by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The first film I screened for us was The Mask of Fu Manchu, a 1932 production by MGM based on a Sax Rohmer novel (yet more evidence of how quickly properties got filmed in those days: the novel was originally published as a serial by Collier’s from May 7 to July 23, 1932 and the film was begun in August 1932 and released November 5 of that year!), directed by Charles Brabin (most famous now as the man who got fired from the silent Ben-Hur and replaced with Fred Niblo), who according to the American Film Institute Catalog replaced the young Charles Vidor on the project. The script credits were even more convoluted: Courtenay Terrett wrote the script Vidor began shooting, Raoul Whitfield and Bayard Veiller were brought in for rewrites and the final screen credits listed Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allan Woolf and John Willard as the sole writers. (Woolf worked on The Wizard of Oz — it was his last assignment before his death — and while that may seem a very different property from a Fu Manchu story, Mask and Oz contain at least one element in common: the villain uses an hourglass to mark his/her plan to kill the hero.)
What’s kept this film in circulation well beyond the life of previous Fu Manchu films (which had been produced at Paramount with Warner Oland as Fu Manchu — thus making Charlie Chan at the Opera a “doubles” movie) is the cast: Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu and Myrna Loy as his nymphomaniac daughter, Fah Lo See, who demands that he keep white captive Terrence Granville (Charles Starrett) alive long enough so she can have his wicked way with him (aided by four Black servants who whip him on her orders while she gives us orgasmic looks while watching — as much as Loy hated parts like this you couldn’t tell from the full-blooded, all-out way she acts it, though how Fu Manchu acquired a retinue of Black muscle-men as manservants in the middle of northern China is left a mystery).
The plot is a farrago of melodramatic nonsense that has almost no dramatic coherence whatsoever, but Brabin paces it so fast we’re blown breathlessly from incident to incident and it doesn’t matter that so little of the film makes any sense. It also helps that cinematographer Tony Gaudio shoots in an atmospheric, “Germanic,” proto-noir style; that Cedric Gibbons’ set designs are large and spectacular (MGM may have recycled some big sets from older movies but it certainly looks like a far more opulent production than Karloff was used to at his home studio, Universal); and that Karloff’s “Asian” makeup is far more convincing than it would be in his other Chinese roles (the Warners melodrama West of Shanghai and the Mr. Wong films at Monogram), though as an actor Karloff was less effective playing an all-out villain than he was in the almost contemporary The Mummy (shot just one month after Mask and released December 23, 1932), in which he was a figure of some sympathy and not purely evil. Lewis Stone’s Nayland Smith (the Scotland Yard inspector who was Fu Manchu’s nemesis — Sherlock Holmes to his Moriarty, as it were) is a pretty stock characterization, but Karen Morley, playing the daughter of kidnapped British explorer Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant), is quite good, authoritative and convincing. — 10/25/03
•••••
The Mask of Fu Manchu is a really quirky movie — the third film based on Sax Rohmer’s Asiatic Moriarty character (the earlier ones were a 1923 British silent called Cry of the Night Hawk and the 1929 Paramount talkie The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, with “yellowface” actor Warner Oland in the part), based on a Rohmer novel published the same year (1932) the film was made. This film has become legendary mainly because Boris Karloff was cast as Fu Manchu and Myrna Loy played his nymphomaniac daughter, Fah Lo See, who tries to seduce the male romantic lead, Terrence Granville (Charles Starrett), away from his Anglo girlfriend Sheila Barton (Karen Morley).
The plot is basically a knock-off of King Solomon’s Mines in which Sheila’s father, archaeologist Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant), is kidnapped while in the British museum discussing with several associates a planned expedition to northern China to discover the long-lost tomb of Genghis Khan. Just before his disappearance, Sir Lionel was called into the office of Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) of the British secret service and told to expedite his expedition because it’s crucially important to the peace and security of the world that he acquire the sword and mask of Genghis Khan before Fu Manchu does, since if Fu Manchu gets hold of them he’ll be able to pose as the reincarnation of Genghis Khan and rally the people of China to join him in a genocidal war aimed at wiping out the entire white race. (The fact that Genghis Khan was a Mongol usurper and occupier, and most of the Chinese of his time hated him, doesn’t seem to have occurred to Sax Rohmer or the screenwriters, Irene Kuhn, future Wizard of Oz contributor Edgar Allan Woolf and John Willard.)
Alas, Sir Lionel is attacked in the British Museum by Fu Manchu’s minions, dressed as mummies; he’s kidnapped, put on a plane and flown to Fu Manchu’s redoubt in Liangchow, China, where he’s tortured by being tied to a table just below a giant bell that continually rings, depriving him of any chance to sleep. Of course he’s also starved and dehydrated — in one scene Fu Manchu comes in carrying a bunch of grapes and waves it across the poor man’s face, the way S/M doms sometimes caress their subs’ faces with floggers or whips to tease them before they actually start flogging or whipping them; later Fu gives him a drink of water and then says, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, it’s salt.” (I had visions of Dick Cheney watching this movie and thinking, “How cool! Where can we get one of those bells?”) The purpose of the torture, of course, is to get Sir Lionel to reveal to Fu where the tomb of Genghis Khan is. Meanwhile, the expedition from Britain has set forth and actually discovered the tomb — Nayland Smith took Sir Lionel’s place with it and Terrence and Sheila also came along. (Sheila had to deal with the usual this-is-no-place-for-a-woman crap to get into the expedition, but finally convinced the men to take her not only because she understandably wants to find out what happened to her dad, but he discussed the location of the tomb with her and therefore she’s the only other person who actually knows where it is.)
They’re followed by Fu’s minions, who at times seem to encompass the entire population of China, and the rest of the film is a long chase scene interspersed with torture scenes and picturesque sets reflecting MGM art director Cedric Gibbons’ rather demented idea of Chinese traditions. The Mask of Fu Manchu benefits from MGM’s financial resources — even for a 68-minute programmer like this they really shot the budget on the sets, with the result that the torture devices are spanking-new, gleaming and look genuinely intimidating instead of being thrown together with duct tape and baling wire the way they seemed to be at cheaper studios that tried this sort of film — and from a marvelous pre-Code kinkiness; not only do we see Charles Starrett wearing a loincloth and nothing else (Myrna Loy’s character has ordered him stripped as a preliminary to the sexual fun-and-games she wants to play with him) but we see a whole host of Fu’s manservants, large, muscular and inexplicably African-descended (was there a Black community in China or did Fu import them himself?), similarly undressed: a surprise treat for beefcake fans one doesn’t expect to find in a 1932 movie.
It also has a surprisingly good, emotional performance from the usually wooden Karen Morley — her anguish over her father’s fate and, later, over her betrayal by Terrence (he’s been given a drug by Fu Manchu that gets him to give up the mask and sword of Genghis Khan and also reject her in favor of Fu’s daughter), are totally convincing — and marvelously atmospheric direction by Charles Brabin (and Charles Vidor, uncredited) and cinematography by Tony Gaudio that ably captures the aura of slippery evil intrinsic to the story. On the down side are some ghastly overacting by Karloff — within a month, in The Mummy, he’d again play a mastermind prowling around old graves and looking for relics to serve his sinister purposes, but under Karl Freund’s direction he’d give a beautifully understated, almost heart-rending performance far better than his work here — and the story’s relentless racism.
Fu Manchu introduces himself as a “three-time doctor,” having earned Ph.D.’s in philosophy and law and an M.D. from Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, but the message of the film seems to be that educating an Asian that way is a sure-fire recipe for creating a mad, evil genius. The only even remotely sympathetic Chinese character appears at the very end, after Fu has been vanquished and the surviving white principals are on a ship taking them from China to England, when Lewis Stone is about to throw the sword of Genghis Khan overboard (sort of like Gloria Stuart and the jewel at the end of Titanic) so no other Asian madman can get hold of it and try the same stunt, and the expedition’s survivors hear the sound of a bell and freak out — only it's just the ship's dinner gong, being rung by a Chinese steward (Willie Fung) who proudly and happily proclaims his ignorance of all the heavy-duty intellectual subjects Fu Manchu studied way back when.
The Mask of Fu Manchu was significant in Myrna Loy’s career; after this and Thirteen Women (made on loan-out from MGM to RKO) she went to see Louis B. Mayer and demanded, “No more Oriental nymphomaniac roles!” — whereupon Mayer saw her point, told her that from then on she’d only play ladies, sent her to RKO again for a far better loan-out film, Topaze, and then cast her opposite William Powell in Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man, which sent her career into superstar orbit. I remember watching the 1926 silent Mr. Wu with Charles and wishing MGM had remade it as an early talkie re-teaming Karloff and Loy as Chinese father and daughter (the casting directors at Warners and MGM had noticed the slight slant in Loy’s eyes and decided that fitted her for Asian roles — and Warners had even changed her last name from Williams to Loy to make her sound Chinese!), with Ralph Forbes repeating his role as the boyfriend in this Madama Butterfly-esque tale — but they didn’t, even though that would have been a better movie than this one and would have offered Karloff a more multi-dimensional role that probably would have encouraged him to give a subtler and more convincing performance than he does here. — 10/29/09
Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Butte, America (Rattlesnake Productions/PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was an Independent Lens production called Butte, America, an extraordinary hour-long history of Butte, Montana from the 1870’s — when Thomas A. Edison’s invention of the electric light and (even more important long-term) the electric power grid vastly increased the demand for Butte’s principal product, copper — to 1982, when the company that owned Butte’s mines (having acquired or put out of business all its competitors in the early years of the 20th century), Anaconda Copper, finally declared them played out and abruptly shut down operations, leaving Butte a virtual ghost town. The filmmaker, Pamela Roberts, picked Butte as a subject partly because she used to visit the place in her childhood but mostly because she saw Butte as a sort of microcosm of the American corporate economy and how it played out in a typical industrial community (she explicitly compared Butte to Pittsburgh and Flint as industrial cities that rose and fall with the production of a particular product).
It’s an intensely moving historical film that could probably be even more moving if it were longer — especially since in the promotional interview on the PBS Web site for the film, Roberts answered the question of which scene she shot most moved her, “We shot a scene—that did not make the cut—with an underground miner we took back into the mine for the first time in over 30 years. He broke down and cried tears of joy for the opportunity to go underground again—he loved mining. And then came tears of sorrow as he recalled his longtime partner who was killed by an explosion. It was very revealing and very touching.” (The story about the miner whose mining partner — a relationship that seems to have much the same emotional overlay as a police partnership — was killed is in the movie; the heartrending return to the mineshaft after 30 years, alas, is not.) She also said that what she would have wanted to include in a longer movie was “more about the lives of the women I interviewed. Their lives and experiences were so interesting, but often devalued in their own eyes. Also, more about Butte today and the current economic resurgence through its restoration and preservation economy.” All of this makes me hope Roberts still has her outtakes and can use them to make a longer version of the film for theatrical and/or home video release.
Still, what we have of Butte, America tells a story that comes surprisingly close to Roberts’ stated intent of encapsulating all the changes in America between 1870 and 1982:
• starting with the early “rush” as fortunes seemingly were to be made in Butte;
• the evolution of Anaconda Copper as the strongest and, eventually, the only company in town;
• the way the city was literally built on top of the mines;
• the company-town aspect of it (workers technically owned their homes but not the land they stood on — for which they paid the company $2 per month “ground rent” — which meant they could be thrown off the land for any reason at any time);
• the degree to which Anaconda Copper not only ran the workers’ lives and drove wages to subsistence levels (which, as Marx pointed out, is what capitalists always do unless government either regulates wages directly or allows the existence of a strong labor movement) but controlled the city’s and the state’s politics as well (editorial cartoonists doing work opposed to the company, its power and its agenda inevitably riffed on the company’s name and drew it as a giant snake squeezing life out of everything in its way);
• the boom time for workers that lasted from the mid-1930’s (when the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union successfully organized Anaconda after previous unions had died due to company opposition, internal infighting or both) to the 1950’s, when Anaconda opened its first mine in Chile and started squeezing wages down in Butte and demanding concessions from the unions;
• the impact of Salvador Allende’s election as president of Chile in 1970 and his nationalization of Anaconda’s mines there, which led to a sudden plunge in the company’s profitability to which it responded by squeezing Butte’s workers even further;
• the exhaustion of Butte’s high-grade ore (which had to be mined like coal — digging underground tunnels, planting dynamite to dislodge the ore and using picks to ship it out on cars running on tracks) and the company’s conversion to open-pit mining of the low-grade ore that was left;
• the environmental hazards of the operation, including the diseases the miners got from inhaling silica dust as they worked (the dust, similar to glass, collected in and around their lungs and ultimately had a similar effect to pneumonia) as well as the horrific amount of pollution left over when the mines finally closed and Anaconda turned off its pumps, thereby allowing water full of heavy metals and toxic chemicals to flow straight into the city’s water supply (the lake outside Butte is now one of the most heavily polluted Superfund sites in the country);
• as well as the company’s alternation between grand seigneur and pillager, literally bulldozing entire neighborhoods overnight to expand the open pits in the later days (the images here looked like the Israeli army in occupied Palestine!) and setting fire to the amusement park Anaconda had opened years before and claimed it was part of an obligation to the workers. (The fire was supposedly accidental, but the townspeople Roberts interviewed were sure it was set deliberately because the park was in the way of Anaconda’s latest plan for expanding the open pits.)
Butte, America actually does what Roberts set out to do — set Butte’s story against America’s in the 20th century and in particular the metamorphosis of industrial production from a dirty, exploitative job to a relatively well-paid one (thanks to organized labor and a government that supported and facilitated its existence — if we’ve learned one thing about labor in the last 50 years, it’s that it can only exist when the government uses its authority to force the private sector to recognize it; once that authority was withdrawn, America’s labor movement underwent a slow collapse until now, when it’s only American labor’s success in organizing the government’s own workers that is keeping it in business at all) and then back to an underpaid, exploitative one on the long slide towards ceasing to exist at all as America de-industrializes and declares entire segments of its population and its cities surplus and not worth bothering about.
Butte, America is a powerful story, sometimes visually beautiful (Roberts found a considerable amount of footage from virtually the entire arc of Butte’s history, and the faces of the miners as they prepared to descend into the earth to work are extraordinarily moving) and sometimes terrifying, always underscoring the lesson that a corporation has no morals, no ideals, no compassion, nothing but a relentless drive to maximize profits for its shareholders; and since it has no morals, it has no compunction about breaking any commitments it makes to its workers, consumers or anyone else. Butte, America is at once a monument to what capitalism can create and a damnation of how easily it can destroy it all again.
The show was an Independent Lens production called Butte, America, an extraordinary hour-long history of Butte, Montana from the 1870’s — when Thomas A. Edison’s invention of the electric light and (even more important long-term) the electric power grid vastly increased the demand for Butte’s principal product, copper — to 1982, when the company that owned Butte’s mines (having acquired or put out of business all its competitors in the early years of the 20th century), Anaconda Copper, finally declared them played out and abruptly shut down operations, leaving Butte a virtual ghost town. The filmmaker, Pamela Roberts, picked Butte as a subject partly because she used to visit the place in her childhood but mostly because she saw Butte as a sort of microcosm of the American corporate economy and how it played out in a typical industrial community (she explicitly compared Butte to Pittsburgh and Flint as industrial cities that rose and fall with the production of a particular product).
It’s an intensely moving historical film that could probably be even more moving if it were longer — especially since in the promotional interview on the PBS Web site for the film, Roberts answered the question of which scene she shot most moved her, “We shot a scene—that did not make the cut—with an underground miner we took back into the mine for the first time in over 30 years. He broke down and cried tears of joy for the opportunity to go underground again—he loved mining. And then came tears of sorrow as he recalled his longtime partner who was killed by an explosion. It was very revealing and very touching.” (The story about the miner whose mining partner — a relationship that seems to have much the same emotional overlay as a police partnership — was killed is in the movie; the heartrending return to the mineshaft after 30 years, alas, is not.) She also said that what she would have wanted to include in a longer movie was “more about the lives of the women I interviewed. Their lives and experiences were so interesting, but often devalued in their own eyes. Also, more about Butte today and the current economic resurgence through its restoration and preservation economy.” All of this makes me hope Roberts still has her outtakes and can use them to make a longer version of the film for theatrical and/or home video release.
Still, what we have of Butte, America tells a story that comes surprisingly close to Roberts’ stated intent of encapsulating all the changes in America between 1870 and 1982:
• starting with the early “rush” as fortunes seemingly were to be made in Butte;
• the evolution of Anaconda Copper as the strongest and, eventually, the only company in town;
• the way the city was literally built on top of the mines;
• the company-town aspect of it (workers technically owned their homes but not the land they stood on — for which they paid the company $2 per month “ground rent” — which meant they could be thrown off the land for any reason at any time);
• the degree to which Anaconda Copper not only ran the workers’ lives and drove wages to subsistence levels (which, as Marx pointed out, is what capitalists always do unless government either regulates wages directly or allows the existence of a strong labor movement) but controlled the city’s and the state’s politics as well (editorial cartoonists doing work opposed to the company, its power and its agenda inevitably riffed on the company’s name and drew it as a giant snake squeezing life out of everything in its way);
• the boom time for workers that lasted from the mid-1930’s (when the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union successfully organized Anaconda after previous unions had died due to company opposition, internal infighting or both) to the 1950’s, when Anaconda opened its first mine in Chile and started squeezing wages down in Butte and demanding concessions from the unions;
• the impact of Salvador Allende’s election as president of Chile in 1970 and his nationalization of Anaconda’s mines there, which led to a sudden plunge in the company’s profitability to which it responded by squeezing Butte’s workers even further;
• the exhaustion of Butte’s high-grade ore (which had to be mined like coal — digging underground tunnels, planting dynamite to dislodge the ore and using picks to ship it out on cars running on tracks) and the company’s conversion to open-pit mining of the low-grade ore that was left;
• the environmental hazards of the operation, including the diseases the miners got from inhaling silica dust as they worked (the dust, similar to glass, collected in and around their lungs and ultimately had a similar effect to pneumonia) as well as the horrific amount of pollution left over when the mines finally closed and Anaconda turned off its pumps, thereby allowing water full of heavy metals and toxic chemicals to flow straight into the city’s water supply (the lake outside Butte is now one of the most heavily polluted Superfund sites in the country);
• as well as the company’s alternation between grand seigneur and pillager, literally bulldozing entire neighborhoods overnight to expand the open pits in the later days (the images here looked like the Israeli army in occupied Palestine!) and setting fire to the amusement park Anaconda had opened years before and claimed it was part of an obligation to the workers. (The fire was supposedly accidental, but the townspeople Roberts interviewed were sure it was set deliberately because the park was in the way of Anaconda’s latest plan for expanding the open pits.)
Butte, America actually does what Roberts set out to do — set Butte’s story against America’s in the 20th century and in particular the metamorphosis of industrial production from a dirty, exploitative job to a relatively well-paid one (thanks to organized labor and a government that supported and facilitated its existence — if we’ve learned one thing about labor in the last 50 years, it’s that it can only exist when the government uses its authority to force the private sector to recognize it; once that authority was withdrawn, America’s labor movement underwent a slow collapse until now, when it’s only American labor’s success in organizing the government’s own workers that is keeping it in business at all) and then back to an underpaid, exploitative one on the long slide towards ceasing to exist at all as America de-industrializes and declares entire segments of its population and its cities surplus and not worth bothering about.
Butte, America is a powerful story, sometimes visually beautiful (Roberts found a considerable amount of footage from virtually the entire arc of Butte’s history, and the faces of the miners as they prepared to descend into the earth to work are extraordinarily moving) and sometimes terrifying, always underscoring the lesson that a corporation has no morals, no ideals, no compassion, nothing but a relentless drive to maximize profits for its shareholders; and since it has no morals, it has no compunction about breaking any commitments it makes to its workers, consumers or anyone else. Butte, America is at once a monument to what capitalism can create and a damnation of how easily it can destroy it all again.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Copyright Criminals (Changing Images/ITVS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The library movie last Monday was a fascinating one: Copyright Criminals, made for the Independent Television and Video Service (ITVS), which supplies programming to PBS stations that want it (which usually isn’t the one in San Diego!), co-directed by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod based on McLeod’s book of the same title. There are a number of films that could be made with that title growing out of the increasing stringency of copyright laws — how giant corporations, with their near-total domination of politics and governance, are extending copyright protections for longer and longer periods (aiming to change the basis of U.S. copyright law from its constitutional basis — ensuring artists and inventors a limited-time monopoly on selling their work in order to encourage them to create — to creating a permanent intellectual-property right held not by the actual creators but by the corporations that bought the rights from them in the first place) and tightening up the criteria under which others can use copyrighted material on a “fair use” basis; and the paradoxical advent of digital technology that has made duplication (both outright copying and re-use) far easier and thereby threatened the technological assumption behind copyright law: the ability to ban the sale of physical copies of the material by anyone other than the copyright holder or an authorized licensee.
What Franzen and McLeod chose to focus on was a form of artistic creativity, copyright infringement or both that actually pre-dates digital technology: so-called “sampling,” the use of snippets of previously recorded music to create a new background track, usually as a background for rap (or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap favored by people who like it). The filmmakers take a pretty ardently pro-sampling point of view, saying basically that this was an art form created by young African-Americans in depressed areas like the South Bronx in New York and Compton in Los Angeles County, people who wanted to make music but couldn’t afford conventional instruments — so they worked with turntables, lifting bits and pieces from old records (mostly funk from the 1970’s by artists like James Brown, Rick James and George Clinton, the mastermind behind Parliament and Funkadelic — which were actually exactly the same people, except Parliament used horn players and Funkadelic did not, but because they were technically two separate bands Clinton signed them to two different labels: a throwback to the time Duke Ellington had “exclusive” contracts with several different labels at once, sometimes recording under his own name and sometimes as “The Harlem Footwarmers” or some other pseudonym de jour) to create a musical texture over which rappers would perform.
Nobody really cared much as long as these were just young Black kids busking on streetcorners, either not recording at all or just selling homemade cassettes; but when sampling started being the basis of multi-million selling records like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, De la Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, the music industry started fighting back, suing and winning. The result is that now the only people who get to sample are highly successful artists who can afford the often stratospheric licensing fees and people still doing it underground, keeping under the radar of the music industry and — this being the 21st century — distributing the work not on homemade mix tapes but on Web sites.
I must confess to far more mixed feelings about sampling than those reflected in this film — I can acknowledge the argument that by sampling, people are creating new works of art based on old ones (we wouldn’t have a lot of Shakespeare’s plays if he’d had to worry about copyright — while it undoubtedly drove him nuts that there was no legal way he could protect something once he’d performed it, he also took full advantage of the lack of copyright laws to recycle his plots from the work of others; one has to wonder if Hamlet would exist if Shakespeare had had to deal with modern-style copyright laws and thereby either would have had to license the plot from Thomas Kyd or worry about Kyd suing him; likewise one wonders if Matisse would have bothered to do collages if he’d had to worry about the publisher of Le Figaro suing him for appropriating their front pages and demanding a cut of every picture he sold containing their “content” — just as Shepard Fairey is now facing a lawsuit from Associated Press over his Obama “Hope” image) and there ought to be a legal avenue by which they can express their sort of creativity without making it prohibitively expensive.
At the same time, they are basing their creations on previously created material, many of whose creators are still alive and deserve to be compensated. To make the moral situation even muddier, the people who hold the copyrights and are demanding major sums of money to “clear” samples they own legally aren’t always the same people who created them — a defense the “copyright criminals” frequently make in their own defense (“Hey, we’re not ripping off the original artists — you’re the ones who did that!”) Certainly the most poignant person profiled in Copyright Criminals is Clyde Stubblefield. Never heard of him? I hadn’t either, even though he was James Brown’s drummer in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and created many of the basic rhythm patters that have been used ever since not only in the funk-soul genre Brown helped create but on rap records and plenty of other places.
The first person who ripped off Stubblefield’s work without giving him either credit or royalties was James Brown; in the film Stubblefield (who’s still alive, performs at small clubs in the Detroit area and bills himself as “The Original ‘Funky Drummer,’” after a song in which Brown used his drum licks and paid tribute to him) said that he would frequently just jam a rhythm pattern, Brown’s bass player would join in, then his guitarists would come in and start playing licks on top of the rhythms that were taking shape, and finally Brown would come in, start singing along and making up words off the top of his head — and eventually this would become a full-fledged song, only Brown would take composer credit exclusively himself and not co-credit the musicians who had actually worked out the musical basis of the new song. Brown figured the musicians were being compensated by their regular salaries as part of his band and therefore never offered them credit or royalties — and neither did the companies that sold Brown’s records or published his songs, so Stubblefield isn’t getting royalties either from continuing sales of Brown’s old records or from the multi-million selling rap hits built around his drumming.
One of the strategies Franzen and McLeod use is to point out that many of the groups suing to demand royalties from records containing samples of their work themselves practiced earlier forms of sampling — like the Beatles (though apparently the lawsuits over the Beatles’ work are coming from their record company, EMI, and not from the surviving Beatles themselves or the estates of the dead ones), who built the track “Revolution #9” almost exclusively from the 1960’s technological equivalent of samples. They could have made a point detailing the history of sampling back even further — “Revolution #9” was based on a genre invented by French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the late 1940’s called musique concrète, in which they pieced together snippets of sound — taking advantage of the newly invented technology of magnetic tape — and created musical works by splicing these together and manipulating them electronically; like much of the rest of the avant-garde art world’s influence on the Beatles in their later years, musique concrète became part of their world via Yoko Ono, who was thoroughly familiar with it and encouraged John Lennon to experiment with its techniques.
Also, one of the most delightful parts of their film was strictly speaking not a sample at all; it was Little Roger and the Goosebumps’ legendary record “Gilligan’s Island Stairway,” their recording of the theme song from the Gilligan’s Island TV show sung to the tune of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” — and a record that seemed bound for hit status until Led Zeppelin sued and got it taken off the market. The filmmakers here accompanied the Little Roger parody with a mash-up video overlaying the Gilligan’s Island credits with Led Zeppelin concert footage — and the audience (I think it’s safe to assume that I was the only person in that room who had actually heard “Gilligan’s Island Stairway” before) reacted to the song with the same admiration for the band’s audacity that I did when I first heard it in 1979.
Franzen and McLeod could have bolstered their everybody-does-it argument by referencing a copyright controversy that involved Led Zeppelin at the other end — the song “Whole Lotta Love” on their first album, which they claimed was their rewrite of an old blues song in the public domain. Along came Willie Dixon, pointing out — and proving in court — that it wasn’t a public-domain song; he had written it himself and it was copyrighted. The final settlement simply took Jimmy Page’s and Robert Plant’s names off the composer credits of the Zeppelin version and put Willie Dixon’s on — and while most of the resulting royalties went to Dixon’s publisher, Arc Music (a subsidiary of Chess Records), Dixon made enough from the song to be able to live a comfortable existence for the rest of his life.
I’ll admit that I’d probably be a lot more sympathetic to the concept of sampling if I had more affection for the rap genre with which it is most closely associated — as it is, my distaste for the aggressive ugliness of rap as a sound and its gravitation towards socially unconscious subject matter (the days when Public Enemy would sample a Malcolm X speech have long since given way to the modern-day rappers boasting about how much money they make, how much bling they wear, how many women they’ve fucked, how many Gays they’ve beaten up and how many “gangstas” they’ve killed) has made me rather prejudiced against them. I’ll also acknowledge that I’ve made some pretty sour jokes about D.J.’s that I’m at least partially willing to take back now that I’ve seen this film — I once said that calling a D.J. an “artist” was like calling the guy who hung the Mona Lisa on the Louvre wall an “artist” — and that now that I’ve seen the art of classic D.J. sampling with turntables “up close and personal” in this film, I’m ready to concede that it takes a level of skill that has at least some commonality with playing a musical instrument. (At the same time I still admire the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk for not needing to sample; if he wanted, say, a Charlie Parker lick for one of his compositions, he had the musical talent and skill to play it himself.)
It’s interesting to note — as this film does in passing — that turntable sampling had become such an essential tool of rap that when the copyright holders started coming down hard on the samplers, some of them responded by recording their own drum and bass lines, then mastering them to vinyl so the D.J.’s could “sample” these new, purpose-made recordings and thereby get the same sound while being in the clear legally. The most valuable insight into Copyright Criminals is it shows not only how outdated traditional copyright law has become in the digital age (especially now that digital technology has “democratized” sampling even further — now you don’t even need the skill to handle vinyl records on a pair of turntables; you can input sounds, chop them up and manipulate them on a computer) but also how traditional copyright law has become in many ways an impediment to creativity rather than an encouragement of it — just as the vast extension of patent rights to scientific discoveries has slowed research rather than sped it up (despite Big Pharma’s claim of “no patents, no cures,” the fact is that academic researchers are now scared to go near certain lines of research for fear they’ll accidentally infringe on a patent held by another researcher or a pharmaceutical company and get themselves sued), especially as the major media corporations pursue ever more restrictive copyright laws and seek ultimately either to abolish the concept of “fair use” altogether or so restrict it that basically corporations have perpetual ownership of content and anyone using it has essentially to rent it from them.
My solution would be to restrict the total term of a copyright to 50 years — the good-sense solution that most European countries adopted but is now under attack there (there’s a major push on the British parliament to amend their copyright laws to match the bloated terms of U.S. copyrights — and I suspect that just as the push for perpetual copyrights in the U.S. was masterminded by the Walt Disney company, which didn’t want Mickey Mouse coming into the public domain, so the current pressure in Britain is probably coming from EMI to make sure that the Beatles’ recordings don’t start entering the public domain in 2012, as they would under current British law) — and to institute compulsory licensing as the solution to things like sampling. Much use of copyrighted material is already covered by compulsory licensing — particularly the performance of phonograph records on radio and the public performance of copyrighted songs (one person interviewed in Copyright Criminals points out that if you just want to cover “Stairway to Heaven,” there’s an established body of law governing your right to do so and you know in advance exactly how much it will cost you, but if you want to rewrite or parody it, it has to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis and the copyright holder can either price it prohibitively or flat-out say no, you can’t do it at all — which means that Little Roger got screwed because they parodied someone without a sense of humor, while Steve Dahl got to release and have a hit on “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?,” his parody of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” just because Stewart thought it was funny and let it go).
I personally think compulsory licensing is fair: it says to the copyright holder that you have the right to be compensated for use of this material but not the right to prevent it from being reused at all. And for the inevitable conflicts I’d recommend setting up a special “copyright court,” modeled on the arbitration panels the Screen Writers’ Guild and Screen Directors’ Guild set up to adjudicate who deserves credit on films multiple writers or directors have worked on — the courts would look at how much of a previously copyrighted work was used, how extensively it was sampled and how significant its use was (a James Brown sample whose sampler wanted us to hear it and go, “That’s James Brown!,” seems quite different artistically from one whose sampler was just using a vocal grunt as part of a broader texture and didn’t want it to be recognizable), and rule on what percentage, if any, of the income from the new work should go to the copyright owner of the original.
The library movie last Monday was a fascinating one: Copyright Criminals, made for the Independent Television and Video Service (ITVS), which supplies programming to PBS stations that want it (which usually isn’t the one in San Diego!), co-directed by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod based on McLeod’s book of the same title. There are a number of films that could be made with that title growing out of the increasing stringency of copyright laws — how giant corporations, with their near-total domination of politics and governance, are extending copyright protections for longer and longer periods (aiming to change the basis of U.S. copyright law from its constitutional basis — ensuring artists and inventors a limited-time monopoly on selling their work in order to encourage them to create — to creating a permanent intellectual-property right held not by the actual creators but by the corporations that bought the rights from them in the first place) and tightening up the criteria under which others can use copyrighted material on a “fair use” basis; and the paradoxical advent of digital technology that has made duplication (both outright copying and re-use) far easier and thereby threatened the technological assumption behind copyright law: the ability to ban the sale of physical copies of the material by anyone other than the copyright holder or an authorized licensee.
What Franzen and McLeod chose to focus on was a form of artistic creativity, copyright infringement or both that actually pre-dates digital technology: so-called “sampling,” the use of snippets of previously recorded music to create a new background track, usually as a background for rap (or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap favored by people who like it). The filmmakers take a pretty ardently pro-sampling point of view, saying basically that this was an art form created by young African-Americans in depressed areas like the South Bronx in New York and Compton in Los Angeles County, people who wanted to make music but couldn’t afford conventional instruments — so they worked with turntables, lifting bits and pieces from old records (mostly funk from the 1970’s by artists like James Brown, Rick James and George Clinton, the mastermind behind Parliament and Funkadelic — which were actually exactly the same people, except Parliament used horn players and Funkadelic did not, but because they were technically two separate bands Clinton signed them to two different labels: a throwback to the time Duke Ellington had “exclusive” contracts with several different labels at once, sometimes recording under his own name and sometimes as “The Harlem Footwarmers” or some other pseudonym de jour) to create a musical texture over which rappers would perform.
Nobody really cared much as long as these were just young Black kids busking on streetcorners, either not recording at all or just selling homemade cassettes; but when sampling started being the basis of multi-million selling records like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, De la Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, the music industry started fighting back, suing and winning. The result is that now the only people who get to sample are highly successful artists who can afford the often stratospheric licensing fees and people still doing it underground, keeping under the radar of the music industry and — this being the 21st century — distributing the work not on homemade mix tapes but on Web sites.
I must confess to far more mixed feelings about sampling than those reflected in this film — I can acknowledge the argument that by sampling, people are creating new works of art based on old ones (we wouldn’t have a lot of Shakespeare’s plays if he’d had to worry about copyright — while it undoubtedly drove him nuts that there was no legal way he could protect something once he’d performed it, he also took full advantage of the lack of copyright laws to recycle his plots from the work of others; one has to wonder if Hamlet would exist if Shakespeare had had to deal with modern-style copyright laws and thereby either would have had to license the plot from Thomas Kyd or worry about Kyd suing him; likewise one wonders if Matisse would have bothered to do collages if he’d had to worry about the publisher of Le Figaro suing him for appropriating their front pages and demanding a cut of every picture he sold containing their “content” — just as Shepard Fairey is now facing a lawsuit from Associated Press over his Obama “Hope” image) and there ought to be a legal avenue by which they can express their sort of creativity without making it prohibitively expensive.
At the same time, they are basing their creations on previously created material, many of whose creators are still alive and deserve to be compensated. To make the moral situation even muddier, the people who hold the copyrights and are demanding major sums of money to “clear” samples they own legally aren’t always the same people who created them — a defense the “copyright criminals” frequently make in their own defense (“Hey, we’re not ripping off the original artists — you’re the ones who did that!”) Certainly the most poignant person profiled in Copyright Criminals is Clyde Stubblefield. Never heard of him? I hadn’t either, even though he was James Brown’s drummer in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and created many of the basic rhythm patters that have been used ever since not only in the funk-soul genre Brown helped create but on rap records and plenty of other places.
The first person who ripped off Stubblefield’s work without giving him either credit or royalties was James Brown; in the film Stubblefield (who’s still alive, performs at small clubs in the Detroit area and bills himself as “The Original ‘Funky Drummer,’” after a song in which Brown used his drum licks and paid tribute to him) said that he would frequently just jam a rhythm pattern, Brown’s bass player would join in, then his guitarists would come in and start playing licks on top of the rhythms that were taking shape, and finally Brown would come in, start singing along and making up words off the top of his head — and eventually this would become a full-fledged song, only Brown would take composer credit exclusively himself and not co-credit the musicians who had actually worked out the musical basis of the new song. Brown figured the musicians were being compensated by their regular salaries as part of his band and therefore never offered them credit or royalties — and neither did the companies that sold Brown’s records or published his songs, so Stubblefield isn’t getting royalties either from continuing sales of Brown’s old records or from the multi-million selling rap hits built around his drumming.
One of the strategies Franzen and McLeod use is to point out that many of the groups suing to demand royalties from records containing samples of their work themselves practiced earlier forms of sampling — like the Beatles (though apparently the lawsuits over the Beatles’ work are coming from their record company, EMI, and not from the surviving Beatles themselves or the estates of the dead ones), who built the track “Revolution #9” almost exclusively from the 1960’s technological equivalent of samples. They could have made a point detailing the history of sampling back even further — “Revolution #9” was based on a genre invented by French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the late 1940’s called musique concrète, in which they pieced together snippets of sound — taking advantage of the newly invented technology of magnetic tape — and created musical works by splicing these together and manipulating them electronically; like much of the rest of the avant-garde art world’s influence on the Beatles in their later years, musique concrète became part of their world via Yoko Ono, who was thoroughly familiar with it and encouraged John Lennon to experiment with its techniques.
Also, one of the most delightful parts of their film was strictly speaking not a sample at all; it was Little Roger and the Goosebumps’ legendary record “Gilligan’s Island Stairway,” their recording of the theme song from the Gilligan’s Island TV show sung to the tune of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” — and a record that seemed bound for hit status until Led Zeppelin sued and got it taken off the market. The filmmakers here accompanied the Little Roger parody with a mash-up video overlaying the Gilligan’s Island credits with Led Zeppelin concert footage — and the audience (I think it’s safe to assume that I was the only person in that room who had actually heard “Gilligan’s Island Stairway” before) reacted to the song with the same admiration for the band’s audacity that I did when I first heard it in 1979.
Franzen and McLeod could have bolstered their everybody-does-it argument by referencing a copyright controversy that involved Led Zeppelin at the other end — the song “Whole Lotta Love” on their first album, which they claimed was their rewrite of an old blues song in the public domain. Along came Willie Dixon, pointing out — and proving in court — that it wasn’t a public-domain song; he had written it himself and it was copyrighted. The final settlement simply took Jimmy Page’s and Robert Plant’s names off the composer credits of the Zeppelin version and put Willie Dixon’s on — and while most of the resulting royalties went to Dixon’s publisher, Arc Music (a subsidiary of Chess Records), Dixon made enough from the song to be able to live a comfortable existence for the rest of his life.
I’ll admit that I’d probably be a lot more sympathetic to the concept of sampling if I had more affection for the rap genre with which it is most closely associated — as it is, my distaste for the aggressive ugliness of rap as a sound and its gravitation towards socially unconscious subject matter (the days when Public Enemy would sample a Malcolm X speech have long since given way to the modern-day rappers boasting about how much money they make, how much bling they wear, how many women they’ve fucked, how many Gays they’ve beaten up and how many “gangstas” they’ve killed) has made me rather prejudiced against them. I’ll also acknowledge that I’ve made some pretty sour jokes about D.J.’s that I’m at least partially willing to take back now that I’ve seen this film — I once said that calling a D.J. an “artist” was like calling the guy who hung the Mona Lisa on the Louvre wall an “artist” — and that now that I’ve seen the art of classic D.J. sampling with turntables “up close and personal” in this film, I’m ready to concede that it takes a level of skill that has at least some commonality with playing a musical instrument. (At the same time I still admire the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk for not needing to sample; if he wanted, say, a Charlie Parker lick for one of his compositions, he had the musical talent and skill to play it himself.)
It’s interesting to note — as this film does in passing — that turntable sampling had become such an essential tool of rap that when the copyright holders started coming down hard on the samplers, some of them responded by recording their own drum and bass lines, then mastering them to vinyl so the D.J.’s could “sample” these new, purpose-made recordings and thereby get the same sound while being in the clear legally. The most valuable insight into Copyright Criminals is it shows not only how outdated traditional copyright law has become in the digital age (especially now that digital technology has “democratized” sampling even further — now you don’t even need the skill to handle vinyl records on a pair of turntables; you can input sounds, chop them up and manipulate them on a computer) but also how traditional copyright law has become in many ways an impediment to creativity rather than an encouragement of it — just as the vast extension of patent rights to scientific discoveries has slowed research rather than sped it up (despite Big Pharma’s claim of “no patents, no cures,” the fact is that academic researchers are now scared to go near certain lines of research for fear they’ll accidentally infringe on a patent held by another researcher or a pharmaceutical company and get themselves sued), especially as the major media corporations pursue ever more restrictive copyright laws and seek ultimately either to abolish the concept of “fair use” altogether or so restrict it that basically corporations have perpetual ownership of content and anyone using it has essentially to rent it from them.
