by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Ann Carter’s Profession, an odd 1933 “B”-plus from Columbia with a couple of genuine stars, though not superstars, from other studios — Fay Wray and Gene Raymond — in a 71-minute vest-pocket movie, directed speedily and surprisingly artistically by Edward Buzzell from a script by Robert Riskin. For the first two-thirds this is actually quite a good movie, until the clichés kick in with a vengeance — Schreiber theorists who want to attribute the quality of all Frank Capra’s classic films to Riskin (even the ones Riskin didn’t write, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life) are going to have a problem with this one.
When we meet our leads, Ann Carver (Wray) and “Lightning” Bill Graham (Raymond), they’re seniors in college and about to graduate, he with a degree in architecture and she with a degree in law. He’s also the campus football star and has just won a poll conducted by the student paper for the “Most Popular Man on Campus” — a designation he resents so much that when the film opens he’s burning a clipping of his photo for that article over an open flame. The only girl on campus he has his eye on is Ann — there’s an astonishing tracking shot by Buzzell and cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff that discovers them through the round window of the door from the dining area of the café where she works into the kitchen, and the camera appears to pass through the window as it dollies towards them and a close-up of their clinch (and people thought Gregg Toland’s shot through the skylight of Susan Alexander Kane’s nightclub in Citizen Kane eight years later was so innovative!) — and eventually they graduate, marry (shown by inserts of, in sequence, his architecture degree, her law degree and their marriage certificate) and settle in a small cottage on the outskirts of New York City while he gets a job doing hack work for a large architectural firm.
Just in case The Fountainhead has conditioned your expectation of what a movie about an architect will be like, this one will jar it — Bill resents the continued spillover of his one-time popularity on the gridiron and resents it even more when his wife drags him to a party hosted by Judge Bingham (a surprisingly serious Claude Gillingwater), who’s actually a retired judge who’s resumed work as an attorney. Ann went to the party hoping that Bill would meet some rich people who might be interested in backing his ideas as an architect (not that he appears actually to have any!); instead she started critiquing Judge Bingham’s plans for his latest case — representing a young man from a rich family who’s being sued for breach of promise by a light-skinned Black woman — and when Bingham looks at Bill and says, “Your wife sounds like a lawyer,” Bill replies, “She is a lawyer.”
Immediately she’s offered a job at Bingham’s firm, gets assigned to the case and wins it through a stratagem Charles recognized from a real case a few years before the movie was made: in 1924, New York socialite Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander sought an annulment of his marriage to a former servant girl, Alice Jones, on the ground that she was part-Black and had concealed that fact from him. Like his counterpart in the movie, he hired a retired judge, Isaac Mills, as his counsel — and Alice in turn hired a former protégé of Mills, Lee Parson Davis, as her lawyer — and in the middle of the trial, the judge ordered her to strip in his chambers so the jury could examine the color of her skin, and in particular that of her nipples, to see for themselves whether she was Black or white. In real life, Rhinelander lost his case (which also became famous because Bernarr MacFadden published in his notorious tabloid, the New York Evening Graphic, one of his famous “composographs,” a faked photo of the unveiling since the judge hadn’t allowed reporters or real photographers in his chambers); in the movie, however, Ann Carver’s sensational courtroom stunt (even though, this being Hollywood — even so-called “pre-Code” Hollywood — all the woman in the movie had to do was pull down the sleeve of her dress to show off her shoulder) wins the case for her wealthy client and launches her on a spectacular career.
Meanwhile, hubby gets more and more alienated as they move into more and more elaborate apartments and acquire a service staff — and the last straw for him is when the first of the month rolls around and she’s out of town on the case, the head butler demands their pay and he tells them he doesn’t have the money and they’re just going to have to wait until his wife gets back. Embarrassed, he quits his job at the architecture firm and accepts the offer of his former college friend Jim Thompson (Frank Albertson) — a thoroughly obnoxious person with the repulsive habit of dropping the terminal syllable of every word at the end of a sentence (“Everything’s perf!,” he says, meaning “perfect,” whenever anyone asks how he is) — who’s now the bandleader at the Club Mirador, to sing with the band. All Thompson really wants is to exploit Bill’s former fame as a football star — and in the scenes we get of Raymond actually singing (imdb.com lists two songs from this film, “There’s Life in Music” and “Why Can’t We Love Forever?”), his voice sounds considerably more ragged than it does in his other musicals, indicating that director Buzzell was deliberately having him sing at less than his best to depict the character as having at best a mediocre voice.
He also takes up with his fellow club vocalist, Carole Rogers (Claire Dodd) — she made a specialty of playing the “other woman,” and both she and Raymond appeared in films with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (he in Flying Down to Rio and she in Roberta) — and the two sink into a despond of drink and dissipation after he moves out of his wife’s palatial apartment (not that she’s there very much, since she’s almost always working late or out of town on a case). Just in case you think Ann Carver has suffered enough for the “sins” of being a successful professional woman and making much more money than her husband, Riskin really kicks out the melodramatic jams; he has Carole Rogers fall over drunk in the apartment she more or less shares with Bill and has her strangled accidentally by the strap of her purse getting caught on the arm of their couch (which is carved with a gargoyle-like face whose expression seems to be commenting on the action). Later Bill comes home after a night of nightclubbing and drinking, too drunk to notice that his girlfriend is dead or to do anything else but make it as far as his bed and then pass out himself — and naturally, when the police find him passed out and her dead they arrest him for her murder and Our Heroine offers to defend him.
Riskin isn’t through twisting the knife into the side of his heroine; he has the prosecutor relentlessly attack Bill’s character — and Ann has to defend him by blaming the death on herself, saying in an intensely emotional speech (the quality of Riskin’s writing and Wray’s delivery only makes the sexist sentiments that much more loathsome) that it was all her fault that she sought success instead of being content with love and subordinating herself to her man. Bill’s acquitted, they’re reconciled and there’s an unbelievable tag scene that reveals he’s become a successful architect after all and they’re contemplating having a baby as the film fades out. (Charles noted the irony that roles like these were being played by the most highly paid women in the country at the time — and to add to the irony of this one in particular, nine years after it was made Fay Wray married Robert Riskin for real.)
Ann Carver’s Profession is a frustrating movie because so much of it is good, but the parts that aren't are so obnoxiously sexist they tend to cast a pall over the whole movie — and for some reason this one is even more bothersome in that regard than Scarlet Pages and some of the other career-girl-gets-her-comeuppance movies Hollywood was cranking out just then. It’s a real pity because Edward Buzzell’s sensitive and surprisingly visually inventive direction proves he was good for more than just pointing his cameras at the Marx Brothers, and likewise Fay Wray’s intense, sincere performance, in particular her strength at playing the scenes in which she’s a successful attorney, indicate she had far more acting talent than one would think if all you knew her as was the damsel in distress from Lionel Atwill or King Kong.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Underworld Trilogy (Screen Gems, 2003, 2006, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Underworld, not the 1927 Josef von Sternberg silent that marked the first true gangster picture (there’d been plenty of movies about crime before but none on the peculiar mixture of criminal enterprise and above-ground business that sprang up to provide alcoholic beverages to Americans during Prohibition) but a 2003 special-effects extravaganza starring Kate Beckinsale as Celine, a member of a “Death-Dealer” squadron of vampires devoted to the extermination of “Lycans” (werewolves to you) in the middle of an unnamed city that looks awfully like London. (The final credits identify this as a U.S.-British-German-Hungarian co-production, and among the people listed in the credit roll are some with “vampiric” first names like Bela — as in Lugosi, who you’ll recall was in both the original Dracula and The Wolf Man — and Vlad, the true first name of Vlad Tepes Drakulya the Impaler, the real-life inspiration for Bram Stoker’s vampire character.)
The gimmick is that Lucian (Michael Sheen), the werewolf king supposedly killed 600 years before by vampire king Kraven (Shane Brolly), is in fact alive, and he and Kraven are working together for some unspecified but undoubtedly nefarious purpose. Not surprisingly, given that this is a youth-oriented movie with a young cast aimed at a young audience, the plot, such as it is, is a mere pretext for spectacular action sequences. The promotion for the film emphasized the Romeo and Juliet-like aspects of the story, as killer vampire Celine falls for Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), an internist who’s just been bitten by Lucian and, of course, turned into a Lycan himself — and it turns out that both vampires and Lycans are descendants of a Hungarian family who were infected with plague in the 13th century but whose viruses mutated, one to cause lycanthropy, one to cause vampirism, and one which left the person normally human but immune both to conventional plague symptoms and to the lycanthropic and vampiric symptoms associated with the other two mutations. (Well, it’s as good an explanation as any for the existence of vampires and werewolves in an otherwise recognizable 21st century urban environment.)
Much of the film consists of action scenes of vampire and werewolf death squads firing at each other with automatic pistols and machine guns, and writer Danny McBride (he shares story credit with Kevin Grevioux and director Len Wiseman but gets sole credit for the actual script) at least explains how vampires and werewolves can shoot each other: the vampires’ guns are loaded with silver bullets (duh) while the werewolves’ guns are loaded with bullets with luminous pale-blue spheres in the tips that create an instant flash of light once they explode inside a body, thereby subjecting the vampires to an artificial sunlight which has the same effect on them — instant death — as the real thing. McBride even explains how the vampires can afford to go through all those silver bullets — they own a company that makes artificial blood and plasma, which is not only profitable enough to fund their ammunition needs but has the beneficial side effect of providing them a source of food so they don’t have to keep putting the bite, as it were, on human beings (though they also feed on the blood of livestock à la some of Stoker’s junior vampires).
As long as you accept that what you’re going to see is a phantasmagoria of intense visual images tied to a plot that won’t make more than a lick of sense, Underworld is actually great fun. True, it’s not always that easy to tell who is who — particularly because most of the cast is young and the actors tend to look alike (especially Scott Speedman and Shane Brolly; it took me about one-third of the film before I was reliably able to tell them apart) — and some of the images are so camped-out as to be risible, particularly the sight of vampire elder Viktor (Bill Nighy) being awakened from his tomb and revivified by plugging about 12 IV’s into the back of his body — but the sheer stunning visual quality of this film makes it entertaining, and there’s nothing as self-consciously gross as the eyeball soup in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Indeed, I ordered the “unrated director’s cut” version of the film through the Columbia House DVD Club and was braced for some really gory, blood-spewing action that would have grossed out Charles and made me queasy, but nothing like that occurred (the closest to it we did get were some bizarre scenes of werewolves literally pushing out the potentially toxic silver bullets from inside, the bullets emerging back out of the entrance wounds and plopping safely to the ground beside their would-be victims). Director Len Wiseman kept his camera in almost constant motion, the fight scenes were brilliantly choreographed, and the look Wiseman and cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts blessedly avoided the past-is-brown approach and created a convincing Gothic look by shooting as close to black-and-white as they could get in color and using color very sparingly. (Directors of neo-noir movies, please take note!) Wiseman even quoted one of the most famous Val Lewton gimmicks — in an early scene Celine is about to blow away some werewolves when a subway train suddenly blocks her view, and we hear the sound of the train before it enters the screen — though little of the film is at a Lewtonian level of subtlety, nor can we really expect it to be given what the modern market for the genre wants.
Like Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream (the only two films of his I’ve seen), Underworld was clearly made by people who would be capable of a subtler, more artistic approach to horror than they can get away with in today’s market, but even so it’s great entertainment and a far more appealing and believable combination of horror myths than Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the other clunkers Universal made during the dog days of their monster cycle after Lewton’s films had pushed RKO ahead of them in making truly artistic films in the genre, and it leaves me anticipating the sequel, Underworld: Evolution (which I imagine will be built around the sexual union of Celine and Michael — Michael having been established as the only human in the world who has both vampire and werewolf viruses in his system and can still survive — and what manner of creature it will produce), even though watching all those pitched battles in the subways and streets I couldn’t help but wonder why the collateral body count of normal humans caught in the crossfire wasn’t catching the attention of the human authorities — the only “cops” we see are two werewolf agents in disguise.
Still, it’s fun to see the digital effects work turning the human characters literally into feral creatures of the night, able to climb up walls and on ceilings in images Hieronymus Bosch would have loved to have painted — we’ve gone a long way since the days when John Fulton had to wait patiently for his double-exposure shots while Jack P. Pierce progressively plastered more and more of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s body with yak wool! — 9/21/06
••••••••••
I was finally ready to run Charles a movie: Underworld: Evolution, a 2006 sequel to the 2003 Underworld, the story of a centuries-old war between vampires and “Lycans” (werewolves) that has somehow managed to continue on earth, with a horrifically high body count on both sides, without the normal human population ever seeming to notice. (Anne Rice’s novels, whatever their deficiencies, at least did a better job of suggesting how her vampire cult could have existed under the radar of the rest of humanity for so long.) The previous film ends with “death-dealer” vampire Selene (Kate Beckinsale in a hot, skin-tight black leather outfit) slicing the head off her father, Viktor (Bill Nighy), after she finds out he’s the latest in a long line of vampires that have betrayed her, and after she’s discovered Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), who has been bitten by both vampire and werewolf and therefore has become a “hybrid,” with characteristics of both.
This one begins back in the Middle Ages, with a sequence depicting the brothers Marcus (Tony Curran) and William (Brian Steele) Corvinus, sons of Alexander Corvinus (Derek Jacobi — what a way to end a career that began so illustriously with I, Claudius, also, come to think of it, a tale of relatives murdering each other for power!) and founders of the vampire and Lycan races, respectively. (A written foreword helpfully explained that Marcus was bitten by a bat and thereby became a vampire, while William was bitten by a wolf and thereby became a werewolf; I joked, “Actually there was a third brother who was bitten by a gerbil, but we don’t talk about him.”) It seems that back then the human-to-Lycan transformation was one-way; it was only later, through internal discipline, that the Lycans learned to go back to being human once in a while -— until then they just became feral animals, raging killing machines without consciousness or conscience.
Then the film returns us to the early 21st century, with Selene opening up Marcus’s tomb — and having him turn out to be yet another deceitful baddie, though probably the coolest-looking character in either film: with extra arms that can pierce an entire body (with which he performs a bloodier version of the Vulcan mind-meld to get whatever information he needs at the moment) and cool bat-wings that descend from his original arms and enable him to fly. She goes around the world looking for other vampires with clues on how to defeat Marcus and finds vampire historian (I’m not making this up, you know!) Andreas Tanis (Steven Mackintosh), whom she discovers under house arrest made considerably more pleasurable than Marcus (who sentenced him centuries earlier) anticipated by the presence of two vampirettes (Christine Danielle and Kaja Gjesdal) who were apparently the result of a vampires’ blood-sucking raid on a Playboy Club one night.
Tanis bites the big one (pun definitely intended!) at Marcus’s hands, but not before revealing that the mysterious commander of a vampire ship (I’m not making that up, either!) is none other than Alexander Corvinus, father of both these clans and also distant ancestor of, you guessed it, Selene’s formerly mortal boyfriend, Michael Corvin, who at first turns down the bags of blood Selene offers him as his repast and then, as she warned him, gets violently ill when he tries to eat normal human food — which he does at, of all places, a Russian military base (“Yeah, we know the food is bad, but it’s usually not that bad!”).
Underworld: Evolution is one of those obnoxious sequelae that doesn’t really go beyond the earlier episode but instead offers just more: more exciting action, more blood, more gore, more bodies (it’s the sort of film where the credits include a listing for “corpse creation,” and the credited corpse creator, Joel Echallier, definitely earned whatever they paid him), and also more incomprehensible plot twists and a lot more scenes in which director Len Wiseman and screenwriter Danny McBride (they collaborated on the original story and Kevin Grevioux is credited with them for having created the characters in the first place) rather rawly introduce us to new dramatis personae just by cutting them in and evoking the age-old question, “Who the hell is he?”
It has most of the virtues of the first film, particularly a steely-gray look that proves to be a good way of doing Gothic in color (thanks be to cinematographer Simon Duggan for not bathing it all in murky brown!) and would be a good way of doing noir in color as well, and a script that at least feints at explaining who all these people are and what they need to do to kill each other. Alas, it’s weaker than the first one simply because this time around the plot makes even less sense than the previous one did, and the predictable action set-piece at the end (William the werewolf is revivified — and he looks all too much like a pretty ordinary feral dog the pound is about to have to put down, and he and Marcus have the inevitable battle to the death which they both lose) offers us a pretty pat resolution of the plot.
At least we get a rather chilly sex scene between Beckinsale and Speedman, though carefully framed to avoid showing any “naughty bits,” as well as yet another orgy scene (this time between Tanis and his Playboy Bunny vampire pets) that suggests an alternate title could have been Fangs Wide Shut. I don’t want to sound too hard on the Underworld movies because they’re actually quite entertaining for the genre and the era; the gore almost never seems gratuitous and the filmmakers obviously aimed at a work of some taste (the Matrix influences are obvious in the big effects set-pieces but McBride and Wiseman are nowhere near as opportunistic in their plotting as the Wachowskis were), though they could have done better by making the movie even more restrained (their quote of the famous Val Lewton “bus” effect in the first Underworld convinces me that they’ve seen the classics and would be able to duplicate their approach if they didn’t know too well how little patience modern audiences would have for that sort of thing). — 10/2/06
••••••••••
I ran us the third film in the Underworld series, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which I didn’t realize until I read the blurb on the DVD box wasn’t a sequel to the previous Underworlds but a prequel, set in medieval times two generations after the mutated plague bacteria that gave birth to the new life forms the cycle depicts, vampires and “lycans” — a.k.a., werewolves. In the first two generations of lycans, a rather unctuous narrator explains at the beginning, they were simply people who changed into wolves — they never changed back. Then another mutation arose and a baby was born with the ability to change from human to wolf and back, and Viktor (Bill Nighy), the leader of the vampire clan, decides to use him to transmit the new-style lycan mutation to other humans, then puts collars around them (parts of this movie do look like a particularly violent S/M play party!) and forces them to stand guard as slaves around the vampires’ castle, so the vampires will have a security guard to repel anyone that might try to attack them during the day, when they’re vulnerable.
Once the exposition is complete, the main part of the film is sort of Romeo and Juliet meets Spartacus, as Lucian (Michael Sheen), the first lycan “switch,” and Viktor’s vampire daughter Sonja (Rhona Mitra) fall in love and Lucian rallies his fellow lycans to rebel against their vampire masters, forging a key with which they can remove their collars to make that possible. The script is by the usual committee, and it’s a sign of the times that the writing credits feature nine listings even though they only represent six actual people: the screenplay is by Danny McBride, Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain (nice to know a “Blackman” and someone named McCain can work together on something!) based on a story by Len Wiseman, Robert Orr and McBride, in turn based on characters created by Wiseman, McBride and Kevin Grevioux — and Grevioux is actually in the movie as Raze, one of Lucian’s lieutenants and a rather incongruous Black person in an otherwise all-white world.
The writing committee never made it clear whether the collars are simply symbolic of slavery or they contain some magic power that actually saps their wearers’ wills and forces them into obedience (though, judging from Lucian’s attitude when he’s wearing one — which isn’t appreciably less rebellious than when he isn’t — it’s hard to believe they have much intrinsic power), and there really isn’t much more plot to it than the basics of a war between lycans and vampires that ends inconclusively, since according to the first two movies it’s been continuing for at least 500 years and is still going on in our own time.
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is the first episode in the series that wasn’t directed by Len Wiseman, a genuinely talented filmmaker with a feel for the history of his genre (my love and respect for the first Underworld were probably cemented when it included a copy of the famous scene in the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur Cat People in which the climax of a shock scene was the hissing airbrake of a bus — an innocuous sound that in this context made audiences both in1942 and 2003 leap with fright); instead, this time around they gave the direction to the effects guy, Patrick Tatopoulos. Naturally he kept the visual style Wiseman and company had established in the first two films — notably the steely-gray, almost monochrome overall “look” to establish Gothic atmosphere — and I don’t think it’s fair to blame Tatopoulos for a comparatively uninteresting script.
There are some quite spectacular scenes, including one of unearthly beauty in which Lucian calls out to his fellow Lycans in various stages of werewolf-dom; another in which Viktor consigns Sonja to execution by putting her in a room and then slowly opening the skylight, which since she’s a vampire condemns her to death by utter obliteration — her body simply turns to smoke and blows away. (Both Charles and one of the imdb.com contributors noted, though, that this wasn’t the way Sonja died in the flashback exposition scene in the original Underworld.)
Overall, though, Rise of the Lycans strikes me as the weakest of the three (and audiences seemed to agree, since it was a box-office disappointment and didn’t match the success of the other two), partly because so little happens; partly because (as with the latter two Matrices) the atmosphere is so mephitic and dark that the movie is half over before we actually see a daylight exterior; partly because where the first two films were morally ambiguous and neatly divided our sympathies between werewolves and vampires, in this one the werewolves are clearly the good guys and the vampires the bad guys; and partly because we really miss the element of clash between this Gothic netherworld and our own familiar existence that the first two films had because they were set in modern times.
I faulted the first two Underworlds because it wasn’t altogether believable that this war between vampires and werewolves could exist so totally under the radar of modern humanity — Anne Rice did a much better job of explaining how her vampire cult co-existed with modern life while remaining pretty much incognito — but the solution to that credibility issue was not to set the whole movie in a medieval netherworld which fell heir to the big problem with fantasy stories in general: when anything can happen, you can’t play with audience expectations because you haven’t set up any you can then shock the audience by violating. (In fairness, merely setting a movie in modern times and avoiding blatantly fantastic elements is no guarantee of avoiding this; Duplicity is a perfect case in point.)
I’m not sure there’s going to be another Underworld movie — the first two had pretty much seemed to exhaust the premise and the lackluster returns on Rise of the Lycans are not the sort that usually inspire a sequel (nor is the Zeitgeist working in its favor; the vampire movies people are going to see today are things like Twilight that emphasize the romantic side of the vampire myth, which Underworld virtually eliminated) — but if there is another, I hope they bring it back to the modern world! — 9/29/09
The film was Underworld, not the 1927 Josef von Sternberg silent that marked the first true gangster picture (there’d been plenty of movies about crime before but none on the peculiar mixture of criminal enterprise and above-ground business that sprang up to provide alcoholic beverages to Americans during Prohibition) but a 2003 special-effects extravaganza starring Kate Beckinsale as Celine, a member of a “Death-Dealer” squadron of vampires devoted to the extermination of “Lycans” (werewolves to you) in the middle of an unnamed city that looks awfully like London. (The final credits identify this as a U.S.-British-German-Hungarian co-production, and among the people listed in the credit roll are some with “vampiric” first names like Bela — as in Lugosi, who you’ll recall was in both the original Dracula and The Wolf Man — and Vlad, the true first name of Vlad Tepes Drakulya the Impaler, the real-life inspiration for Bram Stoker’s vampire character.)
The gimmick is that Lucian (Michael Sheen), the werewolf king supposedly killed 600 years before by vampire king Kraven (Shane Brolly), is in fact alive, and he and Kraven are working together for some unspecified but undoubtedly nefarious purpose. Not surprisingly, given that this is a youth-oriented movie with a young cast aimed at a young audience, the plot, such as it is, is a mere pretext for spectacular action sequences. The promotion for the film emphasized the Romeo and Juliet-like aspects of the story, as killer vampire Celine falls for Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), an internist who’s just been bitten by Lucian and, of course, turned into a Lycan himself — and it turns out that both vampires and Lycans are descendants of a Hungarian family who were infected with plague in the 13th century but whose viruses mutated, one to cause lycanthropy, one to cause vampirism, and one which left the person normally human but immune both to conventional plague symptoms and to the lycanthropic and vampiric symptoms associated with the other two mutations. (Well, it’s as good an explanation as any for the existence of vampires and werewolves in an otherwise recognizable 21st century urban environment.)
Much of the film consists of action scenes of vampire and werewolf death squads firing at each other with automatic pistols and machine guns, and writer Danny McBride (he shares story credit with Kevin Grevioux and director Len Wiseman but gets sole credit for the actual script) at least explains how vampires and werewolves can shoot each other: the vampires’ guns are loaded with silver bullets (duh) while the werewolves’ guns are loaded with bullets with luminous pale-blue spheres in the tips that create an instant flash of light once they explode inside a body, thereby subjecting the vampires to an artificial sunlight which has the same effect on them — instant death — as the real thing. McBride even explains how the vampires can afford to go through all those silver bullets — they own a company that makes artificial blood and plasma, which is not only profitable enough to fund their ammunition needs but has the beneficial side effect of providing them a source of food so they don’t have to keep putting the bite, as it were, on human beings (though they also feed on the blood of livestock à la some of Stoker’s junior vampires).
As long as you accept that what you’re going to see is a phantasmagoria of intense visual images tied to a plot that won’t make more than a lick of sense, Underworld is actually great fun. True, it’s not always that easy to tell who is who — particularly because most of the cast is young and the actors tend to look alike (especially Scott Speedman and Shane Brolly; it took me about one-third of the film before I was reliably able to tell them apart) — and some of the images are so camped-out as to be risible, particularly the sight of vampire elder Viktor (Bill Nighy) being awakened from his tomb and revivified by plugging about 12 IV’s into the back of his body — but the sheer stunning visual quality of this film makes it entertaining, and there’s nothing as self-consciously gross as the eyeball soup in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Indeed, I ordered the “unrated director’s cut” version of the film through the Columbia House DVD Club and was braced for some really gory, blood-spewing action that would have grossed out Charles and made me queasy, but nothing like that occurred (the closest to it we did get were some bizarre scenes of werewolves literally pushing out the potentially toxic silver bullets from inside, the bullets emerging back out of the entrance wounds and plopping safely to the ground beside their would-be victims). Director Len Wiseman kept his camera in almost constant motion, the fight scenes were brilliantly choreographed, and the look Wiseman and cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts blessedly avoided the past-is-brown approach and created a convincing Gothic look by shooting as close to black-and-white as they could get in color and using color very sparingly. (Directors of neo-noir movies, please take note!) Wiseman even quoted one of the most famous Val Lewton gimmicks — in an early scene Celine is about to blow away some werewolves when a subway train suddenly blocks her view, and we hear the sound of the train before it enters the screen — though little of the film is at a Lewtonian level of subtlety, nor can we really expect it to be given what the modern market for the genre wants.
Like Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream (the only two films of his I’ve seen), Underworld was clearly made by people who would be capable of a subtler, more artistic approach to horror than they can get away with in today’s market, but even so it’s great entertainment and a far more appealing and believable combination of horror myths than Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the other clunkers Universal made during the dog days of their monster cycle after Lewton’s films had pushed RKO ahead of them in making truly artistic films in the genre, and it leaves me anticipating the sequel, Underworld: Evolution (which I imagine will be built around the sexual union of Celine and Michael — Michael having been established as the only human in the world who has both vampire and werewolf viruses in his system and can still survive — and what manner of creature it will produce), even though watching all those pitched battles in the subways and streets I couldn’t help but wonder why the collateral body count of normal humans caught in the crossfire wasn’t catching the attention of the human authorities — the only “cops” we see are two werewolf agents in disguise.
Still, it’s fun to see the digital effects work turning the human characters literally into feral creatures of the night, able to climb up walls and on ceilings in images Hieronymus Bosch would have loved to have painted — we’ve gone a long way since the days when John Fulton had to wait patiently for his double-exposure shots while Jack P. Pierce progressively plastered more and more of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s body with yak wool! — 9/21/06
••••••••••
I was finally ready to run Charles a movie: Underworld: Evolution, a 2006 sequel to the 2003 Underworld, the story of a centuries-old war between vampires and “Lycans” (werewolves) that has somehow managed to continue on earth, with a horrifically high body count on both sides, without the normal human population ever seeming to notice. (Anne Rice’s novels, whatever their deficiencies, at least did a better job of suggesting how her vampire cult could have existed under the radar of the rest of humanity for so long.) The previous film ends with “death-dealer” vampire Selene (Kate Beckinsale in a hot, skin-tight black leather outfit) slicing the head off her father, Viktor (Bill Nighy), after she finds out he’s the latest in a long line of vampires that have betrayed her, and after she’s discovered Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), who has been bitten by both vampire and werewolf and therefore has become a “hybrid,” with characteristics of both.
This one begins back in the Middle Ages, with a sequence depicting the brothers Marcus (Tony Curran) and William (Brian Steele) Corvinus, sons of Alexander Corvinus (Derek Jacobi — what a way to end a career that began so illustriously with I, Claudius, also, come to think of it, a tale of relatives murdering each other for power!) and founders of the vampire and Lycan races, respectively. (A written foreword helpfully explained that Marcus was bitten by a bat and thereby became a vampire, while William was bitten by a wolf and thereby became a werewolf; I joked, “Actually there was a third brother who was bitten by a gerbil, but we don’t talk about him.”) It seems that back then the human-to-Lycan transformation was one-way; it was only later, through internal discipline, that the Lycans learned to go back to being human once in a while -— until then they just became feral animals, raging killing machines without consciousness or conscience.
Then the film returns us to the early 21st century, with Selene opening up Marcus’s tomb — and having him turn out to be yet another deceitful baddie, though probably the coolest-looking character in either film: with extra arms that can pierce an entire body (with which he performs a bloodier version of the Vulcan mind-meld to get whatever information he needs at the moment) and cool bat-wings that descend from his original arms and enable him to fly. She goes around the world looking for other vampires with clues on how to defeat Marcus and finds vampire historian (I’m not making this up, you know!) Andreas Tanis (Steven Mackintosh), whom she discovers under house arrest made considerably more pleasurable than Marcus (who sentenced him centuries earlier) anticipated by the presence of two vampirettes (Christine Danielle and Kaja Gjesdal) who were apparently the result of a vampires’ blood-sucking raid on a Playboy Club one night.
Tanis bites the big one (pun definitely intended!) at Marcus’s hands, but not before revealing that the mysterious commander of a vampire ship (I’m not making that up, either!) is none other than Alexander Corvinus, father of both these clans and also distant ancestor of, you guessed it, Selene’s formerly mortal boyfriend, Michael Corvin, who at first turns down the bags of blood Selene offers him as his repast and then, as she warned him, gets violently ill when he tries to eat normal human food — which he does at, of all places, a Russian military base (“Yeah, we know the food is bad, but it’s usually not that bad!”).
Underworld: Evolution is one of those obnoxious sequelae that doesn’t really go beyond the earlier episode but instead offers just more: more exciting action, more blood, more gore, more bodies (it’s the sort of film where the credits include a listing for “corpse creation,” and the credited corpse creator, Joel Echallier, definitely earned whatever they paid him), and also more incomprehensible plot twists and a lot more scenes in which director Len Wiseman and screenwriter Danny McBride (they collaborated on the original story and Kevin Grevioux is credited with them for having created the characters in the first place) rather rawly introduce us to new dramatis personae just by cutting them in and evoking the age-old question, “Who the hell is he?”
It has most of the virtues of the first film, particularly a steely-gray look that proves to be a good way of doing Gothic in color (thanks be to cinematographer Simon Duggan for not bathing it all in murky brown!) and would be a good way of doing noir in color as well, and a script that at least feints at explaining who all these people are and what they need to do to kill each other. Alas, it’s weaker than the first one simply because this time around the plot makes even less sense than the previous one did, and the predictable action set-piece at the end (William the werewolf is revivified — and he looks all too much like a pretty ordinary feral dog the pound is about to have to put down, and he and Marcus have the inevitable battle to the death which they both lose) offers us a pretty pat resolution of the plot.
At least we get a rather chilly sex scene between Beckinsale and Speedman, though carefully framed to avoid showing any “naughty bits,” as well as yet another orgy scene (this time between Tanis and his Playboy Bunny vampire pets) that suggests an alternate title could have been Fangs Wide Shut. I don’t want to sound too hard on the Underworld movies because they’re actually quite entertaining for the genre and the era; the gore almost never seems gratuitous and the filmmakers obviously aimed at a work of some taste (the Matrix influences are obvious in the big effects set-pieces but McBride and Wiseman are nowhere near as opportunistic in their plotting as the Wachowskis were), though they could have done better by making the movie even more restrained (their quote of the famous Val Lewton “bus” effect in the first Underworld convinces me that they’ve seen the classics and would be able to duplicate their approach if they didn’t know too well how little patience modern audiences would have for that sort of thing). — 10/2/06
••••••••••
I ran us the third film in the Underworld series, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which I didn’t realize until I read the blurb on the DVD box wasn’t a sequel to the previous Underworlds but a prequel, set in medieval times two generations after the mutated plague bacteria that gave birth to the new life forms the cycle depicts, vampires and “lycans” — a.k.a., werewolves. In the first two generations of lycans, a rather unctuous narrator explains at the beginning, they were simply people who changed into wolves — they never changed back. Then another mutation arose and a baby was born with the ability to change from human to wolf and back, and Viktor (Bill Nighy), the leader of the vampire clan, decides to use him to transmit the new-style lycan mutation to other humans, then puts collars around them (parts of this movie do look like a particularly violent S/M play party!) and forces them to stand guard as slaves around the vampires’ castle, so the vampires will have a security guard to repel anyone that might try to attack them during the day, when they’re vulnerable.
Once the exposition is complete, the main part of the film is sort of Romeo and Juliet meets Spartacus, as Lucian (Michael Sheen), the first lycan “switch,” and Viktor’s vampire daughter Sonja (Rhona Mitra) fall in love and Lucian rallies his fellow lycans to rebel against their vampire masters, forging a key with which they can remove their collars to make that possible. The script is by the usual committee, and it’s a sign of the times that the writing credits feature nine listings even though they only represent six actual people: the screenplay is by Danny McBride, Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain (nice to know a “Blackman” and someone named McCain can work together on something!) based on a story by Len Wiseman, Robert Orr and McBride, in turn based on characters created by Wiseman, McBride and Kevin Grevioux — and Grevioux is actually in the movie as Raze, one of Lucian’s lieutenants and a rather incongruous Black person in an otherwise all-white world.
The writing committee never made it clear whether the collars are simply symbolic of slavery or they contain some magic power that actually saps their wearers’ wills and forces them into obedience (though, judging from Lucian’s attitude when he’s wearing one — which isn’t appreciably less rebellious than when he isn’t — it’s hard to believe they have much intrinsic power), and there really isn’t much more plot to it than the basics of a war between lycans and vampires that ends inconclusively, since according to the first two movies it’s been continuing for at least 500 years and is still going on in our own time.
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is the first episode in the series that wasn’t directed by Len Wiseman, a genuinely talented filmmaker with a feel for the history of his genre (my love and respect for the first Underworld were probably cemented when it included a copy of the famous scene in the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur Cat People in which the climax of a shock scene was the hissing airbrake of a bus — an innocuous sound that in this context made audiences both in1942 and 2003 leap with fright); instead, this time around they gave the direction to the effects guy, Patrick Tatopoulos. Naturally he kept the visual style Wiseman and company had established in the first two films — notably the steely-gray, almost monochrome overall “look” to establish Gothic atmosphere — and I don’t think it’s fair to blame Tatopoulos for a comparatively uninteresting script.
There are some quite spectacular scenes, including one of unearthly beauty in which Lucian calls out to his fellow Lycans in various stages of werewolf-dom; another in which Viktor consigns Sonja to execution by putting her in a room and then slowly opening the skylight, which since she’s a vampire condemns her to death by utter obliteration — her body simply turns to smoke and blows away. (Both Charles and one of the imdb.com contributors noted, though, that this wasn’t the way Sonja died in the flashback exposition scene in the original Underworld.)
Overall, though, Rise of the Lycans strikes me as the weakest of the three (and audiences seemed to agree, since it was a box-office disappointment and didn’t match the success of the other two), partly because so little happens; partly because (as with the latter two Matrices) the atmosphere is so mephitic and dark that the movie is half over before we actually see a daylight exterior; partly because where the first two films were morally ambiguous and neatly divided our sympathies between werewolves and vampires, in this one the werewolves are clearly the good guys and the vampires the bad guys; and partly because we really miss the element of clash between this Gothic netherworld and our own familiar existence that the first two films had because they were set in modern times.
I faulted the first two Underworlds because it wasn’t altogether believable that this war between vampires and werewolves could exist so totally under the radar of modern humanity — Anne Rice did a much better job of explaining how her vampire cult co-existed with modern life while remaining pretty much incognito — but the solution to that credibility issue was not to set the whole movie in a medieval netherworld which fell heir to the big problem with fantasy stories in general: when anything can happen, you can’t play with audience expectations because you haven’t set up any you can then shock the audience by violating. (In fairness, merely setting a movie in modern times and avoiding blatantly fantastic elements is no guarantee of avoiding this; Duplicity is a perfect case in point.)
I’m not sure there’s going to be another Underworld movie — the first two had pretty much seemed to exhaust the premise and the lackluster returns on Rise of the Lycans are not the sort that usually inspire a sequel (nor is the Zeitgeist working in its favor; the vampire movies people are going to see today are things like Twilight that emphasize the romantic side of the vampire myth, which Underworld virtually eliminated) — but if there is another, I hope they bring it back to the modern world! — 9/29/09
The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (Malibu Productions/American International, 1957)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I both wanted a cinematic palate cleanser after Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, so I searched through the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 downloads and found it in Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent — or, to use its inexplicably endless full title, The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. It’s a 1957 indie from Roger Corman’s Malibu Productions, released through American-International and probably timed to make it to theatres ahead of the prestigious 1958 film The Vikings, produced by and starring Kirk Douglas and also featuring Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine under Richard Fleischer’s direction.
Corman’s movie is also an excuse to show a lot of hot young starlets in various stages of undress, and its plot (story by Irving Block, screenplay by Lawrence L. Goldman — and yes, the MST3K crew couldn’t help but joke about the absurdity of giving two guys with such obviously Jewish names the assignment to write about ancient Scandinavians!) is pretty simple: the wives and/or girlfriends of several top Vikings are getting upset that their menfolk’s ship is well behind schedule on its return, so they decide to build a boat themselves (an absurdly flimsy-looking one) and sail off to find them. The expedition is led by blonde Desir (Abby Dalton) but only gets authorized when, after one of the weirdest-looking elections ever shown on screen (according to this movie, the Vikings voted by throwing spears at a tree; if your spear lodged in the tree that was a yes vote, if you missed — deliberately or otherwise — that was a no), raven-haired sorceress Enger (Susan Cabot, by far the best actor of either gender in this movie even though she looked so nearsighted I wondered if the character was supposed to be blind) casts, literally, the deciding vote.
The Viking women set off and find themselves trapped in a “vortex” created by the giant sea serpent (a surprisingly credible effect for a Roger Corman movie in 1957, though he wisely keeps us from seeing too much of it or seeing it too often), swimming in the sea off the shore of a country (decidedly fictitious) called Grimault and serving the Grimaultians the same purpose those deliberately misplaced lights served the Russian hunter-of-humans Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game. Their ship (such as it is) is shipwrecked by the vortex and deposits them on the coast of Grimault, where they’re taken prisoner by the Grimaultian king Stark (Richard Devon) and his son, Prince — though the actor comes off as so nellie “Queen” would have been a better title for him — Ottar (Jonathan Haze, the marvelously fey actor who played the lead in the 1960 Little Shop of Horrors). It’s unclear just what Stark and his minions intend to do with all their captives, but it turns out all the Viking men the Viking women were supposed to be looking for are on Grimault, and most of them are still alive.
The boat carrying the Viking women actually also included one male stowaway, cute blond Vedric (Brad Jackson), and though the obvious expectation (at least for a modern audience) is that Queen Vedric and Queen Ottar are going to get the hots for each other, live happily ever after and be the true pioneers of same-sex marriage in Scandinavia, in fact Ottar finds himself attracted to Desir — especially once she kills a boar that’s menacing them (obviously “played” by a pig with two crude little plastic horns glued on either side of its snout to pass it off as a boar) — only at some point he dies (thanks to Enger’s successful invocation to the god Thor, who sends a rainstorm to put out the fires that are about to burn Vedric and another character at the stake, then aims a lightning bolt straight at Ottar’s outstretched sword, conducting current straight into his body and electrocuting him) and his dad Stark blames Desir and goes out to kill all his Viking guests, and they barely flee with their lives.
The MST3K crew joked about the film’s inevitable anachronisms — including the perfectly coiffed hair of the “Viking women,” the perfectly shaved faces of the Viking men and the apparent invention of the push-up bra by the Vikings’ fashion industry (though if you’ve seen the 1940 Hal Roach version of One Million B.C. you’ll know that, at least according to the movies, the invention of the push-up bra vastly predates the Vikings!) — and also at the fact that Corman recycled the locations he’d used in Teenage Caveman (a much better movie, actually, though there were enough off-the-wall and unintentionally risible elements in it that the MST3K people gave it “the treatment” too) — but Viking Women is actually a pretty good movie within the conventions of a low-budget swashbuckler, thanks mainly to the energy of Corman’s direction and his unwillingness, at least in a project like this, to take himself or his movie too seriously.
MST3K showed this relatively short film padded out with one of their weirdest educational shorts, The Home Economics Story, produced by Iowa State College and in washed-out-color, which featured a bunch of women college students (all played by actresses — if, to steal Dwight MacDonald’s famous line about Haya Harareet, I may use that term for courtesy — who seem to be about in their early 30’s) showing off all the cool careers a home ec major can prepare you for, from fashion designer to hospital dietitian to chef to electric appliance repairperson (I’m not making this up, you know!) to just being plain old Mrs. Somebody. None of the people involved in making this film on either side of the camera are identified — probably by their own choice!
Charles and I both wanted a cinematic palate cleanser after Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, so I searched through the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 downloads and found it in Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent — or, to use its inexplicably endless full title, The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. It’s a 1957 indie from Roger Corman’s Malibu Productions, released through American-International and probably timed to make it to theatres ahead of the prestigious 1958 film The Vikings, produced by and starring Kirk Douglas and also featuring Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine under Richard Fleischer’s direction.
Corman’s movie is also an excuse to show a lot of hot young starlets in various stages of undress, and its plot (story by Irving Block, screenplay by Lawrence L. Goldman — and yes, the MST3K crew couldn’t help but joke about the absurdity of giving two guys with such obviously Jewish names the assignment to write about ancient Scandinavians!) is pretty simple: the wives and/or girlfriends of several top Vikings are getting upset that their menfolk’s ship is well behind schedule on its return, so they decide to build a boat themselves (an absurdly flimsy-looking one) and sail off to find them. The expedition is led by blonde Desir (Abby Dalton) but only gets authorized when, after one of the weirdest-looking elections ever shown on screen (according to this movie, the Vikings voted by throwing spears at a tree; if your spear lodged in the tree that was a yes vote, if you missed — deliberately or otherwise — that was a no), raven-haired sorceress Enger (Susan Cabot, by far the best actor of either gender in this movie even though she looked so nearsighted I wondered if the character was supposed to be blind) casts, literally, the deciding vote.
