Tell It to the Marines (MGM, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, July 14), after my husband Charles and I watched the Turner Classic Movies double bill of Burt Lancaster/Robert Siodmak films noir The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949), we stayed on TCM for the “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a film we’d seen decades earlier on a previous TCM showing: Tell It to the Marines (1926). The last time Charles and I watched this, I remember joking afterwards, “Lon Chaney, Sr. made a John Wayne movie at least a decade before John Wayne!” This time around it seemed like a pretty standard-issue military movie and as much a comedy as anything else. You have the stereotypical tough-as-nails Marine sergeant, O’Hara (Lon Chaney, Sr.) and the rather nellie recruit, George “Skeet” Burns (William Haines), whom he gives the proverbial hard time to in order to “make a man” of him. The film opens on the train taking Skeet from his native Kansas to San Diego; he faked an enlistment in the Marines only to get a free train trip to San Diego so he could then cross the U.S.-Mexico border into Tijuana to gamble at the horse races. Along the way he meets Marine General Wilcox (Frank Currier) and, having no idea who he is, proceeds to insult him. When O’Hara learns this about Skeet and sees him running across the train yards at the Santa Fe station – which in this 98-year-old film looks almost exactly as it does today – O’Hara says to himself, “He’ll be back.” Skeet does indeed come back – my guess was that he’d have lost all his money at the Mexican racetracks and he’d be broke and in need of a job, but that’s not at all clear in Richard Schayer’s script – and has the proverbial hard time fitting in to the discipline of the Corps.

At one point O’Hara offers to let Skeet out of any more drill for the day and give him the assignment to “the General’s car.” I thought that would be the old gag of Skeet finding out that the General was the old man he’d so cavalierly insulted on the train, but instead Schayer and director George W. Hill pulled the old gag of having “the General’s car” be a wheelbarrow laden with heavy rocks which Skeet must now move. Love also rears its appealing head in the person of a Navy nurse at the Marine base, Norma Dale (Eleanor Boardman, just around the time she married her first husband, director King Vidor, at the home of Marion Davies; it was supposed to be a double wedding with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, but Garbo got cold feet and bailed out). Needless to say, both O’Hara and Skeet get the hots for Norma, and their romantic rivalry only adds to the tension level of their professional relationship. At one point Skeet rents a car to take Norma out on a drive, only O’Hara commandeers the car and makes it look like Skeet is just his chauffeur. Then Skeet finally gets his chance to be alone in the car with Norma, only he crashes it and both have to abandon it and leave on foot (separately). Skeet’s antics with Norma and his missing bed call lead him to be sentenced to the brig, though on the eve of Skeet’s regiment being shipped out Norma goes to see O’Hara and pleads with him to let Skeet sail – which O’Hara has already done.

Midway through the movie the Marines ship out to Tondo Island, which really exists (it’s in the Philippines, on the main island of Luzon, and until the Spanish conquered the Philippines in the 16th century it was an independent kingdom and because it was on a river delta it was at least technically an island, though today it’s just a district of Manila). But it was never as depicted in this film, which is a Marine refueling station and a cesspool of easy money and easier women where it’s constantly raining. (One wonders whether Richard Schayer got the idea of having it constantly rain on Tondo from W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Miss Thompson” and its incredibly successful stage adaptation by John Colton, Rain.) While on Tondo, Skeet has a fling with a native girl named Zaya (Carmel Myers), but word gets back to Norma and it leads her to refuse his letters and return them to him unopened. Then the Marine regiment ships out again, this time to Shanghai, where they face not only an epidemic (gee, an epidemic starting in China – where have we heard that since?) but also an attack by a private army of bandits led by a warlord played by, of all people, Warner Oland. He’s wearing a big fur hat usually associated with Russians rather than Chinese, but he’s still readily recognizable even though he’s only in a few brief scenes. Though he was actually born in Sweden, Oland got “typed” playing Asians because he had a slight slant to his eyes (as did Sidney Toler, who eventually replaced Oland in his most famous role as Charlie Chan). Oland did get to play non-Asians occasionally – most famously as Al Jolson’s conservative cantor father in The Jazz Singer (1927), in which he gets one word of dialogue (he says, “Stop!,” after he walks in on Jolson singing a jazz version of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” to his mother in a scene hastily written to add more dialogue to the film) – but for the most part he spent his career in the “yellowface” salt mines.

Ultimately the Marines win their battle and bring peace to that part of China, they return to San Diego and Skeet and Norma make plans to marry and buy a ranch together after his Marine enlistment runs out. They even invite O’Hara to join them as their business partner (talk about a third wheel!), but he declines and declares that the U.S. Marine Corps is his true love. We even see him pulling the “General’s car” gag on a new recruit as the film ends. One of the odd aspects of this film is how strongly it dramatizes the mutual antagonism between the Marines and the Navy, even though the Marines are relying on the Navy to transport them to their duty stations. In one sequence Skeet gets clobbered in the boxing ring by a man who, unbeknownst to him, is the Navy’s heavyweight boxing champion (and ironically the actor playing his opponent, Maurice Kains, did more for me aesthetically than William Haines did!). The film is filled with titles representing ribald songs ostensibly sung by the Marines to ridicule their Navy brethren. According to Wikipedia, Tell It to the Marines was the biggest box-office hit of Lon Chaney, Sr.’s career even though it’s also one of the few films in which he looked like his real off-screen self, with none of the fabled character makeups that earned him the nickname “Man of a Thousand Faces.” Director George W. Hill had already proven he knew his way around a movie battlefield when he shot the big action scenes of the 1925 war epic The Big Parade (the second highest-grossing movie of the silent era, after The Birth of a Nation). King Vidor was the credited director of The Big Parade, but after screening that film MGM production chief Irving Thalberg ordered, “Make it bigger,” and with Vidor already at work on another project Hill got assigned to do the battle retakes. The imdb.com biography on Hill makes him sound like a precursor of film noir – “His later films took on a stark, brutally realistic atmosphere and were renowned for their effective use of shadows in the lighting” – but he was found dead in his home on August 10, 1934 at just 39, an apparent suicide.