My solution would be to restrict the total term of a copyright to 50 years — the good-sense solution that most European countries adopted but is now under attack there (there’s a major push on the British parliament to amend their copyright laws to match the bloated terms of U.S. copyrights — and I suspect that just as the push for perpetual copyrights in the U.S. was masterminded by the Walt Disney company, which didn’t want Mickey Mouse coming into the public domain, so the current pressure in Britain is probably coming from EMI to make sure that the Beatles’ recordings don’t start entering the public domain in 2012, as they would under current British law) — and to institute compulsory licensing as the solution to things like sampling. Much use of copyrighted material is already covered by compulsory licensing — particularly the performance of phonograph records on radio and the public performance of copyrighted songs (one person interviewed in Copyright Criminals points out that if you just want to cover “Stairway to Heaven,” there’s an established body of law governing your right to do so and you know in advance exactly how much it will cost you, but if you want to rewrite or parody it, it has to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis and the copyright holder can either price it prohibitively or flat-out say no, you can’t do it at all — which means that Little Roger got screwed because they parodied someone without a sense of humor, while Steve Dahl got to release and have a hit on “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?,” his parody of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” just because Stewart thought it was funny and let it go).
I personally think compulsory licensing is fair: it says to the copyright holder that you have the right to be compensated for use of this material but not the right to prevent it from being reused at all. And for the inevitable conflicts I’d recommend setting up a special “copyright court,” modeled on the arbitration panels the Screen Writers’ Guild and Screen Directors’ Guild set up to adjudicate who deserves credit on films multiple writers or directors have worked on — the courts would look at how much of a previously copyrighted work was used, how extensively it was sampled and how significant its use was (a James Brown sample whose sampler wanted us to hear it and go, “That’s James Brown!,” seems quite different artistically from one whose sampler was just using a vocal grunt as part of a broader texture and didn’t want it to be recognizable), and rule on what percentage, if any, of the income from the new work should go to the copyright owner of the original.
Mr. B Natural (Kling Films/Conn Instruments, 1957)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I dashed home after the movie and when Charles got here we ended up running a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of War of the Colossal Beast, a sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man — originally titled Revenge of the Colossal Man, which would have made more sense (there really isn’t much of a “war” going on in this one), which they prefaced with their marvelous takeoff of an unwittingly surreal promotional film from the Conn musical instruments company in 1957, Mr. B Natural. The MST3K crew really went to town on this bizarre band short, whose oddest aspect was the transgender casting of the title character.
The film opens with a giant white cut-out representing a musical staff with notes on it, only one of the notes comes to life and introduces himself as “Mr. B Natural,” also known as “The Spirit of Music.” Only Mr. B Natural is actually played by actress (if, in the immortal words of Dwight MacDonald, I may use the term for courtesy) Betty Luster, who combines an annoyingly chipper manner, a voice that sounds like Beverly Sills on helium and a voluptuous figure that is all too obviously female — if the breasts that show through the musical-note jacket she’s wearing (which looks like something she picked up at Liberace’s garage sale just before he started wearing sequins) didn’t “out” her as a woman, her ample hips and big butt (revealingly encased in blue denim) would be enough to do so. The plot, if it can be called that, calls for Mr./Ms. B Natural to emerge from the locker of junior-high student Buzz Turner (Bruce Podewell), who’s complaining that the “in” crowd at school has ostracized him, and tell him that if he learns to play an instrument and gets in the band he’ll be considered cool.
Mr./Ms. B appears magically in several other places in Buzz’s life, including his bedroom (if she tried that now she’d be arrested on suspicion of child molestation!), and finally persuades him to take up trumpet and badger his dad to buy him one. There’s a scene at a music store in which the unctuous store clerk fields the question of Papa Turner, “Is quality really important?” with an insistence that it is (“Of course!” I imagined him saying; “The Conn company isn’t spending all this money to make this movie just so you can buy him a Selmer!” — though the production budget didn’t look like it was more than about $12.98) and an assurance that they can buy the horn on installments. The final sequence shows Buzz playing a trumpet solo at a school dance, and one thing I’d give the makers of the film credit for is they didn’t make him sound too good — he plays like what the character is supposed to be, a kid who’s just started lessons and developed a basic technique but is still a little uncomfortable with the horn, not an accomplished virtuoso — but the rest of the movie is just silly when it isn’t hitting heights of unintended surrealism, notably in the gender ambiguity of the title character.
The MST3K crew had a field day with this one, not only ridiculing the transgender casting (”Mr. B Natural, you’re hot!”) but also the uniform Caucasian-ness of the dramatis personae (“We’re white, we’re so white, we’re white as can be,” they sing along to one of the pieces played on-screen by the two real-life school bands featured, the Miami Senior High School Band and the Waukegan Elementary School Band) and the overall dorkiness of the production even by the meager standards of 1950’s industrial films. They also did an hilarious sketch in which robots Tom Servo and Crow hold a formal debate over Mr. B Natural’s true gender.
I dashed home after the movie and when Charles got here we ended up running a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of War of the Colossal Beast, a sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man — originally titled Revenge of the Colossal Man, which would have made more sense (there really isn’t much of a “war” going on in this one), which they prefaced with their marvelous takeoff of an unwittingly surreal promotional film from the Conn musical instruments company in 1957, Mr. B Natural. The MST3K crew really went to town on this bizarre band short, whose oddest aspect was the transgender casting of the title character.
The film opens with a giant white cut-out representing a musical staff with notes on it, only one of the notes comes to life and introduces himself as “Mr. B Natural,” also known as “The Spirit of Music.” Only Mr. B Natural is actually played by actress (if, in the immortal words of Dwight MacDonald, I may use the term for courtesy) Betty Luster, who combines an annoyingly chipper manner, a voice that sounds like Beverly Sills on helium and a voluptuous figure that is all too obviously female — if the breasts that show through the musical-note jacket she’s wearing (which looks like something she picked up at Liberace’s garage sale just before he started wearing sequins) didn’t “out” her as a woman, her ample hips and big butt (revealingly encased in blue denim) would be enough to do so. The plot, if it can be called that, calls for Mr./Ms. B Natural to emerge from the locker of junior-high student Buzz Turner (Bruce Podewell), who’s complaining that the “in” crowd at school has ostracized him, and tell him that if he learns to play an instrument and gets in the band he’ll be considered cool.
Mr./Ms. B appears magically in several other places in Buzz’s life, including his bedroom (if she tried that now she’d be arrested on suspicion of child molestation!), and finally persuades him to take up trumpet and badger his dad to buy him one. There’s a scene at a music store in which the unctuous store clerk fields the question of Papa Turner, “Is quality really important?” with an insistence that it is (“Of course!” I imagined him saying; “The Conn company isn’t spending all this money to make this movie just so you can buy him a Selmer!” — though the production budget didn’t look like it was more than about $12.98) and an assurance that they can buy the horn on installments. The final sequence shows Buzz playing a trumpet solo at a school dance, and one thing I’d give the makers of the film credit for is they didn’t make him sound too good — he plays like what the character is supposed to be, a kid who’s just started lessons and developed a basic technique but is still a little uncomfortable with the horn, not an accomplished virtuoso — but the rest of the movie is just silly when it isn’t hitting heights of unintended surrealism, notably in the gender ambiguity of the title character.
The MST3K crew had a field day with this one, not only ridiculing the transgender casting (”Mr. B Natural, you’re hot!”) but also the uniform Caucasian-ness of the dramatis personae (“We’re white, we’re so white, we’re white as can be,” they sing along to one of the pieces played on-screen by the two real-life school bands featured, the Miami Senior High School Band and the Waukegan Elementary School Band) and the overall dorkiness of the production even by the meager standards of 1950’s industrial films. They also did an hilarious sketch in which robots Tom Servo and Crow hold a formal debate over Mr. B Natural’s true gender.
War of the Colossal Beast (Carmel/American-International, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
War of the Colossal Beast proved to be a flawed film and have its moments of silliness, but it was actually a decent genre piece, better than most of the films Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ridiculed and almost good enough for you to question why they wanted to do it at all. It’s a sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man, made by the same people — producer-director-writer Bert I. Gordon and American International Pictures — who did the original; the first one was released in 1957 and this sequel came out in 1958 — and this time George Worthing Yates, who worked on the script for the first film but didn’t get credit, here gets credit for turning Gordon’s story into a screenplay.
The film starts with Miguel (Robert Hernandez) frantically driving a truck through the wilds of northern Mexico, fleeing an unseen menace, until his truck gets stuck in a mud flat and he survives, but the truck disappears. The truck’s owner, John Swanson (George Becwar, the actor who caused Edward D. Wood, Jr. all that trouble with the union on the set of Bride of the Monster), goes to Mexico to complain to the local police, and after a couple of reels of exposition it turns out that the truck was picked up whole by the Amazing Colossal Man, who stuck his hand into it like a Cracker Jack box (I made the joke a few seconds before the MST3K crew did, too), pulled out the food it contained and ate it. It turns out he’s been doing this to quite a few trucks in the neighborhood since he escaped his fall off the Boulder Dam at the end of the first movie. It also turns out that, though it didn’t kill him, the fall did poke out one of his eyes, seriously scar his face and turn him into a different actor (Dean Parkin instead of Glenn Langan).
There’s an attempt — actually more successful than it was in the first film — to turn the Colossal Man into a character of pathos à la the Frankenstein monster (especially in the James Whale movies) and King Kong — though the accident at the end of film one has cost him his ability to speak in this one and it’s his sister Joyce (Sally Fraser — taking the place of the character of his still normal-sized girlfriend in the first film) who acts as his interlocutor and talks about how the gigantic growth process turned him into a freak. This isn’t a great movie, and for an attempt to engender sympathy for the monster it’s hardly in the same league as Frankenstein or King Kong, but it’s got its points — the film moves, the story makes (relative) sense, the “uglification” of the monster (the fact that he’s badly scarred and not just an unnaturally large human the way he was in the first film) anticipates The Incredible Hulk, and the acting is at least decent and in Sally Forrest’s case better than that.
There’s also a surprisingly creative ending; caught in a trap, the monster kills himself by deliberately grabbing electrical power lines — and at the moment he touches them, the image goes from black-and-white into color and stays that way for the remaining minute or so of the film. Offhand I can’t think of any other movie that has just its last few feet in color — though there was a color insert at the end of the 1956 film I Married a Woman (homely George Gobel is married to sexpot Diana Dors and doubts her love for him until the end) and the 1940’s films The Picture of Dorian Gray and Portrait of Jennie used color inserts to depict the titular artworks even though the rest of those films were in black-and-white. In 1958 American-International used a color final scene far more effectively in How to Make a Monster (and it helped that it was considerably longer — more like a whole final reel in color than just the last few shots!) and here it’s an interesting if not especially compelling effect that put the colossal beast to rest for the last time. (imdb.com lists a 1962 film called Revenge of the Colossal Beasts, but it’s just an amateur short produced and directed by the 14-year-old John Carpenter.)
War of the Colossal Beast proved to be a flawed film and have its moments of silliness, but it was actually a decent genre piece, better than most of the films Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ridiculed and almost good enough for you to question why they wanted to do it at all. It’s a sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man, made by the same people — producer-director-writer Bert I. Gordon and American International Pictures — who did the original; the first one was released in 1957 and this sequel came out in 1958 — and this time George Worthing Yates, who worked on the script for the first film but didn’t get credit, here gets credit for turning Gordon’s story into a screenplay.
The film starts with Miguel (Robert Hernandez) frantically driving a truck through the wilds of northern Mexico, fleeing an unseen menace, until his truck gets stuck in a mud flat and he survives, but the truck disappears. The truck’s owner, John Swanson (George Becwar, the actor who caused Edward D. Wood, Jr. all that trouble with the union on the set of Bride of the Monster), goes to Mexico to complain to the local police, and after a couple of reels of exposition it turns out that the truck was picked up whole by the Amazing Colossal Man, who stuck his hand into it like a Cracker Jack box (I made the joke a few seconds before the MST3K crew did, too), pulled out the food it contained and ate it. It turns out he’s been doing this to quite a few trucks in the neighborhood since he escaped his fall off the Boulder Dam at the end of the first movie. It also turns out that, though it didn’t kill him, the fall did poke out one of his eyes, seriously scar his face and turn him into a different actor (Dean Parkin instead of Glenn Langan).
There’s an attempt — actually more successful than it was in the first film — to turn the Colossal Man into a character of pathos à la the Frankenstein monster (especially in the James Whale movies) and King Kong — though the accident at the end of film one has cost him his ability to speak in this one and it’s his sister Joyce (Sally Fraser — taking the place of the character of his still normal-sized girlfriend in the first film) who acts as his interlocutor and talks about how the gigantic growth process turned him into a freak. This isn’t a great movie, and for an attempt to engender sympathy for the monster it’s hardly in the same league as Frankenstein or King Kong, but it’s got its points — the film moves, the story makes (relative) sense, the “uglification” of the monster (the fact that he’s badly scarred and not just an unnaturally large human the way he was in the first film) anticipates The Incredible Hulk, and the acting is at least decent and in Sally Forrest’s case better than that.
There’s also a surprisingly creative ending; caught in a trap, the monster kills himself by deliberately grabbing electrical power lines — and at the moment he touches them, the image goes from black-and-white into color and stays that way for the remaining minute or so of the film. Offhand I can’t think of any other movie that has just its last few feet in color — though there was a color insert at the end of the 1956 film I Married a Woman (homely George Gobel is married to sexpot Diana Dors and doubts her love for him until the end) and the 1940’s films The Picture of Dorian Gray and Portrait of Jennie used color inserts to depict the titular artworks even though the rest of those films were in black-and-white. In 1958 American-International used a color final scene far more effectively in How to Make a Monster (and it helped that it was considerably longer — more like a whole final reel in color than just the last few shots!) and here it’s an interesting if not especially compelling effect that put the colossal beast to rest for the last time. (imdb.com lists a 1962 film called Revenge of the Colossal Beasts, but it’s just an amateur short produced and directed by the 14-year-old John Carpenter.)
The Land That Time Forgot (Amicus/American-International, 1975)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Eventually I ran Charles a movie I’d recorded off TCM earlier in the day: The Land That Time Forgot, a 1975 co-production between the British-based Amicus company (which was founded in the wake of the initial success of Hammer in the 1950’s to make similar kinds of films and capitalize on the same market) and American-International. It was based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, published in 1918 and set two years earlier (and by an interesting chance, Charles happened to have re-read the novel recently), and tells the story of a German U-boat which sinks an American passenger ship with a secret hold of munitions bound for England. The remaining passengers, including the film’s leading couple, Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure, the only American in an otherwise all-British cast) and Lisa Clayton (played by an actress with the almost incomprehensible name Susan Penhaligon — if I’d encountered her last name out of context I’d probably have figured it was a scientific apparatus to see the molecular structure of chemicals), try to hijack the sub and use it to escape to an Allied, or at least neutral, port.
The German sub commander, von Schoenvorts (John McEnery) — a name which frankly sounds more Dutch or Afrikaner than German — sabotages them by sneaking a magnet into the ship’s compass so that when the hijackers think it’s headed west, it’s actually headed south — only they end up in a surprisingly cold stretch of sea featuring icebergs, and eventually a mountain that’s a giant wall of ice with only a small inlet through which the sub can pass looms out of the sea. They take the inlet (if they hadn’t, there’d have been no movie!) and discover a verdant paradise but also a “land that time forgot,” in which virtually the entire evolution of animal life on earth is happening all at once, from aggressive protozoans (shown by some odd little cartoons representing P.O.V. shots of the scientists looking through microscopes at samples of the native water) to dinosaurs, either predatory land-based or amphibian ones or pterodactyls. There are also two warring tribes of cave people, one discernibly whiter and more technologically advanced than the other, who naturally are bitter rivals and go out of their way to kill each other when the dinosaurs and other creatures on the island aren’t doing that for them. (Charles noted that in the book it’s clearly stated that the whiter a human sub-species’ skin, the more advanced it is — a clearly racist concept but one that put Burroughs squarely within mainstream thought in his time.)
Eventually the various humans, still bearing bits of their tribal rivalries (remember this is all happening while World War I is in full swing), make their way up the island’s central river and find the source of all life on it: two giant brown pots that look like huge coconuts, containing a white fluid that is apparently supposed to represent the “primordial soup” out of which life first formed, a process that in this “land that time forgot” is apparently continually going on. At the end, the other surviving humans (the ones that haven’t become dino-food in the meantime — the amphibian dinosaurs in this film are depicted as meat-eaters, which the real ones weren’t) get in the sub and try to escape, but strand Bowen and Lisa on the island — which turns out to be a good thing for Bowen and Lisa, since at that moment the volcano on the island chooses to erupt, the sub sinks from the volcanic disturbance and only Bowen and Lisa are left alive to eke out an existence on the island — which they apparently do successfully enough that the producers made a sequel, The People That Time Forgot.
The last shot we see is Bowen writing down the whole story and sealing it into a bottle — which was found in a 1975-set framing sequence at the beginning by a sailor who opened the bottle, read the manuscript and thereby set up a flashback containing most of the rest of the film. On TCM the film was introduced by Ben Mankiewicz, who ridiculed the cheesy special effects and said anyone looking for a Jurassic Park level of credibility in the dinosaur shots would be sorely disappointed. He was unfair to the film; the land- and sea-based dinosaurs are quite believable — several orders of magnitude above all the cheesy 1950’s monster-fests that used either actors in dino-suits (was anybody ever really scared by Godzilla when he looked so much like a human in an especially elaborate Hallowe’en costume, which is essentially what he was?) or living lizards with horned plates and other protuberances crudely glued on to represent prehistoric reptiles — though the pterodctyls are almost unbearably crude, simple cut-outs that don’t flap their wings or move their mouths. (The fact that this was 1975, well before the digital era, was no excuse — not when Willis O’Brien and his crew on King Kong 42 years earlier was able to create a fully convincing pterodactyl which flapped its wings — suspended on piano wire, which washed out in the bright lights then used for filming — and opened its mouth wide enough to pick up Fay Wray in it and prepare to eat her until Kong grabbed hold of it, killed it and thereby spared her.)
Charles mentioned that the book contained far more elaborate and interesting creatures than the film — including a race of flying humans — but it’s obvious Amicus had blown its effects budget just doing the dinosaurs and didn’t have any money to spare on winged people. (Derek Meddings got credit for supervising the effects and Roger Dicken was credited — or, in the case of the pterodactyls, blamed — for doing the dinosaurs.) The Land That Time Forgot was scripted by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock — I hadn’t heard of Cawthorn before but Moorcock was a well-known and highly respected British science-fiction writer who could probably have written a better adaptation (or, even better, given Amicus an original) if they’d wanted one — and directed by Kevin Connor, who turned out to be quite good at suspense and at dramatizing the antagonisms between the 1916 humans — the opening sequences in which the British and German contingents duel for control of the submarine well before it gets to the island that time forgot are among the most entertaining parts of the film — but stolid and dull in pace, taking 91 minutes to tell a story that a 1930’s filmmaker probably could have done in 70 minutes. (There was a longer 102-minute cut released in Japan, but in line with Hammer’s practice at the time, that one’s additional running time probably consisted mostly of extra gore.) The Land That Time Forgot — recently remade in a direct-to-video version — is a fun movie for what it is but it could have been even more exciting; at that, I’d probably rather sit through this than the recent disaster Land of the Lost!
Eventually I ran Charles a movie I’d recorded off TCM earlier in the day: The Land That Time Forgot, a 1975 co-production between the British-based Amicus company (which was founded in the wake of the initial success of Hammer in the 1950’s to make similar kinds of films and capitalize on the same market) and American-International. It was based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, published in 1918 and set two years earlier (and by an interesting chance, Charles happened to have re-read the novel recently), and tells the story of a German U-boat which sinks an American passenger ship with a secret hold of munitions bound for England. The remaining passengers, including the film’s leading couple, Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure, the only American in an otherwise all-British cast) and Lisa Clayton (played by an actress with the almost incomprehensible name Susan Penhaligon — if I’d encountered her last name out of context I’d probably have figured it was a scientific apparatus to see the molecular structure of chemicals), try to hijack the sub and use it to escape to an Allied, or at least neutral, port.
The German sub commander, von Schoenvorts (John McEnery) — a name which frankly sounds more Dutch or Afrikaner than German — sabotages them by sneaking a magnet into the ship’s compass so that when the hijackers think it’s headed west, it’s actually headed south — only they end up in a surprisingly cold stretch of sea featuring icebergs, and eventually a mountain that’s a giant wall of ice with only a small inlet through which the sub can pass looms out of the sea. They take the inlet (if they hadn’t, there’d have been no movie!) and discover a verdant paradise but also a “land that time forgot,” in which virtually the entire evolution of animal life on earth is happening all at once, from aggressive protozoans (shown by some odd little cartoons representing P.O.V. shots of the scientists looking through microscopes at samples of the native water) to dinosaurs, either predatory land-based or amphibian ones or pterodactyls. There are also two warring tribes of cave people, one discernibly whiter and more technologically advanced than the other, who naturally are bitter rivals and go out of their way to kill each other when the dinosaurs and other creatures on the island aren’t doing that for them. (Charles noted that in the book it’s clearly stated that the whiter a human sub-species’ skin, the more advanced it is — a clearly racist concept but one that put Burroughs squarely within mainstream thought in his time.)
Eventually the various humans, still bearing bits of their tribal rivalries (remember this is all happening while World War I is in full swing), make their way up the island’s central river and find the source of all life on it: two giant brown pots that look like huge coconuts, containing a white fluid that is apparently supposed to represent the “primordial soup” out of which life first formed, a process that in this “land that time forgot” is apparently continually going on. At the end, the other surviving humans (the ones that haven’t become dino-food in the meantime — the amphibian dinosaurs in this film are depicted as meat-eaters, which the real ones weren’t) get in the sub and try to escape, but strand Bowen and Lisa on the island — which turns out to be a good thing for Bowen and Lisa, since at that moment the volcano on the island chooses to erupt, the sub sinks from the volcanic disturbance and only Bowen and Lisa are left alive to eke out an existence on the island — which they apparently do successfully enough that the producers made a sequel, The People That Time Forgot.
The last shot we see is Bowen writing down the whole story and sealing it into a bottle — which was found in a 1975-set framing sequence at the beginning by a sailor who opened the bottle, read the manuscript and thereby set up a flashback containing most of the rest of the film. On TCM the film was introduced by Ben Mankiewicz, who ridiculed the cheesy special effects and said anyone looking for a Jurassic Park level of credibility in the dinosaur shots would be sorely disappointed. He was unfair to the film; the land- and sea-based dinosaurs are quite believable — several orders of magnitude above all the cheesy 1950’s monster-fests that used either actors in dino-suits (was anybody ever really scared by Godzilla when he looked so much like a human in an especially elaborate Hallowe’en costume, which is essentially what he was?) or living lizards with horned plates and other protuberances crudely glued on to represent prehistoric reptiles — though the pterodctyls are almost unbearably crude, simple cut-outs that don’t flap their wings or move their mouths. (The fact that this was 1975, well before the digital era, was no excuse — not when Willis O’Brien and his crew on King Kong 42 years earlier was able to create a fully convincing pterodactyl which flapped its wings — suspended on piano wire, which washed out in the bright lights then used for filming — and opened its mouth wide enough to pick up Fay Wray in it and prepare to eat her until Kong grabbed hold of it, killed it and thereby spared her.)
Charles mentioned that the book contained far more elaborate and interesting creatures than the film — including a race of flying humans — but it’s obvious Amicus had blown its effects budget just doing the dinosaurs and didn’t have any money to spare on winged people. (Derek Meddings got credit for supervising the effects and Roger Dicken was credited — or, in the case of the pterodactyls, blamed — for doing the dinosaurs.) The Land That Time Forgot was scripted by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock — I hadn’t heard of Cawthorn before but Moorcock was a well-known and highly respected British science-fiction writer who could probably have written a better adaptation (or, even better, given Amicus an original) if they’d wanted one — and directed by Kevin Connor, who turned out to be quite good at suspense and at dramatizing the antagonisms between the 1916 humans — the opening sequences in which the British and German contingents duel for control of the submarine well before it gets to the island that time forgot are among the most entertaining parts of the film — but stolid and dull in pace, taking 91 minutes to tell a story that a 1930’s filmmaker probably could have done in 70 minutes. (There was a longer 102-minute cut released in Japan, but in line with Hammer’s practice at the time, that one’s additional running time probably consisted mostly of extra gore.) The Land That Time Forgot — recently remade in a direct-to-video version — is a fun movie for what it is but it could have been even more exciting; at that, I’d probably rather sit through this than the recent disaster Land of the Lost!
Blond Cheat (RKO, 1938)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Fortunately I’d picked a short one from the backlog: Blond Cheat, a 61-minute 1938 “B” from RKO that starred a virtually all-British cast (so much so that at first Charles and I wondered if the film had actually been shot there, though it wasn’t) headed by pre-stardom Joan Fontaine and Derrick de Marney (the latter known to modern audiences mostly for his turn as the young and innocent murder suspect in Hitchcock’s marvelous 1937 Young and Innocent) in a film based on a story by Aladar Laszlo (spelled “Lazlo” on the credits here), the Hungarian playwright whose play The Honest Finder became the basis for Paramount’s marvelous 1932 release Trouble in Paradise, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Herbert Marshall, Kay Francis and Miriam Hopkins.
Blond Cheat isn’t as compelling a story as Trouble in Paradise, but it still shows Laszlo’s penchant for flipping our moral attitude towards the characters and showing people being manipulated behind the scenes in ways that aren’t readily apparent. The real secret protagonists are pawnbroker Rufus Trent (Cecil Kellaway, a first-rate character actor who got wasted playing dotty scientists in 1950’s sci-fi films) and his socially ambitious wife Genevieve (Cecil Cunningham). Genevieve has forced her husband to rename his pawnshop a “loan office” and, at least judging from what we see on screen, to remodel it as a deco extravaganza with such an enormous lobby we can’t help but wonder when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are going to show up to dance in its floor show. She also wants to marry off her daughter Roberta (Lilian Bond from James Whale’s 1932 classic The Old Dark House) to Michael Ashburn (Derrick de Marney), who comes from an old aristocratic family even though he’s currently broke and forced to work at Rufus’s pawn- — excuse me, loan office.
Those plans get derailed when Julie Evans (Joan Fontaine) and her supposed uncle (Olaf Hytten) burst into the loan company just as it’s closing and borrow 400 pounds, putting up Julie’s earrings as collateral and then telling Michael that since she’s been wearing them since childhood, they can’t be removed. So Michael has to treat her as “human collateral,” never letting her out of her sight even though that means breaking a dinner date with his fiancée and her parents at the posh “Piccadilly Club.” We eventually learn that Julie is actually an aspiring musical star (an odd casting for Fontaine after she did so dismally as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner in the otherwise enchanting A Damsel in Distress) and the “uncle” is Paul Douglas, a producer who wants to star her in a show — which Rufus Trent has agreed to back if Julie can break off Roberta’s engagement to Michael and leave her free to marry the man she really wants, clerk Gilbert Potts (Robert Coote).
After a few up-and-down complications that test the limits of the Production Code, two robbers steal the supposedly unremovable earrings and it turns out they are also actors, hired by Genevieve to break up the burgeoning romance between Michael and Julie and thereby steer Michael’s romantic attentions back towards Roberta. Though a committee of screenwriters (Charles Kaufman — not the current one — Paul Yawitz, Viola Brothers Shore and Harry Segall) do a serviceable job of turning Laszlo’s interesting if convoluted story into a script, they don’t have the flair that Samson Raphaelson brought to Trouble in Paradise, and to say that director Joseph Santley (who actually made a few rather interesting movies) is no Lubitsch is putting it quite politely, but Blond Cheat is actually a nicely done movie even though, despite only lasting an hour, it still feels a bit slow and padded for the material. Maybe it should have been a short … — 6/24/06
•••••
The night before Charles and I had watched a quite charming movie — and one which seemed vaguely familiar — called Blond Cheat, made at RKO in 1938 as part of their failed attempt to make a major star of Joan Fontaine. (Eventually they dropped her, and she landed the part of the lead in the 1940 Rebecca, produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock — and that film made her a star at last.) It’s set in London and accordingly RKO recruited almost their whole cast from Hollywood’s British colony — including Derrick de Marney, fresh from his own Hitchcock connection (he’s the innocent suspect accused of murder in Young and Innocent), as the male lead. De Marney plays Michael Ashburn, general manager of the Trafalgar Loan Company — a sort of glorified pawnshop — who on the night he is to dine at the exclusive Piccadilly Club with his fiancée, stuck-up rich bitch Roberta Trent (Lilian Bond) is accosted by Paul Douglas (Olaf Hytten), who insists he must borrow 400 pounds immediately and puts up the earrings worn by his niece, Julie Evans (Joan Fontaine), for collateral.
Only when Michael asks Julie to remove the earrings so her uncle can pawn them, he’s told that she’s worn them so long that they’ve grown in and can’t be removed without a surgical operation — so she’s just going to have to spend the weekend with him (the film opens on a Friday afternoon) until her uncle comes back on Monday to redeem them — and her. The debt of the “original” story by Hungarian playwright Aladar Laszlo (spelled “Lazlo” in his credit) — whose works also furnished the bases for the much better-known films Trouble in Paradise and (sort of) Top Hat — to the tale filmed by MGM in 1931 as The Man in Possession and in 1937 as Personal Property is pretty obvious (one of Hollywood’s usual writing committees — Charles Kaufman, Paul Yawitz, Viola Brothers Shore and Harry Segall — turned Laszlo’s story into a script), but Blond Cheat has a discernible charm of its own.
Partly that’s due to the performance by Fontaine, who manages to go through the entire movie with something of the comic malevolence of Katharine Hepburn’s character in Bringing Up Baby — positively taking joy in screwing up the plans of the man she’s attached herself to — and add some grit to a tale that in lesser hands might have turned into a pretty dull comic soufflé. The plot resolution really doesn’t make much sense — it turns out that “Douglas” is actually a theatrical impresario who puts on the floor shows at the Piccadilly Club, and Julie is an aspiring actress and singer auditioning for a spot in one (and she does a production number at the end, singing in an obviously dubbed voice). The gimmick is that Julie is supposed to show her skill as an actress by posing as Douglas’ niece and getting Michael embroiled so deeply in their plot that it breaks up his engagement — though why Douglas wants to break up Michael’s engagement to Roberta is never made clear — and in the end Michael crashes the stage in the middle of Julie’s number (she got the job) and proposes to her, while Roberta is left with foofy glasses-wearing Gilbert Potts (Robert Coote), another member of the Trafalgar staff, as a consolation prize.
But despite the lapses in plot logic, Blond Crazy is a nice little film, directed by Joseph Santley (co-director of the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, an experience which stood him in good stead here) with just the right touch of lightness and insouciance, and while it’s hardly laugh-out-loud funny it arouses a lot of smiling and chuckling and it’s a perfectly nice little light entertainment that, at only an hour in length, takes care not to overstay its welcome. — 10/25/09
Fortunately I’d picked a short one from the backlog: Blond Cheat, a 61-minute 1938 “B” from RKO that starred a virtually all-British cast (so much so that at first Charles and I wondered if the film had actually been shot there, though it wasn’t) headed by pre-stardom Joan Fontaine and Derrick de Marney (the latter known to modern audiences mostly for his turn as the young and innocent murder suspect in Hitchcock’s marvelous 1937 Young and Innocent) in a film based on a story by Aladar Laszlo (spelled “Lazlo” on the credits here), the Hungarian playwright whose play The Honest Finder became the basis for Paramount’s marvelous 1932 release Trouble in Paradise, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Herbert Marshall, Kay Francis and Miriam Hopkins.
Blond Cheat isn’t as compelling a story as Trouble in Paradise, but it still shows Laszlo’s penchant for flipping our moral attitude towards the characters and showing people being manipulated behind the scenes in ways that aren’t readily apparent. The real secret protagonists are pawnbroker Rufus Trent (Cecil Kellaway, a first-rate character actor who got wasted playing dotty scientists in 1950’s sci-fi films) and his socially ambitious wife Genevieve (Cecil Cunningham). Genevieve has forced her husband to rename his pawnshop a “loan office” and, at least judging from what we see on screen, to remodel it as a deco extravaganza with such an enormous lobby we can’t help but wonder when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are going to show up to dance in its floor show. She also wants to marry off her daughter Roberta (Lilian Bond from James Whale’s 1932 classic The Old Dark House) to Michael Ashburn (Derrick de Marney), who comes from an old aristocratic family even though he’s currently broke and forced to work at Rufus’s pawn- — excuse me, loan office.
Those plans get derailed when Julie Evans (Joan Fontaine) and her supposed uncle (Olaf Hytten) burst into the loan company just as it’s closing and borrow 400 pounds, putting up Julie’s earrings as collateral and then telling Michael that since she’s been wearing them since childhood, they can’t be removed. So Michael has to treat her as “human collateral,” never letting her out of her sight even though that means breaking a dinner date with his fiancée and her parents at the posh “Piccadilly Club.” We eventually learn that Julie is actually an aspiring musical star (an odd casting for Fontaine after she did so dismally as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner in the otherwise enchanting A Damsel in Distress) and the “uncle” is Paul Douglas, a producer who wants to star her in a show — which Rufus Trent has agreed to back if Julie can break off Roberta’s engagement to Michael and leave her free to marry the man she really wants, clerk Gilbert Potts (Robert Coote).
After a few up-and-down complications that test the limits of the Production Code, two robbers steal the supposedly unremovable earrings and it turns out they are also actors, hired by Genevieve to break up the burgeoning romance between Michael and Julie and thereby steer Michael’s romantic attentions back towards Roberta. Though a committee of screenwriters (Charles Kaufman — not the current one — Paul Yawitz, Viola Brothers Shore and Harry Segall) do a serviceable job of turning Laszlo’s interesting if convoluted story into a script, they don’t have the flair that Samson Raphaelson brought to Trouble in Paradise, and to say that director Joseph Santley (who actually made a few rather interesting movies) is no Lubitsch is putting it quite politely, but Blond Cheat is actually a nicely done movie even though, despite only lasting an hour, it still feels a bit slow and padded for the material. Maybe it should have been a short … — 6/24/06
•••••
The night before Charles and I had watched a quite charming movie — and one which seemed vaguely familiar — called Blond Cheat, made at RKO in 1938 as part of their failed attempt to make a major star of Joan Fontaine. (Eventually they dropped her, and she landed the part of the lead in the 1940 Rebecca, produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock — and that film made her a star at last.) It’s set in London and accordingly RKO recruited almost their whole cast from Hollywood’s British colony — including Derrick de Marney, fresh from his own Hitchcock connection (he’s the innocent suspect accused of murder in Young and Innocent), as the male lead. De Marney plays Michael Ashburn, general manager of the Trafalgar Loan Company — a sort of glorified pawnshop — who on the night he is to dine at the exclusive Piccadilly Club with his fiancée, stuck-up rich bitch Roberta Trent (Lilian Bond) is accosted by Paul Douglas (Olaf Hytten), who insists he must borrow 400 pounds immediately and puts up the earrings worn by his niece, Julie Evans (Joan Fontaine), for collateral.
Only when Michael asks Julie to remove the earrings so her uncle can pawn them, he’s told that she’s worn them so long that they’ve grown in and can’t be removed without a surgical operation — so she’s just going to have to spend the weekend with him (the film opens on a Friday afternoon) until her uncle comes back on Monday to redeem them — and her. The debt of the “original” story by Hungarian playwright Aladar Laszlo (spelled “Lazlo” in his credit) — whose works also furnished the bases for the much better-known films Trouble in Paradise and (sort of) Top Hat — to the tale filmed by MGM in 1931 as The Man in Possession and in 1937 as Personal Property is pretty obvious (one of Hollywood’s usual writing committees — Charles Kaufman, Paul Yawitz, Viola Brothers Shore and Harry Segall — turned Laszlo’s story into a script), but Blond Cheat has a discernible charm of its own.
Partly that’s due to the performance by Fontaine, who manages to go through the entire movie with something of the comic malevolence of Katharine Hepburn’s character in Bringing Up Baby — positively taking joy in screwing up the plans of the man she’s attached herself to — and add some grit to a tale that in lesser hands might have turned into a pretty dull comic soufflé. The plot resolution really doesn’t make much sense — it turns out that “Douglas” is actually a theatrical impresario who puts on the floor shows at the Piccadilly Club, and Julie is an aspiring actress and singer auditioning for a spot in one (and she does a production number at the end, singing in an obviously dubbed voice). The gimmick is that Julie is supposed to show her skill as an actress by posing as Douglas’ niece and getting Michael embroiled so deeply in their plot that it breaks up his engagement — though why Douglas wants to break up Michael’s engagement to Roberta is never made clear — and in the end Michael crashes the stage in the middle of Julie’s number (she got the job) and proposes to her, while Roberta is left with foofy glasses-wearing Gilbert Potts (Robert Coote), another member of the Trafalgar staff, as a consolation prize.
But despite the lapses in plot logic, Blond Crazy is a nice little film, directed by Joseph Santley (co-director of the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, an experience which stood him in good stead here) with just the right touch of lightness and insouciance, and while it’s hardly laugh-out-loud funny it arouses a lot of smiling and chuckling and it’s a perfectly nice little light entertainment that, at only an hour in length, takes care not to overstay its welcome. — 10/25/09
Queen Family (North Carolina Public Television, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran him a curtain-raiser: a half-hour documentary called Queen Family that was literally about a family named Queen — a 90-plus matriarch named Mary Jane Queen and her eight children — who are keeping the tradition of amateur music-making on the front porch going into a world where it’s rapidly dying out. The official synopsis on the PBS Web site described it thusly: “The mountains of Appalachia are home to a folk music tradition that traces its roots to England, Scotland and Ireland. Mary Jane Queen, daughter of a renowned banjo player, brought together the traditions of two Appalachian families when she married musician Claude Queen in 1935. Ninety-two year old Mary Jane and her eight children continue the tradition today, singing and playing the music passed down from their ancestors, among the first Irish-Americans to settle in Jackson County, North Carolina. The Queen family has come to represent mountain music, language, culture and the closeness of family and community in the Southern Highlands. In this documentary, the iconic family describes and exemplifies a way of life and traditions that are quickly passing, with original and traditional mountain music played literally on the back porch. 30 minutes.”
Aside from that last reference to the “back porch” — the Queens far more commonly perform on their front porch (and treasure a wood-burned sign that was the last thing Claude Queen did for the family before he died; it reads “Queens’ Picking Place” and hangs on the front of their house) — the film is a marvelous half-hour slice of life even though the Queens aren’t quite as isolated as the myth-making would have us believe. In the opening narration they’re described as having won an award for best traditional bluegrass group at a local music festival (so they have performed on land other than their own property!), and later on they acknowledged having had a battery-powered radio that enabled them, when they were growing up, to tune to WSM (the Grand Ole Opry station) and other local radio stations that broadcast bluegrass and country music. (They particularly remembered hearing Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.)
