by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I screened a Lifetime TV-movie I’d wanted to watch since I recorded it but just got around to now: The Party Never Stops (or, to give it its full title, The Party Never Stops: Diary of a Binge Drinker), the story of Jessie Brenner (Sara Paxton) who’s looking forward to going to college after a stellar high-school career in which she got a 3.8 GPA and regularly worked out running with her mom, April (Nancy Travis), whom she’s been especially (and, writer Matt Dorff tries to hint, almost pathologically) close since her father died a year before. Once she gets into college she’s assigned a dorm room and a roommate, Shanna Martin (Chelsea Hobbs), who immediately turns her on to drinking, hanging out with the fraternity boys and partying until she sinks into a stupor. Within a few weeks she’s racing to classes (when she wakes up from her binges in time to attend them at all) and has blown her long-time ambition to try out for the college track team because when she drinks she loses her coordination so totally she can no longer run.
She also lets Shanna set her up with Keith (Jared Keeso), a frat-buddy friend of Shanna’s own boyfriend Perry (Brent C.S. O’Connor), blowing off the affections of Colin (James Kirk), who may not be as drop-dead gorgeous as the frat guys (though frankly he did a lot more for me!) but is a lot more appealing, creative, serious and is working his way through college by busking on street corners singing mediocre songs apparently inspired by his desire to be a male version of Joni Mitchell (whom he names as his favorite musician; he and Jessie go into ecstasies about “that stuff she did with Mingus” — actually Mitchell and Charles Mingus were planning to make an album together and had written three songs together, but Mingus died before he and Mitchell could actually record together, and the final Mingus LP Mitchell released in 1979 — a year after Mingus’s death — contained the three songs they worked on together; a fourth song, “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat,” in which Mitchell added lyrics to an old Mingus instrumental; and two new songs Mitchell wrote for the project after Mingus died, one of which was about Mingus).
I noticed at least one imdb.com commentator gave this movie a much better review than it deserved because, like the people who praised the God-awful film Human Trafficking, this writer was so enamored of the intentions behind this film — to warn people, especially students in or about to go to college, of the dangers of binge drinking and the college party scene — he or she ignored what a lousy movie it was. The big problem is that Dorff’s script is so damned predictable — he timidly goes where a thousand addiction movies have gone before him — down to Colin turning out to be a recovering alcoholic himself who did himself out of a scholarship and a job before hitting bottom and sobering up; and Shanna, at the end of the school year, promising Jessie she’s going to stop drinking (Jessie already has, thanks largely due to pressure from her mother, who has turned from best-bud to avenging parent) as soon as she goes to one last frat boys’ party … and literally drinks herself to death at it, as any graduate of Clichéd Screenwriting 101 could have predicted in a heartbeat.
The director, David Wu, doesn’t help either; though at least he doesn’t do the video “flanging” effects beloved of a lot of really schlocky Lifetime directors who think they’re being “artistic,” he’s got another, equally annoying “artistic” mannerism of his own: he way overdoes the freeze-frame and turns the movie into still pictures to indicate that the characters are introspecting. It also doesn’t help that he stages one of the drinking scenes with literal blackouts — as Jessie is climbing the stairs on her way to one such party the image periodically cuts (not fades!) to total black, and the first time this happens we wonder if there’s a problem with our TV before we finally realize, “No, it’s not a picture problem — just an arty director!” I was hoping for some nice soft-core porn scenes, but we don’t even get that — just Jessie waking up in strangers’ beds a couple of times and realizing she’s just let some guy she didn’t even know fuck her because she was too drunk to want to resist.
Friday, August 28, 2009
The Lady and the Mob (Columbia, 1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked out one of the more obscure films featuring Ida Lupino TCM had shown earlier in the day in their “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to her: The Lady and the Mob, a 1939 Columbia “B” whose cartoon-style main titles and the top-billed casting of Fay Bainter, as well as the cheery music, indicated this would be a comedy. It wasn’t drop-dead funny (let’s face it, so soon after watching The Cameraman it’s hard to imagine being especially impressed by a movie comedy whose star isn’t named Keaton or Chaplin — and no, I don’t mean Michael, Diane or Geraldine!) but it was consistently charming and amusing.
Lupino plays Lila Thorne, who previously to the start of the film has got herself engaged to Fred Leonard (Lee Bowman), the son of a wealthy widow who owns the bank in her small town, and has promised to visit her mother-in-law to-be to get to know her and get her to accept her as a worthy marriage partner for her son. When Lila arrives, she finds her fiancé’s mother, Hattie Leonard (Fay Bainter) incensed that her latest dry-cleaning bill was $2 instead of $1.75. She contacts her dry cleaner, Vincenzo Zambrogio (Henry Armetta, whose mock-Italian accent for once comes across as funny instead of overbearing), and learns he’s had to raise his prices to cover the $7 per week “protection” money he’s being charged by racketeer “Harry the Lug” (Harold Huber). This just makes Hattie even angrier: she insists on being at Zambrogio’s business the next time Harry comes to collect, and in order to go up against the crooks she recruits an old friend of hers who used to be a crook himself: Frankie O’Fallon (Warren Hymer),who once tried to steal Hattie’s purse. Instead of pressing charges, she agreed to help O’Fallon find a legitimate job and bought him a taxi so he could make his living as a cabdriver. Now she wants O’Fallon to beat up Harry and drive him out of business — and when Harry beats up O’Fallon instead, Hattie determines to recruit a gang of her own, asking the district attorney (Forbes Murray) to round her up some crooks who have records but aren’t wanted for anything at the moment to become her own gang and take on the extortionists.
The Lady and the Mob is essentially a three-joke movie — the main joke is a woman of Hattie’s age and history delving into crime-fighting; the subsidiary joke is her fish-out-of-water inability to relate to the crooks she’s recruited or to get comfortable with their jargon (her bobbling the expression “take it on the lam” is one of the cuter bits of the film); and the third joke is Lila’s increasing exasperation with Hattie and the doubts she’s having about whether she should marry into a family with such a crazy matriarch in the first place. (This isn’t the first time Hattie’s antics have driven one of her son’s girlfriends away; early on in the film she reminisces about a previous one who came over as a houseguest and seemed really nice, then adds, “Funny thing, after that weekend we never saw her again.”) The script by the usual writing committee (George Bradshaw and Price Day, story; Richard Maibaum — later writer of pioneering spy movies, including the 1946 O.S.S. with Alan Ladd and even the adaptations of the first few James Bond films! — and Gertrude Purcell, screenplay) plows its way through to the predictable resolution, but this is one of those movies in which getting there is almost all the fun — and one particularly clever part of the movie is the spoof of the formula of Columbia’s then-number one director, Frank Capra (one of whose films, You Can’t Take It With You, is referenced via a movie poster on one of the street shots). The tradespeople being victimized by the racketeers are perfectly willing to keep paying and leave well enough alone — it’s Hattie who rallies them to resist with rhetoric from the Founding Fathers — and there’s also a bit of metafiction in the way Hattie and her gang trace the protection racket from low-ball Harry the Lug to his boss, Mr. George Watson (George Meeker), and then in turn to someone even higher up. “There’s always got to be someone higher up!” says Hattie, in a ferocious tone of voice that suggests she’s seen enough movies to know all the clichés herself — even of the one in which she appears as a character!
I picked out one of the more obscure films featuring Ida Lupino TCM had shown earlier in the day in their “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to her: The Lady and the Mob, a 1939 Columbia “B” whose cartoon-style main titles and the top-billed casting of Fay Bainter, as well as the cheery music, indicated this would be a comedy. It wasn’t drop-dead funny (let’s face it, so soon after watching The Cameraman it’s hard to imagine being especially impressed by a movie comedy whose star isn’t named Keaton or Chaplin — and no, I don’t mean Michael, Diane or Geraldine!) but it was consistently charming and amusing.
Lupino plays Lila Thorne, who previously to the start of the film has got herself engaged to Fred Leonard (Lee Bowman), the son of a wealthy widow who owns the bank in her small town, and has promised to visit her mother-in-law to-be to get to know her and get her to accept her as a worthy marriage partner for her son. When Lila arrives, she finds her fiancé’s mother, Hattie Leonard (Fay Bainter) incensed that her latest dry-cleaning bill was $2 instead of $1.75. She contacts her dry cleaner, Vincenzo Zambrogio (Henry Armetta, whose mock-Italian accent for once comes across as funny instead of overbearing), and learns he’s had to raise his prices to cover the $7 per week “protection” money he’s being charged by racketeer “Harry the Lug” (Harold Huber). This just makes Hattie even angrier: she insists on being at Zambrogio’s business the next time Harry comes to collect, and in order to go up against the crooks she recruits an old friend of hers who used to be a crook himself: Frankie O’Fallon (Warren Hymer),who once tried to steal Hattie’s purse. Instead of pressing charges, she agreed to help O’Fallon find a legitimate job and bought him a taxi so he could make his living as a cabdriver. Now she wants O’Fallon to beat up Harry and drive him out of business — and when Harry beats up O’Fallon instead, Hattie determines to recruit a gang of her own, asking the district attorney (Forbes Murray) to round her up some crooks who have records but aren’t wanted for anything at the moment to become her own gang and take on the extortionists.
The Lady and the Mob is essentially a three-joke movie — the main joke is a woman of Hattie’s age and history delving into crime-fighting; the subsidiary joke is her fish-out-of-water inability to relate to the crooks she’s recruited or to get comfortable with their jargon (her bobbling the expression “take it on the lam” is one of the cuter bits of the film); and the third joke is Lila’s increasing exasperation with Hattie and the doubts she’s having about whether she should marry into a family with such a crazy matriarch in the first place. (This isn’t the first time Hattie’s antics have driven one of her son’s girlfriends away; early on in the film she reminisces about a previous one who came over as a houseguest and seemed really nice, then adds, “Funny thing, after that weekend we never saw her again.”) The script by the usual writing committee (George Bradshaw and Price Day, story; Richard Maibaum — later writer of pioneering spy movies, including the 1946 O.S.S. with Alan Ladd and even the adaptations of the first few James Bond films! — and Gertrude Purcell, screenplay) plows its way through to the predictable resolution, but this is one of those movies in which getting there is almost all the fun — and one particularly clever part of the movie is the spoof of the formula of Columbia’s then-number one director, Frank Capra (one of whose films, You Can’t Take It With You, is referenced via a movie poster on one of the street shots). The tradespeople being victimized by the racketeers are perfectly willing to keep paying and leave well enough alone — it’s Hattie who rallies them to resist with rhetoric from the Founding Fathers — and there’s also a bit of metafiction in the way Hattie and her gang trace the protection racket from low-ball Harry the Lug to his boss, Mr. George Watson (George Meeker), and then in turn to someone even higher up. “There’s always got to be someone higher up!” says Hattie, in a ferocious tone of voice that suggests she’s seen enough movies to know all the clichés herself — even of the one in which she appears as a character!
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
The Cameraman (MGM, 1928)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Cameraman was a film I hadn’t seen in years, but it was as deliciously funny and moving as I remembered it. It was Buster Keaton’s first film at MGM, and he fought the studio like mad but got to make it his way — though it was still a silent film at a time when Keaton was desperate to strut his stuff in a talkie (the many verbal gags in the subtitles — which read less like normal silent-film titles and more like dialogue repartée in a sound comedy — indicate how eager he was to make a sound film, and how good he would have been at it if he’d been able to maintain control of himself and his career).
The print TCM was showing was quite a good one, taken from a newly discovered first-generation positive print from the MGM vaults — though, as the opening title explains, one scene (in which Keaton’s girlfriend at MGM News, played by Marceline Day, gives him the tip that a Tong War is about to take place in Chinatown) was missing from this positive print and had to be filled in from the earlier version of the film, discovered in France in 1968. (I’d seen this film twice in the 1970’s and never noticed anything unidiomatic about the titles — either the original English titles survived or the French translations were better than they usually were; in some cases in which silent films survived only in prints from non-English-speaking countries, the translators made such hash of the titles that the films barely made sense anymore.) As TCM’s annotator promised, the difference between the two sources was quite obvious: the French version was washed out, with ghostly white faces and a blurry background, while the 1991 discovery suffered from occasional nitrate deterioration but was otherwise beautiful, luminous, finely grained, richly detailed and showed off the quality of the original photography by Elgin Lessley (Keaton’s favorite cameraman) and Reggie Lanning (though it must also be said that the finer detail of this print shows that Keaton’s alcoholism was already beginning to take its toll on his looks, though not yet on his stunning physical coordination).
The film is a charming tale — though Keaton’s character is a bit more nebbishy than usual — and contains some of his greatest set pieces: Keaton frantically running up and down the staircase in the boarding house he lives in when he is expecting his girlfriend to call; Keaton attempting to change clothes in a public-pool dressing room the size of a phone booth and getting his clothes mixed up with those of a much larger man in the room with him (one wonders if this was the inspiration for the famous scene in the stateroom in A Night at the Opera, written by ex-Keaton gag man Al Boasberg); Keaton risking life and limb to get newsreel shots of the Tong War; and the finale in which the organ-grinder’s monkey Keaton has picked up continues grinding away at the camera and thereby shows Day that she was rescued from drowning not by her other boyfriend, but by Keaton. — 7/13/98
•••••
The movie at last night’s Organ Pavilion concert was a comedy classic: The Cameraman, the 1928 feature that was a turning point in the career of Buster Keaton for both good and ill. Just before it was made, Keaton’s producer, Joseph M. Schenck, had decided to dissolve the independent production company he and Keaton jointly owned, and arranged for Keaton to work at MGM, since Schenck’s brother Nicholas was president of the company. What Keaton didn’t realize — or maybe he did — was that he wouldn’t be working for his old mentor’s brother, since Nick Schenck ran MGM’s business affairs from a New York office but had nothing to do with actually making films; instead he ran smack into Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, the production chiefs at the studio, who intended to run it as a tight ship and had no use for quirky, independent talents like Keaton.
Thalberg assigned his brother-in-law, Lawrence Weingarten, to be Keaton’s producer, and comedy veteran Edward Sedgwick to be Keaton’s director — before that, Keaton had usually directed himself, though sometimes others (usually one or two of his gag writers) had received director credit on his films — and though eventually the studio officials would take over Keaton’s career and put him through professional grief that, combined with the breakdown of his marriage (to Joseph Schenck’s sister-in-law, Natalie Talmadge), activated his latent alcoholism, for The Cameraman MGM let Keaton (mostly) be Keaton and allowed him to make his last masterpiece.
The Cameraman stars Keaton as “Buster,” a tintype cameraman who’s barely making a living on the streets of New York — in the opening scene, his attempt to photograph a rare paying customer gets interrupted by a parade honoring New York’s then-mayor, Jimmy Walker — who happens to run into Sally (Marceline Day), the receptionist at MGM’s newsreel office. He’s immediately infatuated with her, and he determines to become a freelance newsreel cameraman himself in order to impress her. Of course, he’s got a rival, star cameraman Stagg (Harold Goodwin) — indeed, when Stagg walks in with his state-of-the-art camera while Buster has been flirting with Sally, there’s a marvelous little scene in which he seems as turned on by the camera as the girl.
Buster takes his last savings out of his bank to buy an ancient camera from a pawnshop and sets out to shoot whatever he can find to make the grade as a newsreel cinematographer (the writing committee — Clyde Bruckman, Lew Lipton and an uncredited Byron Morgan, story; Richard Schayer, continuity; Joe Farnham, titles; and an uncredited Al Boasberg, gags — never bothers to explain how he covers the added expense of buying film), and in a marvelously surrealistic (a word Keaton hated when used to describe his work) sequence his film comes back weirdly framed and double-, triple- and sometimes quadruple-exposed, including one scene in which a battleship actually seems to be sailing up a New York City street on its way to Times Square.
Buster tries to get to a warehouse fire but gets tongue-tied trying to ask a policeman (Harry Gribbon) for directions — one of many sequences in The Cameraman that’s funny as it stands but would have been even funnier in a sound film (unlike Charlie Chaplin, Keaton loved the idea of sound films and was eager to start making them, but by the time he did the “suits” at MGM had taken over his career completely and he wasn’t able to explore the creative uses of sound the way he’d been able to with the capabilities of silent film in the 1920’s) — and he goes to Yankee Stadium and finds it empty. “Aren’t the Yankees playing today?” he asks the groundskeeper. “Sure … in St. Louis!” is the reply. In one of the film’s most beautiful scenes, Buster takes the pitcher’s mound and pantomimes a ballgame, first from the point of view of the pitcher trying to pick off the base runners, then as a batter hitting a home run and triumphantly rounding the bases to win. (This scene was copied in Pastime, a mediocre baseball movie from 1991 that was an obvious attempt to suck off the commercial success of Field of Dreams.)
Buster finally gets Sally to take his phone number, and she promises to call — setting up a scene that transforms romantic longing into frantic comedy as Buster, who lives in a seedy rooming house (he practically tears out the paper-thin walls of his room when his piggy bank, on which he’s counting to finance his date, falls through a crack he’s made with a hammer trying to open the thing) with a long staircase between him and the building’s one phone, goes into hysterics (in both senses) whenever a call comes in, sometimes so excited he overshoots his mark and ends up either on the building’s roof or its basement. Keaton, ever the gadget lover, shot this scene with an elevator crane — a piece of equipment that allowed the camera to move up and down a multi-story building set, thereby following the action.
The elevator crane had been invented by director F. W. Murnau and cinematographer Karl Freund for the 1924 German film The Last Laugh, which was a big enough international hit that Keaton may well have seen it and copied the idea; 32 years after The Cameraman, Jerry Lewis used an elevator crane to follow himself around the multi-story department-store set of The Errand Boy — and at least one critic I’ve read falsely credited Lewis with being the first comedian to use the elevator crane. (This wasn’t the first time others had been credited with Keaton’s innovations; Fred Astaire’s dance scene to “You’re All the World to Me” in Royal Wedding — in which he literally dances up the wall, onto the ceiling and then down again, apparently defying gravity — and the sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the flight attendant on the moonship walks up the wall and turns herself upside down to bring space scientist Heywood Floyd [William Sylvester] his meal, were both filmed with a technique Keaton invented for the submarine scenes at the end of his 1924 film The Navigator: a revolving set with a stationary camera bolted to it so the camera and the set always stayed in the same relative position, while the actors — in fact always at the bottom of the construction, whatever position it was in — appeared to defy gravity.)
When they go out, they go to the Municipal Plunge public swimming pool at Coney Island, and Buster gets trapped in a tiny dressing room with a corpulent man (uncredited but played by Ed Brophy, who’d be a popular character actor for decades afterwards — he acted again with Keaton as his drill sergeant in the 1930 World War I film Doughboys, that time getting screen credit) in a scene written by Keaton gagman Al Boasberg, who seven years later would again get laughs from too many people in too small a space when he wrote the stateroom scene for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. He ends up in a suit several sizes too big for him, while yet a third person (Vernon Dent, later a comic foil for the Three Stooges in many of their films) ends up with Keaton’s swimsuit and asks, “Is this a suit — or a bib?” Trying to impress Sally by showing off a dive, Buster loses his oversized suit in the water and there’s a surprisingly racy sequence in which he’s naked and can’t get out of the pool without revealing himself in the altogether. (He gets out of it by stealing part of a suit worn by a ridiculously overdressed woman, who screams, “Help! I’ve been robbed!”) But Sally drives home with someone else and Buster is relegated to the rumble seat of their car, where he’s drenched by a pouring rainstorm on their way home.
Still feeling sorry for him, and also more or less in love, Sally gives Buster a tip that two Chinese gangs are plotting a tong war and the Chinese new year’s celebrations are going to have a lot more than just fireworks this year. Buster arrives in Chinatown after a run-in with an organ grinder, who accuses Buster of killing his monkey and orders him to pay him for the animal. The monkey revives and follows Buster to Chinatown, where Buster risks his life and gets some incredible footage — at one point rather gilding his lily by slipping a knife into the hand of one of the tong warriors he’s shooting to make his footage look that much more thrilling. Only when he gets back to the MGM newsreel office, someone has taken the film magazine out of his camera and all that’s left is a tiny scrap of raw stock. (“Pretty short war,” says the MGM newsreel editor, played by Sidney Bracey in a role that was probably a relief to him if only because he got to play an authority figure instead of his usual valet.) Buster assumes that he forgot to load the camera with film, and he’s banned from the MGM newsreel office.
The next day he takes his camera to the Westport regatta, where his rival Stagg is taking Sally out in a speedboat. Attempting to show Sally how well he can drive the boat, Stagg takes a hazardous turn and capsizes it, swimming to safety himself but leaving Sally to drown. Buster reaches Sally in a rowboat he’s been using to film the regatta, and saves her — but when he brings her to shore she’s unconscious, and while he’s off at a drugstore getting substances to revive her Stagg comes along, takes her in his arms as she comes to, and pretends he rescued her. Buster goes back to his old trade as a tintyper — tintypes were hopelessly old-fashioned even in 1928 but his tintype camera itself has an oddly futuristic look, like a ray gun in a cheap 1950’s sci-fi movie — but he leaves behind his remaining footage at the MGM newsreel office, saying they can use it for free. It turns out to contain the tong war and also the scene of Sally’s rescue — the monkey, used to turning the crank of his old master’s barrel-organ, had cranked the camera and caught the whole thing, proving to Sally that it was Buster and not Stagg that saved her. The editor declares Buster’s (and the monkey’s) footage the best he’s ever seen, and Sally seeks out Buster and says he’s going to be honored — and just then the triumphal parade welcoming Charles Lindbergh (who’s seen in real newsreel footage of the event) starts up and Buster waves to the crowd, thinking the parade’s for him.
The Cameraman is a marvelous film — before it started Dennis James, who played the live organ accompaniment, read a contemporary review from Motion Picture magazine that said it wasn’t as good as The General (most modern critics and film buffs would agree, but that wasn’t the critical consensus in 1926; one of Keaton’s biographers quoted a New York Herald-Tribune review of The General that denounced the film and said some of the gags were in “gruesomely bad taste”) but was still very funny; this critic also misunderstood Marceline Day’s role and called her a stenographer (she’s a receptionist) — though it’s a peculiar item in the Keaton canon because it’s one of the few times this usually unsentimental comedian actually went for pathos, big-time.
The Cameraman may be the most openly Chaplinesque film of Keaton’s career — one could easily imagine Chaplin in the lead role as a lovesick cameraman who’s competing for his love object’s attentions with a hunkier and/or richer rival, whereas one can’t possibly imagine Chaplin in Sherlock, Jr. or The General — though it’s a testament to Keaton’s skill as both actor and editor (while the Russian directors were experimenting with closeups of an utterly impassive actor cut next to a pretty girl, a bowl of soup or a dying baby and noting that audiences read the scene and thought the actor was registering the emotions the viewers were actually supplying themselves, Keaton was — perhaps unwittingly — doing the same thing in his comedies) that he’s able within the limits of his unchanging “great stone face” expression to convey the same lovelorn emotions Chaplin used his full panoply of facial tics to get across.
The Cameraman even casts Keaton at the bottom of society, or close to it; like Chaplin in The Kid, Keaton in The Cameraman isn’t homeless but lives in a really cheap building — whereas in a lot of his earlier films Keaton had cast himself as an upper-class twit, as if he felt that the way to differentiate himself from Chaplin was to play the opposite end of the socioeconomic scale. What’s remarkable about The Cameraman is not only the individual gag scenes but the overall conception — though Dennis James accompanied it expertly it sometimes seemed less like a silent film than a talkie with the sound turned off, and as good as Joe Farnham’s joke titles were one really missed sound in some of the characters’ repartée — and also Keaton’s continuing fascination with the mechanics of film.
In Sherlock, Jr. he’d played a movie projectionist who dreams himself into the film he’s showing; here Keaton builds some of his best laughs out of the mechanics of making films, and though he’s usually not considered much of a satirist his treatment of the tong war is a marvelously understated commentary on how the media affect the events they cover and use trickery to make them seem even more exciting than they are. One can regret the ethnic stereotyping that mars this film — not only the tong war but also the Jewish name on the pawnbroker’s shop where Keaton buys his camera and the mock-Italian dialect from the organ grinder (“Hey! You kill-a da monk!” reads the title when the organ grinder demands payment from Keaton for his presumably dead monkey) — but that’s a minor blemish on a film that is not only funny as all get-out but was ripped off for years by other filmmakers (including an MGM crew 10 years later for Too Hot to Handle, with Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon as rival newsreel cameramen not above faking footage to get more powerful stories before the public).
Indeed, The Cameraman for years was regarded as MGM’s training film for aspiring comedians; every new comedy act MGM signed was made to sit through it as an example of what the studio wanted from them — including the Marx Brothers, which particularly perplexed Groucho because he couldn’t help but wonder what the hell he was expected to learn from watching a comic genius whose style was so different from his own! — 8/25/09
The Cameraman was a film I hadn’t seen in years, but it was as deliciously funny and moving as I remembered it. It was Buster Keaton’s first film at MGM, and he fought the studio like mad but got to make it his way — though it was still a silent film at a time when Keaton was desperate to strut his stuff in a talkie (the many verbal gags in the subtitles — which read less like normal silent-film titles and more like dialogue repartée in a sound comedy — indicate how eager he was to make a sound film, and how good he would have been at it if he’d been able to maintain control of himself and his career).
The print TCM was showing was quite a good one, taken from a newly discovered first-generation positive print from the MGM vaults — though, as the opening title explains, one scene (in which Keaton’s girlfriend at MGM News, played by Marceline Day, gives him the tip that a Tong War is about to take place in Chinatown) was missing from this positive print and had to be filled in from the earlier version of the film, discovered in France in 1968. (I’d seen this film twice in the 1970’s and never noticed anything unidiomatic about the titles — either the original English titles survived or the French translations were better than they usually were; in some cases in which silent films survived only in prints from non-English-speaking countries, the translators made such hash of the titles that the films barely made sense anymore.) As TCM’s annotator promised, the difference between the two sources was quite obvious: the French version was washed out, with ghostly white faces and a blurry background, while the 1991 discovery suffered from occasional nitrate deterioration but was otherwise beautiful, luminous, finely grained, richly detailed and showed off the quality of the original photography by Elgin Lessley (Keaton’s favorite cameraman) and Reggie Lanning (though it must also be said that the finer detail of this print shows that Keaton’s alcoholism was already beginning to take its toll on his looks, though not yet on his stunning physical coordination).
The film is a charming tale — though Keaton’s character is a bit more nebbishy than usual — and contains some of his greatest set pieces: Keaton frantically running up and down the staircase in the boarding house he lives in when he is expecting his girlfriend to call; Keaton attempting to change clothes in a public-pool dressing room the size of a phone booth and getting his clothes mixed up with those of a much larger man in the room with him (one wonders if this was the inspiration for the famous scene in the stateroom in A Night at the Opera, written by ex-Keaton gag man Al Boasberg); Keaton risking life and limb to get newsreel shots of the Tong War; and the finale in which the organ-grinder’s monkey Keaton has picked up continues grinding away at the camera and thereby shows Day that she was rescued from drowning not by her other boyfriend, but by Keaton. — 7/13/98
•••••
The movie at last night’s Organ Pavilion concert was a comedy classic: The Cameraman, the 1928 feature that was a turning point in the career of Buster Keaton for both good and ill. Just before it was made, Keaton’s producer, Joseph M. Schenck, had decided to dissolve the independent production company he and Keaton jointly owned, and arranged for Keaton to work at MGM, since Schenck’s brother Nicholas was president of the company. What Keaton didn’t realize — or maybe he did — was that he wouldn’t be working for his old mentor’s brother, since Nick Schenck ran MGM’s business affairs from a New York office but had nothing to do with actually making films; instead he ran smack into Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, the production chiefs at the studio, who intended to run it as a tight ship and had no use for quirky, independent talents like Keaton.
Thalberg assigned his brother-in-law, Lawrence Weingarten, to be Keaton’s producer, and comedy veteran Edward Sedgwick to be Keaton’s director — before that, Keaton had usually directed himself, though sometimes others (usually one or two of his gag writers) had received director credit on his films — and though eventually the studio officials would take over Keaton’s career and put him through professional grief that, combined with the breakdown of his marriage (to Joseph Schenck’s sister-in-law, Natalie Talmadge), activated his latent alcoholism, for The Cameraman MGM let Keaton (mostly) be Keaton and allowed him to make his last masterpiece.
The Cameraman stars Keaton as “Buster,” a tintype cameraman who’s barely making a living on the streets of New York — in the opening scene, his attempt to photograph a rare paying customer gets interrupted by a parade honoring New York’s then-mayor, Jimmy Walker — who happens to run into Sally (Marceline Day), the receptionist at MGM’s newsreel office. He’s immediately infatuated with her, and he determines to become a freelance newsreel cameraman himself in order to impress her. Of course, he’s got a rival, star cameraman Stagg (Harold Goodwin) — indeed, when Stagg walks in with his state-of-the-art camera while Buster has been flirting with Sally, there’s a marvelous little scene in which he seems as turned on by the camera as the girl.
Buster takes his last savings out of his bank to buy an ancient camera from a pawnshop and sets out to shoot whatever he can find to make the grade as a newsreel cinematographer (the writing committee — Clyde Bruckman, Lew Lipton and an uncredited Byron Morgan, story; Richard Schayer, continuity; Joe Farnham, titles; and an uncredited Al Boasberg, gags — never bothers to explain how he covers the added expense of buying film), and in a marvelously surrealistic (a word Keaton hated when used to describe his work) sequence his film comes back weirdly framed and double-, triple- and sometimes quadruple-exposed, including one scene in which a battleship actually seems to be sailing up a New York City street on its way to Times Square.
Buster tries to get to a warehouse fire but gets tongue-tied trying to ask a policeman (Harry Gribbon) for directions — one of many sequences in The Cameraman that’s funny as it stands but would have been even funnier in a sound film (unlike Charlie Chaplin, Keaton loved the idea of sound films and was eager to start making them, but by the time he did the “suits” at MGM had taken over his career completely and he wasn’t able to explore the creative uses of sound the way he’d been able to with the capabilities of silent film in the 1920’s) — and he goes to Yankee Stadium and finds it empty. “Aren’t the Yankees playing today?” he asks the groundskeeper. “Sure … in St. Louis!” is the reply. In one of the film’s most beautiful scenes, Buster takes the pitcher’s mound and pantomimes a ballgame, first from the point of view of the pitcher trying to pick off the base runners, then as a batter hitting a home run and triumphantly rounding the bases to win. (This scene was copied in Pastime, a mediocre baseball movie from 1991 that was an obvious attempt to suck off the commercial success of Field of Dreams.)
Buster finally gets Sally to take his phone number, and she promises to call — setting up a scene that transforms romantic longing into frantic comedy as Buster, who lives in a seedy rooming house (he practically tears out the paper-thin walls of his room when his piggy bank, on which he’s counting to finance his date, falls through a crack he’s made with a hammer trying to open the thing) with a long staircase between him and the building’s one phone, goes into hysterics (in both senses) whenever a call comes in, sometimes so excited he overshoots his mark and ends up either on the building’s roof or its basement. Keaton, ever the gadget lover, shot this scene with an elevator crane — a piece of equipment that allowed the camera to move up and down a multi-story building set, thereby following the action.
The elevator crane had been invented by director F. W. Murnau and cinematographer Karl Freund for the 1924 German film The Last Laugh, which was a big enough international hit that Keaton may well have seen it and copied the idea; 32 years after The Cameraman, Jerry Lewis used an elevator crane to follow himself around the multi-story department-store set of The Errand Boy — and at least one critic I’ve read falsely credited Lewis with being the first comedian to use the elevator crane. (This wasn’t the first time others had been credited with Keaton’s innovations; Fred Astaire’s dance scene to “You’re All the World to Me” in Royal Wedding — in which he literally dances up the wall, onto the ceiling and then down again, apparently defying gravity — and the sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the flight attendant on the moonship walks up the wall and turns herself upside down to bring space scientist Heywood Floyd [William Sylvester] his meal, were both filmed with a technique Keaton invented for the submarine scenes at the end of his 1924 film The Navigator: a revolving set with a stationary camera bolted to it so the camera and the set always stayed in the same relative position, while the actors — in fact always at the bottom of the construction, whatever position it was in — appeared to defy gravity.)
When they go out, they go to the Municipal Plunge public swimming pool at Coney Island, and Buster gets trapped in a tiny dressing room with a corpulent man (uncredited but played by Ed Brophy, who’d be a popular character actor for decades afterwards — he acted again with Keaton as his drill sergeant in the 1930 World War I film Doughboys, that time getting screen credit) in a scene written by Keaton gagman Al Boasberg, who seven years later would again get laughs from too many people in too small a space when he wrote the stateroom scene for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. He ends up in a suit several sizes too big for him, while yet a third person (Vernon Dent, later a comic foil for the Three Stooges in many of their films) ends up with Keaton’s swimsuit and asks, “Is this a suit — or a bib?” Trying to impress Sally by showing off a dive, Buster loses his oversized suit in the water and there’s a surprisingly racy sequence in which he’s naked and can’t get out of the pool without revealing himself in the altogether. (He gets out of it by stealing part of a suit worn by a ridiculously overdressed woman, who screams, “Help! I’ve been robbed!”) But Sally drives home with someone else and Buster is relegated to the rumble seat of their car, where he’s drenched by a pouring rainstorm on their way home.
Still feeling sorry for him, and also more or less in love, Sally gives Buster a tip that two Chinese gangs are plotting a tong war and the Chinese new year’s celebrations are going to have a lot more than just fireworks this year. Buster arrives in Chinatown after a run-in with an organ grinder, who accuses Buster of killing his monkey and orders him to pay him for the animal. The monkey revives and follows Buster to Chinatown, where Buster risks his life and gets some incredible footage — at one point rather gilding his lily by slipping a knife into the hand of one of the tong warriors he’s shooting to make his footage look that much more thrilling. Only when he gets back to the MGM newsreel office, someone has taken the film magazine out of his camera and all that’s left is a tiny scrap of raw stock. (“Pretty short war,” says the MGM newsreel editor, played by Sidney Bracey in a role that was probably a relief to him if only because he got to play an authority figure instead of his usual valet.) Buster assumes that he forgot to load the camera with film, and he’s banned from the MGM newsreel office.
The next day he takes his camera to the Westport regatta, where his rival Stagg is taking Sally out in a speedboat. Attempting to show Sally how well he can drive the boat, Stagg takes a hazardous turn and capsizes it, swimming to safety himself but leaving Sally to drown. Buster reaches Sally in a rowboat he’s been using to film the regatta, and saves her — but when he brings her to shore she’s unconscious, and while he’s off at a drugstore getting substances to revive her Stagg comes along, takes her in his arms as she comes to, and pretends he rescued her. Buster goes back to his old trade as a tintyper — tintypes were hopelessly old-fashioned even in 1928 but his tintype camera itself has an oddly futuristic look, like a ray gun in a cheap 1950’s sci-fi movie — but he leaves behind his remaining footage at the MGM newsreel office, saying they can use it for free. It turns out to contain the tong war and also the scene of Sally’s rescue — the monkey, used to turning the crank of his old master’s barrel-organ, had cranked the camera and caught the whole thing, proving to Sally that it was Buster and not Stagg that saved her. The editor declares Buster’s (and the monkey’s) footage the best he’s ever seen, and Sally seeks out Buster and says he’s going to be honored — and just then the triumphal parade welcoming Charles Lindbergh (who’s seen in real newsreel footage of the event) starts up and Buster waves to the crowd, thinking the parade’s for him.
The Cameraman is a marvelous film — before it started Dennis James, who played the live organ accompaniment, read a contemporary review from Motion Picture magazine that said it wasn’t as good as The General (most modern critics and film buffs would agree, but that wasn’t the critical consensus in 1926; one of Keaton’s biographers quoted a New York Herald-Tribune review of The General that denounced the film and said some of the gags were in “gruesomely bad taste”) but was still very funny; this critic also misunderstood Marceline Day’s role and called her a stenographer (she’s a receptionist) — though it’s a peculiar item in the Keaton canon because it’s one of the few times this usually unsentimental comedian actually went for pathos, big-time.
The Cameraman may be the most openly Chaplinesque film of Keaton’s career — one could easily imagine Chaplin in the lead role as a lovesick cameraman who’s competing for his love object’s attentions with a hunkier and/or richer rival, whereas one can’t possibly imagine Chaplin in Sherlock, Jr. or The General — though it’s a testament to Keaton’s skill as both actor and editor (while the Russian directors were experimenting with closeups of an utterly impassive actor cut next to a pretty girl, a bowl of soup or a dying baby and noting that audiences read the scene and thought the actor was registering the emotions the viewers were actually supplying themselves, Keaton was — perhaps unwittingly — doing the same thing in his comedies) that he’s able within the limits of his unchanging “great stone face” expression to convey the same lovelorn emotions Chaplin used his full panoply of facial tics to get across.
The Cameraman even casts Keaton at the bottom of society, or close to it; like Chaplin in The Kid, Keaton in The Cameraman isn’t homeless but lives in a really cheap building — whereas in a lot of his earlier films Keaton had cast himself as an upper-class twit, as if he felt that the way to differentiate himself from Chaplin was to play the opposite end of the socioeconomic scale. What’s remarkable about The Cameraman is not only the individual gag scenes but the overall conception — though Dennis James accompanied it expertly it sometimes seemed less like a silent film than a talkie with the sound turned off, and as good as Joe Farnham’s joke titles were one really missed sound in some of the characters’ repartée — and also Keaton’s continuing fascination with the mechanics of film.
In Sherlock, Jr. he’d played a movie projectionist who dreams himself into the film he’s showing; here Keaton builds some of his best laughs out of the mechanics of making films, and though he’s usually not considered much of a satirist his treatment of the tong war is a marvelously understated commentary on how the media affect the events they cover and use trickery to make them seem even more exciting than they are. One can regret the ethnic stereotyping that mars this film — not only the tong war but also the Jewish name on the pawnbroker’s shop where Keaton buys his camera and the mock-Italian dialect from the organ grinder (“Hey! You kill-a da monk!” reads the title when the organ grinder demands payment from Keaton for his presumably dead monkey) — but that’s a minor blemish on a film that is not only funny as all get-out but was ripped off for years by other filmmakers (including an MGM crew 10 years later for Too Hot to Handle, with Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon as rival newsreel cameramen not above faking footage to get more powerful stories before the public).
