Movie Magg

Remember the Night (Paramount, 1939)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 21:25:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I picked for Christmas night was one with a holiday theme: Remember the Night, a movie that’s being ballyhooed big-time on Turner Classic Movies because they partnered with Universal Home Video to release it on DVD for the first time. (It was a Paramount production but, like virtually everything Paramount made between the start of the sound era and 1949, it is now held by Universal because MCA-TV bought the rights to the Paramount catalog in 1959 and later its parent company, MCA, bought Universal.) It was the first of four films co-starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray (she was billed ahead of him this time; in their next two films together, Double Indemnity and The Moonlighter, he’d be on top and she’d regain top billing in their last, There’s Always Tomorrow) and was directed by Mitchell Leisen from a script by Preston Sturges — his last script for another director before he became a director himself and launched a short-lived career with the hit political farce The Great McGinty.

Sturges was upset with the way Leisen rewrote the script and took out much of the badinage between the leads — Leisen didn’t think MacMurray could handle the sort of rapid-fire wit Sturges had written — but what remains is a typical Sturges genre-bender in which the first half of the movie is sting-in-the-tail screwball comedy, the second half is romantic melodrama and there’s an interlude in the film which is almost all-out noir. Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck) opens the movie by shoplifting a bracelet from an expensive jeweler, then — in a move that would have qualified her for America’s Stupidest Criminals if such a show had existed in 1939 (when this film was made) — tries to pawn it just two blocks away. The sequence is shot with almost no dialogue and has some marvelous visual wit (just before the pawnbroker locks his shop, with her in it, and places her under citizen’s arrest, she narrowly misses apprehension by a cop who’s too busy donating to a Salvation Army Santa to notice her pass by even though the bracelet is clearly visible on her arm (she has a muff but hasn’t even taken the basic precaution of putting her arm far enough into it to conceal the stolen item!).

Assistant district attorney John Sargent (Fred MacMurray) pulls the job of prosecuting her — he’s assigned by his boss because he’s shown skill at convicting women defendants — while she hires a defense attorney named Francis X. O’Leary (Willard Robertson), a pompous windbag (Preston Sturges must have had a lot of fun writing his ridiculous courtroom speeches) who offers a diminished-capacity defense — and Sargent eagerly leaps at it, saying that as long as the defense is bringing up psychiatric issues he’d like to call a state psychiatrist as a witness, but he can’t do so until after the new year because the man is in Florida with his family for the holidays. Sargent’s strategy is to get the trial continued until after Christmas because he’s worried that if the case goes to the jury before the holiday, they’ll be moved by the holiday spirit and tempted to acquit. It works, but he’s conscience-stricken enough that when Lee is taken into custody — she’s run out of bail money (and the expression on Willard Robertson’s face when he realizes his client has far less money than he thought and there’s a good chance she’s not going to be able to pay him is priceless) — Sargent puts up her bail, whereupon she, thinking he’s done that because he wants to get in her pants, shows up at his apartment and is positively resentful that he’s turned her loose on the streets instead of letting her have the nice warm cell and three meals a day she was hoping for.

Sargent tells her she can’t stay since he’s going home to his family in Indiana for the holidays, and Lee tells him she too is from Indiana — so they end up driving there together and getting caught in a trap in a small town in Pennsylvania, where a series of detours puts them on a farm whose owner makes a citizen’s arrest of them for trespassing and petty theft (they tried to milk one of his cows). They flee — naturally Sturges’ interest in creating this scene is the irony that now Sargent is a fugitive from justice too, and they realize they’ll have to bypass Pennsylvania on their way back to New York and go through Canada instead — and the two of them finally arrive in Indiana, first at her family’s home and then at his. Their arrival at the home of Lee’s mother (Georgia Caine) is where Remember the Night takes its detour from screwball into noir; Leisen’s direction and Ted Tetzlaff’s cinematography go all dark and chiaroscuro and full of oblique angles, and the script also gets considerably darker as Lee’s mother denounces her as a hopeless criminal and turns her away.

When they finally get to the Sargents’ home, their reception couldn’t be more different: Sargent’s mom (Beulah Bondi) and her aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson) instantly assume Lee is Sargent’s girlfriend and couldn’t be nicer to her; mom even lends Lee her old wedding dress for a local dance (there’s a nifty gag showing it wrapped in a newspaper whose headline is “Teddy Refuses to Seek Third Term,” dating it to 1908 and also providing an ironic contrast to the opposite decision reached by the President Roosevelt who was in office when this film was made), and proximity works its magic and Sargent and Lee kiss in a heart-rendingly beautiful shot behind confetti screamers at the dance. The budding romance is tempered by the fate hanging over both their heads — when they get back to New York she’s supposed to go back on trial and he’s supposed to prosecute her — and at one point they stand outside the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and Sargent tells her they’re not in the U.S. and she’s free to escape. Sturges manages to write himself out of the corner he’s seemingly written himself into when the trial resumes and Sargent, breaking all his own rules on how to win a conviction against a woman, antagonizes the defendant, the judge and the jurors — and she turns the tables on him by pleading guilty, leaving her legal fate undetermined but with an understanding that, if he still wants her, she’ll marry him after she completes her sentence, whatever it is.

When I first heard TCM pushing this movie I was rather wishing they were promoting Remember Last Night? — James Whale’s brilliant offtake on The Thin Man that ramped up both the drinking and the obsessiveness (and one movie that desperately needs to be available on DVD) — but Remember the Night is also a quite good movie, maybe less so than it might have been with Sturges directing it and a more charismatic leading man (at times during the movie I found myself wishing Cary Grant would have done it, though at other times I thought MacMurray’s reserve might have been better for the role than Grant’s Bringing Up Baby neurotic rambunctiousness) but still a lot of fun and surprisingly rich and moving, with an ending that manages the delicate balance of satisfying the Production Code requirements while still making dramatic and emotional sense.

Inglourious Basterds (Weinstein Co., Universal, 2009)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:00:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie the Bears San Diego showed two nights ago was Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds — the deliberate misspelling was much discussed when the film was released theatrically (Tarantino gave a very rude I’m-not-going-to-tell-you response when he was asked about it in an interview) but appears to be a reflection of the virtually illiterate status of the central character, Tennessee moonshiner turned U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), so named by Tarantino as a weird tribute to the mediocre 1950’s actor Aldo Ray. (Aldo Ray was the guy Harry Cohn wanted to play Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity, even though Ray himself knew he wasn’t a good enough actor for the part — and so did the film’s director, Fred Zinnemann, who finally faced down Cohn and said, “Either Montgomery Clift plays Prewitt, or you can find yourself another director.”)

This isn’t a movie I would ordinarily have gone to see (or bought on DVD) — Charles and I had never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie before because we were put off by his reputation for insane amounts of violence, but Inglourious Basterds turned out to be a bad movie in a way neither of us were expecting: it was boring. The nasty stuff Tarantino is known for was certainly there — from a special effect that allows his World War II Allied commandos literally to scalp the Nazis they kill to some quite explosive, staccato scenes shot with an almost cartoon-like lack of affect (when a director like Sam Fuller with a real understanding of war, which he got from having been a combat soldier himself, does violence the effect is shocking in its revelation of the pointlessness of all this killing; when a guy like Tarantino, whose sole reference point seems to be other people’s movies, does it it’s just gratuitous and disgusting) — but it’s stuck in as arbitrarily like the sex scenes in a porn film, and compared to a porn film far more of Inglourious Basterds’ running time is taken up by boring reams of exposition to set up the action highlights.

Tarantino’s aesthetic as a director is never spend three seconds on a scene that can be stretched to last three minutes, with the result that a basic plot that a hack “B” director from the 1940’s could have got on and off screen in a little over an hour here lasts 153 minutes. (In fact, some “B” filmmakers in the 1940’s did get this type of story on and off screen in a little over an hour in a similarly plotted film called Hitler: Dead or Alive, in which a rich American offers $1 million to the first hit man who can off Hitler — and in the final scene Hitler does indeed die, but is replaced by a double without either the German people or anyone else being the wiser. Tarantino actually mentioned this film as an influence in an interview.) Oddly, the first “chapter” of Inglourious Basterds is by far the best part of the film: a Jewish family named Dreyfus is being sheltered on the farm of another (non-Jewish) family in the French countryside, and the establishing images at the start of the movie look like Millet’s paintings of French rural life (kudos to Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson for not shooting these scenes in past-is-brown orthodoxy) and give a haunting quality to the opening scenes.

