by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I broke open the misnamed Universal Rarities: Films of
the 1930’s boxed set from Universal and TCM
(the box is misnamed because all four films in it were actually produced by
Paramount between 1932 and 1937; they ended up at Universal because in a
typical but amazingly short-sighted decision Paramount sold the rights of their
pre-1950 output to MCA Television in the mid-1950’s; later MCA absorbed
Universal and transferred the rights to these films, including remake rights,
to Universal) and watched the first five minutes of the 1937 film Artists
and Models and then played our “feature”
for the evening, Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties, her fourth film and the first to come under the ukase of strict Production Code enforcement after —
largely due to moralistic agitation from Roman Catholic pressure groups and
women’s organizations against her previous movies — the relative freedom of the
so-called “pre-Code” Hollywood glasnost came to an abrupt end, the Legion of Decency (that name says it all!)
was formed and the Production Code Administration got serious to the point of
dementia about enforcing the Code. Charles and I had seen Artists and
Models before in February 2009 — earlier
I’d watched it in the early 1970’s and been stunned by the film’s most famous
sequence, the dance number featuring Martha Raye and Louis Armstrong in the
song “Public Melody Number One” (the first film work ever for the young
Vincente Minnelli, who was actually credited on screen), and had vainly
searched for it ever since only to find that every time it was advertised the
film turned out to be the so-called “remake” from 1955, which was a vehicle for
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that took nothing from the original movie but its
title.
So I practically had an orgasm when I saw it listed in TCM’s offerings
for that month — only to find that there was a weird transmission glitch that
made it impossible to see the
movie’s opening scene, the Yacht Club Boys doing a wild comic number called
“The Super-Special Epic of the Year,” though we could hear a distorted version of the song on the soundtrack.
Now I got to see it again at long last and it’s a pretty incredible number —
and it’s ironic that after watching all those Busby Berkeley Gold
Diggers films lately, here we were seeing a
number that deliberately satirized them, with one of the Yacht Club Boys
impersonating star choreographer/director “Sasha Pasha” and making more and
more extravagant demands for big sets, including several built in the Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari style, complete with slants
and forced perspectives. The Yacht Club Boys (their bland name came from the
New York night spot in which they played and had nothing to do with their act, which was a relentless pre-Monty
Python assault on the funnybone) were a
wild musical-comedy foursome whose material actually holds up quite well;
though this isn’t anywhere near as good as “Down With Everything,” their spoof
of campus radicalism that along with Judy Garland’s three songs and Patsy
Kelly’s voice-of-reason supporting role are virtually the only reasons to watch
the 1936 musical Pigskin Parade,
“The Super-Special Epic of the Year” is a great number and a worthy opening to
a quite underrated film that hopefully won’t be so underrated now that it’s
readily available on DVD.
As for Belle of the Nineties, it suffers from the censor-mandated cuts —
including one glaringly obvious splice in the middle of Mae West’s song “When a
St. Louis Woman Comes Down to New Orleans” (the film, based as usual on a
script by West — whose writing credit is three-fourths the size of her acting
credit and about the size of Leo McCarey’s credit as director — was originally
called It Ain’t No Sin, which
probably more than anything else sums up the Mae West mythos! — and then St.
Louis Woman, a title Paramount couldn’t use
because Screencraft Productions, an independent studio, already owned it) — but
it’s still a nice bit of good clean dirty Mae West fun, source of many of her
one-liners. The most famous one is when the villain (John Miljan) is sizing her
up while attempting to seduce her, paying compliments to her arms, her eyes,
her hair — and she snaps back, “What are you doing, making love or taking
inventory?” Mae West plays Ruby Carter, a St. Louis woman who does indeed come
down (physically and morally) to
New Orleans in more ways than one: she’s the star of a music hall in St. Louis
and also is having an affair with up-and-coming boxer Tiger Kid (Roger Pryor).