Indeed, The Cameraman for years was regarded as MGM’s training film for aspiring comedians; every new comedy act MGM signed was made to sit through it as an example of what the studio wanted from them — including the Marx Brothers, which particularly perplexed Groucho because he couldn’t help but wonder what the hell he was expected to learn from watching a comic genius whose style was so different from his own! — 8/25/09
Virtue (Columbia, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked was Virtue, fifth and last in that interesting sequence of early-1930’s “B”’s from Columbia TCM showed on July 10 (the others were The Good Bad Girl, Attorney for the Defense, The Final Edition and the awesome Three Wise Girls). Virtue had some of the same virtues (pardon the pun) of Three Wise Girls: an excellent star performance in the female lead by an actress who would go on to mega-stardom elsewhere, Carole Lombard (and by a grim irony would also, like Three Wise Girls star Jean Harlow, die tragically young!); a salty “pre-Code” script by Robert Riskin; a refreshing honesty in its treatment of human relationships rare in films then or now; and a few abrupt turns to barely credible melodrama as the film started creeping to a close and the plot strands needed to be resolved — but though the twists and turns on the way to the end weakened the film, they certainly didn’t invalidate it completely and what was left was a quite remarkable piece of work.
Also like Three Wise Girls, Virtue had a director who’s not particularly respected — Edward Buzzell, whose best known works are two of the Marx Brothers’ later (and lesser) films, At the Circus and Go West — and in a way this is really a Schreiber movie since it’s Riskin’s sensibility that rules, not Buzzell’s. It also had in common with the last film we watched, Big City, that its male lead was a cabdriver, but it’s a far superior movie in that it stays on one main plot line throughout and doesn’t have the jarring and ill-managed genre shifts of Big City. It’s also nowhere near as sentimental; anyone coming to this film knowing Riskin from his work for Frank Capra will be astonished at how hard and tough his sensibility could be before he hooked up with the Capra-corn man (though Capra not only helped Riskin to an Academy Award and enduring fame, he probably helped keep Riskin’s career going through the wrenching adjustments after the Legion of Decency came in in 1934 and Production Code enforcement was toughened to a level that films like Three Wise Girls and Virtue could no longer be made in the U.S.).
Virtue opens with Mae (Carole Lombard), a hard woman of apparent ill repute, being escorted by a police officer onto a train from New York to Danbury, Connecticut. “Pretty soft for you, sister, getting the city to pay your fare to Danbury,” says the cop. “Pretty soft for the city I don’t live in Australia,” Mae fires back. It turns out she’s being thrown out of New York for moral offenses that don’t get specified until well into the running time, and that she’s determined not to leave; even before the train pulls out of the station, she’s off of it, hiding out in the home of her similarly employed (and similarly transgressive) friend Lil (Mayo Methot, Humphrey Bogart’s third wife — and given that she’s playing here a serious version of the tough, no-nonsense salty broad Lauren Bacall later kidded, it’s easy enough to see what attracted him to her) and ultimately landing a job in a café alongside Gert Hanlon (Shirley Gray),
Meanwhile the male lead, cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O’Brien, another actor from this film who became a major star elsewhere), is introduced having an argument with a friend and co-worker, Frank (Ward Bond). Frank insists that the girl he’s just become engaged to is decent — different from all the other girls both he and Jimmy have been dating — and Jimmy insists that all women are alike, all unscrupulous creatures who live just to exploit men. Needless to say, Jimmy and Mae meet (when she gets into his cab and then sneaks out again, stiffing him for the fare) and ultimately start dating; eventually they get married, only in the meantime the cops find out about Mae still being in New York (a film crew shooting some scenes of dignitaries visiting the city offices at the same time Jimmy and Mae were leaving their civil wedding caught the couple and “outed” Mae) and go to see her to arrest her. When Jimmy naturally wants to know what they’re going to arrest her for, they say, “The same thing she did to you — picking men up off the street.” (That’s as much of a clue as we get to why Mae was being thrown out of town in the opening scene, but that’s really all we need.)
Jimmy shows the cops their marriage license and gets them to back off, but his own trust in her is undermined big-time and for much of the rest of the movie he’s suspicious of her motives, and in particular he closely questions her about what she’s doing with their money and whether she’s been tapping their savings account — which is significant plot-wise because Jimmy has an option to buy half-interest in a gas station as soon as he can raise $500. He’s almost there when Gert shows up and says she’s desperately ill and needs $200 for an operation immediately, and when Mae says no Gert grabs a bottle of poison, threatens to drink it, collapses to the floor outside Mae’s apartment and gets the money out of her. Then she and Jimmy have Frank over for dinner, and Frank reveals that Gert scammed him similarly — and with Jimmy needing all their money immediately to pay for the gas station, Mae determines to find Gert and get her money back. It turns out that Gert pulled the scam in association with Toots O’Neil (Jack LaRue), a thoroughly nasty piece of work who’s also the boyfriend of Mae’s old roommate Lil — he’s cheating on Lil with Gert while also pulling scams with her — and when Gert gets an attack of conscience and wants them to give Mae back her money, Toots kills her and sets Mae up to take the fall.Jimmy, who’s been following his wife around because he’s suspicious of her, actually saw a man in Gert’s apartment the night she was killed (the police theory is that she and Mae were the only people there that night), but when he attempts to visit Mae in jail with the information that could free her, she’s so hurt that she refuses to see him.
Eventually it all ends happily — the cops figure out who really killed Gert and arrest Toots, Mae buys the half a gas station for Jimmy and herself, and there’s a cute reconciliation scene there — but in the meantime the eccentrically titled Virtue has been quite a ride, most powerful in the simple scenes in which lack of money and lack of trust both take their toll on Jimmy’s and Mae’s relationship and they struggle along to stay together in a series of powerfully intense, well-written scenes that make them come across as real people in a difficult situation, not the stick-figures of most movies. Virtue is a tough, no-nonsense story about people barely hanging on in the proletariat, and like Three Wise Girls, it makes one wonder just how many other intensely moving, emotional and highly watchable films like this are moldering in Columbia’s vaults!
The film I picked was Virtue, fifth and last in that interesting sequence of early-1930’s “B”’s from Columbia TCM showed on July 10 (the others were The Good Bad Girl, Attorney for the Defense, The Final Edition and the awesome Three Wise Girls). Virtue had some of the same virtues (pardon the pun) of Three Wise Girls: an excellent star performance in the female lead by an actress who would go on to mega-stardom elsewhere, Carole Lombard (and by a grim irony would also, like Three Wise Girls star Jean Harlow, die tragically young!); a salty “pre-Code” script by Robert Riskin; a refreshing honesty in its treatment of human relationships rare in films then or now; and a few abrupt turns to barely credible melodrama as the film started creeping to a close and the plot strands needed to be resolved — but though the twists and turns on the way to the end weakened the film, they certainly didn’t invalidate it completely and what was left was a quite remarkable piece of work.
Also like Three Wise Girls, Virtue had a director who’s not particularly respected — Edward Buzzell, whose best known works are two of the Marx Brothers’ later (and lesser) films, At the Circus and Go West — and in a way this is really a Schreiber movie since it’s Riskin’s sensibility that rules, not Buzzell’s. It also had in common with the last film we watched, Big City, that its male lead was a cabdriver, but it’s a far superior movie in that it stays on one main plot line throughout and doesn’t have the jarring and ill-managed genre shifts of Big City. It’s also nowhere near as sentimental; anyone coming to this film knowing Riskin from his work for Frank Capra will be astonished at how hard and tough his sensibility could be before he hooked up with the Capra-corn man (though Capra not only helped Riskin to an Academy Award and enduring fame, he probably helped keep Riskin’s career going through the wrenching adjustments after the Legion of Decency came in in 1934 and Production Code enforcement was toughened to a level that films like Three Wise Girls and Virtue could no longer be made in the U.S.).
Virtue opens with Mae (Carole Lombard), a hard woman of apparent ill repute, being escorted by a police officer onto a train from New York to Danbury, Connecticut. “Pretty soft for you, sister, getting the city to pay your fare to Danbury,” says the cop. “Pretty soft for the city I don’t live in Australia,” Mae fires back. It turns out she’s being thrown out of New York for moral offenses that don’t get specified until well into the running time, and that she’s determined not to leave; even before the train pulls out of the station, she’s off of it, hiding out in the home of her similarly employed (and similarly transgressive) friend Lil (Mayo Methot, Humphrey Bogart’s third wife — and given that she’s playing here a serious version of the tough, no-nonsense salty broad Lauren Bacall later kidded, it’s easy enough to see what attracted him to her) and ultimately landing a job in a café alongside Gert Hanlon (Shirley Gray),
Meanwhile the male lead, cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O’Brien, another actor from this film who became a major star elsewhere), is introduced having an argument with a friend and co-worker, Frank (Ward Bond). Frank insists that the girl he’s just become engaged to is decent — different from all the other girls both he and Jimmy have been dating — and Jimmy insists that all women are alike, all unscrupulous creatures who live just to exploit men. Needless to say, Jimmy and Mae meet (when she gets into his cab and then sneaks out again, stiffing him for the fare) and ultimately start dating; eventually they get married, only in the meantime the cops find out about Mae still being in New York (a film crew shooting some scenes of dignitaries visiting the city offices at the same time Jimmy and Mae were leaving their civil wedding caught the couple and “outed” Mae) and go to see her to arrest her. When Jimmy naturally wants to know what they’re going to arrest her for, they say, “The same thing she did to you — picking men up off the street.” (That’s as much of a clue as we get to why Mae was being thrown out of town in the opening scene, but that’s really all we need.)
Jimmy shows the cops their marriage license and gets them to back off, but his own trust in her is undermined big-time and for much of the rest of the movie he’s suspicious of her motives, and in particular he closely questions her about what she’s doing with their money and whether she’s been tapping their savings account — which is significant plot-wise because Jimmy has an option to buy half-interest in a gas station as soon as he can raise $500. He’s almost there when Gert shows up and says she’s desperately ill and needs $200 for an operation immediately, and when Mae says no Gert grabs a bottle of poison, threatens to drink it, collapses to the floor outside Mae’s apartment and gets the money out of her. Then she and Jimmy have Frank over for dinner, and Frank reveals that Gert scammed him similarly — and with Jimmy needing all their money immediately to pay for the gas station, Mae determines to find Gert and get her money back. It turns out that Gert pulled the scam in association with Toots O’Neil (Jack LaRue), a thoroughly nasty piece of work who’s also the boyfriend of Mae’s old roommate Lil — he’s cheating on Lil with Gert while also pulling scams with her — and when Gert gets an attack of conscience and wants them to give Mae back her money, Toots kills her and sets Mae up to take the fall.Jimmy, who’s been following his wife around because he’s suspicious of her, actually saw a man in Gert’s apartment the night she was killed (the police theory is that she and Mae were the only people there that night), but when he attempts to visit Mae in jail with the information that could free her, she’s so hurt that she refuses to see him.
Eventually it all ends happily — the cops figure out who really killed Gert and arrest Toots, Mae buys the half a gas station for Jimmy and herself, and there’s a cute reconciliation scene there — but in the meantime the eccentrically titled Virtue has been quite a ride, most powerful in the simple scenes in which lack of money and lack of trust both take their toll on Jimmy’s and Mae’s relationship and they struggle along to stay together in a series of powerfully intense, well-written scenes that make them come across as real people in a difficult situation, not the stick-figures of most movies. Virtue is a tough, no-nonsense story about people barely hanging on in the proletariat, and like Three Wise Girls, it makes one wonder just how many other intensely moving, emotional and highly watchable films like this are moldering in Columbia’s vaults!
Manhandled (Pine-Thomas/Paramount, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was Manhandled, a 1949 film noir wanna-be (film gris, as I like to call such things) from Paramount whose title makes no sense in terms of its plot — it seems that Paramount just had the title lying around from a 1924 silent with Gloria Swanson as a department-store clerk (she actually took a job clerking at a department store to prepare for the role; she intended to stay there three weeks but just after lunch break on her first day, word went out across the shop floor, “Gloria Swanson’s in the store!,” and she was “outed” all too quickly) and stuck it on this movie on the theory that it would bring more customers into the theatres than The Man Who Stole a Dream (the working title, and the name of the novel by L. S. Goldsmith on which it was based) or Betrayal (which would actually have made more sense than Manhandled — no one actually gets manhandled during the course of this movie — but would still have left audiences wondering who betrayed whom), the other titles they considered sticking on it.
Directed by Lewis R. Foster (not exactly one of the names to conjure with in the history of Hollywood’s auteurs) from a script by himself and Whitman Chambers (author of the source stories for the 1930’s independent thrillers Murder on the Campus and the awesome Sensation Hunters), Manhandled is a movie pieced together, Frankenstein-style, from bits and pieces of other, better movies. The “star” is Sterling Hayden, playing an insurance investigator and playing him in a relentlessly overbearing manner (frankly, Hayden was not to the hero manner born; his best films — The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Dr. Strangelove — cast him as villains), but the reason I put “star” in quotes is that he doesn’t appear at all until half an hour into a 97-minute movie.
The film opens with what turns out to be a best scene: a figure of ambiguous gender (it’s obviously a person, wearing either a fancy dress or a dressing gown) crouches under a piece of furniture in a lavishly appointed apartment and watches a woman and a man enter the apartment together; the other man leaves and the hiding figure emerges and turns out to be the woman’s husband, renowned novelist Alton Bennet (Alan Napier, just coming off of his best-ever film role as the Holy Father in the Orson Welles Macbeth and having little idea that The Mole People lay just seven years in his future!), who proceeds to corner her in their bedroom and club her to death with a perfume bottle. Then the scene dissolves to the office of psychiatrist Dr. Redman (Harold Vermilyea), and it turns out that Bennet is in therapy with Dr. Redman and the previous sequence was a recurring dream he has been having and which he just narrated to the therapist.
Sitting in on the session was Dr. Redman’s secretary, Merl Kramer (a 35-year-old and definitely past-her-prime Dorothy Lamour), whom Redman told Bennet had been working there for four years when it’s really only been four weeks. Merl is dating Karl Benson (Dan Duryea), a private detective (the sign on his window says “KARL BENSON — COLLECTIONS — INVESTIGATIONS”) who has a live-work office just one floor down from Merl’s own apartment. Redman decides that Mrs. Bennet (Irene Hervey) is in genuine danger of being murdered by her husband, and he calls her up to set up a meeting and explain the danger — only right after the two meet she is in fact killed, clubbed to death with her perfume bottle just as her husband did in his dream, and $100,000 worth of jewelry is stolen from her room by her killer. The husband manages to convince the usual shitload of dumb police officers that he didn’t do it — he persuades them he was under the influence of sleeping pills at the time of the murder — and instead they decide that Merl must be the killer, since supposedly the only people who knew of Bennet’s revelations in therapy were Redman and her.
What we know, though the rest of the characters don’t, is that she’s been breaking patient confidences right and left by blabbing to her boyfriend Karl about what the patients are telling the therapist — and later we find out that they were in a plot together and Karl forged phony references so she could get the job in the first place, with the idea that with the information she was getting from the therapy sessions and feeding to him, he’d be able to target anyone on the psychiatrist’s list of patients who had something worth stealing or was otherwise an appropriate target for criminal activity. Foster and Chambers clearly intended audiences to be shocked at the end of the movie when Benson was revealed as the killer — he followed the script of Bennet’s dream in hopes of framing him for his wife’s murder, then when that didn’t work he planted one of Mrs. Bennet’s jewels on Merl to make her the fall person.
The problem with Manhandled is that it’s a mad jumble of plot lines and situations that had already been done better in previous movies, some of them made the same producers (William Pine and William Thomas, who had risen from the “B” ranks to a berth at a major studio): the gimmick of having the murder prefigured by a dream had been done better in the Pine-Thomas-Paramount Fear in the Night from 1947 (in which DeForest Kelley, later Dr. McCoy on Star Trek, played a man who’s hypnotized into actually committing a murder and then recalling it later only as a dream — based on a Cornell Woolrich story, this film was utterly preposterous plot-wise but also much more powerful drama than Manhandled), Sterling Hayden’s role as the avenging insurance agent had been done better by Burt Lancaster (in his first film!) in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), and Dan Duryea had played this sort of part considerably better in his films The Woman in the Window (1945) and Scarlet Street (1946), both with a considerably better director (Fritz Lang) and a stronger, more powerful actress, Joan Bennett, as the woman he lured into helping out with his criminal schemes — and it doesn’t help that Foster and Chambers somehow got the Production Code office to let them suggest a romantic interest between the Hayden and Lamour characters at the end even though she was a co-conspirator in the villain’s crimes.
Lamour is one of the problems with this movie; the part desperately calls for a salty noir woman like Lauren Bacall or Paramount’s own Veronica Lake, she’s not a good enough actress to pull off the crisis of conscience the script hints at, and she was 35 and her figure was no longer as willowy as it had been in her “sarong” movies — before the movie TCM host Robert Osborne said she’d made “the fatal mistake of getting older,” and while I pointed out that old age isn’t usually “fatal” until it actually leads to death, it’s clear that at all stages of Hollywood history the mid-30’s have been a dangerous career shoal for stars, especially for women. (Most of the big male names at the end of the silent era — Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, William Powell, John Barrymore, etc.) made the transition to sound quite easily; most of the women — Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, Corinne Griffith, Colleen Moore and Constance and Norma Talmadge — didn’t because sound came in right when they were hitting that awkward mid-30’s age that would have caused them career problems anyway.)
But the main problem with this movie is that it’s incredibly uneven; amazing noir scenes by cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (even though so many of them take place after it’s just rained that it reminded me of the Mad magazine joke about the TV series The Fugitive: in the last panel of their spoof, in a scene that looked like it had just rained, there was a man in a white work coat whose back said, “Making Streets Look Like It Just Rained Co.”) alternate with plainly photographed setups of people talking to each other in rooms; for a supposed thriller it doesn’t have very many thrills; and even the genuinely talented actors, like Duryea, seem way off — Duryea seems so hyper one wonders if he was snorting helium before every take and one misses the chilling restraint with which he enacted similar villains for the great Fritz Lang instead of the mediocre Lewis R. Foster!
The film I picked out was Manhandled, a 1949 film noir wanna-be (film gris, as I like to call such things) from Paramount whose title makes no sense in terms of its plot — it seems that Paramount just had the title lying around from a 1924 silent with Gloria Swanson as a department-store clerk (she actually took a job clerking at a department store to prepare for the role; she intended to stay there three weeks but just after lunch break on her first day, word went out across the shop floor, “Gloria Swanson’s in the store!,” and she was “outed” all too quickly) and stuck it on this movie on the theory that it would bring more customers into the theatres than The Man Who Stole a Dream (the working title, and the name of the novel by L. S. Goldsmith on which it was based) or Betrayal (which would actually have made more sense than Manhandled — no one actually gets manhandled during the course of this movie — but would still have left audiences wondering who betrayed whom), the other titles they considered sticking on it.
Directed by Lewis R. Foster (not exactly one of the names to conjure with in the history of Hollywood’s auteurs) from a script by himself and Whitman Chambers (author of the source stories for the 1930’s independent thrillers Murder on the Campus and the awesome Sensation Hunters), Manhandled is a movie pieced together, Frankenstein-style, from bits and pieces of other, better movies. The “star” is Sterling Hayden, playing an insurance investigator and playing him in a relentlessly overbearing manner (frankly, Hayden was not to the hero manner born; his best films — The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Dr. Strangelove — cast him as villains), but the reason I put “star” in quotes is that he doesn’t appear at all until half an hour into a 97-minute movie.
The film opens with what turns out to be a best scene: a figure of ambiguous gender (it’s obviously a person, wearing either a fancy dress or a dressing gown) crouches under a piece of furniture in a lavishly appointed apartment and watches a woman and a man enter the apartment together; the other man leaves and the hiding figure emerges and turns out to be the woman’s husband, renowned novelist Alton Bennet (Alan Napier, just coming off of his best-ever film role as the Holy Father in the Orson Welles Macbeth and having little idea that The Mole People lay just seven years in his future!), who proceeds to corner her in their bedroom and club her to death with a perfume bottle. Then the scene dissolves to the office of psychiatrist Dr. Redman (Harold Vermilyea), and it turns out that Bennet is in therapy with Dr. Redman and the previous sequence was a recurring dream he has been having and which he just narrated to the therapist.
Sitting in on the session was Dr. Redman’s secretary, Merl Kramer (a 35-year-old and definitely past-her-prime Dorothy Lamour), whom Redman told Bennet had been working there for four years when it’s really only been four weeks. Merl is dating Karl Benson (Dan Duryea), a private detective (the sign on his window says “KARL BENSON — COLLECTIONS — INVESTIGATIONS”) who has a live-work office just one floor down from Merl’s own apartment. Redman decides that Mrs. Bennet (Irene Hervey) is in genuine danger of being murdered by her husband, and he calls her up to set up a meeting and explain the danger — only right after the two meet she is in fact killed, clubbed to death with her perfume bottle just as her husband did in his dream, and $100,000 worth of jewelry is stolen from her room by her killer. The husband manages to convince the usual shitload of dumb police officers that he didn’t do it — he persuades them he was under the influence of sleeping pills at the time of the murder — and instead they decide that Merl must be the killer, since supposedly the only people who knew of Bennet’s revelations in therapy were Redman and her.
What we know, though the rest of the characters don’t, is that she’s been breaking patient confidences right and left by blabbing to her boyfriend Karl about what the patients are telling the therapist — and later we find out that they were in a plot together and Karl forged phony references so she could get the job in the first place, with the idea that with the information she was getting from the therapy sessions and feeding to him, he’d be able to target anyone on the psychiatrist’s list of patients who had something worth stealing or was otherwise an appropriate target for criminal activity. Foster and Chambers clearly intended audiences to be shocked at the end of the movie when Benson was revealed as the killer — he followed the script of Bennet’s dream in hopes of framing him for his wife’s murder, then when that didn’t work he planted one of Mrs. Bennet’s jewels on Merl to make her the fall person.
The problem with Manhandled is that it’s a mad jumble of plot lines and situations that had already been done better in previous movies, some of them made the same producers (William Pine and William Thomas, who had risen from the “B” ranks to a berth at a major studio): the gimmick of having the murder prefigured by a dream had been done better in the Pine-Thomas-Paramount Fear in the Night from 1947 (in which DeForest Kelley, later Dr. McCoy on Star Trek, played a man who’s hypnotized into actually committing a murder and then recalling it later only as a dream — based on a Cornell Woolrich story, this film was utterly preposterous plot-wise but also much more powerful drama than Manhandled), Sterling Hayden’s role as the avenging insurance agent had been done better by Burt Lancaster (in his first film!) in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), and Dan Duryea had played this sort of part considerably better in his films The Woman in the Window (1945) and Scarlet Street (1946), both with a considerably better director (Fritz Lang) and a stronger, more powerful actress, Joan Bennett, as the woman he lured into helping out with his criminal schemes — and it doesn’t help that Foster and Chambers somehow got the Production Code office to let them suggest a romantic interest between the Hayden and Lamour characters at the end even though she was a co-conspirator in the villain’s crimes.
Lamour is one of the problems with this movie; the part desperately calls for a salty noir woman like Lauren Bacall or Paramount’s own Veronica Lake, she’s not a good enough actress to pull off the crisis of conscience the script hints at, and she was 35 and her figure was no longer as willowy as it had been in her “sarong” movies — before the movie TCM host Robert Osborne said she’d made “the fatal mistake of getting older,” and while I pointed out that old age isn’t usually “fatal” until it actually leads to death, it’s clear that at all stages of Hollywood history the mid-30’s have been a dangerous career shoal for stars, especially for women. (Most of the big male names at the end of the silent era — Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, William Powell, John Barrymore, etc.) made the transition to sound quite easily; most of the women — Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, Corinne Griffith, Colleen Moore and Constance and Norma Talmadge — didn’t because sound came in right when they were hitting that awkward mid-30’s age that would have caused them career problems anyway.)
But the main problem with this movie is that it’s incredibly uneven; amazing noir scenes by cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (even though so many of them take place after it’s just rained that it reminded me of the Mad magazine joke about the TV series The Fugitive: in the last panel of their spoof, in a scene that looked like it had just rained, there was a man in a white work coat whose back said, “Making Streets Look Like It Just Rained Co.”) alternate with plainly photographed setups of people talking to each other in rooms; for a supposed thriller it doesn’t have very many thrills; and even the genuinely talented actors, like Duryea, seem way off — Duryea seems so hyper one wonders if he was snorting helium before every take and one misses the chilling restraint with which he enacted similar villains for the great Fritz Lang instead of the mediocre Lewis R. Foster!
Friday, August 21, 2009
Three Wise Girls (Columbia, © 1931, rel. 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked the fourth in a sequence of five films TCM showed made at Columbia in the early 1930’s: Three Wise Girls, an unexpectedly good movie thanks largely to the original story, “Blonde Baby,” by Wilson Collison; a wisecracky script by Robert Riskin (based on Agnes Christine Johnston’s adaptation of Collison’s story); and a marvelous performance by Jean Harlow in the lead, Cassie Barnes, small-town girl from Chillicothe (it’s somewhat surprising in a movie this old to see a real small town depicted on screen instead of a generic or fictional one) who works as a soda jerk (jerkette?) at a drugstore and makes $15 per week, out of which she appears to be supporting her widowed mother (Lucy Beaumont) as well as herself. When her friend Gladys Kane (Mae Clarke) returns to Chillicothe and tells Cassie she’s making $200 per week as a model in New York, that’s all Cassie needs to hear: she’s out of that depressing small town almost immediately, whereupon she promptly loses three jobs in New York, the last of which (and, it’s implied, the other two) she was fired from when she punched out a boss who was making advances to her.
We already know that Harlow’s character is playing someone highly protective of her virginity because when the film opened, she was walking away from a date who parked three miles outside of town and tried to “get fresh” with her. A man drives by and offers her a ride home, but she saltily tells him that it’s because of another man with a car and some nasty ideas about her that she’s walking home. Once she’s in New York, rooming with Dot (silent-screen veteran Marie Prevost) — who works from home doing address labels (in a modern movie she’d be doing something involving the Internet, but the principle would be the same!) — she visits Gladys at the salon where she models, and Gladys gets her a job and she becomes a success. (One of the surprising things about this movie from today’s point of view is that it’s impossible to imagine anyone as full-figured as Harlow being a clothes model now.)
She also finds that Gladys is actually making only $60 per week and that she’s dating a married man, Arthur Phelps (Jameson Thomas) — who both she and we quickly find out is a total heel when he makes a pass at Cassie while Gladys isn’t looking. Cassie had earlier met her own rich man, Jerry Dexter (Walter Byron, the leading man for Gloria Swanson in the ill-fated Queen Kelly), only when he brings his wife (Natalie Moorhead) to the salon where Gladys and Cassie model she’s stunned — but at the same time not too surprised — to find he, too, is married. What’s more, in the earlier exposition scene setting up the fact that Jerry is married, he and his wife describe a relationship (they can date other people but each gets veto power over the other’s choices) that sounds more like modern-day polyamory than anything we expect to see in a classic-era Hollywood movie — even one like this that comes from the so-called “pre-Code” period of looser (but not nonexistent!) Production Code enforcement.
Tearing into Gladys for setting herself up for unhappiness by dating a married man, Cassie rattles off a series of predictions — that he’ll say it doesn’t mean anything, that if it weren’t for his wife refusing to give her consent he’d divorce her in a moment, and that shouldn’t mean they can’t still go out together — that (thanks to Robert Riskin and a strain of mordant wit in his writing he had to suppress in his later work for Frank Capra) exactly parallels the arguments she gets from Jerry as to why she should allow their relationship to continue. The film goes on its merry way, punching holes in conventional morality all over the place and using tough wisecracks to get away with depicting people as they actually behave — especially sexually — and it’s only towards the end, when conventional morality has to be given a chance to start kicking back, that it gets soapy: Phelps makes it look as if he’s having an affair with Cassie, thereby driving Jerry away in a jealous hissy-fit, then gets away from both Gladys and Cassie by announcing a reconciliation with his wife that’s announced on the front page of the New York Sun (second edition — Charles was pleased for once to see a newspaper in a movie that wasn’t a final or an extra).
Gladys responds by committing suicide — Riskin toys with us by showing her alone in her apartment, her window wide open and her standing at the edge of it, just before she calls Cassie; Cassie arrives and we think she’s got there in time to save her friend; then Gladys collapses in her arms and Cassie heads for the bathroom to get a wet cloth to revive her and finds an empty bottle marked “Poison.” Cassie responds by returning to Chillicothe and her old job in the drugstore, but Jerry traces her there, shows her a newspaper headline that announces that he and his wife are indeed divorcing, and so there’s a happy ending for two of the three wise girls, at least — since in the meantime there’s been a charming comic-relief romance between Dot and Jerry’s chauffeur Jimmy Callahan (Andy Devine — almost unrecognizable in a role that doesn’t give him much dialogue with which to show off that famous gravelly voice) and they’re together in the front seat of Jerry’s car at the fadeout.
Three Wise Girls is the last film Harlow made anywhere other than at MGM — she was still under contract to Howard Hughes then but he was loaning her out all over Hollywood — and three films after this she’d do another film based on a Collison story, Red Dust, and have one of the biggest hits of her career (thanks largely to having Clark Gable as a co-star, a far cry from all the prissy guys with thin moustaches that inhabit the male roles here!). It also has a surprising director, William Beaudine — yes, the very man who made what was probably the worst film of Bela Lugosi’s career (at least until he hooked up with Ed Wood), The Ape Man, just 11 years later; though the quality of Three Wise Girls is probably due far more to Riskin than Beaudine (Schreiber theorists take note!).
Beaudine’s name was on the credits of a truly great film from two years later, The Old-Fashioned Way, but that was a winner simply because W. C. Fields was the star and all a Fields director had to do is make sure the cameras were pointed at him and in focus. Here Beaudine actually turns in a stylish job that proved he did have real talent that probably got bludgeoned out of him by all the cheap, tacky assignments he had to take to pay off his debts from the stock market crash; maybe it’s damning with faint praise to say that William Beaudine could make a great movie with an Academy Award-winning writer and a star who later became one of Hollywood’s enduring legends (and not just because she died tragically young), but though he started off with those advantages he was certainly good enough here to prove himself worthy of them!
I picked the fourth in a sequence of five films TCM showed made at Columbia in the early 1930’s: Three Wise Girls, an unexpectedly good movie thanks largely to the original story, “Blonde Baby,” by Wilson Collison; a wisecracky script by Robert Riskin (based on Agnes Christine Johnston’s adaptation of Collison’s story); and a marvelous performance by Jean Harlow in the lead, Cassie Barnes, small-town girl from Chillicothe (it’s somewhat surprising in a movie this old to see a real small town depicted on screen instead of a generic or fictional one) who works as a soda jerk (jerkette?) at a drugstore and makes $15 per week, out of which she appears to be supporting her widowed mother (Lucy Beaumont) as well as herself. When her friend Gladys Kane (Mae Clarke) returns to Chillicothe and tells Cassie she’s making $200 per week as a model in New York, that’s all Cassie needs to hear: she’s out of that depressing small town almost immediately, whereupon she promptly loses three jobs in New York, the last of which (and, it’s implied, the other two) she was fired from when she punched out a boss who was making advances to her.
We already know that Harlow’s character is playing someone highly protective of her virginity because when the film opened, she was walking away from a date who parked three miles outside of town and tried to “get fresh” with her. A man drives by and offers her a ride home, but she saltily tells him that it’s because of another man with a car and some nasty ideas about her that she’s walking home. Once she’s in New York, rooming with Dot (silent-screen veteran Marie Prevost) — who works from home doing address labels (in a modern movie she’d be doing something involving the Internet, but the principle would be the same!) — she visits Gladys at the salon where she models, and Gladys gets her a job and she becomes a success. (One of the surprising things about this movie from today’s point of view is that it’s impossible to imagine anyone as full-figured as Harlow being a clothes model now.)
She also finds that Gladys is actually making only $60 per week and that she’s dating a married man, Arthur Phelps (Jameson Thomas) — who both she and we quickly find out is a total heel when he makes a pass at Cassie while Gladys isn’t looking. Cassie had earlier met her own rich man, Jerry Dexter (Walter Byron, the leading man for Gloria Swanson in the ill-fated Queen Kelly), only when he brings his wife (Natalie Moorhead) to the salon where Gladys and Cassie model she’s stunned — but at the same time not too surprised — to find he, too, is married. What’s more, in the earlier exposition scene setting up the fact that Jerry is married, he and his wife describe a relationship (they can date other people but each gets veto power over the other’s choices) that sounds more like modern-day polyamory than anything we expect to see in a classic-era Hollywood movie — even one like this that comes from the so-called “pre-Code” period of looser (but not nonexistent!) Production Code enforcement.
Tearing into Gladys for setting herself up for unhappiness by dating a married man, Cassie rattles off a series of predictions — that he’ll say it doesn’t mean anything, that if it weren’t for his wife refusing to give her consent he’d divorce her in a moment, and that shouldn’t mean they can’t still go out together — that (thanks to Robert Riskin and a strain of mordant wit in his writing he had to suppress in his later work for Frank Capra) exactly parallels the arguments she gets from Jerry as to why she should allow their relationship to continue. The film goes on its merry way, punching holes in conventional morality all over the place and using tough wisecracks to get away with depicting people as they actually behave — especially sexually — and it’s only towards the end, when conventional morality has to be given a chance to start kicking back, that it gets soapy: Phelps makes it look as if he’s having an affair with Cassie, thereby driving Jerry away in a jealous hissy-fit, then gets away from both Gladys and Cassie by announcing a reconciliation with his wife that’s announced on the front page of the New York Sun (second edition — Charles was pleased for once to see a newspaper in a movie that wasn’t a final or an extra).
Gladys responds by committing suicide — Riskin toys with us by showing her alone in her apartment, her window wide open and her standing at the edge of it, just before she calls Cassie; Cassie arrives and we think she’s got there in time to save her friend; then Gladys collapses in her arms and Cassie heads for the bathroom to get a wet cloth to revive her and finds an empty bottle marked “Poison.” Cassie responds by returning to Chillicothe and her old job in the drugstore, but Jerry traces her there, shows her a newspaper headline that announces that he and his wife are indeed divorcing, and so there’s a happy ending for two of the three wise girls, at least — since in the meantime there’s been a charming comic-relief romance between Dot and Jerry’s chauffeur Jimmy Callahan (Andy Devine — almost unrecognizable in a role that doesn’t give him much dialogue with which to show off that famous gravelly voice) and they’re together in the front seat of Jerry’s car at the fadeout.
Three Wise Girls is the last film Harlow made anywhere other than at MGM — she was still under contract to Howard Hughes then but he was loaning her out all over Hollywood — and three films after this she’d do another film based on a Collison story, Red Dust, and have one of the biggest hits of her career (thanks largely to having Clark Gable as a co-star, a far cry from all the prissy guys with thin moustaches that inhabit the male roles here!). It also has a surprising director, William Beaudine — yes, the very man who made what was probably the worst film of Bela Lugosi’s career (at least until he hooked up with Ed Wood), The Ape Man, just 11 years later; though the quality of Three Wise Girls is probably due far more to Riskin than Beaudine (Schreiber theorists take note!).
Beaudine’s name was on the credits of a truly great film from two years later, The Old-Fashioned Way, but that was a winner simply because W. C. Fields was the star and all a Fields director had to do is make sure the cameras were pointed at him and in focus. Here Beaudine actually turns in a stylish job that proved he did have real talent that probably got bludgeoned out of him by all the cheap, tacky assignments he had to take to pay off his debts from the stock market crash; maybe it’s damning with faint praise to say that William Beaudine could make a great movie with an Academy Award-winning writer and a star who later became one of Hollywood’s enduring legends (and not just because she died tragically young), but though he started off with those advantages he was certainly good enough here to prove himself worthy of them!
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The Pink Panther (MGM/Columbia/Sony, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Pink Panther, the 2006 quasi-remake of the 1963 film that introduced Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau to the world — and it may seem heretical, but I actually found the new one funnier than the old. I’m not saying Steve Martin, the star of this Pink Panther and the 2009 sequel, is a greater comedian than Peter Sellers — but I suspect, having recently re-seen the first two Sellers Clouseaus, the 1963 Pink Panther and the 1964 A Shot in the Dark, that there’s a tendency among film buffs to remember these movies as funnier than they really are. Martin is a surprisingly credible physical comedian (even if, as I suspect, a lot of his pratfalls were stunt-doubled the way many of Robin Williams’ were in Flubber) and he does the cluelessness about as well as any modern comedian could have, even though it’s clear throughout the movie that he doesn’t have his own “read” on the character: he’s playing Peter Sellers playing Clouseau.
Not surprisingly, the new Pink Panther used nothing from the original but the title, the fabulously expensive jewel after which the film is named, and some of the character names. It opens in the middle of a World Cup semi-final between France and China, in which France scores an upset victory in a sudden-death overtime (actually when a regular soccer game is tied at the end, it’s settled with penalty kicks — I’ll never forget the World Cup that was held in the U.S. in which the final was between Italy and Brazil, the two teams held each other to a scoreless tie in regulation play, and Brazil finally won 1-0 on a penalty kick — and people wonder why soccer isn’t a popular spectator sport in the U.S.?), and the French coach, Yves Gluant (Jason Statham), is immediately murdered with a poisoned dart as his team is celebrating the win.