The farm is visited by SS Col. Hans Linda (Christoph Waltz, whose quiet, understated villainy steals the film straight out from under Brad Pitt and the other better-known actors), who in a series of extraordinarily subtle (at least by Tarantino standards) scenes worms out of the farmer that he’s hiding Jews under the floorboards of the farmhouse. Linda calls in his squad and four of the five Dreyfus family members are killed immediately. The fifth, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), escapes and turns up two “chapters” later running a movie theatre in Paris she inherited from an aunt and uncle. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army forms a unit called the “Basterds,” a group of commandos whose assignment is to kill “Nazis” (by which they mean anyone in the German military, whether they’re card-carrying Party members or not) and rack up as high a body count as possible. The unit is headed by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and includes a motley group of people — including a renegade German sergeant, Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), who killed 13 German servicemembers (whether by accident or out of disgust with Nazism is a plot point Tarantino, ordinarily so forthcoming in his exposition, never lets us in on) — who tear up the German countryside and are as deceitful as the people they’re up against, making deals for surrender and then double-crossing the Germans who try to surrender to them and blowing them away again.

The two plot threads converge on Shosanna’s movie theatre, which has won the right to premiere a German war movie, Nation’s Pride, about the adventures of a sniper, Private Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), and the real Zoller and his co-star, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) — who’s really an agent for British intelligence (don’t ask) are scheduled to be there. So, after a lot more boring exposition, are the crème de la crème of high-level Nazidom: Hitler (Martin Wuttke) Göring , Bormann and Goebbels (Sylvester Groth). Both Shosanna and the “Basterds” plan to assassinate the whole Nazi leadership at the theatre (I doubt if Tarantino was consciously thinking of a parallel to the alleged Southern plot in 1865 to assassinate the whole top leadership of the Union government right after Lee’s surrender — Lincoln was killed, of course, and secretary of state Henry Seward was wounded by an attacker, but the guy who was supposed to take out vice-president Andrew Johnson got drunk instead — but the similarities are interesting): Shosanna by setting her own theatre ablaze by using her stores of nitrate film as an incendiary device (by way of explanation as to how flammable nitrate film was Tarantino inserts a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage — I think it’s ill-advised for a director at Tarantino’s level to insert a clip from a director on Hitchcock’s; it only makes Tarantino seem even worse than he is) — and the “Basterds” by going in there with bombs and blowing the place up even if that means they take themselves out as well (so this is a film in which suicide bombers are the heroes).

Raine and another “Basterd” are captured by Col. Landa before the attack is scheduled, but Landa, figuring by then that his side has already lost the war, offers a deal by which he will allow the attack to go forward if he gets a real sweetheart deal, including a free house in Nantucket, after the war … and the theatre duly blows up (after embarrassing the Nazis by showing a special sequence Shosanna and her Black assistant made up and inserted into the fourth reel of Nation’s Pride to condemn them — apparently Tarantino had read or seen The Magic Christian) while Landa gets a swastika carved on his face (a trick the “Basterds” have pulled on most of the Nazis they haven’t outright killed) just to make sure he can’t blend unobtrusively into American society after the war.

Quentin Tarantino’s chutzpah in rewriting a major slice of world history so the principal Nazis meet an end quite different from the ones they actually did isn’t the biggest problem with Inglourious Basterds; nor is Tarantino’s knack for highly stylized violence. The biggest problems are its slowness, its reams of exposition (far more than needed to explain the plot — I’d faulted Public Enemies for its overall slowness but it’s a work of irresistible kinetic energy compared to Inglourious Basterds!) and its sense of being drawn from movies instead of life. As one example, Quentin Tarantino wanted Ennio Morricone to write an original score for his film, but Morricone’s heavy schedule prevented this. No problem; Tarantino simply raided Morricone’s (and others’) previous soundtracks for the music — gaining a quite impressive patchwork score but also leaving us in the audience wondering, “Where have we heard that before?,” just as many of his visuals give us the feeling, “Where have we seen that before?”

Coraline (Focus Features/Universal, 2009)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 01:56:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our movie last night, Coraline, was a 2009 release (gee, two recent movies in a row!) from Universal’s art-house division, Focus Features (I call them “Out-of-Focus Features” since their logo is the word “FOCUS” in all caps, but with the “O” blurry while the rest of the letters are clear). Directed by Henry Selick, who also made The Nightmare Before Christmas (though Tim Burton got most of the credit since he’d written the story and done much of the preliminary design work), Coraline is based on a children’s book by Neil Gaiman that as a story is sort of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz meet Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) — that’s her name, though of course (and much to her irritation) most of the people in the movie insist on calling her “Caroline” — is the daughter of Charlie Jones (John Hodgman) and his wife Mel (Teri Hatcher). He’s a writer, which explains why he’s on his computer virtually all day (in a desperate attempt to get his attention, Coraline flips the fuse switch and cuts off power to his computer, thereby erasing much of his day’s work), though he also cooks all the family’s meals since his wife couldn’t be less interested in that sort of thing. They live in a place called the Pink Palace, even though it isn’t pink and isn’t a palace; instead it’s a typical movie haunted house, Victorian in style and with a lot of moldering old rooms and a general aura of the sinister. Coraline ventures outside and meets a rangy outdoor cat and a boy named Wybie (Robert Bailey, Jr.) who’s so compulsively talkative he bores and disgusts Coraline at first sight. (“Wybie” — a character Selick added to his script for the film — is short for “Wyborn,” and Coraline irresistibly puns on his name, “Whywereyouborn?”).

Much of the first half-hour of this 101-minute film is scene-setting and characterization, but eventually the plot kicks into high gear when Coraline discovers a secret child-sized doorway in a part of the house. It’s been wallpapered over on her side and bricked over on the other, but she cuts through the wallpaper, the bricks magically vanish and she goes through the doorway and finds herself in … the same house, with the same mom and dad. Only they’re totally different; mom is a great cook, dad is a musician instead of a writer (with two formidable extension arms so he can play the piano while he’s doing other things with his hands) and they’re both considerably warmer to her than her real parents back on the other side of the door. On this side of the door the cat can talk and Wybie can’t — Coraline is pleased with both those developments — and it’s only after a while of experiencing her dream of what she wishes her family and their lives together were like that Coraline realizes the whole setup is there for some sinister purpose and she is its target. Eventually she comes to grip with the fact that the “Other Father” and “Other Mother” she’s found so much more congenial than her real ones are alien beings of some sort that are there to eat her. At least I think that’s what happened; as with a lot of other fantasies, the dramaturgy gets muddled towards the end as we’re not sure what laws of physics and nature the author is declaring inoperative for the sake of his story and which ones he’s clinging to.

Coraline is quite a charming movie, convincingly animated (and while some of it is computer-generated much of it was done with puppets and old-fashioned stop-motion figures) and effectively staged, and the 3-D effects are fun and add a lot of appeal even though this isn’t a virtuoso display of the in-depth process the way some 3-D films have been. I like this almost literally “skeletal” form of animation that seems unique to Burton and Selick (I can’t remember any other director who’s tried it!); the use of puppets and models to enact the characters enables Selick to bring them to the screen without the heavy literalness of a version in live-action with computer-generated effects shots, and the film maintains a good balance, getting us into Coraline’s point of view while not allowing her to take over the whole movie. It does tend to sag in the second half, though, mainly because of another problem with fantasy as a genre: once you’ve set aside the normal laws of nature and thereby set up your story so anything can happen, the tendency is almost irresistlble to make anything happen — even if it breaks the rules of your fantasy as well as physical reality. Still, Coraline is a nice movie, well balanced between adult appeal and attraction to kids (it’s the sort of movie you can take your family to and no one will be bored — the kids will like the cool effects shots and root for Coraline the character, while the grownups will enjoy the bits of darkness and the inventiveness of the gags.

Seven Days Ashore (RKO, 1944)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:10:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film we watched was Seven Days Ashore, a nice if insignificant little comedy-musical from RKO in 1944 presented as a vehicle for Wally Brown and Alan Carney (the two vaudevillians RKO paired in an attempt to create their own bionic Abbott and Costello) but really a romantic quadrilateral dealing with the sailors in the merchant marine. The film, based on an “original” story by Jacques Deval and scripted by Edward Verdier, Irving Phillips and Lawrence Kimble, seems at least in part to have been intended as a riposte to audience members who thought merchant-marine sailors were wimps avoiding the “real” war; Charles pointed out that most of the people in the merchant marine had been sailors on freight vessels in civilian life — and the only difference is that in wartime people were shooting at them and trying to sink their ships, which meant that after the war they were considered veterans because they had served in combat.