The Viking women set off and find themselves trapped in a “vortex” created by the giant sea serpent (a surprisingly credible effect for a Roger Corman movie in 1957, though he wisely keeps us from seeing too much of it or seeing it too often), swimming in the sea off the shore of a country (decidedly fictitious) called Grimault and serving the Grimaultians the same purpose those deliberately misplaced lights served the Russian hunter-of-humans Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game. Their ship (such as it is) is shipwrecked by the vortex and deposits them on the coast of Grimault, where they’re taken prisoner by the Grimaultian king Stark (Richard Devon) and his son, Prince — though the actor comes off as so nellie “Queen” would have been a better title for him — Ottar (Jonathan Haze, the marvelously fey actor who played the lead in the 1960 Little Shop of Horrors). It’s unclear just what Stark and his minions intend to do with all their captives, but it turns out all the Viking men the Viking women were supposed to be looking for are on Grimault, and most of them are still alive.
The boat carrying the Viking women actually also included one male stowaway, cute blond Vedric (Brad Jackson), and though the obvious expectation (at least for a modern audience) is that Queen Vedric and Queen Ottar are going to get the hots for each other, live happily ever after and be the true pioneers of same-sex marriage in Scandinavia, in fact Ottar finds himself attracted to Desir — especially once she kills a boar that’s menacing them (obviously “played” by a pig with two crude little plastic horns glued on either side of its snout to pass it off as a boar) — only at some point he dies (thanks to Enger’s successful invocation to the god Thor, who sends a rainstorm to put out the fires that are about to burn Vedric and another character at the stake, then aims a lightning bolt straight at Ottar’s outstretched sword, conducting current straight into his body and electrocuting him) and his dad Stark blames Desir and goes out to kill all his Viking guests, and they barely flee with their lives.
The MST3K crew joked about the film’s inevitable anachronisms — including the perfectly coiffed hair of the “Viking women,” the perfectly shaved faces of the Viking men and the apparent invention of the push-up bra by the Vikings’ fashion industry (though if you’ve seen the 1940 Hal Roach version of One Million B.C. you’ll know that, at least according to the movies, the invention of the push-up bra vastly predates the Vikings!) — and also at the fact that Corman recycled the locations he’d used in Teenage Caveman (a much better movie, actually, though there were enough off-the-wall and unintentionally risible elements in it that the MST3K people gave it “the treatment” too) — but Viking Women is actually a pretty good movie within the conventions of a low-budget swashbuckler, thanks mainly to the energy of Corman’s direction and his unwillingness, at least in a project like this, to take himself or his movie too seriously.
MST3K showed this relatively short film padded out with one of their weirdest educational shorts, The Home Economics Story, produced by Iowa State College and in washed-out-color, which featured a bunch of women college students (all played by actresses — if, to steal Dwight MacDonald’s famous line about Haya Harareet, I may use that term for courtesy — who seem to be about in their early 30’s) showing off all the cool careers a home ec major can prepare you for, from fashion designer to hospital dietitian to chef to electric appliance repairperson (I’m not making this up, you know!) to just being plain old Mrs. Somebody. None of the people involved in making this film on either side of the camera are identified — probably by their own choice!
Fatal Desire (LIfetime, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched one of the Lifetime movies I’ve been recording lately, Fatal Desire, distinguished (if you can call it that) by two semi-major stars in the leads, Anne Heche and Eric Roberts (whom Charles recognized even though he’d only seen him “young” before). The promo on Lifetime’s Web site promised a considerably hotter and steamier movie than this — though supposedly it’s based on a true story — and what comes across on screen is a pretty ordinary tale of adultery and psychopathology whose only real au courant twist (this was made in 2006, though imdb.com lists other movies called Fatal Desire — both either TV-movies or direct-to-video releases — from 2003 and 2004) is that the adulterous couple first meet on the Internet.
She’s Tanya Sullivan (Anne Heche), a frustrated housewife in Pittsburgh whose husband works at a junkyard and who has a job of her own as a cosmetics sales representative. He’s Joe (Eric Roberts), an ex-cop (he was a sheriff’s deputy fired for blowing the whistle on a case his boss wanted covered up) and a pit boss at a casino in Atlantic City who first hooks up with Tanya on a sexually explicit chat room and then starts an e-mail exchange with her and then gets sufficiently inflamed by her charms as she’s described them and illustrated them with her photo that he insists on what most Internet cruising buffs describe as an “F2F” — i.e., a face-to-face meeting. When they meet, he’s briefly disappointed that she’s married and she’s briefly disappointed that he’s not a casino owner, as he falsely claimed (though given how we’ve seen movies about psychopathological casino owners on Lifetime it’s probably just as well he isn’t!), but the screw like bunny rabbits anyway. In a scene that’s so silly it achieves camp, they have sex in a parked car and go at each other so intensely, and scream so loudly, it sets off the car alarm not only of their own car but of every other car in the parking lot!
The second time they meet Tanya brings a home pregnancy test and tells Joe she’s pregnant with their child — they’re both raising children of their own, she a daughter, Molly (Jessica Parsons), by her husband Mark (Mark A. Owen) and he a son, Teddy (James Edward Campbell, with an early Beatles haircut and so perfect a moon face that if they do a movie about the Beatles’ childhoods before he grows up, he’d be a good choice to play the boy John Lennon), by an ex-wife whom we never see; and Joe takes this piece of information and spins a fantasy of her divorcing her husband and the five of them forming a family. On subsequent visits Tanya tells Joe that she was molested as a child and that her husband is a member of the Mafia and beats her — she even claims to have been beaten by him (she sends him pictures of her bruises) and gang-raped by some of her husband’s hired thugs and nearly drowned in their swimming pool. By now we’re getting the idea that she’s spinning a lot of tall tales to get him to do something drastic, but he’s totally clueless — apparently he’d never seen Double Indemnity in his life — and so when she challenges him to kill her husband for her, he agrees, follows her instructions on how to get to his workplace, and does the deed with a shotgun.
Then she totally cuts off contact with him, and in the film’s most genuinely chilling scene responds to his repeated phone calls and e-mails by pressing the “delete” button on her computer and deleting his entire file. (It’s a comment not only on the psychopathology of her character but on the cruel ease with which one can drop one’s online “friends” — I’ll never forget one social-networking Web site that offered a button with which one could “Change Your Community!”) Knowing that items “deleted” from a computer actually remain on its hard drive until they are written over with new information (and even afterwards some particularly skilled IT people with special software can retrieve them), I thought her final comeuppance would come as a result of evidence she thought she had erased forever but she really hadn’t. Instead it comes from conscience-stricken Joe, who tells his confidant Paula (Kathleen York) — a dealer at the casino who had been in unrequited love with him — that he’s got something on his conscience and hints that he’s going to commit suicide. She tries to stop him by taking away his guns (suggesting a plot twist that she’s going to dispose of the murder weapon accidentally and thereby make it that much harder for the police to solve the crime), but in the end — instead of doing the obviously sensible thing, which is to turn himself in and ask for leniency in exchange for implicating her (having worked on the other side of law enforcement, an ex-cop would have known how that particular game in the system plays out!) — he actually does kill himself, but leaves behind a briefcase full of evidence that allows the Pittsburgh police to nail her.
Fatal Desire is sloppily written (the only writing credits are for Paul Janczewski and Mark Morris for writing the book on which it was based, Fatal Error — which would actually have been a better title, but less blatantly sexy and therefore presumably less appealing to the Lifetime audience) and way overdirected by Ralph Hemecker — instead of giving us the hot soft-core porn scenes Lifetime is known for, he indulges in camera tricks like shooting one of Joe’s drinking binges from above the bar, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the bartender serving him a shot and him drinking it — and it had the problem of being unable to make Anne Heche’s character that much crazier than she is for real, what with her tales of being abducted by space aliens and the fact that she’s most famous for her brief relationship with Ellen DeGeneres even though both before and after that she was otherwise totally straight. Eric Roberts is decently well preserved — even in his current state he’s a good deal more attractive than the common run of Lifetime’s leading men — though the TV delivery person whom Tanya takes up with at the end (and who’s in her house when she’s arrested) is played by Matthew MacCaull, easily the hottest guy in the movie.
It’s one of those interesting stories that could have made a much better movie than it did — and the similarities to Double Indemnity (which was also inspired by a true story — James M. Cain based his 1935 novel on Ruth Snyder’s 1927 murder of her husband Al, which she committed in partnership with her lover, Judd Grey — though in the real story, she tricked her husband into secretly signing an insurance policy on his life but the insurance agent was not her lover and co-conspirator) only underscore not only what a better movie Billy Wilder’s classic is but also how much better an actress Barbara Stanwyck was than Anne Heche and that the situation makes for more powerful drama if the man knows from the start what he’s being asked to do and that it’s wrong, but goes ahead and does it anyway.
This morning I watched one of the Lifetime movies I’ve been recording lately, Fatal Desire, distinguished (if you can call it that) by two semi-major stars in the leads, Anne Heche and Eric Roberts (whom Charles recognized even though he’d only seen him “young” before). The promo on Lifetime’s Web site promised a considerably hotter and steamier movie than this — though supposedly it’s based on a true story — and what comes across on screen is a pretty ordinary tale of adultery and psychopathology whose only real au courant twist (this was made in 2006, though imdb.com lists other movies called Fatal Desire — both either TV-movies or direct-to-video releases — from 2003 and 2004) is that the adulterous couple first meet on the Internet.
She’s Tanya Sullivan (Anne Heche), a frustrated housewife in Pittsburgh whose husband works at a junkyard and who has a job of her own as a cosmetics sales representative. He’s Joe (Eric Roberts), an ex-cop (he was a sheriff’s deputy fired for blowing the whistle on a case his boss wanted covered up) and a pit boss at a casino in Atlantic City who first hooks up with Tanya on a sexually explicit chat room and then starts an e-mail exchange with her and then gets sufficiently inflamed by her charms as she’s described them and illustrated them with her photo that he insists on what most Internet cruising buffs describe as an “F2F” — i.e., a face-to-face meeting. When they meet, he’s briefly disappointed that she’s married and she’s briefly disappointed that he’s not a casino owner, as he falsely claimed (though given how we’ve seen movies about psychopathological casino owners on Lifetime it’s probably just as well he isn’t!), but the screw like bunny rabbits anyway. In a scene that’s so silly it achieves camp, they have sex in a parked car and go at each other so intensely, and scream so loudly, it sets off the car alarm not only of their own car but of every other car in the parking lot!
The second time they meet Tanya brings a home pregnancy test and tells Joe she’s pregnant with their child — they’re both raising children of their own, she a daughter, Molly (Jessica Parsons), by her husband Mark (Mark A. Owen) and he a son, Teddy (James Edward Campbell, with an early Beatles haircut and so perfect a moon face that if they do a movie about the Beatles’ childhoods before he grows up, he’d be a good choice to play the boy John Lennon), by an ex-wife whom we never see; and Joe takes this piece of information and spins a fantasy of her divorcing her husband and the five of them forming a family. On subsequent visits Tanya tells Joe that she was molested as a child and that her husband is a member of the Mafia and beats her — she even claims to have been beaten by him (she sends him pictures of her bruises) and gang-raped by some of her husband’s hired thugs and nearly drowned in their swimming pool. By now we’re getting the idea that she’s spinning a lot of tall tales to get him to do something drastic, but he’s totally clueless — apparently he’d never seen Double Indemnity in his life — and so when she challenges him to kill her husband for her, he agrees, follows her instructions on how to get to his workplace, and does the deed with a shotgun.
Then she totally cuts off contact with him, and in the film’s most genuinely chilling scene responds to his repeated phone calls and e-mails by pressing the “delete” button on her computer and deleting his entire file. (It’s a comment not only on the psychopathology of her character but on the cruel ease with which one can drop one’s online “friends” — I’ll never forget one social-networking Web site that offered a button with which one could “Change Your Community!”) Knowing that items “deleted” from a computer actually remain on its hard drive until they are written over with new information (and even afterwards some particularly skilled IT people with special software can retrieve them), I thought her final comeuppance would come as a result of evidence she thought she had erased forever but she really hadn’t. Instead it comes from conscience-stricken Joe, who tells his confidant Paula (Kathleen York) — a dealer at the casino who had been in unrequited love with him — that he’s got something on his conscience and hints that he’s going to commit suicide. She tries to stop him by taking away his guns (suggesting a plot twist that she’s going to dispose of the murder weapon accidentally and thereby make it that much harder for the police to solve the crime), but in the end — instead of doing the obviously sensible thing, which is to turn himself in and ask for leniency in exchange for implicating her (having worked on the other side of law enforcement, an ex-cop would have known how that particular game in the system plays out!) — he actually does kill himself, but leaves behind a briefcase full of evidence that allows the Pittsburgh police to nail her.
Fatal Desire is sloppily written (the only writing credits are for Paul Janczewski and Mark Morris for writing the book on which it was based, Fatal Error — which would actually have been a better title, but less blatantly sexy and therefore presumably less appealing to the Lifetime audience) and way overdirected by Ralph Hemecker — instead of giving us the hot soft-core porn scenes Lifetime is known for, he indulges in camera tricks like shooting one of Joe’s drinking binges from above the bar, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the bartender serving him a shot and him drinking it — and it had the problem of being unable to make Anne Heche’s character that much crazier than she is for real, what with her tales of being abducted by space aliens and the fact that she’s most famous for her brief relationship with Ellen DeGeneres even though both before and after that she was otherwise totally straight. Eric Roberts is decently well preserved — even in his current state he’s a good deal more attractive than the common run of Lifetime’s leading men — though the TV delivery person whom Tanya takes up with at the end (and who’s in her house when she’s arrested) is played by Matthew MacCaull, easily the hottest guy in the movie.
It’s one of those interesting stories that could have made a much better movie than it did — and the similarities to Double Indemnity (which was also inspired by a true story — James M. Cain based his 1935 novel on Ruth Snyder’s 1927 murder of her husband Al, which she committed in partnership with her lover, Judd Grey — though in the real story, she tricked her husband into secretly signing an insurance policy on his life but the insurance agent was not her lover and co-conspirator) only underscore not only what a better movie Billy Wilder’s classic is but also how much better an actress Barbara Stanwyck was than Anne Heche and that the situation makes for more powerful drama if the man knows from the start what he’s being asked to do and that it’s wrong, but goes ahead and does it anyway.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Air Hostess (Columbia, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked was Air Hostess, an intriguing 1933 “B” from Columbia based on a story of the same title by one Dora Macy published serially in True Story magazine from October 1932 to February 1933. (Columbia had the movie out on January 15, 1933, just in time for the final installment of the serial to appear in print; now there’s synergistic marketing for you!) The opening title gives the locale as “Somewhere in France” during World War I, where an older man named Bob King is flying in the air corps along with another old guy, Pa Kearns (J. M. Kerrigan), younger pilot Ted Hunter (James Murray) and a guy named “Lucky.” King shows his fellow pilots a picture of his daughter, who’s still a child, and the other pilots joke about trying to date her when she grows up. All this happens while King is actually dying, shot down and lying in the wreckage of his plane after a battle.
The scene flashes forward to “Somewhere in the United States” — which turns out to be Albuquerque, New Mexico, the headquarters of TWA. That’s right; this is one 1930’s movie that uses the name of a real business, not a fictitious one — though at the time TWA stood for “Transcontinental and Western Airlines” and it wasn’t until Howard Hughes bought it that he changed it to “Trans World Airlines” and expanded its range to international flights. This incarnation of TWA is flying Ford Trimotor aircraft — the standard for commercial passenger flight in the U.S. until Douglas built the DC-3, a much larger and more comfortable plane that made long-distance air travel practical — and when we next meet Bob King’s daughter Kitty, she’s a grown woman (Evalyn Knapp) and working as, you guessed it, a TWA air hostess. Earlier she was stood up on a date by Ted Hunter — she waited inside a hangar until 4 a.m. to see him and all she got was a cold — and as a result the TWA pilots and mechanics have formed an informal gang that threatens to beat up any man who tries to date her or shows any romantic interest in her at all. Between them and her ultra-strict foster parents, Pa Kearns and his wife (Jane Darwell) — Pa continues to work in aviation even though he’s blind and therefore can’t fly anymore, because his hearing is so sensitive that when a plane comes in he can tell if it’s having mechanical trouble, and if so, precisely what — Kitty is feeling imprisoned, especially when a newly hired TWA pilot, Dick Miller (Arthur Pierson), offers her a date and then backs off rather than risk being beaten within an inch of his life.
Salvation of a sort comes in the form of Ted Hunter, who shows up at the Albuquerque airport in a barnstormer’s biplane, trailing a romantic past as a mercenary in Manchuria and Bolivia (we’re not sure ourselves how many of his stories are real and how many are made up, though he appears to have been covered in newspapers) and looking for a backer to help him build a new plane, with retractable wings, with which he hopes to fly nonstop across the Pacific and thereby make his name the way Lindbergh did by flying nonstop across the Atlantic. Hunter escapes the posse around Kitty by flying her across the border to Mexico for a wild night of gambling and drinking, though he stops short of actually having sex with her — later he asks her to marry him and she accepts, but since he doesn’t have a regular job and his typical 1930’s movie male ego makes him forbid her to work, they’re broke. Desperate, she insists on resuming her career as an air hostess (incidentally, there are very few scenes of her actually doing this work, but from what we see it’s clear that there wasn’t much an air hostess of the early 1930’s could do to make the passengers comfortable and give them refreshments in the cramped quarters of a Ford Trimotor) and runs into a passenger she sizes up as a potential backer, Sylvia Carleton (Thelma Todd, who’s billed fourth but only appears in the second half of the film).
Carleton is a gold-digger who’s accumulated a fortune from the four rich men she’s married and divorced, and as any moviegoer (then or now) over the age of about two could guess, she’s only pretending to be interested in Ted’s plane; what she’s really after is Ted’s body. Kitty is aware of this possibility but believes so strongly in Ted’s mission that he nonetheless encourages him to spend a weekend with her at her ranch estate in Albuquerque (on top of the homes she owns in L.A. and New York), and the inevitable happens and he ends up in Sylvia’s arms. Interestingly, the writers, Milton Raison and Keene Thompson blessedly avoid having Kitty actually catch her husband and Sylvia in flagrante delicto — thank goodness for small mercies — but she catches on when she sees the model of his plane in her living room with its wing broken off, she storms out in a huff and, to the consternation of Dick Miller — who flew her there and was clearly hoping to get her on the rebound — announces that she never wants to have anything to do with flying or flyers again and is going to take the train to L.A.
Then there’s a spectacular action climax in which Hunter and Miller both learn that the train is going to cross a bridge that is dangerously weak and will probably collapse, killing Kitty and everyone else on board, and both Miller in his TWA Trimotor and Hunter in his biplane try to intercept the train and get its engineer to stop. When all else fails, Hunter deliberately crashes his plane onto the railroad track ahead of the train, it stops in time and everyone is saved, and he and Kitty get back together — helped by the good news that another potential backer (a male one this time!) has come forward and it looks like he’s going to get to build his super-plane and try his record run after all.
Air Hostess isn’t exactly fresh drama — apparently Columbia’s executives thought that the sheer novelty of commercial air travel would give the movie unique appeal without needing to give it anything more than the simplest, most clichéd actual story (incidentally there seems to be uncertainty about the writer’s name — the American Film Institute Catalog says the original New York Times review listed the film as based on a story by “Grace Perkins,” a pseudonym of Dora Macy, while imdb.com says Perkins was her real name and Macy the pseudonym) — but it’s one of those movies that’s redeemed by the personalities of the cast members as well as some surprisingly good special effects for a (then) cheap studio like Columbia (even though the train and the bridge, albeit convincing, are pretty obviously models).
Evalyn Knapp shines — a real surprise to me because the only two movies of hers I’d seen previously were Sinners’ Holiday (in which the leads, Knapp and Grant Withers, were inevitably upstaged by supporting players James Cagney and Joan Blondell) and Smart Money; somehow this film’s director, Albert S. Rogell, managed to get a tough, emotionally sensitive and utterly sincere performance out of her whereas her previous directors had just let her walk through her films. James Murray, remembered today almost exclusively for one film — King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) — isn’t exactly drop-dead gorgeous (one can only dream wistfully of what Cary Grant could have done with this part!), but he’s good enough to portray both his appeal to Kitty’s caged-bird character and the weakness that allows him to drift into the affair with Sylvia. Thelma Todd is perfectly competent, but her long association with comedians leaves us expecting Stan Laurel or Groucho Marx to appear just about every time she’s on screen. Overall, Air Hostess is a quite competent studio product, several cuts above the norm for independent films of the time and one that causes me to revise my opinion of Evalyn Knapp’s acting skills up a great deal!
The film I picked was Air Hostess, an intriguing 1933 “B” from Columbia based on a story of the same title by one Dora Macy published serially in True Story magazine from October 1932 to February 1933. (Columbia had the movie out on January 15, 1933, just in time for the final installment of the serial to appear in print; now there’s synergistic marketing for you!) The opening title gives the locale as “Somewhere in France” during World War I, where an older man named Bob King is flying in the air corps along with another old guy, Pa Kearns (J. M. Kerrigan), younger pilot Ted Hunter (James Murray) and a guy named “Lucky.” King shows his fellow pilots a picture of his daughter, who’s still a child, and the other pilots joke about trying to date her when she grows up. All this happens while King is actually dying, shot down and lying in the wreckage of his plane after a battle.
The scene flashes forward to “Somewhere in the United States” — which turns out to be Albuquerque, New Mexico, the headquarters of TWA. That’s right; this is one 1930’s movie that uses the name of a real business, not a fictitious one — though at the time TWA stood for “Transcontinental and Western Airlines” and it wasn’t until Howard Hughes bought it that he changed it to “Trans World Airlines” and expanded its range to international flights. This incarnation of TWA is flying Ford Trimotor aircraft — the standard for commercial passenger flight in the U.S. until Douglas built the DC-3, a much larger and more comfortable plane that made long-distance air travel practical — and when we next meet Bob King’s daughter Kitty, she’s a grown woman (Evalyn Knapp) and working as, you guessed it, a TWA air hostess. Earlier she was stood up on a date by Ted Hunter — she waited inside a hangar until 4 a.m. to see him and all she got was a cold — and as a result the TWA pilots and mechanics have formed an informal gang that threatens to beat up any man who tries to date her or shows any romantic interest in her at all. Between them and her ultra-strict foster parents, Pa Kearns and his wife (Jane Darwell) — Pa continues to work in aviation even though he’s blind and therefore can’t fly anymore, because his hearing is so sensitive that when a plane comes in he can tell if it’s having mechanical trouble, and if so, precisely what — Kitty is feeling imprisoned, especially when a newly hired TWA pilot, Dick Miller (Arthur Pierson), offers her a date and then backs off rather than risk being beaten within an inch of his life.
Salvation of a sort comes in the form of Ted Hunter, who shows up at the Albuquerque airport in a barnstormer’s biplane, trailing a romantic past as a mercenary in Manchuria and Bolivia (we’re not sure ourselves how many of his stories are real and how many are made up, though he appears to have been covered in newspapers) and looking for a backer to help him build a new plane, with retractable wings, with which he hopes to fly nonstop across the Pacific and thereby make his name the way Lindbergh did by flying nonstop across the Atlantic. Hunter escapes the posse around Kitty by flying her across the border to Mexico for a wild night of gambling and drinking, though he stops short of actually having sex with her — later he asks her to marry him and she accepts, but since he doesn’t have a regular job and his typical 1930’s movie male ego makes him forbid her to work, they’re broke. Desperate, she insists on resuming her career as an air hostess (incidentally, there are very few scenes of her actually doing this work, but from what we see it’s clear that there wasn’t much an air hostess of the early 1930’s could do to make the passengers comfortable and give them refreshments in the cramped quarters of a Ford Trimotor) and runs into a passenger she sizes up as a potential backer, Sylvia Carleton (Thelma Todd, who’s billed fourth but only appears in the second half of the film).
Carleton is a gold-digger who’s accumulated a fortune from the four rich men she’s married and divorced, and as any moviegoer (then or now) over the age of about two could guess, she’s only pretending to be interested in Ted’s plane; what she’s really after is Ted’s body. Kitty is aware of this possibility but believes so strongly in Ted’s mission that he nonetheless encourages him to spend a weekend with her at her ranch estate in Albuquerque (on top of the homes she owns in L.A. and New York), and the inevitable happens and he ends up in Sylvia’s arms. Interestingly, the writers, Milton Raison and Keene Thompson blessedly avoid having Kitty actually catch her husband and Sylvia in flagrante delicto — thank goodness for small mercies — but she catches on when she sees the model of his plane in her living room with its wing broken off, she storms out in a huff and, to the consternation of Dick Miller — who flew her there and was clearly hoping to get her on the rebound — announces that she never wants to have anything to do with flying or flyers again and is going to take the train to L.A.
Then there’s a spectacular action climax in which Hunter and Miller both learn that the train is going to cross a bridge that is dangerously weak and will probably collapse, killing Kitty and everyone else on board, and both Miller in his TWA Trimotor and Hunter in his biplane try to intercept the train and get its engineer to stop. When all else fails, Hunter deliberately crashes his plane onto the railroad track ahead of the train, it stops in time and everyone is saved, and he and Kitty get back together — helped by the good news that another potential backer (a male one this time!) has come forward and it looks like he’s going to get to build his super-plane and try his record run after all.
Air Hostess isn’t exactly fresh drama — apparently Columbia’s executives thought that the sheer novelty of commercial air travel would give the movie unique appeal without needing to give it anything more than the simplest, most clichéd actual story (incidentally there seems to be uncertainty about the writer’s name — the American Film Institute Catalog says the original New York Times review listed the film as based on a story by “Grace Perkins,” a pseudonym of Dora Macy, while imdb.com says Perkins was her real name and Macy the pseudonym) — but it’s one of those movies that’s redeemed by the personalities of the cast members as well as some surprisingly good special effects for a (then) cheap studio like Columbia (even though the train and the bridge, albeit convincing, are pretty obviously models).
Evalyn Knapp shines — a real surprise to me because the only two movies of hers I’d seen previously were Sinners’ Holiday (in which the leads, Knapp and Grant Withers, were inevitably upstaged by supporting players James Cagney and Joan Blondell) and Smart Money; somehow this film’s director, Albert S. Rogell, managed to get a tough, emotionally sensitive and utterly sincere performance out of her whereas her previous directors had just let her walk through her films. James Murray, remembered today almost exclusively for one film — King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) — isn’t exactly drop-dead gorgeous (one can only dream wistfully of what Cary Grant could have done with this part!), but he’s good enough to portray both his appeal to Kitty’s caged-bird character and the weakness that allows him to drift into the affair with Sylvia. Thelma Todd is perfectly competent, but her long association with comedians leaves us expecting Stan Laurel or Groucho Marx to appear just about every time she’s on screen. Overall, Air Hostess is a quite competent studio product, several cuts above the norm for independent films of the time and one that causes me to revise my opinion of Evalyn Knapp’s acting skills up a great deal!
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Flaxy Martin (Warners, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was Flaxy Martin, an obscure and oddly title Warners’ film noir from 1949 written by David Lang and directed by Richard L. Bare, who seems to have taken the noir “look” to almost terminal extremes. Plenty of scenes in this film, including what are supposed to be big action moments, take place in almost total darkness punctuated only by shards of light and sudden flashes on the screen and explosions on the soundtrack — time and time again we hear someone shooting someone else but we have to wait until the lights come back on to see who shot whom. The film is named after the femme fatale character played by Virginia Mayo, though the real lead is Zachary Scott as Walter Colby, young attorney (one had to do a bit of suspension of disbelief to accept Scott as the youthful age his character is supposed to be) who just got out of law school two years earlier, encountered Flaxy Martin, and was seduced by her — literally — into working for gangster Hap Richey (a nicely sinister performance by Douglas Kennedy, who ably portrays him as the small-time Mafia wannabe Lang wrote).
Colby naïvely hopes that by working for Richey he can raise enough money to marry Flaxy and get them out of that lifestyle — what he doesn’t know, but we do, is that she’s really Richey’s mistress. (We’re told that in a surprisingly blatant scene for a Code-era film; he slips her a wad of cash and says, “Here. Go buy yourself something.”) The opening scene is a typical Warners whirlwind of rapid action; Richey’s hulking hitman Caesar (Jack Overman) shoots down a woman in a tenement building, another woman in the building sees it go down and registers his face, and without any tiresome exposition about how the police put a name to her description the very next scene shows him in custody, then cuts to Richey anxiously summoning Colby at 2 a.m. and saying he must represent Caesar in court and get him acquitted because otherwise — we find out later — Caesar will turn state’s evidence and blow the whistle on Richey’s gang. Without telling Colby, Richey and Flaxy bribe a witness to provide Caesar a false alibi, then Flaxy goes to their phony witness and kills her herself when she tries to blackmail more money out of Richey. When Colby refuses to play along, Richey and Flaxy frame him for the woman’s murder, and he’s arrested — though later he breaks jail and, with the help of his garage mechanic friend Sam (Tom D’Andrea), flees to the countryside and meets “good girl” Nora Carson (Dorothy Malone). Nora hides him out, at first not knowing who he is but eventually putting two and two together and associating him with Colby from an article on the case in her local country newspaper, even though that paper (unlike the big-city dailies whose front pages we’ve seen earlier) ran the story without his photo.
Alas, Richey’s hit man Roper (Elisha Cook, Jr. in one of his very best bad-guy performances — as good as he was as the milquetoast in over his head in the criminal life, he could be equally effective as a black-hearted killer, and if anything he’s even better here than in The Maltese Falcon because he’s got more to do) traces them and is ready to kill Colby, Nora and the dumb country sheriff who was checking up on them when Roper arrived — only Colby gets away again and the finale occurs back in the city, where Flaxy re-hooks up with Colby and decides to get rid of both men in her life by enticing Colby to steal a $40,000 payroll from Hap, then killing Colby herself and getting the money. Of course it doesn’t work that way, and eventually the bad guys get what they deserve — and Colby offers the $40,00 to Nora so they can flee and start a new life together, but she won’t have anything to do with him unless he turns himself in and faces up to what he’s done, so the film ends with him becoming honest, facing a two-year sentence for perjury and the loss of his law license but at least back on the moral straight-and-narrow.
Flaxy Martin is an odd movie, not only because of how far it pushes the visual tropes of film noir but because of some of the intriguing spins it puts on the noir clichés: Flaxy herself is a businesslike femme fatale who doesn’t get a particular thrill out of manipulating the men in her life but does it coldly and calculatingly, just for the money. Colby is a marvelously complex anti-hero — well suited to Scott, whose reputation up to that point had been almost entirely built on out-and-out villain roles in movies like The Mask of Dimitrios and Mildred Pierce — who rises to the challenge of Lang’s script and suggests a man finding and getting in touch with an inner decency that had been beaten out of him by long years of economic struggle. (This isn’t stressed in Lang’s script but we do get the impression that he impoverished himself to work his way through law school.)
Certainly there’ve been plenty of other movies in which a crooked but not entirely unsympathetic protagonist disappears from an urban environment, finds himself in the country and is wholly or partly redeemed by the love of a good country girl — previous examples include The Life of Jimmy Dolan, They Made Me a Criminal, High Sierra and Out of the Past — but this one is edgier than most because Lang’s writing is good enough to give both Scott and Malone the chance to play walking-wounded characters, and they rise to the occasion. I had been under the impression that Flaxy Martin was a “B,” but that’s belied by the length (87 minutes) and a cast that, though lacking any superstars, at least featured actors that had played with superstars in major films: Mayo with James Cagney in White Heat and Scott with Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Flaxy Martin is quite an engaging movie even despite its big weakness — the title character disappears midway through and only turns up at the end — and though the title seems rather silly (I suspect it meant “Flaxy” as in “flaxen,” and was supposed to make us think Virginia Mayo was playing a “bottle blonde”) the film itself is a crackling-tough noir boosted by Warners’ trademarked breakneck pace and bolstered by a music score by William Lava, whose apprenticeship at Republic had certainly trained him to write action music!
The film I picked out was Flaxy Martin, an obscure and oddly title Warners’ film noir from 1949 written by David Lang and directed by Richard L. Bare, who seems to have taken the noir “look” to almost terminal extremes. Plenty of scenes in this film, including what are supposed to be big action moments, take place in almost total darkness punctuated only by shards of light and sudden flashes on the screen and explosions on the soundtrack — time and time again we hear someone shooting someone else but we have to wait until the lights come back on to see who shot whom. The film is named after the femme fatale character played by Virginia Mayo, though the real lead is Zachary Scott as Walter Colby, young attorney (one had to do a bit of suspension of disbelief to accept Scott as the youthful age his character is supposed to be) who just got out of law school two years earlier, encountered Flaxy Martin, and was seduced by her — literally — into working for gangster Hap Richey (a nicely sinister performance by Douglas Kennedy, who ably portrays him as the small-time Mafia wannabe Lang wrote).
Colby naïvely hopes that by working for Richey he can raise enough money to marry Flaxy and get them out of that lifestyle — what he doesn’t know, but we do, is that she’s really Richey’s mistress. (We’re told that in a surprisingly blatant scene for a Code-era film; he slips her a wad of cash and says, “Here. Go buy yourself something.”) The opening scene is a typical Warners whirlwind of rapid action; Richey’s hulking hitman Caesar (Jack Overman) shoots down a woman in a tenement building, another woman in the building sees it go down and registers his face, and without any tiresome exposition about how the police put a name to her description the very next scene shows him in custody, then cuts to Richey anxiously summoning Colby at 2 a.m. and saying he must represent Caesar in court and get him acquitted because otherwise — we find out later — Caesar will turn state’s evidence and blow the whistle on Richey’s gang. Without telling Colby, Richey and Flaxy bribe a witness to provide Caesar a false alibi, then Flaxy goes to their phony witness and kills her herself when she tries to blackmail more money out of Richey. When Colby refuses to play along, Richey and Flaxy frame him for the woman’s murder, and he’s arrested — though later he breaks jail and, with the help of his garage mechanic friend Sam (Tom D’Andrea), flees to the countryside and meets “good girl” Nora Carson (Dorothy Malone). Nora hides him out, at first not knowing who he is but eventually putting two and two together and associating him with Colby from an article on the case in her local country newspaper, even though that paper (unlike the big-city dailies whose front pages we’ve seen earlier) ran the story without his photo.
Alas, Richey’s hit man Roper (Elisha Cook, Jr. in one of his very best bad-guy performances — as good as he was as the milquetoast in over his head in the criminal life, he could be equally effective as a black-hearted killer, and if anything he’s even better here than in The Maltese Falcon because he’s got more to do) traces them and is ready to kill Colby, Nora and the dumb country sheriff who was checking up on them when Roper arrived — only Colby gets away again and the finale occurs back in the city, where Flaxy re-hooks up with Colby and decides to get rid of both men in her life by enticing Colby to steal a $40,000 payroll from Hap, then killing Colby herself and getting the money. Of course it doesn’t work that way, and eventually the bad guys get what they deserve — and Colby offers the $40,00 to Nora so they can flee and start a new life together, but she won’t have anything to do with him unless he turns himself in and faces up to what he’s done, so the film ends with him becoming honest, facing a two-year sentence for perjury and the loss of his law license but at least back on the moral straight-and-narrow.
Flaxy Martin is an odd movie, not only because of how far it pushes the visual tropes of film noir but because of some of the intriguing spins it puts on the noir clichés: Flaxy herself is a businesslike femme fatale who doesn’t get a particular thrill out of manipulating the men in her life but does it coldly and calculatingly, just for the money. Colby is a marvelously complex anti-hero — well suited to Scott, whose reputation up to that point had been almost entirely built on out-and-out villain roles in movies like The Mask of Dimitrios and Mildred Pierce — who rises to the challenge of Lang’s script and suggests a man finding and getting in touch with an inner decency that had been beaten out of him by long years of economic struggle. (This isn’t stressed in Lang’s script but we do get the impression that he impoverished himself to work his way through law school.)
Certainly there’ve been plenty of other movies in which a crooked but not entirely unsympathetic protagonist disappears from an urban environment, finds himself in the country and is wholly or partly redeemed by the love of a good country girl — previous examples include The Life of Jimmy Dolan, They Made Me a Criminal, High Sierra and Out of the Past — but this one is edgier than most because Lang’s writing is good enough to give both Scott and Malone the chance to play walking-wounded characters, and they rise to the occasion. I had been under the impression that Flaxy Martin was a “B,” but that’s belied by the length (87 minutes) and a cast that, though lacking any superstars, at least featured actors that had played with superstars in major films: Mayo with James Cagney in White Heat and Scott with Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Flaxy Martin is quite an engaging movie even despite its big weakness — the title character disappears midway through and only turns up at the end — and though the title seems rather silly (I suspect it meant “Flaxy” as in “flaxen,” and was supposed to make us think Virginia Mayo was playing a “bottle blonde”) the film itself is a crackling-tough noir boosted by Warners’ trademarked breakneck pace and bolstered by a music score by William Lava, whose apprenticeship at Republic had certainly trained him to write action music!
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Dick Tracy (Republic serial, 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last Charles and I had run a couple of quirky movies, also downloaded. One was the first episode of the 1937 serial Dick Tracy, made by Republic and written by the usual committee (Morgan Cox and George Morgan, story — wouldn’t it have been more fun if the names had been switched and it had been Morgan Morgan and George Cox? — and Barry Shipman and Winston Miller, screenplay), who for some reason changed him from a detective with the Chicago Police Department to an FBI agent, and moved the story to San Francisco — where the first chapter deals with a sabotage attempt against the newly opening Bay Bridge. The serial was actually quite good for the genre; Ralph Byrd played Tracy, his girifriend Gwen Andrews (Kay Hughes) was also his partner in crime-fighting and an intelligent and savvy action heroine in her own right; the “comic” relief of his stupid sidekick Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette, carrying over from his usual role as comic foil to Gene Autry) and the tearjerking of Junior (a 12-year-old foundling played by Lee Van Atta, a surprisingly tough child actor who here, as in the contemporary Undersea Kingdom, is frequently the voice of reason and experience in the cast!) are both held in check.
The best part of it — aside from the cool special effects (including the magnificent “Flying Wing” aircraft used by the bad guys, which just about everyone who’s seen this or the follow-up, The Fighting Devil Dogs, which wasn’t a Tracy story but recycled the Flying Wing — incidentally there were experiments in building actual aircraft of this type but they foundered because it was hard to keep them stable, though Charles said the current “stealth” planes reminded him of the Wing) — is the excellent direction by Alan James and Ray Taylor. This isn’t one of those all-too-typical serials in which we get a lot of boring exposition scenes to set up the action-porn serial audiences wanted; it’s (so far, anyway) a quite consistent, highly taut thriller with genuine suspense editing and an overall level of excitement instead of the long lulls between action sequences typical of the serial genre.
Ralph Byrd acts his part as Tracy with power and authority (even though I tend to disagree with the critical consensus that his physiognomy made him especially suited to Tracy because it matched Chester Gould’s drawings), Kay Hughes is likewise a real figure of strength (you want liberated women in 1930’s movies? There were a surprising number of them in serials, especially Republic’s!), and the overall production values are excellent (reflecting Republic owner Herbert Yates’ insistence on maintaining a physical plant and equipment that were technically the equal of the major studios) — and the plot gimmick is pretty audacious: the bad guys are a group of criminals led by “The Lame One” (clearly there’s going to be a last-minute revelation that he’s an outwardly respectable person pursuing a criminal career under an assumed identity — and doing it much the way Moriarty and Mabuse did, hiding his real identity even from his subordinates and communicating with them in convoluted ways to preserve his incognito) and one of them, a mad surgeon named Moloch (John Picorri), takes Tracy’s kidnapped brother Gordon and gives him an operation that not only alters his appearance so totally he’s played by a different actor (Richard Beach “before,” Carleton Young “after”) but changes his moral sense so that he’s now a tool in the hands of the villains (a plot gimmick Republic pulled in Undersea Kingdom as well). — 8/31/09
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Actually what we ended up watching were episodes two and three of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “The Bridge of Terror” and “The Fur Pirates,” which pretty much confirmed my good impression of episode one (especially both the cool design of the villains’ “Flying Wing” aircraft and the precision of the special-effects people, John T. Coyle and future Republic stalwarts Howard and Theodore Lydecker, in getting it to fly absolutely convincingly on screen) except for one detail: the utter idiocy of the writing of Dick Tracy’s escapes from the cliffhangers. At the end of episode one he’s about to be crushed by a bunch of girders released from a construction crane on the Bay Bridge (one wonders why a crane and girders were there since the bridge had supposedly already been finished) when, at the start of episode two, he simply rolls away from the danger. The end of episode two was even worse; Tracy (Ralph Byrd) and his sidekick Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette) have stolen a plane from the villains and are making their escape when the baddies shoot off the plane’s propeller, it goes out of control, crashes into a bridge tower and falls to the ground below, leaving Tracy and McGurk facing certain death … only in episode three they simply walk away from the wreckage, not only alive but totally unhurt, and continue their pursuit of the villains from their conveniently parked car! — 9/1/09
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We kicked off the evening with episode four of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “Death Rides the Sky” — and it certainly does, since this is a really weird farrago of serial-type action centering around the attempt of the master villain “The Lame One” and his hunchbacked (at least as credibly hunchbacked as the Republic costume department could make him, which was not very) assistant “Moloch” (John Picorri, who’s easily the most interesting actor in the whole show — indeed, he seems to anticipate Blofeld in always petting a lap cat while he’s in the middle of plotting his schemes, though his cat is black instead of white) to steal a hideous-looking bauble called the “Mogra Necklace” that looks like a very bad piece of costume jewelry.
One gimmick is that there are actually two Mogra Necklaces, a genuinely valuable one and a worthless imitation the jeweler in charge of it, M. Clare Renee (André Cheron) — apparently nobody bothered to brief the writers on which gender is which in French names — had made for security purposes. The thieves have actually made off with the real one — they infiltrated a thug onto the dirigible Pacific Queen and had him steal it at gunpoint, then parachute out, and Dick Tracy (Ralph Byrd) and his partner Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette) gave chase in the plane they had previously docked on the underside of the dirigible (did they really do that sort of thing?), only the parathug landed and was picked up by a rope ladder hanging from the villains’ cool aircraft, the Flying Wing. But Tracy plants a story in the papers that the one they stole was the fake, ensuring that the villains will try to steal the necklace again to make sure they get the real one — and they’ve set up a dummy robot-controlled plane that supposedly carries the necklace, only Tracy’s ward Junior (Lee Van Atta) stows away inside the supposedly uninhabited (and thereby readily sacrificable) plane and Tracy has to lower himself down from his own biplane onto Junior’s and then break into the cockpit by smashing the front windows — and just as the villains are about to shoot him down, the episode ends and that’s the cliffhanger.
The 1937 Dick Tracy has some ridiculously unlikely gimmicks to get the good guys out of danger, but overall it’s one of the better serials; the villains’ plots are well thought out and the effects work, particularly the Flying Wing in action, is utterly convincing — though the whole plot gimmick of Dick Tracy’s brother Gordon (Richard Beach, pre-op; Carleton Young, post-op) having been turned against him and impressed into the villains’ service by a super-operation performed on his brain by Moloch has been horrendously underused thus far — though given that episode five is called “Brother Against Brother,” hopefully that will change! — 9/4/09
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I ran Charles episode five of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “Brother Against Brother.” This was a rather silly one in which Dick Tracy finally confronted his brother Gordon, a formerly ethical lawyer who was transformed into a villain’s minion by a super-operation performed by “Moloch” (John Picorri), the hunchbacked assistant of the serial’s principal villain, “The Lame One.” (As I’ve noted earlier, the operation was so successful that it changed Gordon’s appearance completely — to the point where he’s played by different actors pre- and post-op.) What was most depressing about this episode was that there was absolutely no recognition scene between the brothers — none of the expected explosion of shock when Dick Tracy found his brother working against him on the other side of the villains’ plots — and it seems pretty much as if, after a genuinely exciting and suspenseful opening, the 1937 Dick Tracy fell into the usual serial ruts.