Mary Jane Queen has one of those authoritative old voices that may crack and break all over the place (though give her a break; she’s over 90 and this gives no impression of what she would have sounded like in her youth) but nonetheless she sings with cutting power and soul; she does lead on most of the songs heard here and it’s clear who wears the proverbial pants in the family. The music was mostly familiar bluegrass and gospel standards like “Black Jack Davy” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — though there were a few surprises, including a flash uptempo guitar duet by Mark Queen and one of his brothers that was amazing in its sheer virtuosity and made me sit up and think, “These guys aren’t just amateur folk musicians — they can pick!” There’s even a spectacular scene in which two of the Queens play the same guitar at the same time, with surprising adeptness: the first time I’ve ever seen anyone attempt guitar four-hands.
I ran him a curtain-raiser: a half-hour documentary called Queen Family that was literally about a family named Queen — a 90-plus matriarch named Mary Jane Queen and her eight children — who are keeping the tradition of amateur music-making on the front porch going into a world where it’s rapidly dying out. The official synopsis on the PBS Web site described it thusly: “The mountains of Appalachia are home to a folk music tradition that traces its roots to England, Scotland and Ireland. Mary Jane Queen, daughter of a renowned banjo player, brought together the traditions of two Appalachian families when she married musician Claude Queen in 1935. Ninety-two year old Mary Jane and her eight children continue the tradition today, singing and playing the music passed down from their ancestors, among the first Irish-Americans to settle in Jackson County, North Carolina. The Queen family has come to represent mountain music, language, culture and the closeness of family and community in the Southern Highlands. In this documentary, the iconic family describes and exemplifies a way of life and traditions that are quickly passing, with original and traditional mountain music played literally on the back porch. 30 minutes.”
Aside from that last reference to the “back porch” — the Queens far more commonly perform on their front porch (and treasure a wood-burned sign that was the last thing Claude Queen did for the family before he died; it reads “Queens’ Picking Place” and hangs on the front of their house) — the film is a marvelous half-hour slice of life even though the Queens aren’t quite as isolated as the myth-making would have us believe. In the opening narration they’re described as having won an award for best traditional bluegrass group at a local music festival (so they have performed on land other than their own property!), and later on they acknowledged having had a battery-powered radio that enabled them, when they were growing up, to tune to WSM (the Grand Ole Opry station) and other local radio stations that broadcast bluegrass and country music. (They particularly remembered hearing Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.)
Mary Jane Queen has one of those authoritative old voices that may crack and break all over the place (though give her a break; she’s over 90 and this gives no impression of what she would have sounded like in her youth) but nonetheless she sings with cutting power and soul; she does lead on most of the songs heard here and it’s clear who wears the proverbial pants in the family. The music was mostly familiar bluegrass and gospel standards like “Black Jack Davy” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — though there were a few surprises, including a flash uptempo guitar duet by Mark Queen and one of his brothers that was amazing in its sheer virtuosity and made me sit up and think, “These guys aren’t just amateur folk musicians — they can pick!” There’s even a spectacular scene in which two of the Queens play the same guitar at the same time, with surprising adeptness: the first time I’ve ever seen anyone attempt guitar four-hands.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Wild Boys of the Road (Warners, as “First National,” 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided to reproduce a recent double-bill on TCM, Wild Boys of the Road and Girls of the Road (I guess the girls weren’t quite so “wild”), presented as part of their current salute to films about the Depression, both the ones made during it and the ones made about it afterwards. Though with similar stories and themes, they couldn’t have been more different. Wild Boys of the Road starts out as a typical student film, with Eddie Smith (Frankie Darro) and his friend Tommy Gordon (Edwin Phillips) trying to get into a “Sophomore Frolic” dance for which admission is 75 cents for boys and free for girls. Eddie has enough for his own ticket but not enough to stake Tommy, so he dresses Tommy in drag and gets him in for free — but a watchman catches Tommy taking off his wig and dress and revealing a suit under it, and Our Heroes and their dates all get thrown out. Tommy tells Eddie he plans to drop out of school and look for work, and Eddie says he’ll ask his dad (Grant Mitchell) if his employer can give Tommy a job — but Eddie finds out that his dad has been laid off himself.
Not wanting to burden his family, Eddie takes off on the road with Tommy, and on the first train they hop they meet Grace (Rochelle Hudson), a young woman dressed as a man so she can “ride the rods” without having to worry about sexual assault. The first 20 minutes or so of this film are pretty silly, but once the “wild” boys actually get on the road it becomes a near-masterpiece, directed with an utter lack of sentimentality by William A. Wellman (who in a 1927 Paramount silent called Beggars for Life had already pulled the gimmick of having a woman hobo dress as a man — in that one she was played by Louise Brooks, who named it as her favorite of her films) and putting its characters through a series of ordeals, leavened only by a series of all too transitory breaks. They’re busted en masse by police, find a modicum of decency in a homeless encampment until it too is raided, and in the scene everyone remembers from this film Tommy collapses on a railroad track and, though he manages to pull himself far enough away that he doesn’t die when the train inevitably comes, does lose a leg in the crash and is put through intense pain both at the scene of the accident and later, when a sympathetic doctor (Arthur Hohl) treats him, during his ministrations.
The ending is a bizarre piece of propaganda for the Roosevelt administration: after being arrested for attempting to hold up a theatre, Eddie — who agreed to take a note to the theatre cashier for a promise of $5, which he was planning to use so he could buy a coat to work a legitimate job as an elevator boy (the two men who made this offer to him were such obvious gangster types I guess we’re supposed to assume that Eddie never went to the movies even when his family still had money) — and his two friends, Tommy and Grace, end up before a judge who has an NRA poster on the wall above his chair, and who ultimately gives them a chance to work themselves out of their predicament on condition that they promise to return home to their parents as soon as they’ve earned the money to do so. The ending is overly blatant and strikes a false note, but the rest of the film, written by Earl Baldwin from a story by Daniel Ahearn, has been so powerful (interestingly anticipating some of the scenes of The Grapes of Wrath even though it was made three years before John Steinbeck’s novel was published) that one can forgive it.
Wild Boys of the Road is one of Wellman’s triumphs as a Warners contractee, rivaling The Public Enemy and the awesome (and woefully little-known) Safe in Hell, and it’s also a film that uses the greater sexual and moral freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” era not to titillate but to make a powerful dramatic point: in one sequence a railroad man catches Grace washing out her clothes, realizes she’s a girl, and rapes her — and the “wild boys” band together and push him off the train, presumably killing him (though in fact he disappears from the story altogether and we don’t find out if he lives or dies). Though the “R-word” is never used (even in the “pre-Code” days there was enough enforcement of the Production Code that they couldn’t quite go there), the scene is pretty obvious and quite intense, especially in capturing Rochelle Hudson’s sense of having been violated in a way that seems modern.
Wild Boys of the Road also gains from its blessedly sparing use of music — the idea of underscoring dialogue scenes was still in its infancy; Jack Warner wasn’t yet issuing ukases that the music should start when it said “Warner Bros. Presents” and not let up until it said “The End,” and aside from the opening and closing credits and a powerful montage scene of various “wild boys” (including the principals and seemingly thousands of others) in the middle, the film is unscored and is actually more powerful from the lack of music. The scene in which Tommy loses his leg on the tracks has been shown in just about every documentary on Wellman, Warners in the 1930’s or how Hollywood dealt with the Depression, but if anything it’s even more powerful in context — and Wild Boys of the Road emerges as a near-masterpiece, tough, gritty and blessedly free of compromise until that regrettable but inevitable ending.
I decided to reproduce a recent double-bill on TCM, Wild Boys of the Road and Girls of the Road (I guess the girls weren’t quite so “wild”), presented as part of their current salute to films about the Depression, both the ones made during it and the ones made about it afterwards. Though with similar stories and themes, they couldn’t have been more different. Wild Boys of the Road starts out as a typical student film, with Eddie Smith (Frankie Darro) and his friend Tommy Gordon (Edwin Phillips) trying to get into a “Sophomore Frolic” dance for which admission is 75 cents for boys and free for girls. Eddie has enough for his own ticket but not enough to stake Tommy, so he dresses Tommy in drag and gets him in for free — but a watchman catches Tommy taking off his wig and dress and revealing a suit under it, and Our Heroes and their dates all get thrown out. Tommy tells Eddie he plans to drop out of school and look for work, and Eddie says he’ll ask his dad (Grant Mitchell) if his employer can give Tommy a job — but Eddie finds out that his dad has been laid off himself.
Not wanting to burden his family, Eddie takes off on the road with Tommy, and on the first train they hop they meet Grace (Rochelle Hudson), a young woman dressed as a man so she can “ride the rods” without having to worry about sexual assault. The first 20 minutes or so of this film are pretty silly, but once the “wild” boys actually get on the road it becomes a near-masterpiece, directed with an utter lack of sentimentality by William A. Wellman (who in a 1927 Paramount silent called Beggars for Life had already pulled the gimmick of having a woman hobo dress as a man — in that one she was played by Louise Brooks, who named it as her favorite of her films) and putting its characters through a series of ordeals, leavened only by a series of all too transitory breaks. They’re busted en masse by police, find a modicum of decency in a homeless encampment until it too is raided, and in the scene everyone remembers from this film Tommy collapses on a railroad track and, though he manages to pull himself far enough away that he doesn’t die when the train inevitably comes, does lose a leg in the crash and is put through intense pain both at the scene of the accident and later, when a sympathetic doctor (Arthur Hohl) treats him, during his ministrations.
The ending is a bizarre piece of propaganda for the Roosevelt administration: after being arrested for attempting to hold up a theatre, Eddie — who agreed to take a note to the theatre cashier for a promise of $5, which he was planning to use so he could buy a coat to work a legitimate job as an elevator boy (the two men who made this offer to him were such obvious gangster types I guess we’re supposed to assume that Eddie never went to the movies even when his family still had money) — and his two friends, Tommy and Grace, end up before a judge who has an NRA poster on the wall above his chair, and who ultimately gives them a chance to work themselves out of their predicament on condition that they promise to return home to their parents as soon as they’ve earned the money to do so. The ending is overly blatant and strikes a false note, but the rest of the film, written by Earl Baldwin from a story by Daniel Ahearn, has been so powerful (interestingly anticipating some of the scenes of The Grapes of Wrath even though it was made three years before John Steinbeck’s novel was published) that one can forgive it.
Wild Boys of the Road is one of Wellman’s triumphs as a Warners contractee, rivaling The Public Enemy and the awesome (and woefully little-known) Safe in Hell, and it’s also a film that uses the greater sexual and moral freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” era not to titillate but to make a powerful dramatic point: in one sequence a railroad man catches Grace washing out her clothes, realizes she’s a girl, and rapes her — and the “wild boys” band together and push him off the train, presumably killing him (though in fact he disappears from the story altogether and we don’t find out if he lives or dies). Though the “R-word” is never used (even in the “pre-Code” days there was enough enforcement of the Production Code that they couldn’t quite go there), the scene is pretty obvious and quite intense, especially in capturing Rochelle Hudson’s sense of having been violated in a way that seems modern.
Wild Boys of the Road also gains from its blessedly sparing use of music — the idea of underscoring dialogue scenes was still in its infancy; Jack Warner wasn’t yet issuing ukases that the music should start when it said “Warner Bros. Presents” and not let up until it said “The End,” and aside from the opening and closing credits and a powerful montage scene of various “wild boys” (including the principals and seemingly thousands of others) in the middle, the film is unscored and is actually more powerful from the lack of music. The scene in which Tommy loses his leg on the tracks has been shown in just about every documentary on Wellman, Warners in the 1930’s or how Hollywood dealt with the Depression, but if anything it’s even more powerful in context — and Wild Boys of the Road emerges as a near-masterpiece, tough, gritty and blessedly free of compromise until that regrettable but inevitable ending.
Girls of the Road (Columbia, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the power and impact of Wild Boys of the Road, Girls of the Road was a return to “reality” as usually seen by the movie camera. Robert D. Andrews’ “original” screenplay focused not on the “wild girls” themselves but on an outsider who enters their ranks to snoop — in this case Kay Warren (Ann Dvorak), daughter and secretary to Governor Warren (Howard Hickman) of the carefully unnamed state where this story takes place (the writers and director of Wild Boys of the Road kept their film carefully grounded in genuine geography), who hears a couple of well-minded civic reformers give a report to her dad on conditions for women on the road, realizes that the report will just get shit-canned if someone doesn’t go out there and document the real life of the “road girls,” and naturally decides to be that person herself, taking off for the road with a nice coat and slacks and $200 on her.
This film was made in 1940, when the Depression was no longer a “live” issue, and its main purpose seems to have been to titillate the audience with as much sexual suggestion as Andrews and the director, Nick Grindé (who’s actually a considerably more interesting filmmaker here than he was in the contemporary “mad scientist” sci-fi/horror films he was making at Columbia with Boris Karloff as his star), could cram into a “post-Code” film. The Lesbian subtexts are veiled but still there — seeing tough-as-nails Mickey (Helen Mack), the hobo Kay first antagonizes and then befriends, one almost expects them to become a Lesbian couple with Mickey as the butch and Kay as the femme — and there’s an even harder type when they get to an abandoned show boat that’s being run as a camp for female tramps by an even tougher broad. At the same time there’s vulnerable Irene (Marjorie Cooley), who’s carrying a box containing a white wedding dress because, in a spectacular example of misplaced priorities, she wanted to go back home to her fiancé but she didn’t have enough money for both a bus ticket and a wedding dress, so she bought the dress and tried to hitch back — and naturally, as the only girl in the dramatis personae who actually has a relationship (even though we never see her boyfriend), she’s the one who dies. The film’s stars, Dvorak, Mack and Lola Lane (playing yet another attitude queen from the road), supposedly got busted in Saugus, California by a police chief who were convinced they were real hoboes, not just actresses playing them.
Girls of the Road isn’t a bad movie, but it suffers so much by comparison with Wild Boys of the Road it probably wasn’t a good idea for either TCM or us to screen them consecutively. The “road girls” themselves may be wearing the most dirty and disheveled trousers in Columbia’s wardrobe department, but throughout the movie their hair is perfectly permed and their eyebrows plucked. There are plot holes galore — in one scene Elly steals Kay’s clothes and Irene’s wedding dress but somehow misses the $200 bankroll Kay had stashed (I was expecting this scene to anticipate the gimmick in Sullivan’s Travels in which the person who was pretending to be a hobo suddenly finds himself cut off from all his money and resources and forced to live as one, but no dice) — and there’s music, music, music (done by Columbia’s usual committee of stock-music composers, including Sidney Cutner, Ben Oakland, George Parrish, Gregory Stone and Dimitri Tiomkin), underscoring scenes Wellman powerfully left silent in Wild Boys of the Road (including a copy of the scene in which the hoboes throw the rapist off the train — only in this version the girls attack before the rape occurs and the assailant definitely survives).
Girls of the Road isn’t a bad movie, most of the acting is perfectly fine (though I’m not much of an Ann Dvorak fan and I still think the 1932 film Three on a Match would have been better if she and Bette Davis had switched roles), and the “happy ending” (the governor’s daughter, returned to her normal social status, uses her influence and contact to build a “girls’ castle” — a home in which the “girls of the road” can settle and get rehabilitated) is actually more convincing than the one stuck on Wild Boys of the Road, but especially compared to Wellman’s near-masterpiece, Girls of the Road simply partakes too much of the standard-issue silliness that generally crept into 1930’s Hollywood films when they tried to take on serious social, political or economic issues.
After the power and impact of Wild Boys of the Road, Girls of the Road was a return to “reality” as usually seen by the movie camera. Robert D. Andrews’ “original” screenplay focused not on the “wild girls” themselves but on an outsider who enters their ranks to snoop — in this case Kay Warren (Ann Dvorak), daughter and secretary to Governor Warren (Howard Hickman) of the carefully unnamed state where this story takes place (the writers and director of Wild Boys of the Road kept their film carefully grounded in genuine geography), who hears a couple of well-minded civic reformers give a report to her dad on conditions for women on the road, realizes that the report will just get shit-canned if someone doesn’t go out there and document the real life of the “road girls,” and naturally decides to be that person herself, taking off for the road with a nice coat and slacks and $200 on her.
This film was made in 1940, when the Depression was no longer a “live” issue, and its main purpose seems to have been to titillate the audience with as much sexual suggestion as Andrews and the director, Nick Grindé (who’s actually a considerably more interesting filmmaker here than he was in the contemporary “mad scientist” sci-fi/horror films he was making at Columbia with Boris Karloff as his star), could cram into a “post-Code” film. The Lesbian subtexts are veiled but still there — seeing tough-as-nails Mickey (Helen Mack), the hobo Kay first antagonizes and then befriends, one almost expects them to become a Lesbian couple with Mickey as the butch and Kay as the femme — and there’s an even harder type when they get to an abandoned show boat that’s being run as a camp for female tramps by an even tougher broad. At the same time there’s vulnerable Irene (Marjorie Cooley), who’s carrying a box containing a white wedding dress because, in a spectacular example of misplaced priorities, she wanted to go back home to her fiancé but she didn’t have enough money for both a bus ticket and a wedding dress, so she bought the dress and tried to hitch back — and naturally, as the only girl in the dramatis personae who actually has a relationship (even though we never see her boyfriend), she’s the one who dies. The film’s stars, Dvorak, Mack and Lola Lane (playing yet another attitude queen from the road), supposedly got busted in Saugus, California by a police chief who were convinced they were real hoboes, not just actresses playing them.
Girls of the Road isn’t a bad movie, but it suffers so much by comparison with Wild Boys of the Road it probably wasn’t a good idea for either TCM or us to screen them consecutively. The “road girls” themselves may be wearing the most dirty and disheveled trousers in Columbia’s wardrobe department, but throughout the movie their hair is perfectly permed and their eyebrows plucked. There are plot holes galore — in one scene Elly steals Kay’s clothes and Irene’s wedding dress but somehow misses the $200 bankroll Kay had stashed (I was expecting this scene to anticipate the gimmick in Sullivan’s Travels in which the person who was pretending to be a hobo suddenly finds himself cut off from all his money and resources and forced to live as one, but no dice) — and there’s music, music, music (done by Columbia’s usual committee of stock-music composers, including Sidney Cutner, Ben Oakland, George Parrish, Gregory Stone and Dimitri Tiomkin), underscoring scenes Wellman powerfully left silent in Wild Boys of the Road (including a copy of the scene in which the hoboes throw the rapist off the train — only in this version the girls attack before the rape occurs and the assailant definitely survives).
Girls of the Road isn’t a bad movie, most of the acting is perfectly fine (though I’m not much of an Ann Dvorak fan and I still think the 1932 film Three on a Match would have been better if she and Bette Davis had switched roles), and the “happy ending” (the governor’s daughter, returned to her normal social status, uses her influence and contact to build a “girls’ castle” — a home in which the “girls of the road” can settle and get rehabilitated) is actually more convincing than the one stuck on Wild Boys of the Road, but especially compared to Wellman’s near-masterpiece, Girls of the Road simply partakes too much of the standard-issue silliness that generally crept into 1930’s Hollywood films when they tried to take on serious social, political or economic issues.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
One Romantic Night a.k.a. The Swan (United Artists, 1930)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we picked was One Romantic Night, a.k.a. The Swan, a 1930 United Artists release that was the second of three films based on Ferenc Molnar’s play “A hattyú,” meaning “The Swan.” The print we were watching came from a recent TCM showing as part of a day-long festival for D. W. Griffith’s greatest star, Lillian Gish, on her birthday, October 14. On one level it was quite a good movie; the splendiferous sets by William Cameron Menzies and Paul French eloquently framed the action; the pacing of Paul L. Stein’s direction was good and the actors mostly delivered their lines naturalistically, with few of those deadly pauses that marred many early talkies and actually made them seem less realistic than silent films.
On the other hand, it was saddled with a really silly story, one of those love-vs.-duty things: Gish plays Alexandra, daughter of a royal family who lost their throne but still retain their title — and her mom, Beatrice (Marie Dressler, acting with the same transcendent authority she showed in Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie, and likewise out-pointing the leads), is determined to rehabilitate the family’s coffers and royal standing by getting Alexandra to marry Prince Albert (Rod LaRocque). Meanwhile, Prince Albert himself isn’t interested in marrying anybody — he’s having too much fun “playing the field” (when he was introduced Charles asked me why he wasn’t singing the lusty songs of the male lead in The Merry Widow) and going through women like a reaper through a wheat field. The entire film takes place on the estate of Alexandra and her parents, and focuses on Beatrice’s attempts to have another man court Alexandra so Albert will get so jealous of Alexandra that he’ll pop the question just to make sure someone else doesn’t get her.
The other man she has in mind is Dr. Nicholas Haller (Conrad Nagel, never any great shakes as an actor but considerably better-looking and sexier than LaRocque!), tutor to Alexandra and her two younger brothers, who’s had an unrequited crush on her and doesn’t seem to mind being used by her mom as a cat’s-paw even though he’s all too aware that he doesn’t stand a chance with a card-carrying princess. At the end, Albert receives a telegram that he’s been ordered by his family to marry Princess Marie of Hohenhauen — only Beatrice checks her copy of Gotha’s Almanac and figures out that there is no such person, but not before Albert has used that information to get Alexandra to run away with him, thinking that pairing up with him is going to cost him his throne and they’ll spend the rest of their days as two footloose ex-royals in South America.
It’s much ado about nothing, really, and both Gish and LaRocque seem a bit nervous about acting in sound films (it was her first talkie, though not his) and Dressler and Nagel both do more credible jobs of acting with their voices. Marie Dressler had the advantage over a lot of other Hollywood actors dealing with the talkie transition of having had extensive experience in both live plays and silent films — this meant she knew movies and she knew dialogue, and here as in Anna Christie it shows in a much greater level of confidence in the process and her ability to create a character in it than that of many of her co-stars. As for Nagel, he was so often tapped for major roles in the early years of sound that he joked that he and his wife could no longer just go to the movies for their own entertainment because they couldn’t find a picture playing anywhere that he wasn’t in.
It’s odd that this piece of Ruritanian cheese has been filmed three times — and though Lillian Gish would act again (even though she made only one other movie, 1933’s His Double Life — in the next 12 years) the stars of the other two versions would not. The first version of The Swan was a silent filmed at Paramount in 1926, just before its lead, Frances Howard, quit acting to marry Sam Goldwyn; and the last version was made at MGM in 1956 just before, in one of those ironic real-life situations that wouldn’t be believed in fiction, its star, Grace Kelly, quit the business to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco and become a princess in real life.
The film we picked was One Romantic Night, a.k.a. The Swan, a 1930 United Artists release that was the second of three films based on Ferenc Molnar’s play “A hattyú,” meaning “The Swan.” The print we were watching came from a recent TCM showing as part of a day-long festival for D. W. Griffith’s greatest star, Lillian Gish, on her birthday, October 14. On one level it was quite a good movie; the splendiferous sets by William Cameron Menzies and Paul French eloquently framed the action; the pacing of Paul L. Stein’s direction was good and the actors mostly delivered their lines naturalistically, with few of those deadly pauses that marred many early talkies and actually made them seem less realistic than silent films.
On the other hand, it was saddled with a really silly story, one of those love-vs.-duty things: Gish plays Alexandra, daughter of a royal family who lost their throne but still retain their title — and her mom, Beatrice (Marie Dressler, acting with the same transcendent authority she showed in Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie, and likewise out-pointing the leads), is determined to rehabilitate the family’s coffers and royal standing by getting Alexandra to marry Prince Albert (Rod LaRocque). Meanwhile, Prince Albert himself isn’t interested in marrying anybody — he’s having too much fun “playing the field” (when he was introduced Charles asked me why he wasn’t singing the lusty songs of the male lead in The Merry Widow) and going through women like a reaper through a wheat field. The entire film takes place on the estate of Alexandra and her parents, and focuses on Beatrice’s attempts to have another man court Alexandra so Albert will get so jealous of Alexandra that he’ll pop the question just to make sure someone else doesn’t get her.
The other man she has in mind is Dr. Nicholas Haller (Conrad Nagel, never any great shakes as an actor but considerably better-looking and sexier than LaRocque!), tutor to Alexandra and her two younger brothers, who’s had an unrequited crush on her and doesn’t seem to mind being used by her mom as a cat’s-paw even though he’s all too aware that he doesn’t stand a chance with a card-carrying princess. At the end, Albert receives a telegram that he’s been ordered by his family to marry Princess Marie of Hohenhauen — only Beatrice checks her copy of Gotha’s Almanac and figures out that there is no such person, but not before Albert has used that information to get Alexandra to run away with him, thinking that pairing up with him is going to cost him his throne and they’ll spend the rest of their days as two footloose ex-royals in South America.
It’s much ado about nothing, really, and both Gish and LaRocque seem a bit nervous about acting in sound films (it was her first talkie, though not his) and Dressler and Nagel both do more credible jobs of acting with their voices. Marie Dressler had the advantage over a lot of other Hollywood actors dealing with the talkie transition of having had extensive experience in both live plays and silent films — this meant she knew movies and she knew dialogue, and here as in Anna Christie it shows in a much greater level of confidence in the process and her ability to create a character in it than that of many of her co-stars. As for Nagel, he was so often tapped for major roles in the early years of sound that he joked that he and his wife could no longer just go to the movies for their own entertainment because they couldn’t find a picture playing anywhere that he wasn’t in.
It’s odd that this piece of Ruritanian cheese has been filmed three times — and though Lillian Gish would act again (even though she made only one other movie, 1933’s His Double Life — in the next 12 years) the stars of the other two versions would not. The first version of The Swan was a silent filmed at Paramount in 1926, just before its lead, Frances Howard, quit acting to marry Sam Goldwyn; and the last version was made at MGM in 1956 just before, in one of those ironic real-life situations that wouldn’t be believed in fiction, its star, Grace Kelly, quit the business to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco and become a princess in real life.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Three Views of Shakespeare’s “Henry V”
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a great movie, one that tied in with the trip we’re currently taking through the BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings that adapted eight of Shakespeare’s history plays into a continuous cycle from the deposing of Richard II in 1399 to the Battle of Bosworth Field and the accession of the Tudors in 1485. Having recently seen the two Age of Kings episodes dealing with Henry V (his reign and Shakespeare’s play about him), I was curious as a point of comparison to run Laurence Olivier’s masterly film of the same play from 1944. The film is actually called The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France — a title, including the variant spellings (it wouldn’t be until Samuel Johnson wrote his famous English-language dictionary that the spellings of English words would be regularized and systematized), that might well have adorned one of the original printed editions of the play or been posted on a playbill of the time — not that a playbill would have done much good since most of the people in Shakespeare’s audiences couldn’t read. (It’s generally assumed that Shakespeare and his rival theatre company managers sent out barkers with bells to herald that a performance of such-and-such a play was about to occur and how much it would cost to get in.)
Olivier’s three Shakespeare films as actor-director — Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III (he actually appeared in films of two other Shakespeare plays, As You Like It and Othello, but did not direct those) — have often been regarded as the last word on how to bring the Bard to the screen, and while there are other approaches that work (I’ve always been quite partial to the Orson Welles Macbeth — at least once I had a chance to see the restored 107-minute version of the film — with its Caligari-esque stylizations mirroring Macbeth’s diseased mind), Olivier’s Shakespeare films are clearly the work of a man who loved the author and the theatrical tradition from which he sprang.
In fact, Henry V works on various levels of artifice — the film actually begins in May 1600, starting with a flag fluttering in the air and opening up to reveal the main title credit, then a pan shot over the London of the time (a marvelously convincing model by special-effects genius W. Percy Day, who would later work his magic with Michael Powell on A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes) that comes to rest inside the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s company is about to put on a performance of the play. For the first 37 minutes of the movie we remain pretty much inside the Globe — sometimes going backstage and watching the characters hurriedly putting on their costumes and wigs before going on, mostly witnessing the play as spectators in Shakespeare’s time would (presumably) have seen it (though there’s an anachronism in Olivier’s use of signboards to tell the audience when the scene changes — as noted above, very few people in Shakespeare’s London could actually read) — and it’s only about one-quarter of the way through the movie, when Henry V’s expeditionary force finally sails to France, that the film opens up and uses the full resources of cinema to tell its story.
Henry V overall is a marvelous movie, thanks largely to Olivier’s skill and sensitivity as a director and a text editor (he co-wrote the script with Alan Dent and an uncredited Dallas Bower, using Shakespeare’s dialogue almost exclusively — except for the end of the Boar’s Head scene, when Pistol quotes a few lines from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great — but cut extensively, sometimes moved lines from one character to another, and incorporated Henry V’s famous kiss-off of Falstaff — “I know thee not, old man/Fall to thy prayers” — from the end of Henry IV, Part 2) and his ability to recruit competent (more than that!) help, not only an amazing cast (Leslie Banks — otherwise best known as the villain in The Most Dangerous Game and the hero in the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much — as the Chorus, Robert Newton as Pistol, Felix Aylmer as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ernest Thesiger as the French ambassador, Leo Genn as the Constable of France, and quite a few less famous but equally gifted players in the supporting cast, including Harcourt Williams as a decrepit, out-of-it French king and Max Adrian as his son and heir, the Dauphin) but also the brilliant cinematographer Robert Krasker (shooting color for the first time in his life), the great designers Robert and Margaret Furse (who intensively studied paintings of Henry V’s time to determine what the sets should look like, and came up with an appealing mixture of realistic and non-realistic designs that shouldn’t have worked, but did) and, above all, composer William Walton.
With the possible exception of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (whose first film assignment was to adapt Mendelssohn’s music for Warners’ 1935 production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), it’s hard to imagine any experienced film composer in 1944 who would have given this score the consistent imagination Walton does; though he falls a bit flat on the Battle of Agincourt (the cues here are pretty much standard back-and-forth “battle music” without the awesome power of Prokofieff’s score for the battle on the ice in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky), throughout the movie Walton’s music does what a film score should do: it amplifies the emotions of the situations without getting in the way of the great dialogue. Interestingly, Walton did not allow the music to be performed independently of the words; when Walton adapted this and his scores for Olivier’s other Shakespeare films for concert performance, he included a part for a narrator reading Shakespeare’s lines.
Much of the interest of Olivier’s Henry V lies in its fascinating balance between three views of the story: Henry V’s French campaign and the Battle of Agincourt as it would have appeared then; the story as it played in Shakespeare’s time; and how it would be seen by a British public in a middle of a war for the country’s very existence. It’s well known that Winston Churchill, who had virtually shut down the British film industry for most of the war (he was concerned about it using men, money and strategic materials needed for the war effort), gave Olivier special dispensation to make this movie, including letting him out of his own enlistment and authorizing producer Filippo del Giudice to spend the money on lavish sets and costumes, and also Technicolor (the first time Shakespeare was ever filmed in color). Olivier was also allowed to film the battle scenes in Ireland (a neutral country in World War II) and to use on-leave servicemembers as his battle extras.
Perhaps as part of his deal to make the film and perhaps also from his own sensitivity to its appeal as a morale-booster, Olivier somewhat sanitized Henry’s character; he deleted Henry’s quick execution of the Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Grey for having plotted his assassination (though he kept in the scene in which Henry pardons another person for speaking out against the King) and he also deleted the scene in which Henry orders his soldiers to kill all the French prisoners they’d taken at Agincourt. (Oddly, Olivier and Dent left in the cue line for this — “I was not angry since I came to France/Until this instant” — but cut the actual order and its execution, leaving the line somewhat hanging in mid-air.) On the plus side, Olivier and Dent did leave in the opening scene — after the Chorus’s prologue but before the King’s council — in which the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely anxiously debate Henry V’s threatened revival of a law the House of Commons had considered under Henry IV to seize for the state all estates willed to the Church, and the two reach a consensus that in order to forestall that confiscation they’d better give Henry the answer he wants about the validity of his claim to the throne of France. (Eric Crozier, editing the play for An Age of Kings, left this out and went straight from the prologue to the council scene.)
It should be noted that Shakespeare wrote Henry V at least in part as a morale-booster; the Earl of Essex was about to take a British army to subdue and occupy Ireland, and Shakespeare in 1599 was dredging up this slice of British history from 1415 to inspire the British public to support the war — just as Olivier dredged up Shakespeare’s play in 1944 at least in part to bolster support for Britain’s effort in World War II. So there are essentially three separate views of the events of Agincourt embodied in Olivier’s film, and time has added a fourth; when we see the film today, we can’t help but be affected by the changes in how we view war and both individual and national honor between 1944 and 2009, and in particular how the ghastly slaughters of both 20th century world wars and the bland acceptance that civilians are fair game has changed the morality of war and challenged the whole concept of combat as a test of individual merit and courage.
Having just watched the Age of Kings version of this story, Charles and I couldn’t help but compare the two, not only in the different ways they edited Shakespeare’s text but how differently Olivier as both star and director handled much of it from the way Robert Hardy (who had the advantage of playing Henry V as part of a complete cycle and therefore being able to give us the entire character arc) played it under Michael Hayes’ direction. Oddly, it’s Hardy who’s the more straightforward hero; Olivier’s performance as Henry V is surprisingly edgy, reminding us that in his nation’s existential crisis there were two major leaders who were especially known for their eloquence and ability to move people as public speakers. One was his country’s leader, Churchill; the other was his enemy’s leader, Hitler — and Olivier sometimes seems to be pitching his Henry V midway between Churchill and Hitler (and evoking the ways Churchill consciously used quasi-Shakespearean rhetoric to rally his country).
At times Olivier seems to be mocking Henry’s pretensions to a surprising degree for a movie that started out as a rah-rah piece to boost Allied morale — the opening council scene, played straight in An Age of Kings, becomes low comedy here, as the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Ely fumble their way through the elaborate stack of papers purporting to establish the right and justice of Henry’s claim to France. Henry’s big pep talks to his soldiers — the “For Harry, England and St. George” speech outside the walls of Harfleur and the St. Crispian’s Day speech on the morning of Agincourt — really do seem, in Olivier’s readings, like he’s making them up as he goes along, figuring out just what he has to say to these men to get them to go to battle against a force that vastly outnumbers them.
On the other hand, the scenes in the French camp — which Michael Hayes in An Age of Kings plays as high camp — are far more seriously staged here. As James Agee noted in his Time magazine feature on the film, “Olivier transforms the French into sleepy, overconfident, highly intelligent, highly sophisticated noblemen, subtly disunified, casually contemptuous of their Dauphin — an all but definitive embodiment of a civilization a little too ripe to survive.” It’s odd that, in a film so dependent for its appeal on the power of its language — for it was the enduring appeal of Shakespeare’s eloquent speech that led a filmmaker to bother with this play 245 years after its premiere — the scene that most sums up the atavistic nature of the French and their culture of chivalry is non-verbal: a grimly amusing shot of a French knight so weighted down by his armor that his assistants have to use a pulley to raise him into the air and then set him down again atop his horse.
Also, for all the edginess of Olivier’s playing in Henry’s big public moments, his performance is strongest when it is quietest — especially in the long sequence just before Agincourt in which Henry disguises himself and walks around the English camp, talking to his countrymen and showing off the love and understanding of the common people Henry got from all those afternoons carousing at the Boar’s Head in the two previous plays in the cycle before he became king. To quote Agee again, “Shakespeare gave to a cynical old soldier the great speech, ‘But if the cause be not good … ’. Olivier puts it in the mouth of a slow-minded country boy (Brian Nissen). The boy’s complete lack of cynicism, his youth, his eyes bright with sleepless danger, the pleasant patience of his delivery, and his Devon repetition of the tolled word ‘die’ as ‘doy,’ lift this wonderful expression of common humanity caught in human war level with the greatness of the king.” (And later in the movie it seemed to me that it was the sight of Nissen’s corpse, one of the mere 29 British soldiers killed in the battle, that provoked Henry’s outburst, “I was not angry since I came to France/Until this instant,” as if the anguish of seeing someone he had befriended — albeit briefly and casually — killed had provoked Henry’s anger against his enemies.)
Henry V is a movie that’s been a bit overrated — Peter Hall called Olivier’s direction of Henry V as his first film “comparable with Orson Welles’ achievement in directing Citizen Kane,” with which I would disagree (Welles and his writer, Herman Mankiewicz, were working directly from life, not adapting a dramatic poem by a genius author who had already done much of the work), though ironically in the marvelous scene showing the death of Sir John Falstaff (only referred to in Shakespeare’s play) Olivier indulges in two visual quotes from Kane: the long tracking shot through the window of the Boar’s Head into the room in which Falstaff lays dying, and the straight-line horizontal shot of his deathbed instead of the usual three-quarter view from above. That’s not the only visual quote in this movie; the scene in which the British soldiers leap from the trees to ambush the French riding below is straight from The Adventures of Robin Hood (the 1938 version with Errol Flynn).
For me, the attempts to mesh various levels of realism — the reproduction of what Shakespeare’s audiences presumably saw when the play was first produced, the stylized backdrops (in forced perspective) of many of the French “exteriors,” and the naturalism of the battle itself — don’t always work, and the two scenes with Princess Katherine of France (played by Renée Asherson after Olivier’s then-wife, Vivien Leigh, was denied permission to do the role by David O. Selznick, who held her movie contract — Asherson later admitted she only got the role because she was the same size as Leigh and therefore could wear the same costumes without alterations) aren’t totally free from the trap of coyness Shakespeare set in them. But overall it’s a haunting film, mostly devoid of the annoying affectations filmmakers tend to fall into when doing Shakespeare — the actors fulfill their first duty by making us believe that this language is their normal mode of expression; they don’t sing-song their way through it or over-compensate the other way by deliberately breaking Shakespeare’s carefully worked out rhythms — and the multiple levels of reality do bring the story into focus for us and our time far better than a flat-out modern-dress production would have.
Henry V is an acknowledged landmark in the filming of Shakespeare and in Olivier’s career (it’s indicative of his skill as an actor and his glamour as a personality that he’s able to get away with playing Henry at 37, eight years older than the real Henry was at Agincourt and two years older than Henry was when he died), and a vivid theatrical and dramatic experience even though it by no means exhausts the possibilities of Shakespeare on film. — 10/20/09
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The film I picked was the third disc in An Age of Kings, the cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays produced by the BBC in 1960 with a cast of those wonderful British actors that seem to recur in each generation. This contained two episodes dealing with the play Henry V, “Signs of War” and “The Band of Brothers,” and the single episode editor Eric Crozier got out of the play Henry VI, Part 1, “The Red Rose and the White.” One problem with presenting the Shakespeare history plays as a cycle is that Shakespeare wrote the second set of four — the three Henry VI plays and Richard III — before he wrote the first set, and scholars still disagree about how much of the Henry VI plays are Shakespeare’s work.
Henry V was Shakespeare’s last history play (aside from Henry VIII, one of his last works and not part of the cycle depicted in An Age of Kings), written in 1599 and apparently at least in part a celebration of the Earl of Essex, who was about to launch a war to subdue Ireland that Queen Elizabeth saw as an analogue to Henry V’s war for France — though as things turned out Essex, unlike Henry V, got his ass kicked by an Irish army led by the Earl of Tyrone, and the defeat cost him Elizabeth’s favor and ultimately led to the plot that finally got him arrested for treason.
On the surface, it’s a glorification of war and imperialism — but that’s only on the surface; as strong and decisive as Henry V appears, the play also contains a lot of dialogue questioning not only some of the actions but the justice and righteousness of his cause itself. Though this scene was deleted from An Age of Kings, the play begins with a nervous debate between two high church officials worried that the new king is going to seize the church’s assets, and accordingly when a cleric is asked for his opinion about the justice of Henry V’s claim to the French throne (in the scene that opens this presentation of the play) naturally he knows he has to give the “right” answer.