In the opening sequence a merchant-marine ship successfully rams and sinks a Japanese submarine that was trying to sink it, only between the damage to their own ship and the fact that it got separated from its convoy, the crew members have no idea where they are. The captain promises everybody a seven-day leave once they arrive in port — no matter where that is — and the ship’s reigning Don Juan, Dan Arland, Jr. (Gordon Oliver), shows his shipmates Monty Stephens (Wally Brown) and Orval “Handsome” Martin (Alan Carney) his address book, in which he literally has a girl in every port. As it turns out, they’re just a few miles off the coast of San Francisco, where Dan’s parents (Alan Dinehart and Marjorie Gateson) live — and where he has three girls, Annabelle (Elaine Shepard), Carol (Virginia Mayo — I recorded this off a TCM birthday tribute to her) and Lucy (Amelita Ward), the latter two of whom are members of Dot Diamond’s (Marcy McGuire) all-girl band that plays at a local dance hall. (There was a brief vogue for women musicians and all-women bands during the war because bandleaders didn’t have to worry about female sidepersons being drafted.)

Dan intends to send a letter to either Carol or Lucy telling her he’s in town and asking her to meet him at the dock, but of course both of them get mailed and the two women find out he’s been two-timing each with the other and vow revenge. Meanwhile, Annabella — established early on as the woman he was really interested in but who broke with him in disgust over his constant cruising (hmm, seems like there’s a moral lesson here!) — is staying with Dan’s parents as a house guest even though she’s already engaged to someone else (though we don’t meet him until the end of the movie). The plot, of course, is just a pretext on which to hang 11 songs and some gags — though Brown and Carney have surprisingly little to do in the comedy department and their main plot function is to woo Carol and Lucy when both sue Dan for breach of promise and he wants two other guys to take them off his hands. He tells them to pass themselves off as millionaires, and the girls see through the imposture relatively quickly but fall in love with them anyway — and the finale is a triple wedding just before the ship sails again (establishing in that annoying Production Code way that even though the three sailors have all married their girlfriends they still haven’t had time to have sex with them!).

The film features some interesting musical guests, including Freddie Slack and his orchestra (though with McGuire singing with them instead of Slack’s regular vocalist, Ella Mae Morse) and a novelty band led by Freddie Fisher as “Col. Corn,” and though McGuire isn’t that great a singer and she’s utterly incapable of convincing us that she can play the clarinet (she wields the thing like a baseball bat and her fingers don’t move at all when she’s supposedly playing), she turns out to be a spectacular acrobatic dancer whose solos are among the high points. Also in the cast is Dooley Wilson, playing the Arlands’ house servant and also a singing piano player (singing he could do for real, piano playing he couldn’t) who trots out the song “Apple Blossoms in the Rain” by Lew Pollack and Mort Greene whenever Dan and Annabelle are on the outs and he wants to bring them together. The song compares to “As Time Goes By” about as well as Gordon Oliver and Elaine Shepard do to Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but at least Wilson is personable, has a nice voice and is allowed to play a relatively more intelligent character than most of the African-American actors who got cast as servants in this era (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Mantan Moreland are special cases).

There’s also a nice offtake on that hoary old plot gimmick about the son of a wealthy family whose father is down-to-earth and likes pop culture, while his mother is snooty and puts on classical “musicales” in her home; in this case, she invites an impossibly bad opera singer named Mrs. Croxton-Lynch, played by the Marx Brothers’ great foil, Margaret Dumont — making an hilarious effect singing “Over the Waves” in a deliberately bad voice. (She was obviously exaggerating and singing badly on purpose because her voice here, especially her intonation, is far inferior to her quite well sung “When the clock on the wall strikes ten … ” bit in the opening scene of Duck Soup.) About the only thing wrong with this relatively unpretentious entertainment is how little the nominal stars, Brown and Carney, are featured; Brown comes off more as a second romantic lead than a Bud Abbott-like comic foil, and Carney seems to have forgotten that there was more to imitating Lou Costello than just whining a lot. They only get one big slapstick moment — when their girlfriends, cottoning to the fact that they aren’t really millionaires, push them off a boat and into the water (whereupon, in true Hollywood logic, they are so endeared by the sight of them floundering around in the sea that they fall in love with them instantly!) — and seem to be lost in what was supposed to be their vehicle.

Hollywood Stadium Mystery (Republic, 1938)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:36:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I pulled out a public-domain DVD from Alpha Video of a movie called Hollywood Stadium Mystery, a 1938 “B” from Republic that starred Neil Hamilton and Evelyn Venable (names that were considered pretty much over-the-hill even then — though Hamilton here plays Los Angeles district attorney Bill Devons, and it feels like a job he could have had before being appointed police commissioner of Gotham City, which he played in the 1960’s Batman TV series) in a mystery in which a boxer, Ace Cummings (Pat Flaherty), dies while sitting in his corner just before the start of a championship bout against Champ Madison (William Haade) which Ace was favored to win. Venable plays mystery writer Polly Ward, and in the opening scene a man wearing a rubber face mask comes into the study of a detective and announces he’s going to kill him — only the detective, put on guard by recognizing his would-be killer’s voice, draws first and shoots the intruder instead. Then the curtain falls and it’s revealed that this scene is part of a play Ward has written and presented at a dinner theatre, where she’s sitting at a table with Devons (even though they’ve never met before) — and he, not knowing that the attractive woman he’s cruising is the author, starts ripping the play to shreds and saying that the whole idea of a man recognizing another by voice alone is ridiculous. To prove his point, he disguises his voice and holds her up outside the theatre as she leaves — and she gets the security person to arrest him, cuffing him with an old pair of handcuffs to which he’s lost the key.

Hollywood Stadium Mystery — presented here in a 54-minute version Republic cut down from the 65-minute original for TV showings in the 1950’s (and with the theme music from the 1937 Dick Tracy serial heard over the opening credits — which give the title of the film and the names of its cast and crew as headlines in a series of mock newspapers) — is a quite charming movie, the kind of combination murder mystery and screwball comedy that became popular in the wake of the success of the Thin Man movies. When the murder occurs at the boxing match at Hollywood Stadium, Polly is there but Devons isn’t — he’s later summoned there by the homicide cops and he has to bring the watchman along because they’re still handcuffed together — and the film turns into a game of one-upmanship between Devons and Polly punctuated by the attempts to solve the mystery and sort out the suspects — including Ace’s two rival girlfriends, Edna (Lynne Roberts) and “Regent Pictures” movie star Althea Ames (Barbara Pepper, the vamp from King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread), whom he dumped for Edna; gambler Slats O’Keefe (James Spottswood), the champion’s manager; actor Ralph Mortimer (Reed Hadley), whose eyes were blackened in a fight; the champ himself and Nick Nichols (Jimmy Wallington), the ringside radio announcer.

Paula proves that the murder was committed by using a squirt gun to blast cyanide powder into Ace’s face just before the fight was supposed to begin. She also realizes that the killer whistled a song — which she can’t place until, in an intriguing example of Republic’s cross-promotion, she sees a poster for the Gene Autry movie Comin’ ’Round the Mountain and realizes that’s the song. Eventually she catches on that Nick, the radio announcer — who previously has seemed merely obnoxious — is the actual killer (by this time Slats is dead, too), though he kidnaps her and is about to eliminate her too when an opportune visit from Devons and the cops saves her. (Nick’s motive is that he won 60 percent of the champion’s contract from Slats in a card game, and the share would have been worthless if Ace had fought and beaten the champ.)

It’s the sort of movie that doesn’t aim high but hits what it’s aiming for — a charming, unpretentious entertainment that alternates between the battle-of-the-sexes courtship between Devons and Polly and the murder mystery, without short-changing either plot angle — and Hamilton and Venable, neither among the most charismatic names in 1930’s Hollywood, bring their characters to life convincingly. The film was written by Stuart Palmer (a mystery writer of some reputation), Darrell McGowan and Stuart McGowan, from a story by Stuart McGowan, and directed at a reasonable clip by David Howard with assistance from John Ford’s nephew, Phil Ford. Though it would be nice if the complete theatrical version turns up someday, the extant Hollywood Stadium Mystery is easy to follow and doesn’t contain any obvious lacunae from the TV-motivated deletions — and what we have of it is a quite charming mystery-comedy, typical of the period but done with a literacy and flair more common at a major studio than a “B” factory like Republic.