The gimmick is that the Commissioner of Police for Paris, Dreyfus (Kevin Kline in the role originated in the 1960’s by Herbert Lom), is upset because he’s been nominated seven times for the Medal of Honor but has never won. (“Being nominated seven times is … something,” he muses, a Hollywood in-joke about people who’ve been repeatedly nominated for Academy Awards but never won.) His strategy is to find the most incompetent local policeman in all France, give him a promotion to Inspector, bring him to Paris and set him to work on the Gluant murder — while he himself works behind the scenes and actually solves the case. The suspects are a motley crew including Gluant’s girlfriend, pop singer Xania (Beyoncé Knowles, frankly less appealing singing her own music than she was as Diana Ross in Dreamgirls or Etta James in Cadillac Records); Bizu (William Abadie), the team’s star player, who was dating Xania until she left him for Gluant; Cherie (Kristen Chenoweth), who was dating Bizu until he left her for Xania; plus assorted hangers-on including the team’s trainer, Yuri (“the trainer who trains,” Clouseau repeatedly calls him in his fractured English) and members of the Chinese team, whom Dreyfus suspects because the poison that killed Gluant was made from Chinese herbs.
The plot doesn’t really matter much — Yuri turns out to be the killer, in case you actually cared (though there’s a nice worm-turning moment in which we learn that Clouseau was able to solve the case because his preposterous claim of being able to understand Chinese was actually true, and the resolution based on a chain of hilarious deductions was pretty obviously intended as a parody on Sherlock Holmes) — but there are some brilliant sight gags as well as some interestingly inventive turns on some of the old chestnuts. When Dreyfus gives Clouseau a fountain pen to sign his appointment as an inspector, we wait for — and dread — the scene in which Clouseau will spray Dreyfus in the face with the ink. Instead Clouseau signs the document without mishap, hands Dreyfus the pen uncapped — and Dreyfus puts it in his shirt pocket and we see more and more of his white shirt stained black as the ink drips from it until he utters the punch line, “Why am I feeling wet?” Later Clouseau starts twirling a big bronze globe in the commissioner’s office — and just when one is beginning to think the globe might magically turn into a balloon and he might do a Chaplin-style dance with it, instead it slips off its moorings, barrels down the stairs of the building and starts taking out pedestrians, cars and the bicyclists running the Tour de France. (Well, the Tour is one of the most famous things that happens in France these days, so it was almost inevitable they’d mine it for a gag — and, indeed, bicyclists really take it in the neck throughout this film.)
There’s also a gag in which Clouseau flies to New York to pursue a clue and ends up searched at the airport and arrested for trying to smuggle two hamburgers onto the flight home, and another in which he totally accidentally gets credit for capturing the “Gas Mask Bandits,” who release toxic gas into public places and rob them at will because they’re wearing gas masks, courtesy of British secret agent 006 (“You’re one number short of the top,” Clouseau says) who dons Clouseau’s coat and goes after the bandits because “nobody can know I’m here.” The new Pink Panther isn’t exactly a deathless comedic masterpiece, but it’s a very funny film and it does a good job of maintaining the sought-after balance of physical and verbal humor — and frankly it made me laugh harder than the originals from the 1960’s did!
Kudos belong to director Shawn Levy and the usual writing committee — Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards (who directed the original Pink Panther movies) get credit for creating the characters, and Len Blum receives co-credits for both the original story (with Michael Saltzman) and the screenplay (with Steve Martin, who shows a good instinct for what works for him and what doesn’t — and he’s written much-produced plays like Picasso at the Lapin Agile so he’s not just an egomaniac star demanding a writing credit for little or no actual input) — and also to Christophe Beck, who’s credited with an “original” score but mostly — wisely — confines himself to a series of inventive variations on Henry Mancini’s original “Pink Panther” theme (including a funny disco version that heralds Xenia’s arrival on screen) — and of course there’s a pink-panther animated sequence in the opening credits, though it’s digitally done in the three-dimensional Pixar style and somehow not as cute or clever as the old hand-drawn animation of the originals. But that’s a minor disappointment in a very funny movie that honors its original source and at the same time manages, in a way, to outdo it.
The film was The Pink Panther, the 2006 quasi-remake of the 1963 film that introduced Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau to the world — and it may seem heretical, but I actually found the new one funnier than the old. I’m not saying Steve Martin, the star of this Pink Panther and the 2009 sequel, is a greater comedian than Peter Sellers — but I suspect, having recently re-seen the first two Sellers Clouseaus, the 1963 Pink Panther and the 1964 A Shot in the Dark, that there’s a tendency among film buffs to remember these movies as funnier than they really are. Martin is a surprisingly credible physical comedian (even if, as I suspect, a lot of his pratfalls were stunt-doubled the way many of Robin Williams’ were in Flubber) and he does the cluelessness about as well as any modern comedian could have, even though it’s clear throughout the movie that he doesn’t have his own “read” on the character: he’s playing Peter Sellers playing Clouseau.
Not surprisingly, the new Pink Panther used nothing from the original but the title, the fabulously expensive jewel after which the film is named, and some of the character names. It opens in the middle of a World Cup semi-final between France and China, in which France scores an upset victory in a sudden-death overtime (actually when a regular soccer game is tied at the end, it’s settled with penalty kicks — I’ll never forget the World Cup that was held in the U.S. in which the final was between Italy and Brazil, the two teams held each other to a scoreless tie in regulation play, and Brazil finally won 1-0 on a penalty kick — and people wonder why soccer isn’t a popular spectator sport in the U.S.?), and the French coach, Yves Gluant (Jason Statham), is immediately murdered with a poisoned dart as his team is celebrating the win.
The gimmick is that the Commissioner of Police for Paris, Dreyfus (Kevin Kline in the role originated in the 1960’s by Herbert Lom), is upset because he’s been nominated seven times for the Medal of Honor but has never won. (“Being nominated seven times is … something,” he muses, a Hollywood in-joke about people who’ve been repeatedly nominated for Academy Awards but never won.) His strategy is to find the most incompetent local policeman in all France, give him a promotion to Inspector, bring him to Paris and set him to work on the Gluant murder — while he himself works behind the scenes and actually solves the case. The suspects are a motley crew including Gluant’s girlfriend, pop singer Xania (Beyoncé Knowles, frankly less appealing singing her own music than she was as Diana Ross in Dreamgirls or Etta James in Cadillac Records); Bizu (William Abadie), the team’s star player, who was dating Xania until she left him for Gluant; Cherie (Kristen Chenoweth), who was dating Bizu until he left her for Xania; plus assorted hangers-on including the team’s trainer, Yuri (“the trainer who trains,” Clouseau repeatedly calls him in his fractured English) and members of the Chinese team, whom Dreyfus suspects because the poison that killed Gluant was made from Chinese herbs.
The plot doesn’t really matter much — Yuri turns out to be the killer, in case you actually cared (though there’s a nice worm-turning moment in which we learn that Clouseau was able to solve the case because his preposterous claim of being able to understand Chinese was actually true, and the resolution based on a chain of hilarious deductions was pretty obviously intended as a parody on Sherlock Holmes) — but there are some brilliant sight gags as well as some interestingly inventive turns on some of the old chestnuts. When Dreyfus gives Clouseau a fountain pen to sign his appointment as an inspector, we wait for — and dread — the scene in which Clouseau will spray Dreyfus in the face with the ink. Instead Clouseau signs the document without mishap, hands Dreyfus the pen uncapped — and Dreyfus puts it in his shirt pocket and we see more and more of his white shirt stained black as the ink drips from it until he utters the punch line, “Why am I feeling wet?” Later Clouseau starts twirling a big bronze globe in the commissioner’s office — and just when one is beginning to think the globe might magically turn into a balloon and he might do a Chaplin-style dance with it, instead it slips off its moorings, barrels down the stairs of the building and starts taking out pedestrians, cars and the bicyclists running the Tour de France. (Well, the Tour is one of the most famous things that happens in France these days, so it was almost inevitable they’d mine it for a gag — and, indeed, bicyclists really take it in the neck throughout this film.)
There’s also a gag in which Clouseau flies to New York to pursue a clue and ends up searched at the airport and arrested for trying to smuggle two hamburgers onto the flight home, and another in which he totally accidentally gets credit for capturing the “Gas Mask Bandits,” who release toxic gas into public places and rob them at will because they’re wearing gas masks, courtesy of British secret agent 006 (“You’re one number short of the top,” Clouseau says) who dons Clouseau’s coat and goes after the bandits because “nobody can know I’m here.” The new Pink Panther isn’t exactly a deathless comedic masterpiece, but it’s a very funny film and it does a good job of maintaining the sought-after balance of physical and verbal humor — and frankly it made me laugh harder than the originals from the 1960’s did!
Kudos belong to director Shawn Levy and the usual writing committee — Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards (who directed the original Pink Panther movies) get credit for creating the characters, and Len Blum receives co-credits for both the original story (with Michael Saltzman) and the screenplay (with Steve Martin, who shows a good instinct for what works for him and what doesn’t — and he’s written much-produced plays like Picasso at the Lapin Agile so he’s not just an egomaniac star demanding a writing credit for little or no actual input) — and also to Christophe Beck, who’s credited with an “original” score but mostly — wisely — confines himself to a series of inventive variations on Henry Mancini’s original “Pink Panther” theme (including a funny disco version that heralds Xenia’s arrival on screen) — and of course there’s a pink-panther animated sequence in the opening credits, though it’s digitally done in the three-dimensional Pixar style and somehow not as cute or clever as the old hand-drawn animation of the originals. But that’s a minor disappointment in a very funny movie that honors its original source and at the same time manages, in a way, to outdo it.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The Girl in Lovers’ Lane (Robert Roark Productions, 1959)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I showed was a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a movie that in some ways seemed too interesting to be appropriate for their ridicule — though in others it was just right for the “treatment.” It was The Girl in Lovers’ Lane (the title doesn’t contain an apostrophe but it bothers me too much to leave it out!), an indie made in 1959 by Robert Roark Productions (I couldn’t help thinking of his near-namesakes — Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s superman architect in The Fountainhead, and the 1950’s author Robert Ruark) and directed by Charles R. Rondeau from a script by Jo Heims.
It’s a very simple plot: for some reason we’re never quite told (the imdb.com synopsis says he’s a rich kid and he’s doing this because he’s upset that his parents were just divorced, but that’s not all that apparent from the actual film), Danny Winslow (Lowell Brown), a decently dressed young man with $100 in his wallet, decides to start hopping trains and living as a hobo. As the film open he’s fleeing two men who are trying to rob him; he throws his wallet into the boxcar of a train that’s about to leave, then follows it inside and meets up with Bix Dugan (Brett Halsey, top-billed), who’s supposed to be an experienced hobo but doesn’t look any seedier than Danny — they both look like people who regularly get three squares, clean clothes and a place to shower and shave. Bix grabs Danny’s wallet and there’s some doubt as to whether he’s going to give it back, but eventually he does, albeit with some warnings aimed at trying to keep Danny from getting rolled in the future.
The two take the train to a nearby small town, getting off a mile away so they don’t get arrested at the railroad yard when the train pulls in, and from then on most of the action takes place at the small-town diner owned by Cal Anders (Emile Meyer) and staffed, it seems, mostly by his daughter Carrie (Joyce Meadows). From then on the film is 78 minutes of surprisingly little action; mostly it’s talk, as Carrie welcomes the attentions of Bix and fends off those of Jesse (Jack Elam), a tall man with bad hair who hangs out at the diner and has a decidedly unrequited crush on her. Jesse is supposed to be so repulsive that no woman in her right mind would want to go out (or have sex) with him, but in fact all it looks like is he’s in need of a comb — and Elam is by far the most talented actor in this film (and, not coincidentally, the only person in the cast I’d heard of before).
Anyway, the film is basically Of Mice and Men meets Baby Doll, as the characters speak a lot of pseudo-“poetic” dialogue (I was pretty sure Jo Heims was inspired by Tennessee Williams) and occasionally go out to the meadow outside of town (a pretty obvious soundstage “exterior”), where Jesse attempts to rape Carrie and Bix happens on the scene to stop him. There’s an attempt to move us with Bix’s internal conflict — should I stay or should I go? Should I settle down to a relationship with a woman who I love and who loves me, or should I leave her and hit the road again? — though this becomes academic when Jesse confronts Carrie in the meadow a second time, and this time Bix happens on the scene too late to spare her; mortally wounded by Jesse’s assault, she dies in Bix’s arms and naturally Bix is assumed to be the guilty party. Not only is he arrested, but Carrie’s father organizes a lynch mob, which grabs Bix from the jail and starts beating him up — until Danny brings in Jesse and gets Jesse to blurt out that he raped and killed Carrie. Bix and Danny hit the road again as the film ends.
I’ll give The Girl in Lovers’ Lane credit for daring a lot more than your average cheap, exploitative drive-in movie with a no-name cast; there’s almost no action to speak of, Jo Heims is attempting to write a serious drama (though Tennessee Williams’ brand of faux “poetry” was bad enough when he did it — virtually none of Williams’ plays persuade us that any real people talk like that — and Heims’ attempt to do his schtick is even worse) and director Rondeau (punning on the meaning of his name as a musical term, I joked that he would use the same footage again and again — though this film is actually refreshingly sparing in its use of stock footage) tries to bring it some atmosphere, but the sheer pretension of the plot and the lack of serious dramatic incident hamstrings the movie. So does the cast; there aren’t any truly bad actors in it (except maybe Meyer, who’s an even more repulsive screen presence than the character needs to be to make the story’s points about him) but, aside from Elam, there aren’t any especially good ones either and it’s no mystery why even the most hardened movie-goers haven’t heard of most of these people.
The MST3K people did their best to spoof a movie that really didn’t offer them most of their usual targets for humor — the best they could come up with was referring to Bix Dugan as “Big Stupid” (his name jarred me, too, but only because I’m not used to hearing about people named Bix who aren’t jazz musicians, just as I remember reading a story in the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980’s about Elvis Cooney, who led the Sandinista party on an island offshore of Nicaragua, and whom I recalled as the first person I’d heard of named “Elvis” who wasn’t a rock ’n’ roll singer by profession!), and their interstital segments were considerably more amusing than their offtakes on the movie itself.
The film I showed was a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a movie that in some ways seemed too interesting to be appropriate for their ridicule — though in others it was just right for the “treatment.” It was The Girl in Lovers’ Lane (the title doesn’t contain an apostrophe but it bothers me too much to leave it out!), an indie made in 1959 by Robert Roark Productions (I couldn’t help thinking of his near-namesakes — Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s superman architect in The Fountainhead, and the 1950’s author Robert Ruark) and directed by Charles R. Rondeau from a script by Jo Heims.
It’s a very simple plot: for some reason we’re never quite told (the imdb.com synopsis says he’s a rich kid and he’s doing this because he’s upset that his parents were just divorced, but that’s not all that apparent from the actual film), Danny Winslow (Lowell Brown), a decently dressed young man with $100 in his wallet, decides to start hopping trains and living as a hobo. As the film open he’s fleeing two men who are trying to rob him; he throws his wallet into the boxcar of a train that’s about to leave, then follows it inside and meets up with Bix Dugan (Brett Halsey, top-billed), who’s supposed to be an experienced hobo but doesn’t look any seedier than Danny — they both look like people who regularly get three squares, clean clothes and a place to shower and shave. Bix grabs Danny’s wallet and there’s some doubt as to whether he’s going to give it back, but eventually he does, albeit with some warnings aimed at trying to keep Danny from getting rolled in the future.
The two take the train to a nearby small town, getting off a mile away so they don’t get arrested at the railroad yard when the train pulls in, and from then on most of the action takes place at the small-town diner owned by Cal Anders (Emile Meyer) and staffed, it seems, mostly by his daughter Carrie (Joyce Meadows). From then on the film is 78 minutes of surprisingly little action; mostly it’s talk, as Carrie welcomes the attentions of Bix and fends off those of Jesse (Jack Elam), a tall man with bad hair who hangs out at the diner and has a decidedly unrequited crush on her. Jesse is supposed to be so repulsive that no woman in her right mind would want to go out (or have sex) with him, but in fact all it looks like is he’s in need of a comb — and Elam is by far the most talented actor in this film (and, not coincidentally, the only person in the cast I’d heard of before).
Anyway, the film is basically Of Mice and Men meets Baby Doll, as the characters speak a lot of pseudo-“poetic” dialogue (I was pretty sure Jo Heims was inspired by Tennessee Williams) and occasionally go out to the meadow outside of town (a pretty obvious soundstage “exterior”), where Jesse attempts to rape Carrie and Bix happens on the scene to stop him. There’s an attempt to move us with Bix’s internal conflict — should I stay or should I go? Should I settle down to a relationship with a woman who I love and who loves me, or should I leave her and hit the road again? — though this becomes academic when Jesse confronts Carrie in the meadow a second time, and this time Bix happens on the scene too late to spare her; mortally wounded by Jesse’s assault, she dies in Bix’s arms and naturally Bix is assumed to be the guilty party. Not only is he arrested, but Carrie’s father organizes a lynch mob, which grabs Bix from the jail and starts beating him up — until Danny brings in Jesse and gets Jesse to blurt out that he raped and killed Carrie. Bix and Danny hit the road again as the film ends.
I’ll give The Girl in Lovers’ Lane credit for daring a lot more than your average cheap, exploitative drive-in movie with a no-name cast; there’s almost no action to speak of, Jo Heims is attempting to write a serious drama (though Tennessee Williams’ brand of faux “poetry” was bad enough when he did it — virtually none of Williams’ plays persuade us that any real people talk like that — and Heims’ attempt to do his schtick is even worse) and director Rondeau (punning on the meaning of his name as a musical term, I joked that he would use the same footage again and again — though this film is actually refreshingly sparing in its use of stock footage) tries to bring it some atmosphere, but the sheer pretension of the plot and the lack of serious dramatic incident hamstrings the movie. So does the cast; there aren’t any truly bad actors in it (except maybe Meyer, who’s an even more repulsive screen presence than the character needs to be to make the story’s points about him) but, aside from Elam, there aren’t any especially good ones either and it’s no mystery why even the most hardened movie-goers haven’t heard of most of these people.
The MST3K people did their best to spoof a movie that really didn’t offer them most of their usual targets for humor — the best they could come up with was referring to Bix Dugan as “Big Stupid” (his name jarred me, too, but only because I’m not used to hearing about people named Bix who aren’t jazz musicians, just as I remember reading a story in the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980’s about Elvis Cooney, who led the Sandinista party on an island offshore of Nicaragua, and whom I recalled as the first person I’d heard of named “Elvis” who wasn’t a rock ’n’ roll singer by profession!), and their interstital segments were considerably more amusing than their offtakes on the movie itself.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Cry Danger (Olympic Productions/RKO, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched two movies last night that were linked (by me and a happenstance of my videotaping, not by TCM this time) by the appearance of the word “danger” in their titles. One was Cry Danger, a 1951 RKO release directed by Robert Parrish (he’d written the screenplay for the 1947 film Body and Soul and this was his first time out as a director) and starring Dick Powell as Rocky Malloy, an ex-con who was unjustly convicted of killing a guard during an armored-car holdup that netted $100,000 and served five years in prison. His alibi was that he was on a drinking binge with a bunch of Marines who couldn’t be located because they shipped out (“were deployed” would be the current argot) the next day. A Marine veteran, DeLong (Richard Erdman), surfaced and claimed to be one of Rocky’s drinking buddies, and though he actually wasn’t that was good enough to get Rocky pardoned and released.
Once he’s out he arrives in L.A., from whence he came (and of which we get quite a few nice cityscapes from cinematographer Joseph L. Biroc) to try to trace the rest of the money and also to contact Nancy (Rhonda Fleming), the widow of the man who was convicted along with him. He and DeLong move into the same trailer park where Nancy lives and they rekindle their romance (the backstory is that Nancy had dated Rocky before they quarreled and she married his partner Danny — whom we never see — on the rebound). Meanwhile Rocky is tracking down Los Amigos nightclub owner Castro (William Conrad in one of the best of his early performances), who masterminded the holdup and presumably still has the $100,000; while Rocky is in turn being tailed by Cobb (Regis Toomey), a Javert-like police detective who’s convinced Rocky was in on the holdup and will lead him to the never-recovered money.
The plot goes through quite a few turns and twists — including a car accident in which DeLong is mistaken for Rocky and nearly killed, while his morally ambiguous girlfriend Darlene Lavonne (Jean Porter in a surprisingly Monroe-ish performance well before Monroe’s mannerisms became clichés), whom he continued to date even after she picked his pocket (or tried to) during one outing, is killed — before the all-too-predictable resolution in which Nancy (ya remember Nancy?) turns out to be a bad girl after all; she, her husband Danny (whom Rocky had assumed was also innocent) and Castro plotted the robbery in the first place and she and Castro split the loot and sat on it for five years.
The plot (the script is by William Bowers from a story by Jerry Cady) really doesn’t make much sense, and Powell turned in other tough-guy performances that were better than this (notably in Murder, My Sweet and Cornered), but what saves this film is the atmospherics: the quirky supporting players (including the trailer-park manager, a middle-aged eccentric who’s shown constantly strumming a ukulele and usually singing wordlessly and out-of-tune to his own accompaniment), the effective use of actual L.A. locations and some of the studio noir setups, notably a great depth-of-field shot in which DeLong (who’s by far the most interesting character in the piece, reminiscent of Van Heflin’s alcoholic supporting character in Johnny Eager that won him an Academy Award and stole the film right out from under its nominal leads, Robert Taylor and Lana Turner) is shown in the background and a liquor bottle looms in the foreground, dwarfing him and vividly dramatizing his compulsion to drink.
There’s a curious anomaly in the credits — we’re promised a song called “Cry Danger,” music by Hugo Friedhofer and lyrics by Leon Pober — but no such song materializes. Perhaps one of the nightclub sequences originally contained a performance of a song based on the main theme of the background score (also by Friedhofer), but it was deleted from the final cut. — 6/19/04
•••••
I showed Cry Danger, a 1951 semi-noir (it qualifies thematically if not visually) from RKO in partnership with “Olympic Productions” (probably a “collapsible” company formed to make just that one film) that stars Dick Powell as “Rocky” Mulloy, a convict, recently released after serving five years for a robbery he didn’t commit. He returns to Los Angeles from wherever it was he was incarcerated — in an otherwise deserted railway station (a location Charles recalled and said still looks the same) in which he appears to be the only person getting off his train — and hooks up with the man who got him released, DeLong (Richard Erdman). It seems that Rocky’s alibi was that he was out drinking with a group of Marines when the robbery occurred, but he was never able to find any of them. DeLong, a Marine himself, decided to come forward and identify himself as one of the Marines who were Rocky’s drinking buddies that night — and claim that all the others had been killed in the war — because, even though he wasn’t, posing as Rocky’s alibi witness and getting him sprung would presumably lead him to the $100,000 in proceeds from the robbery, which had never been found.
Also in search of the $100,000 is police detective lieutenant Gus Cobb (Regis Toomey), who busted Rocky in the first place, and despite his official exoneration is still convinced of Rocky’s guilt and sure Rocky will access the money sooner or later — thereby allowing Cobb to recover it and send Rocky back to prison. Rocky and DeLong move in as roommates to a seedy trailer in a trailer park, where DeLong starts dating one of the residents, blonde pickpocket Darlene LaVonne (Jean Porter) while Rocky hooks up with Nancy Morgan (Rhonda Fleming, second-billed). Nancy is the wife of Rocky’s supposed confederate in the robbery; he’s still in prison and, though he’s scheduled to be paroled in six months, Rocky wants him released free and clear because neither of them were actually guilty. Rocky mounts his own investigation of the crime, which takes him to a wide variety of places and hooks him up with people like Castro (a young but already corpulent William Conrad), the gangster he figures masterminded the robbery he got nailed for.
Rocky makes a bet on a horse race with one of Castro’s bookies — only to realize he’s been set up when the money he’s paid off with turns out to be “hot” money from the original heist. Eventually he realizes that the real mastermind behind the robbery is Nancy Morgan, whom he’s already started falling for — setting up a potentially interesting conflict between sex and loyalty to his still-incarcerated friend writers Jerome Cady (story) and William Bowers (screenplay) don’t do justice to. What the writers are clearly interested in is yet another recycling of the Maltese Falcon gimmick of having the hero’s girlfriend turn out to be the crook he’s after, and the film ends with a bittersweet scene in which Rocky is finally exonerated but also alone and emotionally devastated.
Cry Danger has the moral ambiguity necessary for film noir, and William Bowers’ script abounds in marvelous wisecracks which Powell delivers in the world-weary tone he brought to his breakthrough noir role as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, but where it differs from most of the previous noirs is that it takes place mostly during daylight and is largely shot outdoors on real L.A. locations — and cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc seems either unable or (more likely) just uninterested in creating the rich, chiaroscuro nighttime atmosphere of the classic noirs. But what this movie loses in atmosphere, it gains in you-are-here realism — both Charles and I recognized some of the locations from modern-day L.A. — and overall Cry Danger emerged as a workmanlike thriller.
Incidentally, a “trivia” item on the film on imdb.com says that Tom Weaver did an interview with Jean Porter, who said that though Robert Parrish (who the same year made The Mob, which was even better) is credited as director, Dick Powell actually directed the film himself — he’d make his “official” directorial debut, also at RKO, two years later with the film Split Second, an explicitly anti-Communist thriller but one far better than the norm for that usually irritating sub-genre. — 8/18/09
Charles and I watched two movies last night that were linked (by me and a happenstance of my videotaping, not by TCM this time) by the appearance of the word “danger” in their titles. One was Cry Danger, a 1951 RKO release directed by Robert Parrish (he’d written the screenplay for the 1947 film Body and Soul and this was his first time out as a director) and starring Dick Powell as Rocky Malloy, an ex-con who was unjustly convicted of killing a guard during an armored-car holdup that netted $100,000 and served five years in prison. His alibi was that he was on a drinking binge with a bunch of Marines who couldn’t be located because they shipped out (“were deployed” would be the current argot) the next day. A Marine veteran, DeLong (Richard Erdman), surfaced and claimed to be one of Rocky’s drinking buddies, and though he actually wasn’t that was good enough to get Rocky pardoned and released.
Once he’s out he arrives in L.A., from whence he came (and of which we get quite a few nice cityscapes from cinematographer Joseph L. Biroc) to try to trace the rest of the money and also to contact Nancy (Rhonda Fleming), the widow of the man who was convicted along with him. He and DeLong move into the same trailer park where Nancy lives and they rekindle their romance (the backstory is that Nancy had dated Rocky before they quarreled and she married his partner Danny — whom we never see — on the rebound). Meanwhile Rocky is tracking down Los Amigos nightclub owner Castro (William Conrad in one of the best of his early performances), who masterminded the holdup and presumably still has the $100,000; while Rocky is in turn being tailed by Cobb (Regis Toomey), a Javert-like police detective who’s convinced Rocky was in on the holdup and will lead him to the never-recovered money.
The plot goes through quite a few turns and twists — including a car accident in which DeLong is mistaken for Rocky and nearly killed, while his morally ambiguous girlfriend Darlene Lavonne (Jean Porter in a surprisingly Monroe-ish performance well before Monroe’s mannerisms became clichés), whom he continued to date even after she picked his pocket (or tried to) during one outing, is killed — before the all-too-predictable resolution in which Nancy (ya remember Nancy?) turns out to be a bad girl after all; she, her husband Danny (whom Rocky had assumed was also innocent) and Castro plotted the robbery in the first place and she and Castro split the loot and sat on it for five years.
The plot (the script is by William Bowers from a story by Jerry Cady) really doesn’t make much sense, and Powell turned in other tough-guy performances that were better than this (notably in Murder, My Sweet and Cornered), but what saves this film is the atmospherics: the quirky supporting players (including the trailer-park manager, a middle-aged eccentric who’s shown constantly strumming a ukulele and usually singing wordlessly and out-of-tune to his own accompaniment), the effective use of actual L.A. locations and some of the studio noir setups, notably a great depth-of-field shot in which DeLong (who’s by far the most interesting character in the piece, reminiscent of Van Heflin’s alcoholic supporting character in Johnny Eager that won him an Academy Award and stole the film right out from under its nominal leads, Robert Taylor and Lana Turner) is shown in the background and a liquor bottle looms in the foreground, dwarfing him and vividly dramatizing his compulsion to drink.
There’s a curious anomaly in the credits — we’re promised a song called “Cry Danger,” music by Hugo Friedhofer and lyrics by Leon Pober — but no such song materializes. Perhaps one of the nightclub sequences originally contained a performance of a song based on the main theme of the background score (also by Friedhofer), but it was deleted from the final cut. — 6/19/04
•••••
I showed Cry Danger, a 1951 semi-noir (it qualifies thematically if not visually) from RKO in partnership with “Olympic Productions” (probably a “collapsible” company formed to make just that one film) that stars Dick Powell as “Rocky” Mulloy, a convict, recently released after serving five years for a robbery he didn’t commit. He returns to Los Angeles from wherever it was he was incarcerated — in an otherwise deserted railway station (a location Charles recalled and said still looks the same) in which he appears to be the only person getting off his train — and hooks up with the man who got him released, DeLong (Richard Erdman). It seems that Rocky’s alibi was that he was out drinking with a group of Marines when the robbery occurred, but he was never able to find any of them. DeLong, a Marine himself, decided to come forward and identify himself as one of the Marines who were Rocky’s drinking buddies that night — and claim that all the others had been killed in the war — because, even though he wasn’t, posing as Rocky’s alibi witness and getting him sprung would presumably lead him to the $100,000 in proceeds from the robbery, which had never been found.
Also in search of the $100,000 is police detective lieutenant Gus Cobb (Regis Toomey), who busted Rocky in the first place, and despite his official exoneration is still convinced of Rocky’s guilt and sure Rocky will access the money sooner or later — thereby allowing Cobb to recover it and send Rocky back to prison. Rocky and DeLong move in as roommates to a seedy trailer in a trailer park, where DeLong starts dating one of the residents, blonde pickpocket Darlene LaVonne (Jean Porter) while Rocky hooks up with Nancy Morgan (Rhonda Fleming, second-billed). Nancy is the wife of Rocky’s supposed confederate in the robbery; he’s still in prison and, though he’s scheduled to be paroled in six months, Rocky wants him released free and clear because neither of them were actually guilty. Rocky mounts his own investigation of the crime, which takes him to a wide variety of places and hooks him up with people like Castro (a young but already corpulent William Conrad), the gangster he figures masterminded the robbery he got nailed for.
Rocky makes a bet on a horse race with one of Castro’s bookies — only to realize he’s been set up when the money he’s paid off with turns out to be “hot” money from the original heist. Eventually he realizes that the real mastermind behind the robbery is Nancy Morgan, whom he’s already started falling for — setting up a potentially interesting conflict between sex and loyalty to his still-incarcerated friend writers Jerome Cady (story) and William Bowers (screenplay) don’t do justice to. What the writers are clearly interested in is yet another recycling of the Maltese Falcon gimmick of having the hero’s girlfriend turn out to be the crook he’s after, and the film ends with a bittersweet scene in which Rocky is finally exonerated but also alone and emotionally devastated.
Cry Danger has the moral ambiguity necessary for film noir, and William Bowers’ script abounds in marvelous wisecracks which Powell delivers in the world-weary tone he brought to his breakthrough noir role as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, but where it differs from most of the previous noirs is that it takes place mostly during daylight and is largely shot outdoors on real L.A. locations — and cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc seems either unable or (more likely) just uninterested in creating the rich, chiaroscuro nighttime atmosphere of the classic noirs. But what this movie loses in atmosphere, it gains in you-are-here realism — both Charles and I recognized some of the locations from modern-day L.A. — and overall Cry Danger emerged as a workmanlike thriller.
Incidentally, a “trivia” item on the film on imdb.com says that Tom Weaver did an interview with Jean Porter, who said that though Robert Parrish (who the same year made The Mob, which was even better) is credited as director, Dick Powell actually directed the film himself — he’d make his “official” directorial debut, also at RKO, two years later with the film Split Second, an explicitly anti-Communist thriller but one far better than the norm for that usually irritating sub-genre. — 8/18/09
Monday, August 17, 2009
Bunco Squad (RKO, 1950)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Bunco Squad, a 1950 RKO “B” I have a certain fondness for — Charles and I watched a videotape of it years ago but I wanted to see it again, especially since reading Russell Miller’s biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had put me in the mood to see a film exposing the tricks of phony spiritualists and mediums. The 67-minute film was based on a novel by Reginald Taviner and was written by George Callahan (also the author of many of the scripts for Monogram’s Charlie Chan movies) and directed by Herbert I. Leeds (who’d done some of the detective series films at 20th Century-Fox just before the war and was a hack, but a competent one with a pretty good sense of pace). Though “bunco” was a general term referring to con games in general, after a short introductory film showing some of the more terrestrial cons the film focuses on a spiritualist racket masterminded by Tony Weldon (Ricardo Cortez), a.k.a. Anthony Wells, who recruits a motley crew including “The Swami,” t/n Drake (Robert Bice); graphologist Annie Cobb (Vivien Oakland) — who willingly gets involved with Weldon again even though the last time she worked with him, she got arrested and served three years in prison while he got off scot-free; and medium Liane (Bernadene Hayes). The film as a whole takes a very superior attitude towards anybody who would believe this sort of nonsense.
In order to fleece wealthy widow Mrs. Jessica Royce (the great Elizabeth Risdon) out of the $2 million by pretending to make contact with the spirit of her dead son (he was killed in the Normandy invasion during World War II), the four form a front organization called “The Rama Society” and invite her to its séances, complete with sheet-clad “ghosts” making appearances on schedule and speaking with sepulchral voices that don’t sound like those of any living person, They also blackmail her previous spiritual advisor, Dr. Largo (Frank Wilcox), by threatening to reveal his true name, Mike Finlayson, to the police, who still want him for similar cons committed in another state. Though they don’t charge for their services initially, their intent is to get the spirit of Royce’s “son” to urge her to will her entire estate to the Rama Society, and once she signs the will they intend to kill her and make it look like an accident.
For people engaged in what is usually a non-violent sort of crime, these folks are pretty bloodthirsty; they off Royce’s secretary, Barbara Madison (Marguerite Churchill), after Weldon has pumped her for information by dating her (though Ricardo Cortez had clearly aged from his glory years in the silent era and in early talkies like The Younger Generation and the 1931 The Maltese Falcon, he was still good-looking enough one could believe he could attract a woman visibly half his age) only to find that she was totally skeptical about the whole spirit business and might, if allowed to live, be able to keep Royce from doing anything stupid like willing her fortune to phony psychics.
The good guys in all this are bunco squad detective sergeants Steve Johnson (Robert Sterling) and Mack McManus (Douglas Fowley) as well as Steve’s long-suffering girlfriend, Grace Bradshaw (Joan Dixon) — who in an interesting twist in the plot is also a minor contract player at RKO. The significance in making the (good) female lead an actress emerges when the police realize that the only way to pull Mrs. Royce from the influence of the Rama Society is to set up a phony spiritualist operation of their own, and to that end they recruit Dante the Magician (playing himself — eight years after he appeared in the Laurel and Hardy film A-Haunting We Will Go) to show her the tricks of the phony spiritualist trade — Dante apparently having taken up where Houdini left off in demonstrating that the spiritualists’ manifestations were simply the same sorts of tricks he pulled on audiences as an entertainer. Dante and the cops coach Grace to speak in a suitably low and deep voice when she’s supposedly channeling the souls of the dead — and at one point she complains that she’ll never be able to memorize the stupid dialogue she’s instructed to use to convince the gullible Mrs. Royce that she’s genuinely in communication with her dead son.
Though Bunco Squad is one of those movies in which the crooks, who until then have been acting cautiously and carefully, have to get obnoxiously stupid in the last reel in order for the police to be able to catch them, it’s still an entertaining little movie and actually superior to the 1938 film Crime Ring, which used the same story source but had an overly complicated plot in which the syndicate was involved in way too many rackets for either the filmmakers or the audience to keep track — and it has the services of Cortez, a gentlemanly and appealing actor even in a black-hearted villain’s role and worth seeing in almost anything (even if his quite good performance in the 1931 Maltese Falcon, probably the best of his career, has been overshadowed by Humphrey Bogart’s even better one in the far more famous 1941 remake).
The film was Bunco Squad, a 1950 RKO “B” I have a certain fondness for — Charles and I watched a videotape of it years ago but I wanted to see it again, especially since reading Russell Miller’s biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had put me in the mood to see a film exposing the tricks of phony spiritualists and mediums. The 67-minute film was based on a novel by Reginald Taviner and was written by George Callahan (also the author of many of the scripts for Monogram’s Charlie Chan movies) and directed by Herbert I. Leeds (who’d done some of the detective series films at 20th Century-Fox just before the war and was a hack, but a competent one with a pretty good sense of pace). Though “bunco” was a general term referring to con games in general, after a short introductory film showing some of the more terrestrial cons the film focuses on a spiritualist racket masterminded by Tony Weldon (Ricardo Cortez), a.k.a. Anthony Wells, who recruits a motley crew including “The Swami,” t/n Drake (Robert Bice); graphologist Annie Cobb (Vivien Oakland) — who willingly gets involved with Weldon again even though the last time she worked with him, she got arrested and served three years in prison while he got off scot-free; and medium Liane (Bernadene Hayes). The film as a whole takes a very superior attitude towards anybody who would believe this sort of nonsense.
In order to fleece wealthy widow Mrs. Jessica Royce (the great Elizabeth Risdon) out of the $2 million by pretending to make contact with the spirit of her dead son (he was killed in the Normandy invasion during World War II), the four form a front organization called “The Rama Society” and invite her to its séances, complete with sheet-clad “ghosts” making appearances on schedule and speaking with sepulchral voices that don’t sound like those of any living person, They also blackmail her previous spiritual advisor, Dr. Largo (Frank Wilcox), by threatening to reveal his true name, Mike Finlayson, to the police, who still want him for similar cons committed in another state. Though they don’t charge for their services initially, their intent is to get the spirit of Royce’s “son” to urge her to will her entire estate to the Rama Society, and once she signs the will they intend to kill her and make it look like an accident.
For people engaged in what is usually a non-violent sort of crime, these folks are pretty bloodthirsty; they off Royce’s secretary, Barbara Madison (Marguerite Churchill), after Weldon has pumped her for information by dating her (though Ricardo Cortez had clearly aged from his glory years in the silent era and in early talkies like The Younger Generation and the 1931 The Maltese Falcon, he was still good-looking enough one could believe he could attract a woman visibly half his age) only to find that she was totally skeptical about the whole spirit business and might, if allowed to live, be able to keep Royce from doing anything stupid like willing her fortune to phony psychics.