Watching An Age of Kings in this go-round I’ve been struck by the parallel between Henry V and George W. Bush — indicative that the source of Shakespeare’s endurance has been the fact that not only did he capture human nature and depict both political and personal issues with an insight rare for the time, but that human nature has changed so little that our species continues to generate situations similar to those Shakespeare wrote about. Both Henry V and George W. Bush were the sons of hereditary rulers, both had youthful periods of licentiousness and wastrel behavior that disappointed their fathers (indeed, both had more strait-laced brothers who had much more of their dad’s favor), and both ultimately rose out of their drinking and carousing to seize the responsibilities of power. The parallel isn’t entirely exact — Henry V instructs his occupying army to treat the French gently, take no French food or other goods without paying for it, and (at least until the scene in the aftermath of Agincourt in which he ordered his army to massacre the French prisoners — a major war crime we’re really not prepared for by the way Shakespeare has drawn Henry V up to that point) to take good care of their prisoners — but the arrogance of the war council with which the play opens and the sheer outrageousness of the idea that, armed with a flimsy claim to the throne of France, Henry V can install himself as king of both countries by sheer will and force of arms ring all too closely parallel to more recent bits of history.
Producer Peter Dews and director Michael Hayes had more competition on Henry V than on most of the plays in the series — in 1944 Laurence Olivier had done a big-screen feature film (shooting the battle scenes in Ireland, where there was enough unspoiled countryside to stage a medieval battle without any modern anachronisms creeping in), and in 1989 Kenneth Branagh (both starring and directing, as Olivier had) did a remake — and their version suffers in the depiction of the actual battle of Agincourt (which is basically a handful of people hacking away at each other with swords — on a 1960 BBC-TV budget they couldn’t possibly duplicate the massed longbow attacks that actually won the battle for the British), but is certainly competitive with the casting.
I haven’t seen either the Olivier or Branagh films in years, but Robert Hardy is as good a Henry V as I remember his formidable feature-film competitors as being, capturing the character’s sense of justice and morals as well as his arrogance and self-righteousness, his understanding of the common people from having hung out with them before he became king (yet another strong difference between him and George W. Bush), his ability to make quick decisions even if (like the massacre of the French prisoners) they’re not necessarily the best decisions he could have made, and above all his ability to rally a significantly outnumbered army to victory. (In the 1920’s and 1930’s football coaches studied Henry’s St. Crispian’s Day address to figure out how to do pep talks to their teams.) He’s matched by a formidable cast of supporting actors — what’s most amazing about the acting in An Age of Kings is how well the cast members mesh and how they manage to inhabit characters speaking in an unfamiliar sort of English and actually convince us they’re people living 450 years earlier — including the young (but instantly recognizable) Judi Dench as Princess Catherine of France, whom Henry marries to solidify his claim to the French throne but whom he also wants genuinely to love and be loved by.
One of the most interesting aspects of Henry V is the extent to which religion — only peripherally mentioned in the earlier plays, and then usually in a context of frustration (Richard II aghast that God, who supposedly installed him as king, is allowing him to be deposed by a mere mortal; Henry IV’s intention to atone for his sin in deposing Richard by mounting a Crusade, systematically frustrated by the unrest at home and the attempts to organize a revolution against him, one of which — at the start of Henry IV, Part 2 — is led by a clergyman) — takes center stage; with the church already having been suborned, blackmailed or whatever into giving divine blessing to Henry’s actions, the characters cross themselves incessantly and are constantly appealing to God’s favor on their enterprise. (Henry’s eve-of-battle pep talk even keys on the saint whose name-day is the day the battle is taking place.)
Another interesting parallel that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t watching the plays in sequence, in a context like this in which they’re being presented as a single story instead of separate works, is the similarity between Hotspur’s eve-of-battle attitude in Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry’s attitude here — particularly when both rally the troops by saying that, contrary to showing fear at the way they’re outnumbered, they should glory in being outnumbered because then the victory will be all the sweeter. Though this really doesn’t come through in Shakespeare, other tellings of the story — like A. M. Maughan’s novel Harry of Monmouth — stress that Henry and Hotspur were boyhood friends (their fathers, after all, were friends and allies until they broke spectacularly right after Richard II’s fall), grew up together and were similar in a lot of ways, and in Henry IV, Part 1 Henry IV audibly wishes Hotspur were his son (just as in Henry IV, Part 2 he wishes his younger son, John of Lancaster, were the heir to his throne — as I noted above, yet another parallel to George H. W. Bush and his relative estimation of his children’s fitness to rule; it’s well known that Daddy Bush thought it would be Jeb, not W., who’d be the second President Bush). — 10/17/09
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About the Kenneth Branagh Henry V several things are important to say. First of all, did Alistair Cooke really believe it when he said Branagh had no idea, when he was making this film, that he’d be compared to Laurence Olivier — and not just compared, but have a lot of questions asked about him in the who-does-this-guy-think-he-is vein? It’s as if a modern singer were to release an album containing all the songs in Sgt. Pepper, in exactly the same order as on the Beatles’ album, and not expect the inevitable comparisons to be made. What’s more, Branagh’s Henry V seems to have been planned and executed almost deliberately as a modern-day answer to Olivier’s, from 45 years later when audiences are a lot more cynical than they were in Olivier’s day and would be intolerant of a production that used the play as a wartime morale-booster the way Sir Larry did in his film. The differences are summed up in the opening sequences; both Olivier and Branagh retain the Chorus character, but Olivier’s Chorus introduced the story from a replica of the Globe Theatre while Branagh’s does so from a film studio, complete with medieval props and miniature buildings as well as cameras and lights.
Basically, Branagh’s Henry V is the most noir Shakespeare movie I’ve seen since Orson Welles’ Macbeth, to which it bears a lot more resemblance than it does to any production Olivier ever went near. Much of it is in contemporary color noir style — all dank browns and greens, especially in the scenes involving Falstaff (whom Shakespeare removed from Henry V, but both Olivier and Branagh re-introduced, Olivier by a dramatization of the narrated death scene and Branagh through flashbacks drawing on the Henry IV plays for material) — and, predictably, the usually cut opening scene (in which two Catholic priests debate how to keep Henry V from confiscating the Church’s lands, and finally decide to tell him his planned war against France has divine sanction) is retained, which sets up from the beginning what Branagh’s “take” on the story is going to be. It’s a measure of Shakespeare’s richness as an artist that everything Branagh wants to put in the play — the cynicism towards war as an instrument of national policy, the tacit pacifism of reminding people that the essence of war is killing and the deflating of a highly pretentious king and his macho fantasies of himself — is already there, ready to be brought to the forefront by a revisionist director like Branagh instead of glided over or skipped as a mainstreamer would do. On my usual test for a revisionist production — does it shed new light on the original work, and do the deviations from tradition have a serious, readily discernible artistic point? — Branagh’s Henry V passes with flying colors.
Branagh’s Henry V also might be described as the first rock ‘n’ roll Shakespeare movie. His own playing of the title role, more than anything else, gives it that flavor; he comes off as a refugee from a punk-rock band (which, in a sense, Henry was — or at least the medieval equivalent thereof), bursting with barely containable energy. The siege of Harfleur is, visually, the best thing in the movie, even though it takes place at night and is filled with the sound of explosions (hardly something you’d expect to hear in a reproduction of medieval war, however de rigueur they would be in any screen battle taking place after the invention of gunpowder — though the armies of Henry V's time did have artillery, but not hand-held guns). The sequence looks like a heavy-metal MTV video, with Henry riding a horse across a battlefield and sheets of flame coming from the city’s gates. Also awesome is the battle of Agincourt, which could have been staged better but has some incredible shots of the arrows from the English longbows literally raining down on the hapless French troops. Branagh is also to be commended for not having the French all come off like screaming queens (a real temptation, given the deliberately campy lines Shakespeare wrote for them!), though he edged dangerously close to Derek Jarman territory when he had Henry V hug and even kiss a young nobleman who’d been a close friend until he turned traitor, just prior to executing him.
There are some moments of Henry V that simply don’t work. Having the Chorus come on, in the middle of a medieval scene, dressed in a modern greatcoat is jarring. The big “production number” at the end of the battle of Agincourt, in which the troops start singing “Dona nobis pacem” and the music swells to a great climax on the soundtrack, is just Thirties-Hollywood silly (though Shakespeare did call for singing here and both Olivier’s film and An Age of Kings include it). On the whole, however, this is a truly remarkable movie, every bit as legitimate an interpretation of Shakespeare as Olivier’s version, and able to withstand the inevitable comparisons everybody but Branagh himself was ready for from the moment it was released. — 3/8/03
Last night Charles and I watched a great movie, one that tied in with the trip we’re currently taking through the BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings that adapted eight of Shakespeare’s history plays into a continuous cycle from the deposing of Richard II in 1399 to the Battle of Bosworth Field and the accession of the Tudors in 1485. Having recently seen the two Age of Kings episodes dealing with Henry V (his reign and Shakespeare’s play about him), I was curious as a point of comparison to run Laurence Olivier’s masterly film of the same play from 1944. The film is actually called The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France — a title, including the variant spellings (it wouldn’t be until Samuel Johnson wrote his famous English-language dictionary that the spellings of English words would be regularized and systematized), that might well have adorned one of the original printed editions of the play or been posted on a playbill of the time — not that a playbill would have done much good since most of the people in Shakespeare’s audiences couldn’t read. (It’s generally assumed that Shakespeare and his rival theatre company managers sent out barkers with bells to herald that a performance of such-and-such a play was about to occur and how much it would cost to get in.)
Olivier’s three Shakespeare films as actor-director — Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III (he actually appeared in films of two other Shakespeare plays, As You Like It and Othello, but did not direct those) — have often been regarded as the last word on how to bring the Bard to the screen, and while there are other approaches that work (I’ve always been quite partial to the Orson Welles Macbeth — at least once I had a chance to see the restored 107-minute version of the film — with its Caligari-esque stylizations mirroring Macbeth’s diseased mind), Olivier’s Shakespeare films are clearly the work of a man who loved the author and the theatrical tradition from which he sprang.
In fact, Henry V works on various levels of artifice — the film actually begins in May 1600, starting with a flag fluttering in the air and opening up to reveal the main title credit, then a pan shot over the London of the time (a marvelously convincing model by special-effects genius W. Percy Day, who would later work his magic with Michael Powell on A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes) that comes to rest inside the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s company is about to put on a performance of the play. For the first 37 minutes of the movie we remain pretty much inside the Globe — sometimes going backstage and watching the characters hurriedly putting on their costumes and wigs before going on, mostly witnessing the play as spectators in Shakespeare’s time would (presumably) have seen it (though there’s an anachronism in Olivier’s use of signboards to tell the audience when the scene changes — as noted above, very few people in Shakespeare’s London could actually read) — and it’s only about one-quarter of the way through the movie, when Henry V’s expeditionary force finally sails to France, that the film opens up and uses the full resources of cinema to tell its story.
Henry V overall is a marvelous movie, thanks largely to Olivier’s skill and sensitivity as a director and a text editor (he co-wrote the script with Alan Dent and an uncredited Dallas Bower, using Shakespeare’s dialogue almost exclusively — except for the end of the Boar’s Head scene, when Pistol quotes a few lines from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great — but cut extensively, sometimes moved lines from one character to another, and incorporated Henry V’s famous kiss-off of Falstaff — “I know thee not, old man/Fall to thy prayers” — from the end of Henry IV, Part 2) and his ability to recruit competent (more than that!) help, not only an amazing cast (Leslie Banks — otherwise best known as the villain in The Most Dangerous Game and the hero in the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much — as the Chorus, Robert Newton as Pistol, Felix Aylmer as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ernest Thesiger as the French ambassador, Leo Genn as the Constable of France, and quite a few less famous but equally gifted players in the supporting cast, including Harcourt Williams as a decrepit, out-of-it French king and Max Adrian as his son and heir, the Dauphin) but also the brilliant cinematographer Robert Krasker (shooting color for the first time in his life), the great designers Robert and Margaret Furse (who intensively studied paintings of Henry V’s time to determine what the sets should look like, and came up with an appealing mixture of realistic and non-realistic designs that shouldn’t have worked, but did) and, above all, composer William Walton.
With the possible exception of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (whose first film assignment was to adapt Mendelssohn’s music for Warners’ 1935 production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), it’s hard to imagine any experienced film composer in 1944 who would have given this score the consistent imagination Walton does; though he falls a bit flat on the Battle of Agincourt (the cues here are pretty much standard back-and-forth “battle music” without the awesome power of Prokofieff’s score for the battle on the ice in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky), throughout the movie Walton’s music does what a film score should do: it amplifies the emotions of the situations without getting in the way of the great dialogue. Interestingly, Walton did not allow the music to be performed independently of the words; when Walton adapted this and his scores for Olivier’s other Shakespeare films for concert performance, he included a part for a narrator reading Shakespeare’s lines.
Much of the interest of Olivier’s Henry V lies in its fascinating balance between three views of the story: Henry V’s French campaign and the Battle of Agincourt as it would have appeared then; the story as it played in Shakespeare’s time; and how it would be seen by a British public in a middle of a war for the country’s very existence. It’s well known that Winston Churchill, who had virtually shut down the British film industry for most of the war (he was concerned about it using men, money and strategic materials needed for the war effort), gave Olivier special dispensation to make this movie, including letting him out of his own enlistment and authorizing producer Filippo del Giudice to spend the money on lavish sets and costumes, and also Technicolor (the first time Shakespeare was ever filmed in color). Olivier was also allowed to film the battle scenes in Ireland (a neutral country in World War II) and to use on-leave servicemembers as his battle extras.
Perhaps as part of his deal to make the film and perhaps also from his own sensitivity to its appeal as a morale-booster, Olivier somewhat sanitized Henry’s character; he deleted Henry’s quick execution of the Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Grey for having plotted his assassination (though he kept in the scene in which Henry pardons another person for speaking out against the King) and he also deleted the scene in which Henry orders his soldiers to kill all the French prisoners they’d taken at Agincourt. (Oddly, Olivier and Dent left in the cue line for this — “I was not angry since I came to France/Until this instant” — but cut the actual order and its execution, leaving the line somewhat hanging in mid-air.) On the plus side, Olivier and Dent did leave in the opening scene — after the Chorus’s prologue but before the King’s council — in which the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely anxiously debate Henry V’s threatened revival of a law the House of Commons had considered under Henry IV to seize for the state all estates willed to the Church, and the two reach a consensus that in order to forestall that confiscation they’d better give Henry the answer he wants about the validity of his claim to the throne of France. (Eric Crozier, editing the play for An Age of Kings, left this out and went straight from the prologue to the council scene.)
It should be noted that Shakespeare wrote Henry V at least in part as a morale-booster; the Earl of Essex was about to take a British army to subdue and occupy Ireland, and Shakespeare in 1599 was dredging up this slice of British history from 1415 to inspire the British public to support the war — just as Olivier dredged up Shakespeare’s play in 1944 at least in part to bolster support for Britain’s effort in World War II. So there are essentially three separate views of the events of Agincourt embodied in Olivier’s film, and time has added a fourth; when we see the film today, we can’t help but be affected by the changes in how we view war and both individual and national honor between 1944 and 2009, and in particular how the ghastly slaughters of both 20th century world wars and the bland acceptance that civilians are fair game has changed the morality of war and challenged the whole concept of combat as a test of individual merit and courage.
Having just watched the Age of Kings version of this story, Charles and I couldn’t help but compare the two, not only in the different ways they edited Shakespeare’s text but how differently Olivier as both star and director handled much of it from the way Robert Hardy (who had the advantage of playing Henry V as part of a complete cycle and therefore being able to give us the entire character arc) played it under Michael Hayes’ direction. Oddly, it’s Hardy who’s the more straightforward hero; Olivier’s performance as Henry V is surprisingly edgy, reminding us that in his nation’s existential crisis there were two major leaders who were especially known for their eloquence and ability to move people as public speakers. One was his country’s leader, Churchill; the other was his enemy’s leader, Hitler — and Olivier sometimes seems to be pitching his Henry V midway between Churchill and Hitler (and evoking the ways Churchill consciously used quasi-Shakespearean rhetoric to rally his country).
At times Olivier seems to be mocking Henry’s pretensions to a surprising degree for a movie that started out as a rah-rah piece to boost Allied morale — the opening council scene, played straight in An Age of Kings, becomes low comedy here, as the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Ely fumble their way through the elaborate stack of papers purporting to establish the right and justice of Henry’s claim to France. Henry’s big pep talks to his soldiers — the “For Harry, England and St. George” speech outside the walls of Harfleur and the St. Crispian’s Day speech on the morning of Agincourt — really do seem, in Olivier’s readings, like he’s making them up as he goes along, figuring out just what he has to say to these men to get them to go to battle against a force that vastly outnumbers them.
On the other hand, the scenes in the French camp — which Michael Hayes in An Age of Kings plays as high camp — are far more seriously staged here. As James Agee noted in his Time magazine feature on the film, “Olivier transforms the French into sleepy, overconfident, highly intelligent, highly sophisticated noblemen, subtly disunified, casually contemptuous of their Dauphin — an all but definitive embodiment of a civilization a little too ripe to survive.” It’s odd that, in a film so dependent for its appeal on the power of its language — for it was the enduring appeal of Shakespeare’s eloquent speech that led a filmmaker to bother with this play 245 years after its premiere — the scene that most sums up the atavistic nature of the French and their culture of chivalry is non-verbal: a grimly amusing shot of a French knight so weighted down by his armor that his assistants have to use a pulley to raise him into the air and then set him down again atop his horse.
Also, for all the edginess of Olivier’s playing in Henry’s big public moments, his performance is strongest when it is quietest — especially in the long sequence just before Agincourt in which Henry disguises himself and walks around the English camp, talking to his countrymen and showing off the love and understanding of the common people Henry got from all those afternoons carousing at the Boar’s Head in the two previous plays in the cycle before he became king. To quote Agee again, “Shakespeare gave to a cynical old soldier the great speech, ‘But if the cause be not good … ’. Olivier puts it in the mouth of a slow-minded country boy (Brian Nissen). The boy’s complete lack of cynicism, his youth, his eyes bright with sleepless danger, the pleasant patience of his delivery, and his Devon repetition of the tolled word ‘die’ as ‘doy,’ lift this wonderful expression of common humanity caught in human war level with the greatness of the king.” (And later in the movie it seemed to me that it was the sight of Nissen’s corpse, one of the mere 29 British soldiers killed in the battle, that provoked Henry’s outburst, “I was not angry since I came to France/Until this instant,” as if the anguish of seeing someone he had befriended — albeit briefly and casually — killed had provoked Henry’s anger against his enemies.)
Henry V is a movie that’s been a bit overrated — Peter Hall called Olivier’s direction of Henry V as his first film “comparable with Orson Welles’ achievement in directing Citizen Kane,” with which I would disagree (Welles and his writer, Herman Mankiewicz, were working directly from life, not adapting a dramatic poem by a genius author who had already done much of the work), though ironically in the marvelous scene showing the death of Sir John Falstaff (only referred to in Shakespeare’s play) Olivier indulges in two visual quotes from Kane: the long tracking shot through the window of the Boar’s Head into the room in which Falstaff lays dying, and the straight-line horizontal shot of his deathbed instead of the usual three-quarter view from above. That’s not the only visual quote in this movie; the scene in which the British soldiers leap from the trees to ambush the French riding below is straight from The Adventures of Robin Hood (the 1938 version with Errol Flynn).
For me, the attempts to mesh various levels of realism — the reproduction of what Shakespeare’s audiences presumably saw when the play was first produced, the stylized backdrops (in forced perspective) of many of the French “exteriors,” and the naturalism of the battle itself — don’t always work, and the two scenes with Princess Katherine of France (played by Renée Asherson after Olivier’s then-wife, Vivien Leigh, was denied permission to do the role by David O. Selznick, who held her movie contract — Asherson later admitted she only got the role because she was the same size as Leigh and therefore could wear the same costumes without alterations) aren’t totally free from the trap of coyness Shakespeare set in them. But overall it’s a haunting film, mostly devoid of the annoying affectations filmmakers tend to fall into when doing Shakespeare — the actors fulfill their first duty by making us believe that this language is their normal mode of expression; they don’t sing-song their way through it or over-compensate the other way by deliberately breaking Shakespeare’s carefully worked out rhythms — and the multiple levels of reality do bring the story into focus for us and our time far better than a flat-out modern-dress production would have.
Henry V is an acknowledged landmark in the filming of Shakespeare and in Olivier’s career (it’s indicative of his skill as an actor and his glamour as a personality that he’s able to get away with playing Henry at 37, eight years older than the real Henry was at Agincourt and two years older than Henry was when he died), and a vivid theatrical and dramatic experience even though it by no means exhausts the possibilities of Shakespeare on film. — 10/20/09
••••••••••
The film I picked was the third disc in An Age of Kings, the cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays produced by the BBC in 1960 with a cast of those wonderful British actors that seem to recur in each generation. This contained two episodes dealing with the play Henry V, “Signs of War” and “The Band of Brothers,” and the single episode editor Eric Crozier got out of the play Henry VI, Part 1, “The Red Rose and the White.” One problem with presenting the Shakespeare history plays as a cycle is that Shakespeare wrote the second set of four — the three Henry VI plays and Richard III — before he wrote the first set, and scholars still disagree about how much of the Henry VI plays are Shakespeare’s work.
Henry V was Shakespeare’s last history play (aside from Henry VIII, one of his last works and not part of the cycle depicted in An Age of Kings), written in 1599 and apparently at least in part a celebration of the Earl of Essex, who was about to launch a war to subdue Ireland that Queen Elizabeth saw as an analogue to Henry V’s war for France — though as things turned out Essex, unlike Henry V, got his ass kicked by an Irish army led by the Earl of Tyrone, and the defeat cost him Elizabeth’s favor and ultimately led to the plot that finally got him arrested for treason.
On the surface, it’s a glorification of war and imperialism — but that’s only on the surface; as strong and decisive as Henry V appears, the play also contains a lot of dialogue questioning not only some of the actions but the justice and righteousness of his cause itself. Though this scene was deleted from An Age of Kings, the play begins with a nervous debate between two high church officials worried that the new king is going to seize the church’s assets, and accordingly when a cleric is asked for his opinion about the justice of Henry V’s claim to the French throne (in the scene that opens this presentation of the play) naturally he knows he has to give the “right” answer.
Watching An Age of Kings in this go-round I’ve been struck by the parallel between Henry V and George W. Bush — indicative that the source of Shakespeare’s endurance has been the fact that not only did he capture human nature and depict both political and personal issues with an insight rare for the time, but that human nature has changed so little that our species continues to generate situations similar to those Shakespeare wrote about. Both Henry V and George W. Bush were the sons of hereditary rulers, both had youthful periods of licentiousness and wastrel behavior that disappointed their fathers (indeed, both had more strait-laced brothers who had much more of their dad’s favor), and both ultimately rose out of their drinking and carousing to seize the responsibilities of power. The parallel isn’t entirely exact — Henry V instructs his occupying army to treat the French gently, take no French food or other goods without paying for it, and (at least until the scene in the aftermath of Agincourt in which he ordered his army to massacre the French prisoners — a major war crime we’re really not prepared for by the way Shakespeare has drawn Henry V up to that point) to take good care of their prisoners — but the arrogance of the war council with which the play opens and the sheer outrageousness of the idea that, armed with a flimsy claim to the throne of France, Henry V can install himself as king of both countries by sheer will and force of arms ring all too closely parallel to more recent bits of history.
Producer Peter Dews and director Michael Hayes had more competition on Henry V than on most of the plays in the series — in 1944 Laurence Olivier had done a big-screen feature film (shooting the battle scenes in Ireland, where there was enough unspoiled countryside to stage a medieval battle without any modern anachronisms creeping in), and in 1989 Kenneth Branagh (both starring and directing, as Olivier had) did a remake — and their version suffers in the depiction of the actual battle of Agincourt (which is basically a handful of people hacking away at each other with swords — on a 1960 BBC-TV budget they couldn’t possibly duplicate the massed longbow attacks that actually won the battle for the British), but is certainly competitive with the casting.
I haven’t seen either the Olivier or Branagh films in years, but Robert Hardy is as good a Henry V as I remember his formidable feature-film competitors as being, capturing the character’s sense of justice and morals as well as his arrogance and self-righteousness, his understanding of the common people from having hung out with them before he became king (yet another strong difference between him and George W. Bush), his ability to make quick decisions even if (like the massacre of the French prisoners) they’re not necessarily the best decisions he could have made, and above all his ability to rally a significantly outnumbered army to victory. (In the 1920’s and 1930’s football coaches studied Henry’s St. Crispian’s Day address to figure out how to do pep talks to their teams.) He’s matched by a formidable cast of supporting actors — what’s most amazing about the acting in An Age of Kings is how well the cast members mesh and how they manage to inhabit characters speaking in an unfamiliar sort of English and actually convince us they’re people living 450 years earlier — including the young (but instantly recognizable) Judi Dench as Princess Catherine of France, whom Henry marries to solidify his claim to the French throne but whom he also wants genuinely to love and be loved by.
One of the most interesting aspects of Henry V is the extent to which religion — only peripherally mentioned in the earlier plays, and then usually in a context of frustration (Richard II aghast that God, who supposedly installed him as king, is allowing him to be deposed by a mere mortal; Henry IV’s intention to atone for his sin in deposing Richard by mounting a Crusade, systematically frustrated by the unrest at home and the attempts to organize a revolution against him, one of which — at the start of Henry IV, Part 2 — is led by a clergyman) — takes center stage; with the church already having been suborned, blackmailed or whatever into giving divine blessing to Henry’s actions, the characters cross themselves incessantly and are constantly appealing to God’s favor on their enterprise. (Henry’s eve-of-battle pep talk even keys on the saint whose name-day is the day the battle is taking place.)
Another interesting parallel that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t watching the plays in sequence, in a context like this in which they’re being presented as a single story instead of separate works, is the similarity between Hotspur’s eve-of-battle attitude in Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry’s attitude here — particularly when both rally the troops by saying that, contrary to showing fear at the way they’re outnumbered, they should glory in being outnumbered because then the victory will be all the sweeter. Though this really doesn’t come through in Shakespeare, other tellings of the story — like A. M. Maughan’s novel Harry of Monmouth — stress that Henry and Hotspur were boyhood friends (their fathers, after all, were friends and allies until they broke spectacularly right after Richard II’s fall), grew up together and were similar in a lot of ways, and in Henry IV, Part 1 Henry IV audibly wishes Hotspur were his son (just as in Henry IV, Part 2 he wishes his younger son, John of Lancaster, were the heir to his throne — as I noted above, yet another parallel to George H. W. Bush and his relative estimation of his children’s fitness to rule; it’s well known that Daddy Bush thought it would be Jeb, not W., who’d be the second President Bush). — 10/17/09
••••••••••
About the Kenneth Branagh Henry V several things are important to say. First of all, did Alistair Cooke really believe it when he said Branagh had no idea, when he was making this film, that he’d be compared to Laurence Olivier — and not just compared, but have a lot of questions asked about him in the who-does-this-guy-think-he-is vein? It’s as if a modern singer were to release an album containing all the songs in Sgt. Pepper, in exactly the same order as on the Beatles’ album, and not expect the inevitable comparisons to be made. What’s more, Branagh’s Henry V seems to have been planned and executed almost deliberately as a modern-day answer to Olivier’s, from 45 years later when audiences are a lot more cynical than they were in Olivier’s day and would be intolerant of a production that used the play as a wartime morale-booster the way Sir Larry did in his film. The differences are summed up in the opening sequences; both Olivier and Branagh retain the Chorus character, but Olivier’s Chorus introduced the story from a replica of the Globe Theatre while Branagh’s does so from a film studio, complete with medieval props and miniature buildings as well as cameras and lights.
Basically, Branagh’s Henry V is the most noir Shakespeare movie I’ve seen since Orson Welles’ Macbeth, to which it bears a lot more resemblance than it does to any production Olivier ever went near. Much of it is in contemporary color noir style — all dank browns and greens, especially in the scenes involving Falstaff (whom Shakespeare removed from Henry V, but both Olivier and Branagh re-introduced, Olivier by a dramatization of the narrated death scene and Branagh through flashbacks drawing on the Henry IV plays for material) — and, predictably, the usually cut opening scene (in which two Catholic priests debate how to keep Henry V from confiscating the Church’s lands, and finally decide to tell him his planned war against France has divine sanction) is retained, which sets up from the beginning what Branagh’s “take” on the story is going to be. It’s a measure of Shakespeare’s richness as an artist that everything Branagh wants to put in the play — the cynicism towards war as an instrument of national policy, the tacit pacifism of reminding people that the essence of war is killing and the deflating of a highly pretentious king and his macho fantasies of himself — is already there, ready to be brought to the forefront by a revisionist director like Branagh instead of glided over or skipped as a mainstreamer would do. On my usual test for a revisionist production — does it shed new light on the original work, and do the deviations from tradition have a serious, readily discernible artistic point? — Branagh’s Henry V passes with flying colors.
Branagh’s Henry V also might be described as the first rock ‘n’ roll Shakespeare movie. His own playing of the title role, more than anything else, gives it that flavor; he comes off as a refugee from a punk-rock band (which, in a sense, Henry was — or at least the medieval equivalent thereof), bursting with barely containable energy. The siege of Harfleur is, visually, the best thing in the movie, even though it takes place at night and is filled with the sound of explosions (hardly something you’d expect to hear in a reproduction of medieval war, however de rigueur they would be in any screen battle taking place after the invention of gunpowder — though the armies of Henry V's time did have artillery, but not hand-held guns). The sequence looks like a heavy-metal MTV video, with Henry riding a horse across a battlefield and sheets of flame coming from the city’s gates. Also awesome is the battle of Agincourt, which could have been staged better but has some incredible shots of the arrows from the English longbows literally raining down on the hapless French troops. Branagh is also to be commended for not having the French all come off like screaming queens (a real temptation, given the deliberately campy lines Shakespeare wrote for them!), though he edged dangerously close to Derek Jarman territory when he had Henry V hug and even kiss a young nobleman who’d been a close friend until he turned traitor, just prior to executing him.
There are some moments of Henry V that simply don’t work. Having the Chorus come on, in the middle of a medieval scene, dressed in a modern greatcoat is jarring. The big “production number” at the end of the battle of Agincourt, in which the troops start singing “Dona nobis pacem” and the music swells to a great climax on the soundtrack, is just Thirties-Hollywood silly (though Shakespeare did call for singing here and both Olivier’s film and An Age of Kings include it). On the whole, however, this is a truly remarkable movie, every bit as legitimate an interpretation of Shakespeare as Olivier’s version, and able to withstand the inevitable comparisons everybody but Branagh himself was ready for from the moment it was released. — 3/8/03
The Hoodlum Saint (MGM, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Hoodlum Saint, a 1946 MGM vehicle for William Powell, which judging from its description in the TCM schedule (“After finding religion, a cynical newspaperman tries to help young hoods”) I thought would cast William Powell as a mentor to some Dead End-style young toughs on the New York streets: a Bowery Boys movie with an MGM budget and star. Instead it’s a considerably wilder tale than that; it begins in 1919, with Powell as Terry O’Neill, who’s just returned from serving in World War I and expects to be given back his old job as a reporter in Baltimore (a plot line of obvious topicality in 1946). Instead he’s told that in order to make room for him, his editor would have to fire someone else — and rather than let anyone else lose their job over him, Terry walks and is out of work, which means he can no longer give money to the comic gangsters who have been tapping him all along: Snarp (James Gleason), Fishface (“Rags” Ragland, in his last film before his sudden death on August 20, 1946, three days short of his 41st birthday), Three Finger (Frank McHugh) and Eel (Slim Summerville).
Terry manages to land another job by crashing a wedding reception and pretending to be the boyfriend of Kay Lorrison (Esther Williams in a non-swimming role, at which she’s capable if not especially impressive), then bluffing his way into a job on the newspaper owned by Lorrison’s father Joe (Charles Trowbridge). Lorrison père puts Terry on a series of investigative stories to expose the commodities company owned by Lewis J. Malbery (Henry O’Neill) — only Terry makes a deal with Malbery to quit the newspaper and spike the stories in exchange for a job doing P.R. for Malbery’s company in New York — where the comic gangsters also migrate so they’ll be within handout distance of Terry. Over the next decade Terry rises to vice-president of the company and makes $2 million on his stock options, while Snape opens a pool hall and runs a bookmaking operation out of its back room.
When he’s busted by two cops, Terry decides to bail him out but not let him know he had a hand in it — instead he concocts a story based on the Biblical character of Dismas, the so-called “good thief” who was one of the three on Golgotha with Jesus and who was not bailed out by the crowd but was crucified along with Christ. All Snape is supposed to know is that Dismas “miraculously” provided the money to bail him out, and as a result the gangsters get religion and start regularly attending the St. Dismas church pastured by Father Nolan (Lewis Stone, whose approach as a minister seems mainly to consist of giving individual congregants the kinds of “heart-to-heart talks” he used to inflict on Mickey Rooney in the Hardy Family movies). Meanwhile, singer Dusty Millard (Angela Lansbury — who, as in all her other MGM movies in which her character sang, got saddled with a voice double she neither wanted nor needed), the New York girlfriend Terry took up with after Kay Lorrison refused to join him and instead married someone else, works with the gangsters and sets up a charity to help the poor in the name of St. Dismas and eventually turns it into a racket, with the proprietors taking 95 percent off the top for “administration.”
Everybody gets their comeuppance thanks to the use by screenwriters James Hill and Frank “Spig” Wead (the Navy veteran whom John Wayne played in the John Ford-directed biopic The Wings of Eagles and who was better known for writing films about aviation) of the 1929 stock market crash as a deus ex machina. Just before the crash Terry tries to woo back the now-widowed Kay with his lavish apartment and $2 million bank balance — and, in a scene strongly reminiscent of the one in A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge’s girlfriend walks out on him for similar reasons, she virtuously turns him down — and when the market collapses and takes Terry’s paper fortune with it, he’s returned to where he should be, with another newspaper job and in the good graces of both his friends and the church, when Dusty (who goes from being a good sport to an avaricious gold-digger and back with no hint from the writers as to what changed her either way) contributes a bracelet Terry bought her in flush times to make up the shortfall between what the Dismas charity collected and its actual cash on hand, thereby saving it from closure by the Charities Board and its principals from prosecution — and Terry, who up until now has been cynical about religion in general and St. Dismas in particular, finds his faith for real (largely as the result of another “man-to-man talk” from Lewis Stone!) and also gets Kay to marry him at long last.
The Hoodlum Saint is a good movie but also a really quirky one — one of those films that changes tone so often one things the writers just gave up on the task of melding their various plot lines into a coherent script, and also annoying in that the Dismas angle, which gives the film its title, isn’t introduced until midway through. Still, it’s an appealing movie, with a lot of quality actors (especially Powell, Lansbury, Gleason and Ragland) doing their things and a certain charm. The director is Norman Taurog, who had a reputation for working with child actors that stemmed from his having helmed Jackie Cooper’s star-making vehicle, Skippy (1931); and while there aren’t any significant pre-pubescent characters in this one, he had a pretty rambunctious and oddly matched set of talents whom he managed to meld into a surprisingly credible ensemble cast.
Incidentally, The Hoodlum Saint is not to be confused with The Hoodlum Priest, a 1961 movie based on the real-life attempts of a priest actually named after Dismas — Father Charles Dismas Clark (Don Murray, who also co-wrote the script as “Don Dare”) — to rehabilitate some juvenile delinquents on those mean inner-city streets — and Charles informs me that the story of Dismas as told in The Hoodlum Saint is actually quite close to the historically and theologically accepted version, especially in his role as the saint for people who have fallen especially low into vice or crime.
The film was The Hoodlum Saint, a 1946 MGM vehicle for William Powell, which judging from its description in the TCM schedule (“After finding religion, a cynical newspaperman tries to help young hoods”) I thought would cast William Powell as a mentor to some Dead End-style young toughs on the New York streets: a Bowery Boys movie with an MGM budget and star. Instead it’s a considerably wilder tale than that; it begins in 1919, with Powell as Terry O’Neill, who’s just returned from serving in World War I and expects to be given back his old job as a reporter in Baltimore (a plot line of obvious topicality in 1946). Instead he’s told that in order to make room for him, his editor would have to fire someone else — and rather than let anyone else lose their job over him, Terry walks and is out of work, which means he can no longer give money to the comic gangsters who have been tapping him all along: Snarp (James Gleason), Fishface (“Rags” Ragland, in his last film before his sudden death on August 20, 1946, three days short of his 41st birthday), Three Finger (Frank McHugh) and Eel (Slim Summerville).
Terry manages to land another job by crashing a wedding reception and pretending to be the boyfriend of Kay Lorrison (Esther Williams in a non-swimming role, at which she’s capable if not especially impressive), then bluffing his way into a job on the newspaper owned by Lorrison’s father Joe (Charles Trowbridge). Lorrison père puts Terry on a series of investigative stories to expose the commodities company owned by Lewis J. Malbery (Henry O’Neill) — only Terry makes a deal with Malbery to quit the newspaper and spike the stories in exchange for a job doing P.R. for Malbery’s company in New York — where the comic gangsters also migrate so they’ll be within handout distance of Terry. Over the next decade Terry rises to vice-president of the company and makes $2 million on his stock options, while Snape opens a pool hall and runs a bookmaking operation out of its back room.
When he’s busted by two cops, Terry decides to bail him out but not let him know he had a hand in it — instead he concocts a story based on the Biblical character of Dismas, the so-called “good thief” who was one of the three on Golgotha with Jesus and who was not bailed out by the crowd but was crucified along with Christ. All Snape is supposed to know is that Dismas “miraculously” provided the money to bail him out, and as a result the gangsters get religion and start regularly attending the St. Dismas church pastured by Father Nolan (Lewis Stone, whose approach as a minister seems mainly to consist of giving individual congregants the kinds of “heart-to-heart talks” he used to inflict on Mickey Rooney in the Hardy Family movies). Meanwhile, singer Dusty Millard (Angela Lansbury — who, as in all her other MGM movies in which her character sang, got saddled with a voice double she neither wanted nor needed), the New York girlfriend Terry took up with after Kay Lorrison refused to join him and instead married someone else, works with the gangsters and sets up a charity to help the poor in the name of St. Dismas and eventually turns it into a racket, with the proprietors taking 95 percent off the top for “administration.”
Everybody gets their comeuppance thanks to the use by screenwriters James Hill and Frank “Spig” Wead (the Navy veteran whom John Wayne played in the John Ford-directed biopic The Wings of Eagles and who was better known for writing films about aviation) of the 1929 stock market crash as a deus ex machina. Just before the crash Terry tries to woo back the now-widowed Kay with his lavish apartment and $2 million bank balance — and, in a scene strongly reminiscent of the one in A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge’s girlfriend walks out on him for similar reasons, she virtuously turns him down — and when the market collapses and takes Terry’s paper fortune with it, he’s returned to where he should be, with another newspaper job and in the good graces of both his friends and the church, when Dusty (who goes from being a good sport to an avaricious gold-digger and back with no hint from the writers as to what changed her either way) contributes a bracelet Terry bought her in flush times to make up the shortfall between what the Dismas charity collected and its actual cash on hand, thereby saving it from closure by the Charities Board and its principals from prosecution — and Terry, who up until now has been cynical about religion in general and St. Dismas in particular, finds his faith for real (largely as the result of another “man-to-man talk” from Lewis Stone!) and also gets Kay to marry him at long last.
The Hoodlum Saint is a good movie but also a really quirky one — one of those films that changes tone so often one things the writers just gave up on the task of melding their various plot lines into a coherent script, and also annoying in that the Dismas angle, which gives the film its title, isn’t introduced until midway through. Still, it’s an appealing movie, with a lot of quality actors (especially Powell, Lansbury, Gleason and Ragland) doing their things and a certain charm. The director is Norman Taurog, who had a reputation for working with child actors that stemmed from his having helmed Jackie Cooper’s star-making vehicle, Skippy (1931); and while there aren’t any significant pre-pubescent characters in this one, he had a pretty rambunctious and oddly matched set of talents whom he managed to meld into a surprisingly credible ensemble cast.