Public Enemies (Relativity Media/Universal, 2009)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:05:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran Charles and I the movie Public Enemies, all 140 minutes of it, a June 2009 release and Hollywood’s latest take on the criminal career of John Dillinger — pronounced here, as in every other movie about him, with a soft “g” even though Dillinger himself, proud of his German heritage, said the name with a hard “g” and insisted that all his friends and associates do so as well. That’s just one of the many mistakes made in this weirdly anachronistic movie, directed by Michael Mann from a script started by Ronan Bennett and finished by Mann and Ann Biderman, based on a book by Bryan Burrough called Public Enemies; America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Public Enemies is the sort of movie (like Lady Sings the Blues and The Buddy Holly Story) that frustrates not only because the film runs roughshod over the real-life history it’s purportedly telling, but because the true story would actually have made a better movie.

The film is basically concerned with the long-standing antagonism between Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the FBI agent who was assigned by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) to go after him and who led the law-enforcement team that finally ambushed and killed Dillinger outside the Biograph movie theatre in Chicago on July 22, 1934. Remember that date because it’s going to be an important reference point later on to the many anachronisms and flagrant inaccuracies in this movie; as slovenly as it was, the 1945 Monogram film Dillinger (hastily thrown together after the Production Code Administration finally lifted its decade-long ban on Dillinger as a movie subject) was actually closer to the real story. Public Enemies has the flaws of a lot of historical movies these days: an inflated running time (as the film unspooled across all those 140 minutes I couldn’t help but recall how 1930’s Warners hacks like Lloyd Bacon and Ray Enright had been able to tell stories like this in half that amount of running time!); a slow, somber pace — a real surprise coming from Mann, who as a director is best known for fast, exciting, kinetically-paced modern-day thrillers (does he really think people moved that much more slowly in the 1930’s?) — and an elegiac feel expressed not only in the slow pace but also in the relentlessly past-is-brown cinematography by Dante Spinotti.

The biggest single mistake in the film is that the FBI is shown pursuing Dillinger well before they did — or could have; until his famous escape from jail in Crown Point, Indiana on March 3, 1934 the FBI had no jurisdiction over Dillinger since he had not yet committed a federal crime. (The FBI did, however, assist local law enforcement by running fingerprint analysis on Dillinger and making the results available — a kind of cooperation that was highly unusual then even though it’s become routine now.) It was only after the escape that Dillinger drove a stolen car across a state line from Indiana to Illinois — thereby finally committing a federal offense and giving the FBI the pretense it needed to go after him. (One point of accuracy I will give the filmmakers credit for is they don’t call the FBI the FBI — in 1934 it was still officially the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice; “Federal” wasn’t added to its name until 1935.) What’s more, they have Purvis “making his bones” as a federal agent by shooting and killing outlaw Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, then being assigned to the Dillinger case as a result of his success with Floyd; in real life Floyd survived Dillinger by three months. (The sequence is correct in the novel Pretty Boy Floyd by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, which they adapted from an unproduced screenplay they wrote for Warners — and on the strength of that novel, that movie would have been considerably better than this one!) They also have another legendary outlaw, “Baby Face” Nelson (true name: Lester Gillis), dying along with Dillinger in the Biograph Theatre shootout — the real Nelson, though part of Dillinger’s gang at the end, outlived Dillinger by four months.

The filmmakers took pains to make the movie look as authentically 1930’s as possible, but a lot of visual anachronisms slipped in anyway — contributors to imdb.com noted details like the appearance of modern automobiles, locomotives manufactured well after Dillinger’s death, modern-day judicial robes in the courtroom scenes and the like — and I was particularly (and predictably) annoyed by the musical anachronisms. As delightful as it was to hear three snippets of songs by Billie Holiday on the soundtrack — “Love Me or Leave Me” and “Am I Blue” from early-1940’s Columbia studio recordings and “The Man I Love” from a 1946 concert recording from Los Angeles (not from Carnegie Hall, as stated in the film’s closing credits) — when Dillinger died Billie was an obscure singer eking out a living in hole-in-the-wall New York cabarets and had made only two obscure records (“Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch,” with a Benny Goodman-led studio group and issued under Goodman’s name), and it’s highly unlikely Billie would have played in a place that had a radio wire even to do local broadcasts, let alone be heard on the air in a city as far away from New York as Chicago.

If they had wanted to use a real-life jazz great on the soundtrack, they should have picked Jack Teagarden, who had at least an indirect connection to Dillinger. In 1933-34, Chicago was hosting a world’s fair called the Century of Progress Exposition, and the real Dillinger frequently went on dates there, sometimes just with one of his (many) girlfriends and sometimes with members of his gang. One of the exhibitors at the Century of Progress was hosting an on-site nightclub at which Teagarden led a band, and while it’s not known for certain whether Dillinger actually saw Teagarden perform (unlike Al Capone, Dillinger was not known as a jazz fan), it’s certainly more likely than that he ever heard Billie Holiday! (There’s another musical anachronism; Diana Krall plays a jazz singer and is shown performing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” in the film, but the arrangement is characteristic of the 1950’s rather than the 1930’s. The film also includes Benny Goodman’s recording of Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” — made on July 1, 1935, almost a year after Dillinger’s death.)

As a movie, Public Enemies isn’t bad — though the factual errors and in particular the inflation of the role of the FBI (or whatever it was called then) in his capture rankle. The best thing about it is the kind of parallelism built up between the crooks and the cops, who in the rather cynical manner of a lot of modern crime films are shown as morally equivalent — especially when Purvis orders a roundup of all of Dillinger’s acquaintances, including family members and others not suspected of any involvement in his crimes, and tells his men to keep them under custody until they provide information: the parallel to George W. Bush and his orders for the indefinite detention of so-called “terror suspects” is unstated but relatively obvious. The script also does a good job of depicting Dillinger’s bravado — at one point he walks into a Chicago police station (his current girlfriend needs a police license to work as a waitress and he’s accompanying her as she gets it) and strolls through the office of the Chicago Police Department’s anti-Dillinger task force, unrecognized.

Another nice touch of characterization riffed off the last night of Dillinger’s life, when the FBI got a tip that he was going to a movie at either the Marbro or the Biograph, but the tipster — Anna Sage (Branka Katic), later known as the “Lady in Red” because the orange dress she was wearing (her pre-arranged signal to the federal agents) showed red under the theatre’s outside lights — didn’t know which. Purvis looks at the movie listings in the newspaper and, though he has both theatres staked out, he himself goes to the Biograph because it’s showing a gangster movie, Manhattan Melodrama, while the Marbro is showing Little Miss Marker and he can’t imagine Dillinger wanting to see a Shirley Temple movie when something ballsier and closer to his own experience is available.

The cast is strong but not as strong as it could have been; as Dillinger, Johnny Depp turns in a surprisingly un-quirky performance, losing himself in the character but also making him a bit on the dull side. (Before Depp signed for the role, Leonardo DiCaprio was also up for it — though I think the best actors for the part today would have been Nicolas Cage and Sean Penn.) Christian Bale is interesting as Purvis — though the film doesn’t tell the rest of the story (there’s an American Graffiti-esque title that mentions that he left the FBI in 1936 and committed suicide in 1960; what it doesn’t mention is that J. Edgar Hoover forced him out because he brooked no rivals in public esteem) and there’s a bit of the Batman in his performance (not that I minded!) — and Billy Crudup is fascinating as Hoover. Considerably better-looking than the real one, without the famous bulldog face and with an odd hint of a British accent at odds with the way the oft-filmed real Hoover talked, Crudup nonetheless catches the smarmy self-righteousness of the man. Dillinger’s main girlfriend Evelyn “Billie” Frechette is played by Marion Cotillard (Academy Award-winner for playing Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose), and she’s quite good, properly proletarian and with only a hint of her French accent — I’ve seen much worse attempts by foreign actors to adapt to playing American characters in American movies!