The plotting became simply a series of pretexts for the big action scenes; Gwen Andrews (Kay Hughes), who in the first episode seemed poised to a role as a ballsy action heroine genuinely helping Dick Tracy out of his scrapes, faded out in the subsequent episodes and had virtually nothing to do in this one; and the cliffhangers were pretty dull and unimaginative. (This was always a problem with Republic; for all their skills at making serials, the chapter endings were almost invariably formulaic and tended to cheat — so many of the episodes of Zombies of the Stratosphere ended with the central character jumping his way out of danger that Charles and I started joking about it, calling out to him, “Jump! Jump!” as the cliffhanger approached.) It’s still a fun serial, but nowhere near as good as I thought it would be when I started watching it. — 9/6/09
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I ran Charles and I the next two episodes in sequence of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, chapters six and seven, “Dangerous Waters” and “The Ghost Town Mystery.” These were pretty much the same mix as before, including some surprisingly dorky cliffhangers (at the end of episode five Dick Tracy was shot and fell off the roof of a building; at the start of episode six he was just scratched and fell into a bush, climbed out of it and continued his pursuit of the bad guys; the next cliffhanger was a rope being towed by a boat, in which Tracy’s foot got hooked and he was dragged underwater, but again he escaped absurdly easily at the start of episode seven), too little use made of enviably spunky actress Kay Hughes as Tracy’s secretary/assistant Gwen, and the usual nonsensical plot devices to keep the action going, including a secret new metal called “Nickolodium” which an eccentric inventor has devised (I couldn’t help but be reminded of the “Rearden Metal” in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged — when Wendell Berry wrote in the current Progressive, “If we are destroying both the productive land and the rural communities and cultures, how can we assume that money will somehow attract food to us whenever we need it?,” it occurred to me that a Randite would answer that question by saying that if we allow the genius of the world’s super-entrepreneurs to operate untrammeled by regulation, they will come up with some fantastic new invention that will enable them to make a profit by selling us food produced in ways that literally — like the “Rearden Metal” and the super-engine powered by air Rand actually did create, in her imagination, in Atlas Shrugged — violate the laws of nature) and which the bad guys are, of course, trying to get their hands on.
That’s episode six; in episode seven the MacGuffin (the serial writers seemed to need a new one every week!) is a large gold mine the prospector who dug it is willing to offer the government and the bad guys, of course, want to steal it. This isn’t much of a serial, actually — Republic got better at them later on — though it’s still fun, largely because of the colorful villains and their magnificent (and quite well-done) aircraft, the “Flying Wing.” — 9/8/09
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I ran the next episodes in sequence of the 1937 serial Dick Tracy (eight and nine, “Battle in the Clouds” — something of a misnomer because the titular battle doesn’t happen until the last two minutes or so — and “The Stratosphere Adventure”), which deal with the latest attempt of the principal villain, who’s referred to variously as “The Lame One” and “The Spider” (the “Spider Ring” is the name of his organization), to wreak havoc on the world, this time by stealing a super-fast airplane invented by H. T. Clayton (Wedgwood Nowell) that can go up to 700 miles an hour (20 miles per hour shy of the sound barrier, which wasn’t broken for another decade and then by a rocket plane that had to be taken up by a carrier aircraft) and has been test-flown only by Clayton’s daughter Betty (Ann Ainslee, a personable blonde whose good looks and easygoing manner should have given her more of a career than she had).
Alas, the folks at Republic’s production design and special effects department, which had created an absolutely stunning-looking aircraft for the villains in the “Flying Wing” (recycled a year later in the 1938 serial The Fighting Devil Dogs), let the side down when it came to Clayton’s plane. Despite the model of such state-of-the-art high-tech planes as Howard Hughes’ H-1 (a sleek monoplane with stubby wings and virtually nothing else on its fuselage), the plane they came up with looked all too much like a quite ordinary general-aviation aircraft, complete with a wraparound cockpit and fixed landing gear. No one — not even in 1937 — would have designed a speed plane with landing gear that couldn’t be retracted to avoid air resistance in actual flight.
Still, these two episodes were among the more entertaining ones, complete with an agent with the absolutely preposterous name of “Durston Cloggerstein” (Harrison Greene) who wants either the plans of the super-plane, the plane itself or at least its engine so he can take them back to the carefully unnamed foreign power he’s from on a dirigible that’s scheduled to pick him up within a day. The tensions between the Lame One, his assistant Moloch (John Picorri), Gordon Tracy — Dick Tracy’s brother, who by Moloch’s super-surgery has been converted from a good guy to a villain — and Durston are entertaining enough even though we have to wonder how this criminal gang is making enough money to stay in business given that Dick Tracy is anticipating its every move and frustrating its every attempt to make money off of crime.
At least part of the problem with this movie was summed up by William K. Everson in The Detective in Film: “On the detection level … the scales were always loaded very much in Tracy’s favor. A typical plot gimmick would be for Tracy to find a specific clue, perhaps a fragment of some rare mineral. A rapid check would invariably reveal that such a mineral was handled by only one specific company and, knowing that the villain needed it for some current infernal machine, off Tracy would troop to the warehouse where it was stored, either to forestall the villain’s acquisition of it or to give chase if he was too late. … Its sole purpose was to enable the hero to anticipate the plans of the villain, and keep the action moving constantly.”
At least — unlike such later and more pretentious feature films as The Guns of Navarone — serials like the 1937 Dick Tracy made no bones about being anything other than action porn, with the exposition sequences good for nothing but setting up the next action highlight and keeping things going at a breakneck pace (though later Republic serials worked much better in the pace department than this one, which still has a bit of the leaden-ness that often afflicted serials at Republic’s predecessor studio, Mascot). I also liked Betty Clayton as a character and only wish we’d got to see more of her! — 9/13/09
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We ended up watching episodes ten and eleven of the 1937 Republic Dick Tracy serial, “The Gold Ship” and “Harbor Pursuit,” in which the big action centered around a freighter that had just docked in San Francisco (where the serial is mostly — almost totally, in fact — set; not only did they change Tracy from a Chicago police detective to an FBI agent, they moved him to San Francisco) with $1 million in gold missing. It turns out, of course, to be the Spider Ring again (apparently every other criminal in America has just stopped doing anything illegal in deference to the Spider Ring’s priorities); they have agents on the ship and other agents on another ship that struck the gold freighter in mid-ocean, causing damage to one of its outer plates that needs to be repaired — the gimmick being that the Spider Ring operates a ship-repair company as a front and will make sure they get the job so that, under cover of removing the plate and replacing it, they will simply take the gold out of the place on the ship to which they had relocated it instead of actually stealing it.
It’s a ridiculously complicated criminal scheme even by serial standards, and naturally Dick Tracy foils it absurdly easily despite the intervention of a cliffhanger when the heavy steel panel the bad guys have removed as part of their phony “repair” starts hurtling down and Tracy rolls away and gets out from under it just in time. In episode 11, after the titular harbor pursuit ends with much of the Spider Ring arrested and the whole enterprise coming out empty-handed (again!), their new plan is to kidnap master engraver Henry Coulter (Forbes Murray) — I couldn’t help wishing they’d kill him before he could continue his line and allow a later generation of his family to bring forth Ann Coulter — so they can force him to make plates for counterfeiting U.S. currency on the grounds that, as the mind-controlled Gordon Tracy puts it, “It would be more convenient for us to make our own money.” “Yeah, right — especially since you haven’t been able to steal any!” I fired back at the screen.
Episode 11 is also the one in which it finally starts to dawn on Dick Tracy that his brother Gordon is part of the criminal enterprise he’s fighting — indeed, at one point he thinks Gordon might actually be the head of it — after he compares a note from Spider Ring headquarters they confiscated from one of the harbor crooks they arrested to an inscription on a photo of himself Gordon once gave him. The fact that on at least two occasions Dick Tracy actually saw his brother Gordon post-op doesn’t seem to enter into it — though maybe we’re supposed to believe that the hunchbacked henchman Moloch’s super-operation on Gordon to eliminate his will and allow the gang to brainwash him also changed his appearance so much even his own brother wouldn’t recognize him … which is at least plausible, since Republic cast two actors as Gordon Tracy: Richard Beach pre-op and Carleton Young post-op. — 9/16/09
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I ended up running chapters 12 and 13 of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “The Trail of the Spider” (which makes one wonder what the first 11 chapters were about!) and “The Fire Trap.” “The Trail of the Spider” turned out to be a so-called “recap episode,” in which Tracy and his crew interrogated newly discovered witnesses to the events of the exposition in episode one (which wasn’t altogether a bad thing considering how much more imaginative episode one was than the rest of it!), and there was a lot of business about the Spider, a.k.a. the Lame One (the writers seem uncertain as to whether “Spider” was the name of the criminal mastermind or just the name of his gang), coming to Tracy’s office to assassinate him — that was the cliffhanger of episode 12 — and Junior (Lee Van Atta) getting a photo of him, not that that does the good guys any good because in episode 13 the Lame One and Tracy’s brother Gordon (still under the Lame One’s control and still played by Carleton Young rather than Richard Beach, who played him before the operation by John Picorri as the Lame One’s hunchbacked sidekick Moloch undid his moral sense) sends an agent to Tracy’s house (how did they know where it was?) who walks in (apparently the super G-man is too dumb to lock his doors!) and enters the darkroom where Tracy and crew are developing the photo (how did he know where it was?) just in time to ruin the print, after which he destroys the negative, so the best clue Tracy and company had to the Lame One’s real identity is lost.
The titular fire trap is set for Tracy when a lantern on the boat where the Lame One has his headquarters (at least in this episode) overturns and sets the old tub ablaze — though knowing Republic’s writers, the way they have him get out of it will probably be a cheat … — 9/19/09
Charles and I ended up watching the last two episodes of the 1937 Dick Tracy as our movie offering last night — a bit disappointing in that the final action sequence was surprisingly unexciting, a confrontation between Tracy and the villains in the catacombs under the abandoned power station that was the lair of the Lame One, a.k.a. the Spider (the writers seemed undecided between episodes — and sometimes even within the same episode — whether “the Spider Ring” was simply the name of the villainous gang or whether its leader was actually called “the Spider”). The Lame One, a.k.a. the Spider, turned out to be a minor character named Walter Odette (Edwin Stanley), who made a surprise appearance at FBI headquarters (or was it Dick Tracy’s home? They started to look alike after a while!) in episode 14, “The Devil in White” (presumably a reference to the hospital orderly who spirits out the heavily bandaged patient they think is the master engraver Henry Coulter, played by Forbes Murray, when he’s scheduled to be released — only it’s not Coulter at all, it’s Dick Tracy hiding under the bandages and allowing himself to be used as a decoy so his fellow FBI men can follow the crooks and find their secret hideout), which set up the unsurprising revelation in the next and last episode, “Brothers United,” in which Dick Tracy and his brother Gordon finally come together after the operation by the Lame One’s henchman Moloch (John Picorri) that converted Gordon from good to evil.
In fact, the cliffhanger between the last two episodes is Moloch stretching Dick Tracy out on his operating table and threatening to perform the same operation on him. The irony was that in at least two previous episodes Dick Tracy saw Gordon in his villainous identity without any apparent awareness that this thug with a white streak in his hair was his brother (Gordon was played post-op by Carleton Young — another actor, Richard Beach, had played him pre-op and maybe we were supposed to think that Moloch’s surgery had altered Gordon’s appearance so drastically that Dick wouldn’t recognize him!), but on the operating table at the end of episode 14 Dick finally awakens some shreds of Gordon’s conscience and in episode 15 Gordon and the Lame One are fleeing in a car, Gordon is driving, and he swerves to avoid hitting Junior and Gwen (whose job description seemed to change from episode to episode; sometimes she was Dick’s lab technician, sometimes his general assistant and sometimes merely his secretary), who are in the middle of the road.
The car swerves off the road, the Lame One is killed instantly, and I was rather hoping that Gordon would survive long enough to make it to the hospital, where the operation to relieve the concussion on the brain from the crash would also reverse the effects of Moloch’s surgery and restore the good Gordon Tracy (and Richard Beach as the actor playing him!) to Dick’s family. No such luck, probably due to the Production Code and the unwillingness of the Code authorities to forgive all those reels of Gordon’s villainy just because he was under medico-psychological compulsion and therefore not responsible for his actions; instead Gordon has to die, too, though he and Dick have a surprisingly moving last scene together in which Ralph Byrd plays with real sensitivity and emotion after 15 reels that haven’t called on him to do anything but stand tall and look butch.
The 1937 Dick Tracy as a whole doesn’t deserve the opprobrium William K. Everson heaped on it in The Detective in Film (“not very good … extremely slow, cheaply made, with a maximum of back projection and other studio economies and with a dearth of imaginative chapter endings”); he’s right about the chapter endings and the low budget, but the scenes of the Flying Wing are beautiful and effective even though, alas, the Wing totally disappears in the second half of the serial — the villains talk about using it to escape but they never get that far. Interestingly, built into the last episode after it creaked to a climax (and Smiley Burnette got the final fade-out for one of his not-particularly-funny comic-relief scenes) was a trailer — back when the term meant literally that, a commercial for a future release stuck at the end (“trailing”) of the last reel of the feature film — for a Western serial called The Painted Stallion that featured Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and Kit Carson as on-screen characters. Now that might be interesting! — 9/23/09
The night before last Charles and I had run a couple of quirky movies, also downloaded. One was the first episode of the 1937 serial Dick Tracy, made by Republic and written by the usual committee (Morgan Cox and George Morgan, story — wouldn’t it have been more fun if the names had been switched and it had been Morgan Morgan and George Cox? — and Barry Shipman and Winston Miller, screenplay), who for some reason changed him from a detective with the Chicago Police Department to an FBI agent, and moved the story to San Francisco — where the first chapter deals with a sabotage attempt against the newly opening Bay Bridge. The serial was actually quite good for the genre; Ralph Byrd played Tracy, his girifriend Gwen Andrews (Kay Hughes) was also his partner in crime-fighting and an intelligent and savvy action heroine in her own right; the “comic” relief of his stupid sidekick Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette, carrying over from his usual role as comic foil to Gene Autry) and the tearjerking of Junior (a 12-year-old foundling played by Lee Van Atta, a surprisingly tough child actor who here, as in the contemporary Undersea Kingdom, is frequently the voice of reason and experience in the cast!) are both held in check.
The best part of it — aside from the cool special effects (including the magnificent “Flying Wing” aircraft used by the bad guys, which just about everyone who’s seen this or the follow-up, The Fighting Devil Dogs, which wasn’t a Tracy story but recycled the Flying Wing — incidentally there were experiments in building actual aircraft of this type but they foundered because it was hard to keep them stable, though Charles said the current “stealth” planes reminded him of the Wing) — is the excellent direction by Alan James and Ray Taylor. This isn’t one of those all-too-typical serials in which we get a lot of boring exposition scenes to set up the action-porn serial audiences wanted; it’s (so far, anyway) a quite consistent, highly taut thriller with genuine suspense editing and an overall level of excitement instead of the long lulls between action sequences typical of the serial genre.
Ralph Byrd acts his part as Tracy with power and authority (even though I tend to disagree with the critical consensus that his physiognomy made him especially suited to Tracy because it matched Chester Gould’s drawings), Kay Hughes is likewise a real figure of strength (you want liberated women in 1930’s movies? There were a surprising number of them in serials, especially Republic’s!), and the overall production values are excellent (reflecting Republic owner Herbert Yates’ insistence on maintaining a physical plant and equipment that were technically the equal of the major studios) — and the plot gimmick is pretty audacious: the bad guys are a group of criminals led by “The Lame One” (clearly there’s going to be a last-minute revelation that he’s an outwardly respectable person pursuing a criminal career under an assumed identity — and doing it much the way Moriarty and Mabuse did, hiding his real identity even from his subordinates and communicating with them in convoluted ways to preserve his incognito) and one of them, a mad surgeon named Moloch (John Picorri), takes Tracy’s kidnapped brother Gordon and gives him an operation that not only alters his appearance so totally he’s played by a different actor (Richard Beach “before,” Carleton Young “after”) but changes his moral sense so that he’s now a tool in the hands of the villains (a plot gimmick Republic pulled in Undersea Kingdom as well). — 8/31/09
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Actually what we ended up watching were episodes two and three of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “The Bridge of Terror” and “The Fur Pirates,” which pretty much confirmed my good impression of episode one (especially both the cool design of the villains’ “Flying Wing” aircraft and the precision of the special-effects people, John T. Coyle and future Republic stalwarts Howard and Theodore Lydecker, in getting it to fly absolutely convincingly on screen) except for one detail: the utter idiocy of the writing of Dick Tracy’s escapes from the cliffhangers. At the end of episode one he’s about to be crushed by a bunch of girders released from a construction crane on the Bay Bridge (one wonders why a crane and girders were there since the bridge had supposedly already been finished) when, at the start of episode two, he simply rolls away from the danger. The end of episode two was even worse; Tracy (Ralph Byrd) and his sidekick Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette) have stolen a plane from the villains and are making their escape when the baddies shoot off the plane’s propeller, it goes out of control, crashes into a bridge tower and falls to the ground below, leaving Tracy and McGurk facing certain death … only in episode three they simply walk away from the wreckage, not only alive but totally unhurt, and continue their pursuit of the villains from their conveniently parked car! — 9/1/09
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We kicked off the evening with episode four of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “Death Rides the Sky” — and it certainly does, since this is a really weird farrago of serial-type action centering around the attempt of the master villain “The Lame One” and his hunchbacked (at least as credibly hunchbacked as the Republic costume department could make him, which was not very) assistant “Moloch” (John Picorri, who’s easily the most interesting actor in the whole show — indeed, he seems to anticipate Blofeld in always petting a lap cat while he’s in the middle of plotting his schemes, though his cat is black instead of white) to steal a hideous-looking bauble called the “Mogra Necklace” that looks like a very bad piece of costume jewelry.
One gimmick is that there are actually two Mogra Necklaces, a genuinely valuable one and a worthless imitation the jeweler in charge of it, M. Clare Renee (André Cheron) — apparently nobody bothered to brief the writers on which gender is which in French names — had made for security purposes. The thieves have actually made off with the real one — they infiltrated a thug onto the dirigible Pacific Queen and had him steal it at gunpoint, then parachute out, and Dick Tracy (Ralph Byrd) and his partner Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette) gave chase in the plane they had previously docked on the underside of the dirigible (did they really do that sort of thing?), only the parathug landed and was picked up by a rope ladder hanging from the villains’ cool aircraft, the Flying Wing. But Tracy plants a story in the papers that the one they stole was the fake, ensuring that the villains will try to steal the necklace again to make sure they get the real one — and they’ve set up a dummy robot-controlled plane that supposedly carries the necklace, only Tracy’s ward Junior (Lee Van Atta) stows away inside the supposedly uninhabited (and thereby readily sacrificable) plane and Tracy has to lower himself down from his own biplane onto Junior’s and then break into the cockpit by smashing the front windows — and just as the villains are about to shoot him down, the episode ends and that’s the cliffhanger.
The 1937 Dick Tracy has some ridiculously unlikely gimmicks to get the good guys out of danger, but overall it’s one of the better serials; the villains’ plots are well thought out and the effects work, particularly the Flying Wing in action, is utterly convincing — though the whole plot gimmick of Dick Tracy’s brother Gordon (Richard Beach, pre-op; Carleton Young, post-op) having been turned against him and impressed into the villains’ service by a super-operation performed on his brain by Moloch has been horrendously underused thus far — though given that episode five is called “Brother Against Brother,” hopefully that will change! — 9/4/09
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I ran Charles episode five of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “Brother Against Brother.” This was a rather silly one in which Dick Tracy finally confronted his brother Gordon, a formerly ethical lawyer who was transformed into a villain’s minion by a super-operation performed by “Moloch” (John Picorri), the hunchbacked assistant of the serial’s principal villain, “The Lame One.” (As I’ve noted earlier, the operation was so successful that it changed Gordon’s appearance completely — to the point where he’s played by different actors pre- and post-op.) What was most depressing about this episode was that there was absolutely no recognition scene between the brothers — none of the expected explosion of shock when Dick Tracy found his brother working against him on the other side of the villains’ plots — and it seems pretty much as if, after a genuinely exciting and suspenseful opening, the 1937 Dick Tracy fell into the usual serial ruts.
The plotting became simply a series of pretexts for the big action scenes; Gwen Andrews (Kay Hughes), who in the first episode seemed poised to a role as a ballsy action heroine genuinely helping Dick Tracy out of his scrapes, faded out in the subsequent episodes and had virtually nothing to do in this one; and the cliffhangers were pretty dull and unimaginative. (This was always a problem with Republic; for all their skills at making serials, the chapter endings were almost invariably formulaic and tended to cheat — so many of the episodes of Zombies of the Stratosphere ended with the central character jumping his way out of danger that Charles and I started joking about it, calling out to him, “Jump! Jump!” as the cliffhanger approached.) It’s still a fun serial, but nowhere near as good as I thought it would be when I started watching it. — 9/6/09
•••••
I ran Charles and I the next two episodes in sequence of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, chapters six and seven, “Dangerous Waters” and “The Ghost Town Mystery.” These were pretty much the same mix as before, including some surprisingly dorky cliffhangers (at the end of episode five Dick Tracy was shot and fell off the roof of a building; at the start of episode six he was just scratched and fell into a bush, climbed out of it and continued his pursuit of the bad guys; the next cliffhanger was a rope being towed by a boat, in which Tracy’s foot got hooked and he was dragged underwater, but again he escaped absurdly easily at the start of episode seven), too little use made of enviably spunky actress Kay Hughes as Tracy’s secretary/assistant Gwen, and the usual nonsensical plot devices to keep the action going, including a secret new metal called “Nickolodium” which an eccentric inventor has devised (I couldn’t help but be reminded of the “Rearden Metal” in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged — when Wendell Berry wrote in the current Progressive, “If we are destroying both the productive land and the rural communities and cultures, how can we assume that money will somehow attract food to us whenever we need it?,” it occurred to me that a Randite would answer that question by saying that if we allow the genius of the world’s super-entrepreneurs to operate untrammeled by regulation, they will come up with some fantastic new invention that will enable them to make a profit by selling us food produced in ways that literally — like the “Rearden Metal” and the super-engine powered by air Rand actually did create, in her imagination, in Atlas Shrugged — violate the laws of nature) and which the bad guys are, of course, trying to get their hands on.
That’s episode six; in episode seven the MacGuffin (the serial writers seemed to need a new one every week!) is a large gold mine the prospector who dug it is willing to offer the government and the bad guys, of course, want to steal it. This isn’t much of a serial, actually — Republic got better at them later on — though it’s still fun, largely because of the colorful villains and their magnificent (and quite well-done) aircraft, the “Flying Wing.” — 9/8/09
•••••
I ran the next episodes in sequence of the 1937 serial Dick Tracy (eight and nine, “Battle in the Clouds” — something of a misnomer because the titular battle doesn’t happen until the last two minutes or so — and “The Stratosphere Adventure”), which deal with the latest attempt of the principal villain, who’s referred to variously as “The Lame One” and “The Spider” (the “Spider Ring” is the name of his organization), to wreak havoc on the world, this time by stealing a super-fast airplane invented by H. T. Clayton (Wedgwood Nowell) that can go up to 700 miles an hour (20 miles per hour shy of the sound barrier, which wasn’t broken for another decade and then by a rocket plane that had to be taken up by a carrier aircraft) and has been test-flown only by Clayton’s daughter Betty (Ann Ainslee, a personable blonde whose good looks and easygoing manner should have given her more of a career than she had).
Alas, the folks at Republic’s production design and special effects department, which had created an absolutely stunning-looking aircraft for the villains in the “Flying Wing” (recycled a year later in the 1938 serial The Fighting Devil Dogs), let the side down when it came to Clayton’s plane. Despite the model of such state-of-the-art high-tech planes as Howard Hughes’ H-1 (a sleek monoplane with stubby wings and virtually nothing else on its fuselage), the plane they came up with looked all too much like a quite ordinary general-aviation aircraft, complete with a wraparound cockpit and fixed landing gear. No one — not even in 1937 — would have designed a speed plane with landing gear that couldn’t be retracted to avoid air resistance in actual flight.
Still, these two episodes were among the more entertaining ones, complete with an agent with the absolutely preposterous name of “Durston Cloggerstein” (Harrison Greene) who wants either the plans of the super-plane, the plane itself or at least its engine so he can take them back to the carefully unnamed foreign power he’s from on a dirigible that’s scheduled to pick him up within a day. The tensions between the Lame One, his assistant Moloch (John Picorri), Gordon Tracy — Dick Tracy’s brother, who by Moloch’s super-surgery has been converted from a good guy to a villain — and Durston are entertaining enough even though we have to wonder how this criminal gang is making enough money to stay in business given that Dick Tracy is anticipating its every move and frustrating its every attempt to make money off of crime.
At least part of the problem with this movie was summed up by William K. Everson in The Detective in Film: “On the detection level … the scales were always loaded very much in Tracy’s favor. A typical plot gimmick would be for Tracy to find a specific clue, perhaps a fragment of some rare mineral. A rapid check would invariably reveal that such a mineral was handled by only one specific company and, knowing that the villain needed it for some current infernal machine, off Tracy would troop to the warehouse where it was stored, either to forestall the villain’s acquisition of it or to give chase if he was too late. … Its sole purpose was to enable the hero to anticipate the plans of the villain, and keep the action moving constantly.”
At least — unlike such later and more pretentious feature films as The Guns of Navarone — serials like the 1937 Dick Tracy made no bones about being anything other than action porn, with the exposition sequences good for nothing but setting up the next action highlight and keeping things going at a breakneck pace (though later Republic serials worked much better in the pace department than this one, which still has a bit of the leaden-ness that often afflicted serials at Republic’s predecessor studio, Mascot). I also liked Betty Clayton as a character and only wish we’d got to see more of her! — 9/13/09
•••••
We ended up watching episodes ten and eleven of the 1937 Republic Dick Tracy serial, “The Gold Ship” and “Harbor Pursuit,” in which the big action centered around a freighter that had just docked in San Francisco (where the serial is mostly — almost totally, in fact — set; not only did they change Tracy from a Chicago police detective to an FBI agent, they moved him to San Francisco) with $1 million in gold missing. It turns out, of course, to be the Spider Ring again (apparently every other criminal in America has just stopped doing anything illegal in deference to the Spider Ring’s priorities); they have agents on the ship and other agents on another ship that struck the gold freighter in mid-ocean, causing damage to one of its outer plates that needs to be repaired — the gimmick being that the Spider Ring operates a ship-repair company as a front and will make sure they get the job so that, under cover of removing the plate and replacing it, they will simply take the gold out of the place on the ship to which they had relocated it instead of actually stealing it.
It’s a ridiculously complicated criminal scheme even by serial standards, and naturally Dick Tracy foils it absurdly easily despite the intervention of a cliffhanger when the heavy steel panel the bad guys have removed as part of their phony “repair” starts hurtling down and Tracy rolls away and gets out from under it just in time. In episode 11, after the titular harbor pursuit ends with much of the Spider Ring arrested and the whole enterprise coming out empty-handed (again!), their new plan is to kidnap master engraver Henry Coulter (Forbes Murray) — I couldn’t help wishing they’d kill him before he could continue his line and allow a later generation of his family to bring forth Ann Coulter — so they can force him to make plates for counterfeiting U.S. currency on the grounds that, as the mind-controlled Gordon Tracy puts it, “It would be more convenient for us to make our own money.” “Yeah, right — especially since you haven’t been able to steal any!” I fired back at the screen.
Episode 11 is also the one in which it finally starts to dawn on Dick Tracy that his brother Gordon is part of the criminal enterprise he’s fighting — indeed, at one point he thinks Gordon might actually be the head of it — after he compares a note from Spider Ring headquarters they confiscated from one of the harbor crooks they arrested to an inscription on a photo of himself Gordon once gave him. The fact that on at least two occasions Dick Tracy actually saw his brother Gordon post-op doesn’t seem to enter into it — though maybe we’re supposed to believe that the hunchbacked henchman Moloch’s super-operation on Gordon to eliminate his will and allow the gang to brainwash him also changed his appearance so much even his own brother wouldn’t recognize him … which is at least plausible, since Republic cast two actors as Gordon Tracy: Richard Beach pre-op and Carleton Young post-op. — 9/16/09
•••••
I ended up running chapters 12 and 13 of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “The Trail of the Spider” (which makes one wonder what the first 11 chapters were about!) and “The Fire Trap.” “The Trail of the Spider” turned out to be a so-called “recap episode,” in which Tracy and his crew interrogated newly discovered witnesses to the events of the exposition in episode one (which wasn’t altogether a bad thing considering how much more imaginative episode one was than the rest of it!), and there was a lot of business about the Spider, a.k.a. the Lame One (the writers seem uncertain as to whether “Spider” was the name of the criminal mastermind or just the name of his gang), coming to Tracy’s office to assassinate him — that was the cliffhanger of episode 12 — and Junior (Lee Van Atta) getting a photo of him, not that that does the good guys any good because in episode 13 the Lame One and Tracy’s brother Gordon (still under the Lame One’s control and still played by Carleton Young rather than Richard Beach, who played him before the operation by John Picorri as the Lame One’s hunchbacked sidekick Moloch undid his moral sense) sends an agent to Tracy’s house (how did they know where it was?) who walks in (apparently the super G-man is too dumb to lock his doors!) and enters the darkroom where Tracy and crew are developing the photo (how did he know where it was?) just in time to ruin the print, after which he destroys the negative, so the best clue Tracy and company had to the Lame One’s real identity is lost.
The titular fire trap is set for Tracy when a lantern on the boat where the Lame One has his headquarters (at least in this episode) overturns and sets the old tub ablaze — though knowing Republic’s writers, the way they have him get out of it will probably be a cheat … — 9/19/09
Charles and I ended up watching the last two episodes of the 1937 Dick Tracy as our movie offering last night — a bit disappointing in that the final action sequence was surprisingly unexciting, a confrontation between Tracy and the villains in the catacombs under the abandoned power station that was the lair of the Lame One, a.k.a. the Spider (the writers seemed undecided between episodes — and sometimes even within the same episode — whether “the Spider Ring” was simply the name of the villainous gang or whether its leader was actually called “the Spider”). The Lame One, a.k.a. the Spider, turned out to be a minor character named Walter Odette (Edwin Stanley), who made a surprise appearance at FBI headquarters (or was it Dick Tracy’s home? They started to look alike after a while!) in episode 14, “The Devil in White” (presumably a reference to the hospital orderly who spirits out the heavily bandaged patient they think is the master engraver Henry Coulter, played by Forbes Murray, when he’s scheduled to be released — only it’s not Coulter at all, it’s Dick Tracy hiding under the bandages and allowing himself to be used as a decoy so his fellow FBI men can follow the crooks and find their secret hideout), which set up the unsurprising revelation in the next and last episode, “Brothers United,” in which Dick Tracy and his brother Gordon finally come together after the operation by the Lame One’s henchman Moloch (John Picorri) that converted Gordon from good to evil.
In fact, the cliffhanger between the last two episodes is Moloch stretching Dick Tracy out on his operating table and threatening to perform the same operation on him. The irony was that in at least two previous episodes Dick Tracy saw Gordon in his villainous identity without any apparent awareness that this thug with a white streak in his hair was his brother (Gordon was played post-op by Carleton Young — another actor, Richard Beach, had played him pre-op and maybe we were supposed to think that Moloch’s surgery had altered Gordon’s appearance so drastically that Dick wouldn’t recognize him!), but on the operating table at the end of episode 14 Dick finally awakens some shreds of Gordon’s conscience and in episode 15 Gordon and the Lame One are fleeing in a car, Gordon is driving, and he swerves to avoid hitting Junior and Gwen (whose job description seemed to change from episode to episode; sometimes she was Dick’s lab technician, sometimes his general assistant and sometimes merely his secretary), who are in the middle of the road.
The car swerves off the road, the Lame One is killed instantly, and I was rather hoping that Gordon would survive long enough to make it to the hospital, where the operation to relieve the concussion on the brain from the crash would also reverse the effects of Moloch’s surgery and restore the good Gordon Tracy (and Richard Beach as the actor playing him!) to Dick’s family. No such luck, probably due to the Production Code and the unwillingness of the Code authorities to forgive all those reels of Gordon’s villainy just because he was under medico-psychological compulsion and therefore not responsible for his actions; instead Gordon has to die, too, though he and Dick have a surprisingly moving last scene together in which Ralph Byrd plays with real sensitivity and emotion after 15 reels that haven’t called on him to do anything but stand tall and look butch.
The 1937 Dick Tracy as a whole doesn’t deserve the opprobrium William K. Everson heaped on it in The Detective in Film (“not very good … extremely slow, cheaply made, with a maximum of back projection and other studio economies and with a dearth of imaginative chapter endings”); he’s right about the chapter endings and the low budget, but the scenes of the Flying Wing are beautiful and effective even though, alas, the Wing totally disappears in the second half of the serial — the villains talk about using it to escape but they never get that far. Interestingly, built into the last episode after it creaked to a climax (and Smiley Burnette got the final fade-out for one of his not-particularly-funny comic-relief scenes) was a trailer — back when the term meant literally that, a commercial for a future release stuck at the end (“trailing”) of the last reel of the feature film — for a Western serial called The Painted Stallion that featured Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and Kit Carson as on-screen characters. Now that might be interesting! — 9/23/09
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Riders of the Whistling Skull (Republic, 1936/37)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked a film Charles had just downloaded from archive.org, Riders of the Whistling Skull, a 1936 (the copyright and release date was January 4, 1937 but the production was obviously in the previous year) film from Republic Studios (when Nat Levine was still head of production) featuring their series characters “The Three Mesquiteers,” created by Western writer William Colt MacDonald. According to the American Film Institute Catalog, RKO shot two “Three Mesquiteers” movies in 1935 before turning over the rights to the characters to Republic, which had made their first in the series, called The Three Mesquiteers, in the summer of 1936 with Ray Livingston as Stony Brook, Ray Corrigan as Tucson Smith and Syd Saylor as the comic-relief Mesquiteer, Lullaby Joslyn. By the time of Riders of the Whistling Skull — whose credits rather awkwardly claimed it was an “original story” by Bernard McConville and Oliver Drake, turned into a screenplay by Drake and John Rathmell, but also claimed a basis in MacDonald’s 1934 novel of the same title (and the AFI Catalog claimed that this film drew on another MacDonald novel as well, The Singing Scorpion) — Max Terhune had replaced Saylor as Lullaby Joslyn, a lineup which lasted until later in the series when Livingston was replaced, at least briefly, by John Wayne.
Surprisingly, the Mesquiteers characters add little to the story of this film, directed with workmanlike skill by Mack V. Wright and coming in at just 52 minutes (I had wondered if this was one of Republic’s re-edits of their old films for TV in the 1950’s, but according to the catalog the original theatrical running time was 55 to 56 minutes, so this is probably a complete or near-complete version); instead it’s basically a ripoff of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, with leading lady Betty Marsh (a quite personable Mary Russell) attempting to organize an expedition to find her missing father, Professor Marsh (John Van Pelt), who disappeared while trying to find the mysterious lost city of Luckachakai (pronounced “LOO-kah-CHOO-kai,” by the way). Betty, her friend Henrietta McCoy (Fern Emmett as the comic-relief girl), the Mesquiteers, trading post owner Rutledge (Roger Williams), his Indian guide Otah (Yakima Canutt, looking surprisingly hunky for someone who spent most of his career as a stunt double — indeed, Henrietta briefly oohs and aahs about the “handsome primitive” before transferring her affections more appropriately, at least by Hollywood standards, to her fellow white comic-relief partner, Lullaby) and Professor Marsh’s traveling companion, Professor Faxon (C. Montague Shaw), are all in Rutledge’s trading post when Faxon is killed by a ceremonial Indian knife inscribed with so-called “Indian hieroglyphic” writing that only Betty (who learned how from her dad and their joint studies of Indian traditions) can read.
The inscription, natch, is a curse that declares death as the penalty for anyone desecrating the site of the lost city — from which Betty has shown a gold artifact to demonstrate that the claims of a buried treasure are true, and in fact she and her dad dug up the treasure and hid it elsewhere. Rutledge tries to blame Faxon’s killing on an Indian attack, even though it happened with the door closed in a building with no other exit and therefore the murderer had to be one of the people in the room at the time. Betty hits on the idea of taking all the suspects along on the planned expedition to find her father, and they split up the map to the “Whistling Skull” where the treasure was hidden so that four people each hold pieces of it, all useless without the others. One of the other professors, Fronc (George Godfrey) is abducted, and his piece of the map stolen, and though he’s found alive his shirt is gone and his chest is criss-crossed with scars (indicating that he’s been tortured) and branded with the insignia of a fanatical Indian cult.
Another professor, Cleary (Earle Ross), has earlier been killed with an arrow inscribed similarly to the knife that killed Faxon, and eventually the killers turn out to be Rutledge and Otah — so much for the hope that there might be any “good Indians” in this film! It turns out Rutledge is half-Indian and the secret leader of the cult trying to keep the whites away from the treasure of Luckachakai, and it ends with Stony kidnapped (and also, in a move beefcake fans will find welcome, stripped of his shirt to be prepared for torture and branding) but the sheriff’s deputies forming a sort of ersatz Seventh Cavalry to come to the rescue of the good guys just in time and get them out of the Whispering Skull — actually a rock formation that looks like a skull and “whispers” when the wind blows through it — where they’ve found Professor Marsh but where the bad guys have trapped them by taking away the ladder they used to get in. (Charles noted that the good guys should have pulled up the ladder after them, but this is a Republic Western so no one there thought of that!)
Riders of the Whistling Skull — a great title that deserved a better movie (it sounds like one of those Western/horror hybrids John Wayne made at Monogram before it got absorbed into Republic) — is the sort of film that literally got churned out by the yard in Hollywood’s glory days and always had a reliable audience, so there’s not much point in criticizing it aesthetically. It’s got good acting — at least from the women — and director Wright and cinematographer Jack Marta take advantage of the picturesque canyon locations (they went farther afield for this film than Republic usually did) and get some quite interesting images when they’re outdoors (notably a periodic appearance of an Indian, entirely in shadow, to symbolize the threat that is stalking Our Heroes), but when they have to shoot an interior the scenes become dull and tableau-like, more like a film from 1912 than 1936. Curiously, the AFI Catalog said the story rights were acquired by Monogram and used for one of their last Charlie Chan movies, The Feathered Serpent, in 1948 with Roland Winters as Chan and Robert Livingston playing the villain this time!
I picked a film Charles had just downloaded from archive.org, Riders of the Whistling Skull, a 1936 (the copyright and release date was January 4, 1937 but the production was obviously in the previous year) film from Republic Studios (when Nat Levine was still head of production) featuring their series characters “The Three Mesquiteers,” created by Western writer William Colt MacDonald. According to the American Film Institute Catalog, RKO shot two “Three Mesquiteers” movies in 1935 before turning over the rights to the characters to Republic, which had made their first in the series, called The Three Mesquiteers, in the summer of 1936 with Ray Livingston as Stony Brook, Ray Corrigan as Tucson Smith and Syd Saylor as the comic-relief Mesquiteer, Lullaby Joslyn. By the time of Riders of the Whistling Skull — whose credits rather awkwardly claimed it was an “original story” by Bernard McConville and Oliver Drake, turned into a screenplay by Drake and John Rathmell, but also claimed a basis in MacDonald’s 1934 novel of the same title (and the AFI Catalog claimed that this film drew on another MacDonald novel as well, The Singing Scorpion) — Max Terhune had replaced Saylor as Lullaby Joslyn, a lineup which lasted until later in the series when Livingston was replaced, at least briefly, by John Wayne.
Surprisingly, the Mesquiteers characters add little to the story of this film, directed with workmanlike skill by Mack V. Wright and coming in at just 52 minutes (I had wondered if this was one of Republic’s re-edits of their old films for TV in the 1950’s, but according to the catalog the original theatrical running time was 55 to 56 minutes, so this is probably a complete or near-complete version); instead it’s basically a ripoff of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, with leading lady Betty Marsh (a quite personable Mary Russell) attempting to organize an expedition to find her missing father, Professor Marsh (John Van Pelt), who disappeared while trying to find the mysterious lost city of Luckachakai (pronounced “LOO-kah-CHOO-kai,” by the way). Betty, her friend Henrietta McCoy (Fern Emmett as the comic-relief girl), the Mesquiteers, trading post owner Rutledge (Roger Williams), his Indian guide Otah (Yakima Canutt, looking surprisingly hunky for someone who spent most of his career as a stunt double — indeed, Henrietta briefly oohs and aahs about the “handsome primitive” before transferring her affections more appropriately, at least by Hollywood standards, to her fellow white comic-relief partner, Lullaby) and Professor Marsh’s traveling companion, Professor Faxon (C. Montague Shaw), are all in Rutledge’s trading post when Faxon is killed by a ceremonial Indian knife inscribed with so-called “Indian hieroglyphic” writing that only Betty (who learned how from her dad and their joint studies of Indian traditions) can read.
The inscription, natch, is a curse that declares death as the penalty for anyone desecrating the site of the lost city — from which Betty has shown a gold artifact to demonstrate that the claims of a buried treasure are true, and in fact she and her dad dug up the treasure and hid it elsewhere. Rutledge tries to blame Faxon’s killing on an Indian attack, even though it happened with the door closed in a building with no other exit and therefore the murderer had to be one of the people in the room at the time. Betty hits on the idea of taking all the suspects along on the planned expedition to find her father, and they split up the map to the “Whistling Skull” where the treasure was hidden so that four people each hold pieces of it, all useless without the others. One of the other professors, Fronc (George Godfrey) is abducted, and his piece of the map stolen, and though he’s found alive his shirt is gone and his chest is criss-crossed with scars (indicating that he’s been tortured) and branded with the insignia of a fanatical Indian cult.
Another professor, Cleary (Earle Ross), has earlier been killed with an arrow inscribed similarly to the knife that killed Faxon, and eventually the killers turn out to be Rutledge and Otah — so much for the hope that there might be any “good Indians” in this film! It turns out Rutledge is half-Indian and the secret leader of the cult trying to keep the whites away from the treasure of Luckachakai, and it ends with Stony kidnapped (and also, in a move beefcake fans will find welcome, stripped of his shirt to be prepared for torture and branding) but the sheriff’s deputies forming a sort of ersatz Seventh Cavalry to come to the rescue of the good guys just in time and get them out of the Whispering Skull — actually a rock formation that looks like a skull and “whispers” when the wind blows through it — where they’ve found Professor Marsh but where the bad guys have trapped them by taking away the ladder they used to get in. (Charles noted that the good guys should have pulled up the ladder after them, but this is a Republic Western so no one there thought of that!)