The good guys in all this are bunco squad detective sergeants Steve Johnson (Robert Sterling) and Mack McManus (Douglas Fowley) as well as Steve’s long-suffering girlfriend, Grace Bradshaw (Joan Dixon) — who in an interesting twist in the plot is also a minor contract player at RKO. The significance in making the (good) female lead an actress emerges when the police realize that the only way to pull Mrs. Royce from the influence of the Rama Society is to set up a phony spiritualist operation of their own, and to that end they recruit Dante the Magician (playing himself — eight years after he appeared in the Laurel and Hardy film A-Haunting We Will Go) to show her the tricks of the phony spiritualist trade — Dante apparently having taken up where Houdini left off in demonstrating that the spiritualists’ manifestations were simply the same sorts of tricks he pulled on audiences as an entertainer. Dante and the cops coach Grace to speak in a suitably low and deep voice when she’s supposedly channeling the souls of the dead — and at one point she complains that she’ll never be able to memorize the stupid dialogue she’s instructed to use to convince the gullible Mrs. Royce that she’s genuinely in communication with her dead son.
Though Bunco Squad is one of those movies in which the crooks, who until then have been acting cautiously and carefully, have to get obnoxiously stupid in the last reel in order for the police to be able to catch them, it’s still an entertaining little movie and actually superior to the 1938 film Crime Ring, which used the same story source but had an overly complicated plot in which the syndicate was involved in way too many rackets for either the filmmakers or the audience to keep track — and it has the services of Cortez, a gentlemanly and appealing actor even in a black-hearted villain’s role and worth seeing in almost anything (even if his quite good performance in the 1931 Maltese Falcon, probably the best of his career, has been overshadowed by Humphrey Bogart’s even better one in the far more famous 1941 remake).
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The Case Against Brooklyn (Morningside/Columbia, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I settled in and watched a movie: The Case Against Brooklyn, which TCM ran on their night of undercover-cop movies right after The Undercover Man (which didn’t really feature an undercover man!) and The Mob (which did). It was also a Columbia release, co-produced with an outfit called Morningstar (which may have been a “collapsible” production company formed to make just one film) and directed by hack Paul Wendkos from a story inspired by an article by reporter Ed Reid for True magazine. The film credits Daniel B. Ullman with the story and “Raymond T. Marcus” with the screenplay from it, though “Marcus” was actually a pseudonym for blacklisted writers Bernard Gordon and Julian Zimet.
The plot of this one has Darren McGavin playing Pete Harris, a former Army intelligence officer who after the war (which one? Probably Korea, since 1958 seems a bit late in the day for the character to be a World War II veteran, though an opening title specifies the time of the story as “a few years ago”) leaves the Army to join the New York Police Department and is just about to graduate from the police academy when the film opens. Actually the film begins with the sad tale of Gus Polumbo (Joe De Santis), who’s got himself $5,800 in debt to a bookie ring run by Finelli (Nestor Païva, a good deal heavier than he was in the “Black Lagoon” movies just four years earlier!) and is being told to come up with the money that day — or else! That night he’s ambushed in the auto garage he runs and beaten up while his wife Lil (Margaret Hayes), who was supposed to meet him so they could go out to a show, catches sight of what’s going on. Unable to raise any money for his gambling debt and knowing that the gangsters are just going to keep beating him up regularly until he either pays up or dies, Gus loads his truck and drives it at a frantic pace, ultimately losing control, running off the road and dying in the accident — actually a suicide but made to look like an accident so his widow can collect under the double indemnity clause of his life insurance policy. (We see the ominous words “DOUBLE INDEMNITY” stamped across the face of the policy — and we can’t help but flash back to the far better 1944 movie of that title.)
Then we cut to the office of Kings County district attorney Michael W. Norris (Tol Avery), who’s aware that the bookie ring has bribed cops not only to look the other way and allow it to operate, but actually shoot people who get too close to its operations. He figures that the way to combat it is to requisition newly graduated police officers, fresh from the academy and therefore, as he puts it, unaware that to all too many veteran cops “honesty” is a dirty word. Because of his intelligence background, Pete Harris is a “natural” for this assignment, but there’s one nagging detail: in order to get information on the gang, he has to pursue an affair with the widow Polumbo — even though he’s already married to Jane (Peggy McKay). The D.A. outfits him with an apartment near Polumbo’s garage, where he rents space for his car and pursues his acquaintance with the widow — who genuinely likes him and finds herself attracted to him.
Meanwhile, the police decide to rotate the officers’ beats so there’ll be a new group of people patrolling the Brooklyn territory of the bookie ring — only within a week the syndicate’s agents have got to them, too — and events move towards a climax when the syndicate’s hit man, Rudi Franklin (Warren Stevens, easily the most charismatic and interesting actor in the film), catches Pete’s partner Jess Johnson (Brian Hutton) changing tapes in the recorder with which they’re taping Finelli’s wiretapped phone conversations, reports him as a prowler and gets crooked cop Detective Sergeant Bonney (Robert Osterloh) to kill him. Meanwhile, Jane calls the number of Pete’s “cover” apartment and Lil answers — and Jane naturally leaps to the wrong conclusion and decides her husband is having an affair. The fact that he may be doing so in the line of duty predictably cuts no ice with her, and just as we’re beginning to wonder what long-term effect this is going to have on Pete’s and Jane’s relationship when the case is over, the bad guys turn the tables on Pete and bug his apartment (his “real” home with Jane), then send up a phony “repairman” with a booby-trapped phone that explodes when Jane answers it, killing her. (Thus the film turns towards the end into a semi-remake of The Big Heat, though in that movie the honest cop’s wife dies considerably earlier, also as a result of a booby-trap meant for her husband, and thus the ensuing affair-ette between the hero and the demi-monde girl he’s pumping for information is more poignant and less kinky.)
The shock of the loss of his wife turns Pete from a cool, calm, collected law-enforcement officer into a prototype of Dirty Harry, throwing his gun at the D.A. and going out after Rudi with every intent of killing him, but at the end the baddies are taken alive and Pete even smokes out the big boss of the outfit — and there’s a quirky final scene in which Pete and Lil meet again, only there’s no reunion; she’s leaving town and they say a bittersweet goodbye at the fade-out. The Case Against Brooklyn — a title suggesting an even more far-reaching criminal conspiracy than the one actually depicted — isn’t exactly fresh and original storytelling, and there are some wrenching bits like the voice-over narrator who suddenly appears on the soundtrack about 20 minutes in, but it’s basically a good movie, maintaining interest even as it travels down well-worn dramatic paths, and McGavin (as he usually did) turns in an unspectacular but workmanlike performance even though Warren Stevens steals the movie out from under everyone else.
Charles and I settled in and watched a movie: The Case Against Brooklyn, which TCM ran on their night of undercover-cop movies right after The Undercover Man (which didn’t really feature an undercover man!) and The Mob (which did). It was also a Columbia release, co-produced with an outfit called Morningstar (which may have been a “collapsible” production company formed to make just one film) and directed by hack Paul Wendkos from a story inspired by an article by reporter Ed Reid for True magazine. The film credits Daniel B. Ullman with the story and “Raymond T. Marcus” with the screenplay from it, though “Marcus” was actually a pseudonym for blacklisted writers Bernard Gordon and Julian Zimet.
The plot of this one has Darren McGavin playing Pete Harris, a former Army intelligence officer who after the war (which one? Probably Korea, since 1958 seems a bit late in the day for the character to be a World War II veteran, though an opening title specifies the time of the story as “a few years ago”) leaves the Army to join the New York Police Department and is just about to graduate from the police academy when the film opens. Actually the film begins with the sad tale of Gus Polumbo (Joe De Santis), who’s got himself $5,800 in debt to a bookie ring run by Finelli (Nestor Païva, a good deal heavier than he was in the “Black Lagoon” movies just four years earlier!) and is being told to come up with the money that day — or else! That night he’s ambushed in the auto garage he runs and beaten up while his wife Lil (Margaret Hayes), who was supposed to meet him so they could go out to a show, catches sight of what’s going on. Unable to raise any money for his gambling debt and knowing that the gangsters are just going to keep beating him up regularly until he either pays up or dies, Gus loads his truck and drives it at a frantic pace, ultimately losing control, running off the road and dying in the accident — actually a suicide but made to look like an accident so his widow can collect under the double indemnity clause of his life insurance policy. (We see the ominous words “DOUBLE INDEMNITY” stamped across the face of the policy — and we can’t help but flash back to the far better 1944 movie of that title.)
Then we cut to the office of Kings County district attorney Michael W. Norris (Tol Avery), who’s aware that the bookie ring has bribed cops not only to look the other way and allow it to operate, but actually shoot people who get too close to its operations. He figures that the way to combat it is to requisition newly graduated police officers, fresh from the academy and therefore, as he puts it, unaware that to all too many veteran cops “honesty” is a dirty word. Because of his intelligence background, Pete Harris is a “natural” for this assignment, but there’s one nagging detail: in order to get information on the gang, he has to pursue an affair with the widow Polumbo — even though he’s already married to Jane (Peggy McKay). The D.A. outfits him with an apartment near Polumbo’s garage, where he rents space for his car and pursues his acquaintance with the widow — who genuinely likes him and finds herself attracted to him.
Meanwhile, the police decide to rotate the officers’ beats so there’ll be a new group of people patrolling the Brooklyn territory of the bookie ring — only within a week the syndicate’s agents have got to them, too — and events move towards a climax when the syndicate’s hit man, Rudi Franklin (Warren Stevens, easily the most charismatic and interesting actor in the film), catches Pete’s partner Jess Johnson (Brian Hutton) changing tapes in the recorder with which they’re taping Finelli’s wiretapped phone conversations, reports him as a prowler and gets crooked cop Detective Sergeant Bonney (Robert Osterloh) to kill him. Meanwhile, Jane calls the number of Pete’s “cover” apartment and Lil answers — and Jane naturally leaps to the wrong conclusion and decides her husband is having an affair. The fact that he may be doing so in the line of duty predictably cuts no ice with her, and just as we’re beginning to wonder what long-term effect this is going to have on Pete’s and Jane’s relationship when the case is over, the bad guys turn the tables on Pete and bug his apartment (his “real” home with Jane), then send up a phony “repairman” with a booby-trapped phone that explodes when Jane answers it, killing her. (Thus the film turns towards the end into a semi-remake of The Big Heat, though in that movie the honest cop’s wife dies considerably earlier, also as a result of a booby-trap meant for her husband, and thus the ensuing affair-ette between the hero and the demi-monde girl he’s pumping for information is more poignant and less kinky.)
The shock of the loss of his wife turns Pete from a cool, calm, collected law-enforcement officer into a prototype of Dirty Harry, throwing his gun at the D.A. and going out after Rudi with every intent of killing him, but at the end the baddies are taken alive and Pete even smokes out the big boss of the outfit — and there’s a quirky final scene in which Pete and Lil meet again, only there’s no reunion; she’s leaving town and they say a bittersweet goodbye at the fade-out. The Case Against Brooklyn — a title suggesting an even more far-reaching criminal conspiracy than the one actually depicted — isn’t exactly fresh and original storytelling, and there are some wrenching bits like the voice-over narrator who suddenly appears on the soundtrack about 20 minutes in, but it’s basically a good movie, maintaining interest even as it travels down well-worn dramatic paths, and McGavin (as he usually did) turns in an unspectacular but workmanlike performance even though Warren Stevens steals the movie out from under everyone else.
Friday, August 14, 2009
The Undercover Man (Columbia, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One movie Charles and I watched last night was The Undercover Man, made in 1949 and produced by Robert Rossen, though he gave over the writing duties to other people — Sydney Boehm and Jack Rubin, with additional dialogue by Malvin Wald — and it was directed by someone else as well: Joseph H. Lewis, about to end his long apprenticeship on Western, horror and gangster “B”’s and about to go from this film to his first masterpiece, Gun Crazy. The film began life as a true story, narrated by magazine writer Frank J. Wilson in a piece called “Undercover Man: He Trapped Capone,” though according to Robert Osborne (who introduced the film on TCM as part of a night devoted to undercover cops) the filmmakers weren’t allowed by Columbia’s legal department to use Capone’s name so they referred to him only as “The Big Fellow.” (One wonders why they couldn’t use Capone’s name, since the real Capone had died in 1946, three years before the film was made.) They also set the film in the (1949) present instead of doing it as a 1920’s period piece.
The Undercover Man ends up as a quite straightforward police-procedural thriller in which Glenn Ford plays Treasury agent Frank Warren, who frequently has to absent himself from his Washington, D.C. home and his wife Judith (Nina Foch, reunited with Lewis four years after My Name Is Julia Ross — though the character is a one-dimensional Long-Suffering Wife and, compared to her genuinely conflicted playing in Julia Ross, here she’s playing a part she could have played in her sleep, and through much of the film that looks like exactly what she’s doing) to go on long case assignments at considerable physical risk to himself. He travels to a carefully unnamed city (Columbia apparently shot this under the working title Chicago Story but evidently decided that even giving the film such a specific place was risking legal complications) to build a case against the “Big Fellow” and his extensive criminal enterprise, and to do this he stages a series of wide-open raids on ordinary retail businesses that offer secret sidelines in bookmaking, drug dealing and other illegal trades — not so much to nail the small-time proprietors of these establishments than to seize their books and use them to get testimony against the “Big Fellow.”
While the title is a cheat — at no time during the movie do we see either Glenn Ford or anyone else playing a representative of law enforcement actually operating undercover — what comes through most strongly is the sheer extent of the control the “Big Fellow” and his syndicate have over the city. The film’s most interesting character is the “Big Fellow”’s combination attorney and enforcer, Edward J. O’Rourke (Barry Kelley), who seems able to intimidate potential witnesses into silence just by staring at them and glowering — and throughout the movie the syndicate is depicted as so powerful they can murder people in broad daylight with utter impunity because everyone in eyeshot is so terrified of the prospect of being next that they’ll conveniently “forget” they ever saw anything (much the way the drug cartels, the Crips and the Bloods, and their equivalent gangs in the Latino-American communities operate today).
Throughout the movie Frank Warren is in a Kafka-esque loop in which just when he seems to have got a witness actually willing to testify against the mob, they’re killed — and finally when he is able to assemble a handful of former syndicate small-fry who can testify to the “Big Fellow”’s crimes, and keep them alive long enough to get a grand jury indictment against the “Big Fellow” and the other syndicate principals, he finds to his horror that even before the names of the people on the jury pool are released to the court, the syndicate has got hold of them and either bribed or scared them into guaranteeing an acquittal. (O’Rourke leaks this information to Warren and is himself killed — run over by a car — for his pains.) Eventually the judge in the case (Everett Glass) assures the prosecution a fair trial by arranging a last-minute swap of jury panels with another judge in another case, and the trial goes forward and leads to convictions.
The Undercover Man has some powerful scenes — notably one in which the grandmother of a girl whose dad was killed by the syndicate when he was about to testify recalls for him the days of her childhood in Italy, when the Mafia (the original camorra) ran roughshod over her little village and scared everybody into paying them — and, in a conversation that becomes even more poignant because she speaks only Italian and her granddaughter has to interpret for her, she convinces Warren, who’d been on the point of giving up the case and his Treasury career and retiring to a farm with his wife, to stick it out — but most of it is pretty straightforward cops-and-robbers stuff, and Lewis turns in a well-paced job of direction but without his usual stylistic flair in a film that really only barely counts as noir even though The Film Noir Encyclopedia lists it.
It’s also a good film for the Schreiber theorists — the advocates for the writer, not the director, as auteur — because it’s really a lot closer in mood and overall approach to Sydney Boehm’s other movies (especially The Big Heat and Rogue Cop) than to Lewis’s. Indeed, at some points it seems like a beta version of The Big Heat, especially since Glenn Ford is the star in both, though The Big Heat benefits not only from Fritz Lang’s masterly direction but also a story that kills off Ford’s wife early on and gives him a powerful personal motive, as well as his professional one, for taking on the syndicate.
One movie Charles and I watched last night was The Undercover Man, made in 1949 and produced by Robert Rossen, though he gave over the writing duties to other people — Sydney Boehm and Jack Rubin, with additional dialogue by Malvin Wald — and it was directed by someone else as well: Joseph H. Lewis, about to end his long apprenticeship on Western, horror and gangster “B”’s and about to go from this film to his first masterpiece, Gun Crazy. The film began life as a true story, narrated by magazine writer Frank J. Wilson in a piece called “Undercover Man: He Trapped Capone,” though according to Robert Osborne (who introduced the film on TCM as part of a night devoted to undercover cops) the filmmakers weren’t allowed by Columbia’s legal department to use Capone’s name so they referred to him only as “The Big Fellow.” (One wonders why they couldn’t use Capone’s name, since the real Capone had died in 1946, three years before the film was made.) They also set the film in the (1949) present instead of doing it as a 1920’s period piece.
The Undercover Man ends up as a quite straightforward police-procedural thriller in which Glenn Ford plays Treasury agent Frank Warren, who frequently has to absent himself from his Washington, D.C. home and his wife Judith (Nina Foch, reunited with Lewis four years after My Name Is Julia Ross — though the character is a one-dimensional Long-Suffering Wife and, compared to her genuinely conflicted playing in Julia Ross, here she’s playing a part she could have played in her sleep, and through much of the film that looks like exactly what she’s doing) to go on long case assignments at considerable physical risk to himself. He travels to a carefully unnamed city (Columbia apparently shot this under the working title Chicago Story but evidently decided that even giving the film such a specific place was risking legal complications) to build a case against the “Big Fellow” and his extensive criminal enterprise, and to do this he stages a series of wide-open raids on ordinary retail businesses that offer secret sidelines in bookmaking, drug dealing and other illegal trades — not so much to nail the small-time proprietors of these establishments than to seize their books and use them to get testimony against the “Big Fellow.”
While the title is a cheat — at no time during the movie do we see either Glenn Ford or anyone else playing a representative of law enforcement actually operating undercover — what comes through most strongly is the sheer extent of the control the “Big Fellow” and his syndicate have over the city. The film’s most interesting character is the “Big Fellow”’s combination attorney and enforcer, Edward J. O’Rourke (Barry Kelley), who seems able to intimidate potential witnesses into silence just by staring at them and glowering — and throughout the movie the syndicate is depicted as so powerful they can murder people in broad daylight with utter impunity because everyone in eyeshot is so terrified of the prospect of being next that they’ll conveniently “forget” they ever saw anything (much the way the drug cartels, the Crips and the Bloods, and their equivalent gangs in the Latino-American communities operate today).
Throughout the movie Frank Warren is in a Kafka-esque loop in which just when he seems to have got a witness actually willing to testify against the mob, they’re killed — and finally when he is able to assemble a handful of former syndicate small-fry who can testify to the “Big Fellow”’s crimes, and keep them alive long enough to get a grand jury indictment against the “Big Fellow” and the other syndicate principals, he finds to his horror that even before the names of the people on the jury pool are released to the court, the syndicate has got hold of them and either bribed or scared them into guaranteeing an acquittal. (O’Rourke leaks this information to Warren and is himself killed — run over by a car — for his pains.) Eventually the judge in the case (Everett Glass) assures the prosecution a fair trial by arranging a last-minute swap of jury panels with another judge in another case, and the trial goes forward and leads to convictions.
The Undercover Man has some powerful scenes — notably one in which the grandmother of a girl whose dad was killed by the syndicate when he was about to testify recalls for him the days of her childhood in Italy, when the Mafia (the original camorra) ran roughshod over her little village and scared everybody into paying them — and, in a conversation that becomes even more poignant because she speaks only Italian and her granddaughter has to interpret for her, she convinces Warren, who’d been on the point of giving up the case and his Treasury career and retiring to a farm with his wife, to stick it out — but most of it is pretty straightforward cops-and-robbers stuff, and Lewis turns in a well-paced job of direction but without his usual stylistic flair in a film that really only barely counts as noir even though The Film Noir Encyclopedia lists it.
It’s also a good film for the Schreiber theorists — the advocates for the writer, not the director, as auteur — because it’s really a lot closer in mood and overall approach to Sydney Boehm’s other movies (especially The Big Heat and Rogue Cop) than to Lewis’s. Indeed, at some points it seems like a beta version of The Big Heat, especially since Glenn Ford is the star in both, though The Big Heat benefits not only from Fritz Lang’s masterly direction but also a story that kills off Ford’s wife early on and gives him a powerful personal motive, as well as his professional one, for taking on the syndicate.
The Mob (Columbia, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Oddly, the second movie we watched last night, The Mob — likewise an urban drama about corruption, and also a Columbia Pictures production — was a good deal better. Indeed, the most ironic thing about it is that, three years before making On the Waterfront, Columbia did another story about corruption on the New York docks and made a film that, though hardly as “good” in terms of such indicia of quality as production values, stars and prestige names behind the camera, ended up as a good deal more exciting and fun to watch.
The Mob was based on a novel called Waterfront by Ferguson Findley, and was written by William Bowers and directed by Robert Parrish — hardly as much of a “name” to conjure with in the annals of all-time great directors as Joseph H. Lewis — but The Mob has a lot more noir atmospherics going for it (the cinematographer is old Columbia hand Joseph L. Walker, who shot most of the major Capras in the 1930’s) as well as much more in the way of excitement and proletarian credibility. Part of the latter is due to the choice of a star, Broderick Crawford, whom Columbia was desperate to cast because he’d risen from character actor to Academy Award winner in the lead in All the King’s Men (only because Columbia needed someone fast after Spencer Tracy withdrew from All the King’s Men at the last minute!), but he still wasn’t exactly the romantic leading-man type.
Here, though, he’s ideal in a custom-tailored role as Johnny Damico, a plainclothes police detective in New York City who, while on patrol in a driving rainstorm, watches a tall man in an overcoat and a hat worn low on his head shoot somebody. The shooter instantly claims to be a police officer himself -— “Lieutenant Henderson” — and even flashes an authentic police badge. Damico therefore lets him get away, and it’s only later when he meets his superior, Sgt. Bennion (Walter Klavun), that he finds out there’s no such New York cop as “Lieutenant Henderson” and the man he saw was really mob hit-man Blackie Clegg, whom he let get away with shooting a key witness in an upcoming case about waterfront corruption. As for the badge Clegg flashed, it was real all right — Clegg had taken it off the body of a cop he’d assassinated in a previous job assignment for the mob.
Bennion works out a plot to suspend Damico publicly — he even has a newspaper run a photo of him that’s really of a relative — but really assign him to infiltrate the gang undercover; he’s supposed to go to New Orleans, join the longshore union there, then get a job on a ship and work his way back to New York, then ask for a visitor’s permit and find out how the waterfront gang operates by doing longshore work and finding out how the syndicate extracts money from the workers as well as the shippers. The methods involved should be no surprise to anyone who’s seen On the Waterfront — involving kickbacks disguised as phony “charities” for injured workers; forced “loans” at massive rates of interest; as well as gimmicks that don’t involve the workers directly, like stealing valuable items from the cargoes of the ships they unload — though, if anything, The Mob is actually more progressive than On the Waterfront on at least one point: The Mob depicts the longshore union’s hierarchy as appalled by the corruption and working with the police to end it, while in On the Waterfront the union was itself part of the syndicate.
Using the name “Tim Flynn,” Damico bluffs his way into getting a visitor card and a highly coveted assignment driving a forklift (so he doesn’t have to handle cargo by hand). As part of his pose, he’s been ordered to be very combative and truculent, at one point accusing a gang of his fellow longshoremen of being “chorus boys” (Charles joked that they probably were chorus boys merely playing longshoremen!), and Crawford’s scenes in this mode are his most powerful bits of acting in the film. He makes us believe in him as a proletarian in a way Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, laden down by all his Method-actor tics and the gimmicks both in his performance and the script itself to make him seem “sensitive,” never did.
Where The Mob disappoints is in giving us too few scenes that actually take place on the docks — there’s no equivalent to the chilling scene in On the Waterfront in which the dock bosses throw the medallions that entitle their holders to a job that day at the workers like zookeepers feeding the animals, and the workers eagerly snap them up like zoo animals being fed — and it goes off the rails in its last half-hour by throwing so many reversals at us it gets confusing and one wonders whether William Bowers was a role model for Duplicity writer-director Tony Gilroy. We learn [spoiler alert!] that Clancy (Richard Kiley), whom Damico befriended in his cover identity as Flynn and sought out for help in working his way up the hierarchy in the docks, is himself an undercover agent — a federal one — and that Smoothie (Matt Crowley), the bartender at the misnamed “Royal Bar” attached to the fleabag hotel where Flynn and Clancy live, is really Blackie Clegg.
The film ends in a hospital, where Damico is being treated for wounds he suffered in a shoot-out and Clegg takes Damico’s fiancée Mary Kiernan (Betty Buehler, playing a typically nothing damsel-in-distress role) hostage until the police eventually manage to pick him off without hurting her — a confusing and low-energy ending for a movie that until then has been a quite credible crackerjack thriller and a good deal more entertaining than the more prestigious — but also much more pretentious — On the Waterfront, made by the same studio on the same subject three years later! And one interesting aspect of The Mob, was the number of future stars who appear in it in small roles, including Neville Brand (basically duplicating his appearance in D.O.A. as a hired gun for the bad guys who gets his sick psycho jollies by holding a gun on the hero as they’re riding together in the back seat of a car), Ernest Borgnine (as a gang boss) and even Charles Bronson (uncredited — if they had credited him, it would have been under his original last name, “Buchinsky” — as a longshoreman).
Oddly, the second movie we watched last night, The Mob — likewise an urban drama about corruption, and also a Columbia Pictures production — was a good deal better. Indeed, the most ironic thing about it is that, three years before making On the Waterfront, Columbia did another story about corruption on the New York docks and made a film that, though hardly as “good” in terms of such indicia of quality as production values, stars and prestige names behind the camera, ended up as a good deal more exciting and fun to watch.
The Mob was based on a novel called Waterfront by Ferguson Findley, and was written by William Bowers and directed by Robert Parrish — hardly as much of a “name” to conjure with in the annals of all-time great directors as Joseph H. Lewis — but The Mob has a lot more noir atmospherics going for it (the cinematographer is old Columbia hand Joseph L. Walker, who shot most of the major Capras in the 1930’s) as well as much more in the way of excitement and proletarian credibility. Part of the latter is due to the choice of a star, Broderick Crawford, whom Columbia was desperate to cast because he’d risen from character actor to Academy Award winner in the lead in All the King’s Men (only because Columbia needed someone fast after Spencer Tracy withdrew from All the King’s Men at the last minute!), but he still wasn’t exactly the romantic leading-man type.
Here, though, he’s ideal in a custom-tailored role as Johnny Damico, a plainclothes police detective in New York City who, while on patrol in a driving rainstorm, watches a tall man in an overcoat and a hat worn low on his head shoot somebody. The shooter instantly claims to be a police officer himself -— “Lieutenant Henderson” — and even flashes an authentic police badge. Damico therefore lets him get away, and it’s only later when he meets his superior, Sgt. Bennion (Walter Klavun), that he finds out there’s no such New York cop as “Lieutenant Henderson” and the man he saw was really mob hit-man Blackie Clegg, whom he let get away with shooting a key witness in an upcoming case about waterfront corruption. As for the badge Clegg flashed, it was real all right — Clegg had taken it off the body of a cop he’d assassinated in a previous job assignment for the mob.
Bennion works out a plot to suspend Damico publicly — he even has a newspaper run a photo of him that’s really of a relative — but really assign him to infiltrate the gang undercover; he’s supposed to go to New Orleans, join the longshore union there, then get a job on a ship and work his way back to New York, then ask for a visitor’s permit and find out how the waterfront gang operates by doing longshore work and finding out how the syndicate extracts money from the workers as well as the shippers. The methods involved should be no surprise to anyone who’s seen On the Waterfront — involving kickbacks disguised as phony “charities” for injured workers; forced “loans” at massive rates of interest; as well as gimmicks that don’t involve the workers directly, like stealing valuable items from the cargoes of the ships they unload — though, if anything, The Mob is actually more progressive than On the Waterfront on at least one point: The Mob depicts the longshore union’s hierarchy as appalled by the corruption and working with the police to end it, while in On the Waterfront the union was itself part of the syndicate.
Using the name “Tim Flynn,” Damico bluffs his way into getting a visitor card and a highly coveted assignment driving a forklift (so he doesn’t have to handle cargo by hand). As part of his pose, he’s been ordered to be very combative and truculent, at one point accusing a gang of his fellow longshoremen of being “chorus boys” (Charles joked that they probably were chorus boys merely playing longshoremen!), and Crawford’s scenes in this mode are his most powerful bits of acting in the film. He makes us believe in him as a proletarian in a way Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, laden down by all his Method-actor tics and the gimmicks both in his performance and the script itself to make him seem “sensitive,” never did.
Where The Mob disappoints is in giving us too few scenes that actually take place on the docks — there’s no equivalent to the chilling scene in On the Waterfront in which the dock bosses throw the medallions that entitle their holders to a job that day at the workers like zookeepers feeding the animals, and the workers eagerly snap them up like zoo animals being fed — and it goes off the rails in its last half-hour by throwing so many reversals at us it gets confusing and one wonders whether William Bowers was a role model for Duplicity writer-director Tony Gilroy. We learn [spoiler alert!] that Clancy (Richard Kiley), whom Damico befriended in his cover identity as Flynn and sought out for help in working his way up the hierarchy in the docks, is himself an undercover agent — a federal one — and that Smoothie (Matt Crowley), the bartender at the misnamed “Royal Bar” attached to the fleabag hotel where Flynn and Clancy live, is really Blackie Clegg.
The film ends in a hospital, where Damico is being treated for wounds he suffered in a shoot-out and Clegg takes Damico’s fiancée Mary Kiernan (Betty Buehler, playing a typically nothing damsel-in-distress role) hostage until the police eventually manage to pick him off without hurting her — a confusing and low-energy ending for a movie that until then has been a quite credible crackerjack thriller and a good deal more entertaining than the more prestigious — but also much more pretentious — On the Waterfront, made by the same studio on the same subject three years later! And one interesting aspect of The Mob, was the number of future stars who appear in it in small roles, including Neville Brand (basically duplicating his appearance in D.O.A. as a hired gun for the bad guys who gets his sick psycho jollies by holding a gun on the hero as they’re riding together in the back seat of a car), Ernest Borgnine (as a gang boss) and even Charles Bronson (uncredited — if they had credited him, it would have been under his original last name, “Buchinsky” — as a longshoreman).
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Michael Jackson: HIStory on Film, Volume II (Flattery Yukich Inc., MJJ Productions, Sony, 1997)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ended up running the Michael Jackson video collection HIStory on Film: Volume II, the follow-up to the two-CD package HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I from 1996 and the simultaneously released (first on VHS and then on DVD) video collection. The project began as a Michael Jackson greatest-hits CD to which his record company, Epic, asked him to add two new songs so they’d have a selling point to people who already had the previous albums from which its other songs had been extracted — only Jackson, who as Quincy Jones said tended to over-record (supposedly he brought in 32 songs for Thriller, of which only nine ended up on the finished disc — lending credibility to the reports that there are over 100 unreleased Michael Jackson songs in Sony Records’ vaults and we can expect “new” Jackson releases for a decade or so to come), ended up creating so much new material that the final package was a two-CD set, half old material and half new. The new material included some of his ballsiest songs as a solo artist, including “Scream” (a surprisingly angry duet with his sister Janet, who’d participated on some of his demos but had never before recorded with him for commercial release); “Childhood” (the song Jackson himself said would explain him to anyone who cared; not surprisingly, it’s a lament that he never had a real childhood); and “They Don’t Care About Us,” a Black-nationalist rant that was widely considered anti-Semitic when it was first released.
The present DVD was originally released in 1997 (no doubt on VHS since DVD’s weren’t introduced until the following year) and offered an intriguing compilation of Jackson videos framed with some of the most bizarre footage this bizarre artist ever had created of himself: the opening, “Program Start/Teaser,” shows the unveiling of a huge several-times life-size statue of Jackson in a stadium in Prague (the statue actually existed — camera trickery made it look even more enormous than it was, but Jackson did have a several-times bigger than life statue created for the sequence and it was used in its actual silver color on the original HIStory cover and in a gold-tinted image on this one), and both it and the “Brace Yourself” segment at the very end featured huge numbers of goose-stepping extras and a general air of such fascistic power and determination one gets the impression that Michael Jackson’s ghost director this time was Leni Riefenstahl. (She was still alive, so it could have happened.)
Like the original HIStory album, this disc is divided into two sides (for some reason it was mastered as a two-sided DVD even though the whole program is less than two hours long and would have fit easily on a one-sided disc), one featuring old material and one with new stuff. The old material starts out brilliantly with one of Jackson’s most legendary clips: the performance on the 1983 Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever TV special (one can readily see where Jackson got his penchant for absurdly over-dramatic titles!) — on the complete show he did a medley of old Jackson 5 hits with his brothers and then made a little speech to the effect that that was something old, and now he wanted to do something new. The version here cuts in right after Jackson’s speech, with his performance of “Billie Jean” from Thriller — I’m convinced he was merely lip-synching to the record even though during the previous medley he’d been performing “live” — and one of the most spectacular dance routines he ever did, introducing the famous “moonwalk.”
This is the Michael Jackson America fell in love with — it was this show that, more than anything else, transformed Thriller from another hit record to a phenomenon, still the best-selling album of original material ever released (it was at least briefly surpassed at the top of the all-time charts by — of all things — The Eagles’ Greatest Hits) — and he’s young, hot-looking (like his friend Macaulay Culkin, Jackson aged into a reasonably attractive adult but with an oddly chiseled face rather than the baby face of his years as a child star, and that’s what seems to have inspired Jackson to do that horrible succession of plastic surgeries that left him literally without a nose at the end), utterly in command of his body and presenting himself without the distractions endemic to his videos — oops, excuse me, “short films,” to use the term Jackson preferred. (He even spent extra money to shoot them on 35 mm film instead of videotape to ensure crisp image quality.)
The next item is the video for “Beat It,” a rather silly tale of warring gangs of many colors brought together by Michael Jackson (who’s introduced in bed, wearing what looks like a pullover flannel T-shirt with a childish, pajama-like design), who descends from his apartment to teach them a dance routine; its roots in West Side Story (his choreographer was quite obviously channeling Jerome Robbins here) and the teen-gang movies The Outsiders and Rumble Fish by future Jackson collaborator Francis Ford Coppola are quite obvious, but the clip is still relatively engaging. The next clips are “Liberian Girl” and “Smooth Criminal” from the Bad album; “Liberian Girl” is simply a waste — just an excuse to show off how many celebrity friends (some of them virtually forgotten today!) Jackson had; he doesn’t even appear until the very end, riding a camera crane, and the clip is dedicated to Elizabeth Taylor, seemingly the only star in Jackson’s circle who didn’t appear in it — but “Smooth Criminal” is an entertaining dance, even though like “Beat It” it has clear roots in a classic film.
This time Jackson’s source was the marvelous “Girl Hunt” ballet Vincente Minnelli did in The Band Wagon with yet another Jackson celebrity friend, Fred Astaire (so there was another celebrity Jackson knew who wasn’t in “Liberian Girl,” though it’s possible Astaire had already died by the time the clip was made). The Band Wagon was filmed five years before Michael Jackson was born, but he’d obviously done his homework on classic Hollywood, because the “Smooth Criminal” video reproduces not only the basic situation of “The Girl Hunt” and the similar smoky atmospherics, but some of the steps and even some of Alan Jay Lerner’s dialogue for the sequence.
The next clip is an overlong and very messy performance from the 1995 MTV Music Awards, which reveals that his skills as a dancer had already started to deteriorate — the comparison between his performance of a bit of “Billie Jean” (the soundtrack is an arbitrarily spliced-together medley of some of his hits) here and his incandescent reading of the same song from the Motown show 12 years earlier is heartbreaking — though he does pull off a convincing evocation of some of the “Smooth Criminal” steps we’d just seen in their original form. Also, as the album covers document, it was sometime between Thriller and Bad that Michael Jackson metamorphosed from a well-conditioned and reasonably handsome African-American to the wraithlike apparition, with skin unnaturally white even for a Caucasian, let alone someone of African descent, he would be for the rest of his life. He blamed this on vitiligo, a (genuine) disease characterized by the loss of skin pigment — anyone of any race can get this but it’s most noticeable among African-descended people simply because they generally have more pigment to lose — but I’ve never believed that; I’ve seen Black people with vitiligo and they become piebald — they get white blotches on otherwise dark skin; they certainly don’t become consistently white all over from it!
The final clip on side one brings us back to the days when Michael Jackson still looked like an African-American (I remember often joking that “nostalgia means being able to remember when Michael Jackson was still Black”): the 14-minute “Thriller” video, which begins with an odd apologia that the video is not supposed to imply that its creator himself believes in the occult — and it’s a fascinating clip, particularly its opening transformation of Jackson into a werewolf, though as I joked during it, frankly it looks like what Ed Wood would have done if he’d had money. Like a lot of Jackson’s other attempts at long-form videos, it’s irritating to hear the song stop and then start again (though at least when he did that in “Smooth Criminal” it was for a music-less dance break — a trick Jackson’s artistic model for that clip, Fred Astaire, often pulled — and therefore it wasn’t as jarring as usual), though it’s nice to hear Vincent Price deliver a longer version of his rap on the original record.
It also is yet more evidence that Michael Jackson lived his whole life separated from the reality of the rest of humanity — that virtually his entire understanding of human emotions of any kind came from movies, TV shows and songs — and how he never really outgrew his adolescence (indeed, his later years seem to be a Benjamin Button-style regression to the childhood he never had when he actually was a child chronologically) — the “Thriller” segment is a mad mélange of images from cheesy horror films, and whereas a more sensitive, grounded artist might have created something like this as a tongue-in-cheek camp homage, for Jackson these images seem to have been a serious metaphor for terror.