Her act in St. Louis, after an opening routine by a “beef trust” line of
especially hefty chorus girls (West set virtually all her films in the 1890’s
not only because the tight corsets and long, elaborately decorated dresses of
the time flattered her figure but because zaftig was in back then; it wasn’t until the flappers of
the 1920’s that slender and boyish replaced pleasingly plump and amply curved
as the straight male’s epitome of female sexuality, and even then there were
throwbacks — like Marilyn Monroe, whom West once named as the only person who
could play her in a biopic), is a preposterous series of tableaux set to a song
called “My American Beauty” (sung by pop tenor Gene Austin, who’d had the
biggest hit record of the 1920’s in “My Blue Heaven” but was already on the
downgrade when this film was made) that ends with her appearing as the Statue
of Liberty, with American flags billowing behind her. She has to leave St.
Louis in a hurry when a stratagem staged by the Tiger Kid’s manager, Kirby
(James Donlan), convinces him that she’s seeing other men (well, she’s a Mae
West character — what did he expect?), and she accepts the offer of gambler Ace Lamont
(John Miljan) to headline at his Sensation Club in New Orleans, where she’s
backed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
After the smash success of her second
and third films, She Done Him Wrong
and I’m No Angel — both with the
young and largely unknown Cary Grant as her costar — West could do just about
anything she wanted at Paramount, and what she wanted for this film is actually
to be seen on screen accompanied
by a great band whose members happened to be Black. She didn’t hide them behind
screens or confine their participation to the recording stage and have white
musicians mime to their records on film; she had Ellington and the boys right
on the set with her, playing their eerie, slithery sort of jazz on songs like
W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” (which West sings superbly, as well or better
than any other white woman could have done at the time), and in his memoir Music
Is My Mistress Ellington acknowledged West
and Maurice Chevalier (who in 1930, told he could have any band in the country
back him when he appeared live at the New York Paramount Theatre to promote his
Paramount films, demanded Ellington’s — and when the horrified “suits” at
Paramount told him he could never get away with having a Black band on stage
with him, Chevalier said, “Why not? In France we do it all the time!”) for
helping break down the color line and make him successful with white audiences.
Anyway, it soon becomes clear both to “Ruby” and the audience that Lamont’s
motivation in giving her a job was to get into her ample pants (elaborate
dresses and layered petticoats, more accurately), and though he has a
girlfriend already, Molly Brant (played by Cecil B. DeMille’s niece Katherine —
and quite effectively, too), he doesn’t see why that should stop Ruby from
having an affair with him. Only even though she’s a Mae West character, Ruby
still has a moral code of her own; she won’t steal a man from another woman
“unless she’s done me dirty,” which Molly hasn’t.
Tiger Kid comes to New
Orleans as a last-minute substitute for an indisposed fighter in a championship
bout — it goes to 28 rounds on screen (45 rounds was the standard length for a
championship fight just then, which was something of an improvement over the
way prizefights had been staged before the Marquis of Queensbury: they just
lasted, no rounds, no breaks, until one of the fighters incapacitated the
other) — only he gets tricked into staging a fake holdup against Ace and Ruby
so Ace can steal the expensive jewels another one of Ruby’s suitors, Brooks
Claybourne (John Mack Brown), has given her. Catching on, Ruby gives Tiger a
spiked drink between rounds 27 and 28 of his fight so Ace will lose all the
money he bet on Tiger to win and Claybourne will get the value of his jewels
back on the money he, at Ruby’s
behest, bet on Tiger to lose. Ace, realizing that if he pays off all his
gambling losses on the fight he’ll be broke, tells Ruby he’s fleeing to Havana
with all his assets and wants her to come with him so she can be his lover and
the star of the casino he plans to open there —while he plans to cover for his
disappearance by burning down the Sensation Club and making it appear as if
he’s been killed in the fire. Meanwhile, he’s knocked out Molly and locked her
in the closet so when he torches the club, she’ll be killed and he’ll be rid of
her. Only Ruby learns the whole plot by spying on Ace (using binoculars to read
the combination of his safe where he’s keeping the jewels Tiger stole for him
in the fake holdup) and she and Tiger arrive in time to rescue Molly and call
the fire department, and Ruby and Carter end up getting married after Tiger is
acquitted of the charge of setting the fire and killing Ace (who died when,
after a struggle for the gun Ace was holding on him — Maurine Watkins, your
plagiarism attorney thanks you for the down payment on his third house — Tiger
pushed him to the floor).