Riders of the Whistling Skull — a great title that deserved a better movie (it sounds like one of those Western/horror hybrids John Wayne made at Monogram before it got absorbed into Republic) — is the sort of film that literally got churned out by the yard in Hollywood’s glory days and always had a reliable audience, so there’s not much point in criticizing it aesthetically. It’s got good acting — at least from the women — and director Wright and cinematographer Jack Marta take advantage of the picturesque canyon locations (they went farther afield for this film than Republic usually did) and get some quite interesting images when they’re outdoors (notably a periodic appearance of an Indian, entirely in shadow, to symbolize the threat that is stalking Our Heroes), but when they have to shoot an interior the scenes become dull and tableau-like, more like a film from 1912 than 1936. Curiously, the AFI Catalog said the story rights were acquired by Monogram and used for one of their last Charlie Chan movies, The Feathered Serpent, in 1948 with Roland Winters as Chan and Robert Livingston playing the villain this time!
Monday, September 21, 2009
Panic in the Streets (20th Century-Fox, 1950)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last Charles and I had run one of my archive.org downloads, the 1950 film Panic in the Streets, a quite good noir thriller directed by Elia Kazan that proved he could make a movie just as good, if not better, with old-line Hollywood actors as he could with the Actors’ Studio “Method” crew from New York. It began life as a story called “Outbreak,” also the working title of the film, by Edna and Edward Anhalt, which was adapted by Daniel Fuchs and turned into a screenplay by Richard Murphy.
It begins in the underworld of New Orleans, specifically a poker game hosted by Blackie (Jack Palance, making his film debut and billed under his real first name, “Walter”) and Raymond Fitch (Zero Mostel, showing what a fine “straight” character actor he could be before he was blacklisted and then made his comeback as a schticky comedian). They’ve inveigled a newly arrived undocumented immigrant named Kochak (Lewis Charles) into their game, and he’s won $190 from them (it’s not specified, but the impression is they were “seeding” him, letting him win a little before they started cheating and taking his money) when he complains that he’s feeling ill and tries to leave. Blackie and Fitch follow him out and chase him around on the docks before Blackie shoots him.
The scene cuts to the morgue, where the autopsy doctor is baffled by the symptoms the victim presented and the odd microscope slides of the cultures from his body. So he calls in the U.S. Public Health Service, which duly arrives in the person of Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark). He was hoping to spend the day off with his wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) and their son (Tommy Rettig), but he goes into work — the film makes no bones about how the Public Health Service was originally organized as a branch of the U.S. military; Reed’s a doctor but he’s also an army lieutenant commander and he arrives at the morgue in a dress uniform — and soon discovers that Kochak was infected with pneumonic plague (the rarer form of the disease but also the more deadly — bubonic plague can only be spread via fleas but pneumonic is casually transmissible and airborne, and the death rate approaches 100 percent).
Reed — one suspects the writers deliberately made him the namesake of the Public Health Service’s famous founder, Dr. Walter Reed — immediately orders everyone who had contact with the body to be injected with a serum containing the antibiotic streptomycin, then announces that there’s an important potential transmission vector still unaccounted for: the person or persons who killed Kochak (the authorities do not yet know the victim’s identity). The New Orleans police put the investigation of the crime in the hands of homicide captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), who at first is incredibly skeptical of Dr. Reed’s impassioned pleas for urgency — he insists that the crime must be solved, and the killers taken into custody, within 48 hours or the plague will spread uncontrollably through New Orleans and there really will be the “panic in the streets” alluded to in the title — but in the end teams up with Dr. Reed for a rather Holmes-and-Watson-ish collaboration that takes them into the noir underworld (accompanied by a lot of sleazy-sounding jazz, including some recognizable tunes like “Johnson Rag” and Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow,” which here is sung by an unseen but definitely male singer), where they encounter a lot of people who, even if they aren’t crooks themselves, are sufficiently suspicious of the authorities that they don’t cooperate.
One of the more grimly ironic scenes is one in which a Greek restaurateur (played by future director Alexis Minotis, whose presence puts Richard Widmark one degree of separation from Maria Callas) who served a meal to the victim and his killers is dissuaded from talking by his wife (Aline Stevens) — the irony being that later she dies of plague, and had she shut up and let her husband talk to the authorities, her life might well have been saved. Panic in the Streets has some quite remarkable anticipations of later films involving Widmark (the scene in which he interrogates a woman on a houseboat, as he would in Pickup on South Street three years later) and Kazan (the New Orleans setting of A Streetcar Named Desire — which is actually used more effectively here because the story is grittier and more realistic — and the dock locations of On the Waterfront), and its story works in some finely honed ironies — particularly the way the criminals are baffled at the intense police attention being given to catching them when their crime (murdering a two-bit thug who wasn’t even in the country legally) would ordinarily end up near the bottom of law enforcement’s priorities.
The film does overdo Widmark’s action-hero credentials a bit, and the final shootout in a coffee plant is a noir set-piece along the lines of the Brooklyn Bridge finale of The Naked City that is fun to watch but somewhat breaks the realistic mode of the rest, but there are still plenty of amazing bits in this movie and overall it’s a drama both thrilling and intense. There’s an interesting analysis of it by Jonathan Benair in The Film Noir Encyclopedia that begins, “For years gangsters and criminals have been referred to in films as rats and scum, as a menace to society. Panic in the Streets takes this thought to its logical conclusion, making it literally as well as figuratively true.”
Benair notes the irony (this film is full of ironies, but they serve to add to the story instead of calling attention to themselves and saying, “Hey, look at me! I’m post-modern!”) that Blackie is caught in the end when he’s trying to climb a rope to get on a ship that is sailing out of the country, only he’s trapped by a hawser — a metal disc installed on the rope to prevent rats (which of course incubate plague germs) from climbing ropes to get on ships — and he loses his grip on the rope trying to maneuver his way around the hawser, falls into the water and is captured. Earlier there’s been an interesting argument between Reed and the police, who are being fired upon by the crooks and don’t care whether they live or die — to Reed, of course, it’s essential that they be captured alive so he can use them to do contact tracing and find who else may have been exposed to the disease.
The character of Reed is a vivid dramatization of what has been called the “robust” attitude towards public health, a sort of Dirty Harry, M.D. running roughshod over people’s rights and liberties in the single-minded pursuit of a dangerous disease — one which after 9/11 some people in the public health community called for a return to and an application even to conditions like AIDS, which even the most ardent proponents of the HIV/AIDS model admit is not casually transmissible — and it was certainly ironic after attending a lecture earlier that day by the author of a book called The God Virus to be watching a movie about a public health official in pursuit of a genuine — and deadly — biological microorganism!
The night before last Charles and I had run one of my archive.org downloads, the 1950 film Panic in the Streets, a quite good noir thriller directed by Elia Kazan that proved he could make a movie just as good, if not better, with old-line Hollywood actors as he could with the Actors’ Studio “Method” crew from New York. It began life as a story called “Outbreak,” also the working title of the film, by Edna and Edward Anhalt, which was adapted by Daniel Fuchs and turned into a screenplay by Richard Murphy.
It begins in the underworld of New Orleans, specifically a poker game hosted by Blackie (Jack Palance, making his film debut and billed under his real first name, “Walter”) and Raymond Fitch (Zero Mostel, showing what a fine “straight” character actor he could be before he was blacklisted and then made his comeback as a schticky comedian). They’ve inveigled a newly arrived undocumented immigrant named Kochak (Lewis Charles) into their game, and he’s won $190 from them (it’s not specified, but the impression is they were “seeding” him, letting him win a little before they started cheating and taking his money) when he complains that he’s feeling ill and tries to leave. Blackie and Fitch follow him out and chase him around on the docks before Blackie shoots him.
The scene cuts to the morgue, where the autopsy doctor is baffled by the symptoms the victim presented and the odd microscope slides of the cultures from his body. So he calls in the U.S. Public Health Service, which duly arrives in the person of Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark). He was hoping to spend the day off with his wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) and their son (Tommy Rettig), but he goes into work — the film makes no bones about how the Public Health Service was originally organized as a branch of the U.S. military; Reed’s a doctor but he’s also an army lieutenant commander and he arrives at the morgue in a dress uniform — and soon discovers that Kochak was infected with pneumonic plague (the rarer form of the disease but also the more deadly — bubonic plague can only be spread via fleas but pneumonic is casually transmissible and airborne, and the death rate approaches 100 percent).
Reed — one suspects the writers deliberately made him the namesake of the Public Health Service’s famous founder, Dr. Walter Reed — immediately orders everyone who had contact with the body to be injected with a serum containing the antibiotic streptomycin, then announces that there’s an important potential transmission vector still unaccounted for: the person or persons who killed Kochak (the authorities do not yet know the victim’s identity). The New Orleans police put the investigation of the crime in the hands of homicide captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), who at first is incredibly skeptical of Dr. Reed’s impassioned pleas for urgency — he insists that the crime must be solved, and the killers taken into custody, within 48 hours or the plague will spread uncontrollably through New Orleans and there really will be the “panic in the streets” alluded to in the title — but in the end teams up with Dr. Reed for a rather Holmes-and-Watson-ish collaboration that takes them into the noir underworld (accompanied by a lot of sleazy-sounding jazz, including some recognizable tunes like “Johnson Rag” and Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow,” which here is sung by an unseen but definitely male singer), where they encounter a lot of people who, even if they aren’t crooks themselves, are sufficiently suspicious of the authorities that they don’t cooperate.
One of the more grimly ironic scenes is one in which a Greek restaurateur (played by future director Alexis Minotis, whose presence puts Richard Widmark one degree of separation from Maria Callas) who served a meal to the victim and his killers is dissuaded from talking by his wife (Aline Stevens) — the irony being that later she dies of plague, and had she shut up and let her husband talk to the authorities, her life might well have been saved. Panic in the Streets has some quite remarkable anticipations of later films involving Widmark (the scene in which he interrogates a woman on a houseboat, as he would in Pickup on South Street three years later) and Kazan (the New Orleans setting of A Streetcar Named Desire — which is actually used more effectively here because the story is grittier and more realistic — and the dock locations of On the Waterfront), and its story works in some finely honed ironies — particularly the way the criminals are baffled at the intense police attention being given to catching them when their crime (murdering a two-bit thug who wasn’t even in the country legally) would ordinarily end up near the bottom of law enforcement’s priorities.
The film does overdo Widmark’s action-hero credentials a bit, and the final shootout in a coffee plant is a noir set-piece along the lines of the Brooklyn Bridge finale of The Naked City that is fun to watch but somewhat breaks the realistic mode of the rest, but there are still plenty of amazing bits in this movie and overall it’s a drama both thrilling and intense. There’s an interesting analysis of it by Jonathan Benair in The Film Noir Encyclopedia that begins, “For years gangsters and criminals have been referred to in films as rats and scum, as a menace to society. Panic in the Streets takes this thought to its logical conclusion, making it literally as well as figuratively true.”
Benair notes the irony (this film is full of ironies, but they serve to add to the story instead of calling attention to themselves and saying, “Hey, look at me! I’m post-modern!”) that Blackie is caught in the end when he’s trying to climb a rope to get on a ship that is sailing out of the country, only he’s trapped by a hawser — a metal disc installed on the rope to prevent rats (which of course incubate plague germs) from climbing ropes to get on ships — and he loses his grip on the rope trying to maneuver his way around the hawser, falls into the water and is captured. Earlier there’s been an interesting argument between Reed and the police, who are being fired upon by the crooks and don’t care whether they live or die — to Reed, of course, it’s essential that they be captured alive so he can use them to do contact tracing and find who else may have been exposed to the disease.
The character of Reed is a vivid dramatization of what has been called the “robust” attitude towards public health, a sort of Dirty Harry, M.D. running roughshod over people’s rights and liberties in the single-minded pursuit of a dangerous disease — one which after 9/11 some people in the public health community called for a return to and an application even to conditions like AIDS, which even the most ardent proponents of the HIV/AIDS model admit is not casually transmissible — and it was certainly ironic after attending a lecture earlier that day by the author of a book called The God Virus to be watching a movie about a public health official in pursuit of a genuine — and deadly — biological microorganism!
Shock (20th Century-Fox, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie Charles and I watched last night was also a 20th Century-Fox production and also a film noir involving the medical community, though this time the doctor was the villain: Shock, a quite powerful 1946 “B” directed by Alfred Werker (usually a Fox hack but with some quite interesting movies under his belt, especially The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the second and best of the 14-film cycle with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce; apparently stories of crime and suspense turned him on more than other kinds of scripts), with a script by Eugene Ling (with additional dialogue by Martin Berkeley) based on a story by Albert DeMond.
Shock opens in a hotel in San Francisco, and first introduces us to Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw), the wife of a former POW who’s already been on an emotional roller-coaster ride. First she heard that her husband, naval lieutenant Paul Stewart (Frank Latimore), was dead, and after she’d spent two years working through the grief process and finally accepting her loss, she was then told that her husband was alive after all. She insists on being allowed to stay in that particular hotel, even though her reservation was not received, because that’s the one at which her husband is expecting to meet her and there’s no way she can get word to him if she ends up staying anywhere else. The sympathetic manager finally is able to find her a room, but warns her it’s for one night only. She falls asleep on the couch in the suite, and has a simply but powerfully staged dream in which she hears Paul knocking outside but the door recedes as she approaches it, and even when she gets to the door she realizes that the knob has grown so large she can’t open it. (Somehow this crudely but effectively produced dream sequence seems far more credible than the elaborate Dali-designed dream in Spellbound.)
When she wakes up, she goes on the balcony for some air — and she witnesses an argument in the next room between a man named Richard and a woman, his wife, named Margaret. He demands a divorce so he can marry someone else, she says she’ll only grant it if she can go public with the details of the affair, then he gets angry and grabs a statuette off the table and clubs her to death with it. Witnessing this murder renders Our Heroine totally catatonic, and when her husband finally does arrive the next morning (his plane was 12 hours late) he summons the hotel doctor (Selmer Jackson), who announces that a case of catatonic shock is totally beyond his medical expertise, but as it happens there’s a fabulously successful and well-regarded psychiatrist named Dr. Richard Cross (Vincent Price, top-billed) staying in the same hotel. Once we hear the man’s first name we know where this is going, but director Werker nonetheless keeps the suspense building for about four minutes of screen time before Dr. Cross walks in — and is, of course, the person both we and the heroine have just seen killing his wife.
He offers to take Janet to his sanitarium outside of town, and when the husband wants to accompany them he persuades him to remain behind for at least a day. When they get to the sanitarium we learn that the woman Dr. Cross wanted to leave his wife for is one of his nurses, Elaine Jordan (Lynn Bari in a chillingly effective femme fatale role); we also find out that the murder of Mrs. Cross was not the impulsive crime of passion we were led to believe it was, but was carefully calculated and premeditated by Elaine, who seems to have the kind of psychological and sexual hold over the doctor that Mrs. Macbeth had over her husband. The rest of the film is built around the suspense of whether Janet will come to enough to recognize Dr. Cross as the murderer whose crime she witnessed, and whether she’ll be allowed to live long enough for that to happen — Elaine is after Dr. Cross to kill Janet and make it look like a medical accident, but Dr. Cross is reluctant; in an interesting quirk of this script, he’s been willing to knock off his wife at Elaine’s behest but draws back at violating the Hippocratic oath and murdering someone he’s supposed to be treating.
Normally one would expect a movie called Shock with Vincent Price as its star to be a horror film; this one isn’t, though it does draw on a bit of the horror iconography, notably the driving rainstorm in which the sanitarium is shown during a night sequence — and it’s an innovative enough film in its creative deployment of movie clichés that its ending is a genuine and legitimate surprise. Shock has its failings — notably an overwrought musical score by David Buttolph that out-Steiners Max Steiner in mimicking (“mickey-mousing”) every action on screen — but overall it’s a quite good movie that deserves to be far better known than it is, and Vincent Price in particular is at least as effective in his portrayal of self-doubting weakness and evil as he would be in his more florid crazed-villain performances in his later horror films.
The movie Charles and I watched last night was also a 20th Century-Fox production and also a film noir involving the medical community, though this time the doctor was the villain: Shock, a quite powerful 1946 “B” directed by Alfred Werker (usually a Fox hack but with some quite interesting movies under his belt, especially The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the second and best of the 14-film cycle with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce; apparently stories of crime and suspense turned him on more than other kinds of scripts), with a script by Eugene Ling (with additional dialogue by Martin Berkeley) based on a story by Albert DeMond.
Shock opens in a hotel in San Francisco, and first introduces us to Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw), the wife of a former POW who’s already been on an emotional roller-coaster ride. First she heard that her husband, naval lieutenant Paul Stewart (Frank Latimore), was dead, and after she’d spent two years working through the grief process and finally accepting her loss, she was then told that her husband was alive after all. She insists on being allowed to stay in that particular hotel, even though her reservation was not received, because that’s the one at which her husband is expecting to meet her and there’s no way she can get word to him if she ends up staying anywhere else. The sympathetic manager finally is able to find her a room, but warns her it’s for one night only. She falls asleep on the couch in the suite, and has a simply but powerfully staged dream in which she hears Paul knocking outside but the door recedes as she approaches it, and even when she gets to the door she realizes that the knob has grown so large she can’t open it. (Somehow this crudely but effectively produced dream sequence seems far more credible than the elaborate Dali-designed dream in Spellbound.)
When she wakes up, she goes on the balcony for some air — and she witnesses an argument in the next room between a man named Richard and a woman, his wife, named Margaret. He demands a divorce so he can marry someone else, she says she’ll only grant it if she can go public with the details of the affair, then he gets angry and grabs a statuette off the table and clubs her to death with it. Witnessing this murder renders Our Heroine totally catatonic, and when her husband finally does arrive the next morning (his plane was 12 hours late) he summons the hotel doctor (Selmer Jackson), who announces that a case of catatonic shock is totally beyond his medical expertise, but as it happens there’s a fabulously successful and well-regarded psychiatrist named Dr. Richard Cross (Vincent Price, top-billed) staying in the same hotel. Once we hear the man’s first name we know where this is going, but director Werker nonetheless keeps the suspense building for about four minutes of screen time before Dr. Cross walks in — and is, of course, the person both we and the heroine have just seen killing his wife.
He offers to take Janet to his sanitarium outside of town, and when the husband wants to accompany them he persuades him to remain behind for at least a day. When they get to the sanitarium we learn that the woman Dr. Cross wanted to leave his wife for is one of his nurses, Elaine Jordan (Lynn Bari in a chillingly effective femme fatale role); we also find out that the murder of Mrs. Cross was not the impulsive crime of passion we were led to believe it was, but was carefully calculated and premeditated by Elaine, who seems to have the kind of psychological and sexual hold over the doctor that Mrs. Macbeth had over her husband. The rest of the film is built around the suspense of whether Janet will come to enough to recognize Dr. Cross as the murderer whose crime she witnessed, and whether she’ll be allowed to live long enough for that to happen — Elaine is after Dr. Cross to kill Janet and make it look like a medical accident, but Dr. Cross is reluctant; in an interesting quirk of this script, he’s been willing to knock off his wife at Elaine’s behest but draws back at violating the Hippocratic oath and murdering someone he’s supposed to be treating.
Normally one would expect a movie called Shock with Vincent Price as its star to be a horror film; this one isn’t, though it does draw on a bit of the horror iconography, notably the driving rainstorm in which the sanitarium is shown during a night sequence — and it’s an innovative enough film in its creative deployment of movie clichés that its ending is a genuine and legitimate surprise. Shock has its failings — notably an overwrought musical score by David Buttolph that out-Steiners Max Steiner in mimicking (“mickey-mousing”) every action on screen — but overall it’s a quite good movie that deserves to be far better known than it is, and Vincent Price in particular is at least as effective in his portrayal of self-doubting weakness and evil as he would be in his more florid crazed-villain performances in his later horror films.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Queen of Outer Space (Allied Artists, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
We watched Queen of Outer Space as last night’s movie — one of the legendary bad sci-fi movies from the 1950’s, infamous for casting Zsa Zsa Gabor in the lead as Talleah, woman scientist and leader of a resistance movement on the part of the all-female population of Venus (that’s right, the planet Venus) against the planet’s evil queen, Yllana (Laurie Mitchell). But that’s getting ahead — way ahead — of the story! In a prologue that lasts almost 15 minutes before we see the opening credits (at a time when annoying “teasers” like that were far less common than they are now), we see the all-male crew of a spacecraft — Captain Neil Patterson (Eric Fleming, the “other” guy from the TV Western series Rawhide — in 1963 he was offered the lead in a Western feature being filmed in Italy, he turned it down, so the producers offered the part to the other male lead from Rawhide, Clint Eastwood … and the rest, as they say, is history), Lieutenants Mike Cruze (Dave Willock) and Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz), and Prof. Konrad (Paul Birch) — getting ready to fly Prof. Konrad to the space station in earth orbit which he was instrumental in getting authorized in 1963, 22 years before this film takes place.
In a spaceship that, due to the magic of stock footage, changes shape twice — from an oddly “fat” version of a V-2 rocket (apparently the makers of this CinemaScope film forgot to account for what a stock clip shot in the 4:3 ratio would look like squeezed through the anamorphic “decoder” lens through which CinemaScope films were projected) when it lifts off to an Atlas when it flies and, once it’s jettisoned its previous stages, to an airplane-like model that looks like the filmmakers bought it at a toy store. Alas, a series of beams of light flashing through space converge on the space station, destroying it utterly (sort of like the Death Star at the start of the first Star Wars) and then bee-lining for Our Heroes’ spaceship, only instead of blowing up it pulls it in like a tractor beam towards a field of snow where the spaceship crash-lands. (At this point we finally get to see the opening credits which tell us what this film is called and who’s in it.) Through the instruments on their ship, the crew members are able to find out that they’re on a planet with about 87 percent of the gravity of Earth and a similar atmospheric mix, so they can leave the ship without using spacesuits or oxygen supplies. Konrad also figures out that the planet is Venus and that all the conventional wisdom about it — that it’s much hotter than Earth, that its atmosphere is toxic, that it’s perpetually covered by clouds and that it has no moons — is incorrect, a difficult thing for him to admit since he largely determined the conventional wisdom.
In fact, once they get out of the snowdrift where they landed, the planet Venus looks so much like the set of Munchkinland from The Wizard of Oz, complete with brightly-colored rubber plants, I couldn’t help but joke, “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” — only instead of little people, the entire population of Venus consists of women with drop-dead gorgeous figures, ample breasts and mini-skirts (almost a decade before they became fashionable back on Earth), the better to show off their luscious female attributes to the sorts of nerdy but still horny teenage straight boys that were then, and remain, the core audience for science fiction. (Earlier in the movie, as the space station slowly whirled around its axis in space, I had similarly hummed “The Blue Danube” as the tribute imbecility pays to genius.) The male crew members are captured by some of the women who populate Venus, and just when we’re thinking based on the examples of previous movies about all-male space crews landing on all-female planets, like Cat-Women of the Moon and Fire Maidens from Outer Space, that the women in charge of Venus had deliberately brought the men from the spaceship to their planet as a stud service to repopulate their race, writer Charles Beaumont (allegedly adapting an original story by Ben Hecht, though according to one imdb.com contributor Hecht’s contribution was rattling off a story premise at a party where he was drunk, whereupon a producer picked up on it and put it into production, and when Hecht found out he sued and won both money and credit) throws us a curveball and announces that the Venusian Council, the five women with metal face masks (and what look like butterfly antennae above them) who rule the planet, has decided they’re the advance guard of an earth invasion force and sentenced them to death.
The means by which they’re to be executed is the “Beta Disintegrator,” a huge machine which casts those animated light beams across great swaths of space — and which, after they complete the relatively minor matter of disposing of the astronauts, they’re going to use pre-emptively to destroy the Earth itself rather than risk being vulnerable to Earth attack. (Since the Venusians have ray guns while the Earthlings are armed with World War II-vintage pistols, it doesn’t seem like the Venusians would have any trouble repelling an Earth invasion if we were damned foolhardy enough to launch one.) Alas for Queen Yllana, a number of her subjects like the idea that there are men around again — Venus’s native males were blamed for the nuclear war that nearly destroyed the planet and exiled to one of its moons, Tiros — and decide to help the Earthlings in exchange for help in overthrowing Yllana and the Council and establishing a pan-sexual republic, or something.
The essence of the rebels’ demands is conveyed by their leader Talleah when she says, “Men cannot liff vizout vimmin, and vimmin cannot liff vizout men” — which isn’t that bad a line in and of itself, but achieves camp hilarity in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s outrageously fractured delivery of it. Eventually, after several reversals and tricks — plus the big revelation that the faces of Yllana and the other four Councilwomen were permanently scarred by the nuclear war (ya remember the nuclear war?) and that’s why they’re so bitter against men — the rebels win, the Beta Disintegrator (a crude construction which looks like they made it out of plywood) is disarmed and the Earthlings are told that because of the damage to their spaceship, they shouldn’t try to leave Venus for at least a year, until another spaceship can be sent to take them home — and staying on Venus with all the hot babes is a prospect all those highly sexed space guys don’t mind in the slightest!
I’ll say one thing for Queen of Outer Space: it’s a far better movie than Cat-Women of the Moon and Fire Maidens from Outer Space, though that’s just damning it with faint praise. There are people in the cast who’ve actually heard of acting — and Eric Fleming comes damned close to doing it, while Laurie Mitchell as the villain queen steals the movie with her shrieking paranoia and quick mood-changes from forgiveness to vengeance when the astronaut who’s been assigned to seduce her in hopes that will change her mind about killing them recoils in horror at the sight of her real face. (I hadn’t realized this when I was watching the movie, but in retrospect the scene is clearly The Phantom of the Opera with the genders reversed.) The film is in color — nice, vivid, bright, primary-skewed color that’s a wonderful contrast to the dirty greens and browns that dominate today’s movies — and the print we were watching was in excellent shape even though it was panned-and-scanned, which only added to the camp value (especially in some early scenes in which disembodied arms at one side of the screen or the other carry on a conversation with the person in the center).
The sets and costumes were far above the norm for movies like this — probably because most of them were ripped off of other movies, and not just other Allied Artists (née Monogram) productions either: the costumes came from Forbidden Planet, a big-budget MGM sci-fi film from 1956 (and a flawed movie but still much better than this one!), while the sets were recycled from a previous Allied Artists lost-world production, World Without End, also from 1956. The director was Edward Bernds, not exactly one of the great names to conjure with in filmmaking history but at least a solid talent who knew what he was doing behind the camera — he was originally a sound man at Columbia and in 1945 they gave him an assignment to direct a Three Stooges short, a spoof of radio called Micro-Phonies, which Leonard Maltin and other Stooges connoisseurs (the fact that there are such things as Three Stooges connoisseurs is hard enough to believe!) consider their best ever. Even the T&A exhibition was repeated later on more than one episode of the 1960’s Star Trek.
The only real problems with Queen of Outer Space are the silliness of the script and the ludicrous casting of Zsa Zsa Gabor — though in a quirky way they actually reinforce each other and give the film whatever entertainment value it has. Since it’s a dumb concept to begin with, Zsa Zsa can’t weaken this film the way she did the 1952 Moulin Rouge (an excellent film except when she’s on screen), and the looniness of her almost incomprehensible Hungarian accent coming from a Venusian who supposedly learned to speak English from watching earth TV just adds to the delightful absurdity of the film as a whole.
We watched Queen of Outer Space as last night’s movie — one of the legendary bad sci-fi movies from the 1950’s, infamous for casting Zsa Zsa Gabor in the lead as Talleah, woman scientist and leader of a resistance movement on the part of the all-female population of Venus (that’s right, the planet Venus) against the planet’s evil queen, Yllana (Laurie Mitchell). But that’s getting ahead — way ahead — of the story! In a prologue that lasts almost 15 minutes before we see the opening credits (at a time when annoying “teasers” like that were far less common than they are now), we see the all-male crew of a spacecraft — Captain Neil Patterson (Eric Fleming, the “other” guy from the TV Western series Rawhide — in 1963 he was offered the lead in a Western feature being filmed in Italy, he turned it down, so the producers offered the part to the other male lead from Rawhide, Clint Eastwood … and the rest, as they say, is history), Lieutenants Mike Cruze (Dave Willock) and Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz), and Prof. Konrad (Paul Birch) — getting ready to fly Prof. Konrad to the space station in earth orbit which he was instrumental in getting authorized in 1963, 22 years before this film takes place.
In a spaceship that, due to the magic of stock footage, changes shape twice — from an oddly “fat” version of a V-2 rocket (apparently the makers of this CinemaScope film forgot to account for what a stock clip shot in the 4:3 ratio would look like squeezed through the anamorphic “decoder” lens through which CinemaScope films were projected) when it lifts off to an Atlas when it flies and, once it’s jettisoned its previous stages, to an airplane-like model that looks like the filmmakers bought it at a toy store. Alas, a series of beams of light flashing through space converge on the space station, destroying it utterly (sort of like the Death Star at the start of the first Star Wars) and then bee-lining for Our Heroes’ spaceship, only instead of blowing up it pulls it in like a tractor beam towards a field of snow where the spaceship crash-lands. (At this point we finally get to see the opening credits which tell us what this film is called and who’s in it.) Through the instruments on their ship, the crew members are able to find out that they’re on a planet with about 87 percent of the gravity of Earth and a similar atmospheric mix, so they can leave the ship without using spacesuits or oxygen supplies. Konrad also figures out that the planet is Venus and that all the conventional wisdom about it — that it’s much hotter than Earth, that its atmosphere is toxic, that it’s perpetually covered by clouds and that it has no moons — is incorrect, a difficult thing for him to admit since he largely determined the conventional wisdom.
In fact, once they get out of the snowdrift where they landed, the planet Venus looks so much like the set of Munchkinland from The Wizard of Oz, complete with brightly-colored rubber plants, I couldn’t help but joke, “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” — only instead of little people, the entire population of Venus consists of women with drop-dead gorgeous figures, ample breasts and mini-skirts (almost a decade before they became fashionable back on Earth), the better to show off their luscious female attributes to the sorts of nerdy but still horny teenage straight boys that were then, and remain, the core audience for science fiction. (Earlier in the movie, as the space station slowly whirled around its axis in space, I had similarly hummed “The Blue Danube” as the tribute imbecility pays to genius.) The male crew members are captured by some of the women who populate Venus, and just when we’re thinking based on the examples of previous movies about all-male space crews landing on all-female planets, like Cat-Women of the Moon and Fire Maidens from Outer Space, that the women in charge of Venus had deliberately brought the men from the spaceship to their planet as a stud service to repopulate their race, writer Charles Beaumont (allegedly adapting an original story by Ben Hecht, though according to one imdb.com contributor Hecht’s contribution was rattling off a story premise at a party where he was drunk, whereupon a producer picked up on it and put it into production, and when Hecht found out he sued and won both money and credit) throws us a curveball and announces that the Venusian Council, the five women with metal face masks (and what look like butterfly antennae above them) who rule the planet, has decided they’re the advance guard of an earth invasion force and sentenced them to death.
The means by which they’re to be executed is the “Beta Disintegrator,” a huge machine which casts those animated light beams across great swaths of space — and which, after they complete the relatively minor matter of disposing of the astronauts, they’re going to use pre-emptively to destroy the Earth itself rather than risk being vulnerable to Earth attack. (Since the Venusians have ray guns while the Earthlings are armed with World War II-vintage pistols, it doesn’t seem like the Venusians would have any trouble repelling an Earth invasion if we were damned foolhardy enough to launch one.) Alas for Queen Yllana, a number of her subjects like the idea that there are men around again — Venus’s native males were blamed for the nuclear war that nearly destroyed the planet and exiled to one of its moons, Tiros — and decide to help the Earthlings in exchange for help in overthrowing Yllana and the Council and establishing a pan-sexual republic, or something.
The essence of the rebels’ demands is conveyed by their leader Talleah when she says, “Men cannot liff vizout vimmin, and vimmin cannot liff vizout men” — which isn’t that bad a line in and of itself, but achieves camp hilarity in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s outrageously fractured delivery of it. Eventually, after several reversals and tricks — plus the big revelation that the faces of Yllana and the other four Councilwomen were permanently scarred by the nuclear war (ya remember the nuclear war?) and that’s why they’re so bitter against men — the rebels win, the Beta Disintegrator (a crude construction which looks like they made it out of plywood) is disarmed and the Earthlings are told that because of the damage to their spaceship, they shouldn’t try to leave Venus for at least a year, until another spaceship can be sent to take them home — and staying on Venus with all the hot babes is a prospect all those highly sexed space guys don’t mind in the slightest!
I’ll say one thing for Queen of Outer Space: it’s a far better movie than Cat-Women of the Moon and Fire Maidens from Outer Space, though that’s just damning it with faint praise. There are people in the cast who’ve actually heard of acting — and Eric Fleming comes damned close to doing it, while Laurie Mitchell as the villain queen steals the movie with her shrieking paranoia and quick mood-changes from forgiveness to vengeance when the astronaut who’s been assigned to seduce her in hopes that will change her mind about killing them recoils in horror at the sight of her real face. (I hadn’t realized this when I was watching the movie, but in retrospect the scene is clearly The Phantom of the Opera with the genders reversed.) The film is in color — nice, vivid, bright, primary-skewed color that’s a wonderful contrast to the dirty greens and browns that dominate today’s movies — and the print we were watching was in excellent shape even though it was panned-and-scanned, which only added to the camp value (especially in some early scenes in which disembodied arms at one side of the screen or the other carry on a conversation with the person in the center).
The sets and costumes were far above the norm for movies like this — probably because most of them were ripped off of other movies, and not just other Allied Artists (née Monogram) productions either: the costumes came from Forbidden Planet, a big-budget MGM sci-fi film from 1956 (and a flawed movie but still much better than this one!), while the sets were recycled from a previous Allied Artists lost-world production, World Without End, also from 1956. The director was Edward Bernds, not exactly one of the great names to conjure with in filmmaking history but at least a solid talent who knew what he was doing behind the camera — he was originally a sound man at Columbia and in 1945 they gave him an assignment to direct a Three Stooges short, a spoof of radio called Micro-Phonies, which Leonard Maltin and other Stooges connoisseurs (the fact that there are such things as Three Stooges connoisseurs is hard enough to believe!) consider their best ever. Even the T&A exhibition was repeated later on more than one episode of the 1960’s Star Trek.
The only real problems with Queen of Outer Space are the silliness of the script and the ludicrous casting of Zsa Zsa Gabor — though in a quirky way they actually reinforce each other and give the film whatever entertainment value it has. Since it’s a dumb concept to begin with, Zsa Zsa can’t weaken this film the way she did the 1952 Moulin Rouge (an excellent film except when she’s on screen), and the looniness of her almost incomprehensible Hungarian accent coming from a Venusian who supposedly learned to speak English from watching earth TV just adds to the delightful absurdity of the film as a whole.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Officer 13 (Allied Productions, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked out a DVD of a 1932 independent “B” called Officer 13, produced by M. H. Hoffman for his Allied Pictures company and directed by George Melford, who actually made two genuinely great movies: The Sheik, with Rudolph Valentino, in 1921 and the Spanish-language version of Dracula in 1930 (where his visual sense and flair for atmospherics surpassed Tod Browning’s work in the English version). Alas, this was a pretty straight by-the-numbers romantic melodrama, written by Frances Hyland from an “original” story by Paul Edwards and photographed without any flair or atmospherics whatsoever by Harry Neumann and Tom Galligan.
The best part of the film is actually the first reel and a half or so; the cameras track motorcycle cops Tom Burke (Monte Blue) and Sandy Malone (Charles Delaney) as they go on about their business on the real streets of L.A. as they existed in 1932. The city looks refreshingly undeveloped and surprisingly small town-ish as the two cops encounter an Italian fruit vendor (he convinces them not to ticket him because he’s rushing to the hospital to be with his wife, who’s just given birth to triplets) and several other characters, and are inveigled by Malone’s son Buddy (Mickey Rooney, still using the name “Mickey McGuire” — his real one was Joe Yule, Jr. — and, as I joked at one point in the film when his performance seemed oddly restrained, “He hadn’t yet learned to overact”) and his friend Sammy (Jackie Searle) to take them to school after lunch.
Then the plot rears its ugly and almost superfluous head: Malone encounters a speeding car with two people in it, a man and a woman, and gives chase. We cut to the speeders — and the woman implores the man to slow down, pull over and accept a ticket, while he insists he can outrun the cop and lose him. Burke follows Malone with the other motorcycle — oddly, he uses his siren while Malone does not — and eventually the woman pulls the car keys out of the ignition, it stops, but the car’s driver deliberately rams Malone’s cycle, sending it off the road into a patch of California desert and causing Malone to fall and get an injury that doesn’t seem all that dangerous when we watch it, but which we later find out (predictably) is fatal.
It turns out that the woman was Doris Dane (Lila Lee), daughter of a respected judge (Lloyd Ingraham), and her companion was a notorious gambler, Jack Blake (Robert Ellis), whom she was running off with to get married despite her dad’s understandable objections. At first she agrees to lie for him and say that the accident was caused by the cop’s motorcycle hitting a rock — and between her perjury and a $5,000 bribe arranged by Blake and Trixi DuBray (Seena Owen), the owner of the secret, illegal casino where he gambles (though the insert was too blurry to let us see whom she was bribing, or why), the coroner’s inquest rules the death an accident. Burke, of course, is convinced Malone was murdered — especially since Malone himself told him so in the hospital just before he expired — and in a gesture eerily premonitory of the ending of Dirty Harry he takes off his badge and hands it to his police chief (Joseph Girard), saying that he’s now going to seek his revenge against Burke and do so as a private citizen, unconstrained by the legal restrictions on a cop. The chief agrees to help him under-the-table and agrees to stake him to the money he needs to make a good impression at the secret casino — including a tuxedo for him to wear there — and eventually the casino is raided, Trixi is arrested, Burke dies of a fall out of a window while he was trying to flee, and Burke and Doris end up together.
Officer 13 was a workmanlike story with potential to be at least a good (if not great) film, but it needed noir-type atmospherics (the flat, even-toned photography clashes uneasily with the moral dilemmas faced by the characters, especially Burke) and even more than that it needed naturalistic acting and line delivery. Though this was made in 1932 it had the stagy feel of an early talkie from 1929, with the actors speaking v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully avoiding saying their lines until the actors ahead of them had finished their cues. The only actors who actually speak with any degree of realism are the kids, Rooney and Searle; and Frances Rich as Joan Thorpe, Doris’s friend and confidante, who puts Lila Lee to shame in naturalism and general acting skills in each of their scenes together.
It’s surprising that people who had major, or at least semi-major, careers in the silent era — Monte Blue co-starred with Raquel Torres in the beautiful South Pacific pastoral White Shadows in the South Seas; Lila Lee (like her director here) worked with Valentino (as the nice girl in the 1922 Blood and Sand); and Seena Owen worked with Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim in the ill-fated 1928 production Queen Kelly — came up with such a dull movie; but then this sort of thing was typical of producers like M. H. Hoffman, who basically just ground them out as quickly as possible with no tolerance even for the kinds of experiments other low-budget producers allowed their directors. Not surprisingly, the box for the DVD we got this on (from a company called Alpha Video with an American-flag logo) made it seem a good deal more exciting than it turned out to be (“REVENGE! CORRUPTION! MURDER!!”) — but, despite the predictable plot and mostly atrocious acting, it’s still fun for the glimpses of L.A. city life in 1932, vouchsafed to us only because the producer didn’t have enough money to rent space at a studio with a backlot!
I picked out a DVD of a 1932 independent “B” called Officer 13, produced by M. H. Hoffman for his Allied Pictures company and directed by George Melford, who actually made two genuinely great movies: The Sheik, with Rudolph Valentino, in 1921 and the Spanish-language version of Dracula in 1930 (where his visual sense and flair for atmospherics surpassed Tod Browning’s work in the English version). Alas, this was a pretty straight by-the-numbers romantic melodrama, written by Frances Hyland from an “original” story by Paul Edwards and photographed without any flair or atmospherics whatsoever by Harry Neumann and Tom Galligan.
The best part of the film is actually the first reel and a half or so; the cameras track motorcycle cops Tom Burke (Monte Blue) and Sandy Malone (Charles Delaney) as they go on about their business on the real streets of L.A. as they existed in 1932. The city looks refreshingly undeveloped and surprisingly small town-ish as the two cops encounter an Italian fruit vendor (he convinces them not to ticket him because he’s rushing to the hospital to be with his wife, who’s just given birth to triplets) and several other characters, and are inveigled by Malone’s son Buddy (Mickey Rooney, still using the name “Mickey McGuire” — his real one was Joe Yule, Jr. — and, as I joked at one point in the film when his performance seemed oddly restrained, “He hadn’t yet learned to overact”) and his friend Sammy (Jackie Searle) to take them to school after lunch.
Then the plot rears its ugly and almost superfluous head: Malone encounters a speeding car with two people in it, a man and a woman, and gives chase. We cut to the speeders — and the woman implores the man to slow down, pull over and accept a ticket, while he insists he can outrun the cop and lose him. Burke follows Malone with the other motorcycle — oddly, he uses his siren while Malone does not — and eventually the woman pulls the car keys out of the ignition, it stops, but the car’s driver deliberately rams Malone’s cycle, sending it off the road into a patch of California desert and causing Malone to fall and get an injury that doesn’t seem all that dangerous when we watch it, but which we later find out (predictably) is fatal.
It turns out that the woman was Doris Dane (Lila Lee), daughter of a respected judge (Lloyd Ingraham), and her companion was a notorious gambler, Jack Blake (Robert Ellis), whom she was running off with to get married despite her dad’s understandable objections. At first she agrees to lie for him and say that the accident was caused by the cop’s motorcycle hitting a rock — and between her perjury and a $5,000 bribe arranged by Blake and Trixi DuBray (Seena Owen), the owner of the secret, illegal casino where he gambles (though the insert was too blurry to let us see whom she was bribing, or why), the coroner’s inquest rules the death an accident. Burke, of course, is convinced Malone was murdered — especially since Malone himself told him so in the hospital just before he expired — and in a gesture eerily premonitory of the ending of Dirty Harry he takes off his badge and hands it to his police chief (Joseph Girard), saying that he’s now going to seek his revenge against Burke and do so as a private citizen, unconstrained by the legal restrictions on a cop. The chief agrees to help him under-the-table and agrees to stake him to the money he needs to make a good impression at the secret casino — including a tuxedo for him to wear there — and eventually the casino is raided, Trixi is arrested, Burke dies of a fall out of a window while he was trying to flee, and Burke and Doris end up together.
Officer 13 was a workmanlike story with potential to be at least a good (if not great) film, but it needed noir-type atmospherics (the flat, even-toned photography clashes uneasily with the moral dilemmas faced by the characters, especially Burke) and even more than that it needed naturalistic acting and line delivery. Though this was made in 1932 it had the stagy feel of an early talkie from 1929, with the actors speaking v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully avoiding saying their lines until the actors ahead of them had finished their cues. The only actors who actually speak with any degree of realism are the kids, Rooney and Searle; and Frances Rich as Joan Thorpe, Doris’s friend and confidante, who puts Lila Lee to shame in naturalism and general acting skills in each of their scenes together.