In some ways the later clips on side two are more interesting, even though they’re not as much fun. Joan Acocella’s interesting critique of Jackson the dancer in the July 27 New Yorker argues that the later clips were inferior to the earlier ones because he did less dancing — sometimes none at all: “In place of dancing and stories, he ramped up the pyrotechnics. Smoke banks enclose him. Great flames shoot up behind him. … Then come the computer-generated effects: he vanishes, he materializes, he walks on walls. [Ironically, Fred Astaire had become the first dancer to walk on walls — courtesy of a revolving set and a stationary camera bolted to it — in the 1951 film Royal Wedding, though Buster Keaton had used the same gimmick for a gag scene at the end of The Navigator 27 years earlier.] With this abracadabra, good causes, mawkishly treated, make their entry.”
The first clip on this side is “Scream,” shot in black-and-white and with Michael and Janet Jackson’s images continually moving from live-action to Rotoscoped figures in the style of Japanese animé — it’s a clever video but it doesn’t add much to the song, which is one of the bitterest entries in the Jackson canon (right up there with “Billie Jean,” “Dirty Diana” and “They Don’t Care About Us”). After that is “Childhood,” in which the camera mostly looms down on Jackson seated in a sylvan glade — given that he wrote the song as the theme for the film Free Willy 2, one might have expected at least a few stock clips of whales — and then “You Are Not Alone,” which seems to anticipate the movie Northfork in its bizarre opening presentation of Jackson as an angel, with a huge pair of feathered wings that dwarf his actual body. (Not that we actually get to see him fly — even for Michael Jackson, that was still beyond the budget — and throughout the song, written for him by fellow alleged child molester R. Kelly, the wings disappear and then reappear for no particular reason.)
Then comes “Earth Song,” which was filmed on four continents — North America (New York City), South America (Brazil), Europe (Croatia) and Africa — to dramatize the loss of species and habitats to human degradation; it’s actually a pretty good song — with Jackson ramping up the emotional content at the end and using some of the old soul-singer’s tricks to express his outrage at environmental destruction — it’s certainly much less mawkish than any of Jackson’s other socially conscious songs, but the weight of the presentation somewhat takes away from it. After that is a so-called “Brazilian version” of “They Don’t Care About Us,” under Spike Lee’s direction (as much as Michael Jackson may have pioneered the music video as an art form, only two of the clips here have first-tier film directors: Lee on this one and John Landis on “Thriller”), which turns the song into a samba and, despite some rather confused editing (in which Jackson’s costume arbitrarily changes several times), seeing Jackson at the head of a marching Brazilian drum ensemble is actually a treat even though one wishes he could have done more dancing with those exciting rhythms.
Then comes one of the most intriguing clips in the Jackson canon: “Stranger in Moscow,” a black-and-white video in which Jackson is in a cold urban environment that isn’t particularly identifiable as Russian (and the song only uses its title phrase as a metaphor for the character’s feelings), in which Jackson’s wanderings take on an almost Chaplin-like air of pathos (and the song itself is one of Jackson’s most intriguing and even moving ballads). The last video on the disc — before that final, fascistic “Brace Yourself” — is “Blood on the Dance Floor,” the only segment of the disc directed by Michael Jackson himself, in which he subsumes himself in the midst of a lot of couples doing ballroom dancing (even though the song itself is based on disco beats and one doesn’t expect to see people actually touching each other while they dance to it); it doesn’t really showcase him that much, and it doesn’t dramatize the song’s title either, but it’s still an appealing clip if only because for once Michael Jackson put his ego aside and let a few other people share the spotlight with him.
Overall, HIStory just adds further layers of enigma to the Michael Jackson perplex — especially since the CD on which its second side is based has become, for some reason, the hardest item from Jackson’s adult solo career to find (leaving out the second disc of HIStory from the boxed set The Michael Jackson Collection, which contains all his other solo albums for Epic, was a major mistake) — and the portrait we get from it is of Michael Jackson the child-man who had a great gift for communication and, because of his eccentric background, surprisingly little to communicate: an egomaniac with at least some awareness of his own limitations, a prima-donna star with a willingness to learn from others, and a sad and pathetic figure who professionally projected an aura of excitement and joy.
Incidentally, it’s a sign of the time when it was released — 1997 — that in it are titles promoting the official Michael Jackson fan club and at least one environmental organization, but the contact information is limited to addresses and phone numbers, and it’s jolting to be reminded that just 12 years ago the Internet was such a small preserve that the contacts did not include URL’s.
I ended up running the Michael Jackson video collection HIStory on Film: Volume II, the follow-up to the two-CD package HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I from 1996 and the simultaneously released (first on VHS and then on DVD) video collection. The project began as a Michael Jackson greatest-hits CD to which his record company, Epic, asked him to add two new songs so they’d have a selling point to people who already had the previous albums from which its other songs had been extracted — only Jackson, who as Quincy Jones said tended to over-record (supposedly he brought in 32 songs for Thriller, of which only nine ended up on the finished disc — lending credibility to the reports that there are over 100 unreleased Michael Jackson songs in Sony Records’ vaults and we can expect “new” Jackson releases for a decade or so to come), ended up creating so much new material that the final package was a two-CD set, half old material and half new. The new material included some of his ballsiest songs as a solo artist, including “Scream” (a surprisingly angry duet with his sister Janet, who’d participated on some of his demos but had never before recorded with him for commercial release); “Childhood” (the song Jackson himself said would explain him to anyone who cared; not surprisingly, it’s a lament that he never had a real childhood); and “They Don’t Care About Us,” a Black-nationalist rant that was widely considered anti-Semitic when it was first released.
The present DVD was originally released in 1997 (no doubt on VHS since DVD’s weren’t introduced until the following year) and offered an intriguing compilation of Jackson videos framed with some of the most bizarre footage this bizarre artist ever had created of himself: the opening, “Program Start/Teaser,” shows the unveiling of a huge several-times life-size statue of Jackson in a stadium in Prague (the statue actually existed — camera trickery made it look even more enormous than it was, but Jackson did have a several-times bigger than life statue created for the sequence and it was used in its actual silver color on the original HIStory cover and in a gold-tinted image on this one), and both it and the “Brace Yourself” segment at the very end featured huge numbers of goose-stepping extras and a general air of such fascistic power and determination one gets the impression that Michael Jackson’s ghost director this time was Leni Riefenstahl. (She was still alive, so it could have happened.)
Like the original HIStory album, this disc is divided into two sides (for some reason it was mastered as a two-sided DVD even though the whole program is less than two hours long and would have fit easily on a one-sided disc), one featuring old material and one with new stuff. The old material starts out brilliantly with one of Jackson’s most legendary clips: the performance on the 1983 Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever TV special (one can readily see where Jackson got his penchant for absurdly over-dramatic titles!) — on the complete show he did a medley of old Jackson 5 hits with his brothers and then made a little speech to the effect that that was something old, and now he wanted to do something new. The version here cuts in right after Jackson’s speech, with his performance of “Billie Jean” from Thriller — I’m convinced he was merely lip-synching to the record even though during the previous medley he’d been performing “live” — and one of the most spectacular dance routines he ever did, introducing the famous “moonwalk.”
This is the Michael Jackson America fell in love with — it was this show that, more than anything else, transformed Thriller from another hit record to a phenomenon, still the best-selling album of original material ever released (it was at least briefly surpassed at the top of the all-time charts by — of all things — The Eagles’ Greatest Hits) — and he’s young, hot-looking (like his friend Macaulay Culkin, Jackson aged into a reasonably attractive adult but with an oddly chiseled face rather than the baby face of his years as a child star, and that’s what seems to have inspired Jackson to do that horrible succession of plastic surgeries that left him literally without a nose at the end), utterly in command of his body and presenting himself without the distractions endemic to his videos — oops, excuse me, “short films,” to use the term Jackson preferred. (He even spent extra money to shoot them on 35 mm film instead of videotape to ensure crisp image quality.)
The next item is the video for “Beat It,” a rather silly tale of warring gangs of many colors brought together by Michael Jackson (who’s introduced in bed, wearing what looks like a pullover flannel T-shirt with a childish, pajama-like design), who descends from his apartment to teach them a dance routine; its roots in West Side Story (his choreographer was quite obviously channeling Jerome Robbins here) and the teen-gang movies The Outsiders and Rumble Fish by future Jackson collaborator Francis Ford Coppola are quite obvious, but the clip is still relatively engaging. The next clips are “Liberian Girl” and “Smooth Criminal” from the Bad album; “Liberian Girl” is simply a waste — just an excuse to show off how many celebrity friends (some of them virtually forgotten today!) Jackson had; he doesn’t even appear until the very end, riding a camera crane, and the clip is dedicated to Elizabeth Taylor, seemingly the only star in Jackson’s circle who didn’t appear in it — but “Smooth Criminal” is an entertaining dance, even though like “Beat It” it has clear roots in a classic film.
This time Jackson’s source was the marvelous “Girl Hunt” ballet Vincente Minnelli did in The Band Wagon with yet another Jackson celebrity friend, Fred Astaire (so there was another celebrity Jackson knew who wasn’t in “Liberian Girl,” though it’s possible Astaire had already died by the time the clip was made). The Band Wagon was filmed five years before Michael Jackson was born, but he’d obviously done his homework on classic Hollywood, because the “Smooth Criminal” video reproduces not only the basic situation of “The Girl Hunt” and the similar smoky atmospherics, but some of the steps and even some of Alan Jay Lerner’s dialogue for the sequence.
The next clip is an overlong and very messy performance from the 1995 MTV Music Awards, which reveals that his skills as a dancer had already started to deteriorate — the comparison between his performance of a bit of “Billie Jean” (the soundtrack is an arbitrarily spliced-together medley of some of his hits) here and his incandescent reading of the same song from the Motown show 12 years earlier is heartbreaking — though he does pull off a convincing evocation of some of the “Smooth Criminal” steps we’d just seen in their original form. Also, as the album covers document, it was sometime between Thriller and Bad that Michael Jackson metamorphosed from a well-conditioned and reasonably handsome African-American to the wraithlike apparition, with skin unnaturally white even for a Caucasian, let alone someone of African descent, he would be for the rest of his life. He blamed this on vitiligo, a (genuine) disease characterized by the loss of skin pigment — anyone of any race can get this but it’s most noticeable among African-descended people simply because they generally have more pigment to lose — but I’ve never believed that; I’ve seen Black people with vitiligo and they become piebald — they get white blotches on otherwise dark skin; they certainly don’t become consistently white all over from it!
The final clip on side one brings us back to the days when Michael Jackson still looked like an African-American (I remember often joking that “nostalgia means being able to remember when Michael Jackson was still Black”): the 14-minute “Thriller” video, which begins with an odd apologia that the video is not supposed to imply that its creator himself believes in the occult — and it’s a fascinating clip, particularly its opening transformation of Jackson into a werewolf, though as I joked during it, frankly it looks like what Ed Wood would have done if he’d had money. Like a lot of Jackson’s other attempts at long-form videos, it’s irritating to hear the song stop and then start again (though at least when he did that in “Smooth Criminal” it was for a music-less dance break — a trick Jackson’s artistic model for that clip, Fred Astaire, often pulled — and therefore it wasn’t as jarring as usual), though it’s nice to hear Vincent Price deliver a longer version of his rap on the original record.
It also is yet more evidence that Michael Jackson lived his whole life separated from the reality of the rest of humanity — that virtually his entire understanding of human emotions of any kind came from movies, TV shows and songs — and how he never really outgrew his adolescence (indeed, his later years seem to be a Benjamin Button-style regression to the childhood he never had when he actually was a child chronologically) — the “Thriller” segment is a mad mélange of images from cheesy horror films, and whereas a more sensitive, grounded artist might have created something like this as a tongue-in-cheek camp homage, for Jackson these images seem to have been a serious metaphor for terror.
In some ways the later clips on side two are more interesting, even though they’re not as much fun. Joan Acocella’s interesting critique of Jackson the dancer in the July 27 New Yorker argues that the later clips were inferior to the earlier ones because he did less dancing — sometimes none at all: “In place of dancing and stories, he ramped up the pyrotechnics. Smoke banks enclose him. Great flames shoot up behind him. … Then come the computer-generated effects: he vanishes, he materializes, he walks on walls. [Ironically, Fred Astaire had become the first dancer to walk on walls — courtesy of a revolving set and a stationary camera bolted to it — in the 1951 film Royal Wedding, though Buster Keaton had used the same gimmick for a gag scene at the end of The Navigator 27 years earlier.] With this abracadabra, good causes, mawkishly treated, make their entry.”
The first clip on this side is “Scream,” shot in black-and-white and with Michael and Janet Jackson’s images continually moving from live-action to Rotoscoped figures in the style of Japanese animé — it’s a clever video but it doesn’t add much to the song, which is one of the bitterest entries in the Jackson canon (right up there with “Billie Jean,” “Dirty Diana” and “They Don’t Care About Us”). After that is “Childhood,” in which the camera mostly looms down on Jackson seated in a sylvan glade — given that he wrote the song as the theme for the film Free Willy 2, one might have expected at least a few stock clips of whales — and then “You Are Not Alone,” which seems to anticipate the movie Northfork in its bizarre opening presentation of Jackson as an angel, with a huge pair of feathered wings that dwarf his actual body. (Not that we actually get to see him fly — even for Michael Jackson, that was still beyond the budget — and throughout the song, written for him by fellow alleged child molester R. Kelly, the wings disappear and then reappear for no particular reason.)
Then comes “Earth Song,” which was filmed on four continents — North America (New York City), South America (Brazil), Europe (Croatia) and Africa — to dramatize the loss of species and habitats to human degradation; it’s actually a pretty good song — with Jackson ramping up the emotional content at the end and using some of the old soul-singer’s tricks to express his outrage at environmental destruction — it’s certainly much less mawkish than any of Jackson’s other socially conscious songs, but the weight of the presentation somewhat takes away from it. After that is a so-called “Brazilian version” of “They Don’t Care About Us,” under Spike Lee’s direction (as much as Michael Jackson may have pioneered the music video as an art form, only two of the clips here have first-tier film directors: Lee on this one and John Landis on “Thriller”), which turns the song into a samba and, despite some rather confused editing (in which Jackson’s costume arbitrarily changes several times), seeing Jackson at the head of a marching Brazilian drum ensemble is actually a treat even though one wishes he could have done more dancing with those exciting rhythms.
Then comes one of the most intriguing clips in the Jackson canon: “Stranger in Moscow,” a black-and-white video in which Jackson is in a cold urban environment that isn’t particularly identifiable as Russian (and the song only uses its title phrase as a metaphor for the character’s feelings), in which Jackson’s wanderings take on an almost Chaplin-like air of pathos (and the song itself is one of Jackson’s most intriguing and even moving ballads). The last video on the disc — before that final, fascistic “Brace Yourself” — is “Blood on the Dance Floor,” the only segment of the disc directed by Michael Jackson himself, in which he subsumes himself in the midst of a lot of couples doing ballroom dancing (even though the song itself is based on disco beats and one doesn’t expect to see people actually touching each other while they dance to it); it doesn’t really showcase him that much, and it doesn’t dramatize the song’s title either, but it’s still an appealing clip if only because for once Michael Jackson put his ego aside and let a few other people share the spotlight with him.
Overall, HIStory just adds further layers of enigma to the Michael Jackson perplex — especially since the CD on which its second side is based has become, for some reason, the hardest item from Jackson’s adult solo career to find (leaving out the second disc of HIStory from the boxed set The Michael Jackson Collection, which contains all his other solo albums for Epic, was a major mistake) — and the portrait we get from it is of Michael Jackson the child-man who had a great gift for communication and, because of his eccentric background, surprisingly little to communicate: an egomaniac with at least some awareness of his own limitations, a prima-donna star with a willingness to learn from others, and a sad and pathetic figure who professionally projected an aura of excitement and joy.
Incidentally, it’s a sign of the time when it was released — 1997 — that in it are titles promoting the official Michael Jackson fan club and at least one environmental organization, but the contact information is limited to addresses and phone numbers, and it’s jolting to be reminded that just 12 years ago the Internet was such a small preserve that the contacts did not include URL’s.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Cadillac Records (Parkwood/Tri-Star/Sony, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Cadillac Records, an intriguing and frustrating production that, like so many movies today, took a potentially fascinating story and failed to do it justice but still managed to entertain. The story was the history of Chess Records, the pioneering blues label from Chicago that helped launch the rock ’n’ roll revolution — launched it single-handedly if writer-director Darnell Martin’s script is to be believed, which is part of this film’s problem. It all starts in 1941, when Alan Lomax’s field-recording project reaches Mississippi and the plantation where McKinley Morganfield (Jeffrey Wright) works as a cotton picker; Lomax and his partner make some records with the man, and inspire him to leave the fields, make his way to Chicago and try to make it as a street musician there.
At the same time Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody, who took the part after Matt Dillon backed out at the last minute) is told by his girlfriend’s father that he has no intention of letting his daughter marry someone from the same dirt-poor Polish Jew origins as himself, and he decides to make his fortune by opening a nightclub that presents Black musicians for an all-Black clientele. He opens the Macumba in Chicago and hires Muddy Waters — as Morganfield now calls himself — who in the meantime has met a woman named Geneva Wade (Gabrielle Union) and started playing electric guitar, which has made him more audible and more exciting as a busker. Waters in turn puts together a band that includes 17-year-old harmonica player Little Walter (Columbus Short), and they become sensations at Chess’s club — but for mysterious reasons (at least ones Martin never quite explains, though it’s at least hinted that Chess did it deliberately to get money from the insurance for seed capital for his new venture) the Macumba burns down and Chess’s next idea is to open a record company, at first called Aristocrat and later Chess, to showcase Waters and other Chicago blues artists to crack the Black record market nationwide. Leonard Chess and Muddy Waters tour the South and outright bribe disc jockeys to play Waters’ first record, “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and they achieve their goal of nationwide stardom for him — and later break Little Walter as a solo act and also attract other artists to their roster, including Chuck Berry (Mos Def), Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker) and Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles).
The basic outlines of the film’s plot are more or less historically accurate, but there are an awful lot of lacunae — Leonard Chess’s brother Phil, who was his business partner throughout the history of the Chess label until they sold out in 1969 (to a short-lived tape company called GRT), is totally omitted from the dramatis personae, and the only competitor that’s shown is a white woman who supposedly owns a “race-records” company in the South (she’s called something else but it’s pretty clear Martin meant Lillian McMurry of Trumpet Records here), who shows Chess the ropes but balks when he starts bribing D.J.’s, something she proudly boasts she’s never had to do to get her records played. There isn’t any hint of the existence of other race labels at Chess’s level of operations — especially companies like Savoy in New York, Duke in Texas and Modern in Los Angeles; in the real world Modern was Chess’s closest competitor (they fought an intense legal battle over the services of Howlin’ Wolf — thanks to Sam Phillips, the mastermind of the Memphis Recording Service and Sun Records, who made Wolf’s first records and licensed some of the masters to Modern and some to Chess — sometimes different records of the same songs under different titles! — before Phillips founded Sun and achieved his greatest claim to fame by signing Elvis Presley) and, as Chess did with Waters, Modern rode to the top of the R&B charts on the strength of their signature artist, B. B. King.
I can’t fault Cadillac Records for its concision — it lasts 109 minutes, enviably short for a modern movie (all too many films being made today stretch themselves out far longer than their story material can sustain interest, perhaps because movie tickets are so expensive today studios feel that they need to offer audiences a long enough movie to make it feel like it was worth their money) — but Martin’s story does raise far more dramatic issues than he can resolve in the duration of one film. A great movie could have been made about the rise and fall of Muddy Waters — and about Little Walter’s almost psychopathic character and descent into alcohol, heroin and gunplay — and another great movie could have been made with Leonard Chess as the centerpiece, focusing on the uncanny way his relationships with his stars duplicated the way they’d been treated by the white massas on the plantations from which many of them had come (there’s an intriguing hint of this when Chess and Chuck Berry meet Alan Freed — who demanded a one-third writing credit on “Maybelline” as his price for playing the disc — and Freed says “I’m going to make you [Berry] famous and you [Chess] rich,” and Mos Def’s double-take at that line is precious).
Still a third great movie could have been made about Etta James, who was made to look like the film’s central character in the pre-release publicity (largely because Beyoncé was coming off her triumphant performance as Diana Ross — yes, I know they called her something else, but we all knew who it “really” was — in Dreamgirls) but actually doesn’t enter until an hour into this 109-minute movie and initially appears as a blonde-haired Black girl Leonard Chess is trying to pick up sexually and only accidentally discovers that she has a voice. The real Etta James had already not only been making records but had had hits — notably “The Wallflower,” her answer record to Hank Ballard’s “Work with Me, Annie,” for Modern Records in 1955 (indeed, in an insert showing a Chess record moving up the charts, “The Wallflower” is one of the records it passes on its way up), five years before she signed with Chess. She gets to sing three of Etta James’ real Chess recordings — “All I Could Do Was Cry” (which James sang superbly but which Tina Turner sang even better in a Black-on-Black cover), “At Last” (which I was surprised Martin’s script did not mention was a cover of a 1940’s Glenn Miller hit!) and “I’d Rather Be Blind,” and she has a shot at a crossover career like Dinah Washington achieved before her and Aretha Franklin did later, only she blows it on heroin.
The film ends with Leonard Chess being beaten by Black Power thugs outside his office — supposedly because they resented the white guy who made all that money off Black talent — and deciding the time had come to sell out, whereupon he has a heart attack in the car as he’s driving away from the studio for the last time (a transparent movie device — the real Leonard Chess lived for about a year after he sold the company). It’s ironic that Beyoncé’s casting came in for a good deal of criticism (including from the real Etta James, who’s still alive and active) when she’s the only person in the movie who really sings with soul — when the other performers (all of whom did their own singing in their roles) came on, I was impressed by the accuracy of their impersonations; when Beyoncé sang “All I Could Do Was Cry,” I got goosebumps. I could have lived without the intimations of an affair between Leonard Chess and Etta James — when she was interviewed by Arnold Shaw for his invaluable R&B history, Honkers and Shouters, she made her true feelings about Leonard Chess all too clear:
“The Chess brothers didn’t know A from Z in a beat. Leonard Chess would get in the booth with me while I was recording, and when I would get to a part where he thought I should squawl or scream ‘wheeawow!’ he’d punch me in the side. I mean literally punch me. Or he’d pinch me real hard, so I’d go ‘yeeeow.’ And whatever tune had the most ‘ooooch’ or ‘eeech’ or whatever, that’s the tune he thought was going to be the hit.
“Then he’d sit there and listen to the playback, and he wouldn’t pat his foot until I’d seen him sneaking a look at my foot. He’d have to look around and see if my foot was patting. And if he couldn’t see it patting, he’d say, ‘Etta, I don’t think that tune’s any good.’ And then I’d wait until some old jive tune that wasn’t anything came on, and I’d pat my foot and say, ‘How do you like that one?’ And he’d say, ‘That’s it! That’s going to be the hit record! Believe what Leonard tells you!’ He knew nothing about it.”
I could also have used some more intimations of the bond that did exist between Leonard Chess and his musicians — the fact that both came from oppressed minorities (when one of the musicians tries to explain racism to Chess, I would have wanted Martin to have Chess say, “Look, I’m Jewish, and a lot of the people who don’t like you don’t like us, either!”) As it stands, Cadillac Records is a great piece of entertainment (the titular car itself becomes an intriguing symbol of wealth, success and aspiration throughout the film) but one that tantalizes more than it fulfills — the sort of movie that plays around with the facts but leaves you with the feeling that you’re not getting the “real” story even though you’re getting a lot more of it than you would have when Chess Records was still a going concern and its artists were at the top of their game.
The film was Cadillac Records, an intriguing and frustrating production that, like so many movies today, took a potentially fascinating story and failed to do it justice but still managed to entertain. The story was the history of Chess Records, the pioneering blues label from Chicago that helped launch the rock ’n’ roll revolution — launched it single-handedly if writer-director Darnell Martin’s script is to be believed, which is part of this film’s problem. It all starts in 1941, when Alan Lomax’s field-recording project reaches Mississippi and the plantation where McKinley Morganfield (Jeffrey Wright) works as a cotton picker; Lomax and his partner make some records with the man, and inspire him to leave the fields, make his way to Chicago and try to make it as a street musician there.
At the same time Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody, who took the part after Matt Dillon backed out at the last minute) is told by his girlfriend’s father that he has no intention of letting his daughter marry someone from the same dirt-poor Polish Jew origins as himself, and he decides to make his fortune by opening a nightclub that presents Black musicians for an all-Black clientele. He opens the Macumba in Chicago and hires Muddy Waters — as Morganfield now calls himself — who in the meantime has met a woman named Geneva Wade (Gabrielle Union) and started playing electric guitar, which has made him more audible and more exciting as a busker. Waters in turn puts together a band that includes 17-year-old harmonica player Little Walter (Columbus Short), and they become sensations at Chess’s club — but for mysterious reasons (at least ones Martin never quite explains, though it’s at least hinted that Chess did it deliberately to get money from the insurance for seed capital for his new venture) the Macumba burns down and Chess’s next idea is to open a record company, at first called Aristocrat and later Chess, to showcase Waters and other Chicago blues artists to crack the Black record market nationwide. Leonard Chess and Muddy Waters tour the South and outright bribe disc jockeys to play Waters’ first record, “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and they achieve their goal of nationwide stardom for him — and later break Little Walter as a solo act and also attract other artists to their roster, including Chuck Berry (Mos Def), Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker) and Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles).
The basic outlines of the film’s plot are more or less historically accurate, but there are an awful lot of lacunae — Leonard Chess’s brother Phil, who was his business partner throughout the history of the Chess label until they sold out in 1969 (to a short-lived tape company called GRT), is totally omitted from the dramatis personae, and the only competitor that’s shown is a white woman who supposedly owns a “race-records” company in the South (she’s called something else but it’s pretty clear Martin meant Lillian McMurry of Trumpet Records here), who shows Chess the ropes but balks when he starts bribing D.J.’s, something she proudly boasts she’s never had to do to get her records played. There isn’t any hint of the existence of other race labels at Chess’s level of operations — especially companies like Savoy in New York, Duke in Texas and Modern in Los Angeles; in the real world Modern was Chess’s closest competitor (they fought an intense legal battle over the services of Howlin’ Wolf — thanks to Sam Phillips, the mastermind of the Memphis Recording Service and Sun Records, who made Wolf’s first records and licensed some of the masters to Modern and some to Chess — sometimes different records of the same songs under different titles! — before Phillips founded Sun and achieved his greatest claim to fame by signing Elvis Presley) and, as Chess did with Waters, Modern rode to the top of the R&B charts on the strength of their signature artist, B. B. King.
I can’t fault Cadillac Records for its concision — it lasts 109 minutes, enviably short for a modern movie (all too many films being made today stretch themselves out far longer than their story material can sustain interest, perhaps because movie tickets are so expensive today studios feel that they need to offer audiences a long enough movie to make it feel like it was worth their money) — but Martin’s story does raise far more dramatic issues than he can resolve in the duration of one film. A great movie could have been made about the rise and fall of Muddy Waters — and about Little Walter’s almost psychopathic character and descent into alcohol, heroin and gunplay — and another great movie could have been made with Leonard Chess as the centerpiece, focusing on the uncanny way his relationships with his stars duplicated the way they’d been treated by the white massas on the plantations from which many of them had come (there’s an intriguing hint of this when Chess and Chuck Berry meet Alan Freed — who demanded a one-third writing credit on “Maybelline” as his price for playing the disc — and Freed says “I’m going to make you [Berry] famous and you [Chess] rich,” and Mos Def’s double-take at that line is precious).
Still a third great movie could have been made about Etta James, who was made to look like the film’s central character in the pre-release publicity (largely because Beyoncé was coming off her triumphant performance as Diana Ross — yes, I know they called her something else, but we all knew who it “really” was — in Dreamgirls) but actually doesn’t enter until an hour into this 109-minute movie and initially appears as a blonde-haired Black girl Leonard Chess is trying to pick up sexually and only accidentally discovers that she has a voice. The real Etta James had already not only been making records but had had hits — notably “The Wallflower,” her answer record to Hank Ballard’s “Work with Me, Annie,” for Modern Records in 1955 (indeed, in an insert showing a Chess record moving up the charts, “The Wallflower” is one of the records it passes on its way up), five years before she signed with Chess. She gets to sing three of Etta James’ real Chess recordings — “All I Could Do Was Cry” (which James sang superbly but which Tina Turner sang even better in a Black-on-Black cover), “At Last” (which I was surprised Martin’s script did not mention was a cover of a 1940’s Glenn Miller hit!) and “I’d Rather Be Blind,” and she has a shot at a crossover career like Dinah Washington achieved before her and Aretha Franklin did later, only she blows it on heroin.
The film ends with Leonard Chess being beaten by Black Power thugs outside his office — supposedly because they resented the white guy who made all that money off Black talent — and deciding the time had come to sell out, whereupon he has a heart attack in the car as he’s driving away from the studio for the last time (a transparent movie device — the real Leonard Chess lived for about a year after he sold the company). It’s ironic that Beyoncé’s casting came in for a good deal of criticism (including from the real Etta James, who’s still alive and active) when she’s the only person in the movie who really sings with soul — when the other performers (all of whom did their own singing in their roles) came on, I was impressed by the accuracy of their impersonations; when Beyoncé sang “All I Could Do Was Cry,” I got goosebumps. I could have lived without the intimations of an affair between Leonard Chess and Etta James — when she was interviewed by Arnold Shaw for his invaluable R&B history, Honkers and Shouters, she made her true feelings about Leonard Chess all too clear:
“The Chess brothers didn’t know A from Z in a beat. Leonard Chess would get in the booth with me while I was recording, and when I would get to a part where he thought I should squawl or scream ‘wheeawow!’ he’d punch me in the side. I mean literally punch me. Or he’d pinch me real hard, so I’d go ‘yeeeow.’ And whatever tune had the most ‘ooooch’ or ‘eeech’ or whatever, that’s the tune he thought was going to be the hit.
“Then he’d sit there and listen to the playback, and he wouldn’t pat his foot until I’d seen him sneaking a look at my foot. He’d have to look around and see if my foot was patting. And if he couldn’t see it patting, he’d say, ‘Etta, I don’t think that tune’s any good.’ And then I’d wait until some old jive tune that wasn’t anything came on, and I’d pat my foot and say, ‘How do you like that one?’ And he’d say, ‘That’s it! That’s going to be the hit record! Believe what Leonard tells you!’ He knew nothing about it.”
I could also have used some more intimations of the bond that did exist between Leonard Chess and his musicians — the fact that both came from oppressed minorities (when one of the musicians tries to explain racism to Chess, I would have wanted Martin to have Chess say, “Look, I’m Jewish, and a lot of the people who don’t like you don’t like us, either!”) As it stands, Cadillac Records is a great piece of entertainment (the titular car itself becomes an intriguing symbol of wealth, success and aspiration throughout the film) but one that tantalizes more than it fulfills — the sort of movie that plays around with the facts but leaves you with the feeling that you’re not getting the “real” story even though you’re getting a lot more of it than you would have when Chess Records was still a going concern and its artists were at the top of their game.
Found (ACH, Blue Seas, Lifetime, 2005)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday morning I’d watched the 2005 Lifetime movie Found, which like A Kidnapping in the Family (see below) is a basically strong story done to death by overripe melodramatics. It’s an impersonation story with overtones of Detour and Josephine Tey’s novel Brat Farrar (which was the subject of an estimable BBC production in the 1980’s but oh how one wishes Alfred Hitchcock could have filmed it with Cary Grant in the leading role[s]!), which starts out in a country bar in Arizona in which a drunken nympho is cruising private detective Vince (Victor Browne, a genuinely hot and sexy guy who’s far more aesthetically appealing than most of Lifetime’s leading men these days), but he only has eyes for the blonde-haired bartender (Tania Saulnier). The next thing we know we’re in Sarasota, Florida, where he’s presenting her as Catherine Drake, long-lost daughter of Charles and Ellen Drake (Greg Evigan — much the worse for wear over the years — and Joanna Cassidy). Catherine disappeared at the age of eight, supposedly abducted by the family’s nanny, and here she is 16 years later — maybe.
For the first 25 minutes or so we’re carefully kept in the dark as to whether she’s the real Catherine or an impostor — the local police, including a detective who’s still on the force and remains embarrassed that he never caught the original kidnappers, suggests running DNA tests and Ellen reminds them that Catherine is adopted (a virtual necessity for writers Jeff Blyth and Thomas C. Chapman to include in their script, since the CSI shows are so popular and enough publicity has been given to the use of DNA evidence in real cases that if the two were biologically related, people would wonder why they weren’t having DNA tests run to settle the issue once and for all — though Ellen is shown as so obsessively concerned with preserving her daughter’s memory it still seems odd that nobody asks if she still has teeth or hair or something of her missing daughter’s from which a DNA comparison could be made) — until a typical Lifetime soft-core porn scene tracks into the bathroom of the hotel room where “Catherine,” whose real name is Julia, and the detective are getting it on in the shower, and after they make it to the bedroom they have a post-coital discussion of how to continue the scam — including a point to be careful about the red birthmark on her back, a temporary duplicate of Catherine’s real one.
We’re told that Ellen freaked out when her daughter went missing and she’s been on anti-depressants and other psychotropic medications ever since; she also totally believes in Julia as Catherine, whereas both her husband Charlie and Ellen’s brother Howard Addison (John Colton) have their doubts. It takes another half-hour or so before we learn that the reason Vince and Julia were able to pass off Julia as Catherine was that they had inside information, and at first we believe it was from Howard — he was involved in an under-the-table construction business and lived in a guest house on the Drakes’ property which conveniently burned down, though a gardener who was unjustly fired by the Drakes gives Vince the information that records still exist in the basement — but later it turns out that the real culprit is Charles, who married a woman with much more money than he had and enough savvy to make sure her fortune was kept away from him lest he lose it all in ill-advised “business” ventures. When Ellen adopted Catherine, she put the bulk of her fortune in a trust fund for her daughter — and kept it there even after Catherine disappeared, just in case she turned up again. It turns out that the real Catherine didn’t disappear and wasn’t kidnapped; Charles murdered her because she was standing between him and his wife’s money, and still unable to access his wife’s fortune 16 years later he concocted the idea of producing a false Catherine, having her sign away her rights to the trust fund, then killing his wife and faking it to look like an accidental overdose on her meds so he would inherit the whole ball of wax.
For the first hour or so Found comes off as a surprisingly strong piece of neo-noir, held together by some intriguing characterizations — Vince is drawn as money-hungry but not entirely unscrupulous, while Julia is shown as being kept in line to fulfill her role in the plot only by her sexual attraction to him (a neat reversal of the femme fatale gimmick that powered many of the classic noirs) — and impressive suspense direction by Rex Piano, but then the writers overload the plot with so many melodramatic complications that the film collapses under their sheer weight, leaving to a bizarrely ambiguous ending in which both the husband and the detective are killed in a final confrontation, after which Ellen and Julia dump the detective’s body at sea and apparently plan to live as mother and daughter for the rest of their lives, with everyone who could expose Julia as an impostor conveniently dead.
Yesterday morning I’d watched the 2005 Lifetime movie Found, which like A Kidnapping in the Family (see below) is a basically strong story done to death by overripe melodramatics. It’s an impersonation story with overtones of Detour and Josephine Tey’s novel Brat Farrar (which was the subject of an estimable BBC production in the 1980’s but oh how one wishes Alfred Hitchcock could have filmed it with Cary Grant in the leading role[s]!), which starts out in a country bar in Arizona in which a drunken nympho is cruising private detective Vince (Victor Browne, a genuinely hot and sexy guy who’s far more aesthetically appealing than most of Lifetime’s leading men these days), but he only has eyes for the blonde-haired bartender (Tania Saulnier). The next thing we know we’re in Sarasota, Florida, where he’s presenting her as Catherine Drake, long-lost daughter of Charles and Ellen Drake (Greg Evigan — much the worse for wear over the years — and Joanna Cassidy). Catherine disappeared at the age of eight, supposedly abducted by the family’s nanny, and here she is 16 years later — maybe.
For the first 25 minutes or so we’re carefully kept in the dark as to whether she’s the real Catherine or an impostor — the local police, including a detective who’s still on the force and remains embarrassed that he never caught the original kidnappers, suggests running DNA tests and Ellen reminds them that Catherine is adopted (a virtual necessity for writers Jeff Blyth and Thomas C. Chapman to include in their script, since the CSI shows are so popular and enough publicity has been given to the use of DNA evidence in real cases that if the two were biologically related, people would wonder why they weren’t having DNA tests run to settle the issue once and for all — though Ellen is shown as so obsessively concerned with preserving her daughter’s memory it still seems odd that nobody asks if she still has teeth or hair or something of her missing daughter’s from which a DNA comparison could be made) — until a typical Lifetime soft-core porn scene tracks into the bathroom of the hotel room where “Catherine,” whose real name is Julia, and the detective are getting it on in the shower, and after they make it to the bedroom they have a post-coital discussion of how to continue the scam — including a point to be careful about the red birthmark on her back, a temporary duplicate of Catherine’s real one.
We’re told that Ellen freaked out when her daughter went missing and she’s been on anti-depressants and other psychotropic medications ever since; she also totally believes in Julia as Catherine, whereas both her husband Charlie and Ellen’s brother Howard Addison (John Colton) have their doubts. It takes another half-hour or so before we learn that the reason Vince and Julia were able to pass off Julia as Catherine was that they had inside information, and at first we believe it was from Howard — he was involved in an under-the-table construction business and lived in a guest house on the Drakes’ property which conveniently burned down, though a gardener who was unjustly fired by the Drakes gives Vince the information that records still exist in the basement — but later it turns out that the real culprit is Charles, who married a woman with much more money than he had and enough savvy to make sure her fortune was kept away from him lest he lose it all in ill-advised “business” ventures. When Ellen adopted Catherine, she put the bulk of her fortune in a trust fund for her daughter — and kept it there even after Catherine disappeared, just in case she turned up again. It turns out that the real Catherine didn’t disappear and wasn’t kidnapped; Charles murdered her because she was standing between him and his wife’s money, and still unable to access his wife’s fortune 16 years later he concocted the idea of producing a false Catherine, having her sign away her rights to the trust fund, then killing his wife and faking it to look like an accidental overdose on her meds so he would inherit the whole ball of wax.