Incidentally, The Hoodlum Saint is not to be confused with The Hoodlum Priest, a 1961 movie based on the real-life attempts of a priest actually named after Dismas — Father Charles Dismas Clark (Don Murray, who also co-wrote the script as “Don Dare”) — to rehabilitate some juvenile delinquents on those mean inner-city streets — and Charles informs me that the story of Dismas as told in The Hoodlum Saint is actually quite close to the historically and theologically accepted version, especially in his role as the saint for people who have fallen especially low into vice or crime.
Sirocco (Santana/Columbia, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Hoodlum Saint was considerably better than the movie Charles and I watched last night, Sirocco, a 1951 film produced by Humphrey Bogart’s Santana company in association with Columbia (the studio he went to in 1947 to make Dead Reckoning after he’d renegotiated his Warner Bros. contract to be non-exclusive) and released in June of that year, four months after his last film for Warners, The Enforcer. (Both The Enforcer and Sirocco feature the young Zero Mostel in key supporting roles.)
Santana made four films with Columbia as partner and distributor, two of which pushed the envelope — Knock on Any Door (in which Bogart is an attorney who tries — unsuccessfully — to redeem a young psychopath from his old neighborhood, played by John Derek in a film directed by Nicholas Ray — ironically, Derek’s character is closer to the protagonist of the book Rebel Without a Cause than any of the people in the film of that title, also directed by Ray!) and In a Lonely Place (also directed by Ray, and co-starring his then-wife Gloria Grahame, and a tough melodrama even though the script bowdlerized the source novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, in which the screenwriter Bogart played in the film was also a serial killer) — and two of which were just pretty standard Bogart vehicles, Tokyo Joe (1949) and this one.
After the fabulous success of Casablanca quite a few of Bogart’s subsequent films attempted to duplicate its appealing mix of international intrigue, cynicism vs. idealism conflict and romance — among them were Passage to Marseille (actually originally planned as a Casablanca sequel!), To Have and Have Not, Key Largo and Tokyo Joe — but this one was perhaps the most blatant imitation, and paradoxically the weakest. Not only does it, like Casablanca, take place in an Arab country (Syria) and feature a conflict between an occupying power (France, in 1925, under the League of Nations mandate) and an indigenous resistance, it features Bogart as an American expatriate forced to make a shady living (he’s running guns to the rebels while at the same time selling food at an inflated price to the French army) and even casts a Swedish actress, Märta Torén, as his girlfriend.
Oddly, the best scene in Sirocco is the opening, before either of the principals are introduced; the film quickly cuts from a scene of the rebel leader, Emir Hassan (Onslow Stevens), rallying his troops with the justice of their cause, to one of the French general in charge of the occupation, LaSalle (Everett Sloane), telling his second-in-command, Col. Feroud (Lee J. Cobb, looking quite out of place in a cast in which he’s the only Method actor), that diplomacy is useless and only a firm hand, including killing five Syrians for every Frenchman the resistance kills, will enable the success of the occupation. The parallel between the situation and later events — particularly the U.S.’s still-continuing misadventure in Iraq, where we went in under similarly spurious claims and won quick military victories but then couldn’t subdue a popular resistance — is so close one almost expects to see a cable news logo on the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and when Sirocco makes these political points it’s at its most powerful as a film.
Alas, those aspects don’t last long and for the rest of it it’s simply a bad Casablanca knock-off in which the elements that meshed so superbly in the earlier film — the politics, the intrigue, the romance — utterly refuse to gel. Despite good screenwriters (A. L. Bezzerides and Hans Jacoby, adapting a novel called Coup de Grace by Joseph Kessel) and a producer (Robert Lord) and director (Curtis Bernhardt) Bogart had previously worked with at Warners, Sirocco just creeps along so slowly it seems a lot longer than its 98-minute running time, and for a supposed thriller it parcels out its action scenes awfully parsimoniously — the film is nearly an hour old before anything exciting happens. It doesn’t help that Märta Torén, who got this role as part of Columbia’s attempt to ballyhoo her as “The New Ingrid Bergman,” is several orders of magnitude below the talent level of the real Bergman — or that the other guy she’s in love with is Col. Feroud, who just when we’ve got to like him for his advocacy of diplomacy in dealing with the Syrian resistance turns into an asshole by knocking Ms. Torén to the ground during an argument. (At least in Casablanca Bogart’s rival for the heroine’s affections was someone altogether sympathetic — as hard as it was to believe Paul Henried as an anti-Nazi action hero.)
The screenwriters even inserted some business about the passes that are supposed to get the Bogart and Torén characters out of the country — but their use as a plot device turns out to be more Tosca than Casablanca and the movie is even more disappointing in that neither Bogart nor any of the other actors get to play any big scenes of moral transformation. All the characters — the ones who survive, at any rate — end up pretty much the same as when they started, and though the writers deviated from the Casablanca template enough to have Bogart’s character die at the end, we really feel nothing because he hasn’t changed or grown from his experiences, so his death becomes a mere plot contrivance instead of a tragedy.
Sirocco has some nice noir-style compositions from director Bernhardt (who as a German director in the 1920’s had learned the noir look at its source) and cinematographer Burnett Guffey, artfully deploying a mad array of sets (Robert Peterson is the credited art director) that look like Columbia had built them all for “Arabian Nights” movies and assembled them into a surprisingly credible representation of 1925 Damascus. But the exquisite nature of the visuals can’t cover up the excruciating boredom of just about everything that’s going on in them.
The Hoodlum Saint was considerably better than the movie Charles and I watched last night, Sirocco, a 1951 film produced by Humphrey Bogart’s Santana company in association with Columbia (the studio he went to in 1947 to make Dead Reckoning after he’d renegotiated his Warner Bros. contract to be non-exclusive) and released in June of that year, four months after his last film for Warners, The Enforcer. (Both The Enforcer and Sirocco feature the young Zero Mostel in key supporting roles.)
Santana made four films with Columbia as partner and distributor, two of which pushed the envelope — Knock on Any Door (in which Bogart is an attorney who tries — unsuccessfully — to redeem a young psychopath from his old neighborhood, played by John Derek in a film directed by Nicholas Ray — ironically, Derek’s character is closer to the protagonist of the book Rebel Without a Cause than any of the people in the film of that title, also directed by Ray!) and In a Lonely Place (also directed by Ray, and co-starring his then-wife Gloria Grahame, and a tough melodrama even though the script bowdlerized the source novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, in which the screenwriter Bogart played in the film was also a serial killer) — and two of which were just pretty standard Bogart vehicles, Tokyo Joe (1949) and this one.
After the fabulous success of Casablanca quite a few of Bogart’s subsequent films attempted to duplicate its appealing mix of international intrigue, cynicism vs. idealism conflict and romance — among them were Passage to Marseille (actually originally planned as a Casablanca sequel!), To Have and Have Not, Key Largo and Tokyo Joe — but this one was perhaps the most blatant imitation, and paradoxically the weakest. Not only does it, like Casablanca, take place in an Arab country (Syria) and feature a conflict between an occupying power (France, in 1925, under the League of Nations mandate) and an indigenous resistance, it features Bogart as an American expatriate forced to make a shady living (he’s running guns to the rebels while at the same time selling food at an inflated price to the French army) and even casts a Swedish actress, Märta Torén, as his girlfriend.
Oddly, the best scene in Sirocco is the opening, before either of the principals are introduced; the film quickly cuts from a scene of the rebel leader, Emir Hassan (Onslow Stevens), rallying his troops with the justice of their cause, to one of the French general in charge of the occupation, LaSalle (Everett Sloane), telling his second-in-command, Col. Feroud (Lee J. Cobb, looking quite out of place in a cast in which he’s the only Method actor), that diplomacy is useless and only a firm hand, including killing five Syrians for every Frenchman the resistance kills, will enable the success of the occupation. The parallel between the situation and later events — particularly the U.S.’s still-continuing misadventure in Iraq, where we went in under similarly spurious claims and won quick military victories but then couldn’t subdue a popular resistance — is so close one almost expects to see a cable news logo on the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and when Sirocco makes these political points it’s at its most powerful as a film.
Alas, those aspects don’t last long and for the rest of it it’s simply a bad Casablanca knock-off in which the elements that meshed so superbly in the earlier film — the politics, the intrigue, the romance — utterly refuse to gel. Despite good screenwriters (A. L. Bezzerides and Hans Jacoby, adapting a novel called Coup de Grace by Joseph Kessel) and a producer (Robert Lord) and director (Curtis Bernhardt) Bogart had previously worked with at Warners, Sirocco just creeps along so slowly it seems a lot longer than its 98-minute running time, and for a supposed thriller it parcels out its action scenes awfully parsimoniously — the film is nearly an hour old before anything exciting happens. It doesn’t help that Märta Torén, who got this role as part of Columbia’s attempt to ballyhoo her as “The New Ingrid Bergman,” is several orders of magnitude below the talent level of the real Bergman — or that the other guy she’s in love with is Col. Feroud, who just when we’ve got to like him for his advocacy of diplomacy in dealing with the Syrian resistance turns into an asshole by knocking Ms. Torén to the ground during an argument. (At least in Casablanca Bogart’s rival for the heroine’s affections was someone altogether sympathetic — as hard as it was to believe Paul Henried as an anti-Nazi action hero.)
The screenwriters even inserted some business about the passes that are supposed to get the Bogart and Torén characters out of the country — but their use as a plot device turns out to be more Tosca than Casablanca and the movie is even more disappointing in that neither Bogart nor any of the other actors get to play any big scenes of moral transformation. All the characters — the ones who survive, at any rate — end up pretty much the same as when they started, and though the writers deviated from the Casablanca template enough to have Bogart’s character die at the end, we really feel nothing because he hasn’t changed or grown from his experiences, so his death becomes a mere plot contrivance instead of a tragedy.
Sirocco has some nice noir-style compositions from director Bernhardt (who as a German director in the 1920’s had learned the noir look at its source) and cinematographer Burnett Guffey, artfully deploying a mad array of sets (Robert Peterson is the credited art director) that look like Columbia had built them all for “Arabian Nights” movies and assembled them into a surprisingly credible representation of 1925 Damascus. But the exquisite nature of the visuals can’t cover up the excruciating boredom of just about everything that’s going on in them.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Pink Panther 2 (MGM/Columbia/Sony, DVD release by 20th Century-Fox, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Pink Panther 2 was the 2009 sequel to the 2006 Pink Panther (which actually had very little to do with the 1963 original other than both featured the hyperthyroid pink diamond of the title, and virtually all the human characters were either trying to steal the diamond or trying to stop others from doing so). Both starred Steve Martin as Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the French police — the role famously created by Peter Sellers in the 1963 Pink Panther and its immediate sequel, 1964’s A Shot in the Dark — and though most of the reviewers made the predictably invidious comparisons, frankly they were remembering the 1960’s films as far funnier than they seem to be now. Charles missed the running gags of the first Steve Martin Pink Panther — particularly the ones showing Clouseau’s unwitting vendetta against bicyclists; The Pink Panther 2 is more a series of comic set-pieces separated by some dull exposition scenes.
But that doesn’t matter (at least not to me!) because the set-pieces are so funny: a sequence in an Italian restaurant in which Clouseau and his date, Nicole (Emily Mortimer), frantically dash around the restaurant to catch the wine bottles from a nervously tilting rack before they break, save them all but then Clouseau inadvertently sets the restaurant on fire and burns it down (the fire gag is repeated at the end of the film — a bit oddly, because one would have thought that after going through the trouble and expense of rebuilding, the owners would have had the good sense to remove all flaming dishes from their menu); a marvelous scene in which Clouseau and one of his rivals on the international “dream team” (14 years after the O. J. Simpson trial the phrase seems rather anachronistic!) recruited to solve the current set of crimes, British detective Pepperidge (Alfred Molina — odd casting as an Englishman, but it works) engage in a series of competitive deductions similar to the ones Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft do at the beginning of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Greek Interpreter” (remember that Blake Edwards’ original conception of Clouseau’s character was that he was just clumsy, not stupid); the “Black Ninja” bodyguards that are trained to crash into the office of Clouseau’s superior, Dreyfus (John Cleese, replacing Kevin Kline) whenever one of his secret cameras or recorders is disabled, and who can only be stopped with the clue word embedded in a computer chip on Clouseau’s medal from the Legion of Honor (that one, too, is reprised at the end); and what’s easily the best scene in the film, in which Clouseau and the other “dream team” members visit the Pope (the plot, in case you cared, consists of a master thief called “The Tornado” who after a decade in retirement decided to resume his career in spectacular fashion by stealing important historical and religious relics: the original Magna Carta, the Shroud of Turin, the Japanese Imperial Sword, the Pink Panther — well, it had to come in somewhere — and the Pope’s ring, which “The Tornado” manages actually to slip off the Pope’s finger as he sleeps) and Clouseau, announcing he’s going to reconstruct the crime, dresses as the Pope, appears on the Pope’s balcony and of course is mistaken for the real one by the assembled masses below.
In fact Clouseau does that several times, and on the last go-round he takes a spectacular pratfall off the balcony and does a series of Keatonesque “trajectory” gags that get Clouseau “outed” as a Papal impostor and embarrassed worldwide in the media. (There are quite a few TV news reports in this movie — many of them done by Christiane Amanpour of CNN, playing herself and covering the incidents of the plot as she would do with real news.) The finale is a bit disappointing and makes almost no sense — the original “Tornado” is found dead, an apparent suicide, and the note says he destroyed the Pink Panther; later the gem is recovered but it shatters when a bullet hits it — something a real diamond wouldn’t do: obviously the gem is a fake, but it takes the characters several minutes to figure that out even though any reasonably savvy audience member knows it immediately. The new round of crimes turns out to be committed by a second “Tornado,” a woman, Sonia (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) — who’s also been cruising Clouseau throughout the movie whenever he’s been on the outs with Nicole — which in a way brings the Pink Panther series full circle because once again the writers are ripping off Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, a far better movie than any of the Panthers.
Still, thought it was a box-office disappointment (and the way things are going it and the recent Fame remake may be the last movies ever released under the MGM banner — the studio declared bankruptcy on September 25, thereby jeopardizing the production of The Hobbit and the next James Bond movie), The Pink Panther 2 is quite funny — and that despite the handicap (shared by the Absent-Minded Professor remake, Flubber) that the lead is being played by a middle-aged man who’s too old to do spectacular slapstick, with the result that he’s quite obviously doubled through most of the film’s big moments.
The Pink Panther 2 was the 2009 sequel to the 2006 Pink Panther (which actually had very little to do with the 1963 original other than both featured the hyperthyroid pink diamond of the title, and virtually all the human characters were either trying to steal the diamond or trying to stop others from doing so). Both starred Steve Martin as Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the French police — the role famously created by Peter Sellers in the 1963 Pink Panther and its immediate sequel, 1964’s A Shot in the Dark — and though most of the reviewers made the predictably invidious comparisons, frankly they were remembering the 1960’s films as far funnier than they seem to be now. Charles missed the running gags of the first Steve Martin Pink Panther — particularly the ones showing Clouseau’s unwitting vendetta against bicyclists; The Pink Panther 2 is more a series of comic set-pieces separated by some dull exposition scenes.
But that doesn’t matter (at least not to me!) because the set-pieces are so funny: a sequence in an Italian restaurant in which Clouseau and his date, Nicole (Emily Mortimer), frantically dash around the restaurant to catch the wine bottles from a nervously tilting rack before they break, save them all but then Clouseau inadvertently sets the restaurant on fire and burns it down (the fire gag is repeated at the end of the film — a bit oddly, because one would have thought that after going through the trouble and expense of rebuilding, the owners would have had the good sense to remove all flaming dishes from their menu); a marvelous scene in which Clouseau and one of his rivals on the international “dream team” (14 years after the O. J. Simpson trial the phrase seems rather anachronistic!) recruited to solve the current set of crimes, British detective Pepperidge (Alfred Molina — odd casting as an Englishman, but it works) engage in a series of competitive deductions similar to the ones Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft do at the beginning of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Greek Interpreter” (remember that Blake Edwards’ original conception of Clouseau’s character was that he was just clumsy, not stupid); the “Black Ninja” bodyguards that are trained to crash into the office of Clouseau’s superior, Dreyfus (John Cleese, replacing Kevin Kline) whenever one of his secret cameras or recorders is disabled, and who can only be stopped with the clue word embedded in a computer chip on Clouseau’s medal from the Legion of Honor (that one, too, is reprised at the end); and what’s easily the best scene in the film, in which Clouseau and the other “dream team” members visit the Pope (the plot, in case you cared, consists of a master thief called “The Tornado” who after a decade in retirement decided to resume his career in spectacular fashion by stealing important historical and religious relics: the original Magna Carta, the Shroud of Turin, the Japanese Imperial Sword, the Pink Panther — well, it had to come in somewhere — and the Pope’s ring, which “The Tornado” manages actually to slip off the Pope’s finger as he sleeps) and Clouseau, announcing he’s going to reconstruct the crime, dresses as the Pope, appears on the Pope’s balcony and of course is mistaken for the real one by the assembled masses below.
In fact Clouseau does that several times, and on the last go-round he takes a spectacular pratfall off the balcony and does a series of Keatonesque “trajectory” gags that get Clouseau “outed” as a Papal impostor and embarrassed worldwide in the media. (There are quite a few TV news reports in this movie — many of them done by Christiane Amanpour of CNN, playing herself and covering the incidents of the plot as she would do with real news.) The finale is a bit disappointing and makes almost no sense — the original “Tornado” is found dead, an apparent suicide, and the note says he destroyed the Pink Panther; later the gem is recovered but it shatters when a bullet hits it — something a real diamond wouldn’t do: obviously the gem is a fake, but it takes the characters several minutes to figure that out even though any reasonably savvy audience member knows it immediately. The new round of crimes turns out to be committed by a second “Tornado,” a woman, Sonia (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) — who’s also been cruising Clouseau throughout the movie whenever he’s been on the outs with Nicole — which in a way brings the Pink Panther series full circle because once again the writers are ripping off Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, a far better movie than any of the Panthers.
Still, thought it was a box-office disappointment (and the way things are going it and the recent Fame remake may be the last movies ever released under the MGM banner — the studio declared bankruptcy on September 25, thereby jeopardizing the production of The Hobbit and the next James Bond movie), The Pink Panther 2 is quite funny — and that despite the handicap (shared by the Absent-Minded Professor remake, Flubber) that the lead is being played by a middle-aged man who’s too old to do spectacular slapstick, with the result that he’s quite obviously doubled through most of the film’s big moments.
Lot in Sodom (Webber-Watson Productions, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lot in Sodom was a truly odd 1933 short (27 minutes) which Charles downloaded — though it’s available officially from Kino as filler on their reissue of the 1923 Nazimova Salomé — and though Charles was under the impression that it was a German movie (understandable given the highly stylized, Expressionistic visuals and the German-sounding names of some of the actors, notably Friedrich Haak as Lot and Dorothea Haus as his daughter), it turned out to be a U.S. independent production directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, who had previously made a 1928 14-minute silent version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. If you’ve seen that one (as we had) the visual style of Lot in Sodom — crude but effective sets, stylized acting and costumes, and a lot of double exposure — won’t be a surprise; as it is, they push the Expressionistic style so far in this one they might just as well have called it The Cabinet of Lot.
What’s most interesting — aside from the synchronized soundtrack, which is actually used quite effectively (there are even a few bits of dialogue — in Latin, of all languages) is the sheer intensity of the homoerotic imagery. While (like their version of Usher) this film would be totally incomprehensible if you don’t know the original story (and they borrowed bits from elsewhere in the Bible, notably the Song of Songs, for some of the titles), one thing Watson and Webber don’t do is pussy-foot around the usual explanation that homosexuality was at the root of the sins of Sodom. (If you want a treatment of the story that blames the fall of Sodom on “inhospitality” — which is what Jesus himself said in his sermon on the story — instead of homosexuality, look elsewhere.) On their much smaller scale, Watson and Webber were basically playing the same game Cecil B. DeMille played in his Biblical films: titillating the audience with images of forbidden sins by the simple expedient of offering them as examples of horrible ways to behave that God will inevitably punish.
The film is full of scantily clad young men dancing around each other, giving each other “cruising” eyes and, in the climactic scene, making clear the source of their utter disinterest in Lot’s offer to let them have his daughter if they will abandon their demand to rape the angel (Lewis Whitbeck) he’s sheltering. Though there’ very little physical contact (even soft-core) between all those gorgeous young twinks, somehow the film is actually more powerful in its restraint: the overall effect is an intense erotic charge ramped up by this overlay of physical frustration. And though the budget available to Watson and Webber was undoubtedly minuscule, they do the final sequence of Lot’s wife (Hildegarde Watson) turning into a pillar of salt surprisingly effectively — and the fadeout of her turned into essentially a salt statue (much to the disappointment of one imdb.com commentator, the film ends here and we don’t find out what happened to Lot after that) provides a chilling final image to a marvelous underground movie marred only by the casting of Lot as the sort of rank anti-Semitic stereotype one would expect to find in a Nazi propaganda film. (No wonder Charles thought it was a German production!)
Lot in Sodom was a truly odd 1933 short (27 minutes) which Charles downloaded — though it’s available officially from Kino as filler on their reissue of the 1923 Nazimova Salomé — and though Charles was under the impression that it was a German movie (understandable given the highly stylized, Expressionistic visuals and the German-sounding names of some of the actors, notably Friedrich Haak as Lot and Dorothea Haus as his daughter), it turned out to be a U.S. independent production directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, who had previously made a 1928 14-minute silent version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. If you’ve seen that one (as we had) the visual style of Lot in Sodom — crude but effective sets, stylized acting and costumes, and a lot of double exposure — won’t be a surprise; as it is, they push the Expressionistic style so far in this one they might just as well have called it The Cabinet of Lot.
What’s most interesting — aside from the synchronized soundtrack, which is actually used quite effectively (there are even a few bits of dialogue — in Latin, of all languages) is the sheer intensity of the homoerotic imagery. While (like their version of Usher) this film would be totally incomprehensible if you don’t know the original story (and they borrowed bits from elsewhere in the Bible, notably the Song of Songs, for some of the titles), one thing Watson and Webber don’t do is pussy-foot around the usual explanation that homosexuality was at the root of the sins of Sodom. (If you want a treatment of the story that blames the fall of Sodom on “inhospitality” — which is what Jesus himself said in his sermon on the story — instead of homosexuality, look elsewhere.) On their much smaller scale, Watson and Webber were basically playing the same game Cecil B. DeMille played in his Biblical films: titillating the audience with images of forbidden sins by the simple expedient of offering them as examples of horrible ways to behave that God will inevitably punish.
The film is full of scantily clad young men dancing around each other, giving each other “cruising” eyes and, in the climactic scene, making clear the source of their utter disinterest in Lot’s offer to let them have his daughter if they will abandon their demand to rape the angel (Lewis Whitbeck) he’s sheltering. Though there’ very little physical contact (even soft-core) between all those gorgeous young twinks, somehow the film is actually more powerful in its restraint: the overall effect is an intense erotic charge ramped up by this overlay of physical frustration. And though the budget available to Watson and Webber was undoubtedly minuscule, they do the final sequence of Lot’s wife (Hildegarde Watson) turning into a pillar of salt surprisingly effectively — and the fadeout of her turned into essentially a salt statue (much to the disappointment of one imdb.com commentator, the film ends here and we don’t find out what happened to Lot after that) provides a chilling final image to a marvelous underground movie marred only by the casting of Lot as the sort of rank anti-Semitic stereotype one would expect to find in a Nazi propaganda film. (No wonder Charles thought it was a German production!)
The Missing Juror (Columbia, 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I actually squeezed in a movie after he got home: The Missing Juror, an engaging if overwrought and rather silly 1944 “B” from Columbia that’s really a total triumph of style over substance. It’s narrated in flashback by reporter Joe Keats (Jim Bannon), who recalls the murder case of Harry Wharton (George Macready). It seemed Wharton was dating a much richer woman and came home one day to find her dead — and a corrupt private eye, George Szabo (George Lloyd), was the key surprise witness who placed him at the scene of the crime and convinced the jury to convict him. Only on the eve of Wharton’s hanging, Szabo is shot and gives Keats a dying confession that he lied under oath and Wharton was actually framed for the crime by a big-shot gangster who was also dating the girl.
Aided by his newspaper’s legal department, Keats uses this information to extract a last-minute pardon from the governor, and Wharton is released — only the long months of waiting on death row have totally unhinged his mind, and so he remains in custody, now in a mental institution. Keats gets re-interested in the case when four of the 12 jurors die in mysterious deaths that are made to look like accidents but to the reporter seem as if someone is trying to avenge himself by knocking off the jurors. Supposedly Wharton is dead — he’s supposed to have hanged himself in his cell in the institution and then set the room on fire — but we’re solemnly told that when the body was recovered, it was burned beyond recognition, which ought to give any hardened moviegoer all the information he or she needs to figure out where this plot is going.
As if that weren’t self-evident enough, Wharton was earlier shown as obsessed with numerical patterns involving the number 12 — a quite obvious clue planted in the screenplay by Charles “Blackie” O’Neal (Ryan O’Neal’s father) based on a story by Leon Abrams and Richard Hill Wilkinson, and though it’s hard to fault O’Neal for the unbelievability and idiocy of a script whose basic story came from two other people, this film has the same breezy contempt for coherence and anything resembling rational human behavior as the first I Love a Mystery film (also starring Jim Bannon), which O’Neal also scripted.
In any event, once we see the outrageously fake beard adorning the chin and cheeks of the supposedly fabulously wealthy Jerome K. Bentley, the jury foreman (and despite all its solemn warnings against people posting “spoilers,” the imdb.com Web site totally gives the game away by listing George Macready as playing both characters!), we know Wharton faked his own death (the real Bentley was the corpse, burned beyond recognition, that Wharton passed off as his own) and is impersonating Bentley. The female lead is Alice Hill (an appealingly spunky Janis Carter), a decorator whom Bentley hires to outfit his summer house, and with whom Keats has one of those hate-at-first-sight-blossoming-into-love relationships beloved of Hollywood screenwriters from Edison’s day to the present. Eventually it ends the way you expect it to — Wharton uses a fake telegram, ostensibly from Keats, to lure Ann into a trap, but the real Keats figures out the plot just in time (after his irascible editor, Willard Apple — played by Joseph Crehan — has had him put in jail) and gets the police out to where Wharton is holding Ann before he has a chance to kill her.
As demented as this story is — Val Lewton must have got a good script for The Seventh Victim out of O’Neal by hectoring him and demanding a plot line that actually made sense — The Missing Juror is fun to watch, partly due the sheer over-the-topness of Macready’s performance (he doesn’t really fit the role — though once Lon Chaney, Sr. died there was really no one left who could pull off this gimmick of two supposedly different people, varying widely in appearance and mannerisms, who turn out to be the same individual) but mostly due to the direction of Budd Boetticher, clearly warming up for his major career directing mostly Randolph Scott Westerns in the 1950’s. Boetticher and cinematographer L. W. O’Connell take the film noir look to such potent extremes here that whole scenes are shot in near-total darkness, with only the soundtrack and a few flashes of light on an otherwise pitch-black screen giving us clues as to what’s supposed to be going on. A lot of more highly regarded directors, filming stories that made a lot more sense within the conventions of the genre, didn’t push film noir to the level it’s practiced here!
Charles and I actually squeezed in a movie after he got home: The Missing Juror, an engaging if overwrought and rather silly 1944 “B” from Columbia that’s really a total triumph of style over substance. It’s narrated in flashback by reporter Joe Keats (Jim Bannon), who recalls the murder case of Harry Wharton (George Macready). It seemed Wharton was dating a much richer woman and came home one day to find her dead — and a corrupt private eye, George Szabo (George Lloyd), was the key surprise witness who placed him at the scene of the crime and convinced the jury to convict him. Only on the eve of Wharton’s hanging, Szabo is shot and gives Keats a dying confession that he lied under oath and Wharton was actually framed for the crime by a big-shot gangster who was also dating the girl.
Aided by his newspaper’s legal department, Keats uses this information to extract a last-minute pardon from the governor, and Wharton is released — only the long months of waiting on death row have totally unhinged his mind, and so he remains in custody, now in a mental institution. Keats gets re-interested in the case when four of the 12 jurors die in mysterious deaths that are made to look like accidents but to the reporter seem as if someone is trying to avenge himself by knocking off the jurors. Supposedly Wharton is dead — he’s supposed to have hanged himself in his cell in the institution and then set the room on fire — but we’re solemnly told that when the body was recovered, it was burned beyond recognition, which ought to give any hardened moviegoer all the information he or she needs to figure out where this plot is going.
As if that weren’t self-evident enough, Wharton was earlier shown as obsessed with numerical patterns involving the number 12 — a quite obvious clue planted in the screenplay by Charles “Blackie” O’Neal (Ryan O’Neal’s father) based on a story by Leon Abrams and Richard Hill Wilkinson, and though it’s hard to fault O’Neal for the unbelievability and idiocy of a script whose basic story came from two other people, this film has the same breezy contempt for coherence and anything resembling rational human behavior as the first I Love a Mystery film (also starring Jim Bannon), which O’Neal also scripted.
In any event, once we see the outrageously fake beard adorning the chin and cheeks of the supposedly fabulously wealthy Jerome K. Bentley, the jury foreman (and despite all its solemn warnings against people posting “spoilers,” the imdb.com Web site totally gives the game away by listing George Macready as playing both characters!), we know Wharton faked his own death (the real Bentley was the corpse, burned beyond recognition, that Wharton passed off as his own) and is impersonating Bentley. The female lead is Alice Hill (an appealingly spunky Janis Carter), a decorator whom Bentley hires to outfit his summer house, and with whom Keats has one of those hate-at-first-sight-blossoming-into-love relationships beloved of Hollywood screenwriters from Edison’s day to the present. Eventually it ends the way you expect it to — Wharton uses a fake telegram, ostensibly from Keats, to lure Ann into a trap, but the real Keats figures out the plot just in time (after his irascible editor, Willard Apple — played by Joseph Crehan — has had him put in jail) and gets the police out to where Wharton is holding Ann before he has a chance to kill her.
As demented as this story is — Val Lewton must have got a good script for The Seventh Victim out of O’Neal by hectoring him and demanding a plot line that actually made sense — The Missing Juror is fun to watch, partly due the sheer over-the-topness of Macready’s performance (he doesn’t really fit the role — though once Lon Chaney, Sr. died there was really no one left who could pull off this gimmick of two supposedly different people, varying widely in appearance and mannerisms, who turn out to be the same individual) but mostly due to the direction of Budd Boetticher, clearly warming up for his major career directing mostly Randolph Scott Westerns in the 1950’s. Boetticher and cinematographer L. W. O’Connell take the film noir look to such potent extremes here that whole scenes are shot in near-total darkness, with only the soundtrack and a few flashes of light on an otherwise pitch-black screen giving us clues as to what’s supposed to be going on. A lot of more highly regarded directors, filming stories that made a lot more sense within the conventions of the genre, didn’t push film noir to the level it’s practiced here!
Black Moon (Columbia, 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I eventually got to watch a movie I recently recorded from TCM: Black Moon, a 1934 release from Columbia based on a novel (originally published in Cosmopolitan magazine) from 1933 by Clements Ripley that was more or less about voodoo. Directed by Roy William Neill from a screenplay by Wells Root — both names that have adorned much greater films than this one — Black Moon, even more than The Missing Juror, was a triumph of style over substance: vividly atmospheric direction by Neill and incredible chiaroscuro cinematography by Joseph August, dressing up an incredibly silly story with plot holes the size of galaxies and a deep strain of racism that got more annoying as the film progressed.
The story opens in New York City, with businessman Stephen Lane (Jack Holt, top-billed and an odd role for someone known mostly as an action star — it would have been like casting John Wayne in Citizen Kane) getting concerned about his wife, Juanita Perez Lane (Dorothy Burgess), who grew up on a Caribbean island called San Christopher (Charles chuckled at the inadvertently multicultural name!) and whose parents were sacrificed by a voodoo cult when Juanita was just two (though we don’t learn that until well after the halfway point of the film) and who was raised by a Black nanny, Ruva (Madame Sul-Te-Wan), who it’s intimated corrupted her and fed her blood to drink, thereby inducting her to the voodoo cult.
At the start Juanita is living a sort-of normal life — at least she’s maintained her marriage long enough that she and Stephen have a daughter, Nancy (played by Cora Sue Collins, yet another offensively cutesy-poo Shirley Temple wanna-be) — but she’s hearing the call of the jungle and responding to it by obsessively beating a voodoo drum every chance she gets. Juanita thinks she can get the jungle out of her system by going to San Christopher again as an adult, and at first Stephen is going to accompany her but at the last minute he has to stay behind to negotiate a big business deal. Instead he sends her there with his secretary, Gail Hamilton (Fay Wray), as her traveling companion — despite the warnings of her uncle, Dr. Raymond Perez (Arnold Korff), that she should not go.
The population of San Christopher is two whites — plantation owner Dr. Perez and his overseer, John Macklin (Lumsden Hare), whom Dr. Perez dispatches to New York to tell Juanita not to come — and 5,000 Blacks; one wonders why the Blacks don’t rise up and get rid of the two white guys instead of taking some quite different and less sensible avenues of rebellion. One voodoo cult member actually follows Macklin to New York and kills him by throwing a knife at him in a hotel hallway, but not even the murder dissuades Juanita from going to San Christopher. Once there, she falls in with the native cult and is torn between her marriage and family life back in the U.S. and her born destiny as a voodoo priestess (one wonders if Clements Ripley’s novel explained this plot point by making Juanita half-Black and if that got censored from the film). Gail, who previously had been depicted as in love with Stephen but unwilling to have a back-street affair with him — and thereby determined to quit her job with him because seeing the man she loves and can’t have because he’s married to someone else was getting just too frustrating — naturally tries to get Juanita to leave the island and go back to New York.
When that fails, she gets Dr. Perez to send Stephen a message — only he has to do it through the Black wireless operator, and the voodoo cultists (who behave throughout the movie with a ruthlessness that might have appalled Saddam Hussein) kill the guy just as he gets the message off. (Later another cultist sabotages the radio room altogether when Stephen himself arrives and tries to send a message back.) As the film continues director Neill’s atmospheric shots get more and more intense and beautiful — and the plot gets sillier and sillier; Stephen duly arrives, only to find his wife having slipped farther and farther away from his world. She has one last crisis of conscience when the voodoo cultists demand that she sacrifice her own daughter — given the way another woman had been shown as desperately in love with her husband, any even slightly hardened moviegoer could have guessed in 1934 that Juanita would be dead by the fade-out, and where I thought this was going was that she would refuse to kill her daughter and therefore the cultists would kill her — but how it actually does end is that she agrees and is about to do the dirty deed when Stephen crashes the voodoo ritual and shoots her in the back before she can finish the ceremony.
Then, when any rational person would expect the Black worshipers to converge en masse on the white interlopers and lynch him on the spot, all they do is stand there and register shock, allowing him to scoop up his daughter and get away with her, Gail and Lunch McLaren (Clarence Muse), the “nice” Black boat pilot who’s quickly established as the one sympathetic character of his race because he sings spirituals (in most of his scenes he’s doing “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” which actually becomes the basis for the outro music over the end credit) and therefore is a good Christian instead of a voodoo freak. There are a few really good things about Black Moon — not only the atmospheric cinematography but also the interesting “authentic” detail that when the natives are conversing with each other, or Juanita is addressing them directly, they speak Kreyol, the African-flavored dialect of French that is the common language in Haiti — and the Kreyol is untranslated, so we’re kept at an appropriate distance from the native culture and speech.
But what’s good about Black Moon is dwarfed by what’s wrong with it, starting with the plot holes — like the fact that the 5,000 Blacks on the island could easily overwhelm the handful of whites, but they let the whites get away with killing their voodoo priest (Stephen shoots the guy down to keep him from sacrificing an adult woman, just as he later kills his wife for trying to sacrifice their daughter — indeed, since Juanita is shown only from the back it’s not clear at first that she is leading the ceremony and it’s not just the old voodoo priest, merely wounded and not dead) — and continuing with the casting.
Dorothy Burgess and Fay Wray look so much alike — the only reliable way to tell them apart is that Wray has the less attractive hairdo — I was expecting a plot twist that they were sisters (or at least half-sisters); and Burgess herself simply isn’t a good enough actress to convince us that she’s genuinely torn between her white Western mores and her voodoo heritage. I couldn’t help wishing that Columbia had given this part to Zita Johann, who in the 1932 classic The Mummy had played a somewhat similar character — a half-English, half-Egyptian woman pulled apart by the two sides of her heritage and pulled apart even further when she finds she’s the reincarnation of a Pharaonic princess — and played her dazzlingly, with a sophistication and real emotion that totally eluded Burgess.
But the worst part of this movie is its relentless racism — the Blacks of San Christopher are depicted as implacably evil, feeling about white people pretty much the way the Nazis felt about the Jews, and utterly unscrupulous about sacrificing people or just murdering them in cold blood the moment they’ve become inconvenient. Black Moon is arguably the most openly racist mainstream Hollywood production since The Birth of a Nation, and that’s not just 2009 hindsight either: the American Film Institute Catalog entry on the film quoted a contemporary review from the trade paper Motion Picture Herald that warned, “In that the colored natives involved in the film are rather harshly pictured as bloodthirsty worshippers of black gods who indulge in sacrificial orgies, the film may meet with objections in those situations in which colored people make up a portion of the patronage.”
Charles and I eventually got to watch a movie I recently recorded from TCM: Black Moon, a 1934 release from Columbia based on a novel (originally published in Cosmopolitan magazine) from 1933 by Clements Ripley that was more or less about voodoo. Directed by Roy William Neill from a screenplay by Wells Root — both names that have adorned much greater films than this one — Black Moon, even more than The Missing Juror, was a triumph of style over substance: vividly atmospheric direction by Neill and incredible chiaroscuro cinematography by Joseph August, dressing up an incredibly silly story with plot holes the size of galaxies and a deep strain of racism that got more annoying as the film progressed.
The story opens in New York City, with businessman Stephen Lane (Jack Holt, top-billed and an odd role for someone known mostly as an action star — it would have been like casting John Wayne in Citizen Kane) getting concerned about his wife, Juanita Perez Lane (Dorothy Burgess), who grew up on a Caribbean island called San Christopher (Charles chuckled at the inadvertently multicultural name!) and whose parents were sacrificed by a voodoo cult when Juanita was just two (though we don’t learn that until well after the halfway point of the film) and who was raised by a Black nanny, Ruva (Madame Sul-Te-Wan), who it’s intimated corrupted her and fed her blood to drink, thereby inducting her to the voodoo cult.
At the start Juanita is living a sort-of normal life — at least she’s maintained her marriage long enough that she and Stephen have a daughter, Nancy (played by Cora Sue Collins, yet another offensively cutesy-poo Shirley Temple wanna-be) — but she’s hearing the call of the jungle and responding to it by obsessively beating a voodoo drum every chance she gets. Juanita thinks she can get the jungle out of her system by going to San Christopher again as an adult, and at first Stephen is going to accompany her but at the last minute he has to stay behind to negotiate a big business deal. Instead he sends her there with his secretary, Gail Hamilton (Fay Wray), as her traveling companion — despite the warnings of her uncle, Dr. Raymond Perez (Arnold Korff), that she should not go.