It’s surprising that people who had major, or at least semi-major, careers in the silent era — Monte Blue co-starred with Raquel Torres in the beautiful South Pacific pastoral White Shadows in the South Seas; Lila Lee (like her director here) worked with Valentino (as the nice girl in the 1922 Blood and Sand); and Seena Owen worked with Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim in the ill-fated 1928 production Queen Kelly — came up with such a dull movie; but then this sort of thing was typical of producers like M. H. Hoffman, who basically just ground them out as quickly as possible with no tolerance even for the kinds of experiments other low-budget producers allowed their directors. Not surprisingly, the box for the DVD we got this on (from a company called Alpha Video with an American-flag logo) made it seem a good deal more exciting than it turned out to be (“REVENGE! CORRUPTION! MURDER!!”) — but, despite the predictable plot and mostly atrocious acting, it’s still fun for the glimpses of L.A. city life in 1932, vouchsafed to us only because the producer didn’t have enough money to rent space at a studio with a backlot!
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Sherlock Holmes (Goldwyn, 1922)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Eventually I unwrapped the birthday package from Charles … which turned out to be the Kino on Video boxed set of four John Barrymore silents: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which we already had on a Kino DVD we got years ago), Sherlock Holmes, Beloved Rogue (with Barrymore as François Villon) and Tempest (the really intriguing movie he made in 1928, just before sound came in, based on a story by an uncredited Erich von Stroheim and featuring him as a lowly cadet elevated to the Russian officer corps on the eve of World War I and the Revolution, then busted again and forced to spend the rest of the war in prison until the Revolution happens and bails him out, which we’d seen on a Video Yesteryear VHS tape with a live organ accompaniment by Rosa Rio).
Naturally the one I was the most eager to watch was the 1922 Sherlock Holmes, especially since this was a long-lost film that had taken on the aura of an impressive mystery on its own. I first heard of it in William K. Everson’s 1972 book The Detective in Film, which described how the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York “was able to salvage several cans of negative of the film, each can consisting of short, unconnected rolls. They were printed up, spliced together for viewing purposes, and found to be most intriguing but virtually incomprehensible. There was a little of everything — but not very much of anything. Some scenes ran but a few seconds; others would reappear with variations at regular intervals. … All told, there were about 50 minutes of surviving footage, seemingly representing most of the sequences, but only about half of the total.”
After piecing together the film as best he could, film historian and restorationist Kevin Brownlow made an appointment with the director, Albert Parker — who in 1970 was fortunately not only still alive but active in the movie business (as an agent) — to screen the footage and see if Parker could help him reconstruct the original film as much as possible from the extant scenes. For at least two years after that, Brownlow worked on the film. In 1972 Everson wrote, “Brownlow — poring over the fragments of film, matching up minute scene numbers printed on to the celluloid, shooting and inserting stills to bridge gaps, restoring titles — has completed the major part of the reassembly process.”
This version was actually premiered in 1975 at a showing sponsored by the Theodore Huff Memorial Society (Huff was an early film critic from the 1920’s to the 1940’s and wrote a quite good biography of Chaplin) with both Brownlow and Everson in attendance, but what we have on the Kino on Video DVD is a further restoration from 2001, done at the George Eastman House with credits for funding to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Parks Service of the Department of the Interior, and Hugh Hefner, though the DVD package itself contains nothing on the history of the restoration (unlike previous Kino releases of long-thought-lost silent films, which have generally come with essays either on printed inserts or as text screens on the DVD’s themselves explaining just what the sources were for what we were seeing and how much work had to be done to create the “new” version of the film) and the DVD is merely “bare-bones,” without any of the special features (including recordings of speeches from the play on which it was based and clips or trailers from other films of the same story) that made Kino’s release of the 1920 Barrymore Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so appealing.
The restoration is certainly quite watchable — even though Kino’s DVD times out at 82 minutes, still well short of the 107-minute running time imdb.com gives for the original release — and it’s hard to tell whether some of the lacunae in the plot, abrupt transitions and narrative titles telling us about action that should have been shown are the fault of director Parker and his original writers (Earle Browne and Marion Fairfax) or simply represent missing scenes Brownlow (who isn’t credited here) and the people who’ve worked on the film since tried to fill in the best they could with titles. (I didn’t detect any still photos in the film standing in for missing scenes, as has sometimes been done in restorations.)
The plot of the 1922 Sherlock Holmes began in 1897 when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it as a play, not adapting any one Holmes story but creating a pastiche of incidents and themes from all the Holmes stories he’d written to that point. Conan Doyle first offered it to Sir Henry Irving, who requested that the entire role of Holmes be rewritten for him, then put the manuscript aside until 1899, when American-born actor William Gillette was scheduled to appear in London and decided that a Holmes play would make an excellent vehicle for him. Gillette asked Conan Doyle for permission to rewrite the play however he liked, and, in the words of Conan Doyle biographer Russell Miller, “crafted the play into a conventional melodrama, with a strong romantic interest. When he wrote to Conan Doyle asking if, for the purposes of the play, Sherlock Holmes could marry, Conan Doyle famously replied by telegram: ‘You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.’”
Gillette opened Sherlock Holmes in London in 1901 and the critics savaged the play — but the public loved it and flocked to it. Later Gillette came up with another Holmes vehicle, a one-act called The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes, and for that one’s London opening he hired a then-unknown child actor named Charles Chaplin to play Holmes’ houseboy, Billy. Later Chaplin repeated this role in a revival of the full-length Sherlock Holmes play as well. The first film version of the play was shot by the Chicago-based Essanay Studios in 1916 (coincidentally, just after Chaplin — now an adult and a world-famous comedy star — had left their employ), with Arthur Berthelet directing and Gillette himself as Holmes, but that version is well and truly lost.
In 1922 the Goldwyn studios — right in the middle of a struggle for control between Sam Goldwyn (née Goldfish), the company’s co-founder; and Joe Godsol, an investor who’d muscled his way into the company and was busy forcing Goldwyn out (he did, but without Goldwyn the person Goldwyn the company only survived two years longer until it was absorbed into what became MGM) — decided to remake the play as a film and hired Barrymore, fresh from his 1916 stage triumph in Peter Ibbetson and his first major film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for Paramount in 1920, to star as Holmes. (Sherlock Holmes contains an intriguing visual quote from the Barrymore Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: in the earlier film a spider is shown dissolving into the face of the sleeping Dr. Jekyll just before he wakes up as Hyde; and in Sherlock Holmes we see a large prop spider in an artificial web and the spider dissolves into the face of Professor Moriarty, illustrating Conan Doyle’s metaphor of Moriarty as the spider at the center of a web of crime.)
Writers Browne and Fairfax added an elaborate prologue sequence, showing Holmes and Watson (Roland Young, making his film debut) in college, where Holmes is fond of taking long walks and writing philosophical observations about himself in his journal (the list of his weaknesses that Watson writes in Conan Doyle’s first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, is written by Holmes himself here) and where he finds his métier as a detective by exonerating fellow student Prince Alexis (Reginald Denny) of an accusation that he stole the school’s athletic fund. Holmes proves that the theft was actually committed by Forman Wells (William Powell, making his film debut and billed as William H. Powell), son of safecracker John Peg, who was adopted — and his name changed — by Professor Moriarty (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who trained him to pose as a gentleman so he could infiltrate Cambridge University and gather information on people it would be worthwhile for Moriarty’s gang to rob.
The film then jumpily flashes forward several years; Holmes and Watson are now ensconced at 221 B Baker Street, Holmes’ success in the case of Prince Alexis has led to his career as a consulting detective, but he’s still bound and determined to expose Moriarty’s crime ring and bring the Professor to justice. Meanwhile, Prince Alexis himself has received word that his two older brothers have both been killed in a car accident (the setting is contemporary enough that there are cars in the film, though they look more like the vehicles of 1912 than 1922 and they still share the streets with horse-drawn carriages) and, as the Crown Prince, he must return to his homeland (one of those fictitious mittel-Europan principalities that abounded in movies of this era) and abandon his British girlfriend, Rose Faulkner (Peggy Bayfield), who forthwith flees to Switzerland and there commits suicide. (Presumably she was pregnant with Prince Alexis’s child, but there’s no explanation of that in the film itself — or at least in the version we have.)
Faulkner’s sister Alice (Carol Dempster, D. W. Griffith’s second wife and frequent star in the 1920’s, borrowed from him for this film) — who previously met Holmes while in college and got a crush on him which, it was hinted, he reciprocated — naturally hates Alexis for driving her sister to suicide, and she decides to get revenge by selling the letters Alexis wrote Rose to Moriarty for blackmail purposes. Alexis hires Holmes to stop her, and apparently out of love for Holmes she’s willing to drop the whole thing — but Moriarty fights back by having her kidnapped and held in an isolated house by James and Madge Larrabee (Anders Randolf and Hedda Hopper), from which Holmes has to free her before finally confronting Moriarty, busting his gang and eventually building the case against Moriarty so that Scotland Yard, in the person of Inspector Gregson (John Willard), can arrest him. (This is one of the few Holmes films in which Moriarty is actually taken alive; in most others he either dies or escapes in such a way that he appears dead but can be revived by screenwriters’ fiat for a sequel.) Holmes declares his love for Alice Faulkner and proposes to her, she accepts and the film ends in a way that to Holmes fans over a century after the play premiered seems defiantly anti-canonical but which wowed ’em at the time.
It’s really nice to have this film back — almost none of the other Holmes features from the silent era are extant (about the only other one I know of is the 1922 The Hound of the Baskervilles, made in Britain and ostensibly co-produced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself — though I suspect all he contributed to the productions were the rights to the stories — as a way of kicking off a series of short films based on each of the canonical Holmes stories; Eille Norwood played Holmes throughout the series and thus became the first of only two actors to play Holmes in every story Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about him; Jeremy Brett, in his Granada TV series in the 1970’s, was the other) — and though still 27 minutes short of its original running time and with plenty of outrageous jumps in continuity in the plot (notably the lack of any explanation as to why William Powell’s character, Forman Wells, was an agent of Moriarty in the prologue and switched sides and went to work for Holmes in the bulk of the film), the version we have is nonetheless easy to follow and without any readily noticeable gaps in the story.
The problem is it’s simply not a particularly good movie; director Parker is too easy-going and not suited to a suspense thriller; the play itself is a creaky vehicle and hardly as strong a story as the best of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories; and though Barrymore acts with authority and power (as does von Seyffertitz as his principal adversary), the rather talky world of Holmes, with its sweeping deductions expressed in fire-breathing dramatic language couched in simple terms, really demanded sound to be realized on screen adequately. (One imdb.com poster wished John Barrymore would have got to remake the role 10 years later after sound came in; that would have been nice — especially if they could have got his brother Lionel to play Moriarty!) It’s an O.K. movie that takes advantage of a surprising amount of footage shot on real London locations — though the interiors are studio-bound and there are so few closeups and cuts that sometimes this looks like a film from 1912 rather than one from 1922 — and it’s also nice to see a film with so many stars of the future getting their starts (or near-starts) in it.
It’s just not as exciting as it should be, and quite frankly John Barrymore was less interesting as a hero (especially a cerebral hero rather than the action heroes he played in Beau Brummell and Don Juan) than as a multidimensional villain-hero like Jekyll/Hyde, Ahab, Svengali or the murderously jealous impresario Nicolai Nazarov in Maytime — or as the figure of pathos he would frequently appear as in the 1930’s (as the real-life effects of alcoholism took their toll on him and unwittingly fitted him to play the dissolute but still sympathetic roles he had in Grand Hotel, A Bill of Divorcement, Dinner at Eight, Long Lost Father and The Great Man Votes).
The Kino release has a background score composed (improvised, really, if his note on his blog, http://www.silentfilmmusicblog.com/2009/05/sherlock-holmes-with-john-barrymore.html, can be believed) and played by Ben Model on something called a “Miditzer,” which I take to mean a computerized synthesizer designed to sound like a theatre organ — and it’s an effective accompaniment that blessedly stays away from familiar songs. (Some silent-film accompanists actually add to the appeal of their scores by quoting from suitable songs from the period, but in a film like this one that is not definitively set in the 1920’s those sorts of things would be detrimental.) Also, the cinematographer is J. Roy Hunt, who two decades later would be one of the two go-to cameramen at RKO for noirs, and while there’s a bit of the half-lit chiaroscuro sensibility that in 1922 would have been called “the German look,” the film hasn’t survived in good enough shape to do justice to Hunt’s work, most of which is pretty straightforward anyway.
It’s also interesting to note that the 1929 film Bulldog Drummond has a similar plotline — a debonair detective finds that the heroine he has a crush on is being held captive in an isolated location by a criminal couple in the employ of a super-villain — and it’s equally creaky, though a bit more charming than this one because of better direction, sound and a debonair performance by Ronald Colman. Overall, the 1922 Sherlock Holmes is a movie well worth having, even though as recently rediscovered long-thought-lost films go it’s hardly in the same league aesthetically as, say, the 1922 Beyond the Rocks (which not only had Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and a globe-trotting story by Elinor Glyn but a far more sensitive director, Sam Wood, who unlike Parker did continue his career well into the sound era) — still, as the first truly important Sherlock Holmes movie extant it’s a treasurable artifact.
Eventually I unwrapped the birthday package from Charles … which turned out to be the Kino on Video boxed set of four John Barrymore silents: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which we already had on a Kino DVD we got years ago), Sherlock Holmes, Beloved Rogue (with Barrymore as François Villon) and Tempest (the really intriguing movie he made in 1928, just before sound came in, based on a story by an uncredited Erich von Stroheim and featuring him as a lowly cadet elevated to the Russian officer corps on the eve of World War I and the Revolution, then busted again and forced to spend the rest of the war in prison until the Revolution happens and bails him out, which we’d seen on a Video Yesteryear VHS tape with a live organ accompaniment by Rosa Rio).
Naturally the one I was the most eager to watch was the 1922 Sherlock Holmes, especially since this was a long-lost film that had taken on the aura of an impressive mystery on its own. I first heard of it in William K. Everson’s 1972 book The Detective in Film, which described how the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York “was able to salvage several cans of negative of the film, each can consisting of short, unconnected rolls. They were printed up, spliced together for viewing purposes, and found to be most intriguing but virtually incomprehensible. There was a little of everything — but not very much of anything. Some scenes ran but a few seconds; others would reappear with variations at regular intervals. … All told, there were about 50 minutes of surviving footage, seemingly representing most of the sequences, but only about half of the total.”
After piecing together the film as best he could, film historian and restorationist Kevin Brownlow made an appointment with the director, Albert Parker — who in 1970 was fortunately not only still alive but active in the movie business (as an agent) — to screen the footage and see if Parker could help him reconstruct the original film as much as possible from the extant scenes. For at least two years after that, Brownlow worked on the film. In 1972 Everson wrote, “Brownlow — poring over the fragments of film, matching up minute scene numbers printed on to the celluloid, shooting and inserting stills to bridge gaps, restoring titles — has completed the major part of the reassembly process.”
This version was actually premiered in 1975 at a showing sponsored by the Theodore Huff Memorial Society (Huff was an early film critic from the 1920’s to the 1940’s and wrote a quite good biography of Chaplin) with both Brownlow and Everson in attendance, but what we have on the Kino on Video DVD is a further restoration from 2001, done at the George Eastman House with credits for funding to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Parks Service of the Department of the Interior, and Hugh Hefner, though the DVD package itself contains nothing on the history of the restoration (unlike previous Kino releases of long-thought-lost silent films, which have generally come with essays either on printed inserts or as text screens on the DVD’s themselves explaining just what the sources were for what we were seeing and how much work had to be done to create the “new” version of the film) and the DVD is merely “bare-bones,” without any of the special features (including recordings of speeches from the play on which it was based and clips or trailers from other films of the same story) that made Kino’s release of the 1920 Barrymore Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so appealing.
The restoration is certainly quite watchable — even though Kino’s DVD times out at 82 minutes, still well short of the 107-minute running time imdb.com gives for the original release — and it’s hard to tell whether some of the lacunae in the plot, abrupt transitions and narrative titles telling us about action that should have been shown are the fault of director Parker and his original writers (Earle Browne and Marion Fairfax) or simply represent missing scenes Brownlow (who isn’t credited here) and the people who’ve worked on the film since tried to fill in the best they could with titles. (I didn’t detect any still photos in the film standing in for missing scenes, as has sometimes been done in restorations.)
The plot of the 1922 Sherlock Holmes began in 1897 when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it as a play, not adapting any one Holmes story but creating a pastiche of incidents and themes from all the Holmes stories he’d written to that point. Conan Doyle first offered it to Sir Henry Irving, who requested that the entire role of Holmes be rewritten for him, then put the manuscript aside until 1899, when American-born actor William Gillette was scheduled to appear in London and decided that a Holmes play would make an excellent vehicle for him. Gillette asked Conan Doyle for permission to rewrite the play however he liked, and, in the words of Conan Doyle biographer Russell Miller, “crafted the play into a conventional melodrama, with a strong romantic interest. When he wrote to Conan Doyle asking if, for the purposes of the play, Sherlock Holmes could marry, Conan Doyle famously replied by telegram: ‘You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.’”
Gillette opened Sherlock Holmes in London in 1901 and the critics savaged the play — but the public loved it and flocked to it. Later Gillette came up with another Holmes vehicle, a one-act called The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes, and for that one’s London opening he hired a then-unknown child actor named Charles Chaplin to play Holmes’ houseboy, Billy. Later Chaplin repeated this role in a revival of the full-length Sherlock Holmes play as well. The first film version of the play was shot by the Chicago-based Essanay Studios in 1916 (coincidentally, just after Chaplin — now an adult and a world-famous comedy star — had left their employ), with Arthur Berthelet directing and Gillette himself as Holmes, but that version is well and truly lost.
In 1922 the Goldwyn studios — right in the middle of a struggle for control between Sam Goldwyn (née Goldfish), the company’s co-founder; and Joe Godsol, an investor who’d muscled his way into the company and was busy forcing Goldwyn out (he did, but without Goldwyn the person Goldwyn the company only survived two years longer until it was absorbed into what became MGM) — decided to remake the play as a film and hired Barrymore, fresh from his 1916 stage triumph in Peter Ibbetson and his first major film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for Paramount in 1920, to star as Holmes. (Sherlock Holmes contains an intriguing visual quote from the Barrymore Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: in the earlier film a spider is shown dissolving into the face of the sleeping Dr. Jekyll just before he wakes up as Hyde; and in Sherlock Holmes we see a large prop spider in an artificial web and the spider dissolves into the face of Professor Moriarty, illustrating Conan Doyle’s metaphor of Moriarty as the spider at the center of a web of crime.)
Writers Browne and Fairfax added an elaborate prologue sequence, showing Holmes and Watson (Roland Young, making his film debut) in college, where Holmes is fond of taking long walks and writing philosophical observations about himself in his journal (the list of his weaknesses that Watson writes in Conan Doyle’s first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, is written by Holmes himself here) and where he finds his métier as a detective by exonerating fellow student Prince Alexis (Reginald Denny) of an accusation that he stole the school’s athletic fund. Holmes proves that the theft was actually committed by Forman Wells (William Powell, making his film debut and billed as William H. Powell), son of safecracker John Peg, who was adopted — and his name changed — by Professor Moriarty (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who trained him to pose as a gentleman so he could infiltrate Cambridge University and gather information on people it would be worthwhile for Moriarty’s gang to rob.
The film then jumpily flashes forward several years; Holmes and Watson are now ensconced at 221 B Baker Street, Holmes’ success in the case of Prince Alexis has led to his career as a consulting detective, but he’s still bound and determined to expose Moriarty’s crime ring and bring the Professor to justice. Meanwhile, Prince Alexis himself has received word that his two older brothers have both been killed in a car accident (the setting is contemporary enough that there are cars in the film, though they look more like the vehicles of 1912 than 1922 and they still share the streets with horse-drawn carriages) and, as the Crown Prince, he must return to his homeland (one of those fictitious mittel-Europan principalities that abounded in movies of this era) and abandon his British girlfriend, Rose Faulkner (Peggy Bayfield), who forthwith flees to Switzerland and there commits suicide. (Presumably she was pregnant with Prince Alexis’s child, but there’s no explanation of that in the film itself — or at least in the version we have.)
Faulkner’s sister Alice (Carol Dempster, D. W. Griffith’s second wife and frequent star in the 1920’s, borrowed from him for this film) — who previously met Holmes while in college and got a crush on him which, it was hinted, he reciprocated — naturally hates Alexis for driving her sister to suicide, and she decides to get revenge by selling the letters Alexis wrote Rose to Moriarty for blackmail purposes. Alexis hires Holmes to stop her, and apparently out of love for Holmes she’s willing to drop the whole thing — but Moriarty fights back by having her kidnapped and held in an isolated house by James and Madge Larrabee (Anders Randolf and Hedda Hopper), from which Holmes has to free her before finally confronting Moriarty, busting his gang and eventually building the case against Moriarty so that Scotland Yard, in the person of Inspector Gregson (John Willard), can arrest him. (This is one of the few Holmes films in which Moriarty is actually taken alive; in most others he either dies or escapes in such a way that he appears dead but can be revived by screenwriters’ fiat for a sequel.) Holmes declares his love for Alice Faulkner and proposes to her, she accepts and the film ends in a way that to Holmes fans over a century after the play premiered seems defiantly anti-canonical but which wowed ’em at the time.
It’s really nice to have this film back — almost none of the other Holmes features from the silent era are extant (about the only other one I know of is the 1922 The Hound of the Baskervilles, made in Britain and ostensibly co-produced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself — though I suspect all he contributed to the productions were the rights to the stories — as a way of kicking off a series of short films based on each of the canonical Holmes stories; Eille Norwood played Holmes throughout the series and thus became the first of only two actors to play Holmes in every story Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about him; Jeremy Brett, in his Granada TV series in the 1970’s, was the other) — and though still 27 minutes short of its original running time and with plenty of outrageous jumps in continuity in the plot (notably the lack of any explanation as to why William Powell’s character, Forman Wells, was an agent of Moriarty in the prologue and switched sides and went to work for Holmes in the bulk of the film), the version we have is nonetheless easy to follow and without any readily noticeable gaps in the story.
The problem is it’s simply not a particularly good movie; director Parker is too easy-going and not suited to a suspense thriller; the play itself is a creaky vehicle and hardly as strong a story as the best of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories; and though Barrymore acts with authority and power (as does von Seyffertitz as his principal adversary), the rather talky world of Holmes, with its sweeping deductions expressed in fire-breathing dramatic language couched in simple terms, really demanded sound to be realized on screen adequately. (One imdb.com poster wished John Barrymore would have got to remake the role 10 years later after sound came in; that would have been nice — especially if they could have got his brother Lionel to play Moriarty!) It’s an O.K. movie that takes advantage of a surprising amount of footage shot on real London locations — though the interiors are studio-bound and there are so few closeups and cuts that sometimes this looks like a film from 1912 rather than one from 1922 — and it’s also nice to see a film with so many stars of the future getting their starts (or near-starts) in it.
It’s just not as exciting as it should be, and quite frankly John Barrymore was less interesting as a hero (especially a cerebral hero rather than the action heroes he played in Beau Brummell and Don Juan) than as a multidimensional villain-hero like Jekyll/Hyde, Ahab, Svengali or the murderously jealous impresario Nicolai Nazarov in Maytime — or as the figure of pathos he would frequently appear as in the 1930’s (as the real-life effects of alcoholism took their toll on him and unwittingly fitted him to play the dissolute but still sympathetic roles he had in Grand Hotel, A Bill of Divorcement, Dinner at Eight, Long Lost Father and The Great Man Votes).
The Kino release has a background score composed (improvised, really, if his note on his blog, http://www.silentfilmmusicblog.com/2009/05/sherlock-holmes-with-john-barrymore.html, can be believed) and played by Ben Model on something called a “Miditzer,” which I take to mean a computerized synthesizer designed to sound like a theatre organ — and it’s an effective accompaniment that blessedly stays away from familiar songs. (Some silent-film accompanists actually add to the appeal of their scores by quoting from suitable songs from the period, but in a film like this one that is not definitively set in the 1920’s those sorts of things would be detrimental.) Also, the cinematographer is J. Roy Hunt, who two decades later would be one of the two go-to cameramen at RKO for noirs, and while there’s a bit of the half-lit chiaroscuro sensibility that in 1922 would have been called “the German look,” the film hasn’t survived in good enough shape to do justice to Hunt’s work, most of which is pretty straightforward anyway.
It’s also interesting to note that the 1929 film Bulldog Drummond has a similar plotline — a debonair detective finds that the heroine he has a crush on is being held captive in an isolated location by a criminal couple in the employ of a super-villain — and it’s equally creaky, though a bit more charming than this one because of better direction, sound and a debonair performance by Ronald Colman. Overall, the 1922 Sherlock Holmes is a movie well worth having, even though as recently rediscovered long-thought-lost films go it’s hardly in the same league aesthetically as, say, the 1922 Beyond the Rocks (which not only had Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and a globe-trotting story by Elinor Glyn but a far more sensitive director, Sam Wood, who unlike Parker did continue his career well into the sound era) — still, as the first truly important Sherlock Holmes movie extant it’s a treasurable artifact.
Seas Beneath (Fox, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Sherlock Holmes Charles suggested we run another item from the Barrymore box, but I didn’t feel like two silent movies in a row and instead picked out something from an earlier, and far more massive, boxed set he’d given me as a present, the Ford at Fox box 20th Century-Fox released in late 2007 as a tribute to John Ford’s work at the Fox studio (which contains quite a few, though hardly all, of his most important films). We had abruptly broken off our exploration of this box back in March 2008, and after a chance remark from Charles about it I decided to crack it open and pick up where we’d left off: with Ford’s first film after the intriguing 1930 prison-based comedy-drama Up the River, starring Spencer Tracy in his first feature film and Humphrey Bogart in either his first (according to imdb.com) or second (according to Todd McCarthy’s biography) feature film.
The next film up was the 1931 production Seas Beneath, which Ford’s biographer Tag Gallagher rather wrote off (“dreadful acting and splendid photography … an instructive failure”) but which turned out to be quite good once you got beyond a rather creaky opening and two stars in the leads vastly underqualified for their roles. Set in August 1918, Seas Beneath deals with Navy commander Robert “Bob” Kingsley (George O’Brien) and his assignment to command a so-called “mystery ship.” This is a three-masted, sail-driven schooner whose crew consists of Navy reservists — all except the gun crew, who are experienced naval gunners — and whose mission is to sail into the Canary Islands (off the coast of Morocco and held by Spain, though Morocco has been claiming them since it won independence) and attract the attention of the feared German U-boat U-172, which has been responsible for sinking much Allied shipping.
The “mystery ship” is supposed to be disguised as a merchant vessel — the crew are dressed in plain clothes instead of uniforms (and O’Brien’s tight-fitting dungarees show off far more of his anatomy than the usual male attire in a 1930’s film, a bonus for certain viewers) and their state-of-the-art gun is hidden under a housing on deck whose walls are tied with lanyards (the shipmodeling.net Web site defines a lanyard as “a short piece of rope made fast to anything to secure it or to use as a handle, used to secure the shrouds and stays and for firing flintlock guns”) that can be untied in a hurry, thereby causing the walls to fall away and the gun to be exposed for use. The theory is that the sub will try to sink the “mystery ship,” but will surface and use its guns to do so rather than wasting a torpedo on such a puny target — and once it gets within range the mystery ship will be able to hit it with its own gun and sink it.
There are some cornball comedy antics, notably involving crew chief Mike “Guns” Costello (Walter C. Kelly) and his attempts to climb the masts the way he did 20 years earlier — which, predictably, end with him overboard, until the ship finally gets to the Canary Islands and puts to port, where Kingsley warns the crew not to drink or fraternize with the women. Both Kingsley and his ensign, Dick Cabot (Gaylord “Steve” Pendleton — no relation to Nat Pendleton, who’s also in this movie albeit in a much smaller role), break the commander’s own rule; Kingsley starts dating a blonde named Anna Marie (Marion Lessing) while Cabot goes after nightclub singer Lolita (Mona Maris, who does a quite good turn with a song called “My Loves” in a sequence that looks like Ford had carefully studied the opening cabaret scene in Sternberg’s Morocco, made the year before). Both women, it turns out, are German agents — Lolita takes Cabot to her room, gets him so drunk he passes out, then sees the U.S. Navy insignia inside his hat and rifles through his wallet to see his identity papers and confirm he’s really a U.S. servicemember and not a merchant seaman. As for Anna Marie, she’s the brother of U-172’s commander, Von Steuben (Henry Victor), and even when she’s taken prisoner and held on the “mystery ship” she keeps trying to signal the U-boat to stay away and not fall into the Americans’ trap for it.
Much of the movie is surprisingly action-less, and (at least in the U.S. version) there is no music score except for a couple of cheesy themes over the opening and closing credits — the German release stuck on bits of Wagner as underscoring — but the film manages to stay interesting largely due to magnificent photography by Joseph August, the realism of shooting at sea (though they just went as far as the shores off Catalina and one shot in particular — of the gun pointing up the screen to indicate it’s ready for use — looked to me like a studio interior with a process-screen sea as backdrop) and a surprisingly literate script by Dudley Nichols, who did a better than usual job for a film like this of depicting the clashes between duty and love that motivate both characters. (I wondered for a while if the absence of music helped this film or hurt it; it gives the film a far starker and more classical “feel” than the 1943 film Action in the North Atlantic, similarly plotted though set one war later, in which the soundtrack is such a continuous assault of explosions from guns, torpedoes, depth charges and Max Steiner’s music that one cherishes the sequence in which both the sub and the merchant ship it’s trying to sink go into radio silence as a blessed rest for one’s ears!)
All of this makes it even more regrettable that Seas Beneath didn’t have stronger actors in the lead roles (Mona Maris, who had earlier appeared with Humphrey Bogart in a feature called A Devil with Women and would come out of retirement in 1984 after 30 years off screen to play a bitch grandmother in a marvelous Argentinian film called Camila, easily takes the acting honors here). George O’Brien starred in two of the very best films of the late silent era — Ford’s Three Bad Men and Murnau’s Sunrise — but he seems hopeless as a talkie actor, falling flat for the same reason John Gilbert did: there’s nothing wrong with the basic timbre of his voice but he doesn’t have a clue how to act with it, how to vary the pitch and inflection of his speech to reflect and express emotions. Marion Lessing is simply incompetent; John Ford said later that he hadn’t wanted to use her, she’d been forced on him by the studio, she’d tricked the studio bosses into thinking she could speak German — which she couldn’t — and he’d originally wanted Marguerite Churchill for the role.
If (and it’s a very big “if”) she could have worked past her accent (the character is supposed to be German but able to speak perfect American-accented English), Marlene Dietrich would have been ideal for the part — just as the role of the commander cried out for Cary Grant (who was still in New York doing stage work and film shorts) and got George O’Brien. Both these dubious leads seemed lost in Nichols’ oddly moving closing scene, in which Kingsley swears eternal love to Anna Marie and she, anticipating The Third Man nearly 20 years later, walks away from him and chooses her brother and her country over her lover (explaining, in a quirky Nichols-ish way, that the losing country in the war will need her a lot more than the winning one!).
I think Seas Beneath got in the Ford at Fox box because it’s the earliest extant film Dudley Nichols wrote for John Ford — at least the first one that survives with its soundtrack intact; an earlier one, Men Without Women, exists only in the alternative silent version released for the handful of theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound in 1930 — but it’s a considerably better film than its meager reputation in the Ford critical canon would indicate, and it rivals James Whale’s 1931 Waterloo Bridge (made the same year about a different front in the same war) as a film that manages to be interesting and a directorial tour de force despite a weak pair of leads. If only Seas Beneath had met the fate of Waterloo Bridge and got remade with an incandescent star and a director at least close to the skill level of the original one!
Other bits of trivia about Seas Beneath: the schooner used had previously been filmed in the 1930 version of The Sea Wolf (starring Milton Sills, who’d previously starred in the silent version of The Sea Hawk and proved every bit as sexy as Errol Flynn in the sound quasi-remake) and would be used again in a film called The Painted Woman; and John Loder, cast as one of the German navy officers, demanded — and got — $1,000 above his salary for agreeing to have his hair close-cropped in proper German military style.
After Sherlock Holmes Charles suggested we run another item from the Barrymore box, but I didn’t feel like two silent movies in a row and instead picked out something from an earlier, and far more massive, boxed set he’d given me as a present, the Ford at Fox box 20th Century-Fox released in late 2007 as a tribute to John Ford’s work at the Fox studio (which contains quite a few, though hardly all, of his most important films). We had abruptly broken off our exploration of this box back in March 2008, and after a chance remark from Charles about it I decided to crack it open and pick up where we’d left off: with Ford’s first film after the intriguing 1930 prison-based comedy-drama Up the River, starring Spencer Tracy in his first feature film and Humphrey Bogart in either his first (according to imdb.com) or second (according to Todd McCarthy’s biography) feature film.
The next film up was the 1931 production Seas Beneath, which Ford’s biographer Tag Gallagher rather wrote off (“dreadful acting and splendid photography … an instructive failure”) but which turned out to be quite good once you got beyond a rather creaky opening and two stars in the leads vastly underqualified for their roles. Set in August 1918, Seas Beneath deals with Navy commander Robert “Bob” Kingsley (George O’Brien) and his assignment to command a so-called “mystery ship.” This is a three-masted, sail-driven schooner whose crew consists of Navy reservists — all except the gun crew, who are experienced naval gunners — and whose mission is to sail into the Canary Islands (off the coast of Morocco and held by Spain, though Morocco has been claiming them since it won independence) and attract the attention of the feared German U-boat U-172, which has been responsible for sinking much Allied shipping.
The “mystery ship” is supposed to be disguised as a merchant vessel — the crew are dressed in plain clothes instead of uniforms (and O’Brien’s tight-fitting dungarees show off far more of his anatomy than the usual male attire in a 1930’s film, a bonus for certain viewers) and their state-of-the-art gun is hidden under a housing on deck whose walls are tied with lanyards (the shipmodeling.net Web site defines a lanyard as “a short piece of rope made fast to anything to secure it or to use as a handle, used to secure the shrouds and stays and for firing flintlock guns”) that can be untied in a hurry, thereby causing the walls to fall away and the gun to be exposed for use. The theory is that the sub will try to sink the “mystery ship,” but will surface and use its guns to do so rather than wasting a torpedo on such a puny target — and once it gets within range the mystery ship will be able to hit it with its own gun and sink it.
There are some cornball comedy antics, notably involving crew chief Mike “Guns” Costello (Walter C. Kelly) and his attempts to climb the masts the way he did 20 years earlier — which, predictably, end with him overboard, until the ship finally gets to the Canary Islands and puts to port, where Kingsley warns the crew not to drink or fraternize with the women. Both Kingsley and his ensign, Dick Cabot (Gaylord “Steve” Pendleton — no relation to Nat Pendleton, who’s also in this movie albeit in a much smaller role), break the commander’s own rule; Kingsley starts dating a blonde named Anna Marie (Marion Lessing) while Cabot goes after nightclub singer Lolita (Mona Maris, who does a quite good turn with a song called “My Loves” in a sequence that looks like Ford had carefully studied the opening cabaret scene in Sternberg’s Morocco, made the year before). Both women, it turns out, are German agents — Lolita takes Cabot to her room, gets him so drunk he passes out, then sees the U.S. Navy insignia inside his hat and rifles through his wallet to see his identity papers and confirm he’s really a U.S. servicemember and not a merchant seaman. As for Anna Marie, she’s the brother of U-172’s commander, Von Steuben (Henry Victor), and even when she’s taken prisoner and held on the “mystery ship” she keeps trying to signal the U-boat to stay away and not fall into the Americans’ trap for it.
Much of the movie is surprisingly action-less, and (at least in the U.S. version) there is no music score except for a couple of cheesy themes over the opening and closing credits — the German release stuck on bits of Wagner as underscoring — but the film manages to stay interesting largely due to magnificent photography by Joseph August, the realism of shooting at sea (though they just went as far as the shores off Catalina and one shot in particular — of the gun pointing up the screen to indicate it’s ready for use — looked to me like a studio interior with a process-screen sea as backdrop) and a surprisingly literate script by Dudley Nichols, who did a better than usual job for a film like this of depicting the clashes between duty and love that motivate both characters. (I wondered for a while if the absence of music helped this film or hurt it; it gives the film a far starker and more classical “feel” than the 1943 film Action in the North Atlantic, similarly plotted though set one war later, in which the soundtrack is such a continuous assault of explosions from guns, torpedoes, depth charges and Max Steiner’s music that one cherishes the sequence in which both the sub and the merchant ship it’s trying to sink go into radio silence as a blessed rest for one’s ears!)
All of this makes it even more regrettable that Seas Beneath didn’t have stronger actors in the lead roles (Mona Maris, who had earlier appeared with Humphrey Bogart in a feature called A Devil with Women and would come out of retirement in 1984 after 30 years off screen to play a bitch grandmother in a marvelous Argentinian film called Camila, easily takes the acting honors here). George O’Brien starred in two of the very best films of the late silent era — Ford’s Three Bad Men and Murnau’s Sunrise — but he seems hopeless as a talkie actor, falling flat for the same reason John Gilbert did: there’s nothing wrong with the basic timbre of his voice but he doesn’t have a clue how to act with it, how to vary the pitch and inflection of his speech to reflect and express emotions. Marion Lessing is simply incompetent; John Ford said later that he hadn’t wanted to use her, she’d been forced on him by the studio, she’d tricked the studio bosses into thinking she could speak German — which she couldn’t — and he’d originally wanted Marguerite Churchill for the role.
If (and it’s a very big “if”) she could have worked past her accent (the character is supposed to be German but able to speak perfect American-accented English), Marlene Dietrich would have been ideal for the part — just as the role of the commander cried out for Cary Grant (who was still in New York doing stage work and film shorts) and got George O’Brien. Both these dubious leads seemed lost in Nichols’ oddly moving closing scene, in which Kingsley swears eternal love to Anna Marie and she, anticipating The Third Man nearly 20 years later, walks away from him and chooses her brother and her country over her lover (explaining, in a quirky Nichols-ish way, that the losing country in the war will need her a lot more than the winning one!).
I think Seas Beneath got in the Ford at Fox box because it’s the earliest extant film Dudley Nichols wrote for John Ford — at least the first one that survives with its soundtrack intact; an earlier one, Men Without Women, exists only in the alternative silent version released for the handful of theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound in 1930 — but it’s a considerably better film than its meager reputation in the Ford critical canon would indicate, and it rivals James Whale’s 1931 Waterloo Bridge (made the same year about a different front in the same war) as a film that manages to be interesting and a directorial tour de force despite a weak pair of leads. If only Seas Beneath had met the fate of Waterloo Bridge and got remade with an incandescent star and a director at least close to the skill level of the original one!
Other bits of trivia about Seas Beneath: the schooner used had previously been filmed in the 1930 version of The Sea Wolf (starring Milton Sills, who’d previously starred in the silent version of The Sea Hawk and proved every bit as sexy as Errol Flynn in the sound quasi-remake) and would be used again in a film called The Painted Woman; and John Loder, cast as one of the German navy officers, demanded — and got — $1,000 above his salary for agreeing to have his hair close-cropped in proper German military style.
Hangover Square (20th Century-Fox, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last Charles and I had run the film Hangover Square from 1945, a quite obvious follow-up to the 1944 20th Century-Fox remake of The Lodger: the same director (John Brahm), writer (Barré Lyndon) and male leads: Laird Cregar as a psychopathic killer and George Sanders as the Scotland Yard official (here referred to as a police-affiliated doctor rather than an actual cop) who’s trying to catch him. One interesting aspect of this movie is how the billing got flipped around: whereas The Lodger had billed the female lead, Merle Oberon, first, George Sanders second and Laird Cregar third, Hangover Square had Cregar first, Linda Darnell second and Sanders third! Turner Classic Movies showed this as part of a month-long salute to composer Bernard Herrmann, who no doubt particularly relished this assignment because the gimmick in this story (based on a novel by Patrick Hamilton, who also wrote the originals for Gaslight and Rope) is that the mad killer is also a genius-level composer, George Harvey Bone, and the score includes a full-length movement for a piano concerto that supposedly represents Bone’s greatest work.
Aside from that, Hangover Square is a pretty close ripoff of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, not so much Stevenson’s original novel as the 1932 and 1941 film versions of it, both of which had the schizoid hero torn between a good woman and a bad one. Here the good woman is Barbara Chapman (Faye Marlowe), aspiring pianist and daughter of famous conductor Sir Henry Chapman (Alan Napier, in what’s probably his second-best role, after the Holy Father he played in Orson Welles’ film of Shakespeare’s Macbeth three years later), who’s encouraging Bone to write a great piano concerto which her dad has promised to premiere at a soirée at his home, with Bone himself as soloist. The bad girl is music-hall singer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), whom Bone encounters after he tells police psychiatrist Dr. Allan Middleton (George Sanders) that he has spells during which he blacks out completely and has no idea what he’s done until he comes to again hours later — and Middleton, who’s supposed to be the voice of reason in this movie but on this point is totally off base, says that he should take time off from serious composition, mingle with common people and have fun.
Accordingly Bone attends one of Netta’s performances (the handbill for it gives the date as 1903, the only clue we get as to when this film takes place — though all the homes and streets are still rather anachronistically lit with gas instead of electricity and only the presence of a telephone indicates a more modern technological age) and she realizes she can seduce him into writing songs for her shows. Netta is a fascinating character whose ruthless, femme fatale aspects are a bit beyond Darnell’s capabilities as an actress (once again this is a movie from the classic age that would have been a lot better with Barbara Stanwyck as the female lead — not only was she unsurpassed at playing these sorts of hard-bitten, unscrupulous women, but she could have sung the part herself whereas Darnell was quite obviously being voice-doubled); she’s vamping Bone to get songs out of him while at the same time she’s in a relationship with her manager, Eddie Carstairs (Glenn Langan — so two of the cast members of Hangover Square were in stupid sci-fi movies in the 1950’s: Napier in The Mole People and Langan in The Amazing Colossal Man and War of the Colossal Beast) and Eddie is pimping her out to rich men in order to make them both money.
The first third of Hangover Square is almost ludicrously overwrought — thinking of the This Is Spinal Tap joke, I said, “This movie starts at 11!” — but the film gains strength and power as it progresses, mainly because of the skill with which Cregar nails both sides of the character’s personality. The tumbled state of his psyche, the ease with which the traumas that are piling up on him can send him into a murderous psycho state, is the most real part of this film. Brahm and Lyndon make a mistake by showing Cregar as a murderer in the very first scene — both Charles and I thought the film would have been more appealing if they’d kept the is-he-or-isn’t-he suspense going a little while longer (and Charles said he’d have liked it better if the Cregar character had turned out to be an innocent man being manipulated by someone else to commit murder — though perhaps Patrick Hamilton had already done the innocent-being-driven-crazy-and-framed-for-murder bit in Angel Street, the source for Gaslight, and didn’t want to repeat himself) — and for much of the early going they seem uncertain whether to make Hangover Square a thriller or a horror film.