For the first hour or so Found comes off as a surprisingly strong piece of neo-noir, held together by some intriguing characterizations — Vince is drawn as money-hungry but not entirely unscrupulous, while Julia is shown as being kept in line to fulfill her role in the plot only by her sexual attraction to him (a neat reversal of the femme fatale gimmick that powered many of the classic noirs) — and impressive suspense direction by Rex Piano, but then the writers overload the plot with so many melodramatic complications that the film collapses under their sheer weight, leaving to a bizarrely ambiguous ending in which both the husband and the detective are killed in a final confrontation, after which Ellen and Julia dump the detective’s body at sea and apparently plan to live as mother and daughter for the rest of their lives, with everyone who could expose Julia as an impostor conveniently dead.
A Kidnapping in the Family (Michele Brustin Productions, Rysher, Scripps Howard, ABC, 1996)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie I was watching this morning was A Kidnapping in the Family, one of Lifetime’s recyclings of a TV-movie originally made for ABC in 1996, at (or actually a little past) the controversy over ritual Satanic abuse of children and the craziness that led people to believe that certain women had volunteered as “breeders” for Satanic cults to generate children that the cult members could ritually abuse and then sacrifice. Supposedly based on a true story — though the melodramatics of David Birke’s script made it difficult to believe — A Kidnapping in the Family deals with the dysfunctional relationship between DeDe Cooper (Kate Jackson) and her 22-year-old daughter, Sarah Landers (Tracey Gold, whose curly blonde locks make her almost unbelievable as brunette Jackson’s daughter), who’s living at home following her divorce from Chris Landers (Matt Hill), a hot-looking but also rather dim blond who looks more like Sarah’s younger brother than her ex-husband.
During their teen marriage they produced a son, Kyle (Robert Bishop), whom DeDe and Sarah are fighting over — the film opens with Kyle’s fifth birthday party and Sarah brings him a present but DeDe brings him a better one and mom feels upstaged by grandma again! After a flaming argument in which DeDe lays down the as-long-as-you’re-under-my-roof-you’ll-live-by-my-rules law, Sarah decides to walk out then and there, finding a temporary place with her father and Alisa (Chilton Crane), the woman her dad married after he and DeDe broke up, getting a job at a video store and rebuilding her life. She also stops bar-hopping and builds a more-or-less serious relationship with computer programmer Jack Taylor (Jeff Yagher, whose shoulder-length hair makes it look like he was auditioning for a Jimmy Page biopic and got cast in this by mistake, but who’s still great fun to look at — both he and Matt Hill are considerably hotter than the guys who get cast in Lifetime’s own movies these days!), whom she agrees to marry mainly because Kyle needs a father and having a husband and a stable home life will make the courts look more kindly on her in her custody battle with her mom for Kyle.
In the meantime, Kyle has told a story about a devil sticking him with a hot poker, and as a result her mom comes to the conclusion that he’s being sexually abused by a Satanic cult; that Sarah is willingly handing over her kid to the cult and watching as the cult members abuse him; and that the reverend of the local church is the true head (the “Satanic avatar,” explains a loony-tunes cult “expert” who’s called in as a consultant by the police) of the cult and using his public identity as a man of God to cover up his real one as a man of the Devil. Fortunately, since Kyle is the only witness to any of this, Sarah is able to prove her innocence by sneaking back into her mom’s house (she still has the key!) and stealing the tapes on which DeDe was coaching Kyle on what to say to make the ritual abuse story stick and provide the “evidence” that she needs to take her grandson away from his mom permanently.
When Sarah gets the tapes, she plays them for the family court judge and gets her kid back, and then a year elapses — she’s now married to Taylor and pregnant with his biological child, but mom hasn’t given up and she hooks up with a representative from an organization called “Project Shepherd” that operates a nationwide underground railroad devoted to hiding kids from abusing parents. The rest of the movie consists of DeDe’s struggle — along with her daughter Josie (Sarah’s younger sister) — to keep Kyle hidden from Sarah, and Sarah’s efforts to find her despite the strain this puts on her marriage to Jack and her ability to parent her younger son (and, not surprisingly, at one point she blurts out that the only reason she married Jack was to provide Kyle a father — and she accuses Jack of not caring about Kyle because he’s not his biological son) — including the tabloid TV shows she goes on to try to keep the case before the public, leading to a final climax in a train station in Portland in which DeDe and Josie have both been arrested but they’ve turned over Kyle to a Project Shepherd representative and Sarah and the FBI agents investigating the kidnapping (under the post-Lindbergh laws from the early 1930’s that made kidnapping a federal crime if the victim was transported over state lines) have to find the man and the boy in the train station before they can disappear with Kyle forever, place him with a foster home, change his name and hide him permanently. Sarah leaps onto the train at the last moment and chases the balding middle-aged man who’s holding Kyle, alerting the police just in time before the train departs.
It’s a nice suspense ending, though a bit pat, and the film overall is entertaining despite the overwrought melodramatics of Birke’s script and Colin Bucksey’s direction. It helps that the acting is good; Tracey Gold makes Sarah’s transitions from irresponsible playgirl to committed mom to avenging lioness utterly convincing, and Kate Jackson (who always struck me as the best actress of the three original Charlie’s Angels stars — Jaclyn Smith always struck me as the best-looking one of the bunch but Jackson clearly had the acting chops) matches her in her descent from concerned parent to implacable revenge figure, utterly convinced of her own rectitude and determined to the last not to yield to Sarah’s entreaties to help her find Kyle (though Josie, less committed to the Cause, ultimately breaks down and gives Sarah the information that enables her to find her son at last). A Kidnapping in the Family is the sort of movie that has a strong enough story that even the overwrought melodramatics of the script and direction can’t take away from its basic strength.
The movie I was watching this morning was A Kidnapping in the Family, one of Lifetime’s recyclings of a TV-movie originally made for ABC in 1996, at (or actually a little past) the controversy over ritual Satanic abuse of children and the craziness that led people to believe that certain women had volunteered as “breeders” for Satanic cults to generate children that the cult members could ritually abuse and then sacrifice. Supposedly based on a true story — though the melodramatics of David Birke’s script made it difficult to believe — A Kidnapping in the Family deals with the dysfunctional relationship between DeDe Cooper (Kate Jackson) and her 22-year-old daughter, Sarah Landers (Tracey Gold, whose curly blonde locks make her almost unbelievable as brunette Jackson’s daughter), who’s living at home following her divorce from Chris Landers (Matt Hill), a hot-looking but also rather dim blond who looks more like Sarah’s younger brother than her ex-husband.
During their teen marriage they produced a son, Kyle (Robert Bishop), whom DeDe and Sarah are fighting over — the film opens with Kyle’s fifth birthday party and Sarah brings him a present but DeDe brings him a better one and mom feels upstaged by grandma again! After a flaming argument in which DeDe lays down the as-long-as-you’re-under-my-roof-you’ll-live-by-my-rules law, Sarah decides to walk out then and there, finding a temporary place with her father and Alisa (Chilton Crane), the woman her dad married after he and DeDe broke up, getting a job at a video store and rebuilding her life. She also stops bar-hopping and builds a more-or-less serious relationship with computer programmer Jack Taylor (Jeff Yagher, whose shoulder-length hair makes it look like he was auditioning for a Jimmy Page biopic and got cast in this by mistake, but who’s still great fun to look at — both he and Matt Hill are considerably hotter than the guys who get cast in Lifetime’s own movies these days!), whom she agrees to marry mainly because Kyle needs a father and having a husband and a stable home life will make the courts look more kindly on her in her custody battle with her mom for Kyle.
In the meantime, Kyle has told a story about a devil sticking him with a hot poker, and as a result her mom comes to the conclusion that he’s being sexually abused by a Satanic cult; that Sarah is willingly handing over her kid to the cult and watching as the cult members abuse him; and that the reverend of the local church is the true head (the “Satanic avatar,” explains a loony-tunes cult “expert” who’s called in as a consultant by the police) of the cult and using his public identity as a man of God to cover up his real one as a man of the Devil. Fortunately, since Kyle is the only witness to any of this, Sarah is able to prove her innocence by sneaking back into her mom’s house (she still has the key!) and stealing the tapes on which DeDe was coaching Kyle on what to say to make the ritual abuse story stick and provide the “evidence” that she needs to take her grandson away from his mom permanently.
When Sarah gets the tapes, she plays them for the family court judge and gets her kid back, and then a year elapses — she’s now married to Taylor and pregnant with his biological child, but mom hasn’t given up and she hooks up with a representative from an organization called “Project Shepherd” that operates a nationwide underground railroad devoted to hiding kids from abusing parents. The rest of the movie consists of DeDe’s struggle — along with her daughter Josie (Sarah’s younger sister) — to keep Kyle hidden from Sarah, and Sarah’s efforts to find her despite the strain this puts on her marriage to Jack and her ability to parent her younger son (and, not surprisingly, at one point she blurts out that the only reason she married Jack was to provide Kyle a father — and she accuses Jack of not caring about Kyle because he’s not his biological son) — including the tabloid TV shows she goes on to try to keep the case before the public, leading to a final climax in a train station in Portland in which DeDe and Josie have both been arrested but they’ve turned over Kyle to a Project Shepherd representative and Sarah and the FBI agents investigating the kidnapping (under the post-Lindbergh laws from the early 1930’s that made kidnapping a federal crime if the victim was transported over state lines) have to find the man and the boy in the train station before they can disappear with Kyle forever, place him with a foster home, change his name and hide him permanently. Sarah leaps onto the train at the last moment and chases the balding middle-aged man who’s holding Kyle, alerting the police just in time before the train departs.
It’s a nice suspense ending, though a bit pat, and the film overall is entertaining despite the overwrought melodramatics of Birke’s script and Colin Bucksey’s direction. It helps that the acting is good; Tracey Gold makes Sarah’s transitions from irresponsible playgirl to committed mom to avenging lioness utterly convincing, and Kate Jackson (who always struck me as the best actress of the three original Charlie’s Angels stars — Jaclyn Smith always struck me as the best-looking one of the bunch but Jackson clearly had the acting chops) matches her in her descent from concerned parent to implacable revenge figure, utterly convinced of her own rectitude and determined to the last not to yield to Sarah’s entreaties to help her find Kyle (though Josie, less committed to the Cause, ultimately breaks down and gives Sarah the information that enables her to find her son at last). A Kidnapping in the Family is the sort of movie that has a strong enough story that even the overwrought melodramatics of the script and direction can’t take away from its basic strength.
Friday, August 7, 2009
A Shot in the Dark (Mirisch Corporation/United Artists, 1964)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s feature was A Shot in the Dark — imdb.com lists eight films of that title, including very early ones from 1912, 1913 and 1915 as well as talkies from 1933, 1935 and 1941 and a Hong Kong production from 1960 called Hei ye qiang sheng, which translates as “A shot in the dark,” but this is the most famous one: a 1964 comedy-mystery from director Blake Edwards that featured Peter Sellers in his second role as the bumbling French Surété Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The imdb.com contributors seemed undecided as to just when this film was made; at least one commentator said it had actually been filmed before The Pink Panther, which introduced the character of Clouseau to movie audiences, but was held back from release until The Pink Panther came out and proved that Clouseau’s character would be popular.
I have a hard time believing that; it seems more likely that with The Pink Panther turning into a personal triumph for Peter Sellers even though he was billed second (to David Niven) and most of The Pink Panther was a not especially funny sex comedy with Niven essentially recycling his role of the suave jewel thief from Raffles a quarter-century before, United Artists and the Mirisch Corporation wanted a follow-up. They started with a French play by Marcel Achard that had been adapted for the U.S. stage by Harry Kurnitz, set Sellers and Walter Matthau for the roles of the bumbling detectives (plural) at the root of the action, then when the script for this didn’t seem to be going so well they hired Blake Edwards as script doctor and possible director — and Edwards simply threw out the existing story and started over.
Co-written by Edwards and William Peter Blatty — yes, the same guy who wrote The Exorcist — A Shot in the Dark opens with a long series of tracking shots around a castle in France (though actually filmed in England) that traces the goings-on of the personal staff of the Ballon family and looks for a while like “Young Frankenstein — the colorized version.” Eventually a dramatic design emerges as the family’s chauffeur is found murdered and, by mistake, police commissioner Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) — and yes, if you have the right historical bent naming a figure of any authority in the French government “Dreyfus” is a mordantly funny joke in and of itself — assigns Clouseau to the case. What follows is a marvelous series of gags, a bit sluggishly paced between the comedy scenes but funny enough that’s not so much of a bother — when Sellers as Clouseau isn’t tearing his clothes in awkward ways he’s getting himself arrested when he tries to pose as a duck hunter or a balloon salesman and the uniformed French officers demand that he have a license for these activities.
He also ends up tracing a lead at the “Camp Sunshine” nudist colony, along with his girlfriend Elke Sommer (incidentally he’s married in The Pink Panther but he’s a bachelor here, so maybe this movie was made first after all), who plays Maria Gambrelli, the maid of the owner of the Ballon chateau, Benjamin Ballon (George Sanders, older and considerably world-wearier than he was in his prime but still a welcome sight) which gets raided by the uniformed police just as he’s on the point of cracking the case when he’s not also trying to stay afloat in the lake in the middle of the resort or getting his face slapped by a naked woman who thought he was getting too close in both senses of the term. This sequence also features a guitar player/singer who’s called in the movie — and credited — “Turk Thrust” (which sounds like a Gay porn star’s pseudonym!) but is really future director Bryan Forbes, possibly already looking forward to duplicating Blake Edwards’ successful career change from in front of to behind the camera.
The death toll mounts to eight people, four of them on Ballon’s payroll (including a gardener who’s killed just after trying to blackmail his boss) and four of them killed in a massive pub crawl by a mysterious assassin who’s out to get Clouseau and is picking off people in each bar Clouseau and Maria visit as a sort of collateral damage — and who turns out to be Commissioner Dreyfus, foreshadowing the later evolution of his character from a straight-man foil for Sellers to a Blofeldian super-villain driven so crazy by Clouseau’s antics that he’s out to conquer the world. One thing I hadn’t noticed before — and probably wouldn’t have this time if Edwards and Blatty hadn’t named Clouseau’s partner (Graham Stark) “Hercule” — is that Clouseau is quite obviously a parody of Agatha Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot (the scenes in which he starts rattling off the facts of the case, one by one, and comes up with an especially far-fetched conclusion about them, are the most obviously “Christie-an” parts of this film).
According to the imdb.com commentators, a lot of the funniest parts of the film were ad-libs — when Clouseau says one of the murders was committed in “a rit of fealous jage” instead of “a fit of jealous rage,” apparently Peter Sellers had simply blown his line, but Edwards noticed the technicians on the set laughing at it and decided to keep it in the final cut — and it was also an accident when Clouseau got his finger caught in a globe and said, “I’ve got Africa all over my hand!” Supposedly the marvelous scene in which Clouseau and Hercule try to synchronize their watches was also improvised — though somehow it’s a bit hard to believe all these stories; the supposed mistakes and improvisations fit so neatly into the context, either they were actually planned or Edwards and Blatty did some quick on-the-fly rewriting to fit them in.
In any case, A Shot in the Dark was the movie that really put both Inspector Clouseau and Peter Sellers’ performance as him on the cinematic map — even though Sellers didn’t play the part again for 11 years (until the 1975 production The Return of the Pink Panther) and in the meantime there’d been another film with the character, Inspector Clouseau (1968), in which Alan Arkin played him and it was a box-office flop. Sellers would make two more in the series before his death in 1980, The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), and after Sellers’ death Blake Edwards assembled a mishmash of outtakes and new footage with three other actors (Lucca Mezzofanti, Daniel Peacock and Daniel Farrell) as Clouseau, released it as Trail of the Pink Panther (1982), and got hit with a lawsuit from Sellers’ widow, Lynne Frederick, whereupon another movie in the cycle, Curse of the Pink Panther, was released, also with Blake Edwards directing and Roger Moore playing Clouseau (with David Niven reprising his jewel-thief role from the original Pink Panther almost two decades later, but so weakened from illness that celebrity impersonator Rich Little dubbed his lines!), following which the series was laid to a welcome rest until Steve Martin, the King of Remakes, got to play Clouseau in The Pink Panther (2006) and The Pink Panther 2 (2009).
A Shot in the Dark and the subsequent Arkin film are the only ones in the cycle that don’t have the words “Pink Panther” in their titles or use the famous animated character of the Pink Panther in their title sequences — though the titles for A Shot in the Dark are also a cartoon, and quite a clever one that actually got an audience ovation at the film’s original preview screening.
Last night’s feature was A Shot in the Dark — imdb.com lists eight films of that title, including very early ones from 1912, 1913 and 1915 as well as talkies from 1933, 1935 and 1941 and a Hong Kong production from 1960 called Hei ye qiang sheng, which translates as “A shot in the dark,” but this is the most famous one: a 1964 comedy-mystery from director Blake Edwards that featured Peter Sellers in his second role as the bumbling French Surété Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The imdb.com contributors seemed undecided as to just when this film was made; at least one commentator said it had actually been filmed before The Pink Panther, which introduced the character of Clouseau to movie audiences, but was held back from release until The Pink Panther came out and proved that Clouseau’s character would be popular.
I have a hard time believing that; it seems more likely that with The Pink Panther turning into a personal triumph for Peter Sellers even though he was billed second (to David Niven) and most of The Pink Panther was a not especially funny sex comedy with Niven essentially recycling his role of the suave jewel thief from Raffles a quarter-century before, United Artists and the Mirisch Corporation wanted a follow-up. They started with a French play by Marcel Achard that had been adapted for the U.S. stage by Harry Kurnitz, set Sellers and Walter Matthau for the roles of the bumbling detectives (plural) at the root of the action, then when the script for this didn’t seem to be going so well they hired Blake Edwards as script doctor and possible director — and Edwards simply threw out the existing story and started over.
Co-written by Edwards and William Peter Blatty — yes, the same guy who wrote The Exorcist — A Shot in the Dark opens with a long series of tracking shots around a castle in France (though actually filmed in England) that traces the goings-on of the personal staff of the Ballon family and looks for a while like “Young Frankenstein — the colorized version.” Eventually a dramatic design emerges as the family’s chauffeur is found murdered and, by mistake, police commissioner Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) — and yes, if you have the right historical bent naming a figure of any authority in the French government “Dreyfus” is a mordantly funny joke in and of itself — assigns Clouseau to the case. What follows is a marvelous series of gags, a bit sluggishly paced between the comedy scenes but funny enough that’s not so much of a bother — when Sellers as Clouseau isn’t tearing his clothes in awkward ways he’s getting himself arrested when he tries to pose as a duck hunter or a balloon salesman and the uniformed French officers demand that he have a license for these activities.
He also ends up tracing a lead at the “Camp Sunshine” nudist colony, along with his girlfriend Elke Sommer (incidentally he’s married in The Pink Panther but he’s a bachelor here, so maybe this movie was made first after all), who plays Maria Gambrelli, the maid of the owner of the Ballon chateau, Benjamin Ballon (George Sanders, older and considerably world-wearier than he was in his prime but still a welcome sight) which gets raided by the uniformed police just as he’s on the point of cracking the case when he’s not also trying to stay afloat in the lake in the middle of the resort or getting his face slapped by a naked woman who thought he was getting too close in both senses of the term. This sequence also features a guitar player/singer who’s called in the movie — and credited — “Turk Thrust” (which sounds like a Gay porn star’s pseudonym!) but is really future director Bryan Forbes, possibly already looking forward to duplicating Blake Edwards’ successful career change from in front of to behind the camera.
The death toll mounts to eight people, four of them on Ballon’s payroll (including a gardener who’s killed just after trying to blackmail his boss) and four of them killed in a massive pub crawl by a mysterious assassin who’s out to get Clouseau and is picking off people in each bar Clouseau and Maria visit as a sort of collateral damage — and who turns out to be Commissioner Dreyfus, foreshadowing the later evolution of his character from a straight-man foil for Sellers to a Blofeldian super-villain driven so crazy by Clouseau’s antics that he’s out to conquer the world. One thing I hadn’t noticed before — and probably wouldn’t have this time if Edwards and Blatty hadn’t named Clouseau’s partner (Graham Stark) “Hercule” — is that Clouseau is quite obviously a parody of Agatha Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot (the scenes in which he starts rattling off the facts of the case, one by one, and comes up with an especially far-fetched conclusion about them, are the most obviously “Christie-an” parts of this film).
According to the imdb.com commentators, a lot of the funniest parts of the film were ad-libs — when Clouseau says one of the murders was committed in “a rit of fealous jage” instead of “a fit of jealous rage,” apparently Peter Sellers had simply blown his line, but Edwards noticed the technicians on the set laughing at it and decided to keep it in the final cut — and it was also an accident when Clouseau got his finger caught in a globe and said, “I’ve got Africa all over my hand!” Supposedly the marvelous scene in which Clouseau and Hercule try to synchronize their watches was also improvised — though somehow it’s a bit hard to believe all these stories; the supposed mistakes and improvisations fit so neatly into the context, either they were actually planned or Edwards and Blatty did some quick on-the-fly rewriting to fit them in.
In any case, A Shot in the Dark was the movie that really put both Inspector Clouseau and Peter Sellers’ performance as him on the cinematic map — even though Sellers didn’t play the part again for 11 years (until the 1975 production The Return of the Pink Panther) and in the meantime there’d been another film with the character, Inspector Clouseau (1968), in which Alan Arkin played him and it was a box-office flop. Sellers would make two more in the series before his death in 1980, The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), and after Sellers’ death Blake Edwards assembled a mishmash of outtakes and new footage with three other actors (Lucca Mezzofanti, Daniel Peacock and Daniel Farrell) as Clouseau, released it as Trail of the Pink Panther (1982), and got hit with a lawsuit from Sellers’ widow, Lynne Frederick, whereupon another movie in the cycle, Curse of the Pink Panther, was released, also with Blake Edwards directing and Roger Moore playing Clouseau (with David Niven reprising his jewel-thief role from the original Pink Panther almost two decades later, but so weakened from illness that celebrity impersonator Rich Little dubbed his lines!), following which the series was laid to a welcome rest until Steve Martin, the King of Remakes, got to play Clouseau in The Pink Panther (2006) and The Pink Panther 2 (2009).
A Shot in the Dark and the subsequent Arkin film are the only ones in the cycle that don’t have the words “Pink Panther” in their titles or use the famous animated character of the Pink Panther in their title sequences — though the titles for A Shot in the Dark are also a cartoon, and quite a clever one that actually got an audience ovation at the film’s original preview screening.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
On the Waterfront (Horizon/Columbia, 1954)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided to do an envoi to Budd Schulberg and run the most famous film he worked on: On the Waterfront, the 1954 melodrama about corruption and organized crime on the New York waterfront directed by Elia Kazan and written by Schulberg — and largely interpreted as an apologia by both men for their decision to testify as friendly witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee and a piece of propaganda about how it’s a citizen’s moral duty to be an informer. Incidentally, the Los Angeles Times obituary on Schulberg mentioned this controversy and its author, Dennis McClellan, quoted both Kazan and Schulberg on whether or not the film was an attempt to justify their own informing — and the two men made opposite statements on the subject. Kazan said he did mean the film as a justification for his own actions (“I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing”), while Schulberg equally strongly insisted he didn’t (“I was interested in social conditions on the waterfront and drawing a truthful story, not in justifying my position. Can you imagine Kazan asking me to write something that would justify our friendly testimony? It’s a shame that an inaccuracy like that has become a ‘fact’ when it simply couldn’t be more wrong. … Let them say what they want, but they’re missing the point of the film, which was not about informing but about men standing up to the mob for their rights on the docks”).
On the Waterfront had the sort of tangled production history that became more and more common as the studio system broke down and film production was gradually taken over by the makeshift combinations of studio executives, agents, “independent” producers and talent that have made (or not made) most movies ever since and given birth to the late John Gregory Dunne’s infamous mal mot that the true art form of Hollywood is the deal. It began as a series of articles in the New York Sun by reporter Malcolm Johnson in 1948 that exposed the endemic corruption behind the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on the New York docks. Johnson’s series of 24 articles won him a Pulitzer Prize and were given additional credibility when a union hiring boss was murdered while the series was running.
The first attempt to make a movie inspired by Johnson’s reporting was begun at Columbia Pictures in 1951, when studio head Harry Cohn hired writer Arthur Miller to do a script on the waterfront that Miller called The Hook (after the grappling hook longshoremen use — or at least used in the era before container freight — to extract cargo from ship’s holds). Cohn was appalled at the general tenor of Miller’s script, which was about workers being abused by a corrupt combination of exploitative employers and gangster unions, and he put pressure on Miller to change the bad guys running the union from the Mafia to the Communist Party. Miller said on a PBS-TV interview late in his life that Cohn had actually submitted a copy of his movie to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for political vetting, and this had appalled Miller so much that he had quit the project. When that show ran, the Los Angeles Times received a letter to the editor from Roy M. Brewer, who in the early 1950’s had been one of the key people involved in enforcing the Hollywood blacklist — he was the head of the motion picture projectionists’ union and he had ordered his members never to show a film with blacklisted talent (thereby showing some of the same brutal high-handedness of the union bosses in this film!) — who said that Miller was mistaken; that it was he, not Hoover, to whom Cohn had sent Miller’s script for vetting. (It’s an indication of Brewer’s power over Hollywood that Miller could have interpreted Cohn sending him the script as equivalent to him sending it to the head of the FBI.)
The project lay fallow until Budd Schulberg picked it up, hooked up with Elia Kazan, and wrote a script based on the Johnson articles and his own researches around the dock. Kazan, who up to this point had made most of his films for 20th Century-Fox, offered the project to Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck — not realizing that Zanuck had just contracted to make all his films in the new CinemaScope wide-screen process and was steering his slate in the direction of historical romances, sex comedies and other genres that would suit themselves to wide-screen and color. On the Waterfront didn’t qualify — Zanuck told Kazan, “Who’s going to care about a bunch of sweaty longshoremen?” — so Kazan and Schulberg ended up selling the project to Sam Spiegel’s Horizon Pictures, who placed it back at Columbia, where Cohn once again asked that the people corrupting the union be changed from gangsters to Communists. (Apparently the usually savvy Columbia head had been unmoved by the box-office failure of RKO’s The Woman on Pier 13 — formerly called I Married a Communist — in which Robert Ryan plays a longshoreman in San Francisco who resists the Communist thugs who dominate his union.)
The project went forward but with further difficulties, mainly relating to casting — John Garfield, the actor Kazan and Schulberg had had in mind when they started the project (and another apostate Leftist!), was already dead; they signed Frank Sinatra for the part, but then Spiegel decided that Marlon Brando would be a bigger draw and signed him, leading Sinatra to sue for breach of contract. In some ways Brando made a lot more sense — the supporting cast, including Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint (in her first film) and Rod Steiger, was practically an Actors’ Studio all-star list; and Kazan had successfully worked with Brando before in A Streetcar Named Desire (on stage and film) and ¡Viva Zapata! — but, though he won his first Academy Award for this film, his casting adds a level of problems to an already good but flawed movie that’s far from being the classic it’s usually acknowledged as or its makers were obviously trying to create.
On the Waterfront went for Quality with a capital Q: not only a star director, a prestigious writer and the hottest young actor around but a great cinematographer (Boris Kaufman, who’d shown himself a master of the docks two decades earlier in his native France with Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante) and a great composer (Leonard Bernstein, writing his only film score for a non-musical), as well as location shooting (in New Jersey — the forces that had made the New York docks so corrupt in their story were still operating and they wisely decided to shoot somewhere else, albeit close enough that it would look right) and an overall aura of prestige. The odd thing is that they were shooting a story that could have been done as well or better, and far less pretentiously, by Warners two decades earlier, with James Cagney — a much greater actor than Brando could ever have dreamed of being — in the lead. (Cagney was still around in 1954 but would have been too old for the lead — though he could have still played one of the union gangsters and added badly needed energy and a genuine sense of proletarianism to the film.)
The plot gets underway when Terry Malloy (Brando), a former heavyweight contender who ended up on the docks after he agreed to throw a fight he easily could have won, is prevailed upon by union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and his brother Charley “The Gent” Malloy (Rod Steiger), one of Friendly’s lieutenants, to finger Jimmy Doyle (Arthur Keegan) before Doyle goes to testify before the Waterfront Crime Commission (pretty obviously modeled after the real-life Kefauver hearings on organized crime, the first major government hearings about anything to be televised). Terry figures that Friendly’s thugs are only going to rough up Doyle, but in fact they pitch him off the roof of the New York apartment building where he lives (and has a pigeon coop on top of the roof, which is supposed to be considered a moving symbol of his and Terry’s sensitivity but is hard to take seriously after The Producers), killing him.
The good guys are Father Barry (Karl Malden), the priest at the local Roman Catholic church where the longshoremen attend; and Jimmy’s sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint), who’s naturally determined to avenge the death of her brother no matter what the danger to herself or everyone else around her, including her elderly father (John Hamilton) who’s barely hanging on to a longshoreman’s career himself. Father Barry calls a meeting of longshoremen to organize a resistance to the union’s corruption, and Friendly and Charley order Terry to go to the meeting and spy on it — though they hardly seem to need him to because they’ve got a more brutal response in mind: their thugs just surround the church where the meeting is being held and, as the attendees emerge from the basement to go home at the end, the thugs set upon them and beat them up.
Terry narrowly escapes the beating and gets Edie safely out of the situation, and the two of them start to fall in love — only to break up when Terry levels with Edie that he fingered his brother for Friendly’s hit squad and, naturally, she turns on him in a fury and refuses to see him again. Realizing they’re losing their influence on Terry — that he’s about to turn from a “D&D” (“deaf and dumb”) to a “canary” and that Father Barry and Edie may actually persuade him to testify before the Waterfront Crime Commission — they decide to intimidate the hell out of him, first by murdering all his pet pigeons and then by tracking him when he meets with his brother Charley in a taxi. In this, the famous “I coulda been a contenda” scene, Terry pours his heart out to Charley and the brother himself breaks down (doing some remarkably subtle acting we don’t usually associate with Rod Steiger, even though he had to shoot the scene on an otherwise empty set with someone else feeding him Brando’s lines because it was in Brando’s contract that he could leave the set at 4 p.m. each day to see his analyst), whereupon Friendly’s thugs (working with the cabdriver, who’s part of the gang) kidnap Charley and kill him, leaving his body on a hook to scare Terry into shutting up.
Not surprisingly, the death of his brother has exactly the opposite effect (aside from giving him a point of commonality with Eva Marie Saint’s character — one wonders how much of a basis that’s going to be for a future relationship when the biggest thing they have in common is their brothers were both murdered by the same gang); he testifies (though the actual testimony is shown surprisingly briefly), and as he’s on TV naming Johnny Friendly as the man who ordered the hit on Jimmy Doyle, Kazan cuts to a middle-aged man who’s otherwise unidentified in the plot turning off the set and telling his house servant, “If Johnny Friendly calls, tell him I’m out! I’m always out to Johnny Friendly!” — indicating that he’s a higher-up in either the union or the Mafia and therefore the corruption will continue even though Friendly himself is about to get either arrested or killed. Nevertheless, the stage is set for a final scene of redemption in which Terry Malloy is beaten by Friendly’s goons and he can barely stagger back to the docks for work — the scene is carefully staged to evoke parallels to the Crucifixion, an especially odd symbol for a film written by a Jew — but eventually he makes it and the film drags itself to at least a semi-happy ending. (This also inspired a joke around Hollywood among producers and agents to the effect that if you wanted Brando for your movie, you wrote a scene in which his character got beaten up; not surprisingly, the longest and most brutal beating a Brando character ever got was the one in One-Eyed Jacks, the film Brando directed himself.)
On the Waterfront is an acknowledged classic and one hesitates to pick it apart, but there are some pretty deep problems with it. The whole conception is so bombastic and over-the-top — for all the association of the Actors’ Studio with relatively subtle, inward-looking “Method” acting, when Kazan got hold of its graduates he generally cast them in shrieking melodramas in which all the emotions are set at 11. The best parts of the film are the ones that vividly dramatize the corruption of the waterfront and how utterly dependent the workers are on people who are out to exploit them (though, given that this is a 1954 movie and therefore one made at the height of anti-Communist hysteria, we never see a shipping owner or any other sort of capitalist and the culpability of the employers in allowing this racket to continue is blatantly skirted) — and though the people running (and corrupting) the union remain gangsters instead of Communists, the regime they’ve created on the waterfront has a strong similarity to the Stalinist terror, with people afraid to go against the system or even voice their dissatisfaction lest they get an early-morning visit from one of Friendly’s goon squads. The scene in which the union’s straw boss gets fed up with the crowds of longshoremen waiting for work and simply throws out the medallions that entitle their wearers to jobs for the day, and lets them dive for them like zoo animals at feeding time, still packs a wallop and is one of the best and most chilling moments in the film, one of the few times it actually dramatizes the evil of the Mob regime on the docks instead of simply telling us about it.
For all Schulberg’s professed dedication to researching on the real waterfront and bringing it to life realistically, he was too much a child of Hollywood (literally and figuratively) to avoid trotting out old-movie clichés when he needs them to keep his plot going. The I’ll-show-you-you’re-not-so-tough scene in which Father Barry punches out Terry was done a hell of a lot better with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable in MGM’s San Francisco 18 years earlier (and Tracy looked a lot more credible than Karl Malden as a priest — though that’s at least partly a function of Malden’s subsequent career; early on, when he’s trying to rally the longshoremen to resist the gangster union bosses, I joked, “I want you to help yourselves! I want you to make enough money that you can have American Express cards!”), and the patness with which Schulberg maneuvers Terry and Edie both in and out of love (and then back in!) is too old-line to be convincing in what’s supposed to be a gritty drama about proletarian life.
The other problem with this film is Marlon Brando; though there are a number of Brando performances I actually like (notably in some of his less-regarded films like One-Eyed Jacks and the Mutiny on the Bounty remake), he’s never been one of my favorite actors, partly because I find him a turnoff physically (he seems to look crude, barely in charge of his body, and though he was clearly a better actor than Rock Hudson, like Hudson he looks like he was baked out of Wonder bread dough) and partly because I find him almost unbearably mannered, relying on schtick to get his performances across — albeit state-of-the-art (for 1954) Method schtick rather than old-Hollywood schtick. I’ll give him credit for trying to play up Terry’s “sensitive” side — he obviously didn’t want to do Stanley Kowalski all over again and he wanted to make it believable that this rough-and-tumble proletarian had a deep, kindly soul inside — but he way overdoes it; his face is discernibly whiter than the actors playing his fellow longshoremen (a major lapse of visual credibility in a movie about people who spend a lot of their lives outdoors) and time after time his Terry Malloy emerges as an Actors’ Studio creation rather than a living, breathing human being; Brando is a good enough actor to nail both the roughneck and “sensitive” sides of his character, but not a good enough one to bring them into balance and make them believable as belonging to the same person.
One aches through this whole movie at what James Cagney, a more straightforward performer but also a much more powerful and charismatic one, could have done with this part if he’d been able to play it in his youth; his old-line Broadway and Hollywood acting would have done a much better job at making Terry Malloy a believable character instead of a screenwriter’s abstraction (as Cagney did, come to think about it, in a somewhat similarly plotted movie, City for Conquest — which wasn’t about the waterfront but did cast him as a boxer whose career is ruined by corruption; it too had its share of heavy-handed symbolism but Cagney rose above it and made his character live in a way that eluded Brando in On the Waterfront). Add to this a bombastic Bernstein score that perfectly matches Kazan’s visuals — he was able to write beautifully lyrical music for the love (if you can call them that) scenes between Brando and Saint, and tough, loud music symbolizing the docks (though in the opening, as the ship the longshoremen are about to unload comes in, Bernstein assaults the ear with so many drums one half-expects the film to show the longshoremen working in strict unison and the scene to take on the air of a cross between a Busby Berkeley number and a Soviet proletarian musical!
On the Waterfront is a good movie but it’s been incredibly overrated; it tells a moving story but too often hits us over the head with the obviousness and banality of its symbolism, and whatever political agendas its director and writer had in mind (Kazan actually said he thought of On the Waterfront as a pro-HUAC response to Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, and though Schulberg — unlike Kazan — disclaimed any intention to make the film a pro-HUAC parable, he did say his decision to testify as a friendly witness was based on his opposition to the Communists forming a secret cabal to take control of the Screen Writers’ Guild, much the way organized crime secretly or not-so-secretly runs the longshoremen’s union in this film), they get communicated with a sledgehammer force that only — paradoxically — makes it obvious how muddled they are.
I decided to do an envoi to Budd Schulberg and run the most famous film he worked on: On the Waterfront, the 1954 melodrama about corruption and organized crime on the New York waterfront directed by Elia Kazan and written by Schulberg — and largely interpreted as an apologia by both men for their decision to testify as friendly witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee and a piece of propaganda about how it’s a citizen’s moral duty to be an informer. Incidentally, the Los Angeles Times obituary on Schulberg mentioned this controversy and its author, Dennis McClellan, quoted both Kazan and Schulberg on whether or not the film was an attempt to justify their own informing — and the two men made opposite statements on the subject. Kazan said he did mean the film as a justification for his own actions (“I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing”), while Schulberg equally strongly insisted he didn’t (“I was interested in social conditions on the waterfront and drawing a truthful story, not in justifying my position. Can you imagine Kazan asking me to write something that would justify our friendly testimony? It’s a shame that an inaccuracy like that has become a ‘fact’ when it simply couldn’t be more wrong. … Let them say what they want, but they’re missing the point of the film, which was not about informing but about men standing up to the mob for their rights on the docks”).
On the Waterfront had the sort of tangled production history that became more and more common as the studio system broke down and film production was gradually taken over by the makeshift combinations of studio executives, agents, “independent” producers and talent that have made (or not made) most movies ever since and given birth to the late John Gregory Dunne’s infamous mal mot that the true art form of Hollywood is the deal. It began as a series of articles in the New York Sun by reporter Malcolm Johnson in 1948 that exposed the endemic corruption behind the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on the New York docks. Johnson’s series of 24 articles won him a Pulitzer Prize and were given additional credibility when a union hiring boss was murdered while the series was running.