Public Enemies isn’t a bad movie, but it’s still not the film it could have been — the Dillinger story has a lot more interesting cinematic possibilities than are explored here and, quite frankly, the one I would have liked to see is a film I think should be called Dillinger and Leach — Matt Leach being an Ohio state police detective who obsessively pursued Dillinger and then, after Dillinger’s death, was so pissed off at the FBI for horning in on the case and getting the glory for killing Dillinger he bitterly told Ohioans not to cooperate with the FBI and got fired for his pains. Dillinger and Leach actually had the mutually taunting relationship Mann and his writers tried to establish here between Dillinger and Purvis, and the film also touches on the interesting relationship between Dillinger and organized crime (they helped him at first but then shut the doors to him and his gang because Dillinger’s highly publicized, flamboyant sorts of crime were drawing police heat that might potentially get the mobsters in trouble as well)) and the fame of attorneys like Louis Piquett (Peter Gerety) who were considered — often with good reason — to be just as corrupt as the gangsters and outlaws they represented. (The real Piquett was disbarred two years after Dillinger’s death.)

Public Enemies is a good movie, but it’s not great — and given the potential of the story (filmed at least twice before, in 1945 and 1973, as well as in innumerable other variations, including The Petrified Forest, that got around the Production Code ban on Dillinger films by creating characters recognizably based on Dillinger but just calling them something else), the talent of the cast and director Mann’s reputation for slam-bang energy, it should have been great.

Brigham Young (20th Century-Fox, 1940)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:58:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Charles and I watched last night was Brigham Young, a movie Darryl F. Zanuck put into production in 1940 as 20th Century-Fox studio head because he figured America’s fast-growing Mormon population would be interested in a story about the founding of their church and in particular their exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois (where the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, Jr., was convicted of treason on trumped-up charges and then lynched before he could be sentenced) to the valley of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where they ultimately set up their community and (mostly) thrived. He also trusted on his own instincts to hew closely enough to the usual movie formulae that non-Mormon audiences would like it, too. He was spectacularly wrong on both counts — the film was a resounding box-office flop and, in a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate it with ticket buyers Zanuck changed its title to Brigham Young — Frontiersman and tried to pass it off as an ordinary pioneer Western.

It’s actually quite a good movie within the conventions of Hollywood in 1940, though it’s neither a “white” enough version of the Mormons’ founding story to attract Mormon audiences then or now (it’s still probably a lot better than the tacky versions of the Mormons’ early days the church has produced itself) nor a dark enough one to get the maximum interest out of the tale. The film opens in Carthage, Illinois, where a group of townspeople have put up signs advertising a “wolf hunt” at 7 that night — only our first suspicion that dirty deeds are afoot comes when the “wolf hunters” blacken their faces (they wouldn’t have had to do that if they were really hunting wolves because — like their descendants, dogs — wolves can’t see for shit and rely mostly on their senses of hearing and smell). They’re really after Mormon families in a sort of homegrown pogrom that the Mormons themselves, accustomed to such things, know all too well.

The raiders invade the home of the Kents and kill father Caleb Kent and also their friend Mr. Webb (Frederick Burton), a non-Mormon. Caleb’s son Jonathan (Tyrone Power, top-billed — this is one of those movies in which the stars play fictional characters and the down-cast character actors play the real people) narrowly escapes and protects his mother (Jane Darwell) and younger brother Henry (Dickie Jones), then reports to the council of Mormon elders and sparks a debate on how best they can protect themselves against their neighbors’ intolerance. (The sequence in which Caleb Kent is lynched is full of dark, dramatic images that no doubt had heavy resonances to audiences in 1940 who’d seen similar events happening in newsreel footage from Europe; as Caleb is tied to a tree his tormentors order him to spit on a copy of the Book of Mormon, and later there’s a closeup of the book burning on one of the fires the lynch mob set.)

Joseph Smith (Vincent Price) notes that until then he’s turned the other cheek and instructed his followers not to resist (a depiction considerably at variance from the Mormons’ actual history — the real Joseph Smith was quite ready to take up arms against their tormentors, and more than once he warned his real or perceived enemies not to confuse Mormons with Quakers). Porter Rockwell — played by John Carradine in a weird get-up that makes him look like a frontier version of Jesus — says he’s always urged armed resistance, and Smith reluctantly issues instructions to the Mormons to arm themselves and fight back the next time they’re attacked. For this he’s indicted and tried in a crude court on charges of treason — the great character actor Tully Marshall, veteran of Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly, is the judge — and the only person who speaks in his defense is Brigham Young (Dean Jagger), who recounts the story of how he met Joseph Smith (it’s shown in flashback, the only time in the film we see Smith’s first — and only legally recognized — wife, Emma) and challenges the jury to acquit.

The jury convicts, of course, and Smith is lynched that very night (he’s shot to death on the second floor of the jail and his body falls through the jailhouse window to the ground below — which tallies with witness descriptions of how Smith’s murder actually went down), but before he’s killed he tells Young he wants Young to take over the Mormon church. Young has to deal with a rival successor, Angus Duncan (Brian Donlevy, a villain as usual), who wants to compromise and conciliate with the Mormons’ townie enemies. Young falsely claims he’s had a visit from God Himself entrusting him with the leadership of the church, and he’s told by a friend in the U.S. army that the Mormons will be set upon and lynched en masse by the townspeople unless he gets them the hell away from there.

The rest of the film is the story of the Mormon Trek, on which all the principals travel — including non-Mormon girl Zina Webb (Linda Darnell), daughter of the Kents’ ill-fated house guest, who goes on the trek because she’s in love with Jonathan Kent (well, they are the top-billed romantic leads, after all) — which begins excitingly with the Mormons’ successful crossing of a frosted-over river into Iowa, continues with their encounter with Jim Bridger (Arthur Aylesworth) at the fort named for him, their alliance with the Pawnee Indians (who help them at a time when all the white people they encounter are snubbing them) and their final crossing of the Rocky Mountains and Young’s decision to settle them in Utah — rather than continuing on to gold-rush California, as Angus Duncan and many of the others had wanted — on the reasonable ground that the only way the Mormons will survive is if they settle in a place no one else would want, and therefore they will be left alone long enough to build the community Joseph Smith called for, in which everyone would work and be rewarded equally; no one would starve but no one would have more than their share, either; and greed would be a punishable sin. (In this film’s script by Lamar Trotti — Zanuck’s pet writer, who wrote virtually all his most personal projects — based on a story by Louis Bromfield, the Mormons’ ideal sounds even more than usual like the socialist dream.)

Their first winter in the Great Salt Lake is viciously hard — Brigham Young is forced to reduce his people’s rations over and over — and the winter wheat crop they were counting on to bail them out is set upon by crickets, but then salvation occurs in the form of a flock of seagulls from the salt lake itself, who eat the crickets, save the wheat crop and give Young the evidence he wanted that God did indeed ordain him as the true successor to Joseph Smith. (Charles said he’d seen this movie on TV as a boy and remembered the final scene vividly.) One can notice the borrowings from other movies — the insect plague from The Good Earth, the overall conception of an effects-driven ending from The Rains Came (which also had Louis Bromfield as story source and Tyrone Power as star), and even a direct crib of the famous final scene in San Francisco where the pioneer version of Salt Lake City dissolves into the real one as it existed in 1940.

Brigham Young shoehorns a potentially interesting story into the usual Hollywood conventions — though Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell have surprisingly little to do and their romantic story seems only a distraction from Dean Jagger as Young, who (not surprisingly) dominates the film — but it’s also a well-done movie. The cinematography by Arthur Miller is phenomenal, featuring the sort of rich, dappled, contrasty lighting that brings this long-ago world to vivid life in black-and-white and makes one wonder why anyone ever thought the movies needed color. The direction by Henry Hathaway (who was 20th Century-Fox’s usual go-to guy for the scripts John Ford turned down — though his work here is very Fordian, down to the use of “Oh, Susannah!” and other songs of the period to goose up Alfred Newman’s impressive score) is surprisingly (for him) quiet and understated, even in the action scenes.