At least part of the horror is the twist in Bone’s personality that in his psycho states he must not only kill, but dispose of the body by fire — which gives Brahm an excuse to stage some pretty spectacular fire sequences, especially when Bone discovers how Netta has been deceiving him and kills her. As luck would have it, the night he commits the murder is not only the opening night of her big show (there’s a chilling little moment illustrating the transitory nature of fame; when she disappears before her second night, unseen hands pull down the placard advertising her and put up a new one with a different show title and star) but also Guy Fawkes Day, which not only gives Brahm an excuse to stage a Guy Fawkes bonfire but allows him and Lyndon to have Bone dispose of Netta’s body by disguising it as a Fawkes effigy (which fools a passing policeman), throwing it on the bonfire and burning it up.
The film’s ending is as baroque and over-the-top as the rest; fighting a reluctant batch of Scotland Yard personnel who can’t believe Bone is a murderer, Middleton (whose character has definite Holmesian aspects — given Sanders’ repeated successes as lesser detectives, not only in this film and The Lodger but earlier in RKO’s Saint and Falcon series and later in Lured, Sanders as Sherlock Holmes remains one of the great might-have-beens of cinema history; too bad Sanders reached both his creative and career peaks at a time when Basil Rathbone owned Sherlock Holmes on screen!) has finally convinced the Yard’s detectives to arrest Bone on the night he’s supposed to premiere his concerto — and Bone, realizing what’s going on and fearful of being institutionalized, first tries to flee from Chapman’s home (in mid-performance he tells Barbara to take over as piano soloist), then sets the place ablaze and, as everyone else evacuates (there’s a grim bit of amusement as the orchestra members — especially the bass section — try to get out with their instruments), Bone retakes his seat at the piano as the entire house burns down and collapses around him, immolating him.
Hangover Square is an overwrought movie but one with considerable appeal. Herrmann’s score is fascinating — Charles said he ought to have added two more movements and presented it as a full-fledged concerto — and it’s also Cregar’s final film and the only one he made after an ill-advised crash diet lowered his weight from 300 to 200 pounds but also provoked a heart attack that killed him at age 31. Sources differ as to why he wanted to lose weight so badly; the “official” version is that he wanted to be able to play romantic leads instead of being relegated to psycho villains and Sydney Greenstreet-type roles, but one story I’ve heard is that Cregar was Gay and thought he’d have a better chance picking up men if he were slimmer. Be that as it may, Cregar died before Hangover Square was released and, as with James Dean’s final two films, the shadow of his actual death hangs heavily over this film and just adds to the sense of doom that surrounds his character.
The night before last Charles and I had run the film Hangover Square from 1945, a quite obvious follow-up to the 1944 20th Century-Fox remake of The Lodger: the same director (John Brahm), writer (Barré Lyndon) and male leads: Laird Cregar as a psychopathic killer and George Sanders as the Scotland Yard official (here referred to as a police-affiliated doctor rather than an actual cop) who’s trying to catch him. One interesting aspect of this movie is how the billing got flipped around: whereas The Lodger had billed the female lead, Merle Oberon, first, George Sanders second and Laird Cregar third, Hangover Square had Cregar first, Linda Darnell second and Sanders third! Turner Classic Movies showed this as part of a month-long salute to composer Bernard Herrmann, who no doubt particularly relished this assignment because the gimmick in this story (based on a novel by Patrick Hamilton, who also wrote the originals for Gaslight and Rope) is that the mad killer is also a genius-level composer, George Harvey Bone, and the score includes a full-length movement for a piano concerto that supposedly represents Bone’s greatest work.
Aside from that, Hangover Square is a pretty close ripoff of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, not so much Stevenson’s original novel as the 1932 and 1941 film versions of it, both of which had the schizoid hero torn between a good woman and a bad one. Here the good woman is Barbara Chapman (Faye Marlowe), aspiring pianist and daughter of famous conductor Sir Henry Chapman (Alan Napier, in what’s probably his second-best role, after the Holy Father he played in Orson Welles’ film of Shakespeare’s Macbeth three years later), who’s encouraging Bone to write a great piano concerto which her dad has promised to premiere at a soirée at his home, with Bone himself as soloist. The bad girl is music-hall singer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), whom Bone encounters after he tells police psychiatrist Dr. Allan Middleton (George Sanders) that he has spells during which he blacks out completely and has no idea what he’s done until he comes to again hours later — and Middleton, who’s supposed to be the voice of reason in this movie but on this point is totally off base, says that he should take time off from serious composition, mingle with common people and have fun.
Accordingly Bone attends one of Netta’s performances (the handbill for it gives the date as 1903, the only clue we get as to when this film takes place — though all the homes and streets are still rather anachronistically lit with gas instead of electricity and only the presence of a telephone indicates a more modern technological age) and she realizes she can seduce him into writing songs for her shows. Netta is a fascinating character whose ruthless, femme fatale aspects are a bit beyond Darnell’s capabilities as an actress (once again this is a movie from the classic age that would have been a lot better with Barbara Stanwyck as the female lead — not only was she unsurpassed at playing these sorts of hard-bitten, unscrupulous women, but she could have sung the part herself whereas Darnell was quite obviously being voice-doubled); she’s vamping Bone to get songs out of him while at the same time she’s in a relationship with her manager, Eddie Carstairs (Glenn Langan — so two of the cast members of Hangover Square were in stupid sci-fi movies in the 1950’s: Napier in The Mole People and Langan in The Amazing Colossal Man and War of the Colossal Beast) and Eddie is pimping her out to rich men in order to make them both money.
The first third of Hangover Square is almost ludicrously overwrought — thinking of the This Is Spinal Tap joke, I said, “This movie starts at 11!” — but the film gains strength and power as it progresses, mainly because of the skill with which Cregar nails both sides of the character’s personality. The tumbled state of his psyche, the ease with which the traumas that are piling up on him can send him into a murderous psycho state, is the most real part of this film. Brahm and Lyndon make a mistake by showing Cregar as a murderer in the very first scene — both Charles and I thought the film would have been more appealing if they’d kept the is-he-or-isn’t-he suspense going a little while longer (and Charles said he’d have liked it better if the Cregar character had turned out to be an innocent man being manipulated by someone else to commit murder — though perhaps Patrick Hamilton had already done the innocent-being-driven-crazy-and-framed-for-murder bit in Angel Street, the source for Gaslight, and didn’t want to repeat himself) — and for much of the early going they seem uncertain whether to make Hangover Square a thriller or a horror film.
At least part of the horror is the twist in Bone’s personality that in his psycho states he must not only kill, but dispose of the body by fire — which gives Brahm an excuse to stage some pretty spectacular fire sequences, especially when Bone discovers how Netta has been deceiving him and kills her. As luck would have it, the night he commits the murder is not only the opening night of her big show (there’s a chilling little moment illustrating the transitory nature of fame; when she disappears before her second night, unseen hands pull down the placard advertising her and put up a new one with a different show title and star) but also Guy Fawkes Day, which not only gives Brahm an excuse to stage a Guy Fawkes bonfire but allows him and Lyndon to have Bone dispose of Netta’s body by disguising it as a Fawkes effigy (which fools a passing policeman), throwing it on the bonfire and burning it up.
The film’s ending is as baroque and over-the-top as the rest; fighting a reluctant batch of Scotland Yard personnel who can’t believe Bone is a murderer, Middleton (whose character has definite Holmesian aspects — given Sanders’ repeated successes as lesser detectives, not only in this film and The Lodger but earlier in RKO’s Saint and Falcon series and later in Lured, Sanders as Sherlock Holmes remains one of the great might-have-beens of cinema history; too bad Sanders reached both his creative and career peaks at a time when Basil Rathbone owned Sherlock Holmes on screen!) has finally convinced the Yard’s detectives to arrest Bone on the night he’s supposed to premiere his concerto — and Bone, realizing what’s going on and fearful of being institutionalized, first tries to flee from Chapman’s home (in mid-performance he tells Barbara to take over as piano soloist), then sets the place ablaze and, as everyone else evacuates (there’s a grim bit of amusement as the orchestra members — especially the bass section — try to get out with their instruments), Bone retakes his seat at the piano as the entire house burns down and collapses around him, immolating him.
Hangover Square is an overwrought movie but one with considerable appeal. Herrmann’s score is fascinating — Charles said he ought to have added two more movements and presented it as a full-fledged concerto — and it’s also Cregar’s final film and the only one he made after an ill-advised crash diet lowered his weight from 300 to 200 pounds but also provoked a heart attack that killed him at age 31. Sources differ as to why he wanted to lose weight so badly; the “official” version is that he wanted to be able to play romantic leads instead of being relegated to psycho villains and Sydney Greenstreet-type roles, but one story I’ve heard is that Cregar was Gay and thought he’d have a better chance picking up men if he were slimmer. Be that as it may, Cregar died before Hangover Square was released and, as with James Dean’s final two films, the shadow of his actual death hangs heavily over this film and just adds to the sense of doom that surrounds his character.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
My Outlaw Brother (Bogeaus/Eagle-Lion, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we picked was one Charles had downloaded from archive.org: My Outlaw Brother, a 1951 vehicle for Mickey Rooney produced by Benedict Bogeaus for release through Eagle-Lion Pictures, which was basically the old PRC after J. Arthur Rank bought it in 1948 to have a guaranteed American outlet for his British product. (Among the big-budget Rank films Eagle-Lion got to distribute in the U.S. was the 1948 Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film The Red Shoes, a spectacular movie and a sensational hit that put the company on the map big-time.) Rank’s ownership and name change to symbolize the American (Eagle)/British (Lion) alliance led to some minor increases in budgets and star power in the PRC product (PRC’s best director, Edgar G. Ulmer, got to make the 1948 film Ruthless with Louis Hayward and two of Warners’ “B”-listers, Zachary Scott and Sydney Greenstreet), but My Outlaw Brother was an independent production and a really cheap movie, filmed in Mexico to take advantage of the country’s desert locations (with the studio work done at the Tepeyac studios in Mexico City — I guess Bogeaus’s budget was so low he couldn’t even afford Mexico’s best studio, Churubusco!) and with a surprisingly good cast — Wanda Hendrix, Robert Preston, Robert Stack — and a story based on the novel South of the Rio Grande by pulp Western specialist Max Brand.
It’s a Western, of course, with Rooney playing Denny O’Moore, who’s traveling through Texas in the border regions looking for his long-lost older brother Patrick (Robert Stack) and encountering U.S. marshal Joe Walter (Robert Preston), who’s looking for “El Tigre,” a Mexican bandit leader who uses a large gang of about 20 or so to raid banks and other cash-rich businesses on this side of the border, then flees back across la linea and thumbs his nose at U.S. authority. Walter has negotiated with the Mexican government to pursue “El Tigre” on both sides of the border, and Denny happens to be driving his buckboard through a Texas town when “El Tigre” stages a raid — and “El Tigre,” not being the brightest bulb in Mexican bandit-dom, lets the sole witness to his raid get away alive. The sequence of “El Tigre”’s raid on the tiny town’s trading post is easily the action highlight of the film — and it’s over in the first reel; from there on in the movie (written by Gene Fowler, Jr. and Al Levitt, and directed competently but unspectacularly by Elliot Nugent) is nothing but a series of boring scenes involving Rooney’s character as a comic-relief role swollen to movie-dominating dimensions.
Nugent scored one directorial coup — he got Rooney to underplay in his two big scenes, one midway through when Preston’s character informs him that his brother is “El Tigre”’s right-hand man, and another at the end in which “El Tigre” is shot down (at the end of a singularly unexciting attempt at a big action climax), the wig he’s been wearing to make himself look indigenous falls off and it’s revealed that Patrick O’Moore wasn’t just “El Tigre”’s sidekick, he was the “tiger” himself. Other than that, though, this is a singularly dull movie that’s 82 minutes long (which is about 20 more minutes than its meager plot could sustain), fun to look at thanks to the marvelous red-filter effects from cinematographer José Ortiz Ramos but utterly boring otherwise — and Hendrix’s role doesn’t help much either; she’s a Mexican señorita who starts the movie as Stack’s girlfriend and ends up as Rooney’s (something he’s especially glad about because, unlike all the other women he’s dated, she’s small enough he can actually lift her — it’s that kind of a movie!) and the twitchy appeal she showed off in movies like Confidential Agent and Ride the Pink Horse is totally absent here.
The film we picked was one Charles had downloaded from archive.org: My Outlaw Brother, a 1951 vehicle for Mickey Rooney produced by Benedict Bogeaus for release through Eagle-Lion Pictures, which was basically the old PRC after J. Arthur Rank bought it in 1948 to have a guaranteed American outlet for his British product. (Among the big-budget Rank films Eagle-Lion got to distribute in the U.S. was the 1948 Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film The Red Shoes, a spectacular movie and a sensational hit that put the company on the map big-time.) Rank’s ownership and name change to symbolize the American (Eagle)/British (Lion) alliance led to some minor increases in budgets and star power in the PRC product (PRC’s best director, Edgar G. Ulmer, got to make the 1948 film Ruthless with Louis Hayward and two of Warners’ “B”-listers, Zachary Scott and Sydney Greenstreet), but My Outlaw Brother was an independent production and a really cheap movie, filmed in Mexico to take advantage of the country’s desert locations (with the studio work done at the Tepeyac studios in Mexico City — I guess Bogeaus’s budget was so low he couldn’t even afford Mexico’s best studio, Churubusco!) and with a surprisingly good cast — Wanda Hendrix, Robert Preston, Robert Stack — and a story based on the novel South of the Rio Grande by pulp Western specialist Max Brand.
It’s a Western, of course, with Rooney playing Denny O’Moore, who’s traveling through Texas in the border regions looking for his long-lost older brother Patrick (Robert Stack) and encountering U.S. marshal Joe Walter (Robert Preston), who’s looking for “El Tigre,” a Mexican bandit leader who uses a large gang of about 20 or so to raid banks and other cash-rich businesses on this side of the border, then flees back across la linea and thumbs his nose at U.S. authority. Walter has negotiated with the Mexican government to pursue “El Tigre” on both sides of the border, and Denny happens to be driving his buckboard through a Texas town when “El Tigre” stages a raid — and “El Tigre,” not being the brightest bulb in Mexican bandit-dom, lets the sole witness to his raid get away alive. The sequence of “El Tigre”’s raid on the tiny town’s trading post is easily the action highlight of the film — and it’s over in the first reel; from there on in the movie (written by Gene Fowler, Jr. and Al Levitt, and directed competently but unspectacularly by Elliot Nugent) is nothing but a series of boring scenes involving Rooney’s character as a comic-relief role swollen to movie-dominating dimensions.
Nugent scored one directorial coup — he got Rooney to underplay in his two big scenes, one midway through when Preston’s character informs him that his brother is “El Tigre”’s right-hand man, and another at the end in which “El Tigre” is shot down (at the end of a singularly unexciting attempt at a big action climax), the wig he’s been wearing to make himself look indigenous falls off and it’s revealed that Patrick O’Moore wasn’t just “El Tigre”’s sidekick, he was the “tiger” himself. Other than that, though, this is a singularly dull movie that’s 82 minutes long (which is about 20 more minutes than its meager plot could sustain), fun to look at thanks to the marvelous red-filter effects from cinematographer José Ortiz Ramos but utterly boring otherwise — and Hendrix’s role doesn’t help much either; she’s a Mexican señorita who starts the movie as Stack’s girlfriend and ends up as Rooney’s (something he’s especially glad about because, unlike all the other women he’s dated, she’s small enough he can actually lift her — it’s that kind of a movie!) and the twitchy appeal she showed off in movies like Confidential Agent and Ride the Pink Horse is totally absent here.
Friday, September 11, 2009
The Guns of Navarone (Columbia, 1961)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
With enough time to run an unusually long movie, I ran Charles The Guns of Navarone, a big World War II spectacle from 1961 that I remember hearing a great deal about when I was a child but never actually seeing. Apparently the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [sic] has encouraged the major-domos of Turner Classic Movies to dredge up every previous film they have in their catalog dealing with commandos in World War II — and this is certainly one of the most famous ones, a big-budget, star-laden (Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn head up the cast, and below them are a batch of fine British actors including Stanley Baker, Anthony Quayle — whose portrayal of a major whose leg is badly wounded during the action practically steals the movie out from under his more highly regarded colleagues — James Robertson Justice, who also delivers an opening narration, and Richard Harris, whose presence here puts everyone else in this cast one degree of separation from the casts of the first two Harry Potter movies), 2 1/2-hour spectacle written and produced by Carl Foreman (interesting to see this as a point of comparison to his earlier, far less pretentious “B” The Clay Pigeon from 12 years earlier!) and directed in a competent, workmanlike but not especially stirring fashion by J. Lee Thompson.
The big problem with The Guns of Navarone is it’s really nothing more than action porn — the plot, such as it is, is there merely to set up the spectacular action scenes — but Foreman keeps trying to inflate it and put in deep philosophical and social issues about morality, truth and people’s responsibilities towards each other and their collective mission, and every time between big action set-pieces the characters start jabbering with each other about these things the movie just sits down, gets boring and keeps us waiting impatiently for the next action highlight. There are other problems with the movie — like Gregory Peck being way overqualified for the role (he appeared in the trailer for the film and said it was a totally new thing for him — whereas what it seems like was a role he took for the money while waiting for the financing to come through for To Kill a Mockingbird, a film he really cared about and desperately wanted to make) and Thompson’s direction, which there’s really nothing wrong with except one misses the last soupçon of power, energy and drive directors as different as Alfred Hitchcock (with his unbeatable flair for suspense) or John Huston (with his fascination with stories about small groups of people on mad quests) could have brought the plot.
Based on a novel by Alistair MacLean (who was so taken with its success as both a novel and a film that for years he kept on cranking out sequels, always taking pains to include the name “Navarone” in the titles, like Force 10 from Navarone), The Guns of Navarone has a simple enough story that plausibly sets up the action: 200 British soldiers are stranded on an Aegean island and, though the island has no military value whatsoever, the Germans are determined to attack it and annihilate the British garrison just to prove that they can and intimidate Turkey to enter the war on the German side. (One wonders why they consider that so important since Turkey fought World War One on the German side — and a fat lot of good it did the Germans then!) The problem is that the six destroyers the Brits plan to send in to evacuate the men before the Germans can attack have to pass through a strait guarded by the Guns of Navarone, two gigantic pieces of state-of-the-art cannons guided by radar control. (I thought the British were well ahead of the Germans in using radar in World War II.) Charles jokingly came up with a theme song for the film — sung vaguely to the tune of “Hernando’s Hideaway” from The Pajama Game, it went, “We are the Guns of Navarone, you see/We’re two big pieces of artillery.”
Realizing that the guns of Navarone are immune from attack either by sea or air, the Allied commander, Commodore Jensen (James Robertson Justice, who also begins the film with a really pretentious narration citing Greece’s history as the land of myths and legends and implying that the story we’re about to see is a modern addition to those), hires a small group of men to form a commando unit to rappel up the cliffside of Navarone (the only part the Germans aren’t guarding since they figure the cliff faces are sheer and therefore impossible to climb) and infiltrate the island, get to the guns and blow them up. The key members of the group are rival mountain climbers Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) and Andrea Stavros (Anthony Quinn) — Stavros hates Mallory’s guts because in an earlier part of the war Mallory gave some Germans safe conduct to carry out some of their wounded, and instead they used that to attack Stavros’s home town and kill his wife and children, and for that Stavros has sworn to kill Mallory after the war (though Carl Foreman does surprisingly little with this antagonism in his script) — and the explosives expert, British corporal Miller (David Niven at his most supercilious — though this is the first film of his I’ve seen that convinced me he actually would have been a great James Bond; he was the only actor Ian Fleming considered for the part, and had he launched the Bond series it would have worked quite well even though the overall “feel” of it would have been quite different from what ultimately developed, with more intrigue and less superhero-type action).
They have to deal with trial after trial, including stumbling into a Greek wedding (it may not have been big or fat, but an uncredited Victor Buono was cast as the priest!) at which the Germans capture them — and of course they engineer a totally unbelievable few-against-many escape from the Germans on their way to the mission, which turns out to be unexpectedly difficult because a traitor in their midst, Anna (Gia Scala) — who’d supposedly been rendered catatonic by having been beaten and gang-raped by German soldiers, but in fact agreed to change sides to avoid that fate — has been alerting the Germans to their every move along the way (how? They were in such remote locations that, unless she had a portable radio, there was no way she could contact them!) and has also thrown out most of Miller’s explosive kit, leaving him enough to blow up the guns of Navarone but not enough to get the hell out of there before the bombs go off. The final sequence — in which Mallory and Miller essentially booby-trap the guns, setting the explosives to go off when the Germans use the elevator in their field command outpost — has some reasonably good suspense editing (notably a gimmick in which the elevator car twice stops just short of where it needs to be to set off the bomb and the Germans actually get a few shots at the fleet of destroyers before the guns finally blow up) and is marvelously satisfying when the guns not only blow up but explode with such ferocity (presumably from the explosion setting off the artillery shells the Germans had already brought up to the guns and were going to fire with them) it looks from afar — specifically from the boat in which the principals are escaping — as if Navarone has finally turned into a volcano.
The film won the Academy Award for best special effects, beating out The Absent-Minded Professor (the year’s only other nominee in the category, which in itself is an index of how much movies have changed since 1961!), and thoroughly deserved it — particularly in a sequence in which the little boat they’re using to sail to Navarone is hit by a storm and sinks, and the edits are so seamless one can’t tell which scenes were done with a real boat and which with a model. At the same time, there are two earlier sequences — in one of which the commander who sends them on a mission offers to steal them a German military boat instead, and Mallory turns him down on the ground that they need to look like simple Greek fishermen and therefore need a seedy-looking and barely seaworthy craft; and another scene in which the commandos are stopped by a real German military boat and have to kill the entire crew and blow up the boat — which left me wondering that maybe when they confronted that German boat, they should have stolen it and taken it the rest of the way instead of destroying it.
There are some interesting comic anecdotes surrounding The Guns of Navarone, including a particularly marvelous satire Mad magazine did of it “in the day” in which they called it The Guns of Minestrone and set up the scene in which Mallory has just realized that one of the people in their unit is a traitor by having Mallory say, “What war-movie cliché haven’t we done yet? Is there a kid from Brooklyn who’s too young to die? No, I have it — one of us is a traitor!” — and then, when the camera is panning the faces of the crew to determine who it is, in Mad’s version one of the people in the unit is Adolf Hitler.
But the most charming story about this movie came from record producer John Culshaw, who when he went to Tel Aviv in the early 1960’s to record the Israel Philharmonic, found that Decca’s recording engineers had decided that the best-sounding venue was a movie theatre in a suburban village called Rishon-le-Zion, whose manager agreed to rent it to the recording crew on the condition that he be allowed to continue to show The Guns of Navarone twice a night. “In the evenings,” Culshaw recalled, “the projectionist liked to invite us to his box to share a bottle of the local wine, and on one such occasion he forgot to insert the anamorphic lens on one of the two projectors while screening The Guns of Navarone, This meant that the audience saw odd-numbered reels in the correct CinemaScope ratio, and even-numbered reels in the regular format, with the result that characters in the center of the picture were grotesquely elongated and thin. Nobody in the audience seemed to notice.”
With enough time to run an unusually long movie, I ran Charles The Guns of Navarone, a big World War II spectacle from 1961 that I remember hearing a great deal about when I was a child but never actually seeing. Apparently the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [sic] has encouraged the major-domos of Turner Classic Movies to dredge up every previous film they have in their catalog dealing with commandos in World War II — and this is certainly one of the most famous ones, a big-budget, star-laden (Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn head up the cast, and below them are a batch of fine British actors including Stanley Baker, Anthony Quayle — whose portrayal of a major whose leg is badly wounded during the action practically steals the movie out from under his more highly regarded colleagues — James Robertson Justice, who also delivers an opening narration, and Richard Harris, whose presence here puts everyone else in this cast one degree of separation from the casts of the first two Harry Potter movies), 2 1/2-hour spectacle written and produced by Carl Foreman (interesting to see this as a point of comparison to his earlier, far less pretentious “B” The Clay Pigeon from 12 years earlier!) and directed in a competent, workmanlike but not especially stirring fashion by J. Lee Thompson.
The big problem with The Guns of Navarone is it’s really nothing more than action porn — the plot, such as it is, is there merely to set up the spectacular action scenes — but Foreman keeps trying to inflate it and put in deep philosophical and social issues about morality, truth and people’s responsibilities towards each other and their collective mission, and every time between big action set-pieces the characters start jabbering with each other about these things the movie just sits down, gets boring and keeps us waiting impatiently for the next action highlight. There are other problems with the movie — like Gregory Peck being way overqualified for the role (he appeared in the trailer for the film and said it was a totally new thing for him — whereas what it seems like was a role he took for the money while waiting for the financing to come through for To Kill a Mockingbird, a film he really cared about and desperately wanted to make) and Thompson’s direction, which there’s really nothing wrong with except one misses the last soupçon of power, energy and drive directors as different as Alfred Hitchcock (with his unbeatable flair for suspense) or John Huston (with his fascination with stories about small groups of people on mad quests) could have brought the plot.
Based on a novel by Alistair MacLean (who was so taken with its success as both a novel and a film that for years he kept on cranking out sequels, always taking pains to include the name “Navarone” in the titles, like Force 10 from Navarone), The Guns of Navarone has a simple enough story that plausibly sets up the action: 200 British soldiers are stranded on an Aegean island and, though the island has no military value whatsoever, the Germans are determined to attack it and annihilate the British garrison just to prove that they can and intimidate Turkey to enter the war on the German side. (One wonders why they consider that so important since Turkey fought World War One on the German side — and a fat lot of good it did the Germans then!) The problem is that the six destroyers the Brits plan to send in to evacuate the men before the Germans can attack have to pass through a strait guarded by the Guns of Navarone, two gigantic pieces of state-of-the-art cannons guided by radar control. (I thought the British were well ahead of the Germans in using radar in World War II.) Charles jokingly came up with a theme song for the film — sung vaguely to the tune of “Hernando’s Hideaway” from The Pajama Game, it went, “We are the Guns of Navarone, you see/We’re two big pieces of artillery.”
Realizing that the guns of Navarone are immune from attack either by sea or air, the Allied commander, Commodore Jensen (James Robertson Justice, who also begins the film with a really pretentious narration citing Greece’s history as the land of myths and legends and implying that the story we’re about to see is a modern addition to those), hires a small group of men to form a commando unit to rappel up the cliffside of Navarone (the only part the Germans aren’t guarding since they figure the cliff faces are sheer and therefore impossible to climb) and infiltrate the island, get to the guns and blow them up. The key members of the group are rival mountain climbers Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) and Andrea Stavros (Anthony Quinn) — Stavros hates Mallory’s guts because in an earlier part of the war Mallory gave some Germans safe conduct to carry out some of their wounded, and instead they used that to attack Stavros’s home town and kill his wife and children, and for that Stavros has sworn to kill Mallory after the war (though Carl Foreman does surprisingly little with this antagonism in his script) — and the explosives expert, British corporal Miller (David Niven at his most supercilious — though this is the first film of his I’ve seen that convinced me he actually would have been a great James Bond; he was the only actor Ian Fleming considered for the part, and had he launched the Bond series it would have worked quite well even though the overall “feel” of it would have been quite different from what ultimately developed, with more intrigue and less superhero-type action).
They have to deal with trial after trial, including stumbling into a Greek wedding (it may not have been big or fat, but an uncredited Victor Buono was cast as the priest!) at which the Germans capture them — and of course they engineer a totally unbelievable few-against-many escape from the Germans on their way to the mission, which turns out to be unexpectedly difficult because a traitor in their midst, Anna (Gia Scala) — who’d supposedly been rendered catatonic by having been beaten and gang-raped by German soldiers, but in fact agreed to change sides to avoid that fate — has been alerting the Germans to their every move along the way (how? They were in such remote locations that, unless she had a portable radio, there was no way she could contact them!) and has also thrown out most of Miller’s explosive kit, leaving him enough to blow up the guns of Navarone but not enough to get the hell out of there before the bombs go off. The final sequence — in which Mallory and Miller essentially booby-trap the guns, setting the explosives to go off when the Germans use the elevator in their field command outpost — has some reasonably good suspense editing (notably a gimmick in which the elevator car twice stops just short of where it needs to be to set off the bomb and the Germans actually get a few shots at the fleet of destroyers before the guns finally blow up) and is marvelously satisfying when the guns not only blow up but explode with such ferocity (presumably from the explosion setting off the artillery shells the Germans had already brought up to the guns and were going to fire with them) it looks from afar — specifically from the boat in which the principals are escaping — as if Navarone has finally turned into a volcano.
The film won the Academy Award for best special effects, beating out The Absent-Minded Professor (the year’s only other nominee in the category, which in itself is an index of how much movies have changed since 1961!), and thoroughly deserved it — particularly in a sequence in which the little boat they’re using to sail to Navarone is hit by a storm and sinks, and the edits are so seamless one can’t tell which scenes were done with a real boat and which with a model. At the same time, there are two earlier sequences — in one of which the commander who sends them on a mission offers to steal them a German military boat instead, and Mallory turns him down on the ground that they need to look like simple Greek fishermen and therefore need a seedy-looking and barely seaworthy craft; and another scene in which the commandos are stopped by a real German military boat and have to kill the entire crew and blow up the boat — which left me wondering that maybe when they confronted that German boat, they should have stolen it and taken it the rest of the way instead of destroying it.
There are some interesting comic anecdotes surrounding The Guns of Navarone, including a particularly marvelous satire Mad magazine did of it “in the day” in which they called it The Guns of Minestrone and set up the scene in which Mallory has just realized that one of the people in their unit is a traitor by having Mallory say, “What war-movie cliché haven’t we done yet? Is there a kid from Brooklyn who’s too young to die? No, I have it — one of us is a traitor!” — and then, when the camera is panning the faces of the crew to determine who it is, in Mad’s version one of the people in the unit is Adolf Hitler.
But the most charming story about this movie came from record producer John Culshaw, who when he went to Tel Aviv in the early 1960’s to record the Israel Philharmonic, found that Decca’s recording engineers had decided that the best-sounding venue was a movie theatre in a suburban village called Rishon-le-Zion, whose manager agreed to rent it to the recording crew on the condition that he be allowed to continue to show The Guns of Navarone twice a night. “In the evenings,” Culshaw recalled, “the projectionist liked to invite us to his box to share a bottle of the local wine, and on one such occasion he forgot to insert the anamorphic lens on one of the two projectors while screening The Guns of Navarone, This meant that the audience saw odd-numbered reels in the correct CinemaScope ratio, and even-numbered reels in the regular format, with the result that characters in the center of the picture were grotesquely elongated and thin. Nobody in the audience seemed to notice.”
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The Clay Pigeon (RKO, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Clay Pigeon, a surprisingly good 1949 quasi-noir “B” from RKO billed as the story of an amnesiac who comes to and suddenly finds he’s being charged with treason. I had dreaded the prospect that this might be one of Howard Hughes’ paranoid propaganda-fests, but it turned out to be a quite watchable 63-minute movie, expertly directed by the young Richard Fleischer from a script by later blacklistee Carl Foreman. The film starts at the U.S. Navy hospital in Long Beach, where Jim Fletcher (Bill Williams) is coming to after a two-year coma. It starts with a silent sequence in which a blind man is shown putting his hands around his neck — apparently attempting to strangle him, though we’re not sure why — and his doctor (Frank Wilcox) and nurse (Ann Doran) comes in and stops him. Fletcher regains consciousness just in time to hear the doctor and other members of the hospital staff say that they’ve been awaiting his return to consciousness to put him before a court-martial on charges of treason, and that now that he’s come to he’ll be transferred to the prison ward awaiting trial. He sneaks out of the hospital room, steals some clothes from a supply closet, and escapes.
His plan is to seek out his two best friends in the Navy, Mark Gregory (who’s already dead and isn’t seen in the film, not even in flashback) and Ted Niles (future director Richard Quine), to find out what they know about his life and what he might have done to make anyone think he was a traitor. He goes to Los Angeles and then to San Diego, invading the apartment of Mark’s widow, Martha Gregory (played by Williams’ real-life wife, Barbara Hale) and holding her hostage when she tries to call the police on him. Determined to get in touch with Ted Niles, whom he thinks is the only person who can establish his innocence of whatever the charge against him is — he still doesn’t know that — he commandeers Martha’s car and forces her to drive him north in a sequence surprisingly reminiscent of Hitchcock’s films The 39 Steps and Saboteur (also about an innocent hero forced into association with a woman who, at least at first, considers him guilty).
She turns around and realizes his innocence when they’re followed by a car with two men inside whom she (and we) at first think are cops, but instead of pulling them over and arresting him they try to run him off the road and kill him. They survive the attempt on their lives but the shock causes him to black out and relive some of his wartime experiences — and, in a flashback depicted with an early and quite effective solarization effect, we see that he, Mark Gregory and Ted Niles were all inmates in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp run by a sadistic Japanese officer, Ken Tokoyama (Richard Loo — who when he got the role must have groaned and wondered why he was still being offered the parts of sadistic Japanese officers four years after the war had ended!), and Jim remembers that Mark was the head of a group of prisoners who supplemented their atrocious food rations by stealing from the Japanese storehouse, and that the charge against him is that he allegedly reported Mark to the Japanese and got Mark killed.
Jim and Martha spend a week in a trailer park in Oceanside, with him recuperating from the shock, and when they finally get to L.A. they discover Tokoyama is living there — they spot him in a Chinese restaurant called “The White Lotus” that is abruptly closed down the day after, Jim traces the property agent that controls the location, and eventually it turns out that Niles was the real villain (something we guessed about three reels before the filmmakers finally told us); not only did he report the food thieves to Tokoyama, but he, Tokoyama and Wheeler, the property agent, are involved in an elaborate criminal scheme to pass some of the counterfeit U.S. currency the Japanese printed up just after Pearl Harbor for their agents and invading forces to use once they conquered L.A. There’s a suspenseful climax on board a train (with Fleischer seemingly warming up for an even more stylish thriller, The Narrow Margin, which he made at RKO three years later) in which the bad guys take Jim hostage and make their escape, but agents of Naval Intelligence finally track down Martha Gregory (there’s a neat little mini-reversal in which they enter the hotel room where she and Jim have been staying and at first she thinks they’re the thugs who’ve been trying to kill her and Jim, and when they turn out to be genuine law-enforcement agents she heaves a sigh of relief and, in a way too chipper tone of voice, goes, “Naval Intelligence? Why didn’t you say so?”) and she leads them to the train station, too late to catch the train before it leaves, but they’re able to get to it anyway after Fletcher pulls the emergency stop cord just before the baddies are going to kill him.
The Clay Pigeon (which seems to be the only movie on imdb.com’s list that’s called that, though I’d have thought it would be a really obvious and fairly common thriller title) is a neatly done thriller, maintaining audience interest and suspense throughout, and Carl Foreman’s script is an object lesson in the art (and the limits) of the “reversal” modern-day writer-directors like Tony (Duplicity) Gilroy would do well to heed — as well as containing a beautiful scene between Jim and a Chinese widow (Mary Marco) who helps hide him from the bad guys as they chase him through Chinatown whose defiance of all the typical racist stereotypes gives away Foreman’s Leftist politics. The movie is so good one can forgive the flawed casting — Bill Williams is annoyingly nerdy, especially at first (he gathers strength as the film progresses), just as he was in his best-known film, Deadline at Dawn (in which he was also cast as a sailor unjustly accused of a crime); and though Barbara Hale acts her own part with authority and conviction, there’s utterly no charisma between them on screen even though they were a real-life couple; Bogart and Bacall these two are not!
The film was The Clay Pigeon, a surprisingly good 1949 quasi-noir “B” from RKO billed as the story of an amnesiac who comes to and suddenly finds he’s being charged with treason. I had dreaded the prospect that this might be one of Howard Hughes’ paranoid propaganda-fests, but it turned out to be a quite watchable 63-minute movie, expertly directed by the young Richard Fleischer from a script by later blacklistee Carl Foreman. The film starts at the U.S. Navy hospital in Long Beach, where Jim Fletcher (Bill Williams) is coming to after a two-year coma. It starts with a silent sequence in which a blind man is shown putting his hands around his neck — apparently attempting to strangle him, though we’re not sure why — and his doctor (Frank Wilcox) and nurse (Ann Doran) comes in and stops him. Fletcher regains consciousness just in time to hear the doctor and other members of the hospital staff say that they’ve been awaiting his return to consciousness to put him before a court-martial on charges of treason, and that now that he’s come to he’ll be transferred to the prison ward awaiting trial. He sneaks out of the hospital room, steals some clothes from a supply closet, and escapes.
His plan is to seek out his two best friends in the Navy, Mark Gregory (who’s already dead and isn’t seen in the film, not even in flashback) and Ted Niles (future director Richard Quine), to find out what they know about his life and what he might have done to make anyone think he was a traitor. He goes to Los Angeles and then to San Diego, invading the apartment of Mark’s widow, Martha Gregory (played by Williams’ real-life wife, Barbara Hale) and holding her hostage when she tries to call the police on him. Determined to get in touch with Ted Niles, whom he thinks is the only person who can establish his innocence of whatever the charge against him is — he still doesn’t know that — he commandeers Martha’s car and forces her to drive him north in a sequence surprisingly reminiscent of Hitchcock’s films The 39 Steps and Saboteur (also about an innocent hero forced into association with a woman who, at least at first, considers him guilty).
She turns around and realizes his innocence when they’re followed by a car with two men inside whom she (and we) at first think are cops, but instead of pulling them over and arresting him they try to run him off the road and kill him. They survive the attempt on their lives but the shock causes him to black out and relive some of his wartime experiences — and, in a flashback depicted with an early and quite effective solarization effect, we see that he, Mark Gregory and Ted Niles were all inmates in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp run by a sadistic Japanese officer, Ken Tokoyama (Richard Loo — who when he got the role must have groaned and wondered why he was still being offered the parts of sadistic Japanese officers four years after the war had ended!), and Jim remembers that Mark was the head of a group of prisoners who supplemented their atrocious food rations by stealing from the Japanese storehouse, and that the charge against him is that he allegedly reported Mark to the Japanese and got Mark killed.
Jim and Martha spend a week in a trailer park in Oceanside, with him recuperating from the shock, and when they finally get to L.A. they discover Tokoyama is living there — they spot him in a Chinese restaurant called “The White Lotus” that is abruptly closed down the day after, Jim traces the property agent that controls the location, and eventually it turns out that Niles was the real villain (something we guessed about three reels before the filmmakers finally told us); not only did he report the food thieves to Tokoyama, but he, Tokoyama and Wheeler, the property agent, are involved in an elaborate criminal scheme to pass some of the counterfeit U.S. currency the Japanese printed up just after Pearl Harbor for their agents and invading forces to use once they conquered L.A. There’s a suspenseful climax on board a train (with Fleischer seemingly warming up for an even more stylish thriller, The Narrow Margin, which he made at RKO three years later) in which the bad guys take Jim hostage and make their escape, but agents of Naval Intelligence finally track down Martha Gregory (there’s a neat little mini-reversal in which they enter the hotel room where she and Jim have been staying and at first she thinks they’re the thugs who’ve been trying to kill her and Jim, and when they turn out to be genuine law-enforcement agents she heaves a sigh of relief and, in a way too chipper tone of voice, goes, “Naval Intelligence? Why didn’t you say so?”) and she leads them to the train station, too late to catch the train before it leaves, but they’re able to get to it anyway after Fletcher pulls the emergency stop cord just before the baddies are going to kill him.
The Clay Pigeon (which seems to be the only movie on imdb.com’s list that’s called that, though I’d have thought it would be a really obvious and fairly common thriller title) is a neatly done thriller, maintaining audience interest and suspense throughout, and Carl Foreman’s script is an object lesson in the art (and the limits) of the “reversal” modern-day writer-directors like Tony (Duplicity) Gilroy would do well to heed — as well as containing a beautiful scene between Jim and a Chinese widow (Mary Marco) who helps hide him from the bad guys as they chase him through Chinatown whose defiance of all the typical racist stereotypes gives away Foreman’s Leftist politics. The movie is so good one can forgive the flawed casting — Bill Williams is annoyingly nerdy, especially at first (he gathers strength as the film progresses), just as he was in his best-known film, Deadline at Dawn (in which he was also cast as a sailor unjustly accused of a crime); and though Barbara Hale acts her own part with authority and conviction, there’s utterly no charisma between them on screen even though they were a real-life couple; Bogart and Bacall these two are not!
Monday, September 7, 2009
Nothing but the Truth (Battleplan/Yuri/Sony, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Nothing but the Truth, a 2008 thriller based on current events — writer/director Rod Lurie was obviously riffing off the case of Judith Miller, former New York Times reporter who went to jail for 85 days rather than reveal the name of her source for a story she never actually wrote about the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” exploding the point in President Bush’s case for the war in Iraq that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake (a step in the refining of pitchblende into uranium) from the African country of Niger. In Lurie’s rescencion, the President is someone named Lyman, and in the opening scene he is the subject of an assassination attempt. He survives, but becomes convinced that the government of Venezuela is behind the attempt on his life and orders an attack on Venezuela despite the advice of the U.S.’s former Venezuelan ambassador, Oscar Van Doren (Jamey Sheridan), that Venezuela had nothing to do with the assassination attempt.
Then the scene cuts to the offices of the (fictional) Washington, D.C. paper Capital Sun-Times, where reporter Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale, top-billed) is putting the finishing touches on a story “outing” Oscar’s wife Erica (Vera Farmiga) as a CIA agent. She’s assured by her editor, Bonnie Benjamin (Angela Bassett, revealing her versatility in a down-to-earth role far different from her incandescent performance as Tina Turner!), and the paper’s legal staff that the government will be upset with the story but they can handle it. To their shock, they find the legal process working at warp speed — within two days the President has appointed attorney Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon) as special prosecutor, and within a week — despite the paper’s retention of renowned First Amendment attorney Alan Burnside (Alan Alda) to represent her — the government has thrown Rachel in jail and Dubois announced that she’s going to stay there until she reveals who was her original source for the story. From that point the film turns into a Kafka-esque nightmare, as Rachel stays in jail almost a full year and loses her husband Ray (David Schwimmer) and their son Timmy (Preston Bailey) — he takes up with another woman and sues for, and wins, custody of him.
There isn’t quite as much depiction of the culture shock of an upper-middle-class WASP in jail with prostitutes and other female lowlifes as I would have expected from the plot premise, but the film is utterly gripping and manages to make genuinely tragic figures of both Rachel and Erica, whose life is also ruined, as well as evoking great performances not only from the women but also from Dillon, who’s lost his old “Brat Pack” standing but matured as an actor as well as a person. He was the one bright spot in the otherwise unwatchable Factotum and he shines equally here, in a very different role in a much better movie. Dillon plays his character’s self-righteousness to a “T,” and if there’s a flaw in the film it’s that Lurie didn’t give him more to work with — Dillon sought to portray the character in a heroic light, since that’s his image of himself, and he does that quite well even though handicapped by a script that makes clear what side of the fence Lurie is on in the conflict between the First Amendment and “national security” at the heart of the film.