The first attempt to make a movie inspired by Johnson’s reporting was begun at Columbia Pictures in 1951, when studio head Harry Cohn hired writer Arthur Miller to do a script on the waterfront that Miller called The Hook (after the grappling hook longshoremen use — or at least used in the era before container freight — to extract cargo from ship’s holds). Cohn was appalled at the general tenor of Miller’s script, which was about workers being abused by a corrupt combination of exploitative employers and gangster unions, and he put pressure on Miller to change the bad guys running the union from the Mafia to the Communist Party. Miller said on a PBS-TV interview late in his life that Cohn had actually submitted a copy of his movie to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for political vetting, and this had appalled Miller so much that he had quit the project. When that show ran, the Los Angeles Times received a letter to the editor from Roy M. Brewer, who in the early 1950’s had been one of the key people involved in enforcing the Hollywood blacklist — he was the head of the motion picture projectionists’ union and he had ordered his members never to show a film with blacklisted talent (thereby showing some of the same brutal high-handedness of the union bosses in this film!) — who said that Miller was mistaken; that it was he, not Hoover, to whom Cohn had sent Miller’s script for vetting. (It’s an indication of Brewer’s power over Hollywood that Miller could have interpreted Cohn sending him the script as equivalent to him sending it to the head of the FBI.)
The project lay fallow until Budd Schulberg picked it up, hooked up with Elia Kazan, and wrote a script based on the Johnson articles and his own researches around the dock. Kazan, who up to this point had made most of his films for 20th Century-Fox, offered the project to Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck — not realizing that Zanuck had just contracted to make all his films in the new CinemaScope wide-screen process and was steering his slate in the direction of historical romances, sex comedies and other genres that would suit themselves to wide-screen and color. On the Waterfront didn’t qualify — Zanuck told Kazan, “Who’s going to care about a bunch of sweaty longshoremen?” — so Kazan and Schulberg ended up selling the project to Sam Spiegel’s Horizon Pictures, who placed it back at Columbia, where Cohn once again asked that the people corrupting the union be changed from gangsters to Communists. (Apparently the usually savvy Columbia head had been unmoved by the box-office failure of RKO’s The Woman on Pier 13 — formerly called I Married a Communist — in which Robert Ryan plays a longshoreman in San Francisco who resists the Communist thugs who dominate his union.)
The project went forward but with further difficulties, mainly relating to casting — John Garfield, the actor Kazan and Schulberg had had in mind when they started the project (and another apostate Leftist!), was already dead; they signed Frank Sinatra for the part, but then Spiegel decided that Marlon Brando would be a bigger draw and signed him, leading Sinatra to sue for breach of contract. In some ways Brando made a lot more sense — the supporting cast, including Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint (in her first film) and Rod Steiger, was practically an Actors’ Studio all-star list; and Kazan had successfully worked with Brando before in A Streetcar Named Desire (on stage and film) and ¡Viva Zapata! — but, though he won his first Academy Award for this film, his casting adds a level of problems to an already good but flawed movie that’s far from being the classic it’s usually acknowledged as or its makers were obviously trying to create.
On the Waterfront went for Quality with a capital Q: not only a star director, a prestigious writer and the hottest young actor around but a great cinematographer (Boris Kaufman, who’d shown himself a master of the docks two decades earlier in his native France with Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante) and a great composer (Leonard Bernstein, writing his only film score for a non-musical), as well as location shooting (in New Jersey — the forces that had made the New York docks so corrupt in their story were still operating and they wisely decided to shoot somewhere else, albeit close enough that it would look right) and an overall aura of prestige. The odd thing is that they were shooting a story that could have been done as well or better, and far less pretentiously, by Warners two decades earlier, with James Cagney — a much greater actor than Brando could ever have dreamed of being — in the lead. (Cagney was still around in 1954 but would have been too old for the lead — though he could have still played one of the union gangsters and added badly needed energy and a genuine sense of proletarianism to the film.)
The plot gets underway when Terry Malloy (Brando), a former heavyweight contender who ended up on the docks after he agreed to throw a fight he easily could have won, is prevailed upon by union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and his brother Charley “The Gent” Malloy (Rod Steiger), one of Friendly’s lieutenants, to finger Jimmy Doyle (Arthur Keegan) before Doyle goes to testify before the Waterfront Crime Commission (pretty obviously modeled after the real-life Kefauver hearings on organized crime, the first major government hearings about anything to be televised). Terry figures that Friendly’s thugs are only going to rough up Doyle, but in fact they pitch him off the roof of the New York apartment building where he lives (and has a pigeon coop on top of the roof, which is supposed to be considered a moving symbol of his and Terry’s sensitivity but is hard to take seriously after The Producers), killing him.
The good guys are Father Barry (Karl Malden), the priest at the local Roman Catholic church where the longshoremen attend; and Jimmy’s sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint), who’s naturally determined to avenge the death of her brother no matter what the danger to herself or everyone else around her, including her elderly father (John Hamilton) who’s barely hanging on to a longshoreman’s career himself. Father Barry calls a meeting of longshoremen to organize a resistance to the union’s corruption, and Friendly and Charley order Terry to go to the meeting and spy on it — though they hardly seem to need him to because they’ve got a more brutal response in mind: their thugs just surround the church where the meeting is being held and, as the attendees emerge from the basement to go home at the end, the thugs set upon them and beat them up.
Terry narrowly escapes the beating and gets Edie safely out of the situation, and the two of them start to fall in love — only to break up when Terry levels with Edie that he fingered his brother for Friendly’s hit squad and, naturally, she turns on him in a fury and refuses to see him again. Realizing they’re losing their influence on Terry — that he’s about to turn from a “D&D” (“deaf and dumb”) to a “canary” and that Father Barry and Edie may actually persuade him to testify before the Waterfront Crime Commission — they decide to intimidate the hell out of him, first by murdering all his pet pigeons and then by tracking him when he meets with his brother Charley in a taxi. In this, the famous “I coulda been a contenda” scene, Terry pours his heart out to Charley and the brother himself breaks down (doing some remarkably subtle acting we don’t usually associate with Rod Steiger, even though he had to shoot the scene on an otherwise empty set with someone else feeding him Brando’s lines because it was in Brando’s contract that he could leave the set at 4 p.m. each day to see his analyst), whereupon Friendly’s thugs (working with the cabdriver, who’s part of the gang) kidnap Charley and kill him, leaving his body on a hook to scare Terry into shutting up.
Not surprisingly, the death of his brother has exactly the opposite effect (aside from giving him a point of commonality with Eva Marie Saint’s character — one wonders how much of a basis that’s going to be for a future relationship when the biggest thing they have in common is their brothers were both murdered by the same gang); he testifies (though the actual testimony is shown surprisingly briefly), and as he’s on TV naming Johnny Friendly as the man who ordered the hit on Jimmy Doyle, Kazan cuts to a middle-aged man who’s otherwise unidentified in the plot turning off the set and telling his house servant, “If Johnny Friendly calls, tell him I’m out! I’m always out to Johnny Friendly!” — indicating that he’s a higher-up in either the union or the Mafia and therefore the corruption will continue even though Friendly himself is about to get either arrested or killed. Nevertheless, the stage is set for a final scene of redemption in which Terry Malloy is beaten by Friendly’s goons and he can barely stagger back to the docks for work — the scene is carefully staged to evoke parallels to the Crucifixion, an especially odd symbol for a film written by a Jew — but eventually he makes it and the film drags itself to at least a semi-happy ending. (This also inspired a joke around Hollywood among producers and agents to the effect that if you wanted Brando for your movie, you wrote a scene in which his character got beaten up; not surprisingly, the longest and most brutal beating a Brando character ever got was the one in One-Eyed Jacks, the film Brando directed himself.)
On the Waterfront is an acknowledged classic and one hesitates to pick it apart, but there are some pretty deep problems with it. The whole conception is so bombastic and over-the-top — for all the association of the Actors’ Studio with relatively subtle, inward-looking “Method” acting, when Kazan got hold of its graduates he generally cast them in shrieking melodramas in which all the emotions are set at 11. The best parts of the film are the ones that vividly dramatize the corruption of the waterfront and how utterly dependent the workers are on people who are out to exploit them (though, given that this is a 1954 movie and therefore one made at the height of anti-Communist hysteria, we never see a shipping owner or any other sort of capitalist and the culpability of the employers in allowing this racket to continue is blatantly skirted) — and though the people running (and corrupting) the union remain gangsters instead of Communists, the regime they’ve created on the waterfront has a strong similarity to the Stalinist terror, with people afraid to go against the system or even voice their dissatisfaction lest they get an early-morning visit from one of Friendly’s goon squads. The scene in which the union’s straw boss gets fed up with the crowds of longshoremen waiting for work and simply throws out the medallions that entitle their wearers to jobs for the day, and lets them dive for them like zoo animals at feeding time, still packs a wallop and is one of the best and most chilling moments in the film, one of the few times it actually dramatizes the evil of the Mob regime on the docks instead of simply telling us about it.
For all Schulberg’s professed dedication to researching on the real waterfront and bringing it to life realistically, he was too much a child of Hollywood (literally and figuratively) to avoid trotting out old-movie clichés when he needs them to keep his plot going. The I’ll-show-you-you’re-not-so-tough scene in which Father Barry punches out Terry was done a hell of a lot better with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable in MGM’s San Francisco 18 years earlier (and Tracy looked a lot more credible than Karl Malden as a priest — though that’s at least partly a function of Malden’s subsequent career; early on, when he’s trying to rally the longshoremen to resist the gangster union bosses, I joked, “I want you to help yourselves! I want you to make enough money that you can have American Express cards!”), and the patness with which Schulberg maneuvers Terry and Edie both in and out of love (and then back in!) is too old-line to be convincing in what’s supposed to be a gritty drama about proletarian life.
The other problem with this film is Marlon Brando; though there are a number of Brando performances I actually like (notably in some of his less-regarded films like One-Eyed Jacks and the Mutiny on the Bounty remake), he’s never been one of my favorite actors, partly because I find him a turnoff physically (he seems to look crude, barely in charge of his body, and though he was clearly a better actor than Rock Hudson, like Hudson he looks like he was baked out of Wonder bread dough) and partly because I find him almost unbearably mannered, relying on schtick to get his performances across — albeit state-of-the-art (for 1954) Method schtick rather than old-Hollywood schtick. I’ll give him credit for trying to play up Terry’s “sensitive” side — he obviously didn’t want to do Stanley Kowalski all over again and he wanted to make it believable that this rough-and-tumble proletarian had a deep, kindly soul inside — but he way overdoes it; his face is discernibly whiter than the actors playing his fellow longshoremen (a major lapse of visual credibility in a movie about people who spend a lot of their lives outdoors) and time after time his Terry Malloy emerges as an Actors’ Studio creation rather than a living, breathing human being; Brando is a good enough actor to nail both the roughneck and “sensitive” sides of his character, but not a good enough one to bring them into balance and make them believable as belonging to the same person.
One aches through this whole movie at what James Cagney, a more straightforward performer but also a much more powerful and charismatic one, could have done with this part if he’d been able to play it in his youth; his old-line Broadway and Hollywood acting would have done a much better job at making Terry Malloy a believable character instead of a screenwriter’s abstraction (as Cagney did, come to think about it, in a somewhat similarly plotted movie, City for Conquest — which wasn’t about the waterfront but did cast him as a boxer whose career is ruined by corruption; it too had its share of heavy-handed symbolism but Cagney rose above it and made his character live in a way that eluded Brando in On the Waterfront). Add to this a bombastic Bernstein score that perfectly matches Kazan’s visuals — he was able to write beautifully lyrical music for the love (if you can call them that) scenes between Brando and Saint, and tough, loud music symbolizing the docks (though in the opening, as the ship the longshoremen are about to unload comes in, Bernstein assaults the ear with so many drums one half-expects the film to show the longshoremen working in strict unison and the scene to take on the air of a cross between a Busby Berkeley number and a Soviet proletarian musical!
On the Waterfront is a good movie but it’s been incredibly overrated; it tells a moving story but too often hits us over the head with the obviousness and banality of its symbolism, and whatever political agendas its director and writer had in mind (Kazan actually said he thought of On the Waterfront as a pro-HUAC response to Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, and though Schulberg — unlike Kazan — disclaimed any intention to make the film a pro-HUAC parable, he did say his decision to testify as a friendly witness was based on his opposition to the Communists forming a secret cabal to take control of the Screen Writers’ Guild, much the way organized crime secretly or not-so-secretly runs the longshoremen’s union in this film), they get communicated with a sledgehammer force that only — paradoxically — makes it obvious how muddled they are.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The Final Edition (Columbia, rel. 1931, © 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I wound up watching a movie, the third in that interesting run of early-1930’s “B” films (so far all of them have been from Columbia, unusual in itself given that almost nothing from their early-1930’s output is readily available on DVD’s; even most of the Frank Capra films before Lady for a Day have remained in home-video limbo, though the 1932 American Madness was included in the recent Capra box along with his more famous films from late in the decade) recently shown on TCM: The Final Edition, yet another interesting compounding of a gangster plot line with another genre. In this case, as the title implies, the gangster plot is overlaid on a newspaper drama, though it’s not apparent until the start of the second reel just where the newspaper bit will come in.
The film opens with a raid on the illegal casino run by gangster Sid Malvern (Bradley Page) and his girlfriend and partner, Patsy King (Mary Doran), who complain that they were just raided three weeks previously — implying that the earlier raid was just for show and they were paying off the cops to be protected from any serious law enforcement. All bets are off, however, now that a new, compulsively honest police commissioner, Jim Conroy (Wallis Clark), is in charge of the force; he’s out to smash the city’s entire organized crime ring and bust the head man of all the rackets, attorney Neil Selby (Morgan Wallace). Ostensibly Malvern and King are just his clients; really they’re working for him and he’s the real owner of their illegal casino. Conroy brings this terrible trio to his office and chews them out, and shortly thereafter he’s found murdered.
The film then cuts to the office of the Daily Bulletin and to a confrontation between managing editor Sam Bradshaw (Pat O’Brien, top-billed) and reporter Anne Woodman (Mae Clarke); it seems he sent her to a woman embroiled in a bitter divorce case in search of a story about it, the woman talked her out of printing anything, and the rival paper The Record (there’s a certain degree of nostalgia in this movie for the days in which cities could support competing newspapers!) scooped The Bulletin about it. Anne tries to assure Sam that the story was groundless, and by printing it The Record has set itself up for a big libel suit, but shortly thereafter the writers, Roy Chanslor (story) and Dorothy Howell (script), just drop this plot thread altogether and we never hear of it again.
Instead, either Sam fires Anne or she quits — and she decides to solve the Conroy murder herself and offer the story either to the Bulletin or the Record, depending on who’ll pay her more. To do this, she traces Malvern — whom she’s convinced (correctly, as things turn out), ordered the hit on Conroy — to the Lakeside Inn resort (Charles joked that the “lakeshore” on which this resort was built was obviously one of the Los Angeles area’s ocean beaches, and “Oceanside Inn” would have been a better name for it since the “lake” it fronted on was clearly the Pacific Ocean), where she figures that by cruising him she’ll be able to worm out of him the information Conroy had against him and Selby and for which they killed him. The two sunbathe on the beach — where Freddie (James Donlan), Sam’s comic-relief photographer, takes a picture of them together and brings it back to Sam, who decides to publish it — and then go up to Anne’s room, where she makes a fake phone call to the hotel desk to have a distraction so she won’t have to have sex with Malvern, and finally finds in his coat pocket (she’s left him on the beach and pleaded the need to change clothes) a claim check for the baggage room at Union Station and intuits that Malvern deposited the envelope of evidence there.
Malvern catches on when he can’t find the claim check, and he and two of his thugs tail Anne to Union Station and catch up with her just as she’s phoning the Bulletin’s office to let them know she has the information. Sam is out when she calls, so she has to trust Freddie to relay the information, but he gets enough of her message so that Sam, when he returns, realizes that Malvern has kidnapped Anne and is taking her to his own home. It all ends happily, of course, with Sam alerting the police, who surround the building and take Malvern, Patsy (who had a jealous hissy-fit when she saw the photo of Malvern and Anne in the Bulletin, which seems to have been Sam’s motive in running it) and his thugs into custody, recover Conroy’s evidence and give the Bulletin a big story — and in the final tag scene Anne agrees to give up her reportorial career to marry Conroy. (Had it not been for that final twist, this would seem like a prequel to His Girl Friday — a movie which, despite the recent comments on it in the Los Angeles Times that wrote it off as another sexist movie in which the powerful, independent woman is “tamed” by a man, is actually an anti-sexist movie; Rosalind Russell’s character rejects the man who wants her to give up her career and goes back to the man who wants her as a professional and a personal partner.)
Like Attorney for the Defense, The Final Edition isn’t exactly the freshest sort of storytelling (it wasn’t when it was new, either!), but it’s a great little movie for what it is and a perfectly acceptable way to kill 66 minutes even though Howard Higgin, the director, is fine in the newspaper scenes but directs the gangster sequences more slowly and sluggishly than they would have been staged in a Warners movie of the time — although this film actually anticipates later Warners vehicles like Mystery of the Wax Museum, Back in Circulation, Front Page Woman and the Torchy Blane films.
Charles and I wound up watching a movie, the third in that interesting run of early-1930’s “B” films (so far all of them have been from Columbia, unusual in itself given that almost nothing from their early-1930’s output is readily available on DVD’s; even most of the Frank Capra films before Lady for a Day have remained in home-video limbo, though the 1932 American Madness was included in the recent Capra box along with his more famous films from late in the decade) recently shown on TCM: The Final Edition, yet another interesting compounding of a gangster plot line with another genre. In this case, as the title implies, the gangster plot is overlaid on a newspaper drama, though it’s not apparent until the start of the second reel just where the newspaper bit will come in.
The film opens with a raid on the illegal casino run by gangster Sid Malvern (Bradley Page) and his girlfriend and partner, Patsy King (Mary Doran), who complain that they were just raided three weeks previously — implying that the earlier raid was just for show and they were paying off the cops to be protected from any serious law enforcement. All bets are off, however, now that a new, compulsively honest police commissioner, Jim Conroy (Wallis Clark), is in charge of the force; he’s out to smash the city’s entire organized crime ring and bust the head man of all the rackets, attorney Neil Selby (Morgan Wallace). Ostensibly Malvern and King are just his clients; really they’re working for him and he’s the real owner of their illegal casino. Conroy brings this terrible trio to his office and chews them out, and shortly thereafter he’s found murdered.
The film then cuts to the office of the Daily Bulletin and to a confrontation between managing editor Sam Bradshaw (Pat O’Brien, top-billed) and reporter Anne Woodman (Mae Clarke); it seems he sent her to a woman embroiled in a bitter divorce case in search of a story about it, the woman talked her out of printing anything, and the rival paper The Record (there’s a certain degree of nostalgia in this movie for the days in which cities could support competing newspapers!) scooped The Bulletin about it. Anne tries to assure Sam that the story was groundless, and by printing it The Record has set itself up for a big libel suit, but shortly thereafter the writers, Roy Chanslor (story) and Dorothy Howell (script), just drop this plot thread altogether and we never hear of it again.
Instead, either Sam fires Anne or she quits — and she decides to solve the Conroy murder herself and offer the story either to the Bulletin or the Record, depending on who’ll pay her more. To do this, she traces Malvern — whom she’s convinced (correctly, as things turn out), ordered the hit on Conroy — to the Lakeside Inn resort (Charles joked that the “lakeshore” on which this resort was built was obviously one of the Los Angeles area’s ocean beaches, and “Oceanside Inn” would have been a better name for it since the “lake” it fronted on was clearly the Pacific Ocean), where she figures that by cruising him she’ll be able to worm out of him the information Conroy had against him and Selby and for which they killed him. The two sunbathe on the beach — where Freddie (James Donlan), Sam’s comic-relief photographer, takes a picture of them together and brings it back to Sam, who decides to publish it — and then go up to Anne’s room, where she makes a fake phone call to the hotel desk to have a distraction so she won’t have to have sex with Malvern, and finally finds in his coat pocket (she’s left him on the beach and pleaded the need to change clothes) a claim check for the baggage room at Union Station and intuits that Malvern deposited the envelope of evidence there.
Malvern catches on when he can’t find the claim check, and he and two of his thugs tail Anne to Union Station and catch up with her just as she’s phoning the Bulletin’s office to let them know she has the information. Sam is out when she calls, so she has to trust Freddie to relay the information, but he gets enough of her message so that Sam, when he returns, realizes that Malvern has kidnapped Anne and is taking her to his own home. It all ends happily, of course, with Sam alerting the police, who surround the building and take Malvern, Patsy (who had a jealous hissy-fit when she saw the photo of Malvern and Anne in the Bulletin, which seems to have been Sam’s motive in running it) and his thugs into custody, recover Conroy’s evidence and give the Bulletin a big story — and in the final tag scene Anne agrees to give up her reportorial career to marry Conroy. (Had it not been for that final twist, this would seem like a prequel to His Girl Friday — a movie which, despite the recent comments on it in the Los Angeles Times that wrote it off as another sexist movie in which the powerful, independent woman is “tamed” by a man, is actually an anti-sexist movie; Rosalind Russell’s character rejects the man who wants her to give up her career and goes back to the man who wants her as a professional and a personal partner.)
Like Attorney for the Defense, The Final Edition isn’t exactly the freshest sort of storytelling (it wasn’t when it was new, either!), but it’s a great little movie for what it is and a perfectly acceptable way to kill 66 minutes even though Howard Higgin, the director, is fine in the newspaper scenes but directs the gangster sequences more slowly and sluggishly than they would have been staged in a Warners movie of the time — although this film actually anticipates later Warners vehicles like Mystery of the Wax Museum, Back in Circulation, Front Page Woman and the Torchy Blane films.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Love’s Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder (Steve White Entertainment/Lifetime, 1997)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent a good chunk of the morning watching TV shows I’d recorded recently, including screening a Lifetime TV-movie that was shown over a Saturday that was billed as “Whole Lotta Love!” even though virtually all the relationships represented were sordid in some way. This film was no exception: it was a 1997 production (though watching it I had no idea it was that old!) with the awkward title Love’s Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder. It’s based on a true story — the murder of 16-year-old Texas high-school student Adrianne “A.J.” Jones (Cassidy Rae) by David Graham (David Lipper) and Diane Zamora (Holly Marie Combs, top-billed) over a jealous fit Diane had when she found out that, after David had taken her virginity, he had had sex with A.J. as well. The film was apparently made before either David or Diane had been put on trial (they were tried separately and got life sentences) and based primarily on David’s typewritten confession once he was apprehended and given a polygraph test that purportedly showed he was lying when he denied all knowledge of the crime.
What’s fascinating about this movie is how the writers, Skip Hollandsworth (whose article on the case was the basis for the film) and Steve Johnson, and director Richard A. Colla, muff as many opportunities as they live up to in a story that’s full of fascinating issues and twists — but it ends up being a powerful movie anyway. What made the case especially shocking is that both David and Diane seemed to have so much to live for — though they attended different high schools they’d become a (mostly) inseparable couple; they were both high achievers, honor students, and headed for careers as military officers, he in the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs and she in the Navy at Annapolis (the film shows both of them receiving their acceptance letters to those institutions). Early on in the film David is shown necking with Diane and clearly getting a bad case of blue balls; he’s keyed up and wants to take their physical relationship to the highest level and she’s equally insistent that she doesn’t want to give up her virginity, even to the man she insists she’s in love with and wants to stay with forever, but eventually after turning away from him she yields — and so it’s an intense shock to her when she learns that David had a sexual quickie with A.J., who’s on the women’s cross-country team at their school (he’s on the men’s track team, of course!); while on the bus on the way back from a meet, he massaged her injured knee and it led from there to a mutual seduction under the camper shell of a pickup truck in the rain.
Diane worms the secret out of David and then insists that A.J. “must suffer the consequences” of messing around with another woman’s man — and she makes it clear to David that the “consequences” she has in mind involve them luring A.J. out of her home, taking her to a secluded spot and killing her. They don’t seem all that interested in covering their tracks because they seem to think they’re such superior people (sort of like Leopold and Loeb) that by sheer force of will they’ll be able to keep their crime a secret — and indeed it seems to work for a while, as the police investigating the case reject both David and Diane as suspects (despite the testimony of A.J.’s parents and brother that she was lured out of the house by “some guy named David on the track team,” and there’s only one guy named David on the track team) because of their impeccable school records and interest in the military. Instead they focus on Bryan McMillin (Chad Carlberg, a tall, rather gangly blond actor less conventionally handsome than David Lipper but one who did considerably more for me, if only because he was playing the part on the thin edge of effeminacy that suggested his dorky, self-doubting approach to A.J. was in his mind his last hope of getting a girlfriend before he had to reconcile himself to being Gay), who’d cruised A.J. (to her disgust) and had mixed alcohol with his anti-depressants on the night of the murder so he really didn’t know where he was or whether or not he was at the murder scene, though he whiningly insists he didn’t kill anybody; and his father Jimmy (Randell Haynes, a considerably shorter and stockier man who doesn’t look like he could have fathered this person) rails at the cops and finally gets them to release Bryan for lack of evidence.
The case molders in the cold-case files for several months — we’ve seen a Christmas tree in the background during the murder sequence (powerfully staged in neo-noir style by director Colla, whose résumé is almost completely TV work; David lures A.J. into his white pickup truck, Diane is hiding in the back à la Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity — a film this reminded me of quite a bit if only because Diane seems a Stanwyck-esque femme fatale in training — and the original plan is for Diane to strangle A.J., only A.J. escapes and tries to get away and David is forced to follow her and shoot her twice with a handgun, held chillingly with both hands the way they would have taught him to do small-arms fire in R.O.T.C.), later we see David and Diane apparently in the clear attending the school prom, and it’s only after both of them have gone off to their respective military academies that Diane boasts about the murder to her roommates, one of whom takes her seriously enough to turn her in; and the cops back in Texas question David’s friend Ben, who admits that David and Diane came by his place afterwards, used his bathroom to wash off the blood, and asked him to lend them clean clothes, which he did.
The fact that the film was based on David’s police confession makes Diane seem more of a villain than he is — they both received life sentences and, not surprisingly, each blamed the other for the situation escalating to murder — and indeed, in his confession (the parts of it we see on screen as he’s typing it into a computer, and hear on the soundtrack as voice-over narration) he makes himself out as an innocent noir hero lured into a dirty deed by an evil woman.
The film is full of rich themes Colla and Johnson seem more to stumble over than actually depict, including the obvious clash between the two leads’ ostensible commitment to the military “code of honor” and they’re having killed someone in cold blood and industriously covered up for that (though the military authorities come off well in the story; they’re the ones who insist, again as a matter of “honor,” that David take the “lie detector” test that ultimately does him in), the whole extent to which Diane’s own exaggerated sense of her own “honor” as a woman leads her to get her boyfriend to “atone” for having had sex with someone else after he did so with her by killing the other woman, and the mephitic small-town atmosphere where the military and its values of order, authority and discipline (ironically reflected in the killers’ assumption that if they can just maintain their own self-discipline they can get away with the crime forever) rule so powerfully the police don’t want to believe, even as the evidence grows against David and Diane, that two such nice young people, the very model of what they want their youths to be, could be capable of murder. It’s a chilling movie despite the rather flat treatment it gets here — and the nice soft-core porn shots of David Lipper making hot, passionate love with both the women in his life (the one he will kill and the one who will help him do so and, indeed — at least according to this telling of the story — put him up to it) just adds to the film’s appeal.
I spent a good chunk of the morning watching TV shows I’d recorded recently, including screening a Lifetime TV-movie that was shown over a Saturday that was billed as “Whole Lotta Love!” even though virtually all the relationships represented were sordid in some way. This film was no exception: it was a 1997 production (though watching it I had no idea it was that old!) with the awkward title Love’s Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder. It’s based on a true story — the murder of 16-year-old Texas high-school student Adrianne “A.J.” Jones (Cassidy Rae) by David Graham (David Lipper) and Diane Zamora (Holly Marie Combs, top-billed) over a jealous fit Diane had when she found out that, after David had taken her virginity, he had had sex with A.J. as well. The film was apparently made before either David or Diane had been put on trial (they were tried separately and got life sentences) and based primarily on David’s typewritten confession once he was apprehended and given a polygraph test that purportedly showed he was lying when he denied all knowledge of the crime.
What’s fascinating about this movie is how the writers, Skip Hollandsworth (whose article on the case was the basis for the film) and Steve Johnson, and director Richard A. Colla, muff as many opportunities as they live up to in a story that’s full of fascinating issues and twists — but it ends up being a powerful movie anyway. What made the case especially shocking is that both David and Diane seemed to have so much to live for — though they attended different high schools they’d become a (mostly) inseparable couple; they were both high achievers, honor students, and headed for careers as military officers, he in the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs and she in the Navy at Annapolis (the film shows both of them receiving their acceptance letters to those institutions). Early on in the film David is shown necking with Diane and clearly getting a bad case of blue balls; he’s keyed up and wants to take their physical relationship to the highest level and she’s equally insistent that she doesn’t want to give up her virginity, even to the man she insists she’s in love with and wants to stay with forever, but eventually after turning away from him she yields — and so it’s an intense shock to her when she learns that David had a sexual quickie with A.J., who’s on the women’s cross-country team at their school (he’s on the men’s track team, of course!); while on the bus on the way back from a meet, he massaged her injured knee and it led from there to a mutual seduction under the camper shell of a pickup truck in the rain.
Diane worms the secret out of David and then insists that A.J. “must suffer the consequences” of messing around with another woman’s man — and she makes it clear to David that the “consequences” she has in mind involve them luring A.J. out of her home, taking her to a secluded spot and killing her. They don’t seem all that interested in covering their tracks because they seem to think they’re such superior people (sort of like Leopold and Loeb) that by sheer force of will they’ll be able to keep their crime a secret — and indeed it seems to work for a while, as the police investigating the case reject both David and Diane as suspects (despite the testimony of A.J.’s parents and brother that she was lured out of the house by “some guy named David on the track team,” and there’s only one guy named David on the track team) because of their impeccable school records and interest in the military. Instead they focus on Bryan McMillin (Chad Carlberg, a tall, rather gangly blond actor less conventionally handsome than David Lipper but one who did considerably more for me, if only because he was playing the part on the thin edge of effeminacy that suggested his dorky, self-doubting approach to A.J. was in his mind his last hope of getting a girlfriend before he had to reconcile himself to being Gay), who’d cruised A.J. (to her disgust) and had mixed alcohol with his anti-depressants on the night of the murder so he really didn’t know where he was or whether or not he was at the murder scene, though he whiningly insists he didn’t kill anybody; and his father Jimmy (Randell Haynes, a considerably shorter and stockier man who doesn’t look like he could have fathered this person) rails at the cops and finally gets them to release Bryan for lack of evidence.
The case molders in the cold-case files for several months — we’ve seen a Christmas tree in the background during the murder sequence (powerfully staged in neo-noir style by director Colla, whose résumé is almost completely TV work; David lures A.J. into his white pickup truck, Diane is hiding in the back à la Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity — a film this reminded me of quite a bit if only because Diane seems a Stanwyck-esque femme fatale in training — and the original plan is for Diane to strangle A.J., only A.J. escapes and tries to get away and David is forced to follow her and shoot her twice with a handgun, held chillingly with both hands the way they would have taught him to do small-arms fire in R.O.T.C.), later we see David and Diane apparently in the clear attending the school prom, and it’s only after both of them have gone off to their respective military academies that Diane boasts about the murder to her roommates, one of whom takes her seriously enough to turn her in; and the cops back in Texas question David’s friend Ben, who admits that David and Diane came by his place afterwards, used his bathroom to wash off the blood, and asked him to lend them clean clothes, which he did.
The fact that the film was based on David’s police confession makes Diane seem more of a villain than he is — they both received life sentences and, not surprisingly, each blamed the other for the situation escalating to murder — and indeed, in his confession (the parts of it we see on screen as he’s typing it into a computer, and hear on the soundtrack as voice-over narration) he makes himself out as an innocent noir hero lured into a dirty deed by an evil woman.
The film is full of rich themes Colla and Johnson seem more to stumble over than actually depict, including the obvious clash between the two leads’ ostensible commitment to the military “code of honor” and they’re having killed someone in cold blood and industriously covered up for that (though the military authorities come off well in the story; they’re the ones who insist, again as a matter of “honor,” that David take the “lie detector” test that ultimately does him in), the whole extent to which Diane’s own exaggerated sense of her own “honor” as a woman leads her to get her boyfriend to “atone” for having had sex with someone else after he did so with her by killing the other woman, and the mephitic small-town atmosphere where the military and its values of order, authority and discipline (ironically reflected in the killers’ assumption that if they can just maintain their own self-discipline they can get away with the crime forever) rule so powerfully the police don’t want to believe, even as the evidence grows against David and Diane, that two such nice young people, the very model of what they want their youths to be, could be capable of murder. It’s a chilling movie despite the rather flat treatment it gets here — and the nice soft-core porn shots of David Lipper making hot, passionate love with both the women in his life (the one he will kill and the one who will help him do so and, indeed — at least according to this telling of the story — put him up to it) just adds to the film’s appeal.
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Firefly (MGM, 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” was The Firefly, a 1937 mega-production from MGM that came from an attempt to split Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy after the success of Maytime and have each do a film without the other. Eddy’s without MacDonald was the mega-musical Rosalie, with Eleanor Powell as the female lead, a plot largely set in a mythical European kingdom, and a miscast Cole Porter doing his best to write stentorian songs suitable for the Eddy baritone, (“In the Still of the Night” was his only song from the score that became a standard.)
The Firefly, MacDonald’s film without Eddy, was a far better movie, based on a 1912 operetta by Rudolf Friml and Otto Harbach that in turn drew its inspiration from history: Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in the early 1810’s and his imprisonment of the rightful heir to the Spanish throne, Ferdinand VII. Reuniting MacDonald with the director (Robert Z. Leonard) and cinematographer (Oliver T. Marsh) of her favorite film, Maytime (the one true masterpiece — or at least near-masterpiece; the horribly sexist ending still rankles me — of the MacDonald-Eddy cycle), The Firefly cast her as entertainer Nina Maria, who’s actually billed as “La Mosca de Fuego” and who’s really a spy for the Spanish government; she attracts French officers as stage-door johnnies, romances them, gets vital military secrets out of them and passes the information along to her contact, the Marquis de Melito (Douglass Dumbrille, playing a sympathetic role for a change!).
In order to get rid of a particularly pesky French officer whose store of information she’s exhausted, Étienne (Leonard Penn), she plays up to a mysterious stranger named Don Diego (Allan Jones, taking Eddy’s place as MacDonald’s leading man), with the result that Don Diego falls instantly in love with her and follows her around the country, catching up to her carriage on his horse and singing the film’s hit song, “The Donkey Serenade” — actually adapted by MGM’s contract songwriters, Bob Wright and Chet Forrest, from an instrumental called “Chansonette” Friml had written for the original 1912 version of The Firefly. General Savary (Henry Daniell), an emissary from Napoleon, arrives in Madrid with an invitation for Ferdinand to come to Bayonne, just across the border between Spain and France, for a talk to settle the differences between their two countries. We know it’s a trap, and so do the Marquis and Nina Maria — but the guileless Ferdinand accepts the invitation, so the Marquis arranges with Nina Maria to play a gig in Bayonne as a cover for infiltrating the French general staff, finding out what’s really going on, and using carrier pigeons to relay the message to Ferdinand, who’s waiting at the Spanish town of Vitoria just across the border from Bayonne.
Only after a lot of romantic byplay between her and Don Diego, Nina Maria finally catches on when she realizes the markings on her pigeons have changed; someone has swapped her own pigeons for ones that would fly to the French court and give them the evidence they need to charge her with espionage and have her executed. (In the real world, they’d have shot her on sight without bothering with waiting for evidence, but that’s the movies for you.) Eventually she realizes that Don Diego is actually an agent of French intelligence and he’s been romancing her under cover to find out her secrets — an irony of which the film’s writers, Frances Goodrich and her husband Albert Hackett, could have made more of — and she’s turned over to Major de Rouchemont (Warren William), her latest sexual target in the French officer corps, to be put to death, only Don Diego, who makes the usual movie protestation that he’s been in love with her all the time, helps her to escape.
Ferdinand VII walks into the French trap, he’s taken prisoner, Napoleon installs his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain and there’s a series of increasingly bloodthirsty posters — including one that threatens to destroy any town where a Spaniard kills a French soldier — that anticipate the ones that would go up in cities under Nazi occupation in movies made during World War II. Nina Maria goes underground to aid the resistance and poses as a camp follower to the French armies, which overrun most of Spain until the British send forces to aid the Spaniards, the tide of the war turns and the entire outcome hinges on a battle at Vitoria — where through sending out phony information Nina Maria gets the French to screw up their battle formation so the British and Spanish forces can win the battle, and with the war over she and Don Diego — under his real name, André François — can get back together and hit the road to the tunes of “The Donkey Serenade” and the big love duet from the film, “Giannina Mia.”
The Firefly is an example of what I like to call the portmanteau movie — the sort of film Hollywood often made during the classic era in which they sought out to include some element every potential member of the audience would like — romance and glorious operetta singing to appeal to women, spy-thriller scenes and spectacular battle sequences to appeal to men. It’s a refreshing change to watch a movie like this in an era in which the film industry’s marketing strategy is quite the opposite — to fashion every film so totally to the tastes of a market niche that anyone outside that niche almost certainly won’t like it — but it also doesn’t do much to make the work of art a coherent drama. The business of a spy getting into trouble when she falls in love with someone on the other side wasn’t particularly fresh in 1937 (or, probably, in 1912 either!), and Josef von Sternberg had pulled it off a good deal better (and with a real sense of the tragic, one element MGM’s people weren’t interested in even though the tragic elements of Maytime had contributed to its artistic success, and probably to its commercial success as well!) in his 1931 Marlene Dietrich vehicle Dishonored.