The population of San Christopher is two whites — plantation owner Dr. Perez and his overseer, John Macklin (Lumsden Hare), whom Dr. Perez dispatches to New York to tell Juanita not to come — and 5,000 Blacks; one wonders why the Blacks don’t rise up and get rid of the two white guys instead of taking some quite different and less sensible avenues of rebellion. One voodoo cult member actually follows Macklin to New York and kills him by throwing a knife at him in a hotel hallway, but not even the murder dissuades Juanita from going to San Christopher. Once there, she falls in with the native cult and is torn between her marriage and family life back in the U.S. and her born destiny as a voodoo priestess (one wonders if Clements Ripley’s novel explained this plot point by making Juanita half-Black and if that got censored from the film). Gail, who previously had been depicted as in love with Stephen but unwilling to have a back-street affair with him — and thereby determined to quit her job with him because seeing the man she loves and can’t have because he’s married to someone else was getting just too frustrating — naturally tries to get Juanita to leave the island and go back to New York.
When that fails, she gets Dr. Perez to send Stephen a message — only he has to do it through the Black wireless operator, and the voodoo cultists (who behave throughout the movie with a ruthlessness that might have appalled Saddam Hussein) kill the guy just as he gets the message off. (Later another cultist sabotages the radio room altogether when Stephen himself arrives and tries to send a message back.) As the film continues director Neill’s atmospheric shots get more and more intense and beautiful — and the plot gets sillier and sillier; Stephen duly arrives, only to find his wife having slipped farther and farther away from his world. She has one last crisis of conscience when the voodoo cultists demand that she sacrifice her own daughter — given the way another woman had been shown as desperately in love with her husband, any even slightly hardened moviegoer could have guessed in 1934 that Juanita would be dead by the fade-out, and where I thought this was going was that she would refuse to kill her daughter and therefore the cultists would kill her — but how it actually does end is that she agrees and is about to do the dirty deed when Stephen crashes the voodoo ritual and shoots her in the back before she can finish the ceremony.
Then, when any rational person would expect the Black worshipers to converge en masse on the white interlopers and lynch him on the spot, all they do is stand there and register shock, allowing him to scoop up his daughter and get away with her, Gail and Lunch McLaren (Clarence Muse), the “nice” Black boat pilot who’s quickly established as the one sympathetic character of his race because he sings spirituals (in most of his scenes he’s doing “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” which actually becomes the basis for the outro music over the end credit) and therefore is a good Christian instead of a voodoo freak. There are a few really good things about Black Moon — not only the atmospheric cinematography but also the interesting “authentic” detail that when the natives are conversing with each other, or Juanita is addressing them directly, they speak Kreyol, the African-flavored dialect of French that is the common language in Haiti — and the Kreyol is untranslated, so we’re kept at an appropriate distance from the native culture and speech.
But what’s good about Black Moon is dwarfed by what’s wrong with it, starting with the plot holes — like the fact that the 5,000 Blacks on the island could easily overwhelm the handful of whites, but they let the whites get away with killing their voodoo priest (Stephen shoots the guy down to keep him from sacrificing an adult woman, just as he later kills his wife for trying to sacrifice their daughter — indeed, since Juanita is shown only from the back it’s not clear at first that she is leading the ceremony and it’s not just the old voodoo priest, merely wounded and not dead) — and continuing with the casting.
Dorothy Burgess and Fay Wray look so much alike — the only reliable way to tell them apart is that Wray has the less attractive hairdo — I was expecting a plot twist that they were sisters (or at least half-sisters); and Burgess herself simply isn’t a good enough actress to convince us that she’s genuinely torn between her white Western mores and her voodoo heritage. I couldn’t help wishing that Columbia had given this part to Zita Johann, who in the 1932 classic The Mummy had played a somewhat similar character — a half-English, half-Egyptian woman pulled apart by the two sides of her heritage and pulled apart even further when she finds she’s the reincarnation of a Pharaonic princess — and played her dazzlingly, with a sophistication and real emotion that totally eluded Burgess.
But the worst part of this movie is its relentless racism — the Blacks of San Christopher are depicted as implacably evil, feeling about white people pretty much the way the Nazis felt about the Jews, and utterly unscrupulous about sacrificing people or just murdering them in cold blood the moment they’ve become inconvenient. Black Moon is arguably the most openly racist mainstream Hollywood production since The Birth of a Nation, and that’s not just 2009 hindsight either: the American Film Institute Catalog entry on the film quoted a contemporary review from the trade paper Motion Picture Herald that warned, “In that the colored natives involved in the film are rather harshly pictured as bloodthirsty worshippers of black gods who indulge in sacrificial orgies, the film may meet with objections in those situations in which colored people make up a portion of the patronage.”
Monday, October 12, 2009
“Nommogeneity” Explores African-American Poetry and Culture
Terrence Stubbs Presents 32-Minute Film at World Beat Center
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
It’s short — only 32 minutes — but Terrence Stubbs’ film Nommogeneity is a powerful film about African-American poetry and the social and cultural milieu which gives rise to it and inspires its practitioners. Stubbs, who in the 1990’s was a stand-up comedian sharing stages with current superstars like Chris Rock and Jamie Foxx, has spent the last decade studying film in San Diego and Long Beach. He presented Nommogeneity on October 1 at the World Beat Center in Balboa Park, an event held in conjunction with the book festival at San Diego City College.
The word “nommogeneity” was coined by Douglas Kearney, one of the poets featured in the film. It comes from an African legend that twin gods named Nommo brought the gifts of language and writing to the human race. Kearney combined “nommo” with the Greek word for birth (also the root of the word “genesis”) to create a term meaning “generation of the word.” The film features a number of strong-voiced young African-American poets, including Bennie Herron, Jaha Zeinabu and South African expatriate Marion Cloete. There’s also someone who isn’t quite so young: Amiri Baraka, the veteran author who as LeRoi Jones exploded on the New York literary scene in the late 1950’s with a series of plays and poems dealing starkly with racism and the African-American experience.
Baraka has been a provocateur ever since. In the early 1970’s he was actually put on trial for allegedly inciting a race riot in Newark, New Jersey with one of his poems. His close-cropped hair and neatly trimmed beard are now grey instead of black, but he’s still as energetic and visceral in his appeal as ever. In Nommogeneity, he’s shown reading “Somebody Blew Up America,” a poem inspired by 9/11 which uses imagery drawn from centuries of racism to point out that African-Americans have dealt with far more “terrorism” from their white compatriots than from foreign groups like al-Qaeda. The matter-of-fact way in which Baraka reads the poem just adds to its effect.
It wasn’t easy for Stubbs to land such a legendary figure and get him to be in his film. He initially e-mailed Baraka’s official contact for lecture gigs, and got a reply that Baraka would be pleased to cooperate with the project as soon as Stubbs could arrange to come out to New York to film him. That was totally out of Stubbs’ budget, but six months later he got an e-mail that Baraka had a date to read and lecture in New Mexico, and with less of a travel burden Stubbs got his equipment together and filmed both a reading and an interview that turned into the focus of his film, not only because it’s powerful on its own but because it illustrates the inspiration Baraka has provided to many younger Black writers, including virtually all the others in Stubbs’ film.
Stubbs said part of his inspiration for Nommogeneity is he’s tired of all the “love jones” poetry out there. Too much of modern Black writing is either romantic poetry or the kind of “playa” braggadocio — the celebration of conspicuous consumption — of much hip-hop, Stubbs said. What he wanted to showcase, he explained, was “consciousness” — meaning political and social consciousness. “I wanted to pick poets talking about prevalent stuff and give them a voice,” Stubbs said.
“I’d like to have people in schools and kids look at this,” Stubbs said. “People don’t like poetry much. They read Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Homer, but this is different. It’s neo-realistic poetry.” It’s indicative of his bent that the two non-Black poets he named as his favorites, German writer Bertolt Brecht and Puerto Rican poet-actor-playwright Miguel Piñero (“I like his rooftop poem,” Stubbs said, adding that Benjamin Bratt played him in a biopic), were also known for engaging political and social issues in their work. Stubbs sees Piñero as having done in the 1970’s, with direct references to Viet Nam and Watergate, what the poets in his film are doing with the issues of today.
In general, the women poets in the film are less openly didactic than the men. One particularly beautiful sequence shows a woman poet reading on the waterfront at the Embarcadero Marina in San Diego. She’s also playing a flute, and while she couldn’t do both at the same time, she manages to accompany her reading with her flute quite eloquently in the film through the magic of multiple sound recording. Another reads a stunning poem called “Pigtails” inspired by the long braids she wears — and she’s actually shown having her hair braided while her voice is heard reading the poem.
Stubbs freely acknowledged that he used music videos as a model for his technique, making his movie far more than the usual stand-up-and-read poetry documentary. (Before filming Nommongeneity, Stubbs said, all he’d done on film were music videos and “a few cheesy little things.”) In response to a question as to whether poetry by people of color is “more musical” than that by whites, Stubbs replied, “I wouldn’t say ‘more musical,’ It’s just a different type of rhythm. They’re doing riverdance, salsa, the cakewalk or electric slide.” Certainly many of the poems in the film — especially the ones written by men — have such a throbbing, insistent beat and are so strictly cadenced in regular meters that all it would take would be a D.J. sampling tracks in the background to turn them into hip-hop songs.
The most striking performance in the film — and the one Stubbs said is his personal favorite — is a dramatic poem by Douglas Kearney called “The Chitlin’ Circuit.” Its language evokes both the history of African-American entertainment and the long string of demeaning words used by American whites to describe American Blacks. Kearney reads the piece in a highly theatrical manner, blending the words so they bleed into each other and become almost pure sound — and while reading the poem he flips the book containing its text, punctuating every change in rhythm and meaning with a simple physical action.
Stubbs describes Nommogeneity as “a work in progress,” and says he doesn’t consider it finished. “It takes a lot of work, hours and dedication” to make a film, he said. Getting Nommogeneity to its current form took two years, at least in part because he didn’t actually have it scripted in advance. “I’ve learned to plan better next time and go with the plan,” he said. “Some of Nommogeneity was just impromptu. When I did Marianne’s poem (the one read to the poet’s flute accompaniment) I had no idea what we were going to do. I just said, ‘Let’s go to the harbor.’”
Though he didn’t show his film on the City College campus, Stubbs hailed the City College film and video program and said it was a better place to learn than those at more prestigious schools. “City College has the best radio, TV and video program in southern California,” he said. “People come from Northridge to go there because they can touch equipment. Many people I know went straight from the City College program to working in the business,” Stubbs explained, because they got direct experience on actual equipment.
Asked what he’d like to work on in the future, Stubbs mentioned a documentary on Etheridge Knight, a Black poet who started writing in prison in the 1960’s and, after his release, was heavily involved in an organization called the Black Arts Movement — one which also influenced many of the poets in Nommogeneity. “He’s from my home town of Indianapolis,” Stubbs said; though Knight was actually born in Mississippi, he was living in Indiana when he was arrested, then settled in Tennessee after his release from prison. Stubbs said he’d also like to make a feature film, “but not something like Soul Plane. I’d like to do a film with a story and a meaning.”
Terrence Stubbs produced Nommogeneity through his own company, Drapetomania Film Works, which can be reached at (310) 493-6509 or by e-mail at drapetomaniafilmworks@gmail.com. He doesn’t list a Web site, but his Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/terrencestubbs
The Sign of Four (Associated Talking Pictures, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Sign of Four — rather awkwardly subtitled Sherlock Holmes’ Greatest Case (a judgment I don’t think most Holmes fans would agree with — I suspect The Hound of the Baskervilles would get the most honors in that regard, though “The Final Problem” and “Silver Blaze” would also probably rate above this one) — made by a British studio called Associated Talking Pictures in 1932 and starring Arthur Wontner as Holmes and Ian Hunter (who later came to the U.S. and co-starred with Bette Davis and Colin Clive in a weird little Warners programmer from 1935 called The Girl from Tenth Avenue, which I described when Charles and I watched it as “basically a Cinderella story, though it begins as The Lost Weekend, then takes on overtones of Shaw’s Pygmalion and ends up remarkably close to Pretty Woman” — certainly a weird assemblage of plot devices!) as Watson.
Wontner played Holmes five times in all, though his other four Holmes vehicles were made by a different studio (Twickenham) and featured a different actor as Watson (Ian Fleming — not the later author of that name who created James Bond). One of these films, The Missing Rembrandt, is apparently lost, but I’ve seen the other three — The Sleeping Cardinal, The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (based on Conan Doyle’s novel The Valley of Fear, and copying its annoying structure of a long second-half flashback in which Holmes does not appear) and Silver Blaze a.k.a. Murder at the Baskervilles — and The Sign of Four is better than all of them. That seems partly due to the fact that Associated Talking Pictures was a larger and bigger-budgeted company than Twickenham (I don’t know for sure that this film had a bigger budget that the Wontner Holmes films from Twickenham, but it certainly looked like a more elaborate production) and also because they hired much more competent help than the rather lame directors and writers who worked for Twickenham.
The producers included Hollywood veteran Rowland V. Lee (who never personally directed a Holmes film but worked with the greatest Holmes of all, Basil Rathbone, on Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London) and British director Basil Dean, who’d been in the U.S. in 1929 and got to direct the first Holmes talkie (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, with Clive Brook, at Paramount). The director was Graham “Jack” Cutts, whom I’d heard of before only in John Russell Taylor’s biography of Alfred Hitchcock; when Michael Balcon first started producing movies in Britain in the early 1920’s, Cutts was his star director and Hitchcock his assistant. Taylor wrote off Cutts as a mediocrity who drank and womanized his way out of a major career he didn’t really deserve anyway — he included some funny scenes of the people working on Cutts’ films being drafted to keep his various girlfriends from meeting and confronting each other — but judging from this film it seems as if members of the Hitchcock cult should be considering Cutts as an influence on the Master instead of essentially turning Cutts into Watson to Hitchcock’s Holmes.
Based on how good The Sign of Four is — it’s well-paced (which the preceding Wontner Holmes film from Twickenham, The Sleeping Cardinal, hadn’t been), it’s effectively edited for suspense and thrills, it’s got a big climactic fight scene between Holmes and the principal villain (though Wontner is all too obviously doubled throughout it, and one imdb.com commentator said Rowland V. Lee had directed that scene himself) and it’s full of oblique camera angles, including more overhead shots than you’re likely to see in any other movie that isn’t a Busby Berkeley musical — it’s clear that Cutts was a major talent with a flair for just the sort of film his former assistant specialized in. It’s hard to believe Taylor’s story that within three years of making The Sign of Four Cutts was so desperate and so broke he pleaded with Hitchcock for a job (and Hitchcock supposedly gave him a day’s work shooting inserts for The 39 Steps just out of pity). Cutts’ direction here aces Leslie Hiscott’s dull work in The Sleeping Cardinal — though he had the advantage of a far better script as well; while screenwriter W. P. Lipscomb made some of the usual changes in the source (as Charles pointed out, in the novel Mary Morstan receives one pearl each year from the fabulous horde of jewels her grandfather’s partner stole, then killed her grandfather over, decades before; in the film she receives the whole pearl necklace all at once) but took advantage of one of Conan Doyle’s most viscerally exciting stories to create a script with plenty of opportunities for a talented director to create suspense and action.
The story deals with Jonathan Small (Graham Soutten), one of the prisoners on a tropical island prison colony and a man with only one leg — one of Cutts’ most effective devices throughout the film is to use the sound of Small’s peg leg tapping the ground as a scary herald of his coming, at a time when American directors were routinely suggesting off-screen events with sound but almost no British directors were bothering to do so — who alerts two of the guards to a stash of jewels he and a fellow inmate left on the island before they were arrested. The idea is that Small and one of his fellow prisoners will share in the revenue from the stolen jewels with the two guards, and the guards will use the money from the jewels to help the prisoners escape — only one of the guards, Major John Sholto (Herbert Lomas), kills the other and keeps the entire treasure for himself. Once that’s established, the film cuts to “London — Years Later” (the title doesn’t tell us how many years later), and Sholto is an old, dying man with two incredibly queeny middle-aged sons, Thaddeus (Miles Malleson) and Bartholomew (Kynaston Reeves). Seeking to make amends for his own crime before he dies, Major Sholto instructs his son that Mary Morstan (Isla Bevan), granddaughter of the man he killed, is to get one-third of the fortune, and writes her a note to that effect, encloses it in a package with the pearl necklace, and signs it, “A friend.”
Jonathan Small kicks off the plot by escaping at long last, bringing the fourth conspirator with him, and Small literally scares Major Sholto to death just by appearing at his window. Small disguises his sidekick (Roy Emerton) by tattooing him all over his body (imdb.com lists a “Mr. Burnhett” as playing the tattoo artist, but from the film itself it’s clear that Small is supposed to be doing the tattooing, and Burnhett was probably a double used for the scenes in which the tattooing needle was actually shown touching Emerton’s skin) to cover up the identification number tattooed on him when he went to prison. The two of them steal the necklace from the safe in the flower shop Mary operates, and with the help of Tonga (Togo), a pygmy they met and befriended on the penal isle, they murder Bartholomew with a poisoned dart from a blow gun. Holmes, who doesn’t appear as a character until 21 minutes into the 77-minute film, deduces how the murder was done and who was involved, and traces the villains to a “Fun Fair” — a sort of miniature community circus — and then to a warehouse where they’re supposed to meet a boat that’s going to take them out of the country. (There’s also a speedboat race with Holmes and the police chasing down the villains.)
The Sign of Four is one of the best early Holmes movies, aided by a strong story, good direction and excellent production values — Wontner even looks younger here than he had in The Sleeping Cardinal two years earlier, and Ian Hunter is an excellent Watson even though it’s a bit disconcerting that he’s taller than his Holmes. This story gives Watson and Mary Morstan a relationship — in the book it’s depicted as ending in marriage and taking Watson out of his bachelor digs with Holmes at 221B Baker Street (it’s 221A in this film), though some critics at the time dissed the film for giving Watson a lover, not realizing that was part of the book as well! Isla Bevan is an appealing heroine, with a striking resemblance to the young Ginger Rogers (by coincidence, one of the two cinematographers on this film, Robert De Grasse, would later work in Hollywood and become Ginger Rogers’ favorite cameraman), and Graham Soutten is a great villain who proves that, given the right actor, a lower-class cutthroat could be as effective a foil for Holmes as an upper-class intellectual like Moriarty. I’ve never cared that much for Wontner’s Holmes — he’s seemed fine in the more cerebral scenes but miscast when Holmes is called upon to be an action hero (and the obvious doubling in the final fight scene here suggests that was because Wontner, unlike Basil Rathbone, wasn’t athletic) — but under stronger direction than he usually got, he’s quite good here in a film that does justice to the Holmes canon and is well balanced between deduction and action.
The film was The Sign of Four — rather awkwardly subtitled Sherlock Holmes’ Greatest Case (a judgment I don’t think most Holmes fans would agree with — I suspect The Hound of the Baskervilles would get the most honors in that regard, though “The Final Problem” and “Silver Blaze” would also probably rate above this one) — made by a British studio called Associated Talking Pictures in 1932 and starring Arthur Wontner as Holmes and Ian Hunter (who later came to the U.S. and co-starred with Bette Davis and Colin Clive in a weird little Warners programmer from 1935 called The Girl from Tenth Avenue, which I described when Charles and I watched it as “basically a Cinderella story, though it begins as The Lost Weekend, then takes on overtones of Shaw’s Pygmalion and ends up remarkably close to Pretty Woman” — certainly a weird assemblage of plot devices!) as Watson.
Wontner played Holmes five times in all, though his other four Holmes vehicles were made by a different studio (Twickenham) and featured a different actor as Watson (Ian Fleming — not the later author of that name who created James Bond). One of these films, The Missing Rembrandt, is apparently lost, but I’ve seen the other three — The Sleeping Cardinal, The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (based on Conan Doyle’s novel The Valley of Fear, and copying its annoying structure of a long second-half flashback in which Holmes does not appear) and Silver Blaze a.k.a. Murder at the Baskervilles — and The Sign of Four is better than all of them. That seems partly due to the fact that Associated Talking Pictures was a larger and bigger-budgeted company than Twickenham (I don’t know for sure that this film had a bigger budget that the Wontner Holmes films from Twickenham, but it certainly looked like a more elaborate production) and also because they hired much more competent help than the rather lame directors and writers who worked for Twickenham.
The producers included Hollywood veteran Rowland V. Lee (who never personally directed a Holmes film but worked with the greatest Holmes of all, Basil Rathbone, on Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London) and British director Basil Dean, who’d been in the U.S. in 1929 and got to direct the first Holmes talkie (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, with Clive Brook, at Paramount). The director was Graham “Jack” Cutts, whom I’d heard of before only in John Russell Taylor’s biography of Alfred Hitchcock; when Michael Balcon first started producing movies in Britain in the early 1920’s, Cutts was his star director and Hitchcock his assistant. Taylor wrote off Cutts as a mediocrity who drank and womanized his way out of a major career he didn’t really deserve anyway — he included some funny scenes of the people working on Cutts’ films being drafted to keep his various girlfriends from meeting and confronting each other — but judging from this film it seems as if members of the Hitchcock cult should be considering Cutts as an influence on the Master instead of essentially turning Cutts into Watson to Hitchcock’s Holmes.
Based on how good The Sign of Four is — it’s well-paced (which the preceding Wontner Holmes film from Twickenham, The Sleeping Cardinal, hadn’t been), it’s effectively edited for suspense and thrills, it’s got a big climactic fight scene between Holmes and the principal villain (though Wontner is all too obviously doubled throughout it, and one imdb.com commentator said Rowland V. Lee had directed that scene himself) and it’s full of oblique camera angles, including more overhead shots than you’re likely to see in any other movie that isn’t a Busby Berkeley musical — it’s clear that Cutts was a major talent with a flair for just the sort of film his former assistant specialized in. It’s hard to believe Taylor’s story that within three years of making The Sign of Four Cutts was so desperate and so broke he pleaded with Hitchcock for a job (and Hitchcock supposedly gave him a day’s work shooting inserts for The 39 Steps just out of pity). Cutts’ direction here aces Leslie Hiscott’s dull work in The Sleeping Cardinal — though he had the advantage of a far better script as well; while screenwriter W. P. Lipscomb made some of the usual changes in the source (as Charles pointed out, in the novel Mary Morstan receives one pearl each year from the fabulous horde of jewels her grandfather’s partner stole, then killed her grandfather over, decades before; in the film she receives the whole pearl necklace all at once) but took advantage of one of Conan Doyle’s most viscerally exciting stories to create a script with plenty of opportunities for a talented director to create suspense and action.
The story deals with Jonathan Small (Graham Soutten), one of the prisoners on a tropical island prison colony and a man with only one leg — one of Cutts’ most effective devices throughout the film is to use the sound of Small’s peg leg tapping the ground as a scary herald of his coming, at a time when American directors were routinely suggesting off-screen events with sound but almost no British directors were bothering to do so — who alerts two of the guards to a stash of jewels he and a fellow inmate left on the island before they were arrested. The idea is that Small and one of his fellow prisoners will share in the revenue from the stolen jewels with the two guards, and the guards will use the money from the jewels to help the prisoners escape — only one of the guards, Major John Sholto (Herbert Lomas), kills the other and keeps the entire treasure for himself. Once that’s established, the film cuts to “London — Years Later” (the title doesn’t tell us how many years later), and Sholto is an old, dying man with two incredibly queeny middle-aged sons, Thaddeus (Miles Malleson) and Bartholomew (Kynaston Reeves). Seeking to make amends for his own crime before he dies, Major Sholto instructs his son that Mary Morstan (Isla Bevan), granddaughter of the man he killed, is to get one-third of the fortune, and writes her a note to that effect, encloses it in a package with the pearl necklace, and signs it, “A friend.”
Jonathan Small kicks off the plot by escaping at long last, bringing the fourth conspirator with him, and Small literally scares Major Sholto to death just by appearing at his window. Small disguises his sidekick (Roy Emerton) by tattooing him all over his body (imdb.com lists a “Mr. Burnhett” as playing the tattoo artist, but from the film itself it’s clear that Small is supposed to be doing the tattooing, and Burnhett was probably a double used for the scenes in which the tattooing needle was actually shown touching Emerton’s skin) to cover up the identification number tattooed on him when he went to prison. The two of them steal the necklace from the safe in the flower shop Mary operates, and with the help of Tonga (Togo), a pygmy they met and befriended on the penal isle, they murder Bartholomew with a poisoned dart from a blow gun. Holmes, who doesn’t appear as a character until 21 minutes into the 77-minute film, deduces how the murder was done and who was involved, and traces the villains to a “Fun Fair” — a sort of miniature community circus — and then to a warehouse where they’re supposed to meet a boat that’s going to take them out of the country. (There’s also a speedboat race with Holmes and the police chasing down the villains.)
The Sign of Four is one of the best early Holmes movies, aided by a strong story, good direction and excellent production values — Wontner even looks younger here than he had in The Sleeping Cardinal two years earlier, and Ian Hunter is an excellent Watson even though it’s a bit disconcerting that he’s taller than his Holmes. This story gives Watson and Mary Morstan a relationship — in the book it’s depicted as ending in marriage and taking Watson out of his bachelor digs with Holmes at 221B Baker Street (it’s 221A in this film), though some critics at the time dissed the film for giving Watson a lover, not realizing that was part of the book as well! Isla Bevan is an appealing heroine, with a striking resemblance to the young Ginger Rogers (by coincidence, one of the two cinematographers on this film, Robert De Grasse, would later work in Hollywood and become Ginger Rogers’ favorite cameraman), and Graham Soutten is a great villain who proves that, given the right actor, a lower-class cutthroat could be as effective a foil for Holmes as an upper-class intellectual like Moriarty. I’ve never cared that much for Wontner’s Holmes — he’s seemed fine in the more cerebral scenes but miscast when Holmes is called upon to be an action hero (and the obvious doubling in the final fight scene here suggests that was because Wontner, unlike Basil Rathbone, wasn’t athletic) — but under stronger direction than he usually got, he’s quite good here in a film that does justice to the Holmes canon and is well balanced between deduction and action.
Perversion for Profit (Citizens for Decent Literature, c. 1960)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I dug up a DVD I’d recorded last Friday containing the fascinating 15-minute film Perversion for Profit, one of those dreadfully earnest pseudo-documentaries from the late 1950’s or early 1960’s talking about how the explosion in readily available pornography is destroying our kids and preparing them to be unable to resist the coming Communist takeover (I’m not making this up, you know!). Charles and I had seen this before in a computer download but it was fun to see it again — the film features an unctuous narrator (played by a “renowned newsman” named George Putnam whom neither Charles nor I could recall ever having heard of elsewhere) and a series of bilious-looking charts like those that illustrated medical brochures from grade-school health departments back then.
Charles said the film was financed by Charles Keating, the savings-and-loan tycoon who was later (decades later) accused of corrupt campaign contributions to five Senators, four Democrats (including Alan Cranston, who came out of the whole affair looking very much like the Claude Rains character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — among the programs he was accused of taking money from Keating to run was a voter registration drive to help the Libertarian Party candidate take votes from the Republican in a close re-election race) and John McCain (who later said that his being publicly accused of corruption was the worst ordeal of his life — worse than being in that North Viet Namese prison camp because “at least the North Viet Namese didn’t question my honor”), but that’s not necessarily the most interesting thing about it.
The most interesting thing about it is not even its tone of high moral dudgeon and stridency — it seems that Putnam and whoever wrote his script were expecting the audience to gasp in horror at the end of every other sentence — or that in dealing with homosexuality it lumps the relatively serious early Gay publications like One and Mattachine Review in with the hard-core smut (including what look like some of the earliest publications of Tom of Finland’s drawings) — but the fact that it underscores that since America’s modern radical Right began in the 1930’s as a fringe movement of Roosevelt’s craziest critics, its rhetorical styles have never changed one iota: Putnam’s narration here contains the usual bilge about how the people who wrote the Constitution meant our country to be “one nation under God” and governed by the Judeo-Christian ethic (actually they were rationalist Deists who believed in the Enlightenment and in particular the value of reason), and that only the Judeo-Christian ethic can hold our country strong and united in the face of the Communist threat.
It also contains the breathless appeals to fear that have been the essence of the Right’s appeal ever since — fear of the Other, fear of social decay, fear of national disgrace, fear that indulging our own perverted minorities will leave us open to conquest by foreign powers — fear, fear, fear, a devastating weapon when Hitler used it to rile his people against the Jews and almost as devastating in the American context, especially now when operations like this don’t have to put their propaganda out on cheap strips of crudely made film but have the full resources of the corporate media at their disposal to brainwash millions of Americans to think, vote and act according to a sleazy agenda of hate and division.
I dug up a DVD I’d recorded last Friday containing the fascinating 15-minute film Perversion for Profit, one of those dreadfully earnest pseudo-documentaries from the late 1950’s or early 1960’s talking about how the explosion in readily available pornography is destroying our kids and preparing them to be unable to resist the coming Communist takeover (I’m not making this up, you know!). Charles and I had seen this before in a computer download but it was fun to see it again — the film features an unctuous narrator (played by a “renowned newsman” named George Putnam whom neither Charles nor I could recall ever having heard of elsewhere) and a series of bilious-looking charts like those that illustrated medical brochures from grade-school health departments back then.
Charles said the film was financed by Charles Keating, the savings-and-loan tycoon who was later (decades later) accused of corrupt campaign contributions to five Senators, four Democrats (including Alan Cranston, who came out of the whole affair looking very much like the Claude Rains character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — among the programs he was accused of taking money from Keating to run was a voter registration drive to help the Libertarian Party candidate take votes from the Republican in a close re-election race) and John McCain (who later said that his being publicly accused of corruption was the worst ordeal of his life — worse than being in that North Viet Namese prison camp because “at least the North Viet Namese didn’t question my honor”), but that’s not necessarily the most interesting thing about it.
The most interesting thing about it is not even its tone of high moral dudgeon and stridency — it seems that Putnam and whoever wrote his script were expecting the audience to gasp in horror at the end of every other sentence — or that in dealing with homosexuality it lumps the relatively serious early Gay publications like One and Mattachine Review in with the hard-core smut (including what look like some of the earliest publications of Tom of Finland’s drawings) — but the fact that it underscores that since America’s modern radical Right began in the 1930’s as a fringe movement of Roosevelt’s craziest critics, its rhetorical styles have never changed one iota: Putnam’s narration here contains the usual bilge about how the people who wrote the Constitution meant our country to be “one nation under God” and governed by the Judeo-Christian ethic (actually they were rationalist Deists who believed in the Enlightenment and in particular the value of reason), and that only the Judeo-Christian ethic can hold our country strong and united in the face of the Communist threat.
It also contains the breathless appeals to fear that have been the essence of the Right’s appeal ever since — fear of the Other, fear of social decay, fear of national disgrace, fear that indulging our own perverted minorities will leave us open to conquest by foreign powers — fear, fear, fear, a devastating weapon when Hitler used it to rile his people against the Jews and almost as devastating in the American context, especially now when operations like this don’t have to put their propaganda out on cheap strips of crudely made film but have the full resources of the corporate media at their disposal to brainwash millions of Americans to think, vote and act according to a sleazy agenda of hate and division.
The Wild Party (Security Pictures/United Artists, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that Charles and I watched a feature film from 1956 that was on the same disc: The Wild Party, the second film made by Carol Ohmart, one of the most fascinating of the many Marilyn Monroe wanna-bes Hollywood dug up and put on the screen in a series of desperate attempts to match the appeal of the original. Probably the most famous of them long-term were Jayne Mansfield at Fox (Monroe’s studio, which was getting tired of her fights, walkouts and general unreliability and wanted a backup in the wings), who got to make two quite good movies — The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? — before her career degenerated into trash; and Kim Novak, many of whose roles (including her first lead in the 1954 film Pushover) seemed ironic comments on the nature of her manufactured stardom, and who had a respectable career but didn’t really hit the heights until the 1984 re-release of her best film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (also a movie in which she plays a woman made over into a man’s fantasy image in a commentary and almost a mockery of Novak’s own career!), long after she’d retired.
Ohmart had got a buildup from Paramount, who made her first film, The Scarlet Hour, and gave her the great Michael Curtiz as director. The result was a box-office flop — Ohmart turned out too hard-edged for the breathy, sensual Monroe image they were trying to put her into, and rather than reverse course and give her some femme fatale roles that might have suited her, they sent her to United Artists for The Wild Party. At least five films under that title are listed on imdb.com, of which probably the most famous are the 1929 Wild Party with Clara Bow (making her talking debut) as a college coed and Fredric March (in his first film, period) as the anthropology professor she sets out to seduce; and the 1974 Wild Party, based on a narrative open written in the 1920’s by Joseph Moncure March based on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, with James Coco as Arbuckle.
This version of The Wild Party is set in the jazz underworld of Los Angeles, which in a voiceover narration delivered by Nehemiah Persoff in his character as a jazz pianist named “Kicks” Johnson is introduced as a refuge for people who have failed to become rich, successful or happy in the “straight” world (back when “straight” still meant un-hip, not un-Gay) in some bizarre writing by John McPartland that tries desperately for the kind of hip poetry-in-prose Jack Kerouac achieved, and falls far short of McPartland’s “Beat” models. Once the plot begins it evolves around the ambiguous character of Tom Kupfen (Anthony Quinn), who was once a professional football player and keeps reminding the characters (and us) that once upon a time 90,000 people turned out to see him play, and he was able to buy whole rounds in bars where he’s now desperately cadging drinks. The name “Kupfen” is clearly meant to be ethnic, but neither McPartland nor director Harry Horner ever decided what ethnicity — so Anthony Quinn draws on all the ethnic roles he’d ever played and comes up with a sort of indeterminate mish-mosh of an accent that accomplishes nothing except to make his lines harder to decipher.
Kupfen, his girlfriend Honey (Kathryn Grant, in a whiny but still marvelously edgy performance that’s a far cry from her usual roles and suggests the screen lost an interesting talent when she quit to become the second Mrs. Bing Crosby), “Kicks” and Gabe Freeposter (Jay Robinson), a small-time hustler who’s acquired a veneer of “class” to better fool his marks, seek to shake down a “straight” (in both senses) couple they pick up at a respectable hotel/restaurant (we know it’s respectable because a “sweet” non-jazz dance band is playing there) and drag into the jazz underworld. These people are Navy Lieutenant Arthur Mitchell (Arthur Franz) and his fiancée Erica London (Carol Ohmart); he’s eager to marry her before he ships out to Guam the next day, but she’s still nervous about whether or not to take the Big Step. One of the gang members steals her car key, thereby stranding them on Hollywood Boulevard, and on the pretext of offering her a ride to a gas station to call a cab, Gabe gets her into the bad guys’ car — whereupon the whole business breaks down because all Gabe is interested in is extracting money from the pigeons, while Tom has decided he’s going to force Erica to flee to Mexico and marry him. The fact that she can’t stand him doesn’t seem to enter into his calculations — nor does the fact that he doesn’t want to lose Honey, either; he rather preposterously believes he can get Erica to fall in love with him and continue to see Honey even after he marries someone else.
While it’s somewhat disheartening to realize that there was an even more embarrassing entry on Quinn’s résumé than The Naked Street (which was simply a mediocre gangster story that thoroughly wasted the talents of Quinn, Anne Bancroft and Farley Granger), The Wild Party is the sort of haunting movie that’s dreadful by any normal measure and yet holds your attention because you want it to be better than it is — you’re rooting for the filmmakers to grab hold of their subject’s potential and you’re watching helplessly as they miss point after point. Director Horner’s evocation of the night-world atmosphere is superb, and there’s an occasional scene that does work — notably a whispered confidence from Honey to Erica that even though she’s been literally dragged into the netherworld by force, soon enough she’ll begin to like it and feel comfortable nowhere else — but for the most part McPartland’s script, with its only coincidental resemblance to actual human behavior, frustrates the director.
Like most Hollywood movies about jazz, the film’s conceit is that virtually everyone who likes it is a pervert or a crook — and yet some of the greatest L.A.-based jazz musicians of the time (tenor saxophonists Georgie Auld and Bud Shank, trumpeters Maynard Ferguson and Teddy Buckner, guitarist Barney Kessel, pianist Dave Pell and bassist Ralph Peña) are heard on the soundtrack, and two musicians are actually billed: Pete Jolly, who dubbed the piano when Persoff was supposedly playing; and clarinetist Buddy De Franco, who’s shown leading a quartet and whose music is considerably more interesting than the dialogue it’s supposedly underscoring. (De Franco was also in Count Basie’s small band when he appeared in the film Rhythm and Blues Revue — a clip-fest from a TV series that supposedly showed performances from Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, but which were actually studio films interspersed with the same stock clip of an audience used between every song to create the impression of being live; the irony was that De Franco was the only white person seen in Rhythm and Blues Revue.) The musical director was Buddy Bregman, house arranger/conductor at Verve Records (though when we see a record label in the film, it’s RCA Victor’s) who made albums with top-level talents like Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day.
The jazz music heard in The Wild Party is of top quality and far more interesting and complex than the film’s story or dialogue — and had the filmmakers been a bit more sensitive to their subject and less interested in playing the whole Hollywood game of titillating the audience with a glimpse of the demi-monde while simultaneously justifying its depiction morally by proclaiming it an utterly horrible way to live, The Wild Party might have been a genuinely interesting success instead of a genuinely interesting flop. As for Ohmart, I was impressed by her in William Castle’s The House on Haunted Hill — though it might have been just relative since in that movie the rest of the cast was so incompetent Vincent Price and Ohmart were the only people in it who could act at all — but in The Wild Party she’s handicapped by being cast in the wrong role. As useless as the movie is overall, it still would have been stronger had Ohmart and Kathryn Grant switched roles; Ohmart is utterly unable to suggest any response to Quinn’s threats beyond simple annoyance — she’s not a good enough actress either to hint at any attraction to him or to portray desperate revulsion either — and the producers’ costume department made the mistake of cladding her in a bulky fur coat throughout that makes it difficult to see her physical charms: a bizarre mistake to make with an actress they were pushing as a rival to Monroe!
After that Charles and I watched a feature film from 1956 that was on the same disc: The Wild Party, the second film made by Carol Ohmart, one of the most fascinating of the many Marilyn Monroe wanna-bes Hollywood dug up and put on the screen in a series of desperate attempts to match the appeal of the original. Probably the most famous of them long-term were Jayne Mansfield at Fox (Monroe’s studio, which was getting tired of her fights, walkouts and general unreliability and wanted a backup in the wings), who got to make two quite good movies — The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? — before her career degenerated into trash; and Kim Novak, many of whose roles (including her first lead in the 1954 film Pushover) seemed ironic comments on the nature of her manufactured stardom, and who had a respectable career but didn’t really hit the heights until the 1984 re-release of her best film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (also a movie in which she plays a woman made over into a man’s fantasy image in a commentary and almost a mockery of Novak’s own career!), long after she’d retired.
Ohmart had got a buildup from Paramount, who made her first film, The Scarlet Hour, and gave her the great Michael Curtiz as director. The result was a box-office flop — Ohmart turned out too hard-edged for the breathy, sensual Monroe image they were trying to put her into, and rather than reverse course and give her some femme fatale roles that might have suited her, they sent her to United Artists for The Wild Party. At least five films under that title are listed on imdb.com, of which probably the most famous are the 1929 Wild Party with Clara Bow (making her talking debut) as a college coed and Fredric March (in his first film, period) as the anthropology professor she sets out to seduce; and the 1974 Wild Party, based on a narrative open written in the 1920’s by Joseph Moncure March based on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, with James Coco as Arbuckle.