It occurred to me that Lurie may have drawn his plot as much from Susan McDougal (the estranged wife of Whitewater promoter Jim McDougal), who spent two years in federal custody after refusing to testify before the grand jury called by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr to investigate Bill Clinton) as from Judith Miller (who only served 85 days before her source released her from her obligation to keep his identity confidential). Perhaps this movie moved me as much as it did because of my personal connections with it — not only did I see McDougal on her book tour and read her memoir, but I personally knew David Agranoff when he was refusing to testify before a grand jury and was put in jail (and I wrote a letter to the judge on his behalf expressing my personal knowledge of him and his principled refusal to cooperate with grand jury investigations, period — the point was important because judges are not allowed to use the federal contempt power to punish people for refusing to testify to a grand jury; they’re only allowed to put them in custody in order to get them to testify, and if the judge becomes convinced that no amount of jail time will persuade the person to testify, s/he must order them released — a legal point that becomes a plot point in the movie).
Throughout the film Lurie not only maintains our interest in his plot, but he keeps us in genuine suspense and he makes us identify with his characters — a seemingly rare trait in a modern film, given that today’s moviemaking world is seemingly filled with writers and directors who think they’re being “cool” by depicting their characters dispassionately, as if they were lab rats in a maze, and avoiding building any audience identification with them. What’s more, his movie also is one of the most intriguing depictions of how small a town Washington, D.C. (“played” in this movie by Memphis, Tennessee) really is; the reporter and the woman she “outs” as a CIA agent don’t know each other per se but they both have kids in the same school, and there are other intriguing clashes between the characters’ social contacts with each other and their official roles. Nothing But the Truth was apparently kept from a theatrical release by the recession, which forced its initial distributor, Yari Productions, into bankruptcy — a real pity, since it’s so much better than any other film inspired by the “war on terror” I’ve seen; it avoids the insanely melodramatic plot complications of Lions for Lambs and Rendition (not to mention the God-awful Duplicity!) and is moving and supremely watchable start-to-finish in a way I don’t expect from a recent film!
The film was Nothing but the Truth, a 2008 thriller based on current events — writer/director Rod Lurie was obviously riffing off the case of Judith Miller, former New York Times reporter who went to jail for 85 days rather than reveal the name of her source for a story she never actually wrote about the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” exploding the point in President Bush’s case for the war in Iraq that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake (a step in the refining of pitchblende into uranium) from the African country of Niger. In Lurie’s rescencion, the President is someone named Lyman, and in the opening scene he is the subject of an assassination attempt. He survives, but becomes convinced that the government of Venezuela is behind the attempt on his life and orders an attack on Venezuela despite the advice of the U.S.’s former Venezuelan ambassador, Oscar Van Doren (Jamey Sheridan), that Venezuela had nothing to do with the assassination attempt.
Then the scene cuts to the offices of the (fictional) Washington, D.C. paper Capital Sun-Times, where reporter Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale, top-billed) is putting the finishing touches on a story “outing” Oscar’s wife Erica (Vera Farmiga) as a CIA agent. She’s assured by her editor, Bonnie Benjamin (Angela Bassett, revealing her versatility in a down-to-earth role far different from her incandescent performance as Tina Turner!), and the paper’s legal staff that the government will be upset with the story but they can handle it. To their shock, they find the legal process working at warp speed — within two days the President has appointed attorney Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon) as special prosecutor, and within a week — despite the paper’s retention of renowned First Amendment attorney Alan Burnside (Alan Alda) to represent her — the government has thrown Rachel in jail and Dubois announced that she’s going to stay there until she reveals who was her original source for the story. From that point the film turns into a Kafka-esque nightmare, as Rachel stays in jail almost a full year and loses her husband Ray (David Schwimmer) and their son Timmy (Preston Bailey) — he takes up with another woman and sues for, and wins, custody of him.
There isn’t quite as much depiction of the culture shock of an upper-middle-class WASP in jail with prostitutes and other female lowlifes as I would have expected from the plot premise, but the film is utterly gripping and manages to make genuinely tragic figures of both Rachel and Erica, whose life is also ruined, as well as evoking great performances not only from the women but also from Dillon, who’s lost his old “Brat Pack” standing but matured as an actor as well as a person. He was the one bright spot in the otherwise unwatchable Factotum and he shines equally here, in a very different role in a much better movie. Dillon plays his character’s self-righteousness to a “T,” and if there’s a flaw in the film it’s that Lurie didn’t give him more to work with — Dillon sought to portray the character in a heroic light, since that’s his image of himself, and he does that quite well even though handicapped by a script that makes clear what side of the fence Lurie is on in the conflict between the First Amendment and “national security” at the heart of the film.
It occurred to me that Lurie may have drawn his plot as much from Susan McDougal (the estranged wife of Whitewater promoter Jim McDougal), who spent two years in federal custody after refusing to testify before the grand jury called by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr to investigate Bill Clinton) as from Judith Miller (who only served 85 days before her source released her from her obligation to keep his identity confidential). Perhaps this movie moved me as much as it did because of my personal connections with it — not only did I see McDougal on her book tour and read her memoir, but I personally knew David Agranoff when he was refusing to testify before a grand jury and was put in jail (and I wrote a letter to the judge on his behalf expressing my personal knowledge of him and his principled refusal to cooperate with grand jury investigations, period — the point was important because judges are not allowed to use the federal contempt power to punish people for refusing to testify to a grand jury; they’re only allowed to put them in custody in order to get them to testify, and if the judge becomes convinced that no amount of jail time will persuade the person to testify, s/he must order them released — a legal point that becomes a plot point in the movie).
Throughout the film Lurie not only maintains our interest in his plot, but he keeps us in genuine suspense and he makes us identify with his characters — a seemingly rare trait in a modern film, given that today’s moviemaking world is seemingly filled with writers and directors who think they’re being “cool” by depicting their characters dispassionately, as if they were lab rats in a maze, and avoiding building any audience identification with them. What’s more, his movie also is one of the most intriguing depictions of how small a town Washington, D.C. (“played” in this movie by Memphis, Tennessee) really is; the reporter and the woman she “outs” as a CIA agent don’t know each other per se but they both have kids in the same school, and there are other intriguing clashes between the characters’ social contacts with each other and their official roles. Nothing But the Truth was apparently kept from a theatrical release by the recession, which forced its initial distributor, Yari Productions, into bankruptcy — a real pity, since it’s so much better than any other film inspired by the “war on terror” I’ve seen; it avoids the insanely melodramatic plot complications of Lions for Lambs and Rendition (not to mention the God-awful Duplicity!) and is moving and supremely watchable start-to-finish in a way I don’t expect from a recent film!
Baby for Sale (Lifetime, 2004)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Baby for Sale, shown by Lifetime last Saturday for a special event called “We’re in Labor … Day!,” a quirky theme to pun on the two major meanings of “labor” by picking the Labor Day weekend for a festival of movies about pregnancy — though actually no one is pregnant in Baby for Sale and the movie’s central premise is that, after years of trying and failing to conceive a child of their own despite all the tricks in the current fertility doctor’s armamentarium (including drugs as well as in vitro), Dr. Steve Johnson (Hart Bochner, considerably better looking than the guys who usually play Lifetime husbands) and his wife Nathalie (Dana Delany) finally give up on the natural route and decide to adopt. Only they’re unable to get a timely adoption through regular, above-board channels, so in desperation Nathalie posts their entire adoption profile on the Internet and gets a nibble from a corrupt Hungarian attorney named Gabor Szabo (Bruce Ramsey).
The moment I heard the character name I immediately recalled the real Gabor Szabo, a jazz-rock guitarist popular in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s who made albums with titles like Spellbinder and Bacchanal, and wondered if the gimmick was going to be that the name was phony and the guy might not even be Hungarian — but apparently we’re supposed to think that is his name and it was the writer, John Wierick, who either ripped off the name or thought of it independently. Anyway, Gabor has hooked up with a fellow Hungarian immigrant, Janka Maglar (Elizabeth Marleau), who’d recently given birth to a baby girl named Gitta (Kayla Pownall). Janka has simply asked Gabor to find her baby a good American family to raise him, since she can’t afford a kid on what she was making in Hungary, but Gabor sees little Gitta as a goldmine and offers her to the Johnsons for “expenses” of $100,000. He also offers her to several other similarly desperate U.S. families with the intention of selling her to the highest bidder.
The Johnsons catch on to what’s going on and report it to the FBI, whose agents tell them that Gabor hasn’t broken any federal laws and even in New York (where the Johnsons have traveled from their home in Minnesota to pick up “their” child) all he’s guilty of is a misdemeanor (like walking your dog without a leash,” a cynical New York cop tells them — lines Gabor himself repeats later in the film). Like a lot of Lifetime movies, this one is actually pretty good once you get through all the saccharine exposition — it’s a good fusion of problem movie and crime drama, directed in a welcomely straightforward fashion by Peter Svatek (odd that a movie involving Hungarians would be directed by someone with a Slavic name), though Wiereck’s script has a problem in that the big heart-pounding climax when Gabor finally gets arrested as a result of the Johnsons’ willingness to entrap him takes place two-thirds of the way through the movie and the finale is a bit of an anticlimax … though there are a few nice twists and turns left, including the revelation that Gabor lied and told the prospective adoptive parents of Gitta that her father was an American student traveling through Hungary, when he really was Hungarian — which adds an element of fraud to the case against him and thereby enables the authorities to convict him of a felony, get him three years in prison and then deport him to Hungary.
The fllm ends with a hearing in family court where the Johnsons are up against not only the New York Child Protective Services (who send a heavy-set Black woman as their representative — she keeps talking about “the child” and the judge in the case says, “She has a name — it’s Gitta”) but also the Hungarian consulate, representing a government that wants to repatriate the girl now that it’s established that both of her parents are Hungarian (Wiereck never makes it quite clear just where the girl was born, though I presume we’re meant to think she was born in Hungary since if she was born in the U.S. she’d be an American citizen at birth and therefore the Hungarians would not have a claim on her), but eventually Nathalie makes a heartfelt plea to the judge to place her with someone who will genuinely love her rather than the child “protective” system (which will mean subjecting her to the crapshoot of foster care), and Dana Delany plays this scene so intensely and with such delicate emotion that even I, who hardly ever cries at movies like this, cried. They get the baby, of course, and there’s a postlude backing Minnesota with Gitta a few months older (and now played by Billie Calmeau), where she’s settled in with the Johnsons and her stepbrother Evan (Matthew Rothplan), Steve’s (natural) son by his previous wife. Baby for Sale was a quite nice movie, well balanced between genres and genuinely moving and tear-jerking instead of being cheaply sensationalistic.
The film was Baby for Sale, shown by Lifetime last Saturday for a special event called “We’re in Labor … Day!,” a quirky theme to pun on the two major meanings of “labor” by picking the Labor Day weekend for a festival of movies about pregnancy — though actually no one is pregnant in Baby for Sale and the movie’s central premise is that, after years of trying and failing to conceive a child of their own despite all the tricks in the current fertility doctor’s armamentarium (including drugs as well as in vitro), Dr. Steve Johnson (Hart Bochner, considerably better looking than the guys who usually play Lifetime husbands) and his wife Nathalie (Dana Delany) finally give up on the natural route and decide to adopt. Only they’re unable to get a timely adoption through regular, above-board channels, so in desperation Nathalie posts their entire adoption profile on the Internet and gets a nibble from a corrupt Hungarian attorney named Gabor Szabo (Bruce Ramsey).
The moment I heard the character name I immediately recalled the real Gabor Szabo, a jazz-rock guitarist popular in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s who made albums with titles like Spellbinder and Bacchanal, and wondered if the gimmick was going to be that the name was phony and the guy might not even be Hungarian — but apparently we’re supposed to think that is his name and it was the writer, John Wierick, who either ripped off the name or thought of it independently. Anyway, Gabor has hooked up with a fellow Hungarian immigrant, Janka Maglar (Elizabeth Marleau), who’d recently given birth to a baby girl named Gitta (Kayla Pownall). Janka has simply asked Gabor to find her baby a good American family to raise him, since she can’t afford a kid on what she was making in Hungary, but Gabor sees little Gitta as a goldmine and offers her to the Johnsons for “expenses” of $100,000. He also offers her to several other similarly desperate U.S. families with the intention of selling her to the highest bidder.
The Johnsons catch on to what’s going on and report it to the FBI, whose agents tell them that Gabor hasn’t broken any federal laws and even in New York (where the Johnsons have traveled from their home in Minnesota to pick up “their” child) all he’s guilty of is a misdemeanor (like walking your dog without a leash,” a cynical New York cop tells them — lines Gabor himself repeats later in the film). Like a lot of Lifetime movies, this one is actually pretty good once you get through all the saccharine exposition — it’s a good fusion of problem movie and crime drama, directed in a welcomely straightforward fashion by Peter Svatek (odd that a movie involving Hungarians would be directed by someone with a Slavic name), though Wiereck’s script has a problem in that the big heart-pounding climax when Gabor finally gets arrested as a result of the Johnsons’ willingness to entrap him takes place two-thirds of the way through the movie and the finale is a bit of an anticlimax … though there are a few nice twists and turns left, including the revelation that Gabor lied and told the prospective adoptive parents of Gitta that her father was an American student traveling through Hungary, when he really was Hungarian — which adds an element of fraud to the case against him and thereby enables the authorities to convict him of a felony, get him three years in prison and then deport him to Hungary.
The fllm ends with a hearing in family court where the Johnsons are up against not only the New York Child Protective Services (who send a heavy-set Black woman as their representative — she keeps talking about “the child” and the judge in the case says, “She has a name — it’s Gitta”) but also the Hungarian consulate, representing a government that wants to repatriate the girl now that it’s established that both of her parents are Hungarian (Wiereck never makes it quite clear just where the girl was born, though I presume we’re meant to think she was born in Hungary since if she was born in the U.S. she’d be an American citizen at birth and therefore the Hungarians would not have a claim on her), but eventually Nathalie makes a heartfelt plea to the judge to place her with someone who will genuinely love her rather than the child “protective” system (which will mean subjecting her to the crapshoot of foster care), and Dana Delany plays this scene so intensely and with such delicate emotion that even I, who hardly ever cries at movies like this, cried. They get the baby, of course, and there’s a postlude backing Minnesota with Gitta a few months older (and now played by Billie Calmeau), where she’s settled in with the Johnsons and her stepbrother Evan (Matthew Rothplan), Steve’s (natural) son by his previous wife. Baby for Sale was a quite nice movie, well balanced between genres and genuinely moving and tear-jerking instead of being cheaply sensationalistic.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Trapped by Television (Columbia, 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Trapped by Television, an engaging little number we’d just downloaded from Archive.org that turned out to be considerably better than most of the movies we’ve been getting from this source lately. It was made in 1936 at Columbia and directed by Del Lord — mainly known as a comedy director; he was one of the original Keystone Kops in 1915 and by the 1930’s was working at Columbia mainly as a director of the Three Stooges shorts, though when he got this script by Sherman Lowe and Al Martin (story) and Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman (screenplay) he got the chance to show he could do character and situation comedy as well as he did slapstick.
It opens outside the office door of the Acme Collection Agency — “If You’ve Got It, We’ll Get It” (a slogan which couldn’t help but remind me of the unscrupulous collectors in the recent film $9.99!) — where the boss (Wade Boteler) is getting more and more impatient with the interest of his main collection agent, Rocky O’Neil (Nat Pendleton in one of his most appealing performances), in science and technology. (Rocky keeps sneaking copies of Popular Science into the office and reading them when he’s supposed to be working — and Charles and I were both startled to see a real magazine instead of a fictitious one in a 1930’s film!)
Rocky gets sent to collect a bill for $164 at the home of Fred Dennis (Lyle Talbot), who’s invented a revolutionary new television system. (I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect the television equipment was authentic; the real inventor of electronic television, Philo T. Farnsworth, was virtually as poverty-stricken as the fictitious one in this film, and he frequently picked up extra money by renting out his experimental TV equipment to movie studios making films that involved TV. The camera in the film looks more like an alien space weapon than a piece of TV equipment, but the receiving set — aside from having all its controls on the side — looks credibly like a TV set from the 1960’s or so.) Rocky is astonished by Fred’s television system — he agrees to be the subject of an experimental telecast in which his image and voice are beamed through a closed doorway to Fred’s receiving set in his bedroom — and agrees to get Fred a job with the Acme Collection Agency to help him raise the money to pay what he owes (which of course not only includes the $164 for his equipment but also three months’ back rent, owed to his stereotypical Irish landlady played by Lillianne Leighton).
Fred’s first collection assignment is to get payment for a back bill for office equipment owed by Blake Enterprises, Inc. — which turns out to be two women, Barbara “Bobby” Blake (played by an overqualified but still appealing Mary Astor, top-billed) and her secretary, Mae (Joyce Compton). Though her business is promoting inventions and raising the money to get them to market, she’s as broke as Fred is — thanks to the fact that some of her previous promotions were for automatic potato peelers and courses to learn Greek in six easy lessons — but naturally she sees Fred’s TV as her ticket to success. She raises $200 on it from Curtis (Thurston Hall), the head of the Paragon Broadcasting Company, which is concerned that some rival network will beat it to TV — though Curtis gives her the money more to get rid of her than out of any faith in his invention.
What Curtis doesn’t know, but we do, is that his own engineers are involved in a plot to screw him out of his own TV system (the one he’s allocated money to research); newspapers announce that his two top TV engineers have been kidnapped, but the senior engineer is actually being held against his will as part of a plot concocted by his assistant, Griffin (Marc Lawrence) — who has a “roo” moustache and therefore we know he’s up to no good — and Curtis’s own assistant, Standish (Robert Strange), who want to hold up Curtis for tons of money for his own TV system. Part of the plot, of course, involves Standish making sure that no other inventor with a superior TV gets to Curtis — and after Griffin off-handedly shoots the senior engineer to prevent him from escaping and blowing the plot, he sabotages Fred’s attempt to demonstrate his set to Curtis by reversing the wires and shorting out its cathode-ray tube, causing the set to blow up in Curtis’s office and Curtis to decide he wants nothing more to do with Fred, Bobby or their invention.
Nonetheless, Fred manages to get a new cathode-ray tube — courtesy of Bobby, who hocks her fur coat to raise the money — and he re-starts his equipment. Rocky and Mae hook up a plot to get another demonstration at Paragon by sending out fake invitations to the company’s board of directors on the eve before they’re scheduled to sign up for the system Griffin and Standish bootlegged from Paragon — only while Fred and Bobby are at Fred’s place together to stage the show, the bad guys arrive with some hired thugs to smash the equipment and eliminate the competition. Fred gets Bobby to turn the camera switch on, and the Paragon board members get to watch a real-life fight between Fred and the baddies, who are “trapped by television” as the camera makes them visible to the people at the receiving set in the Paragon offices. Eventually the police — led there by Rocky — come and arrest the bad guys, Fred is seen proposing to Bobby on TV and that gives Rocky and Mae the idea to do something similar “live.”
Trapped by Television is a quite charming little film with some great gags in it — like the snarling James Cagney impression Fred uses to convince the Acme office manager he’s tough enough for a collection job (he probably learned how to do Cagney from working alongside him at Warners), or the one towards the end of the film in which Rocky complains at how slowly the cabdriver taking him to Fred’s house is driving. “If you think I’m too slow, drive it yourself,” the driver snarls — and one jump-cut later, Rocky is in the driver’s seat and the cabbie is in the back! It’s a good blend of comedy and suspense, and shows what a nice actor Lyle Talbot could be in the right kinds of roles — no doubt he had no idea that less than 20 years later he’d be making cheesy movies for Ed Wood (in case you were wondering, Talbot is the one degree of separation between Humphrey Bogart and Ed Wood). Nat Pendleton is also surprisingly charming, too — in some of his films he’s just plain annoying, but here he’s likable and genuinely funny (as most of the so-called “comic relief” in films like this wasn’t) — and Joyce Compton does her good hard-bitten blonde act just one tick of quality below Joan Blondell at Warners, which is actually high praise.
Mary Astor is an odder presence since, as noted above, she is way overqualified for this film — she made it the same year she starred in Sam Goldwyn’s prestige production Dodsworth and survived a scandal (a revelation of her affair with playwright George S. Kaufman) that nearly destroyed her career — and as she comes up with various schemes, each more preposterous than the last, to promote Fred’s TV, one half-expects her to tell him, “I’ve been a bad woman … worse than you could know.” Still, she’s appealing and makes the character believable. Trapped by Television is a quite good movie, really a situation comedy (not surprisingly given its director’s background!) though it gets listed on science-fiction checklists because TV was the stuff of science fiction in 1936 (though within three years NBC would actually be putting on regular TV broadcasts in New York City for about 100 or so set-owners, and it was only America’s involvement in World War II that delayed the mainstream TV industry for seven more years) and a showcase for good actors who weren’t really major stars (though Astor would become one later with The Great Lie and The Maltese Falcon at Warners) but had quite appealing personalities and were able to rise to a good, well-constructed script like this which put a fresh spin on the old clichés.
Our “feature” last night was Trapped by Television, an engaging little number we’d just downloaded from Archive.org that turned out to be considerably better than most of the movies we’ve been getting from this source lately. It was made in 1936 at Columbia and directed by Del Lord — mainly known as a comedy director; he was one of the original Keystone Kops in 1915 and by the 1930’s was working at Columbia mainly as a director of the Three Stooges shorts, though when he got this script by Sherman Lowe and Al Martin (story) and Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman (screenplay) he got the chance to show he could do character and situation comedy as well as he did slapstick.
It opens outside the office door of the Acme Collection Agency — “If You’ve Got It, We’ll Get It” (a slogan which couldn’t help but remind me of the unscrupulous collectors in the recent film $9.99!) — where the boss (Wade Boteler) is getting more and more impatient with the interest of his main collection agent, Rocky O’Neil (Nat Pendleton in one of his most appealing performances), in science and technology. (Rocky keeps sneaking copies of Popular Science into the office and reading them when he’s supposed to be working — and Charles and I were both startled to see a real magazine instead of a fictitious one in a 1930’s film!)
Rocky gets sent to collect a bill for $164 at the home of Fred Dennis (Lyle Talbot), who’s invented a revolutionary new television system. (I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect the television equipment was authentic; the real inventor of electronic television, Philo T. Farnsworth, was virtually as poverty-stricken as the fictitious one in this film, and he frequently picked up extra money by renting out his experimental TV equipment to movie studios making films that involved TV. The camera in the film looks more like an alien space weapon than a piece of TV equipment, but the receiving set — aside from having all its controls on the side — looks credibly like a TV set from the 1960’s or so.) Rocky is astonished by Fred’s television system — he agrees to be the subject of an experimental telecast in which his image and voice are beamed through a closed doorway to Fred’s receiving set in his bedroom — and agrees to get Fred a job with the Acme Collection Agency to help him raise the money to pay what he owes (which of course not only includes the $164 for his equipment but also three months’ back rent, owed to his stereotypical Irish landlady played by Lillianne Leighton).
Fred’s first collection assignment is to get payment for a back bill for office equipment owed by Blake Enterprises, Inc. — which turns out to be two women, Barbara “Bobby” Blake (played by an overqualified but still appealing Mary Astor, top-billed) and her secretary, Mae (Joyce Compton). Though her business is promoting inventions and raising the money to get them to market, she’s as broke as Fred is — thanks to the fact that some of her previous promotions were for automatic potato peelers and courses to learn Greek in six easy lessons — but naturally she sees Fred’s TV as her ticket to success. She raises $200 on it from Curtis (Thurston Hall), the head of the Paragon Broadcasting Company, which is concerned that some rival network will beat it to TV — though Curtis gives her the money more to get rid of her than out of any faith in his invention.
What Curtis doesn’t know, but we do, is that his own engineers are involved in a plot to screw him out of his own TV system (the one he’s allocated money to research); newspapers announce that his two top TV engineers have been kidnapped, but the senior engineer is actually being held against his will as part of a plot concocted by his assistant, Griffin (Marc Lawrence) — who has a “roo” moustache and therefore we know he’s up to no good — and Curtis’s own assistant, Standish (Robert Strange), who want to hold up Curtis for tons of money for his own TV system. Part of the plot, of course, involves Standish making sure that no other inventor with a superior TV gets to Curtis — and after Griffin off-handedly shoots the senior engineer to prevent him from escaping and blowing the plot, he sabotages Fred’s attempt to demonstrate his set to Curtis by reversing the wires and shorting out its cathode-ray tube, causing the set to blow up in Curtis’s office and Curtis to decide he wants nothing more to do with Fred, Bobby or their invention.
Nonetheless, Fred manages to get a new cathode-ray tube — courtesy of Bobby, who hocks her fur coat to raise the money — and he re-starts his equipment. Rocky and Mae hook up a plot to get another demonstration at Paragon by sending out fake invitations to the company’s board of directors on the eve before they’re scheduled to sign up for the system Griffin and Standish bootlegged from Paragon — only while Fred and Bobby are at Fred’s place together to stage the show, the bad guys arrive with some hired thugs to smash the equipment and eliminate the competition. Fred gets Bobby to turn the camera switch on, and the Paragon board members get to watch a real-life fight between Fred and the baddies, who are “trapped by television” as the camera makes them visible to the people at the receiving set in the Paragon offices. Eventually the police — led there by Rocky — come and arrest the bad guys, Fred is seen proposing to Bobby on TV and that gives Rocky and Mae the idea to do something similar “live.”
Trapped by Television is a quite charming little film with some great gags in it — like the snarling James Cagney impression Fred uses to convince the Acme office manager he’s tough enough for a collection job (he probably learned how to do Cagney from working alongside him at Warners), or the one towards the end of the film in which Rocky complains at how slowly the cabdriver taking him to Fred’s house is driving. “If you think I’m too slow, drive it yourself,” the driver snarls — and one jump-cut later, Rocky is in the driver’s seat and the cabbie is in the back! It’s a good blend of comedy and suspense, and shows what a nice actor Lyle Talbot could be in the right kinds of roles — no doubt he had no idea that less than 20 years later he’d be making cheesy movies for Ed Wood (in case you were wondering, Talbot is the one degree of separation between Humphrey Bogart and Ed Wood). Nat Pendleton is also surprisingly charming, too — in some of his films he’s just plain annoying, but here he’s likable and genuinely funny (as most of the so-called “comic relief” in films like this wasn’t) — and Joyce Compton does her good hard-bitten blonde act just one tick of quality below Joan Blondell at Warners, which is actually high praise.
Mary Astor is an odder presence since, as noted above, she is way overqualified for this film — she made it the same year she starred in Sam Goldwyn’s prestige production Dodsworth and survived a scandal (a revelation of her affair with playwright George S. Kaufman) that nearly destroyed her career — and as she comes up with various schemes, each more preposterous than the last, to promote Fred’s TV, one half-expects her to tell him, “I’ve been a bad woman … worse than you could know.” Still, she’s appealing and makes the character believable. Trapped by Television is a quite good movie, really a situation comedy (not surprisingly given its director’s background!) though it gets listed on science-fiction checklists because TV was the stuff of science fiction in 1936 (though within three years NBC would actually be putting on regular TV broadcasts in New York City for about 100 or so set-owners, and it was only America’s involvement in World War II that delayed the mainstream TV industry for seven more years) and a showcase for good actors who weren’t really major stars (though Astor would become one later with The Great Lie and The Maltese Falcon at Warners) but had quite appealing personalities and were able to rise to a good, well-constructed script like this which put a fresh spin on the old clichés.
House of Mystery (Monogram, 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I eventually ran a movie last night: House of Mystery, a 1934 Monogram production more or less based on Adam Hull Shirk’s 1927 play The Ape — I say “more or less” because their 1940 film The Ape also claims a basis in Shirk’s play but the two plots have nothing in common except that they both involve murders committed both by a real ape and by a man in an ape suit. Just an hour long, House of Mystery was directed by William Nigh (his name in the credits caused both Charles and I to groan) from a script by Albert De Mond, and the first 20 minutes actually promised a genuinely interesting movie.
It starts with a scene in a bar filmed through a native grate — the opening title gives the location and date as “Asia, 1913,” and though the title doesn’t specify where in Asia it quickly emerges as India — and though this bit of Sternbergism doesn’t develop into much of anything, the scene is still interesting. Archaeologist John Prendergast (Clay Clement) has taken money from backers to do a scientific expedition, but what he’s really after is to steal as many golden artifacts as he can and cheat his backers from any profits, selling the objects and pocketing the proceeds. He’s somehow won the affections of Chanda (Laya Joy, described in the American Film Institute Catalog as “a well-known interpretive dancer”), a dancer in the local Hindu temple, even though his attitude towards the rest of the indigenous population consists of hurling racist epithets at them and backing them up with his whip. The priest of the temple where Chanda works (Brandon Hurst, one of only two cast members I’d actually heard of before) looks into his crystal ball (I’m not kidding!) and “reads” Prendergast’s character correctly, and Prendergast responds by trashing the temple and fleeing with Chanda’s aid.
The setting then moves 20 years forward to the U.S., where Prendergast — having since abbreviated his last name to “Pren” — is living on a large estate bought with his unearned profits, with Chanda still living with him. He’s also apparently disabled — at least he spends all his time (so far as we can see) in a wheelchair — and he’s nursed by a young woman named Ella Browning (Verna Hillie) — and he manages to maintain his incognito until Mrs. Potter (Mary Foy), the wife of one of the expedition’s backers, spots him and reports to her husband (Harry Bradley) that she’s seen him and they should challenge him to get their money back. They visit an attorney, who writes a letter to the other surviving expedition backers: insurance salesman Jack Armstrong (Ed Lowry, top-billed and looking far too young to have made an investment of any kind 20 years before!); wealthy hypochondriac Geraldine Carfax (Dale Fuller, veteran of some of Erich von Stroheim’s silents) and her companion, medium Stella Walters (Fritzi Ridgeway); and gambler David Fells (George Hayes). The letter demands that they assemble at the same time at Pren’s estate, whereupon he informs them he’ll give them the money if they agree to stay in his house for one week. Stella sets up a séance to contact the Indian god Kali (annoyingly pronounced “KAY-lye” throughout the whole film — at least the Beatles’ movie Help! got the correct pronunciation, “Kaah-LEE”), and during the event tom-tom drums are heard, the lights go out and Geraldine Carfax is found murdered.
From this point the movie disintegrates from 20 minutes of relatively exciting melodramatic thriller into a remaining 40 minutes of typical William Nigh-directed snooze-fest, as more down-cast characters get killed; Fells is found dead inside an ape suit; but the other murders, it turns out, are being committed by a real ape whom Pren, who’s actually not crippled at all, has been hiding in the closet and has trained to kill at the sound of drums — only when Pren declares his love for his nurse (who in the meantime has fallen in love with Armstrong, mainly because they’re the only two young people in the cast!) Chanda decides to sic the ape on him, killing him, helping Scotland Yard inspector Ned Pickens (Irving Bacon) solve the case before he’s recalled to his native country, and setting up a happy ending. House of Mystery is yet another one of those annoying bad movies that has a good movie locked inside it struggling to get out, but the slovenliness of Nigh’s direction (at least in the final two-thirds of the film) and the risibility of the plot complications of De Mond’s script (especially towards the end as he starts to resolve his various plot lines) make this one just plain dull despite a professionally competent cast — at least some of these actors deserved better than to be forgotten in a film like this!
Charles and I eventually ran a movie last night: House of Mystery, a 1934 Monogram production more or less based on Adam Hull Shirk’s 1927 play The Ape — I say “more or less” because their 1940 film The Ape also claims a basis in Shirk’s play but the two plots have nothing in common except that they both involve murders committed both by a real ape and by a man in an ape suit. Just an hour long, House of Mystery was directed by William Nigh (his name in the credits caused both Charles and I to groan) from a script by Albert De Mond, and the first 20 minutes actually promised a genuinely interesting movie.
It starts with a scene in a bar filmed through a native grate — the opening title gives the location and date as “Asia, 1913,” and though the title doesn’t specify where in Asia it quickly emerges as India — and though this bit of Sternbergism doesn’t develop into much of anything, the scene is still interesting. Archaeologist John Prendergast (Clay Clement) has taken money from backers to do a scientific expedition, but what he’s really after is to steal as many golden artifacts as he can and cheat his backers from any profits, selling the objects and pocketing the proceeds. He’s somehow won the affections of Chanda (Laya Joy, described in the American Film Institute Catalog as “a well-known interpretive dancer”), a dancer in the local Hindu temple, even though his attitude towards the rest of the indigenous population consists of hurling racist epithets at them and backing them up with his whip. The priest of the temple where Chanda works (Brandon Hurst, one of only two cast members I’d actually heard of before) looks into his crystal ball (I’m not kidding!) and “reads” Prendergast’s character correctly, and Prendergast responds by trashing the temple and fleeing with Chanda’s aid.
The setting then moves 20 years forward to the U.S., where Prendergast — having since abbreviated his last name to “Pren” — is living on a large estate bought with his unearned profits, with Chanda still living with him. He’s also apparently disabled — at least he spends all his time (so far as we can see) in a wheelchair — and he’s nursed by a young woman named Ella Browning (Verna Hillie) — and he manages to maintain his incognito until Mrs. Potter (Mary Foy), the wife of one of the expedition’s backers, spots him and reports to her husband (Harry Bradley) that she’s seen him and they should challenge him to get their money back. They visit an attorney, who writes a letter to the other surviving expedition backers: insurance salesman Jack Armstrong (Ed Lowry, top-billed and looking far too young to have made an investment of any kind 20 years before!); wealthy hypochondriac Geraldine Carfax (Dale Fuller, veteran of some of Erich von Stroheim’s silents) and her companion, medium Stella Walters (Fritzi Ridgeway); and gambler David Fells (George Hayes). The letter demands that they assemble at the same time at Pren’s estate, whereupon he informs them he’ll give them the money if they agree to stay in his house for one week. Stella sets up a séance to contact the Indian god Kali (annoyingly pronounced “KAY-lye” throughout the whole film — at least the Beatles’ movie Help! got the correct pronunciation, “Kaah-LEE”), and during the event tom-tom drums are heard, the lights go out and Geraldine Carfax is found murdered.
From this point the movie disintegrates from 20 minutes of relatively exciting melodramatic thriller into a remaining 40 minutes of typical William Nigh-directed snooze-fest, as more down-cast characters get killed; Fells is found dead inside an ape suit; but the other murders, it turns out, are being committed by a real ape whom Pren, who’s actually not crippled at all, has been hiding in the closet and has trained to kill at the sound of drums — only when Pren declares his love for his nurse (who in the meantime has fallen in love with Armstrong, mainly because they’re the only two young people in the cast!) Chanda decides to sic the ape on him, killing him, helping Scotland Yard inspector Ned Pickens (Irving Bacon) solve the case before he’s recalled to his native country, and setting up a happy ending. House of Mystery is yet another one of those annoying bad movies that has a good movie locked inside it struggling to get out, but the slovenliness of Nigh’s direction (at least in the final two-thirds of the film) and the risibility of the plot complications of De Mond’s script (especially towards the end as he starts to resolve his various plot lines) make this one just plain dull despite a professionally competent cast — at least some of these actors deserved better than to be forgotten in a film like this!
Friday, September 4, 2009
Mesa of Lost Women (Howco International, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Mesa of Lost Women, one of the legendarily bad movies of the early 1950’s — so legendarily bad, in fact, it was a surprise that the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew never gave it the “treatment.” In fact, I looked in vain for an MST3K version of the film before finally running it “straight,” courtesy of a download from archive.org. It’s essentially a blatant ripoff of The Island of Dr. Moreau, though instead of an island it takes place on an isolated mesa in Mexico, separated from civilization by a long arid stretch called the “Muerto Desert” and accessible only by plane — the desert’s name offering a warning the people in the movie, of course, ignore — and deals with a mad scientist named Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan — in case you ever wondered what he did between The Kid and The Addams Family!) who is hiding in the desert because he wants to do transfers of genetic material between humans and tarantulas — which has resulted in one giant tarantula (though we don’t see it until the very end of the movie) and several women who have “spidery” claws and habits, including killing their mates right after having sex with them.
Aranya has worked on male spiders too, though since the male spider is considerably smaller and weaker than the female and his only purpose in life is to impregnate the female and then be eaten by her to give her the strength to nourish the kids, Aranya’s male spider-people are considerably smaller and weaker than his spider-women. In fact they’re so small that they’re played by midgets, including the marvelous Angelo Rossitto as head of the clan and the only one (it seems) who has any brains. The film opens with the two survivors of the expedition through the Muerto Desert, Dan Mulcahey (Richard Travis) and Doreen Culbertson (Mary Hill), arriving at an oil exploration camp and telling the story in flashback — though much of it has already been set up by an unseen narrator (Lyle Talbot, who in this one at least didn’t have the embarrassment of having to show his face the way he did in his films for Ed Wood!) who delivers reams and reams of expositions, probably to cover up lacunae in the footage. Also in their party when they set out to visit Aranya (whose name means “spider” in Spanish) are Grant Phillips (Robert Knapp), the rich man Culbertson plans to marry for gold-digging purposes; fellow scientist Dr. Leland J. Masterson (the entire performance is credited to actor Harmon Stevens but it appears as if more than one actor appeared in the role, since his appearance, height, build, facial makeup and voice change dramatically in mid-movie); and cynical jeep driver Pepe (Chris-Pin Martin), who spends the entire movie unhelpfully pointing out to his passengers what the name “Muerto” means.
Aranya’s star creation is Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), a dancer at a local cantina (when Doreen sees the place for the first time she goes, “What a dump!,” in quite good mimickry of Bette Davis’s famous line in Beyond the Forest). The name is an in-joke; not only is “tarantella” the Italian name for “tarantula,” it’s also a dance performed in Italy that was supposedly an attempt to duplicate the seizures one would go into when fatally bitten by a tarantula. (Throughout the movie the fellow scientists talk about Aranya’s experiments on “hexapods,” meaning six-legged insects; actually tarantulas are spiders, and therefore have eight legs instead of six.) Anyway, after various pieces of skullduggery involving both the spider-born and human-born characters, Masterson sacrifices his own life to blow up Aranya and all his creations, and Dan and Doreen are the only humans who manage to escape — though when Dan is found he’d babbling (seemingly) insanely like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and in particular expressing the fear that “they” may have scattered, in which case the human race will for the rest of its days be menaced by giant spiders and spider-people and won’t be able to get rid of them definitively since they’ll no longer be in the same place where they can be killed at once.
Mesa of Lost Women is a movie that began with some genuine talent involved on both ends of the camera — the star had been a child actor who made a movie with Charlie Chaplin (indeed, Jackie Coogan wasn’t the only cast member who’d played a part as a boy with Chaplin — one of the supporting players was Dean Riesner, who as “Dinky Dean” played the obnoxious kid in The Pilgrim and later grew up to co-write the script for Dirty Harry) and at least part of the film was photographed by the great Karl Struss (who also worked with Chaplin — as cinematographer on The Great Dictator). The film began as a production by one Herbert Tevos, who both wrote the script and directed, but apparently it was abandoned in mid-shoot, partly because Tevos ran out of money and partly because the cast and crew members couldn’t stand working for him — and the footage lay fallow until another grade-Z director, Ron Ormond, bought it, shot enough new footage to complete a semi-coherent movie and released it through Joy Houck’s Howco International company.
It’s hard to judge a movie that’s the product of two different filmmakers with two different agendas — in this case, what that really means is it’s hard to know whom to blame — because Mesa of Lost Women is a sorry mess, a film that systematically blows every possibility of terror or suspense that its story offers. Coogan’s Fester-esque performance is over-the-top and so alien from anything resembling normal human behavior that compared to him, Marlon Brando’s playing in the most recent “official” version of The Island of Dr. Moreau looks positively understated by comparison. Richard Travis is acceptably hunky but the rest of the cast leaves a lot to be desired — and the cinematography is enviably clear and ungrainy, and actually gives a bit of dignity to the Mexican desert locations on occasion, but that’s irrelevant because neither director has given us much of anything we particularly want to watch. But what really makes this film a so-bad-it’s-good classic is the awful music by Hoyt S. Curtin, Jr. — he used only two instruments, guitar and piano, having the guitar play rolling flamenco chords (apparently inspired by the Mexican setting) while the piano pounds away in the background, only intermittently in the same key as the guitar. Edward D. Wood, Jr. bought this score and put it into his second film as a director, Jail Bait — did he actually think it was good?
Last night’s “feature” was Mesa of Lost Women, one of the legendarily bad movies of the early 1950’s — so legendarily bad, in fact, it was a surprise that the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew never gave it the “treatment.” In fact, I looked in vain for an MST3K version of the film before finally running it “straight,” courtesy of a download from archive.org. It’s essentially a blatant ripoff of The Island of Dr. Moreau, though instead of an island it takes place on an isolated mesa in Mexico, separated from civilization by a long arid stretch called the “Muerto Desert” and accessible only by plane — the desert’s name offering a warning the people in the movie, of course, ignore — and deals with a mad scientist named Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan — in case you ever wondered what he did between The Kid and The Addams Family!) who is hiding in the desert because he wants to do transfers of genetic material between humans and tarantulas — which has resulted in one giant tarantula (though we don’t see it until the very end of the movie) and several women who have “spidery” claws and habits, including killing their mates right after having sex with them.
Aranya has worked on male spiders too, though since the male spider is considerably smaller and weaker than the female and his only purpose in life is to impregnate the female and then be eaten by her to give her the strength to nourish the kids, Aranya’s male spider-people are considerably smaller and weaker than his spider-women. In fact they’re so small that they’re played by midgets, including the marvelous Angelo Rossitto as head of the clan and the only one (it seems) who has any brains. The film opens with the two survivors of the expedition through the Muerto Desert, Dan Mulcahey (Richard Travis) and Doreen Culbertson (Mary Hill), arriving at an oil exploration camp and telling the story in flashback — though much of it has already been set up by an unseen narrator (Lyle Talbot, who in this one at least didn’t have the embarrassment of having to show his face the way he did in his films for Ed Wood!) who delivers reams and reams of expositions, probably to cover up lacunae in the footage. Also in their party when they set out to visit Aranya (whose name means “spider” in Spanish) are Grant Phillips (Robert Knapp), the rich man Culbertson plans to marry for gold-digging purposes; fellow scientist Dr. Leland J. Masterson (the entire performance is credited to actor Harmon Stevens but it appears as if more than one actor appeared in the role, since his appearance, height, build, facial makeup and voice change dramatically in mid-movie); and cynical jeep driver Pepe (Chris-Pin Martin), who spends the entire movie unhelpfully pointing out to his passengers what the name “Muerto” means.