The strengths of The Firefly are some of the most gorgeous MacDonald singing ever put on film (the film doesn’t make her pretend to be an opera singer the way Rose-Marie and Maytime did; all the songs here are operetta, the music she sang best, and written by a master of the genre), magnificent sets (just about every set in this movie looks like it could house a musical production number, whether it actually does or not!), the witty screenplay by Goodrich and Hackett (based on an adaptation of Harbach’s original book by Ogden Nash, of all people!) that gives MacDonald a chance to show off her skills as a comedienne, and Marsh’s magnificent cinematography, notably the Sternbergian shadows he throws over the faces of MacDonald and Jones during their big scenes together. Allan Jones is a personable hero, certainly a better actor than Nelson Eddy could have dreamed of being, and as a tenor (Eddy was a baritone), his voice blends considerably better with MacDonald’s from a technical point of view — but somehow, though they work well together, Jones just doesn’t ignite the charismatic sparks with MacDonald that Eddy did.
The Firefly was one of those frustrating (at least to the studio that made it!) movies because it attracted a lot of ticket buyers but had cost so much to make it ended up losing $300,000 — and Louis B. Mayer blamed the failure on Allan Jones, deciding that The Firefly would have turned a profit if Nelson Eddy had been in it and relegating Jones to “B” movies and second leads thereafter — ironically, since Jones had been the studio’s first choice for MacDonald’s leading man in Naughty Marietta, had dropped out of it at the last minute, Eddy had replaced him and the film had been an enormous hit and launched the MacDonald-Eddy team. Jones eventually ended up at Universal, where he made even clunkier movies than his later, lesser MGM films (including reprising “The Donkey Serenade” as a guest star in the 1943 Olsen and Johnson comedy Crazy House), and still later he fathered 1960’s singing star Jack Jones; today Allan Jones is known, if at all, as the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ films A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, and maybe as Gaylord Ravenal in the 1936 James Whale-directed Show Boat from Universal.
Our “feature” was The Firefly, a 1937 mega-production from MGM that came from an attempt to split Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy after the success of Maytime and have each do a film without the other. Eddy’s without MacDonald was the mega-musical Rosalie, with Eleanor Powell as the female lead, a plot largely set in a mythical European kingdom, and a miscast Cole Porter doing his best to write stentorian songs suitable for the Eddy baritone, (“In the Still of the Night” was his only song from the score that became a standard.)
The Firefly, MacDonald’s film without Eddy, was a far better movie, based on a 1912 operetta by Rudolf Friml and Otto Harbach that in turn drew its inspiration from history: Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in the early 1810’s and his imprisonment of the rightful heir to the Spanish throne, Ferdinand VII. Reuniting MacDonald with the director (Robert Z. Leonard) and cinematographer (Oliver T. Marsh) of her favorite film, Maytime (the one true masterpiece — or at least near-masterpiece; the horribly sexist ending still rankles me — of the MacDonald-Eddy cycle), The Firefly cast her as entertainer Nina Maria, who’s actually billed as “La Mosca de Fuego” and who’s really a spy for the Spanish government; she attracts French officers as stage-door johnnies, romances them, gets vital military secrets out of them and passes the information along to her contact, the Marquis de Melito (Douglass Dumbrille, playing a sympathetic role for a change!).
In order to get rid of a particularly pesky French officer whose store of information she’s exhausted, Étienne (Leonard Penn), she plays up to a mysterious stranger named Don Diego (Allan Jones, taking Eddy’s place as MacDonald’s leading man), with the result that Don Diego falls instantly in love with her and follows her around the country, catching up to her carriage on his horse and singing the film’s hit song, “The Donkey Serenade” — actually adapted by MGM’s contract songwriters, Bob Wright and Chet Forrest, from an instrumental called “Chansonette” Friml had written for the original 1912 version of The Firefly. General Savary (Henry Daniell), an emissary from Napoleon, arrives in Madrid with an invitation for Ferdinand to come to Bayonne, just across the border between Spain and France, for a talk to settle the differences between their two countries. We know it’s a trap, and so do the Marquis and Nina Maria — but the guileless Ferdinand accepts the invitation, so the Marquis arranges with Nina Maria to play a gig in Bayonne as a cover for infiltrating the French general staff, finding out what’s really going on, and using carrier pigeons to relay the message to Ferdinand, who’s waiting at the Spanish town of Vitoria just across the border from Bayonne.
Only after a lot of romantic byplay between her and Don Diego, Nina Maria finally catches on when she realizes the markings on her pigeons have changed; someone has swapped her own pigeons for ones that would fly to the French court and give them the evidence they need to charge her with espionage and have her executed. (In the real world, they’d have shot her on sight without bothering with waiting for evidence, but that’s the movies for you.) Eventually she realizes that Don Diego is actually an agent of French intelligence and he’s been romancing her under cover to find out her secrets — an irony of which the film’s writers, Frances Goodrich and her husband Albert Hackett, could have made more of — and she’s turned over to Major de Rouchemont (Warren William), her latest sexual target in the French officer corps, to be put to death, only Don Diego, who makes the usual movie protestation that he’s been in love with her all the time, helps her to escape.
Ferdinand VII walks into the French trap, he’s taken prisoner, Napoleon installs his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain and there’s a series of increasingly bloodthirsty posters — including one that threatens to destroy any town where a Spaniard kills a French soldier — that anticipate the ones that would go up in cities under Nazi occupation in movies made during World War II. Nina Maria goes underground to aid the resistance and poses as a camp follower to the French armies, which overrun most of Spain until the British send forces to aid the Spaniards, the tide of the war turns and the entire outcome hinges on a battle at Vitoria — where through sending out phony information Nina Maria gets the French to screw up their battle formation so the British and Spanish forces can win the battle, and with the war over she and Don Diego — under his real name, André François — can get back together and hit the road to the tunes of “The Donkey Serenade” and the big love duet from the film, “Giannina Mia.”
The Firefly is an example of what I like to call the portmanteau movie — the sort of film Hollywood often made during the classic era in which they sought out to include some element every potential member of the audience would like — romance and glorious operetta singing to appeal to women, spy-thriller scenes and spectacular battle sequences to appeal to men. It’s a refreshing change to watch a movie like this in an era in which the film industry’s marketing strategy is quite the opposite — to fashion every film so totally to the tastes of a market niche that anyone outside that niche almost certainly won’t like it — but it also doesn’t do much to make the work of art a coherent drama. The business of a spy getting into trouble when she falls in love with someone on the other side wasn’t particularly fresh in 1937 (or, probably, in 1912 either!), and Josef von Sternberg had pulled it off a good deal better (and with a real sense of the tragic, one element MGM’s people weren’t interested in even though the tragic elements of Maytime had contributed to its artistic success, and probably to its commercial success as well!) in his 1931 Marlene Dietrich vehicle Dishonored.
The strengths of The Firefly are some of the most gorgeous MacDonald singing ever put on film (the film doesn’t make her pretend to be an opera singer the way Rose-Marie and Maytime did; all the songs here are operetta, the music she sang best, and written by a master of the genre), magnificent sets (just about every set in this movie looks like it could house a musical production number, whether it actually does or not!), the witty screenplay by Goodrich and Hackett (based on an adaptation of Harbach’s original book by Ogden Nash, of all people!) that gives MacDonald a chance to show off her skills as a comedienne, and Marsh’s magnificent cinematography, notably the Sternbergian shadows he throws over the faces of MacDonald and Jones during their big scenes together. Allan Jones is a personable hero, certainly a better actor than Nelson Eddy could have dreamed of being, and as a tenor (Eddy was a baritone), his voice blends considerably better with MacDonald’s from a technical point of view — but somehow, though they work well together, Jones just doesn’t ignite the charismatic sparks with MacDonald that Eddy did.
The Firefly was one of those frustrating (at least to the studio that made it!) movies because it attracted a lot of ticket buyers but had cost so much to make it ended up losing $300,000 — and Louis B. Mayer blamed the failure on Allan Jones, deciding that The Firefly would have turned a profit if Nelson Eddy had been in it and relegating Jones to “B” movies and second leads thereafter — ironically, since Jones had been the studio’s first choice for MacDonald’s leading man in Naughty Marietta, had dropped out of it at the last minute, Eddy had replaced him and the film had been an enormous hit and launched the MacDonald-Eddy team. Jones eventually ended up at Universal, where he made even clunkier movies than his later, lesser MGM films (including reprising “The Donkey Serenade” as a guest star in the 1943 Olsen and Johnson comedy Crazy House), and still later he fathered 1960’s singing star Jack Jones; today Allan Jones is known, if at all, as the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ films A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, and maybe as Gaylord Ravenal in the 1936 James Whale-directed Show Boat from Universal.
Holiday from Rules (Portafilms, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I settled in with Charles for a night of movie-watching that included a couple of oddball shorts, one an “educational” film from 1958 called Holiday from Rules, made in Walled Lake, Michigan by a company called Portafilms (which I inevitably jokingly renamed “Port-a-Pottie Films”) about a group of four kids — two boys and two girls — who complain about the rules that govern their lives and get transported by an omniscient narrator to a fantasy island where they can live on their own, without rules. It starts out as an Ayn Rand wet dream and turns into Lord of the Flies as the kids find that without rules the strongest of their number, or the ones who simply get to a resource first, can hog it all and keep the other people from getting any. One wonders how this potentially dangerous piece of socialist propaganda actually got made and shown to schoolkids!
I settled in with Charles for a night of movie-watching that included a couple of oddball shorts, one an “educational” film from 1958 called Holiday from Rules, made in Walled Lake, Michigan by a company called Portafilms (which I inevitably jokingly renamed “Port-a-Pottie Films”) about a group of four kids — two boys and two girls — who complain about the rules that govern their lives and get transported by an omniscient narrator to a fantasy island where they can live on their own, without rules. It starts out as an Ayn Rand wet dream and turns into Lord of the Flies as the kids find that without rules the strongest of their number, or the ones who simply get to a resource first, can hog it all and keep the other people from getting any. One wonders how this potentially dangerous piece of socialist propaganda actually got made and shown to schoolkids!
The Opry House (Vitaphone/Warner Brothers, 1929)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other short was a Vitaphone number from 1929 called The Opry House (an interesting anticipation of the Grand Ole Opry’s nomenclature by about eight years or so; there was also another short called The Opry House from 1929, a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the nascent Disney studio) in which the manager of a rural vaudeville theatre (Lew Hearn) announces that his name act from out-of-town won’t be able to perform, so in their stead he’s going to put on local talent. “It’s the policy of this here opry house not to make refunds,” he says, “so sit back and enjoy the show the best you can.” What follows is mostly a performance by the pioneering jazz novelty act the Mound City Blue Blowers — Red McKenzie, vocals and a variety of kazoos (including one made out of a tin can); Jack Bland, banjo (incidentally he plays a solo by tapping on the strings along the fretboard — 60 years later Stanley Jordan would be considered a major innovator when he did that); Carl Kress, guitar (not Eddie Lang, who usually played with the band but was also a much in-demand session musician and might have had another, better-paying gig that afternoon; Lang died in 1933 but did get to be in a film, The Big Broadcast, as Bing Crosby’s accompanist); and Frank “Josh” Billings, playing an upturned suitcase with whiskbrooms in lieu of a drum set. (They got their name from McKenzie’s home town, St. Louis, which at the time dumped its trash in giant garbage piles on the outskirts of the city and then covered them with dirt in a vain attempt at making them sanitary; the residents thought they looked like mounds and so “Mound City” became a nickname for St. Louis.) They play hot versions of “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Tiger Rag,” with McKenzie proving (as Louis Armstrong was also doing at the time) that if you understood the nature of jazz and could phrase like an instrumentalist, you could record great jazz vocals even if you didn’t have much of a voice per se. The only letdown in the film is the middle number, a dull version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” by singer Emma Perkins, whose childlike mannerisms and cutesy voice make her seem like Shirley Temple’s older sister.
The other short was a Vitaphone number from 1929 called The Opry House (an interesting anticipation of the Grand Ole Opry’s nomenclature by about eight years or so; there was also another short called The Opry House from 1929, a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the nascent Disney studio) in which the manager of a rural vaudeville theatre (Lew Hearn) announces that his name act from out-of-town won’t be able to perform, so in their stead he’s going to put on local talent. “It’s the policy of this here opry house not to make refunds,” he says, “so sit back and enjoy the show the best you can.” What follows is mostly a performance by the pioneering jazz novelty act the Mound City Blue Blowers — Red McKenzie, vocals and a variety of kazoos (including one made out of a tin can); Jack Bland, banjo (incidentally he plays a solo by tapping on the strings along the fretboard — 60 years later Stanley Jordan would be considered a major innovator when he did that); Carl Kress, guitar (not Eddie Lang, who usually played with the band but was also a much in-demand session musician and might have had another, better-paying gig that afternoon; Lang died in 1933 but did get to be in a film, The Big Broadcast, as Bing Crosby’s accompanist); and Frank “Josh” Billings, playing an upturned suitcase with whiskbrooms in lieu of a drum set. (They got their name from McKenzie’s home town, St. Louis, which at the time dumped its trash in giant garbage piles on the outskirts of the city and then covered them with dirt in a vain attempt at making them sanitary; the residents thought they looked like mounds and so “Mound City” became a nickname for St. Louis.) They play hot versions of “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Tiger Rag,” with McKenzie proving (as Louis Armstrong was also doing at the time) that if you understood the nature of jazz and could phrase like an instrumentalist, you could record great jazz vocals even if you didn’t have much of a voice per se. The only letdown in the film is the middle number, a dull version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” by singer Emma Perkins, whose childlike mannerisms and cutesy voice make her seem like Shirley Temple’s older sister.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Judicial Indiscretion (Ambitious/Insight/Lifetime, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a Lifetime TV-movie I’d recorded the night before, which was billed as its premiere on the network even though imdb.com claims April 9, 2007 as its release date. The film was Judicial Indiscretion, and it seems to have germinated in the mind of its writer-director, George Mendeluk, as a sort of challenge to himself as to just how far he could push the usual Lifetime “pussy in peril” trope, since it has one of the most outrageous premises ever invented for a film: Monica Barrett (Anne Archer) is a highly respected judge on the Eighth Circuit of the U.S. federal courts (Mendeluk made a mistake in his script here because the “circuits” are actually appeals courts, yet Monica is shown functioning as a first-instance trial judge, presiding over trials and handing out sentences) who’s up for consideration for an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just before she’s scheduled to receive word of whether the President (carefully unnamed, and played by Sean Allan in a manner and makeup suggesting that Mendeluk was anticipating that John Edwards would win the 2008 election) is really going to appoint her, she takes a vacation in San Francisco. Her adult daughter Jennifer (Erin Karpluk) is supposed to take the trip with her, but at the last minute Jennifer has to make a big presentation at work and cancels, leaving widow Monica (her husband Paul, Jennifer’s father, died three years before) alone in a strange city and vulnerable to male attractions. Male attractions dutifully appear in the person of a man calling himself “Jack Sullivan” (Michael Shanks), who speaks with a charming Irish brogue, claims to be a writer with a first novel about to come out and an advance on a second, takes her to dinner, drugs her drink, takes her back to her hotel room and rapes her. She comes to naked in her room, and instead of reporting it to the police and preserving the evidence she does what all the stupid rape victims on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit do: she washes herself, practically scrapes off a layer of skin, then sneaks out of town and rejoins her daughter at their home, telling no one about it except her mother and lifelong mentor Victoria (Anna Hagan).
Monica actually gets the Supreme Court appointment and, much to her surprise, wins the support of opposing-party senator Garland Wolf (William B. Davis) even though one of her rulings previously cost him $8 million. She also finds that “Sullivan” is stalking her, and getting into places that indicate he has high-level connections, including getting her cell phone number after she has it changed and turning up in the White House at the press appearance announcing her appointment with a media credential. (Well, the real George W. Bush administration let a male hustler in because he was part of a Republican blog and could be counted on to ask softball questions.) Meanwhile, the White House schedules a nationwide media tour to introduce her to the country and prepare the groundwork for her confirmation, and she’s assigned a minder, Martin Murphy (Matthew Harrison), who picks out her wardrobe (one wonders whether male Supreme Court appointees have to go through this!), coaches her on how to deal with the media and the proper non-answers to give when she’s asked her stands on judicial issues, and generally handles her on her tour.
Inevitably (at least by George Mendeluk’s fiat), her tour takes her to San Francisco, where because of the city’s reputation as being filled with “fruits and nuts” the federal marshals’ office offers her additional protection — and “Sullivan” turns up and claims to have a video of the two of them having sex, which he intends to release to the Internet unless she withdraws immediately. He sends her a DVD copy of the video and she insists that she will not be blackmailed, and then the open question we’ve been wondering about all movie — is he just a free-lance blackmailer or is he doing this as part of a plot masterminded by someone else, and if so, who? — gets answered at last: the whole plot was the handiwork of Senator Wolf, who really wanted the court appointment for someone else but figured that by pretending to support Monica while really hiring someone to ruin her, he could get his revenge against her by driving her from office with scandal and then get his man on the Court.
Wolf’s plan derails when “Sullivan” confronts him in a parked car, tries to blackmail him for more money, then takes away the gun Wolf pulls on him and shoots the Senator, faking the scene to make it look like suicide. Then he invades the hotel where Monica is staying, crashes her room by knocking out her room-service waiter, holds a gun with a silencer on her and demands $100,000 per year from her for life as the price of his silence. The federal marshals who are supposed to be guarding her catch on and break into the room, shooting down the bad guy and in the process obliterating the DVD copy, though the mini-DV original of “Sullivan’s” surreptitiously filmed rape tape survives — and there’s a coda in which Monica says she’s going to resign her appointment anyway rather than participate in a cover-up, her mom persuades her to stay in the fight, and months later she’s survived her confirmation, gets sworn in and presents the whole affair as a “teachable moment” on just how far some people will go to affect the makeup of the Supreme Court.
Despite the risibility of its plot premise and the melodramatic gyrations Mendeluk has to put both his characters and the actors playing them through for his story to work, Judicial Indiscretion is actually a decent piece of filmmaking; Mendeluk manages the wrenching changes in atmosphere quite well and he’s got a better star than usual in Archer, who’s probably most famous as the wife Michael Douglas cheated on with Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and who’s still quite attractive even 22 years later in a role which frankly doesn’t offer her much of a challenge as an actress: all she has to do is look like a woman who’s putting on a composed, collected front while she’s seething with anxiety inside, and maintain that one emotion from the rape scene on to the end.
I watched a Lifetime TV-movie I’d recorded the night before, which was billed as its premiere on the network even though imdb.com claims April 9, 2007 as its release date. The film was Judicial Indiscretion, and it seems to have germinated in the mind of its writer-director, George Mendeluk, as a sort of challenge to himself as to just how far he could push the usual Lifetime “pussy in peril” trope, since it has one of the most outrageous premises ever invented for a film: Monica Barrett (Anne Archer) is a highly respected judge on the Eighth Circuit of the U.S. federal courts (Mendeluk made a mistake in his script here because the “circuits” are actually appeals courts, yet Monica is shown functioning as a first-instance trial judge, presiding over trials and handing out sentences) who’s up for consideration for an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just before she’s scheduled to receive word of whether the President (carefully unnamed, and played by Sean Allan in a manner and makeup suggesting that Mendeluk was anticipating that John Edwards would win the 2008 election) is really going to appoint her, she takes a vacation in San Francisco. Her adult daughter Jennifer (Erin Karpluk) is supposed to take the trip with her, but at the last minute Jennifer has to make a big presentation at work and cancels, leaving widow Monica (her husband Paul, Jennifer’s father, died three years before) alone in a strange city and vulnerable to male attractions. Male attractions dutifully appear in the person of a man calling himself “Jack Sullivan” (Michael Shanks), who speaks with a charming Irish brogue, claims to be a writer with a first novel about to come out and an advance on a second, takes her to dinner, drugs her drink, takes her back to her hotel room and rapes her. She comes to naked in her room, and instead of reporting it to the police and preserving the evidence she does what all the stupid rape victims on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit do: she washes herself, practically scrapes off a layer of skin, then sneaks out of town and rejoins her daughter at their home, telling no one about it except her mother and lifelong mentor Victoria (Anna Hagan).
Monica actually gets the Supreme Court appointment and, much to her surprise, wins the support of opposing-party senator Garland Wolf (William B. Davis) even though one of her rulings previously cost him $8 million. She also finds that “Sullivan” is stalking her, and getting into places that indicate he has high-level connections, including getting her cell phone number after she has it changed and turning up in the White House at the press appearance announcing her appointment with a media credential. (Well, the real George W. Bush administration let a male hustler in because he was part of a Republican blog and could be counted on to ask softball questions.) Meanwhile, the White House schedules a nationwide media tour to introduce her to the country and prepare the groundwork for her confirmation, and she’s assigned a minder, Martin Murphy (Matthew Harrison), who picks out her wardrobe (one wonders whether male Supreme Court appointees have to go through this!), coaches her on how to deal with the media and the proper non-answers to give when she’s asked her stands on judicial issues, and generally handles her on her tour.
Inevitably (at least by George Mendeluk’s fiat), her tour takes her to San Francisco, where because of the city’s reputation as being filled with “fruits and nuts” the federal marshals’ office offers her additional protection — and “Sullivan” turns up and claims to have a video of the two of them having sex, which he intends to release to the Internet unless she withdraws immediately. He sends her a DVD copy of the video and she insists that she will not be blackmailed, and then the open question we’ve been wondering about all movie — is he just a free-lance blackmailer or is he doing this as part of a plot masterminded by someone else, and if so, who? — gets answered at last: the whole plot was the handiwork of Senator Wolf, who really wanted the court appointment for someone else but figured that by pretending to support Monica while really hiring someone to ruin her, he could get his revenge against her by driving her from office with scandal and then get his man on the Court.
Wolf’s plan derails when “Sullivan” confronts him in a parked car, tries to blackmail him for more money, then takes away the gun Wolf pulls on him and shoots the Senator, faking the scene to make it look like suicide. Then he invades the hotel where Monica is staying, crashes her room by knocking out her room-service waiter, holds a gun with a silencer on her and demands $100,000 per year from her for life as the price of his silence. The federal marshals who are supposed to be guarding her catch on and break into the room, shooting down the bad guy and in the process obliterating the DVD copy, though the mini-DV original of “Sullivan’s” surreptitiously filmed rape tape survives — and there’s a coda in which Monica says she’s going to resign her appointment anyway rather than participate in a cover-up, her mom persuades her to stay in the fight, and months later she’s survived her confirmation, gets sworn in and presents the whole affair as a “teachable moment” on just how far some people will go to affect the makeup of the Supreme Court.
Despite the risibility of its plot premise and the melodramatic gyrations Mendeluk has to put both his characters and the actors playing them through for his story to work, Judicial Indiscretion is actually a decent piece of filmmaking; Mendeluk manages the wrenching changes in atmosphere quite well and he’s got a better star than usual in Archer, who’s probably most famous as the wife Michael Douglas cheated on with Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and who’s still quite attractive even 22 years later in a role which frankly doesn’t offer her much of a challenge as an actress: all she has to do is look like a woman who’s putting on a composed, collected front while she’s seething with anxiety inside, and maintain that one emotion from the rape scene on to the end.
Attorney for the Defense (Columbia, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was a 1932 Columbia “B” called Attorney for the Defense, which I’d recorded on the same disc as The Good Bad Girl and proved to be a far, far better movie even with a weaker director, Irving Cummings (best known for the historically important but not especially good films In Old Arizona and Behind That Curtain with Warner Baxter for Fox in 1929). The script was by Jo Swerling (again), based on an original story by James Kevin McGuinness, and it not only allowed for Swerling’s marvelous wit but also provided Cummings and a good but (with two exceptions, Evelyn Brent and — in a brief role — Dwight Frye) not especially scintillating cast with a strong, suspenseful melodrama, not especially innovative but at least artful and unusual in its deployment of the standard movie clichés.
It opens with a premise that seems all too topical today, in the era of the Innocence Project and exoneration through DNA evidence (though of course DNA evidence was unknown in 1932): district attorney William J. Barton (Edmund Lowe, top-billed) wins a murder case against James Wallace (Dwight Frye) based totally on circumstantial evidence. Ruth Barry (Constance Cummings), Burton’s secretary, who’s also his assistant and has an unrequited crush on him that we notice immediately even though he remains oblivious until the very last reel, has misgivings about the conviction and the evidence, but Burton presses ahead and actually gets Wallace the death penalty. Wallace is led out of the courtroom screaming that he’s innocent (and Frye plays the scene much the way he played Renfield’s maddest moments in Dracula), and only after his execution is Wallace finally exonerated when someone else confesses to the crime (and, though we’re not shown this, presumably the police check it out and find the later confession accurate), and the conscience-stricken Burton resigns as D.A. and opens a defense practice.
He also reaches out to Wallace’s widow (Dorothy Peterson) and son Paul (Douglas Haig) and offers them financial help — which she takes though Paul angrily demands that she refuse it — and Paul stays bitter even as Burton's largesse pays for his education, which leads him to the Thomas Jefferson College of Law, where he becomes a star on the football team as well as being groomed by Burton to join his practice once he passes the bar. This happens during a cut in which the film leaps forward 12 years or so — though most of the actors look about the same as they did playing their decade-younger selves and the only change is that Paul is now played by Donald Dillaway (with whom Columbia’s casting department scored a real coup because they actually found a young actor who looked believable as the offspring of Dwight Frye). Burton receives a visit from his former mistress, Val Lorraine (Evelyn Brent) — whom he dumped while he was still D.A., when he found she was two-timing him with gangster Nick Quinn (Bradley Page) — who’s ostensibly interested in getting back together with him but is actually trying to steal back a packet of letters by Quinn implicating him in the city’s corruption, which Burton is working with a citizens’ committee to try to break — and when she can’t seduce Burton himself she and Quinn decide to get back at him by sending her after Paul.
In the space of a couple more jump-cuts we find that Paul has fallen for her hook, line and sinker, enough so that he’s breaking football training with all-night drinking bouts at her apartment and he agrees to steal the letters from Burton’s office — whereupon he takes them to Val’s apartment and throws them in the fire, assuming she only wanted them because they implicated her. She retrieves them because she really wanted them for Quinn, who needs them intact — and when the drunken Paul awakes from his stupor long enough to hear Val on the phone to Quinn and realize how he’s been used, he approaches her with anger and murderous hatred in his eyes and … fadeout to Val lying dead on the floor near her bed, Paul passed out again and unaware of what happened, and Burton arriving on the scene and being discovered by the building’s Black elevator operator (Clarence Muse). The rest of the film is a courtroom melodrama as Burton is himself arrested for Val’s murder and put on trial, he refuses to offer a defense thinking that by so doing he’s shielding Paul, but ultimately he proves in court that Quinn really killed Val (why?), both he and Paul are off the hook, and he finally realizes Barry loves him and the two get together at the fadeout.
Though it’s made up of familiar elements, Attorney for the Defense is actually a quite good movie (even though one could wish for a stronger actor, like Warren William, in the male lead); Evelyn Brent is chilling in her restraint in a role that would have sent most actresses of the day to the scenery with their teeth bared (she has some of the same understatement as her fellow Josef von Sternberg “discovery,” Marlene Dietrich), and though most of it is pretty straightforwardly photographed cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff (a more prestigious “name” than one usually got in a picture like this) gets a few proto-noir atmospherics into it. Indeed, the plot is sufficiently rich in moral ambiguities it’s a wonder Columbia didn’t remake it in the noir era (especially in the late 1940’s, when two actors who would have been superb in the lead, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, were both working there) unless the Production Code Administration nixed it the way they did Columbia’s plans to remake The Good Bad Girl in 1937 for its frank treatment of extramarital sexual relationships (including one involving the hero); it’s a quite literate, well-written movie at a time when Hollywood wasn’t making that many good crime films outside the gangster genre.
The film I picked out was a 1932 Columbia “B” called Attorney for the Defense, which I’d recorded on the same disc as The Good Bad Girl and proved to be a far, far better movie even with a weaker director, Irving Cummings (best known for the historically important but not especially good films In Old Arizona and Behind That Curtain with Warner Baxter for Fox in 1929). The script was by Jo Swerling (again), based on an original story by James Kevin McGuinness, and it not only allowed for Swerling’s marvelous wit but also provided Cummings and a good but (with two exceptions, Evelyn Brent and — in a brief role — Dwight Frye) not especially scintillating cast with a strong, suspenseful melodrama, not especially innovative but at least artful and unusual in its deployment of the standard movie clichés.
It opens with a premise that seems all too topical today, in the era of the Innocence Project and exoneration through DNA evidence (though of course DNA evidence was unknown in 1932): district attorney William J. Barton (Edmund Lowe, top-billed) wins a murder case against James Wallace (Dwight Frye) based totally on circumstantial evidence. Ruth Barry (Constance Cummings), Burton’s secretary, who’s also his assistant and has an unrequited crush on him that we notice immediately even though he remains oblivious until the very last reel, has misgivings about the conviction and the evidence, but Burton presses ahead and actually gets Wallace the death penalty. Wallace is led out of the courtroom screaming that he’s innocent (and Frye plays the scene much the way he played Renfield’s maddest moments in Dracula), and only after his execution is Wallace finally exonerated when someone else confesses to the crime (and, though we’re not shown this, presumably the police check it out and find the later confession accurate), and the conscience-stricken Burton resigns as D.A. and opens a defense practice.
He also reaches out to Wallace’s widow (Dorothy Peterson) and son Paul (Douglas Haig) and offers them financial help — which she takes though Paul angrily demands that she refuse it — and Paul stays bitter even as Burton's largesse pays for his education, which leads him to the Thomas Jefferson College of Law, where he becomes a star on the football team as well as being groomed by Burton to join his practice once he passes the bar. This happens during a cut in which the film leaps forward 12 years or so — though most of the actors look about the same as they did playing their decade-younger selves and the only change is that Paul is now played by Donald Dillaway (with whom Columbia’s casting department scored a real coup because they actually found a young actor who looked believable as the offspring of Dwight Frye). Burton receives a visit from his former mistress, Val Lorraine (Evelyn Brent) — whom he dumped while he was still D.A., when he found she was two-timing him with gangster Nick Quinn (Bradley Page) — who’s ostensibly interested in getting back together with him but is actually trying to steal back a packet of letters by Quinn implicating him in the city’s corruption, which Burton is working with a citizens’ committee to try to break — and when she can’t seduce Burton himself she and Quinn decide to get back at him by sending her after Paul.
In the space of a couple more jump-cuts we find that Paul has fallen for her hook, line and sinker, enough so that he’s breaking football training with all-night drinking bouts at her apartment and he agrees to steal the letters from Burton’s office — whereupon he takes them to Val’s apartment and throws them in the fire, assuming she only wanted them because they implicated her. She retrieves them because she really wanted them for Quinn, who needs them intact — and when the drunken Paul awakes from his stupor long enough to hear Val on the phone to Quinn and realize how he’s been used, he approaches her with anger and murderous hatred in his eyes and … fadeout to Val lying dead on the floor near her bed, Paul passed out again and unaware of what happened, and Burton arriving on the scene and being discovered by the building’s Black elevator operator (Clarence Muse). The rest of the film is a courtroom melodrama as Burton is himself arrested for Val’s murder and put on trial, he refuses to offer a defense thinking that by so doing he’s shielding Paul, but ultimately he proves in court that Quinn really killed Val (why?), both he and Paul are off the hook, and he finally realizes Barry loves him and the two get together at the fadeout.
Though it’s made up of familiar elements, Attorney for the Defense is actually a quite good movie (even though one could wish for a stronger actor, like Warren William, in the male lead); Evelyn Brent is chilling in her restraint in a role that would have sent most actresses of the day to the scenery with their teeth bared (she has some of the same understatement as her fellow Josef von Sternberg “discovery,” Marlene Dietrich), and though most of it is pretty straightforwardly photographed cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff (a more prestigious “name” than one usually got in a picture like this) gets a few proto-noir atmospherics into it. Indeed, the plot is sufficiently rich in moral ambiguities it’s a wonder Columbia didn’t remake it in the noir era (especially in the late 1940’s, when two actors who would have been superb in the lead, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, were both working there) unless the Production Code Administration nixed it the way they did Columbia’s plans to remake The Good Bad Girl in 1937 for its frank treatment of extramarital sexual relationships (including one involving the hero); it’s a quite literate, well-written movie at a time when Hollywood wasn’t making that many good crime films outside the gangster genre.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
The Good Bad Girl (Columbia, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Good Bad Girl was a 1931 “B” from Columbia (with that delightfully cheesy early-Columbia logo with a cartoon Statue of Liberty and the words “A Columbia Production” in an arc over its head) based on a 1926 novel of the same title by one Winifred Van Duzer. It was essentially gangster movie meets soap opera, but with the soap opera elements much stronger than the gangster ones: Marcia Cameron (Mae Clarke, top-billed), is the mistress of gang boss Dan Tyler (Robert Ellis), but is disgusted with his criminal involvement and wants to leave him. Dan, in turn, threatens to kill her if she leaves — and also to murder any other man she might be involved with. Said other man is Bob Henderson (James Hall), whom she’s been seeing so secretly they’ve agreed not even to tell each other their names, sort of like Last Tango in Paris. When Dan asks Marcia to provide him an alibi for his latest murder, she refuses, and as a result he ends up in prison.
Marcia accepts Bob’s marriage proposal and the two stay together long enough that Marcia gets pregnant (which in movies usually happens the first time two people have sex!), but when she’s “outed” by the reporters covering Tyler’s trial Bob’s snooty society parents (Edmund Breese and Nance O’Neil) demand that they break up. Obediently, Bob puts his tail between his legs and heads off to Paris for a divorce, and the Hendersons then set their sights on Marcia and demand that she turn over her child to them. At first she refuses, but when Marcia’s friend and roommate Trixie (Marie Prevost in a marvelous comic-relief performance that’s the best thing in the film) shows up from the restaurant above which they live, and where they both work, with two bottles in her hand and a goodly supply of alcohol already in her body, an embarrassed Marcia decides that giving up the kid is for the best. Meanwhile, Tyler escapes from prison, determined to gun down both Marcia and Bob — only the police catch up to him in Marcia’s apartment, there’s a gun battle in which the police shoot down Tyler while miraculously both Marcia and her son escape unscathed, and Marcia attempts to hide out but her husband, having returned from France still legally married to her, catches up to her on the street and they reconcile.
The Good Bad Girl had real potential — especially with Roy William Neill directing and Jo Swerling writing the script — but there are only sporadic flare-ups of Swerling’s usual comic brilliance (notably one line in which, commenting on the news that Tyler has fled to Philadelphia to avoid arrest, Trixie says, “Nobody goes to Philadelphia unless they have to”) and Neill’s direction includes a few atmospheric shots — some of the gangland scenes are shot as just flashes of light in otherwise intense darkness, and for the final clinch Neill takes his camera above the reunited couple and ends with an odd three-quarter closeup of Mae Clarke from an odd angle above her. But most of the movie’s potential entertainment value is drowned by the relentless soapiness of the material, which is played to the max by all hands, and though unquestionably a product of the “pre-Code” Hollywood glasnost (in 1937 the Production Code Administration refused to allow Columbia to remake it because it dealt with “two illicit sexual relationships”) it’s also a really dull movie that never quite builds up the ferocious energy it needed (imagine it made at Warners with one of their speedfreak directors and Bette Davis in the female lead!).
The Good Bad Girl was a 1931 “B” from Columbia (with that delightfully cheesy early-Columbia logo with a cartoon Statue of Liberty and the words “A Columbia Production” in an arc over its head) based on a 1926 novel of the same title by one Winifred Van Duzer. It was essentially gangster movie meets soap opera, but with the soap opera elements much stronger than the gangster ones: Marcia Cameron (Mae Clarke, top-billed), is the mistress of gang boss Dan Tyler (Robert Ellis), but is disgusted with his criminal involvement and wants to leave him. Dan, in turn, threatens to kill her if she leaves — and also to murder any other man she might be involved with. Said other man is Bob Henderson (James Hall), whom she’s been seeing so secretly they’ve agreed not even to tell each other their names, sort of like Last Tango in Paris. When Dan asks Marcia to provide him an alibi for his latest murder, she refuses, and as a result he ends up in prison.
Marcia accepts Bob’s marriage proposal and the two stay together long enough that Marcia gets pregnant (which in movies usually happens the first time two people have sex!), but when she’s “outed” by the reporters covering Tyler’s trial Bob’s snooty society parents (Edmund Breese and Nance O’Neil) demand that they break up. Obediently, Bob puts his tail between his legs and heads off to Paris for a divorce, and the Hendersons then set their sights on Marcia and demand that she turn over her child to them. At first she refuses, but when Marcia’s friend and roommate Trixie (Marie Prevost in a marvelous comic-relief performance that’s the best thing in the film) shows up from the restaurant above which they live, and where they both work, with two bottles in her hand and a goodly supply of alcohol already in her body, an embarrassed Marcia decides that giving up the kid is for the best. Meanwhile, Tyler escapes from prison, determined to gun down both Marcia and Bob — only the police catch up to him in Marcia’s apartment, there’s a gun battle in which the police shoot down Tyler while miraculously both Marcia and her son escape unscathed, and Marcia attempts to hide out but her husband, having returned from France still legally married to her, catches up to her on the street and they reconcile.
The Good Bad Girl had real potential — especially with Roy William Neill directing and Jo Swerling writing the script — but there are only sporadic flare-ups of Swerling’s usual comic brilliance (notably one line in which, commenting on the news that Tyler has fled to Philadelphia to avoid arrest, Trixie says, “Nobody goes to Philadelphia unless they have to”) and Neill’s direction includes a few atmospheric shots — some of the gangland scenes are shot as just flashes of light in otherwise intense darkness, and for the final clinch Neill takes his camera above the reunited couple and ends with an odd three-quarter closeup of Mae Clarke from an odd angle above her. But most of the movie’s potential entertainment value is drowned by the relentless soapiness of the material, which is played to the max by all hands, and though unquestionably a product of the “pre-Code” Hollywood glasnost (in 1937 the Production Code Administration refused to allow Columbia to remake it because it dealt with “two illicit sexual relationships”) it’s also a really dull movie that never quite builds up the ferocious energy it needed (imagine it made at Warners with one of their speedfreak directors and Bette Davis in the female lead!).
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