So is the acting; Vincent Price is also powerfully understated as Joseph Smith — I couldn’t help but chuckle over the irony that he played both Joseph Smith and Oscar Wilde (the latter in a 1977 one-person stage show called Diversions and Delights I saw live in San Francisco), but what’s more impressive is that an actor known later for campy scenery-chewing here played the part of a self-proclaimed prophet, the sort of part that usually sends performers an engraved invitation to overact, in a quiet and beautifully restrained manner. Alas, his good efforts are largely neutralized by John Carradine, who does chew the scenery unmercifully — and who does more damage to this movie than Price did good because Price is killed 23 minutes in. The film really belongs to Dean Jagger, who manages to make Young the conflicted character he most likely was in real life — determined and just but also severe and impatient with his people when he doesn’t live up to their expectations for them.

One of the obvious minefields in making a movie about the early Mormons — especially in the Production Code era — was how to deal with the polygamy issue and be historically honest while still keeping the Mormons as the good guys. Trotti’s solution was to treat it as a joke; there are only three references to polygamy in the script, and they all have elements of humor. The first is when one of the townspeople in the original lynching party in Illinois jokes, “What’s the difference between a white man and a Mormon? About 50 wives!” The second is when Brigham Young meets Jim Bridger and Bridger asks him, “How many do you have?” — he doesn’t say how many what but it’s not hard to figure out -— and Young answers, “Twelve.” The third, and longest, is when Zina Webb fends off Jonathan Kent’s marriage proposal by joking that she’s not going to be just one of 20 wives, and asks why he doesn’t just propose to all of them at once to save time. At the same time, we’re not shown anybody living the plural-marriage lifestyle; the only one of Young’s wives who’s actually depicted is his first one, Mary Ann (a rather wasted Mary Astor, waiting out the time until her spectacular comeback the next year in The Great Lie and The Maltese Falcon).

Brigham Young doesn’t delve into the darker aspects of its story — nor could it have been expected to under the Production Code-era restrictions and with Darryl Zanuck’s commercial hopes for the movie contingent on the Mormons of 1940 liking it — but on its own terms it’s surprisingly entertaining (even if Tyrone Power sometimes seems like an extra in a film in which he’s supposedly the star!) and even moving … if you can accept the Mormons as good guys and forget about everything they’ve done and stood for since!

The Old Barn (Mack Sennett Productions/Educational Pictures, 1929)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:29:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran The Old Barn, a 1929 Mack Sennett short that was certainly one of his first sound films and may have been the first. I’d downloaded this off archive.org and used it to fill out the disc on which I’d burned the 1933 film Corruption, and it proved to be a mildly amusing but not especially inspired comedy, directed by Sennett himself from a script by the usual committee — Hampton Del Ruth, Alfred M. Loewenthal, Andrew Rice, Earle Rodney and “story supervisor” John A. Waldron. (It was Sennett who pioneered the system — still used for TV sitcoms today — of having the writers sit around a table and bounce potential gags off each other, eventually evolving a script between them by using each other’s laughter, or lack of same, to determine what an audience is likely to find funny.)

By this time Sennett was already on the downgrade, having lost his distribution contract with Paramount and signed with Educational Pictures (the studio formed by his one-time comedy producer rival, Al Christie, which did not in fact make educational pictures) — though within a few years he’d make a mini-comeback, regaining his berth at Paramount and launching Bing Crosby’s movie career and W. C. Fields’ talkie comeback (and also giving Paramount the inside track on signing Crosby and Fields for features). The Old Barn is an interesting little movie, surprisingly naturalistic for a 1929 talkie (as Charles noted, the actors actually spoke normally and without the long … pauses … between … words characteristic of a lot of early sound features) but also not especially funny. It starts out at a country hotel and ends up in (not surprisingly) an old barn, where the various characters are alternately trying to capture and trying to hide from an escaped convict. It’s an O.K. movie but the funniest gag has nothing to do with the plot; it’s the opening logo, in which Sennett parodied the MGM lion by having a dog emerge from an archway and bark to herald the film.

Love Affair (Columbia, 1932)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:24:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our feature last night was Love Affair — not the 1939 classic directed by Leo McCarey and starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in a picturesquely doomed romance, or its 1994 remake with Warren Beatty (as star and director), Annette Bening and (in her last role) Katharine Hepburn (of course the most famous version of the story is the intervening one from 1957, also directed by McCarey and starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, retitled An Affair to Remember), but a 1932 film from Columbia directed by Thornton Freeland (mostly known for his musicals, especially Flying Down to Rio) and starring Dorothy Mackaill and Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart had come out to Hollywood in 1930 with a contract at Fox, but they’d dumped him after a few undistinguished supporting roles (and one quite good performance in John Ford’s Up the River, Spencer Tracy’s first feature and Bogart’s second). Columbia picked him up and had him under contract for six months in late 1931, but this was the only film they gave him — even though it was his first lead in a movie — and he made two films as a free-lancer at Warners in early 1932, Big City Blues and Three on a Match, before going back to New York, pursuing a stage career and making only one movie in the next four years (the 1934 gangster film Midnight, shot in New York for Universal — Bogart’s only credit for that company).

Love Affair, based on a story by Ursula Parrott and adapted for the screen by generally talented writers, Dorothy Howell (continuity) and Jo Swerling (dialogue), was one of those legendary movies I wondered if I’d ever get a chance to see — but unlike some of the others on that list (like Mamoulian’s Applause, Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo and Whale’s Remember Last Night?), it was one that failed to live up to the anticipation. Carol Owen (Dorothy Mackaill) is a devil-may-care heiress who decides out of the blue that she wants to learn to fly, so she enrolls in a flying school run by Gilligan (Jack Kennedy — not the same one!) and insists on going up with the school’s youngest and hunkiest instructor, Jim Leonard (Humphrey Bogart). What she doesn’t realize is that Leonard is about to quit the flying school to form a start-up company to develop a revolutionary new airplane motor he’s invented. What she also doesn’t realize is that she’s broke; for the last year her bills, unbeknownst to her, have been paid by her stockbroker, Bruce Hardy (Hale Hamilton), in anticipation of her marrying him.

Meanwhile, Hardy is also keeping a mistress, Linda Lee (the marvelous Astrid Allwyn), who’s exploiting him for his money so her boyfriend, theatrical director Georgie Keeler (Bradley Page), can soak Hardy for enough to mount a show that will make them both stars. By a weird bit of authorial fiat, Linda Lee is also Jim Leonard’s sister — though neither Linda nor Jim knows about the other’s dealings with Bruce and Carol. Got all that? Predictably — especially given the title of the film — Jack and Carol fall for each other, and Carol takes him on a round of nightclubbing and teaches him to play golf so he can have a sense of fun and not be a workaholic all the time — while Gilligan breaks off his plans to invest in Jack’s company because he thinks Jack has become too wrapped up in his relationship with Carol to devote the attention he needs to perfecting and marketing his invention. Love Affair isn’t an especially interesting story, and it’s told with such a strangulation-poor budget that we don’t get the generally obligatory montage sequence showing Carol leading Jim around to nightclubs, golf courses, and whatever else she’s supposed to be doing with him that’s taking his attention away from his startup.

Columbia seems to have blown the budget on Jim’s glorious-looking Art Deco office — one wonders how a budding entrepreneur who’s supposed to be scrounging for investors can afford such high-class digs — and it all ends with Jim, disillusioned with his triple betrayal (not only is his girlfriend going to marry another guy for his money, but the other guy is cheating on her with Jim’s own sister, while the sister is just trying to extort money from him), abandoning the startup and asking for his old job back, Carol deciding to rent one of Gilligan’s planes and use it to commit suicide, and Jim finally realizing all this and making an heroic run down the runway, where he leaps onto the plane (the leap itself was clearly doubled but there are enough close shots of Bogart grabbing and holding onto the plane for dear life it was clear he was really clinging to a plane as it taxied down the airport location), saves Carol and gives her a big kiss in mid-air to signal their reconciliation. Love Affair isn’t much of a story, and it isn’t told with anywhere near the sense of style that would have been necessary for it to work (though it benefits by the general sexual honesty of the so-called “pre-Code” period; the relationships between the characters are depicted as what they are, even though the Code Adminstration tried and failed to get Columbia to tone down the hints of actual sex between Jim and Carol) — and Mackaill is her usual competent but uninspiring self (the more I’ve seen of her other movies, the more her excellent performance in Safe in Hell looks like a fluke, inspired by the superb direction of William A. Wellman).