Aranya’s star creation is Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), a dancer at a local cantina (when Doreen sees the place for the first time she goes, “What a dump!,” in quite good mimickry of Bette Davis’s famous line in Beyond the Forest). The name is an in-joke; not only is “tarantella” the Italian name for “tarantula,” it’s also a dance performed in Italy that was supposedly an attempt to duplicate the seizures one would go into when fatally bitten by a tarantula. (Throughout the movie the fellow scientists talk about Aranya’s experiments on “hexapods,” meaning six-legged insects; actually tarantulas are spiders, and therefore have eight legs instead of six.) Anyway, after various pieces of skullduggery involving both the spider-born and human-born characters, Masterson sacrifices his own life to blow up Aranya and all his creations, and Dan and Doreen are the only humans who manage to escape — though when Dan is found he’d babbling (seemingly) insanely like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and in particular expressing the fear that “they” may have scattered, in which case the human race will for the rest of its days be menaced by giant spiders and spider-people and won’t be able to get rid of them definitively since they’ll no longer be in the same place where they can be killed at once.
Mesa of Lost Women is a movie that began with some genuine talent involved on both ends of the camera — the star had been a child actor who made a movie with Charlie Chaplin (indeed, Jackie Coogan wasn’t the only cast member who’d played a part as a boy with Chaplin — one of the supporting players was Dean Riesner, who as “Dinky Dean” played the obnoxious kid in The Pilgrim and later grew up to co-write the script for Dirty Harry) and at least part of the film was photographed by the great Karl Struss (who also worked with Chaplin — as cinematographer on The Great Dictator). The film began as a production by one Herbert Tevos, who both wrote the script and directed, but apparently it was abandoned in mid-shoot, partly because Tevos ran out of money and partly because the cast and crew members couldn’t stand working for him — and the footage lay fallow until another grade-Z director, Ron Ormond, bought it, shot enough new footage to complete a semi-coherent movie and released it through Joy Houck’s Howco International company.
It’s hard to judge a movie that’s the product of two different filmmakers with two different agendas — in this case, what that really means is it’s hard to know whom to blame — because Mesa of Lost Women is a sorry mess, a film that systematically blows every possibility of terror or suspense that its story offers. Coogan’s Fester-esque performance is over-the-top and so alien from anything resembling normal human behavior that compared to him, Marlon Brando’s playing in the most recent “official” version of The Island of Dr. Moreau looks positively understated by comparison. Richard Travis is acceptably hunky but the rest of the cast leaves a lot to be desired — and the cinematography is enviably clear and ungrainy, and actually gives a bit of dignity to the Mexican desert locations on occasion, but that’s irrelevant because neither director has given us much of anything we particularly want to watch. But what really makes this film a so-bad-it’s-good classic is the awful music by Hoyt S. Curtin, Jr. — he used only two instruments, guitar and piano, having the guitar play rolling flamenco chords (apparently inspired by the Mexican setting) while the piano pounds away in the background, only intermittently in the same key as the guitar. Edward D. Wood, Jr. bought this score and put it into his second film as a director, Jail Bait — did he actually think it was good?
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Chained for Life (Raymond Spera Productions, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a really peculiar movie I’d just downloaded from archive.org: Chained for Life, a 1951 movie featuring real-life conjoined (“Siamese”) twins Violet and Daisy Hilton as thinly fictionalized versions of their real selves, “Vivian and Dorothy Hamilton.” Produced by Raymond Spera and George Moskov, directed by Harry L. Fraser and written by Ross Frisco, Nat Tanchuck and Albert DePina, Chained for Life is a combination courtroom melodrama and vaudeville story (which in itself quite dates this film; between the archaic camera technique, the crappy sound and the overall stiffness, this looks more like an early-1930’s movie than anything from 1951, especially since all of it takes place either in a courtroom or a theatre and therefore we never see any cars) framed in a courtroom in which Vivian is on trial for murdering Dorothy’s husband. Most of the film is presented in flashbacks narrated by the various witnesses at the trial, all of whom were involved in one way or another in the Hamiltons’ vaudeville career.
They were headlining a bill at the Bijou Theatre (singing vocal duets which sound pretty much like what the Andrews Sisters would have if there’d been only two of them and they’d been conjoined) which also featured marksman Andre Pariseau (Mario Laval, who got an “introducing” credit; I joked that he certainly didn’t have the voice of Mario Lanza but his character had all the moral creepiness of Pierre Laval) and his sidekick Renée (Patricia Wright, a tall, rail-thin actress who makes a fascinatingly androgynous Dietrich-esque impression in top hat and tails, her costume in the act) and several other (real) variety performers, including juggler Whitey Roberts (as himself) and a quite good accordion player who played the William Tell overture and the Hungarian Rhapsody — though I wondered how the writers and director missed doing the obvious gimmick of having Andre shoot an apple off Renée’s head while the accordionist played William Tell.
The Hamiltons’ manager, Hinkley (Allen Jenkins at his most Allen Jenkinsish, and proving that he hadn’t lost a bit of his character-actor authority since his salad days at Warners in the 1930’s), concocts the idea of having one of the conjoined twins get engaged to be married — and he picks Andre as the one Dorothy is supposed to get married to. Vivian is convinced he’s a rotter, but Dorothy falls genuinely in love with him and believes he returns her affections. Vivian, it turns out, is right; Andre has gone along with the “marriage” gag only for the extra $150 per week in pay Hinkley has promised him — he’s really in love with Renée — and though they’re actually married on the stage of the theatre (to a sold-out audience), that night Andre refuses to go through with the wedding night, and his desertion of Dorothy makes headlines in the carefully unnamed city in which all of this is taking place. Vivian, who never liked Andre in the first place, concocts a way of getting revenge by taking up one of Andre’s guns and, in the middle of his act, shooting him.
Eventually, she’s arrested and put on trial, and the dilemma becomes how to punish her for having committed murder without also punishing the innocent Dorothy. Judge Mitchell (Norvel Mitchell), who’s trying the case without a jury (and who opens and closes the film with a Crime Does Not Pay-style on-screen narration), resolves this dilemma by finding Vivian innocent (Charles suggested he could have found her guilty but suspended her sentence), then puts it in our laps as the audience, asks us how we would have found if there’d been a jury and we’d been on it, and returns to a theme he expressed in his opening narration to the effect that if we thought we had problems, just consider what the Hamiltons went through!
Though the central plot premise ensures that the film can’t be anything more than a rather kinky exploitation piece (the writers take care to point out to us that in 27 states it’s illegal for a conjoined twin to marry because it’s considered bigamy), and in some ways Dorothy Parker’s acid remark for one of a pair of conjoined twins in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (“You’ve got to do something about your insomnia! I’ve done nothing but twist and turn and lie awake all night!”) tells more about the dilemma of having to live this way than all 67 minutes of Chained for Life, the film is actually surprisingly sensitive and well done. The Hamiltons have nice if not especially compelling singing voices (they sing in close harmony the way the Duncan Sisters did in the 1920’s), the songs are surprisingly good (though in a late swing style that would have been considered dated in 1951, they could have been at least minor hits even without the gimmick of being introduced by conjoined twins), the story is presented as tastefully as it could be given its central premise, and director Fraser clearly knows what he’s doing.
The most compelling scene is the dream sequence in which Dorothy envisions herself separated from Vivian and dances with Andre in a sylvan glade — it’s quite obviously a studio “exterior” inside a soundstage, and the emancipated Vivian is of course a double, but Fraser keeps his camera far enough away from the double that her presence doesn’t “out” the movie, and the closeups (which really are of Dorothy — with trees and other bits of nature blocking out our view of Vivian from the image) are heart-rending and indicate that these women were not entirely without acting talent (as does the marvelous closeup of Vivian looking on with revulsion when she realizes her sister is actually in love with this creep who’s been paid to say he wants to marry her). One oddity of the movie is that Vivian and Dorothy don’t look that much alike — their faces are similar but Vivian is dark-haired and Dorothy is blonde, and aside from the ungainly way they walk as one it’s not all that clear just from watching the movie that they’re actually conjoined in real life and not a normal pair of sisters just faking being Siamese twins for a movie plot.
What’s most amazing about Chained for Life are the writers’ periodic pleas for understanding — the twins themselves give us quite a lot of dialogue about how they’ve adjusted to their condition over the years, but they also lament that in order to make this bizarre existence work for them they’ve had to forsake love, marriage and children. Indeed, in the age in which same-sex marriage is being so hotly debated, a lot of the dialogue for the twins comes off as quite analogous: members of an oppressed minority lamenting being told by the government and the church that love and marriage with the person of their choice is socially and legally beyond them. Chained for Life is really quite a movie, a good deal better than it had a right to be given that it’s fundamentally an exploitation film, and a rather nasty one at that — though it’s one of those movies that gains from the existence of the Production Code, because of which the filmmakers could only hint at the kinkiness instead of showing it full out the way it would be done today if anyone today were to attempt a film like this at all.
Charles and I watched a really peculiar movie I’d just downloaded from archive.org: Chained for Life, a 1951 movie featuring real-life conjoined (“Siamese”) twins Violet and Daisy Hilton as thinly fictionalized versions of their real selves, “Vivian and Dorothy Hamilton.” Produced by Raymond Spera and George Moskov, directed by Harry L. Fraser and written by Ross Frisco, Nat Tanchuck and Albert DePina, Chained for Life is a combination courtroom melodrama and vaudeville story (which in itself quite dates this film; between the archaic camera technique, the crappy sound and the overall stiffness, this looks more like an early-1930’s movie than anything from 1951, especially since all of it takes place either in a courtroom or a theatre and therefore we never see any cars) framed in a courtroom in which Vivian is on trial for murdering Dorothy’s husband. Most of the film is presented in flashbacks narrated by the various witnesses at the trial, all of whom were involved in one way or another in the Hamiltons’ vaudeville career.
They were headlining a bill at the Bijou Theatre (singing vocal duets which sound pretty much like what the Andrews Sisters would have if there’d been only two of them and they’d been conjoined) which also featured marksman Andre Pariseau (Mario Laval, who got an “introducing” credit; I joked that he certainly didn’t have the voice of Mario Lanza but his character had all the moral creepiness of Pierre Laval) and his sidekick Renée (Patricia Wright, a tall, rail-thin actress who makes a fascinatingly androgynous Dietrich-esque impression in top hat and tails, her costume in the act) and several other (real) variety performers, including juggler Whitey Roberts (as himself) and a quite good accordion player who played the William Tell overture and the Hungarian Rhapsody — though I wondered how the writers and director missed doing the obvious gimmick of having Andre shoot an apple off Renée’s head while the accordionist played William Tell.
The Hamiltons’ manager, Hinkley (Allen Jenkins at his most Allen Jenkinsish, and proving that he hadn’t lost a bit of his character-actor authority since his salad days at Warners in the 1930’s), concocts the idea of having one of the conjoined twins get engaged to be married — and he picks Andre as the one Dorothy is supposed to get married to. Vivian is convinced he’s a rotter, but Dorothy falls genuinely in love with him and believes he returns her affections. Vivian, it turns out, is right; Andre has gone along with the “marriage” gag only for the extra $150 per week in pay Hinkley has promised him — he’s really in love with Renée — and though they’re actually married on the stage of the theatre (to a sold-out audience), that night Andre refuses to go through with the wedding night, and his desertion of Dorothy makes headlines in the carefully unnamed city in which all of this is taking place. Vivian, who never liked Andre in the first place, concocts a way of getting revenge by taking up one of Andre’s guns and, in the middle of his act, shooting him.
Eventually, she’s arrested and put on trial, and the dilemma becomes how to punish her for having committed murder without also punishing the innocent Dorothy. Judge Mitchell (Norvel Mitchell), who’s trying the case without a jury (and who opens and closes the film with a Crime Does Not Pay-style on-screen narration), resolves this dilemma by finding Vivian innocent (Charles suggested he could have found her guilty but suspended her sentence), then puts it in our laps as the audience, asks us how we would have found if there’d been a jury and we’d been on it, and returns to a theme he expressed in his opening narration to the effect that if we thought we had problems, just consider what the Hamiltons went through!
Though the central plot premise ensures that the film can’t be anything more than a rather kinky exploitation piece (the writers take care to point out to us that in 27 states it’s illegal for a conjoined twin to marry because it’s considered bigamy), and in some ways Dorothy Parker’s acid remark for one of a pair of conjoined twins in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (“You’ve got to do something about your insomnia! I’ve done nothing but twist and turn and lie awake all night!”) tells more about the dilemma of having to live this way than all 67 minutes of Chained for Life, the film is actually surprisingly sensitive and well done. The Hamiltons have nice if not especially compelling singing voices (they sing in close harmony the way the Duncan Sisters did in the 1920’s), the songs are surprisingly good (though in a late swing style that would have been considered dated in 1951, they could have been at least minor hits even without the gimmick of being introduced by conjoined twins), the story is presented as tastefully as it could be given its central premise, and director Fraser clearly knows what he’s doing.
The most compelling scene is the dream sequence in which Dorothy envisions herself separated from Vivian and dances with Andre in a sylvan glade — it’s quite obviously a studio “exterior” inside a soundstage, and the emancipated Vivian is of course a double, but Fraser keeps his camera far enough away from the double that her presence doesn’t “out” the movie, and the closeups (which really are of Dorothy — with trees and other bits of nature blocking out our view of Vivian from the image) are heart-rending and indicate that these women were not entirely without acting talent (as does the marvelous closeup of Vivian looking on with revulsion when she realizes her sister is actually in love with this creep who’s been paid to say he wants to marry her). One oddity of the movie is that Vivian and Dorothy don’t look that much alike — their faces are similar but Vivian is dark-haired and Dorothy is blonde, and aside from the ungainly way they walk as one it’s not all that clear just from watching the movie that they’re actually conjoined in real life and not a normal pair of sisters just faking being Siamese twins for a movie plot.
What’s most amazing about Chained for Life are the writers’ periodic pleas for understanding — the twins themselves give us quite a lot of dialogue about how they’ve adjusted to their condition over the years, but they also lament that in order to make this bizarre existence work for them they’ve had to forsake love, marriage and children. Indeed, in the age in which same-sex marriage is being so hotly debated, a lot of the dialogue for the twins comes off as quite analogous: members of an oppressed minority lamenting being told by the government and the church that love and marriage with the person of their choice is socially and legally beyond them. Chained for Life is really quite a movie, a good deal better than it had a right to be given that it’s fundamentally an exploitation film, and a rather nasty one at that — though it’s one of those movies that gains from the existence of the Production Code, because of which the filmmakers could only hint at the kinkiness instead of showing it full out the way it would be done today if anyone today were to attempt a film like this at all.
Delinquent Daughters (American Productions/PRC, 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran one of the movies we’d recently downloaded from archive.org: Delinquent Daughters, a 1944 non-epic from PRC (actually from an outfit called “American Productions, Inc.,” headed by Al Herman — who also directed — and Donald C. McKean, released through PRC, which on this occasion was living up to the name its initials stood for: “Producers’ Releasing Corporation”) about five high-school girls (all of whom looked at least a decade too old for their parts — when they wondered audibly on screen what their parents would be thinking of them, I couldn’t help but think they all looked like they could be parents themselves!) who are drifting into trouble thanks to overly strict parents (at least twice in the film fathers threaten to beat up their daughters, and it’s not until the end of the movie that anybody in the film hints that that might not be the best idea in the world to try to keep your daughters on the straight and narrow) and no-goodnik boyfriends, as well as the malign influences of the operators of a youth hang-out called the “Merry-Go-Round,” which sells soft drinks and has a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy about any of the kids bringing in flasks.
The place is owned by gangster Nick Gordon (Jon Dawson) and his girlfriend Mimi (Fifi D’Orsay, whose presence puts everyone else in this movie one degree of separation from Bing Crosby, James Cagney and Stephen Sondheim!). Nick is attempting to recruit the boyfriends of Our Anti-Heroines into serious crimes — at which they’re totally inept; they rob one store and steal $2, their next robbery nets $6, and their third one (at a gas station) makes $13 and one begins to wonder if there are any store owners in this community that actually have any money. Mimi plays a similar role to Thelma White’s character in Reefer Madness (though D’Orsay, a marvelous musical performer, isn’t as good an actress as White and doesn’t hit the notes of real pathos that White did in an otherwise sorry movie like Reefer Madness), the conscience-stricken consort of the bad guy. The film is actually stolen by Teala Loring as Sally Higgins, the hardest “case” among the delinquent daughters, playing her part as an accomplished bad-ass and showing her readiness for femme fatale roles in noir movies — which, alas, she didn’t get.
The rest of the actors range from mediocre to positively annoying (the most annoying being Mary Bovard as Betty Smith — a blonde with a breathless way of speaking; she sounds like the discarded first prototype for the product line later perfected and called “Marilyn Monroe”); the “original” script (quotes definitely in order!) by Arthur St. Claire is one of those pitiable products that seems designed to keep people away from the dark side of life by making it seem way too boring to bother with; and the ending is ridiculous — all the bad-ass girls and all but one of the bad-ass boys (who seems to disappear from the story altogether) are reformed absurdly easily by being brought together by an ancient judge (Frank McGlynn, Sr.) who looks like Max Schreck prowling the German streets in Nosferatu — eventually he and the police take over the Merry-Go-Round and turn it into a legitimate youth hangout (though it doesn’t look or seem any different except they’re playing the swing music at a louder volume), though given McGlynn’s cadaverous appearance one wonders if PRC was setting up a sequel in which he’d turn out to be a vampire preying on the formerly delinquent daughters and raising them to new heights of blood-lust in both the literal and figurative senses.
Aside from one chilling scene in which Sally appears to be offering herself sexually to a much older man — only to pull out a gun and thereby victimize him in a Production Code-approved manner — Delinquent Daughters is a decent but formulaic movie, and it didn’t help that our download was flawed; just about every scene taking place at night outdoors (which was a lot of the movie!) turned into a gloppy, black-on-black mess and only the soundtrack clued us in to what was supposed to be going on — not that this film is interesting enough that I’m going to spend time tracking down a better source for it!
I ran one of the movies we’d recently downloaded from archive.org: Delinquent Daughters, a 1944 non-epic from PRC (actually from an outfit called “American Productions, Inc.,” headed by Al Herman — who also directed — and Donald C. McKean, released through PRC, which on this occasion was living up to the name its initials stood for: “Producers’ Releasing Corporation”) about five high-school girls (all of whom looked at least a decade too old for their parts — when they wondered audibly on screen what their parents would be thinking of them, I couldn’t help but think they all looked like they could be parents themselves!) who are drifting into trouble thanks to overly strict parents (at least twice in the film fathers threaten to beat up their daughters, and it’s not until the end of the movie that anybody in the film hints that that might not be the best idea in the world to try to keep your daughters on the straight and narrow) and no-goodnik boyfriends, as well as the malign influences of the operators of a youth hang-out called the “Merry-Go-Round,” which sells soft drinks and has a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy about any of the kids bringing in flasks.
The place is owned by gangster Nick Gordon (Jon Dawson) and his girlfriend Mimi (Fifi D’Orsay, whose presence puts everyone else in this movie one degree of separation from Bing Crosby, James Cagney and Stephen Sondheim!). Nick is attempting to recruit the boyfriends of Our Anti-Heroines into serious crimes — at which they’re totally inept; they rob one store and steal $2, their next robbery nets $6, and their third one (at a gas station) makes $13 and one begins to wonder if there are any store owners in this community that actually have any money. Mimi plays a similar role to Thelma White’s character in Reefer Madness (though D’Orsay, a marvelous musical performer, isn’t as good an actress as White and doesn’t hit the notes of real pathos that White did in an otherwise sorry movie like Reefer Madness), the conscience-stricken consort of the bad guy. The film is actually stolen by Teala Loring as Sally Higgins, the hardest “case” among the delinquent daughters, playing her part as an accomplished bad-ass and showing her readiness for femme fatale roles in noir movies — which, alas, she didn’t get.
The rest of the actors range from mediocre to positively annoying (the most annoying being Mary Bovard as Betty Smith — a blonde with a breathless way of speaking; she sounds like the discarded first prototype for the product line later perfected and called “Marilyn Monroe”); the “original” script (quotes definitely in order!) by Arthur St. Claire is one of those pitiable products that seems designed to keep people away from the dark side of life by making it seem way too boring to bother with; and the ending is ridiculous — all the bad-ass girls and all but one of the bad-ass boys (who seems to disappear from the story altogether) are reformed absurdly easily by being brought together by an ancient judge (Frank McGlynn, Sr.) who looks like Max Schreck prowling the German streets in Nosferatu — eventually he and the police take over the Merry-Go-Round and turn it into a legitimate youth hangout (though it doesn’t look or seem any different except they’re playing the swing music at a louder volume), though given McGlynn’s cadaverous appearance one wonders if PRC was setting up a sequel in which he’d turn out to be a vampire preying on the formerly delinquent daughters and raising them to new heights of blood-lust in both the literal and figurative senses.
Aside from one chilling scene in which Sally appears to be offering herself sexually to a much older man — only to pull out a gun and thereby victimize him in a Production Code-approved manner — Delinquent Daughters is a decent but formulaic movie, and it didn’t help that our download was flawed; just about every scene taking place at night outdoors (which was a lot of the movie!) turned into a gloppy, black-on-black mess and only the soundtrack clued us in to what was supposed to be going on — not that this film is interesting enough that I’m going to spend time tracking down a better source for it!
Sitting on the Moon (Republic, 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Sitting on the Moon, a really charming musical from the first year of Republic Pictures (1936) when the studio was still in transition. Republic was formed by Herbert Yates, a Right-wing slimeball (John Hammond notes in his autobiography just how anti-union he was) who as the head of Consolidated Film Industries, the main independent processing lab for movie film in 1930’s Hollywood, had got a lot of smaller film companies in hock to him. He used that clout to get several studios to merge under his ownership, including W. Ray Johnston’s Monogram and Nat Levine’s Mascot. Neither enjoyed working under Yates’s control; within two years Johnston had pulled out of the merger and received a cash settlement from Yates with which he re-started Monogram (alas, at a much lower artistic level than his first iteration!), while Levine (at least according to an imdb.com contributor) cashed out of Republic with $1 million which he promptly proceeded to blow on bad bets on horse races. (Levine turned up in 1939 at MGM, of all places, as a contract producer for the studio, but he only made one film for them — Four Girls in White, a story about nursing students — before MGM let him go.)
Levine was still technically head of the studio during its first year and a half or so, and Sitting on the Moon was his personal production; directed by Ralph Staub (whom he promoted from directing behind-the-scenes shorts about movie stars — sort of the Entertainment Tonight of their time — to making features) from a script by Raymond L. Schrock, Sidney Sutherland (who later turned up at Monogram in the mid-1940’s writing Kay Francis’ God-awful final vehicles) and Rex Taylor, it’s a Hollywood behind-the-scenes story but one that’s distinguished from the usual by focusing on a star who’s already blown her career. The star is Polly Blair (Grace Bradley), who gradually got more diva-ish and ultimately blew her career at Regent Pictures (interesting that a film made at a studio whose name symbolized democratic government would feature a fictitious studio whose name symbolizes monarchy!) by walking out on a film in mid-production. Her once-and-future boyfriend, songwriter Danny West (Roger Pryor), is attempting to get her back on the lot at Regent even if only as a chorus girl (shades of A Chorus Line!) but Worthington (Henry Kolker), Regent’s studio head, is inflexible and refuses to allow her to work there no matter how menial the job.
Danny has his own problems; he keeps running short of inspiration for the big song he’s supposed to provide Worthington for Regent’s next movie (at one point he plays a ragtime piece that turns out to be a swung version of a theme from Tannhäuser — though I must confess I didn’t recognize it as such until he said it was in the dialogue) and he’s been married to Blossom (Joyce Compton), a blonde he met in a drunken ramble through Mexico that left him owing $140 to a cabdriver and with a bride he couldn’t even remember meeting, much less marrying. Unable to make a comeback in Hollywood, Polly goes to New York and gets a job with a big radio program, and Danny follows her there and he and his comic-relief lyricist, Mike (William Newell), write her a song that becomes an enormous hit and establishes her as a radio star. There are a few more ups-and-downs in their relationship — especially when Blossom follows him to New York and demands a settlement to end the marriage so he can marry Polly — but it turns out she’s been married 11 times already, thanks to a scam she and that cabdriver (ya remember the cabdriver?) worked out to ensnare male movie personalities and extort money out of them via sham “marriages.”
Though we were watching one of those damnable cut versions of Republic’s movies they prepared to show on TV in the 1950’s — reduced to 54 minutes from an original 67-minute running time (the editing was at least done well enough that there weren’t any obvious lacunae) — Sitting on the Moon (the title is the big song Danny writes for Polly) was a nice, charming little musical, noteworthy for the intriguing singing of Grace Bradley — while she was hardly a match for the great Black singers of the 1930’s, she phrased with much more sensitivity than most of the white girls who sang with the big bands — and also the songs themselves, written by an obscure but not totally unfamiliar songwriter named Sam H. Stept. He would go on to write one of the biggest hits of the war years — “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” made famous by the Andrews Sisters (and also recorded by Glenn Miller) — and several quite good songs, including “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” and “My First Impression of You” (the latter recorded by Billie Holiday in a divinely inspired — or at least so it seems — version from 1938). Stept’s first hit had actually been “That’s My Weakness Now,” a very dated but still charming period piece from the 1920’s recorded by Helen Kane and covered by Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards and also by the Rhythm Boys with Paul Whiteman (and some sensational jazz breaks by Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer).
The film was Sitting on the Moon, a really charming musical from the first year of Republic Pictures (1936) when the studio was still in transition. Republic was formed by Herbert Yates, a Right-wing slimeball (John Hammond notes in his autobiography just how anti-union he was) who as the head of Consolidated Film Industries, the main independent processing lab for movie film in 1930’s Hollywood, had got a lot of smaller film companies in hock to him. He used that clout to get several studios to merge under his ownership, including W. Ray Johnston’s Monogram and Nat Levine’s Mascot. Neither enjoyed working under Yates’s control; within two years Johnston had pulled out of the merger and received a cash settlement from Yates with which he re-started Monogram (alas, at a much lower artistic level than his first iteration!), while Levine (at least according to an imdb.com contributor) cashed out of Republic with $1 million which he promptly proceeded to blow on bad bets on horse races. (Levine turned up in 1939 at MGM, of all places, as a contract producer for the studio, but he only made one film for them — Four Girls in White, a story about nursing students — before MGM let him go.)
Levine was still technically head of the studio during its first year and a half or so, and Sitting on the Moon was his personal production; directed by Ralph Staub (whom he promoted from directing behind-the-scenes shorts about movie stars — sort of the Entertainment Tonight of their time — to making features) from a script by Raymond L. Schrock, Sidney Sutherland (who later turned up at Monogram in the mid-1940’s writing Kay Francis’ God-awful final vehicles) and Rex Taylor, it’s a Hollywood behind-the-scenes story but one that’s distinguished from the usual by focusing on a star who’s already blown her career. The star is Polly Blair (Grace Bradley), who gradually got more diva-ish and ultimately blew her career at Regent Pictures (interesting that a film made at a studio whose name symbolized democratic government would feature a fictitious studio whose name symbolizes monarchy!) by walking out on a film in mid-production. Her once-and-future boyfriend, songwriter Danny West (Roger Pryor), is attempting to get her back on the lot at Regent even if only as a chorus girl (shades of A Chorus Line!) but Worthington (Henry Kolker), Regent’s studio head, is inflexible and refuses to allow her to work there no matter how menial the job.
Danny has his own problems; he keeps running short of inspiration for the big song he’s supposed to provide Worthington for Regent’s next movie (at one point he plays a ragtime piece that turns out to be a swung version of a theme from Tannhäuser — though I must confess I didn’t recognize it as such until he said it was in the dialogue) and he’s been married to Blossom (Joyce Compton), a blonde he met in a drunken ramble through Mexico that left him owing $140 to a cabdriver and with a bride he couldn’t even remember meeting, much less marrying. Unable to make a comeback in Hollywood, Polly goes to New York and gets a job with a big radio program, and Danny follows her there and he and his comic-relief lyricist, Mike (William Newell), write her a song that becomes an enormous hit and establishes her as a radio star. There are a few more ups-and-downs in their relationship — especially when Blossom follows him to New York and demands a settlement to end the marriage so he can marry Polly — but it turns out she’s been married 11 times already, thanks to a scam she and that cabdriver (ya remember the cabdriver?) worked out to ensnare male movie personalities and extort money out of them via sham “marriages.”
Though we were watching one of those damnable cut versions of Republic’s movies they prepared to show on TV in the 1950’s — reduced to 54 minutes from an original 67-minute running time (the editing was at least done well enough that there weren’t any obvious lacunae) — Sitting on the Moon (the title is the big song Danny writes for Polly) was a nice, charming little musical, noteworthy for the intriguing singing of Grace Bradley — while she was hardly a match for the great Black singers of the 1930’s, she phrased with much more sensitivity than most of the white girls who sang with the big bands — and also the songs themselves, written by an obscure but not totally unfamiliar songwriter named Sam H. Stept. He would go on to write one of the biggest hits of the war years — “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” made famous by the Andrews Sisters (and also recorded by Glenn Miller) — and several quite good songs, including “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” and “My First Impression of You” (the latter recorded by Billie Holiday in a divinely inspired — or at least so it seems — version from 1938). Stept’s first hit had actually been “That’s My Weakness Now,” a very dated but still charming period piece from the 1920’s recorded by Helen Kane and covered by Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards and also by the Rhythm Boys with Paul Whiteman (and some sensational jazz breaks by Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer).
The Sleeping Cardinal a.k.a. Sherlock Holmes’ Fatal Hour (Twickenham/First Division, 1930/31)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Sleeping Cardinal, a.k.a. Sherlock Holmes’ Fatal Hour (a U.S. title that’s quite a misnomer because Sherlock Holmes’ life is never seriously threatened at any time during the film, though there’s a plot gimmick taken from one of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories that makes it look like he’s in mortal danger — more on that later), made at the independent Twickenham Film Studios in Britain in 1930 (released in February 1931) and the first of five films featuring actor Arthur Wontner as Sherlock Holmes. I’ve seen his last two, The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (based on the Conan Doyle Holmes novel The Valley of Fear — and copying the book’s annoying structure of a first half in which Holmes is front and center, followed by a second-half flashback in which Holmes doesn’t appear at all but which establishes the motive for the crime Holmes was investigating in the first half) and Silver Blaze (released in the U.S. as Murder at the Baskervilles — by making Sir Henry Baskerville the owner of the horse Silver Blaze the writers linked the two stories and made the film appear to be a sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles even though the story wasn’t), and as much as I usually respect the critical judgments of the late William K. Everson (who thought Arthur Wontner was one of the two best actors ever to play Sherlock Holmes), I find myself unconvinced by Wontner as Holmes.
Wontner was a tall, rather beefy actor with an imperious upper-class British manner, superficially right for Holmes and actually quite convincing in the cerebral scenes in which Holmes lays back at Baker Street and thinks out his theories about the crime he is investigating. The problem is that Conan Doyle created Holmes not as just a cerebral “armchair detective” (in one story Conan Doyle actually has Holmes say that if the art of the detective began and ended from an armchair, his brother Mycroft would be a better one than he) but also as an action hero and as a neurotic, driven man who (at least in the early stories) had recourse to recreational drugs when he didn’t have a case to keep his mind occupied. Wontner is totally wrong casting for those sides of the Holmes character, and the Holmes films of his I’ve seen suffer because of it.
The Sleeping Cardinal deserves credit for some points: the script starts out not only from Conan Doyle’s characters but actually uses his plots as well. The film claims basis from the stories “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House” (“Holmes’ death and his resurrection,” Charles joked to me) and uses quite a lot of the original dialogue regarding Professor Moriarty (though the writing committee — Leslie S. Hiscott, who also directed; H. Fowler Mear and Cyril Twyford — for some reason changes his first name from “James” to “Robert”) and the sheer extent of his empire of crime, as well as the plot resolution in which Moriarty (of course in “The Empty House” Moriarty was already dead and the would-be assassin was Col. Sebastian Moran, his second-in-command) attempts to kill Holmes with an air gun but only succeeds in blasting to smithereens a bust of Holmes which he had put in his window as a decoy, instructing his landlady Mrs. Hudson (Minnie Rayner) to move it every few minutes to make it seem alive.
The film also scores in some remarkable proto-noir scenes in the first and last reels — during the 1920’s there were enough co-productions between the U.K. and Germany that a lot of British directors learned the chiaroscuro visual tricks invented by the Weimar-era German filmmakers that later became the basis for film noir — and in the casting of Ian Fleming (not the later Ian Fleming who created the character of James Bond!) as a reasonably intelligent Dr. Watson instead of a comic foil à la Nigel Bruce. Alas, in between those visually distinguished first and last reels, the movie is a forest of talk, talk, talk, taking place almost exclusively indoors — and in just two locations, at that: the home of Ronald Adair (Leslie Perrins) and his sister Kathleen (Jane Welsh); and the digs of Holmes and Watson at 221B Baker Street (though the address isn’t given in the film). It’s an indication of how claustrophobic this movie is that though we hear Holmes deduce that Watson has had trouble getting his car started, and therefore we know the film is supposed to be set contemporarily (in 1930 instead of the 1890’s), we never actually see a car in the film.
The “Sleeping Cardinal” itself is a painting that is illuminated whenever Moriarty wants to communicate with any of his subordinates — his words emerge through a loudspeaker mounted on the ceiling just above the picture — and it’s clear Hiscott and his co-writers, unable to discern from the Conan Doyle stories just how Moriarty was supposed to have given orders to his subalterns, decided to copy the iconography of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse movies (though undoubtedly there were literary antecedents to the gimmick of the criminal mastermind posing as a respected member of society and therefore having to issue orders to his staff in cloak-and-dagger ways to preserve his incognito), especially when we cut to Ronald Adair playing cards (high-stakes bridge) and we get an extreme close-up of the cards themselves being dealt, reminiscent of the opening of the 1922 Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler in which the other characters’ faces appear as cards held in Mabuse’s hand. The central intrigue of the movie — Moriarty’s gangsters break into banks but apparently don’t steal anything; Holmes, however, deduces that they’re actually stealing real currency and planting their own counterfeits in its place, then smuggling the real green to the Continent to destabilize the European economy — is also rather Mabusian.
Alas, the movie is mostly just dull; director Hiscott has absolutely no sense of pace or suspense (I couldn’t help but wish they could have borrowed Alfred Hitchcock from British International to direct, but not only was BIP a more prestigious studio than Twickenham but at the time The Sleeping Cardinal was filmed Hitchcock was preparing his early masterpiece, Rich and Strange) and scene after scene plods through pages of script, delivered in that mind-numbingly slow style that accursed all too many early talkies. (Sound recorder Baynham Honri’s credit is in the same size type as the director’s, a throwback to the earliest days of talkies in which the sound men were largely taking over the director’s function, from telling the actors when they should begin a scene to instructing them on how to read their lines and in particular not to interrupt each other, even though real people talking interrupt each other all the time.)
It’s an indication of how hard the writers worked to turn two fast-paced, thrilling stories into a slow and boring movie that the murder of Ronald Adair, which has already happened when “The Empty House” begins, doesn’t take place until 54 minutes into this 82-minute movie — and it also doesn’t help that Ronald Adair is such an annoying upper-class twit (he fell into Moriarty’s clutches when he started cheating at cards to maintain his and his sister’s financial position, and Moriarty caught him at it and blackmailed him) that he way overstays his welcome and we’re really not sorry to see him go when he finally does get killed. The film’s other problem is that Moriarty is operating under an assumed identity as “Col. Henslowe” (Norman McKinnell) and is only revealed as the villain at the end — though there’s an early scene that drops a Mack truck-sized hint when Henslowe, having just lost a game of cards to Adair, quickly calculates how much he owes Adair and the other characters comment on his being a genius at math — and therefore, until his “unmasking” scene, he can’t play Moriarty as the bravura villain George Zucco and Lionel Atwill made of the character in later Holmes films with Basil Rathbone.
But then again, and despite the horribly contrived nature of most of the scripts for Rathbone’s Holmes films (Universal’s licensing agreement specified that each installment had to draw on the Conan Doyle canon for some element — a plot twist, a dialogue exchange, a famous deduction — but they still stayed far away from the letter of Conan Doyle’s conception and only intermittently did justice to its spirit), Rathbone himself was so ideal for the role — he looked like he’d just stepped out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations and he was superb as both the cerebral Holmes and the man of action — that (to paraphrase the famous opening of Conan Doyle’s story “A Scandal in Bohemia”) to me, Basil Rathbone will always be THE Sherlock Holmes.
The film was The Sleeping Cardinal, a.k.a. Sherlock Holmes’ Fatal Hour (a U.S. title that’s quite a misnomer because Sherlock Holmes’ life is never seriously threatened at any time during the film, though there’s a plot gimmick taken from one of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories that makes it look like he’s in mortal danger — more on that later), made at the independent Twickenham Film Studios in Britain in 1930 (released in February 1931) and the first of five films featuring actor Arthur Wontner as Sherlock Holmes. I’ve seen his last two, The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (based on the Conan Doyle Holmes novel The Valley of Fear — and copying the book’s annoying structure of a first half in which Holmes is front and center, followed by a second-half flashback in which Holmes doesn’t appear at all but which establishes the motive for the crime Holmes was investigating in the first half) and Silver Blaze (released in the U.S. as Murder at the Baskervilles — by making Sir Henry Baskerville the owner of the horse Silver Blaze the writers linked the two stories and made the film appear to be a sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles even though the story wasn’t), and as much as I usually respect the critical judgments of the late William K. Everson (who thought Arthur Wontner was one of the two best actors ever to play Sherlock Holmes), I find myself unconvinced by Wontner as Holmes.
Wontner was a tall, rather beefy actor with an imperious upper-class British manner, superficially right for Holmes and actually quite convincing in the cerebral scenes in which Holmes lays back at Baker Street and thinks out his theories about the crime he is investigating. The problem is that Conan Doyle created Holmes not as just a cerebral “armchair detective” (in one story Conan Doyle actually has Holmes say that if the art of the detective began and ended from an armchair, his brother Mycroft would be a better one than he) but also as an action hero and as a neurotic, driven man who (at least in the early stories) had recourse to recreational drugs when he didn’t have a case to keep his mind occupied. Wontner is totally wrong casting for those sides of the Holmes character, and the Holmes films of his I’ve seen suffer because of it.
The Sleeping Cardinal deserves credit for some points: the script starts out not only from Conan Doyle’s characters but actually uses his plots as well. The film claims basis from the stories “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House” (“Holmes’ death and his resurrection,” Charles joked to me) and uses quite a lot of the original dialogue regarding Professor Moriarty (though the writing committee — Leslie S. Hiscott, who also directed; H. Fowler Mear and Cyril Twyford — for some reason changes his first name from “James” to “Robert”) and the sheer extent of his empire of crime, as well as the plot resolution in which Moriarty (of course in “The Empty House” Moriarty was already dead and the would-be assassin was Col. Sebastian Moran, his second-in-command) attempts to kill Holmes with an air gun but only succeeds in blasting to smithereens a bust of Holmes which he had put in his window as a decoy, instructing his landlady Mrs. Hudson (Minnie Rayner) to move it every few minutes to make it seem alive.
The film also scores in some remarkable proto-noir scenes in the first and last reels — during the 1920’s there were enough co-productions between the U.K. and Germany that a lot of British directors learned the chiaroscuro visual tricks invented by the Weimar-era German filmmakers that later became the basis for film noir — and in the casting of Ian Fleming (not the later Ian Fleming who created the character of James Bond!) as a reasonably intelligent Dr. Watson instead of a comic foil à la Nigel Bruce. Alas, in between those visually distinguished first and last reels, the movie is a forest of talk, talk, talk, taking place almost exclusively indoors — and in just two locations, at that: the home of Ronald Adair (Leslie Perrins) and his sister Kathleen (Jane Welsh); and the digs of Holmes and Watson at 221B Baker Street (though the address isn’t given in the film). It’s an indication of how claustrophobic this movie is that though we hear Holmes deduce that Watson has had trouble getting his car started, and therefore we know the film is supposed to be set contemporarily (in 1930 instead of the 1890’s), we never actually see a car in the film.
The “Sleeping Cardinal” itself is a painting that is illuminated whenever Moriarty wants to communicate with any of his subordinates — his words emerge through a loudspeaker mounted on the ceiling just above the picture — and it’s clear Hiscott and his co-writers, unable to discern from the Conan Doyle stories just how Moriarty was supposed to have given orders to his subalterns, decided to copy the iconography of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse movies (though undoubtedly there were literary antecedents to the gimmick of the criminal mastermind posing as a respected member of society and therefore having to issue orders to his staff in cloak-and-dagger ways to preserve his incognito), especially when we cut to Ronald Adair playing cards (high-stakes bridge) and we get an extreme close-up of the cards themselves being dealt, reminiscent of the opening of the 1922 Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler in which the other characters’ faces appear as cards held in Mabuse’s hand. The central intrigue of the movie — Moriarty’s gangsters break into banks but apparently don’t steal anything; Holmes, however, deduces that they’re actually stealing real currency and planting their own counterfeits in its place, then smuggling the real green to the Continent to destabilize the European economy — is also rather Mabusian.
Alas, the movie is mostly just dull; director Hiscott has absolutely no sense of pace or suspense (I couldn’t help but wish they could have borrowed Alfred Hitchcock from British International to direct, but not only was BIP a more prestigious studio than Twickenham but at the time The Sleeping Cardinal was filmed Hitchcock was preparing his early masterpiece, Rich and Strange) and scene after scene plods through pages of script, delivered in that mind-numbingly slow style that accursed all too many early talkies. (Sound recorder Baynham Honri’s credit is in the same size type as the director’s, a throwback to the earliest days of talkies in which the sound men were largely taking over the director’s function, from telling the actors when they should begin a scene to instructing them on how to read their lines and in particular not to interrupt each other, even though real people talking interrupt each other all the time.)
It’s an indication of how hard the writers worked to turn two fast-paced, thrilling stories into a slow and boring movie that the murder of Ronald Adair, which has already happened when “The Empty House” begins, doesn’t take place until 54 minutes into this 82-minute movie — and it also doesn’t help that Ronald Adair is such an annoying upper-class twit (he fell into Moriarty’s clutches when he started cheating at cards to maintain his and his sister’s financial position, and Moriarty caught him at it and blackmailed him) that he way overstays his welcome and we’re really not sorry to see him go when he finally does get killed. The film’s other problem is that Moriarty is operating under an assumed identity as “Col. Henslowe” (Norman McKinnell) and is only revealed as the villain at the end — though there’s an early scene that drops a Mack truck-sized hint when Henslowe, having just lost a game of cards to Adair, quickly calculates how much he owes Adair and the other characters comment on his being a genius at math — and therefore, until his “unmasking” scene, he can’t play Moriarty as the bravura villain George Zucco and Lionel Atwill made of the character in later Holmes films with Basil Rathbone.
But then again, and despite the horribly contrived nature of most of the scripts for Rathbone’s Holmes films (Universal’s licensing agreement specified that each installment had to draw on the Conan Doyle canon for some element — a plot twist, a dialogue exchange, a famous deduction — but they still stayed far away from the letter of Conan Doyle’s conception and only intermittently did justice to its spirit), Rathbone himself was so ideal for the role — he looked like he’d just stepped out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations and he was superb as both the cerebral Holmes and the man of action — that (to paraphrase the famous opening of Conan Doyle’s story “A Scandal in Bohemia”) to me, Basil Rathbone will always be THE Sherlock Holmes.
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