This version of The Wild Party is set in the jazz underworld of Los Angeles, which in a voiceover narration delivered by Nehemiah Persoff in his character as a jazz pianist named “Kicks” Johnson is introduced as a refuge for people who have failed to become rich, successful or happy in the “straight” world (back when “straight” still meant un-hip, not un-Gay) in some bizarre writing by John McPartland that tries desperately for the kind of hip poetry-in-prose Jack Kerouac achieved, and falls far short of McPartland’s “Beat” models. Once the plot begins it evolves around the ambiguous character of Tom Kupfen (Anthony Quinn), who was once a professional football player and keeps reminding the characters (and us) that once upon a time 90,000 people turned out to see him play, and he was able to buy whole rounds in bars where he’s now desperately cadging drinks. The name “Kupfen” is clearly meant to be ethnic, but neither McPartland nor director Harry Horner ever decided what ethnicity — so Anthony Quinn draws on all the ethnic roles he’d ever played and comes up with a sort of indeterminate mish-mosh of an accent that accomplishes nothing except to make his lines harder to decipher.
Kupfen, his girlfriend Honey (Kathryn Grant, in a whiny but still marvelously edgy performance that’s a far cry from her usual roles and suggests the screen lost an interesting talent when she quit to become the second Mrs. Bing Crosby), “Kicks” and Gabe Freeposter (Jay Robinson), a small-time hustler who’s acquired a veneer of “class” to better fool his marks, seek to shake down a “straight” (in both senses) couple they pick up at a respectable hotel/restaurant (we know it’s respectable because a “sweet” non-jazz dance band is playing there) and drag into the jazz underworld. These people are Navy Lieutenant Arthur Mitchell (Arthur Franz) and his fiancée Erica London (Carol Ohmart); he’s eager to marry her before he ships out to Guam the next day, but she’s still nervous about whether or not to take the Big Step. One of the gang members steals her car key, thereby stranding them on Hollywood Boulevard, and on the pretext of offering her a ride to a gas station to call a cab, Gabe gets her into the bad guys’ car — whereupon the whole business breaks down because all Gabe is interested in is extracting money from the pigeons, while Tom has decided he’s going to force Erica to flee to Mexico and marry him. The fact that she can’t stand him doesn’t seem to enter into his calculations — nor does the fact that he doesn’t want to lose Honey, either; he rather preposterously believes he can get Erica to fall in love with him and continue to see Honey even after he marries someone else.
While it’s somewhat disheartening to realize that there was an even more embarrassing entry on Quinn’s résumé than The Naked Street (which was simply a mediocre gangster story that thoroughly wasted the talents of Quinn, Anne Bancroft and Farley Granger), The Wild Party is the sort of haunting movie that’s dreadful by any normal measure and yet holds your attention because you want it to be better than it is — you’re rooting for the filmmakers to grab hold of their subject’s potential and you’re watching helplessly as they miss point after point. Director Horner’s evocation of the night-world atmosphere is superb, and there’s an occasional scene that does work — notably a whispered confidence from Honey to Erica that even though she’s been literally dragged into the netherworld by force, soon enough she’ll begin to like it and feel comfortable nowhere else — but for the most part McPartland’s script, with its only coincidental resemblance to actual human behavior, frustrates the director.
Like most Hollywood movies about jazz, the film’s conceit is that virtually everyone who likes it is a pervert or a crook — and yet some of the greatest L.A.-based jazz musicians of the time (tenor saxophonists Georgie Auld and Bud Shank, trumpeters Maynard Ferguson and Teddy Buckner, guitarist Barney Kessel, pianist Dave Pell and bassist Ralph Peña) are heard on the soundtrack, and two musicians are actually billed: Pete Jolly, who dubbed the piano when Persoff was supposedly playing; and clarinetist Buddy De Franco, who’s shown leading a quartet and whose music is considerably more interesting than the dialogue it’s supposedly underscoring. (De Franco was also in Count Basie’s small band when he appeared in the film Rhythm and Blues Revue — a clip-fest from a TV series that supposedly showed performances from Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, but which were actually studio films interspersed with the same stock clip of an audience used between every song to create the impression of being live; the irony was that De Franco was the only white person seen in Rhythm and Blues Revue.) The musical director was Buddy Bregman, house arranger/conductor at Verve Records (though when we see a record label in the film, it’s RCA Victor’s) who made albums with top-level talents like Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day.
The jazz music heard in The Wild Party is of top quality and far more interesting and complex than the film’s story or dialogue — and had the filmmakers been a bit more sensitive to their subject and less interested in playing the whole Hollywood game of titillating the audience with a glimpse of the demi-monde while simultaneously justifying its depiction morally by proclaiming it an utterly horrible way to live, The Wild Party might have been a genuinely interesting success instead of a genuinely interesting flop. As for Ohmart, I was impressed by her in William Castle’s The House on Haunted Hill — though it might have been just relative since in that movie the rest of the cast was so incompetent Vincent Price and Ohmart were the only people in it who could act at all — but in The Wild Party she’s handicapped by being cast in the wrong role. As useless as the movie is overall, it still would have been stronger had Ohmart and Kathryn Grant switched roles; Ohmart is utterly unable to suggest any response to Quinn’s threats beyond simple annoyance — she’s not a good enough actress either to hint at any attraction to him or to portray desperate revulsion either — and the producers’ costume department made the mistake of cladding her in a bulky fur coat throughout that makes it difficult to see her physical charms: a bizarre mistake to make with an actress they were pushing as a rival to Monroe!
Friday, October 9, 2009
The Return of the Vampire (Columbia, 1943, rel. 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I did run Charles a movie — a short one, The Return of the Vampire from 1944, directed by Lew Landers and written by Griffin Jay from an “idea” by Kurt Neumann — the “idea” apparently having been to come as close as possible to a total ripoff of Bram Stoker’s Dracula without bringing the Universal legal department on top of Columbia, this film’s producing studio, for doing so. Had Neumann also written the actual screenplay this would have been a better movie — some of Jay’s lines were wince-inducing and provoked Charles to Mystery Science Theatre 3000-type comments — but at least it had Bela Lugosi as the vampire (called “Armand Tesla” and depicted as a Rumanian mad scientist who had got so obsessed with studying vampires and vampirism that after his death he became a vampire himself — as I joked to Charles, “He’s a mad scientist and his name is ‘Tesla’? This is too easy!”), Miles Mander in the Edward van Sloan role as the fearless vampire hunter (actually a Scotland Yard police chief who was initially skeptical but was won over to the cause of the vampire’s existence), Matt Willis in the Dwight Frye role (in a move to update the story, he was shown transforming into a werewolf whenever he was under Lugosi’s spell — and, interestingly, the transformations were actually more visually convincing than the ones Universal was putting Lon Chaney, Jr. through at the same time!) and interesting distaff performances from Frieda Inescort as the heroine and Nina Foch (her presence in a film like this is a distinct example of overqualification!) as her mother-in-law, who first slew Tesla (with the traditionally approved stake through the heart) in 1918 only to have him revived when his grave was blasted open in 1941 during a German air raid on London. (Since this was a wartime film, the link between the two world wars and the use of the Blitz as a backdrop gave it topicality.)
The Return of the Vampire also featured a musical score by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a man with a major reputation as a classical composer (though Charles was amused by the idea that anyone would be named “New Castle Germany”!) — it’s a marginally more complex score than the norm for one of these movies, though still pretty much your standard-issue horror-cliché music. In fact, that pretty much sums up this whole movie: a bit better than the B-horror average (with superb atmospheric photography by L. W. O’Connell and some nice moving-camera shots worked out by O’Connell and Landers) and welcome as one of Lugosi’s surprisingly few vampire roles on film (he made just five — Dracula, The Mark of the Vampire, Return of the Vampire, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire — and the last two, as their titles suggest, were comic spoofs of the horror genre). — 9/29/98
•••••
The Return of the Vampire is a 1943 film from Columbia (released and copyrighted on New Year’s Day, 1944) that starred Bela Lugosi in a story that was originally intended by its writers, Kurt Neumann (story) and Griffin Jay (script), as a direct sequel to Dracula. When the Universal legal department found out that Columbia was planning an unauthorized sequel to one of their most prestigious (and closely guarded) horror properties, they wrote a letter to Columbia threatening a plagiarism suit if the project continued. No problem; producer Sam White simply had Neumann and Jay change the names of their characters, so Lugosi’s role became “Dr. Armand Tesla” (the parallel to the real-life scientist Dr. Nikola Tesla, who in the latter part of his life devoted his considerable genius to trying to prove, scientifically, the existence of the supernatural was probably deliberate), a scientist who lived in Eastern Europe 200 years before and became so obsessed with vampires that he wrote a book about them (quoted extensively in the film) and ultimately became a vampire himself after his death — a gimmick Neumann and Jay may have ripped off Fred Myton’s script for PRC’s own Dracula knock-off, Dead Men Walk, the year before.
The film opens with a prologue set in 1918, the last year of World War I, in which Dr. Walter Saunders (Gilbert Emery, playing essentially the same role Edward Van Sloan had in the 1930 Universal Dracula) and his assistant, Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort, wearing a severe dark haircut that gives her a striking resemblance to Ayn Rand) run Tesla down to earth, trace him to his coffin and drive a stake through his heart. Tesla had a werewolf assistant, Andreas Obry (a rather miscast Matt Willis — he’s too ordinary a character-actor type to be credible as a being who undergoes a wrenching supernatural transformation under Tesla’s mind control), who’s sort of the Renfield of this story; over the next 22 years Ainsley works with him at the sanitarium she runs and eventually gets him to overcome his lycanthropic proclivities and achieve a productive career as her assistant. Flash-forward to 1940; by this time Dr. Saunders is dead but his granddaughter Nicki (Nina Foch) I dating Ainsley’s son John (Roland Varno), who gave up his career as an orchestra conductor to enlist in World War II but is returning to work since he was mustered out due to service-related injuries. Jane Ainsley’s friend Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander), commissioner of Scotland Yard, reads Dr. Saunders’ newly discovered manuscript telling how the two of them killed Tesla, and explains to Jane that if she drove a stake through the heart of a living human, she may be liable for murder charges.
Fleet says he’s going to get a court order to have Tesla’s body exhumed to see if he was still alive when the stake was driven through him, but before that can happen a German bombing raid strikes the graveyard where Tesla was buried and brings his corpse to light, whereupon two civil defense workers cleaning up the gravesite remove the stake (thinking it’s a bit of shrapnel lodged in Tesla’s corpse) and, of course, set the vampire free. From then on the film becomes a quest for revenge on Tesla’s part, following the familiar contours of the Dracula plot as he goes after the people he blames for the lost 22 years of his un-life, striking at Lady Jane by putting the bite on her son and his fiancée (he’d already attacked her when she was still a child during the prologue sequence). He also re-enslaves Andreas, turning him back into a werewolf (some imdb.com commentators objected to the fact that Andreas’ lycanthropy had nothing to do with the phases of the moon, but the writers here were clearly drawing on a different version of the werewolf legend in which it was the vampire’s will, not a full moon, that changed Andreas from man to wolf) and forcing him to run deadly errands for him — including carrying around a mysterious package — until the very end, when another opportune German bombing raid blasted open Tesla’s coffin during the daylight and thereby evaporated him. (One imdb.com commentator said this was the first time a vampire literally “disappeared” on screen, though I think Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr anticipated this scene.)
What’s frustrating about The Return of the Vampire is that it’s a movie with a lot of promise, and many things that do go right — the direction by the usually hacky Lew Landers (who’d worked with Lugosi before on the 1935 Universal film The Raven, with Boris Karloff) actually stages some scenes with effective Gothic atmosphere; there’s some good Caligari-esque stylization in the sets by Lionel Banks and Victor Greene (especially the exteriors); the bookending of the vampire’s tale by the two world wars and the direct use of the Blitz as a plot device quite cleverly rendered the story more topical than it would have been otherwise (though Neumann and Jay could have done more with the idea of a vampire dealing out death in a country under heavy bombing attack in which lots of people were dying for perfectly logical reasons — it would have been interesting to have Tesla’s attacks concealed by the death toll from the bomb raids, but that’s probably not a place American filmmakers wanted to go in a movie made while World War II was still going on and set in an allied country); and The Return of the Vampire appears to be the first horror movie ever made in which both a vampire and a werewolf appear on screen as characters. Universal wouldn’t do that until House of Frankenstein, released 11 months later; and in that regard this film anticipates not only the later films in the Universal Frankenstein cycle but the modern Underworld movies as well.
Where the film goes wrong is in giving us so little of Bela Lugosi — we don’t see him at all until 23 minutes into a 69-minute film (though we hear snatches of his voice before that) and he has probably less than 10 minutes of screen time all told; in Matt Willis’s risible appearance as the werewolf (with crudely jutting-out ears that might be closer to a real wolf’s ears than the ones on Jack Pierce’s werewolf makeup for Lon Chaney, Jr. at Universal, but help the makeup evoke laughs instead of fright); in the plodding writing and direction of the non-vampire scenes; and in Nina Foch’s surprisingly incompetent performance as Nicki. Though none of the Dracula films (or their knockoffs) have featured a performance by the actress playing the vampire’s main distaff victim anywhere near the quality Agnes Moorehead brought to this role in Orson Welles’ 1938 Dracula radio broadcast — with just her voice, she managed to capture the attraction as well as the repulsion of vampire-dom better than any actress on screen (though Louise Allbritton in Robert Siodmak’s near-masterpiece, Son of Dracula, from Universal in 1943, is quite good in a different conception of the character as someone actually attracted to vampirism by its promise of eternal life — a premise less Bram Stoker and more Anne Rice than we’re used to in a 1940’s movie) — Foch is so dull in her part that Helen Chandler in the 1930 Dracula looks like a great actress by comparison.
One of the biggest retrospective surprises of Bela Lugosi’s career is that, for all his identification with the role of Dracula both during his lifetime (he was regularly interrupting his film career to make money touring with the stage version) and since, he only played vampires five times — and only two of those films, Dracula and The Return of the Vampire, portrayed the character entirely seriously. The 1935 MGM film The Mark of the Vampire — directed by Tod Browning with far more energy and atmosphere than he’d brought to the Lugosi Dracula five years earlier — cheated at the end by having Lugosi’s character turn out to be, not a bona fide vampire, but an actor playing a vampire in a scheme by police chief Lionel Barrymore to trap a murderer into confessing; and Lugosi’s last two vampire movies, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), were out-and-out spoofs. (I’ve sometimes joked that it would be interesting to double-bill Universal’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man from 1943, in which Lugosi played the Monster, with Boris Karloff’s only vampire part, the 1964 Italian film Black Sabbath, just for the spectacle of the two greatest horror actors of the sound era each playing the role most associated with the other.) — 10/9/09
I did run Charles a movie — a short one, The Return of the Vampire from 1944, directed by Lew Landers and written by Griffin Jay from an “idea” by Kurt Neumann — the “idea” apparently having been to come as close as possible to a total ripoff of Bram Stoker’s Dracula without bringing the Universal legal department on top of Columbia, this film’s producing studio, for doing so. Had Neumann also written the actual screenplay this would have been a better movie — some of Jay’s lines were wince-inducing and provoked Charles to Mystery Science Theatre 3000-type comments — but at least it had Bela Lugosi as the vampire (called “Armand Tesla” and depicted as a Rumanian mad scientist who had got so obsessed with studying vampires and vampirism that after his death he became a vampire himself — as I joked to Charles, “He’s a mad scientist and his name is ‘Tesla’? This is too easy!”), Miles Mander in the Edward van Sloan role as the fearless vampire hunter (actually a Scotland Yard police chief who was initially skeptical but was won over to the cause of the vampire’s existence), Matt Willis in the Dwight Frye role (in a move to update the story, he was shown transforming into a werewolf whenever he was under Lugosi’s spell — and, interestingly, the transformations were actually more visually convincing than the ones Universal was putting Lon Chaney, Jr. through at the same time!) and interesting distaff performances from Frieda Inescort as the heroine and Nina Foch (her presence in a film like this is a distinct example of overqualification!) as her mother-in-law, who first slew Tesla (with the traditionally approved stake through the heart) in 1918 only to have him revived when his grave was blasted open in 1941 during a German air raid on London. (Since this was a wartime film, the link between the two world wars and the use of the Blitz as a backdrop gave it topicality.)
The Return of the Vampire also featured a musical score by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a man with a major reputation as a classical composer (though Charles was amused by the idea that anyone would be named “New Castle Germany”!) — it’s a marginally more complex score than the norm for one of these movies, though still pretty much your standard-issue horror-cliché music. In fact, that pretty much sums up this whole movie: a bit better than the B-horror average (with superb atmospheric photography by L. W. O’Connell and some nice moving-camera shots worked out by O’Connell and Landers) and welcome as one of Lugosi’s surprisingly few vampire roles on film (he made just five — Dracula, The Mark of the Vampire, Return of the Vampire, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire — and the last two, as their titles suggest, were comic spoofs of the horror genre). — 9/29/98
•••••
The Return of the Vampire is a 1943 film from Columbia (released and copyrighted on New Year’s Day, 1944) that starred Bela Lugosi in a story that was originally intended by its writers, Kurt Neumann (story) and Griffin Jay (script), as a direct sequel to Dracula. When the Universal legal department found out that Columbia was planning an unauthorized sequel to one of their most prestigious (and closely guarded) horror properties, they wrote a letter to Columbia threatening a plagiarism suit if the project continued. No problem; producer Sam White simply had Neumann and Jay change the names of their characters, so Lugosi’s role became “Dr. Armand Tesla” (the parallel to the real-life scientist Dr. Nikola Tesla, who in the latter part of his life devoted his considerable genius to trying to prove, scientifically, the existence of the supernatural was probably deliberate), a scientist who lived in Eastern Europe 200 years before and became so obsessed with vampires that he wrote a book about them (quoted extensively in the film) and ultimately became a vampire himself after his death — a gimmick Neumann and Jay may have ripped off Fred Myton’s script for PRC’s own Dracula knock-off, Dead Men Walk, the year before.
The film opens with a prologue set in 1918, the last year of World War I, in which Dr. Walter Saunders (Gilbert Emery, playing essentially the same role Edward Van Sloan had in the 1930 Universal Dracula) and his assistant, Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort, wearing a severe dark haircut that gives her a striking resemblance to Ayn Rand) run Tesla down to earth, trace him to his coffin and drive a stake through his heart. Tesla had a werewolf assistant, Andreas Obry (a rather miscast Matt Willis — he’s too ordinary a character-actor type to be credible as a being who undergoes a wrenching supernatural transformation under Tesla’s mind control), who’s sort of the Renfield of this story; over the next 22 years Ainsley works with him at the sanitarium she runs and eventually gets him to overcome his lycanthropic proclivities and achieve a productive career as her assistant. Flash-forward to 1940; by this time Dr. Saunders is dead but his granddaughter Nicki (Nina Foch) I dating Ainsley’s son John (Roland Varno), who gave up his career as an orchestra conductor to enlist in World War II but is returning to work since he was mustered out due to service-related injuries. Jane Ainsley’s friend Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander), commissioner of Scotland Yard, reads Dr. Saunders’ newly discovered manuscript telling how the two of them killed Tesla, and explains to Jane that if she drove a stake through the heart of a living human, she may be liable for murder charges.
Fleet says he’s going to get a court order to have Tesla’s body exhumed to see if he was still alive when the stake was driven through him, but before that can happen a German bombing raid strikes the graveyard where Tesla was buried and brings his corpse to light, whereupon two civil defense workers cleaning up the gravesite remove the stake (thinking it’s a bit of shrapnel lodged in Tesla’s corpse) and, of course, set the vampire free. From then on the film becomes a quest for revenge on Tesla’s part, following the familiar contours of the Dracula plot as he goes after the people he blames for the lost 22 years of his un-life, striking at Lady Jane by putting the bite on her son and his fiancée (he’d already attacked her when she was still a child during the prologue sequence). He also re-enslaves Andreas, turning him back into a werewolf (some imdb.com commentators objected to the fact that Andreas’ lycanthropy had nothing to do with the phases of the moon, but the writers here were clearly drawing on a different version of the werewolf legend in which it was the vampire’s will, not a full moon, that changed Andreas from man to wolf) and forcing him to run deadly errands for him — including carrying around a mysterious package — until the very end, when another opportune German bombing raid blasted open Tesla’s coffin during the daylight and thereby evaporated him. (One imdb.com commentator said this was the first time a vampire literally “disappeared” on screen, though I think Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr anticipated this scene.)
What’s frustrating about The Return of the Vampire is that it’s a movie with a lot of promise, and many things that do go right — the direction by the usually hacky Lew Landers (who’d worked with Lugosi before on the 1935 Universal film The Raven, with Boris Karloff) actually stages some scenes with effective Gothic atmosphere; there’s some good Caligari-esque stylization in the sets by Lionel Banks and Victor Greene (especially the exteriors); the bookending of the vampire’s tale by the two world wars and the direct use of the Blitz as a plot device quite cleverly rendered the story more topical than it would have been otherwise (though Neumann and Jay could have done more with the idea of a vampire dealing out death in a country under heavy bombing attack in which lots of people were dying for perfectly logical reasons — it would have been interesting to have Tesla’s attacks concealed by the death toll from the bomb raids, but that’s probably not a place American filmmakers wanted to go in a movie made while World War II was still going on and set in an allied country); and The Return of the Vampire appears to be the first horror movie ever made in which both a vampire and a werewolf appear on screen as characters. Universal wouldn’t do that until House of Frankenstein, released 11 months later; and in that regard this film anticipates not only the later films in the Universal Frankenstein cycle but the modern Underworld movies as well.
Where the film goes wrong is in giving us so little of Bela Lugosi — we don’t see him at all until 23 minutes into a 69-minute film (though we hear snatches of his voice before that) and he has probably less than 10 minutes of screen time all told; in Matt Willis’s risible appearance as the werewolf (with crudely jutting-out ears that might be closer to a real wolf’s ears than the ones on Jack Pierce’s werewolf makeup for Lon Chaney, Jr. at Universal, but help the makeup evoke laughs instead of fright); in the plodding writing and direction of the non-vampire scenes; and in Nina Foch’s surprisingly incompetent performance as Nicki. Though none of the Dracula films (or their knockoffs) have featured a performance by the actress playing the vampire’s main distaff victim anywhere near the quality Agnes Moorehead brought to this role in Orson Welles’ 1938 Dracula radio broadcast — with just her voice, she managed to capture the attraction as well as the repulsion of vampire-dom better than any actress on screen (though Louise Allbritton in Robert Siodmak’s near-masterpiece, Son of Dracula, from Universal in 1943, is quite good in a different conception of the character as someone actually attracted to vampirism by its promise of eternal life — a premise less Bram Stoker and more Anne Rice than we’re used to in a 1940’s movie) — Foch is so dull in her part that Helen Chandler in the 1930 Dracula looks like a great actress by comparison.
One of the biggest retrospective surprises of Bela Lugosi’s career is that, for all his identification with the role of Dracula both during his lifetime (he was regularly interrupting his film career to make money touring with the stage version) and since, he only played vampires five times — and only two of those films, Dracula and The Return of the Vampire, portrayed the character entirely seriously. The 1935 MGM film The Mark of the Vampire — directed by Tod Browning with far more energy and atmosphere than he’d brought to the Lugosi Dracula five years earlier — cheated at the end by having Lugosi’s character turn out to be, not a bona fide vampire, but an actor playing a vampire in a scheme by police chief Lionel Barrymore to trap a murderer into confessing; and Lugosi’s last two vampire movies, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), were out-and-out spoofs. (I’ve sometimes joked that it would be interesting to double-bill Universal’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man from 1943, in which Lugosi played the Monster, with Boris Karloff’s only vampire part, the 1964 Italian film Black Sabbath, just for the spectacle of the two greatest horror actors of the sound era each playing the role most associated with the other.) — 10/9/09
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
O’ Horten (Bulbul Films/Sony Pictures Classics, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film at the San Diego Public Library last night was O’ Horten (note the space between the apostrophe and the second word, though imdb.com lists O’Horten, without the space, as an alternate title for the U.S. and U.K.), a 2007 film by Norwegian director Bent Hamer, whom I was curious about because I’d seen a previous film of his, Factotum (2005), also at a library screening: an intriguing adaptation of a novel by Charles Bukowski starring a seedy, gravel-voiced Matt Dillon as Henry Chinaski, the central character Bukowski clearly based on himself. I didn’t care for Factotum but that was more because I found Bukowski’s story boring — judging from this, all Bukowski ever did was drink, fuck and write about drinking and fucking, and since I don’t drink and have a very different attitude towards sex than he does I couldn’t relate to the character.
I couldn’t relate to O’ Horten, either — I had a hard time staying awake through it and I never quite “got” the film, even though I can see why Hamer made it (he both wrote and directed). In some ways it’s an obvious “bookend” for Factotum — where the Bukowski movie was about a man who’s out of place in the world because of his total nonconformity and his resulting inability to keep one job for long, O’ Horten is about a man who’s suddenly turned out of his job after 40 years and finds himself out of place in the world because of his total conformity. The central character, Odd Horten (Bård Owe) is 67 years old and has just reached the mandatory retirement age and is forced to give up his beloved job as an engineer on the Norwegian railroad (the trains we actually see him driving are more like trolleys — they’re streamlined and powered by electric cables suspended above them — than what we usually think of as trains, even though they go long distances across the Norwegian countryside) with almost no idea what he’s going to do with himself from then on.
It doesn’t help that he seems to have had no life outside of work — the only relative we see is his mother (Anette Sagen); if he ever had a lover (of either gender!), a spouse or children, we don’t get to meet them — or that just about everyone he attempts to befriend, including Trygve Sissener (Espen Skjønberg), a man he literally picks up off the snow-drenched streets (we don’t ever get to forget this is all taking place in a cold Northern country!) and takes home, dies almost as soon as he’s got to know them. There are some marvelous visual scenes in O’ Horten — the opening showing his last run as an engineer, in which he has to keep his eyes open through drastic alternations of glaring white light reflecting off the snow and pitch-black darkness, broken only by a white circle of light at the front of the train, as it goes through tunnels; a scene ripped off of The Best Years of Our Lives in which Horten walks through a group of parked locomotives and sadly reminisces about his past; and a climax in which he hurls himself off a deserted ski jump (he has skis and goggles but no poles or any other equipment), we get a point-of-view shot of one of those irises of light at the end of a tunnel, and … at first we think he’s died but he later turns up in one piece, seemingly none the worse for wear (though my husband Charles pointed out that there’s no indication of how much time elapsed between the two scenes — he could have been in hospital for six months or a year recovering from his injuries after the jump).
It also has a lot of welcome indirection — Hamer keeps some of his climaxes tantalizingly off-screen and lets us fill in the gaps instead of thinking he has to show us everything — but it suffers from one of the most annoying flaws in a movie: Hamer can’t make up his mind whether he’s doing a drama or a comedy, and his attempts at both clash. When the film began my thought was, “O.K., it’s going to be Wild Strawberries with an engineer instead of a professor,” but then Hamer put Owe through some odd attempts at subtle slapstick (one imdb.com commentator compared him to Jacques Tati, another moviemaker I find rather overrated — especially compared to Buster Keaton, who pioneered the “great stone face” approach to comedy Tati copied and Owe seems to be drawing on here, and indeed Keaton’s most famous movie cast him as a railroad engineer), notably a bizarre scene in which Horten is supposed to meet a possible buyer for his boat (why he wants to sell his boat when he’s finally got enough time to enjoy it is a mystery Hamer never bothers to explain) at the airport, and he stumbles around until he ends up standing in the middle of a runway.
The pathos of a man turned out of the job that has defined him his entire adult life was better done way back in the silent era with F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), and O’ Horten comes off with that odd coldness I’ve seen in a lot of Scandinavian movies, a coldness in emotion to match the region’s quite visible coldness in temperature, which I noted most recently in the teenage vampire movie Let the Right One In. The region’s two best directors, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman, took that emotional chill and built a powerful aesthetic around it, but though he’s clearly a talented director Hamer is no Dreyer or Bergman.
The film at the San Diego Public Library last night was O’ Horten (note the space between the apostrophe and the second word, though imdb.com lists O’Horten, without the space, as an alternate title for the U.S. and U.K.), a 2007 film by Norwegian director Bent Hamer, whom I was curious about because I’d seen a previous film of his, Factotum (2005), also at a library screening: an intriguing adaptation of a novel by Charles Bukowski starring a seedy, gravel-voiced Matt Dillon as Henry Chinaski, the central character Bukowski clearly based on himself. I didn’t care for Factotum but that was more because I found Bukowski’s story boring — judging from this, all Bukowski ever did was drink, fuck and write about drinking and fucking, and since I don’t drink and have a very different attitude towards sex than he does I couldn’t relate to the character.
I couldn’t relate to O’ Horten, either — I had a hard time staying awake through it and I never quite “got” the film, even though I can see why Hamer made it (he both wrote and directed). In some ways it’s an obvious “bookend” for Factotum — where the Bukowski movie was about a man who’s out of place in the world because of his total nonconformity and his resulting inability to keep one job for long, O’ Horten is about a man who’s suddenly turned out of his job after 40 years and finds himself out of place in the world because of his total conformity. The central character, Odd Horten (Bård Owe) is 67 years old and has just reached the mandatory retirement age and is forced to give up his beloved job as an engineer on the Norwegian railroad (the trains we actually see him driving are more like trolleys — they’re streamlined and powered by electric cables suspended above them — than what we usually think of as trains, even though they go long distances across the Norwegian countryside) with almost no idea what he’s going to do with himself from then on.
It doesn’t help that he seems to have had no life outside of work — the only relative we see is his mother (Anette Sagen); if he ever had a lover (of either gender!), a spouse or children, we don’t get to meet them — or that just about everyone he attempts to befriend, including Trygve Sissener (Espen Skjønberg), a man he literally picks up off the snow-drenched streets (we don’t ever get to forget this is all taking place in a cold Northern country!) and takes home, dies almost as soon as he’s got to know them. There are some marvelous visual scenes in O’ Horten — the opening showing his last run as an engineer, in which he has to keep his eyes open through drastic alternations of glaring white light reflecting off the snow and pitch-black darkness, broken only by a white circle of light at the front of the train, as it goes through tunnels; a scene ripped off of The Best Years of Our Lives in which Horten walks through a group of parked locomotives and sadly reminisces about his past; and a climax in which he hurls himself off a deserted ski jump (he has skis and goggles but no poles or any other equipment), we get a point-of-view shot of one of those irises of light at the end of a tunnel, and … at first we think he’s died but he later turns up in one piece, seemingly none the worse for wear (though my husband Charles pointed out that there’s no indication of how much time elapsed between the two scenes — he could have been in hospital for six months or a year recovering from his injuries after the jump).
It also has a lot of welcome indirection — Hamer keeps some of his climaxes tantalizingly off-screen and lets us fill in the gaps instead of thinking he has to show us everything — but it suffers from one of the most annoying flaws in a movie: Hamer can’t make up his mind whether he’s doing a drama or a comedy, and his attempts at both clash. When the film began my thought was, “O.K., it’s going to be Wild Strawberries with an engineer instead of a professor,” but then Hamer put Owe through some odd attempts at subtle slapstick (one imdb.com commentator compared him to Jacques Tati, another moviemaker I find rather overrated — especially compared to Buster Keaton, who pioneered the “great stone face” approach to comedy Tati copied and Owe seems to be drawing on here, and indeed Keaton’s most famous movie cast him as a railroad engineer), notably a bizarre scene in which Horten is supposed to meet a possible buyer for his boat (why he wants to sell his boat when he’s finally got enough time to enjoy it is a mystery Hamer never bothers to explain) at the airport, and he stumbles around until he ends up standing in the middle of a runway.
The pathos of a man turned out of the job that has defined him his entire adult life was better done way back in the silent era with F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), and O’ Horten comes off with that odd coldness I’ve seen in a lot of Scandinavian movies, a coldness in emotion to match the region’s quite visible coldness in temperature, which I noted most recently in the teenage vampire movie Let the Right One In. The region’s two best directors, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman, took that emotional chill and built a powerful aesthetic around it, but though he’s clearly a talented director Hamer is no Dreyer or Bergman.
Shack Out on 101 (Allied Artists, 1955)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the coldness of O’ Horten, we ended up with a film that if anything had just the opposite problem: the plot, situations and emotions all seemed stuck at 11 or above. It was a late-breaking entry in the brief cycle of anti-Communist films with which Hollywood tried to appease the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950’s: Shack Out on 101 (originally called Shack Up on 101 until its star, Terry Moore, objected to the sexual implications of that title), produced by Allied Artists née Monogram in 1955 on a dirt-cheap Monogram budget and taking place almost entirely in one set: a cheap diner on highway 101 (hence the title) lodged on a cliff above a beach and fortuitously located near a super-sensitive nuclear weapons laboratory.
For about the first three reels it just seems like a bad romantic melodrama in which Kotty (Terry Moore) labors at a waitress at the diner, ignores her boss George’s (Keenan Wynn) unrequited love for her, fends off the animalistic advances of cook “Slob” (no other name) — played by a thin, gangly and almost unrecognizably young Lee Marvin, whose presence is probably the only factor that has kept this film in any kind of circulation over the years; the opening scene, in which Kotty is sunbathing and “Slob” attempts to re-enact the famous Burt Lancaster-Deborah Kerr tryst on the beach from From Here to Eternity, only to have her fight him off, and he gets his revenge by ruining one of her petticoats with sand, is one of the most quirkily delightful parts of this film — and is dating Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), a professor at the lab who’s coaching her on the basics of American democracy so she can take the federal civil service examination and not have to be a waitress all her life.
The film was clearly intended as Terry Moore’s attempt to coarsen her image and prove she could play a sleazy part as well as she could be the nice little girl who played “Beautiful Dreamer” in the giant ape’s paw in Mighty Joe Young. She tries her damnedest, with a push-up bra to make her look more “stacked” than she really was, breathy Monroe-esque intonations and jazz music every time she appears (the score by Paul Dunlap is one of the best parts of the movie, with solos good enough I wondered if some of L.A.’s top jazz musicians were picking up some extra income recording the music for this film), but her basic decency as a “type” still shines through. Then the real plot of this film comes to light when a mystery delivery person comes to the diner with a shipment of frozen fish (itself a surprise because before that we’ve had no intimation that they have anything other than hamburger, cherry pie and coffee on their menu) and “Slob” extracts a roll of something sinister-looking from it that turns out to be microfilm containing what looks like an important nuclear secret (the pi symbol appears on it a lot and it was probably just some joker in the Allied Artists’ prop department’s idea of what looked like a nuclear equation; “It’s actually his recipe for doughnut batter,” I joked).
Later Kotty overhears “Slob,” Professor Bastion and a third person talking about making money selling nuclear secrets to the usual unnamed foreign power, and instead of doing what any sensible person would do — namely, leaving the diner and phoning the police — she twice confronts the miscreants, first “Slob” and then the professor, directly to their faces. Later the third conspirator is killed, and at the end it turns out that the two truckdrivers who were hanging out at the diner, supposedly for food and their own chance to make unwanted passes at Kotty, are really federal agents, and Professor Bastion isn’t a traitor after all; he’s merely posing as one to worm his way into the espionage ring and find the identity of the mysterious “Mr. Gregory” who runs it from afar. In the end, the bad guys get arrested and Bastion and Kotty get together, of course.
Shack Out on 101 is the sort of bad movie that could have been good with a more thoughtful script and one that took us out of the diner more often; it was directed by Edward Dein (whom I’ve previously pointed out had almost the same name as Ed Gein, the real-life serial killer who was supposedly the model for Norman Bates in Psycho) from a script he co-wrote with his wife Mildred. It’s not a badly made movie — Floyd Crosby is the cinematographer (which means it’s considerably more atmospheric visually than the 1950’s “B” norm) and director Dein seems to have clues about how to build suspense, but the rather silly script, full of plot holes he and Mrs. Dein never bothered to fill in, defeats him and so does his cast. It’s obvious why Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn had longer and more prestigious careers than anyone else in the cast — they’re better actors than anyone else in the cast — certainly better than the leads; Moore tries to play a bad girl but both the script and her acting keep her a good girl at heart, and Lovejoy — who’d already done the undercover bit in I Was a Communist for the FBI four years earlier — is a bland screen presence, capable for supporting roles in gangster movies but simply underqualified for a romantic lead.
After the coldness of O’ Horten, we ended up with a film that if anything had just the opposite problem: the plot, situations and emotions all seemed stuck at 11 or above. It was a late-breaking entry in the brief cycle of anti-Communist films with which Hollywood tried to appease the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950’s: Shack Out on 101 (originally called Shack Up on 101 until its star, Terry Moore, objected to the sexual implications of that title), produced by Allied Artists née Monogram in 1955 on a dirt-cheap Monogram budget and taking place almost entirely in one set: a cheap diner on highway 101 (hence the title) lodged on a cliff above a beach and fortuitously located near a super-sensitive nuclear weapons laboratory.
For about the first three reels it just seems like a bad romantic melodrama in which Kotty (Terry Moore) labors at a waitress at the diner, ignores her boss George’s (Keenan Wynn) unrequited love for her, fends off the animalistic advances of cook “Slob” (no other name) — played by a thin, gangly and almost unrecognizably young Lee Marvin, whose presence is probably the only factor that has kept this film in any kind of circulation over the years; the opening scene, in which Kotty is sunbathing and “Slob” attempts to re-enact the famous Burt Lancaster-Deborah Kerr tryst on the beach from From Here to Eternity, only to have her fight him off, and he gets his revenge by ruining one of her petticoats with sand, is one of the most quirkily delightful parts of this film — and is dating Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), a professor at the lab who’s coaching her on the basics of American democracy so she can take the federal civil service examination and not have to be a waitress all her life.
The film was clearly intended as Terry Moore’s attempt to coarsen her image and prove she could play a sleazy part as well as she could be the nice little girl who played “Beautiful Dreamer” in the giant ape’s paw in Mighty Joe Young. She tries her damnedest, with a push-up bra to make her look more “stacked” than she really was, breathy Monroe-esque intonations and jazz music every time she appears (the score by Paul Dunlap is one of the best parts of the movie, with solos good enough I wondered if some of L.A.’s top jazz musicians were picking up some extra income recording the music for this film), but her basic decency as a “type” still shines through. Then the real plot of this film comes to light when a mystery delivery person comes to the diner with a shipment of frozen fish (itself a surprise because before that we’ve had no intimation that they have anything other than hamburger, cherry pie and coffee on their menu) and “Slob” extracts a roll of something sinister-looking from it that turns out to be microfilm containing what looks like an important nuclear secret (the pi symbol appears on it a lot and it was probably just some joker in the Allied Artists’ prop department’s idea of what looked like a nuclear equation; “It’s actually his recipe for doughnut batter,” I joked).
Later Kotty overhears “Slob,” Professor Bastion and a third person talking about making money selling nuclear secrets to the usual unnamed foreign power, and instead of doing what any sensible person would do — namely, leaving the diner and phoning the police — she twice confronts the miscreants, first “Slob” and then the professor, directly to their faces. Later the third conspirator is killed, and at the end it turns out that the two truckdrivers who were hanging out at the diner, supposedly for food and their own chance to make unwanted passes at Kotty, are really federal agents, and Professor Bastion isn’t a traitor after all; he’s merely posing as one to worm his way into the espionage ring and find the identity of the mysterious “Mr. Gregory” who runs it from afar. In the end, the bad guys get arrested and Bastion and Kotty get together, of course.