As for Bogart, he looks almost unimaginably callow. Oddly, in Up the River two years before he’d had a role of real substance (an ex-con desperate to conceal that fact from his family) and had anticipated some of the world-weariness and soured (but ultimately regained) idealism of the great Bogart roles to follow a decade or so later — but in Love Affair he’s a plain old juvenile, playing a part any decent-looking young male actor could have played and offering nothing special, nothing that would have made Harry Cohn realize what a great box-office name he would be. (Cohn would get another crack at Bogart 15 years later in the film Dead Reckoning after Bogart, by then a Warners superstar, renegotiated his Warners contract to be non-exclusive; Cohn would then get four more Bogart films through signing a distribution deal with Bogart’s company, Santana, and a sixth, The Caine Mutiny, when producer Stanley Kramer signed him up for it.)

Frolics on Ice (Everything’s on Ice) (RKO, 1939)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:15:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our “feature” was a really peculiar effort called Frolics on Ice, originally made by producer Sol Lesser at RKO in 1939 and called Everything’s on Ice and then reissued in this version by something called “Screencraft Pictures,” presumably a TV label, in the 1950’s. We downloaded this one from archive.org and it turned out to be an indigestible mixture of skating musical and situation comedy. The main function seemed to be to create a screen vehicle for prepubescent skater Irene Dare, who’s cast as “Irene Barton,” younger daughter of barber Joe Barton (Edgar Kennedy) and his wife Elsie (Mary Hart). Elsie’s brother, Felix Miller (Roscoe Karns), talks Joe out of a loan of $150 (out of the $2,000 Joe has saved up to buy the barbershop at which he works) to launch Irene’s career, so while Joe stays behind in Brooklyn Felix, Elsie, Irene and her older sister Jane (Lynne Roberts) all journey to Florida.

On the train they meet up with nondescript nebbish Leopold Eddington (Eric Linden, who was about a decade too old for his role — he’s the living proof of all those gags in the Gold Diggers movies about youngish-looking men persisting in the juvenile roles until they get lumbago), who we’re told — but the principals are not — is actually a millionaire, having been made so in his teens by the sudden death of his oil-tycoon father (were the writers, Adrian Landis and Sherman Lowe, thinking Howard Hughes here?). He falls in love with Jane — and she with him — at first sight, but Felix thinks Leopold is an impoverished jerk and tries to break him and Jane up. Instead he seeks to pair her off with Harrison Gregg (George Meeker), who’s posing as a millionaire but is in fact about to be thrown out of the hotel for not paying his bill. There were quite a few other movies of the period, including The Gay Deception and Hands Across the Table, that did far more with these tropes than Frolics/Everything’s on Ice did, and eventually it all turns out as we expect it to: Harrison is exposed as a four-flushing gold-digger (we could tell all along because he was blond and had a “roo” moustache), Jane insists on marrying Leopold and finds out only afterwards that he is genuinely rich, and Leopold ingratiates himself with the family by buying Joe (ya remember Joe?) the barbershop and underwriting Irene’s latest production number, introduced by a quartet of singing bears (actually, of course, actors in ill-fitting bear suits), in which she plays a newly hatched baby penguin brought into the world by an avian medico named “Dr. Quack” (I’m not making this up, you know!) — the latter decision makes one (this one, anyway) think his love for the heroine outweighs his brains or good taste.

Irene Dare was billed as six years old — she was actually eight (she was born February 14, 1931 in St. Paul, Minnesota) — and she certainly knew her way around a rink, though her routines seem a bit dated today simply because she doesn’t do the spectacular jumps we expect from top-level figure skaters now. She gets to skate in four big production numbers that don’t involve any other members of the cast — just a bunch of chorus skaters and a stereotypical screaming-queen director staging them — including an introduction set to the title song by Milton Drake & Fred Stryker; an Americana number in which she skates to “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and other moth-eaten “patriotic” favorites; a Hawai’ian number in which she attempts a hula on skates (she can’t do it but it’s highly doubtful anyone could have); and that ghastly final major production, staged by Dave Gould (whose faux-Berkeley spectacles weighted down the early Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, and who’d done a far superior ice ballet in the 1933 musical Melody Cruise) to a song called “Birth of a Snowbird” by Victor Young and Paul Francis Webster (both of whom did much better work elsewhere). Dare’s ice numbers look like they were spliced in from another movie, and though she luckily escaped the fate of JonBenet Ramsey (according to imdb.com Dare is still alive!) there’s something of the sick exploitation of the young about her appearance here, especially when that obnoxious Uncle Felix (judging from this film and also the far superior Road to Happiness, Roscoe Karns’ whole stock in trade seems to have been obnoxiousness!) coaches her to say, as part of his attempt to pass off his family as rich to attract a rich husband for Jane, “I don’t have to skate for money. I skate because I like to.”

Irene Dare (true name: Irene Davidson) was first introduced to movie audiences the previous year in a film also produced by Sol Lesser, Breaking the Ice, with fellow child star Bobby Breen, and she made only one other movie (Silver Skates, for Monogram in 1943, starring Kenny Baker and adult skater Belita with Patricia Morison and the real-life comedy skating duo Frick and Frack), and in a few minutes on the Web I haven’t been able to find out what happened to her after that, but she’s a personable little kid who deserved a better vehicle than this bizarre retreat of old movie clichés (with workmanlike but hardly inspired direction by Erle C. Kenton) in which we’re always two to five reels ahead of the filmmakers in figuring out what’s going to happen next.

One Body Too Many (Pine-Thomas/Paramount, 1944)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:25:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was One Body Too Many, which I recently burned to DVD from an archive.org download, a 1944 horror spoof from Paramount that I probably would have liked better if I hadn’t watched it so soon after the 1941 Universal film The Black Cat, since the plot premises are the same (an eccentric millionaire puts off her — or, in this case, his — relatives by writing a really bizarre will that makes them wait for their inheritances, and during the wait they start knocking each other off) and Bela Lugosi not only appears in both movies but plays the same role: the crazy rich person’s long put-upon butler. Lugosi is billed third — though the public-domain DVD’s generally put him first — behind Jack “Tin Man” Haley and Jean Parker.

Haley plays Albert Tuttle, life-insurance salesman for the Emperor company (which, by the looks of things, appears to be just Tuttle and one other person who banters with him in the opening scene — one wonders why Paramount didn’t recycle the elaborate insurance-company office mockup Billy Wilder had built for Double Indemnity), who has finally made an appointment to sell a $200,000 life insurance policy to eccentric millionaire Cyrus J. Rutherford. Tuttle explains to his partner that Rutherford is a believer in astrology — so much so that he has had an observatory, complete with dome and enclosed telescope, built on the premises of his home, and he’s hired an astronomy professor to work for him full-time, watching the stars through the telescope and giving him information about their positions in the sky so he can forecast his own future — and that Tuttle himself has succeeded in landing an appointment with him where other insurance men have failed by playing along with Rutherford’s astrological bent and making the date for a day when Leo, Rutherford’s sign, is in the ascendant.

We then cut to Rutherford’s home and to a close-up of his coffin — we’re supposed to be savoring the irony that the guy croaked just before Tuttle was to meet him and sell him a policy, but we also feel a sigh of relief that Tuttle didn’t get there in time to sell the policy and then have his company have to pay out on it. Not that there was much chance of Tuttle buying a policy since Rutherford already had a large fortune and hated all his relatives; he has his attorney, Morton Gellman (Bernard Nedell), summon them all to his home and read them the “preamble” to his will. This stipulates that he must be buried in a coffin with a clear window (sort of like Lenin’s) which is to be placed where it has a clear view of the stars, so they will keep shining down on him even after he’s dead. It also says that his relatives — whom he insults viciously throughout the document, suggesting that after he dies he’s going to be reincarnated as Don Rickles — are to wait in the house until his star-oriented crypt is built, and if they leave they will disinherit themselves, while if his body is buried or disposed of in any other way than the one he stipulated, the terms of the will will be reversed and the people he willed the least to will get the most, while those he willed the most to will get the least. He also says that the terms of the will itself — which he hand-wrote and sealed so not even Gellman knows what’s in it — are not to be read until after he’s interred in the clear crypt and placed in full view of the stars.

