administrations of Reagan, Bush I and Clinton pursued deregulatory “free trade” policies that led to the outsourcing of most of our industrial jobs, and more recently have greased the skids of a near-total collapse of Wall Street and the “FIRE” (finance, investment, real estate) sector that was supposed to replace actual honest-to-goodness manufacturing as the driver of our economy.

In the face of all this John McCain remains competitive and even ahead thanks to the Republicans’ well-honed skill at manipulating racial and cultural hatreds that formed the “backlash” to the 1960’s and have worked for them from that time to this — and the sight of all these wonderful young people pursuing a political and social strategy that, by horrifying the bulk of the country, would in effect turn it over to the Right and destroy any basis for a mass American Left gives an eerie, to say the least, feeling to a movie like Chicago 10, obviously made with an affection for the peaceniks and hippies and the same kind of withering scorn for the authority figures the Chicago 10 themselves had. The media showed footage of the police beating up the protesters and all but openly took the protesters’ side — largely because members of the media had themselves been victims of the police riots — and within the week polls were showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans fully approved of the way the Chicago police had handled the demonstrations. That was when we should have known that what we were doing would be terribly, terribly wrong and counterproductive in the long run.

Across the Pacific (Warners, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When Charles and I finally got in the room together I ran him Across the Pacific, the second film on which John Huston and Humphrey Bogart collaborated and Huston’s third film as a director — though Huston signed up for the U.S. Signal Corps as a documentary director to help the war effort and his call-up came through while this film was shooting. Huston met Vincent Sherman, whom Jack Warner assigned to replace him and finish the film, just before he was to shoot a scene in which three Japanese assassins ambush Bogart in a theatre. “How does he get out?” Sherman asked. “That’s your problem! I’m off to the war!” Huston replied.

Across the Pacific was on one level a follow-up to The Maltese Falcon — same director, cinematographer (Arthur Edeson), composer (Adolph Deutsch) and three leads (Bogart, Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet — Peter Lorre wasn’t in this one but there was a fine assortment of Chinese actors, including Keye Luke, Victor Sen Yung and Richard Loo, to provide subsidiary menaces) — though as a story, Richard Macaulay’s script (produced by his old writing partner Jerry Wald and based on a Saturday Evening Post serial by Robert Carson) is hardly in the same league as Dashiell Hammett’s source novel for Falcon, and it suffered from a bizarre change forced on the filmmakers by circumstances beyond their control.

The film was originally supposed to cast Bogart as an undercover U.S. Army agent who breaks up a Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor — and when Pearl Harbor actually was attacked without Bogart being around to break it up, Macaulay did a quick rewrite and instead Bogart foiled a Japanese plot to blow up the Panama Canal (and played the film over a two-week period from November 23 to December 7, 1941 so it would look like his fictional Japanese were coordinating their attack on the Panama Canal with the strike against Pearl Harbor by the real Japanese). The film starts in New York and takes place largely aboard a Japanese freighter, the Genoa Maru, sailing from New York to Panama and expecting to go through the Canal — until U.S. authorities, suspicious of the Japanese intentions (more so than they were for real before Pearl Harbor!), deny it permission to pass through the Canal for “health reasons” and force it to sail all the way down South America and through the Straits of Magellan — whereupon all the principals disembark anyway and the film reaches its climax in Panama. So, though the filmmakers retained the title Across the Pacific, the characters never even get to the Pacific, much less across it!

The film begins with Bogart playing U.S. Army officer Rick Leland, who’s cashiered out of the service for embezzling regimental funds to cover a gambling debt — though, not surprisingly, about half an hour into the film we learn this was just a blind and Rick is really operating undercover, trying to make it look like he’ll turn traitor so he can find out what the Japanese are planning. (This was actually a pretty common device in Warners war films from the early years of the war: Errol Flynn played a similar character in Desperate Journey.) On the Genoa Maru (“Maru” is part of the name of virtually any Japanese watercraft and appears simply to be their word for “boat” or “ship”) Rick meets mystery woman Alberta Marlow (Mary Astor) and Dr. Lorenz (Sidney Greenstreet), who teaches at a university in the Philippines and openly admires the Japanese. They are three of five passengers on what is otherwise a freighter carrying supplies to Panama planter Dan Morton (Monte Blue); the other two are Japanese and during the sailing one of the Japanese passengers disappears and another appears on the ship, a discernibly different person but using the same name.

The new person is actually a prince of the royal blood who has volunteered to fly the bomber that will attack the Canal — and which has been assembled piece by piece out of parts shipped to Morton’s plantation; Morton himself is an alcoholic (making this role something of a repeat of the one Monte Blue played in White Shadows in the South Seas at MGM 14 years earlier) and he’s so far out of it he hasn’t noticed that Lorenz, who’s in charge of the overall plot, has infiltrated Japanese agents into his work force so he’s now a virtual prisoner in the plantation he nominally still owns.

Across the Pacific isn’t a great film — it’s hardly on the level of Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The African Queen — and the problem with it is that the war movie and the film noir keep clashing with each other. But it’s still an efficient studio product with a bit of the Huston obsession with groups of people in tight situations on some sort of quest, and the scenes at the plantation are not only the richest and most pathos-driven parts of the film, they uncannily anticipate the Huston/Bogart collaboration Key Largo from six years later, in which Edward G. Robinson played Greenstreet’s role, Lionel Barrymore played Blue’s, and Lauren Bacall played Astor’s (though in Key Largo it’s known from the beginning that they are father and daughter, while in Across the Pacific that’s a revelation saved for the end — thereby allaying Rick’s suspicions that she’s part of the Japanese plot and allaying our suspicions that Bogart and Astor were going to have to play another scene with him turning her in to the authorities at the end à la Maltese Falcon).

There’s also a curious anticipation of Casablanca, made several months later: not only is Bogart playing a character named “Rick” but he’s got a sidekick named “Sam” who’s a person of color, though this Sam, played by Lee Tung Foo, is Asian instead of Black and a hotel manager instead of a piano player. Across the Pacific is mostly a workmanlike project of the studio system, and sometimes a bit more than that; though it’s not the high point of the Huston/Bogart collaboration, it’s still very much worth seeing.