Shack Out on 101 is the sort of bad movie that could have been good with a more thoughtful script and one that took us out of the diner more often; it was directed by Edward Dein (whom I’ve previously pointed out had almost the same name as Ed Gein, the real-life serial killer who was supposedly the model for Norman Bates in Psycho) from a script he co-wrote with his wife Mildred. It’s not a badly made movie — Floyd Crosby is the cinematographer (which means it’s considerably more atmospheric visually than the 1950’s “B” norm) and director Dein seems to have clues about how to build suspense, but the rather silly script, full of plot holes he and Mrs. Dein never bothered to fill in, defeats him and so does his cast. It’s obvious why Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn had longer and more prestigious careers than anyone else in the cast — they’re better actors than anyone else in the cast — certainly better than the leads; Moore tries to play a bad girl but both the script and her acting keep her a good girl at heart, and Lovejoy — who’d already done the undercover bit in I Was a Communist for the FBI four years earlier — is a bland screen presence, capable for supporting roles in gangster movies but simply underqualified for a romantic lead.
Monday, October 5, 2009
I Shot Jesse James (Lippert, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was I Shot Jesse James, a 1949 Western from Lippert Pictures that marked the directorial debut of Samuel Fuller, who also wrote the story and screenplay (with credited inspiration from an American Weekly article by Homer Croy and uncredited help from Robert Gardner). According to TCM host Robert Osborne’s introduction, Fuller wanted to make this film because he wanted to explore why a man would murder his friend. He originally planned to make the story of Julius Caesar, but couldn’t get any studio to back him. He got a nibble from sub-“B” producer Robert Lippert, who liked the idea of a film about a man who murders his best friend but blanched at the cost of duplicating ancient Rome. Fuller counter-offered a film about Jesse James and Robert Ford, and Lippert bit.
The result was a tough, no-nonsense movie that already established Fuller as a major director, despite some wince-inducing bits of clunky dialogue and awkward situations. An imdb.com commentator quotes Fuller as saying he hated Jesse James — which it’s easy to do; in his previous incarnation as a guerrilla with Quantrill’s Raiders, an irregular force of what would now be called “enemy combatants” for the Confederacy in 1862, he had hijacked a train containing wounded Union soldiers and shot them all — and thought Ford’s action in killing him entirely justified, but that’s not readily apparent in the film itself. (If he wanted to explode the myth of Jesse James the American Robin Hood, he should have made a film about him, rather than making his killer the central character and killing James off in the first 15 minutes.)
The film takes a highly ambiguous moral view of both James (Reed Hadley) and Ford (John Ireland), who kills James because the governor of Missouri has offered a full pardon and a $5,000 reward, which Ford hopes to use to get out of the outlaw life, buy a farm and marry his girlfriend, actress Cynthy Waters (played by Barbara Britton in a marvelously hard-boiled way that adds to this film’s appeal). Once Ford gets the idea to kill Jesse James, he goes about it in an almost comical way that makes one wonder if Fuller was inspired by Chaplin’s marvelous attempts to kill Martha Raye in Monsieur Verdoux — including one bizarrely homoerotic scene in James’s bathtub into which Ford has just emptied two buckets of hot water (how you had to take a warm bath in the days before running water and hot-water heaters).Ford unwraps a gun — a present from Jesse — from a towel at the foot of the tub, and is about to use it on Jesse’s back. “Go ahead and use it,” Jesse says — and just when we’re wondering if the famous outlaw has eyes in the back of his head, Jesse says, “Yeah, the brush. Scrub my back,” which Ford does. Finally Ford shoots Jesse in the back while Jesse is arranging a crooked picture on the wall (a glitch in Fuller’s editing shows the painting slanting down when Jesse first approaches it; with a change in angle the picture is now slanting up, and afterwards Fuller cuts back to his first angle and it slants down again) — a picture of an elderly woman we presume is James’s mother — and James dies without so much as an “Et tu, Robert?”
From then on Robert Ford is reviled throughout Missouri, not only by the townspeople for whom Jesse James had become a folk hero but even by the authorities — they give him the pardon but, saying they wanted James either taken alive or killed in a fair fight rather than assassinated, they only give him $500 and they hurl the bills at him (the connection with Jesus, Judas and the thirty pieces of silver is subtle but unmistakable) — and by Cynthy, who’s as repelled by her former boyfriend as anybody else in the movie. Ford can’t even go into a saloon without being reminded of it when he buys a drink for a traveling musician in exchange for a song — and the musician (Robin Short), who’s listed only as “Troubadour” in the cast list but is obviously supposed to be the real-life Billy Gashade, naturally plays Gashade’s “Ballad of Jesse James,” the famous (and still heard) song that denounces Ford as a “dirty little coward” for having shot James in the back. At one point Ford gets shot at, and he turns around and realizes his assailant is a teenage boy who wants to make his own reputation as a gunslinger by knocking off the man who killed Jesse James — anticipating the plot premise of Henry King’s The Gunfighter by a year. He’s also signed to play himself in a re-enactment of the James killing, only he walks off in mid-performance, apparently having finally realized himself what a horrible thing he did even if Jesse arguably deserved death for his crimes.
Eventually Ford gets caught up in the Colorado silver rush of the 1880’s and moves to the boom town of Creede — as do all the other surviving principals, including Cynthy; her boss, Harry Kane (J. Edward Bromberg), who’s arrived to produce his play in the town; and John Kelley (Preston Foster, top-billed), the poor but decent sort Cynthy took up with after she broke up with Bob. Kelley gets an offer to be the marshal of Creede; Ford saves prospector Soapy Sullivan (Victor Kilian) from a couple of swindlers who try to rob him of his claim while he’s drunk, and the two of them become partners and get rich. With his new-found fortune, Ford proposes to Cynthy — and she accepts less out of interest than fear, afraid he’ll kill her if she turns him down. In the end Jesse’s brother Frank (former Western and horror star Tom Tyler) comes to town intent on killing Ford to avenge Jesse; Ford confronts Kane in the streets of Creede; Kane dares Ford to shoot him in the back but Ford won’t; and eventually Kane turns around and shoots the gun out of Ford’s hand, which allows Frank James to kill him on the spot.
I Shot Jesse James is a surprisingly powerful movie, a triumph of a great director over a mediocre (except for Britton) cast; like the lead role in E. A. Dupont’s The Scarf two years later, the part of Robert Ford cries out for Montgomery Clift and gets John Ireland. At least Fuller gets some animation out of Preston Foster, who seemed to be sleep-walking his way through all too many otherwise interesting films at RKO in the 1930’s — even though his role here probably seemed like dèja vu after The Informer, in which Foster had likewise played a man who has to punish someone he knows well for killing a friend. But Reed Hadley as Jesse James is ludicrously incompetent — hardly likely to make anyone forget the screen’s best-known Jesse James, Tyrone Power — and Tommy Noonan (later Judy Garland’s piano player and confidant in the 1954 A Star Is Born) seems barely out of grade school as Ford’s brother Charlie. Later in his career Fuller would get better at finding unknown but first-rate actors willing to work for the sums he and his producers could afford to pay them, but even so I Shot Jesse James remains a powerful film that showed how well Fuller could direct and in particular how well he could combine moral ambiguity and exciting action in the same movie.
The film was I Shot Jesse James, a 1949 Western from Lippert Pictures that marked the directorial debut of Samuel Fuller, who also wrote the story and screenplay (with credited inspiration from an American Weekly article by Homer Croy and uncredited help from Robert Gardner). According to TCM host Robert Osborne’s introduction, Fuller wanted to make this film because he wanted to explore why a man would murder his friend. He originally planned to make the story of Julius Caesar, but couldn’t get any studio to back him. He got a nibble from sub-“B” producer Robert Lippert, who liked the idea of a film about a man who murders his best friend but blanched at the cost of duplicating ancient Rome. Fuller counter-offered a film about Jesse James and Robert Ford, and Lippert bit.
The result was a tough, no-nonsense movie that already established Fuller as a major director, despite some wince-inducing bits of clunky dialogue and awkward situations. An imdb.com commentator quotes Fuller as saying he hated Jesse James — which it’s easy to do; in his previous incarnation as a guerrilla with Quantrill’s Raiders, an irregular force of what would now be called “enemy combatants” for the Confederacy in 1862, he had hijacked a train containing wounded Union soldiers and shot them all — and thought Ford’s action in killing him entirely justified, but that’s not readily apparent in the film itself. (If he wanted to explode the myth of Jesse James the American Robin Hood, he should have made a film about him, rather than making his killer the central character and killing James off in the first 15 minutes.)
The film takes a highly ambiguous moral view of both James (Reed Hadley) and Ford (John Ireland), who kills James because the governor of Missouri has offered a full pardon and a $5,000 reward, which Ford hopes to use to get out of the outlaw life, buy a farm and marry his girlfriend, actress Cynthy Waters (played by Barbara Britton in a marvelously hard-boiled way that adds to this film’s appeal). Once Ford gets the idea to kill Jesse James, he goes about it in an almost comical way that makes one wonder if Fuller was inspired by Chaplin’s marvelous attempts to kill Martha Raye in Monsieur Verdoux — including one bizarrely homoerotic scene in James’s bathtub into which Ford has just emptied two buckets of hot water (how you had to take a warm bath in the days before running water and hot-water heaters).Ford unwraps a gun — a present from Jesse — from a towel at the foot of the tub, and is about to use it on Jesse’s back. “Go ahead and use it,” Jesse says — and just when we’re wondering if the famous outlaw has eyes in the back of his head, Jesse says, “Yeah, the brush. Scrub my back,” which Ford does. Finally Ford shoots Jesse in the back while Jesse is arranging a crooked picture on the wall (a glitch in Fuller’s editing shows the painting slanting down when Jesse first approaches it; with a change in angle the picture is now slanting up, and afterwards Fuller cuts back to his first angle and it slants down again) — a picture of an elderly woman we presume is James’s mother — and James dies without so much as an “Et tu, Robert?”
From then on Robert Ford is reviled throughout Missouri, not only by the townspeople for whom Jesse James had become a folk hero but even by the authorities — they give him the pardon but, saying they wanted James either taken alive or killed in a fair fight rather than assassinated, they only give him $500 and they hurl the bills at him (the connection with Jesus, Judas and the thirty pieces of silver is subtle but unmistakable) — and by Cynthy, who’s as repelled by her former boyfriend as anybody else in the movie. Ford can’t even go into a saloon without being reminded of it when he buys a drink for a traveling musician in exchange for a song — and the musician (Robin Short), who’s listed only as “Troubadour” in the cast list but is obviously supposed to be the real-life Billy Gashade, naturally plays Gashade’s “Ballad of Jesse James,” the famous (and still heard) song that denounces Ford as a “dirty little coward” for having shot James in the back. At one point Ford gets shot at, and he turns around and realizes his assailant is a teenage boy who wants to make his own reputation as a gunslinger by knocking off the man who killed Jesse James — anticipating the plot premise of Henry King’s The Gunfighter by a year. He’s also signed to play himself in a re-enactment of the James killing, only he walks off in mid-performance, apparently having finally realized himself what a horrible thing he did even if Jesse arguably deserved death for his crimes.
Eventually Ford gets caught up in the Colorado silver rush of the 1880’s and moves to the boom town of Creede — as do all the other surviving principals, including Cynthy; her boss, Harry Kane (J. Edward Bromberg), who’s arrived to produce his play in the town; and John Kelley (Preston Foster, top-billed), the poor but decent sort Cynthy took up with after she broke up with Bob. Kelley gets an offer to be the marshal of Creede; Ford saves prospector Soapy Sullivan (Victor Kilian) from a couple of swindlers who try to rob him of his claim while he’s drunk, and the two of them become partners and get rich. With his new-found fortune, Ford proposes to Cynthy — and she accepts less out of interest than fear, afraid he’ll kill her if she turns him down. In the end Jesse’s brother Frank (former Western and horror star Tom Tyler) comes to town intent on killing Ford to avenge Jesse; Ford confronts Kane in the streets of Creede; Kane dares Ford to shoot him in the back but Ford won’t; and eventually Kane turns around and shoots the gun out of Ford’s hand, which allows Frank James to kill him on the spot.
I Shot Jesse James is a surprisingly powerful movie, a triumph of a great director over a mediocre (except for Britton) cast; like the lead role in E. A. Dupont’s The Scarf two years later, the part of Robert Ford cries out for Montgomery Clift and gets John Ireland. At least Fuller gets some animation out of Preston Foster, who seemed to be sleep-walking his way through all too many otherwise interesting films at RKO in the 1930’s — even though his role here probably seemed like dèja vu after The Informer, in which Foster had likewise played a man who has to punish someone he knows well for killing a friend. But Reed Hadley as Jesse James is ludicrously incompetent — hardly likely to make anyone forget the screen’s best-known Jesse James, Tyrone Power — and Tommy Noonan (later Judy Garland’s piano player and confidant in the 1954 A Star Is Born) seems barely out of grade school as Ford’s brother Charlie. Later in his career Fuller would get better at finding unknown but first-rate actors willing to work for the sums he and his producers could afford to pay them, but even so I Shot Jesse James remains a powerful film that showed how well Fuller could direct and in particular how well he could combine moral ambiguity and exciting action in the same movie.
Outside the Law (Universal, 1920)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a movie I’d downloaded off archive.org: Outside the Law, a 1920 silent and the first of three versions Universal produced based on an original story by Tod Browning, who directed both this one and the first (1930) remake. Outside the Law is of interest mostly as an early vehicle for Lon Chaney, Sr. — one year after his star-making role in Paramount’s 1919 The Miracle Man (a film that is lost in toto, but Chaney’s most famous scene — in which he works for a fake faith healer and poses as a cripple, then straightens himself out again to pass it off as a miracle healing by his employer — exists because it was extracted and used in a 1930’s compilation film) — and, being Lon Chaney, he plays two parts.
Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown (courtesy of some quite impressive sets at Universal City), the film opens in the elaborate home/store live/work space of Chinese merchant Chang Lo (E. Alyn Warren), who is quoting the saying of Confucius that a society with the right set of laws would find it possible to reform human beings so there would be no crime and no need for the death penalty. He’s saying this at a dinner party where he’s hosting the city’s former vice king, Stanley Madden (Ralph Lewis), whom he’s persuaded to reform and go straight; and Madden’s daughter Molly (Priscilla Dean, top-billed). The dinner is being served by Chang Lo’s Chinese manservant, Ah Wing (Lon Chaney, in some not especially credible “Asian” makeup — his skills as a makeup artist would improve, as would his skills as an actor), who seems skeptical about his boss’s plans for social uplift but lets them pass.
Then we cut to another sequence in which gangster “Black Mike” Silva (Lon Chaney) and his sidekicks, Dapper Bill Ballard (Wheeler Oakman) and Humpy (John George), are plotting to stage a riot in Chinatown and use it to frame Stanley Madden for murder. The riot happens, a policeman is killed, and law enforcement is unable to win a murder conviction against Madden but he gets eight months in prison on a lesser charge — and Chang Lo predicts that he will come back with “murder in his heart” and try to kill the person or persons who framed him. Then Black Mike plans another job, the robbery of the Spencer jewel collection, this time intending to recruit Molly Madden to participate and frame her (exactly what he’s got against the Madden family is never made clear, but it’s obviously significant) — only Bill, who’s assigned to seduce Molly and get her to participate, instead falls genuinely in love with her and tries to get her to back out of the deal. Instead she insists on participating in the crime, working out a way to commit it without involving Black Mike and thereby avoiding his trap.
The robbery works, only since they’re wanted by the police and they have to worry about Black Mike confronting them as well, they end up spending the next six months holed up in an apartment on Nob Hill (called “Knob Hill” in the titles) — and these scenes are actually the most powerful parts of the movie: the relationship between Bill and Molly is a weird combination of love, attraction and frustration, not only because they can’t have sex with each other (not with the state censor boards looking askance at such relationships even in this genuinely “pre-Code” era!) but because they literally can’t leave: their only contacts with the outside world are regular deliveries from the grocery (though how they pay for them remains a mystery, since they haven’t been able to liquidate the jewels and they have no other apparent source of cash, legal or otherwise) and visits from a neighbor kid (Stanley Goethals, who grew up to be a literature professor and an expert on Hemingway who wrote the Cliff’s Notes summary of For Whom the Bell Tolls) who turns out to be the son of a police detective living in the same building. (We keep seeing this kid and wondering where his parents are, and eventually his mom turns up — we never see his dad but she tells Bill and Molly what her husband does for a living.)
Meanwhile, Chang Lo arranges with the police detective investigating the Spencer robbery and with the Spencer family not to prosecute if the culprits voluntarily return the jewels — which Bill is actually eager to do anyway, though it takes him time to talk Molly into it. Black Mike finally tracks them down and shows up, naturally wanting the jewels for himself, and eventually there’s a showdown which takes the principals back to Chang Lo’s house — the shootout is rather jumpy, though that may be an indication of the fragmentary form in which this film survived; and I was rather hoping that Ah Wing would get to kill Black Mike if only for the rather trippy experience of seeing Lon Chaney shoot Lon Chaney. Eventually the bad guys die, the good guys get their amnesty and there’s a tag scene with Chang Lo that ends abruptly, probably because some closing footage is still missing.
Outside the Law as presented here had bits and pieces of symphonic music which faded in and out — long stretches of the film unreeled in total silence — and was mostly surprisingly well preserved for a public-domain silent, but there were patches of severe nitrate deterioration in which the image faded almost to pure white. (There’s an “official” edition from Kino that may be superior, or may not — apparently the one surviving print was found in a farmhouse by one Miss Bishman, whose mother had stashed a print after a “traveling man” had left it behind without ever calling for it again, so I’m not sure if a better source for this film even exists.) Outside the Law is historically important as an early Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaboration (frankly, their films together are generally the best in either man’s career — though Chaney’s two most famous films, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, were with other directors) but it’s also quite a good movie in its own right, especially those marvelously claustrophobic sequences in which the two lovebird crooks are hiding out together and the whole situation is getting on their nerves; at one point Bill compares it to being in prison, except that at least when you’re in prison you know when you’re going to get out again! And the movie holds up well in spite of a not terribly distinguished cast; Priscilla Dean overacts in the worst tradition of silent film stars, especially female ones (the part deserved the relative understatement of Gloria Swanson) and everybody — even Chaney, who got to be a more subtle and restrained actor later — leaves deep bite marks in the scenery.
Universal remade Outside the Law twice in the sound era, once in 1930 with Browning directing again, this time eliminating the whole Chinese aspect of the plot, with pre-Little Caesar Edward G. Robinson in the (Anglo) Chaney role of the criminal mastermind; and again in 1946 under the title Inside Job, with the story remodeled into a tale of a nice young couple, both of whom work in the same department store and are blackmailed into robbing it by a crook who knows of the woman’s previous criminal record. Both of those would probably be fun, and Browning’s own remake would undoubtedly be worth seeing even though Chaney’s performance in the 1920 version seems closer to James Cagney than Edward G. Robinson — Chaney even says “You dirty rat!” in one title — launching the interesting connection between those two actors that continued when Chaney anticipated Cagney’s snarling line delivery in his one talkie, the 1930 version of The Unholy Three, and concluded when Cagney played Chaney in the 1957 biopic The Man of a Thousand Faces.
I ran Charles a movie I’d downloaded off archive.org: Outside the Law, a 1920 silent and the first of three versions Universal produced based on an original story by Tod Browning, who directed both this one and the first (1930) remake. Outside the Law is of interest mostly as an early vehicle for Lon Chaney, Sr. — one year after his star-making role in Paramount’s 1919 The Miracle Man (a film that is lost in toto, but Chaney’s most famous scene — in which he works for a fake faith healer and poses as a cripple, then straightens himself out again to pass it off as a miracle healing by his employer — exists because it was extracted and used in a 1930’s compilation film) — and, being Lon Chaney, he plays two parts.
Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown (courtesy of some quite impressive sets at Universal City), the film opens in the elaborate home/store live/work space of Chinese merchant Chang Lo (E. Alyn Warren), who is quoting the saying of Confucius that a society with the right set of laws would find it possible to reform human beings so there would be no crime and no need for the death penalty. He’s saying this at a dinner party where he’s hosting the city’s former vice king, Stanley Madden (Ralph Lewis), whom he’s persuaded to reform and go straight; and Madden’s daughter Molly (Priscilla Dean, top-billed). The dinner is being served by Chang Lo’s Chinese manservant, Ah Wing (Lon Chaney, in some not especially credible “Asian” makeup — his skills as a makeup artist would improve, as would his skills as an actor), who seems skeptical about his boss’s plans for social uplift but lets them pass.
Then we cut to another sequence in which gangster “Black Mike” Silva (Lon Chaney) and his sidekicks, Dapper Bill Ballard (Wheeler Oakman) and Humpy (John George), are plotting to stage a riot in Chinatown and use it to frame Stanley Madden for murder. The riot happens, a policeman is killed, and law enforcement is unable to win a murder conviction against Madden but he gets eight months in prison on a lesser charge — and Chang Lo predicts that he will come back with “murder in his heart” and try to kill the person or persons who framed him. Then Black Mike plans another job, the robbery of the Spencer jewel collection, this time intending to recruit Molly Madden to participate and frame her (exactly what he’s got against the Madden family is never made clear, but it’s obviously significant) — only Bill, who’s assigned to seduce Molly and get her to participate, instead falls genuinely in love with her and tries to get her to back out of the deal. Instead she insists on participating in the crime, working out a way to commit it without involving Black Mike and thereby avoiding his trap.
The robbery works, only since they’re wanted by the police and they have to worry about Black Mike confronting them as well, they end up spending the next six months holed up in an apartment on Nob Hill (called “Knob Hill” in the titles) — and these scenes are actually the most powerful parts of the movie: the relationship between Bill and Molly is a weird combination of love, attraction and frustration, not only because they can’t have sex with each other (not with the state censor boards looking askance at such relationships even in this genuinely “pre-Code” era!) but because they literally can’t leave: their only contacts with the outside world are regular deliveries from the grocery (though how they pay for them remains a mystery, since they haven’t been able to liquidate the jewels and they have no other apparent source of cash, legal or otherwise) and visits from a neighbor kid (Stanley Goethals, who grew up to be a literature professor and an expert on Hemingway who wrote the Cliff’s Notes summary of For Whom the Bell Tolls) who turns out to be the son of a police detective living in the same building. (We keep seeing this kid and wondering where his parents are, and eventually his mom turns up — we never see his dad but she tells Bill and Molly what her husband does for a living.)
Meanwhile, Chang Lo arranges with the police detective investigating the Spencer robbery and with the Spencer family not to prosecute if the culprits voluntarily return the jewels — which Bill is actually eager to do anyway, though it takes him time to talk Molly into it. Black Mike finally tracks them down and shows up, naturally wanting the jewels for himself, and eventually there’s a showdown which takes the principals back to Chang Lo’s house — the shootout is rather jumpy, though that may be an indication of the fragmentary form in which this film survived; and I was rather hoping that Ah Wing would get to kill Black Mike if only for the rather trippy experience of seeing Lon Chaney shoot Lon Chaney. Eventually the bad guys die, the good guys get their amnesty and there’s a tag scene with Chang Lo that ends abruptly, probably because some closing footage is still missing.
Outside the Law as presented here had bits and pieces of symphonic music which faded in and out — long stretches of the film unreeled in total silence — and was mostly surprisingly well preserved for a public-domain silent, but there were patches of severe nitrate deterioration in which the image faded almost to pure white. (There’s an “official” edition from Kino that may be superior, or may not — apparently the one surviving print was found in a farmhouse by one Miss Bishman, whose mother had stashed a print after a “traveling man” had left it behind without ever calling for it again, so I’m not sure if a better source for this film even exists.) Outside the Law is historically important as an early Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaboration (frankly, their films together are generally the best in either man’s career — though Chaney’s two most famous films, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, were with other directors) but it’s also quite a good movie in its own right, especially those marvelously claustrophobic sequences in which the two lovebird crooks are hiding out together and the whole situation is getting on their nerves; at one point Bill compares it to being in prison, except that at least when you’re in prison you know when you’re going to get out again! And the movie holds up well in spite of a not terribly distinguished cast; Priscilla Dean overacts in the worst tradition of silent film stars, especially female ones (the part deserved the relative understatement of Gloria Swanson) and everybody — even Chaney, who got to be a more subtle and restrained actor later — leaves deep bite marks in the scenery.
Universal remade Outside the Law twice in the sound era, once in 1930 with Browning directing again, this time eliminating the whole Chinese aspect of the plot, with pre-Little Caesar Edward G. Robinson in the (Anglo) Chaney role of the criminal mastermind; and again in 1946 under the title Inside Job, with the story remodeled into a tale of a nice young couple, both of whom work in the same department store and are blackmailed into robbing it by a crook who knows of the woman’s previous criminal record. Both of those would probably be fun, and Browning’s own remake would undoubtedly be worth seeing even though Chaney’s performance in the 1920 version seems closer to James Cagney than Edward G. Robinson — Chaney even says “You dirty rat!” in one title — launching the interesting connection between those two actors that continued when Chaney anticipated Cagney’s snarling line delivery in his one talkie, the 1930 version of The Unholy Three, and concluded when Cagney played Chaney in the 1957 biopic The Man of a Thousand Faces.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
The King Murder (Chesterfield, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a movie: The King Murder, a Chesterfield production from 1932 that turned out, like Ann Carver’s Profession, to have a basis in a notorious real-life case: the murder of New York showgirl Dorothy “Dot” King in March 1923. King’s case received nationwide publicity and is credited with introducing the term “sugar daddy” to the American language, because after appearing in just one Broadway show — Broadway Brevities of 1920, which ran for 105 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre — she spent the remaining years of her life living as a model (ostensibly) and as the kept girlfriend of more than one rich man.
“Dot found more success amid the candlelight of her boudoir than among the limelight of Broadway,” writes author Mark Gribben (http://markgribben.com/?p=308). “Described in the press of the day as ‘a lady with more charm than virtue,’ Dot became a popular feature of the New York social scene — particularly the nightclubs and speakeasies. There she met a number of wealthy and powerful men, including the son of President Warren Harding’s Attorney General, and [J. Kearnsley Mitchell], the millionaire son-in-law of one of the wealthiest men in America, Edward T. Stotesbury of Philadelphia. She also made the acquaintance of a well-to-do Puerto Rican steel magnate named Albert Guimares, who would eventually loot his company and resort to stock fraud to keep pace with his richer fellow contestants for Dot’s affections.” According to Gribben, Mitchell “showered her with jewels, furs and other clothes” and set Dot up in a luxury apartment, though he was careful never to be seen alone with or, or to go out with her, for fear of blackmail. Instead he would visit her in the company of his attorney, John H. Jackson; Jackson would first scope out the lobby, and if the coast was clear he and Mitchell would enter the building together, they’d go up to Dot’s apartment, the three would have drinks and then Jackson would leave the lovebirds alone for a few hours. Though Dot had other lovers, Mitchell and Guimares were the only ones who were allowed to visit her at home.
It all ended on March 14, 1923, when Dot’s maid found her body; it turned out she’d been killed with a bottle of chloroform, and the police first suspected suicide but later couldn’t find anything to administer the drug and her body was not in the right position for suicide. Dot’s $15,000 jewel collection was missing, and so were all the letters Mitchell had written her. Mitchell and Guimares were the prime suspects, but Mitchell had an alibi (Gribben doesn’t say what it was but he doesn’t seem to question it either), and so did Guimares — only six years later, one of the people Guimares was supposed to have been with that night, a mystery woman named Aurelia Fischer Dreyfus, said on her deathbed (she’d fallen off a balcony and Guimares’ partner, Edmund McBrian — the other person who’d testified to Guimares’ alibi — was suspected of killing her) that she had perjured herself in giving Guimares his alibi.
According to imdb.com, The King Murder was not the only movie to be inspired by the real-life King murder — the first Philo Vance movie, The Canary Murder Case, drew on the King case and so did The Naked City (!) — but this appears to have been the closest to the facts even though screenwriter Charles Reed Jones took the usual liberties and may have drawn on another famous New York murder — that of showgirl Louise Lawson a year later — for some of his plot. In the movie King’s first name is changed to “Miriam” and she’s played by Dorothy Revier — who’d played similarly morally ambiguous roles like this in the 1929 movie Tanned Legs and the 1931 Charlie Chan film The Black Camel — and she’s shown as involved with married rich man Van Kempen (Robert Frazer).
The film actually opens in the office of homicide chief Henry Barton (Conway Tearle, top-billed), who’s never got over losing the love of his life, Elizabeth Hawthorne (Natalie Moorhead, who was more usually cast as the vamp herself), to Van Kempen. When Elizabeth comes to Barton’s office to complain that her husband has been unfaithful — and with a woman of low morals, at that — Barton is sympathetic. Like her real-life prototype, Miriam King is both a blackmailer — she’s demanding that Van divorce Elizabeth and marry her and threatening to reveal the letters he wrote her if he does not — and a blackmail victim. It’s never quite clear just what her would-be blackmailer has on her, but it’s powerful enough that he demands $5,000 and she tries to shake down Van for it. That night she’s spied on by small-time crooks José Moreno (Don Alvarado) and his girlfriend, Pearl Hope (Marceline Day, the female lead in the 1928 Buster Keaton film The Cameraman), who live in the same building, and when she’s apparently passed out on her bed Pearl sends José into her room to steal something. We’re not sure what it is — at first we think it’s King’s jewel collection, but once José actually enters her room he steals a packet of letters instead.
When King’s murder is reported, Barton insists on investigating the case himself, and after a few reels that just confuse matters he gets the break he needs at a tragic cost: the police officer he left in King’s apartment to make sure the crime scene stayed secure also dies of the same mysterious symptoms King herself did. It turns out both victims died of a poison that’s uncommon but relatively easy to synthesize, but one that works only by injection — and the killer administered it by painting it on the needle of King’s phonograph, so she injected herself with the toxin by sticking herself with the needle just before playing a record. It also turns out that the killer is Van Kampen, who adopted this weird method of murder so it would only be a matter of time before she got exposed to the poison and died, but he wouldn’t have to be there when his murder plot actually worked — and in the end he deliberately pricks himself with the poisoned phonograph needle and dies, though not before confessing all to Barton as the two ride together in an ambulance taking him to a hospital … too late to save him for trial and the chair.
The King Murder is a frustrating film because it’s so under-produced it doesn’t have the edge its story should have; the sound recording sounds more like 1929 than 1932 — especially the long pauses between the different actors’ lines and the rather stilted, clunky delivery — and visually it isn’t all that interesting either. This was a Chesterfield production, and Chesterfield not only had a distribution deal with Universal but had arranged to film at Universal City as well (a fact actually advertised in the opening credits!) — and the access to a major-studio infrastructure gave a lot of Chesterfield productions a surprising degree of major-studio polish. Sometimes (as with the marvelous, underrated 1935 horror film Condemned to Live, which compares favorably to the work of Universal itself in the genre at the time) a creative director made a quite good movie at Chesterfield; here, though, director Richard Thorpe (who got a contract at MGM after Chesterfield went under and stayed there for decades but remained pretty much a hack) proves unable or unwilling to give this film much of an atmosphere.
The story cries out for a dark, chiaroscuro, proto-noir treatment and gets bland, full lighting. Screenwriter Reed turns out not to be much help, either; he’s good at creating potentially morally ambiguous characters (especially José and Pearl) but he’s not good at realizing their potential. Some movies are triumphs of style over substance; The King Murder is actually a triumph of substance over style, managing to entertain more from the sheer audacity of the story than any particular skill or credibility in the way it’s told. The acting isn’t much, either; Conway Tearle seems to glue himself to the lens, Robert Frazer is so colorless it’s even more believable than usual when the girl who’s been vamping him laughs at the sheer lunacy of the idea she could ever actually have been in love with him; Dorothy Revier, stuck with a weaker director than Tanned Legs’ Marshall Neilan or The Black Camel’s Hamilton MacFadden, fails to grasp the potential for the superficially charming, actually vicious woman she’s playing (what it needed was the combination of outward sang-froid and inner sadism Doris Dowling gave to a similar role in The Blue Dahlia 14 years later); and Marceline Day takes the acting honors more from the thinness of the competition than any other reason — though she does show versatility in being able to play this scared small-time crook as well as she did the winsome ingénue in The Cameraman. There’s also surprisingly little music in this movie: just Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman overture over the opening and (an infinitesimal excerpt) closing credits, and Ángel Villoldo’s 1903 tango “El Choclo” (it means “the ear of corn,” though the song was later revived in the 1950’s as “Kiss of Fire”) as source music in a nightclub scene in which Miriam and Van confront each other.
I ran Charles a movie: The King Murder, a Chesterfield production from 1932 that turned out, like Ann Carver’s Profession, to have a basis in a notorious real-life case: the murder of New York showgirl Dorothy “Dot” King in March 1923. King’s case received nationwide publicity and is credited with introducing the term “sugar daddy” to the American language, because after appearing in just one Broadway show — Broadway Brevities of 1920, which ran for 105 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre — she spent the remaining years of her life living as a model (ostensibly) and as the kept girlfriend of more than one rich man.
“Dot found more success amid the candlelight of her boudoir than among the limelight of Broadway,” writes author Mark Gribben (http://markgribben.com/?p=308). “Described in the press of the day as ‘a lady with more charm than virtue,’ Dot became a popular feature of the New York social scene — particularly the nightclubs and speakeasies. There she met a number of wealthy and powerful men, including the son of President Warren Harding’s Attorney General, and [J. Kearnsley Mitchell], the millionaire son-in-law of one of the wealthiest men in America, Edward T. Stotesbury of Philadelphia. She also made the acquaintance of a well-to-do Puerto Rican steel magnate named Albert Guimares, who would eventually loot his company and resort to stock fraud to keep pace with his richer fellow contestants for Dot’s affections.” According to Gribben, Mitchell “showered her with jewels, furs and other clothes” and set Dot up in a luxury apartment, though he was careful never to be seen alone with or, or to go out with her, for fear of blackmail. Instead he would visit her in the company of his attorney, John H. Jackson; Jackson would first scope out the lobby, and if the coast was clear he and Mitchell would enter the building together, they’d go up to Dot’s apartment, the three would have drinks and then Jackson would leave the lovebirds alone for a few hours. Though Dot had other lovers, Mitchell and Guimares were the only ones who were allowed to visit her at home.
It all ended on March 14, 1923, when Dot’s maid found her body; it turned out she’d been killed with a bottle of chloroform, and the police first suspected suicide but later couldn’t find anything to administer the drug and her body was not in the right position for suicide. Dot’s $15,000 jewel collection was missing, and so were all the letters Mitchell had written her. Mitchell and Guimares were the prime suspects, but Mitchell had an alibi (Gribben doesn’t say what it was but he doesn’t seem to question it either), and so did Guimares — only six years later, one of the people Guimares was supposed to have been with that night, a mystery woman named Aurelia Fischer Dreyfus, said on her deathbed (she’d fallen off a balcony and Guimares’ partner, Edmund McBrian — the other person who’d testified to Guimares’ alibi — was suspected of killing her) that she had perjured herself in giving Guimares his alibi.
According to imdb.com, The King Murder was not the only movie to be inspired by the real-life King murder — the first Philo Vance movie, The Canary Murder Case, drew on the King case and so did The Naked City (!) — but this appears to have been the closest to the facts even though screenwriter Charles Reed Jones took the usual liberties and may have drawn on another famous New York murder — that of showgirl Louise Lawson a year later — for some of his plot. In the movie King’s first name is changed to “Miriam” and she’s played by Dorothy Revier — who’d played similarly morally ambiguous roles like this in the 1929 movie Tanned Legs and the 1931 Charlie Chan film The Black Camel — and she’s shown as involved with married rich man Van Kempen (Robert Frazer).
The film actually opens in the office of homicide chief Henry Barton (Conway Tearle, top-billed), who’s never got over losing the love of his life, Elizabeth Hawthorne (Natalie Moorhead, who was more usually cast as the vamp herself), to Van Kempen. When Elizabeth comes to Barton’s office to complain that her husband has been unfaithful — and with a woman of low morals, at that — Barton is sympathetic. Like her real-life prototype, Miriam King is both a blackmailer — she’s demanding that Van divorce Elizabeth and marry her and threatening to reveal the letters he wrote her if he does not — and a blackmail victim. It’s never quite clear just what her would-be blackmailer has on her, but it’s powerful enough that he demands $5,000 and she tries to shake down Van for it. That night she’s spied on by small-time crooks José Moreno (Don Alvarado) and his girlfriend, Pearl Hope (Marceline Day, the female lead in the 1928 Buster Keaton film The Cameraman), who live in the same building, and when she’s apparently passed out on her bed Pearl sends José into her room to steal something. We’re not sure what it is — at first we think it’s King’s jewel collection, but once José actually enters her room he steals a packet of letters instead.
When King’s murder is reported, Barton insists on investigating the case himself, and after a few reels that just confuse matters he gets the break he needs at a tragic cost: the police officer he left in King’s apartment to make sure the crime scene stayed secure also dies of the same mysterious symptoms King herself did. It turns out both victims died of a poison that’s uncommon but relatively easy to synthesize, but one that works only by injection — and the killer administered it by painting it on the needle of King’s phonograph, so she injected herself with the toxin by sticking herself with the needle just before playing a record. It also turns out that the killer is Van Kampen, who adopted this weird method of murder so it would only be a matter of time before she got exposed to the poison and died, but he wouldn’t have to be there when his murder plot actually worked — and in the end he deliberately pricks himself with the poisoned phonograph needle and dies, though not before confessing all to Barton as the two ride together in an ambulance taking him to a hospital … too late to save him for trial and the chair.
The King Murder is a frustrating film because it’s so under-produced it doesn’t have the edge its story should have; the sound recording sounds more like 1929 than 1932 — especially the long pauses between the different actors’ lines and the rather stilted, clunky delivery — and visually it isn’t all that interesting either. This was a Chesterfield production, and Chesterfield not only had a distribution deal with Universal but had arranged to film at Universal City as well (a fact actually advertised in the opening credits!) — and the access to a major-studio infrastructure gave a lot of Chesterfield productions a surprising degree of major-studio polish. Sometimes (as with the marvelous, underrated 1935 horror film Condemned to Live, which compares favorably to the work of Universal itself in the genre at the time) a creative director made a quite good movie at Chesterfield; here, though, director Richard Thorpe (who got a contract at MGM after Chesterfield went under and stayed there for decades but remained pretty much a hack) proves unable or unwilling to give this film much of an atmosphere.
The story cries out for a dark, chiaroscuro, proto-noir treatment and gets bland, full lighting. Screenwriter Reed turns out not to be much help, either; he’s good at creating potentially morally ambiguous characters (especially José and Pearl) but he’s not good at realizing their potential. Some movies are triumphs of style over substance; The King Murder is actually a triumph of substance over style, managing to entertain more from the sheer audacity of the story than any particular skill or credibility in the way it’s told. The acting isn’t much, either; Conway Tearle seems to glue himself to the lens, Robert Frazer is so colorless it’s even more believable than usual when the girl who’s been vamping him laughs at the sheer lunacy of the idea she could ever actually have been in love with him; Dorothy Revier, stuck with a weaker director than Tanned Legs’ Marshall Neilan or The Black Camel’s Hamilton MacFadden, fails to grasp the potential for the superficially charming, actually vicious woman she’s playing (what it needed was the combination of outward sang-froid and inner sadism Doris Dowling gave to a similar role in The Blue Dahlia 14 years later); and Marceline Day takes the acting honors more from the thinness of the competition than any other reason — though she does show versatility in being able to play this scared small-time crook as well as she did the winsome ingénue in The Cameraman. There’s also surprisingly little music in this movie: just Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman overture over the opening and (an infinitesimal excerpt) closing credits, and Ángel Villoldo’s 1903 tango “El Choclo” (it means “the ear of corn,” though the song was later revived in the 1950’s as “Kiss of Fire”) as source music in a nightclub scene in which Miriam and Van confront each other.
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