It’s not exactly the most exciting story ever, and it
suffers from the lack of a male lead who could compete with Mae West in the
charisma department (it would have been a much better film with Cary Grant in Roger Pryor’s role —
in the early years Grant was sufficiently well built he would have looked at
least as much like a boxer than the pasty-faced and ill-toned Pryor, and as far
as sexiness and star quality was concerned they were practically in different
universes); it was originally intended to co-star George Raft (though given his
image my guess would have been he was up for the John Miljan role), but he quit
the film because he thought the part was too small. (George Raft, excellent saboteur of his own career — the man who would later turn
down High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon
and Double Indemnity.) Then West
got an extortion threat from gangsters that led her to demand that Paramount
close the set so no one could see her work — though she relented when President
Roosevelt’s son Elliott asked the studio to be admitted to watch her rehearse. Then the censors came down hard on the film, demanding
that Paramount jettison the original title, It Ain’t No Sin (a problem because Paramount had trained about 300
talking parrots to speak the words “It Ain’t No Sin” — the idea was to station
one in each theatre that was about to play the film and thereby promote it —
exactly what they did with the birds after they were forced to change the
title, I have no idea); the substitute titles St. Louis Woman and Belle of New Orleans proved to have been taken; and Belle of
the Nineties got its own share of bad
publicity when some theatre owners advertised the film as “Belle of the
Nighties”! Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, rejected
outright the first script because of vulgarity, obscenity, glorification of
crime and criminals, glorification of prostitution and a general theme that was
“definitely on the side of evil and against goodness, decency and law.”
Among
the potentially great gags West and Paramount had to jettison because of
Breen’s edicts was one in which the final catastrophe wasn’t going to be a mere
music-hall fire but a Mississippi flood, and the gag was going to be Ruby and
Tiger together in her room, unable to leave for five days as the floodwaters advanced on New
Orleans, with the gimmick being that as the physical passion between the lovers
rose, so would the floodwaters. (“It was one of the funniest scenes I ever
read, but of course I had to cut it,” Breen said later.) The censors and the
studio executives went back and forth for several months and finally Breen’s
boss, Will Hays (for whom the Production Code Administration was still
nicknamed “the Hays office” long after he ceased to have any active role with
it), got involved and dictated five changes Paramount must make in the film
before it could be approved: eliminate any hint that Ruby was a burlesque queen
and a prostitute, eliminate any reference to Tiger being an ex-con, eliminate
the “sex suggestiveness” and “violent and lustful kissing” between them,
eliminate the scene of Ruby stealing from Ace (actually it was rewritten so
Ruby rifled Ace’s safe but only to retrieve property that was rightfully hers),
and clean up the relationship of Ruby and Brooks, the second male lead (which
barely seems to exist at all in the finished film — we see him lavish jewels on
her but we have no idea what, if anything, he’s getting in return). Breen also
demanded that Ruby and Tiger get married at the end, and insisted on a montage
of newspaper headlines that made clear he had been acquitted of the charge of
murdering Ace.
Belle of the Nineties
got a Production Code seal but was further chopped by the New York state censor
board — and that seems to be the only extant version now; as it stands it’s an
engaging movie, coming alive especially when Mae West sings and dances (notably
the marvelous scene in which she witnesses a Black revival meeting from the
window of her apartment and sings the song “Troubled Waters,” reflecting a
world-weariness and a longing for salvation far at variance from what we expect
from Mae West and indicating she was potentially a rangier actress than one would
think from her usual character; Ellington provides an unseen accompaniment for
West and also recorded the song with his usual singer, the haunting-voiced Ivie
Anderson; later Gil Evans revived the song for the album he did with singer
Helen Merrill, and Cat Power sang it on her first covers album), and though one
suspects it would seem even stronger if the pre-censorship cut ever surfaced,
it’s a handsomely produced movie, atmospherically photographed by Karl Struss
and ably directed by McCarey, though West was so totally in control of her own
screen appearance her directors, whoever they were, actually has awfully little
to do. Mae West’s whole act seems awfully tame in today’s world, in which the
envelopes she pushed have long since been shredded to ribbons, but one can
still admire the way this forty-something (when she made her movies) woman can
say more about sex with an arched glance, a luring grin or a vocal inflection
than the actresses of today can by shedding their entire wardrobes on-camera and
letting their co-stars pound away at them on screen.