What follows is a pretty pointless but still sporadically amusing bit of nonsense in which Tuttle comes off as quite personable and attracts the affections of the only decent person in Rutherford’s family, Carol Dunlap (Jean Parker), while Cyrus’s body is stolen from its coffin and a few other people on the premises — including Gellman — turn up dead. One Body Too Many is not much of a movie — the 1941 Black Cat did a better job on this premise — but at least Lugosi gets some droll moments of his own (notably in one scene in which it’s hinted that he’s dropped rat poison in his coffeepot so everyone who drinks his coffee will be killed — though at the end, after everyone else has refused his coffee for reasons ranging from the sensible, “It keeps me awake,” to the snobbish — Tuttle says he won’t have any because it was made with a percolator and “I’m a drip,” evincing a kind of coffee connoisseurship I didn’t think came into existence until at least the 1950’s — he and the maid drink some of it themselves, to no ill effect) and Haley gets to recycle some of the dialogue of his Wizard of Oz cast-mate Bert Lahr and overall project a warm, rather homey air even in the quirky role of an insurance salesman who’s mistaken for the private detective who was supposed to guard Cyrus’s body and make sure nobody tried to bury it contrary to Cyrus’s instructions.

In the end, the murderer is unveiled — he’s Henry Rutherford (Douglas Fowley), the only one in the family who had Cyrus’s last name (all the others, we’re obviously supposed to assume, descended from his female relatives) and who earned (so to speak) his uncle’s dislike when he married a slatternly and unscrupulous woman named Mona (Dorothy Granger) — and Tuttle rescues Carol from him in the nick of time. We don’t ever find out who gets what from the Cyrus Rutherford estate and we don’t really care; directed by Frank McDonald from an “original” screenplay by Winston Miller and future director Maxwell Shane, One Body Too Many is an engaging little farce that could have done more with the central premise than it did but still is a relatively painless way to spend 75 minutes — and for once an archive.org post of a movie is actually complete!

Twilight (Summit Entertainment, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:39:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Charles and I ran last night was Twilight, the heavily hyped first film in the series of adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult vampire novels, all of which seem to be titled according to times of day between dusk and dawn. The film was released last year and was an instant hit, and the sequel, awkwardly called The Twilight Saga: New Moon, was released a couple of weeks ago and was an even bigger instant hit, setting box-office records for the opening weekend. I ordered it my last time at Columbia House and decided to watch it while the sequel was still in theatres and the smell of hype was still in the air. It’s the sort of movie that grows on you; thinking about it now I’m liking it better than I did when I was directly experiencing it, and I’m impressed with it as a workmanlike piece of entertainment even though, since I’m about 40 years older than its target audience, it’s a bit difficult for me to see why it became such a high-profile cult item and attracted the enormous audience it did.

As just about everybody who’s living in a less remote place than Timbuktu knows by now, Twilight is the story of a 17-year-old high-school girl, Isabella “Bella” Swan (Kristen Stewart), who starts out the movie in Arizona, where her mom lives with her stepfather, a minor-league baseball player who spends a lot of time on the road. With mom planning to spend that time on the road with him, Bella decides to move up to Forks, Washington, where her dad Charlie (Billy Burke) is the police chief. Since Forks is a town of only 3,000 people — though Charles joked that its high school looks large enough to hold that many students — being its police chief isn’t that tough a job, and any qualms about its remoteness and isolation soon drain away for Bella because, unlike in virtually every other story ever told about a new kid in high school, rather than being looked down on Bella is instantly popular.

She’s got boys of various colors — Asian nerd Eric (Justin Chon), Black guy Tyler (Gregory Tyree Boyce) and white kid Mike Newton (Michael Welch) — interested in her almost immediately, but she’s unimpressed by any of them. There’s a brief glimmer of interest between her and a Native American kid, Jacob Black (Tyler Lautner), but it dies when she learns he attends school on the local reservation rather than at the big high school, but the boy she eventually goes for is Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who lives with a mysterious clan led by his foster father, Dr. Carlyle Cullen (Peter Facinelli), and Carlyle’s wife Esmé (Elizabeth Reaser). The various Cullens all seem to have paired off with each other — they can since they’re not biologically related — and they’re all pale-skinned. Though they can go out during daytime, they prefer cloudy weather (one reason they located themselves in the chronically foggy, rainy climate of Washington state) because sun makes their skin look like it’s covered with industrial diamonds.

As this movie takes its own sweet time telling us — but most of its audience knew in advance anyway, making the l-o-o-o-o-n-g exposition especially annoying (director Catherine Hardwicke and writer Melissa Rosenberg take 50 minutes of screen time to give us story premises the folks at Universal in the 1930’s and 1940’s would have tossed off in a couple of brief, to-the-point scenes) — the Cullens are actually vampires, though they’ve taken an oath not to consume human blood but to feed themselves only on animals. In one of the nice pieces of dry wit that abound in the script, Edward explains that would be like a normal human being living entirely on tofu — it’s nourishing but tasteless.

Generally, Twilight is at its best when it’s combining the two genres that gave it its special appeal to the teenage audiences who made first the books and then the movies such enormous hits: the teen coming-of-age comedy/drama and the vampire movie. Though Kristen Stewart played an alienated teen in an even better movie, Speak — in which her alienation came not from being the new girl in school and falling in love with a vampire but from having been raped by the B.M.O.C. and then turned into a pariah because she called the police to raid the party at which she met the guy but then ran away instead of staying to press charges —she’s damned good here, and so is her vis-à-vis — even though I thought Cam Gigandet (a boy named Cam?) as James, member of a trio of bad vampires who do drink human blood and commit two murders in the movie (one of them of Waylon, played by Ned Bellamy, an old friend of Bella’s father), was considerably sexier than Robert Pattinson. Charles noted that for a modern-day movie Twilight is unusually well constructed — the story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and though the end is open-ended enough to set up a sequel it’s also a satisfying resolution to this phase of the story, like the endings in Wagner’s and Tolkien’s Ring cycles and not like the maddening serial cliffhanger-style endings of the first two Matrices.

One rather amazing aspect of Twilight is that it’s probably the first vampire movie ever made that doesn’t qualify as a horror film; there’s a fair amount of action (including a spectacular fight scene at the end between the good and bad vampires — one of the conceits of the saga is that vampires have super-powers, able to leap great distances, climb trees, move far more rapidly than normal humans and bend dented cars back into shape; in one sequence Edward uses his super-strength to block Tyler’s SUV as it’s hurtling towards Bella, thereby saving her life) but the emotions the filmmakers are evoking are romance and thrills, not terror. While I personally found the Underworld movies (at least the first two) more convincing rescensions of the vampire mythos into the modern era, Twilight is quite a workmanlike and impressive movie — indeed, I found myself liking it better than the Swedish import, Let the Right One In, that had been promoted as the more intellectually respectable alternative to it (in the Swedish movie the leads were still pre-pubescent and it was the girl, not the boy, who was the vampire) but which seemed to me much colder and less emotionally involving than Twilight.

The film ends with Edward and Bella swearing eternal love for each other even though both of them are all too aware that the only way they can make it eternal is if Bella is herself “vampirized” — and Meyer, Rosenberg and Hardwicke make much of the Anne Ricean irony that she’s more eager for that to happen than he is: at times it seems like one of those stories in which a person who’s never considered himself Gay or herself Lesbian has his/her first sexual experience with a same-sex partner, falls in love immediately and then is warned by the veteran Queer they’ve just fallen in love with, “Not so fast. This kind of life is a lot harder than you think.” Though Twilight suffers from the length of its exposition — it improves dramatically at the 50-minute mark once Bella finally realizes her boyfriend is a vampire — and doesn’t entirely escape the risibility any supernaturally-driven story treads on the thin edge of, it’s a quite impressive piece of work, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the fact that the original story writer, the screenwriter and the director are all women helped shape the marvelous emotional sensitivity with which the story is told. Believe it or not, I’m actually looking forward to seeing the sequel some day!

Road to Happiness (Monogram, 1942)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:11:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our first movie last night was Road to Happiness, an item I’d downloaded from archive.org (http://www.archive.org/details/road_to_happiness) and burned to a DVD, which was billed on their site as a 1934 musical starring John Boles as an aspiring singer who makes it as a radio star. Curiously, I found out from imdb.com that the movie was actually made in 1942 — which explains why Boles looked a decade older than he had in his early-1930’s films (he was a decade older!) — though one could readily see where the mistake came from because this movie, a production of second-iteration (post-1937) Monogram, actually seemed much closer philosophically and thematically to the early 1930’s than the early 1940’s. (The release date for Road to Happiness given on imdb.com was January 9, 1942, which means it was almost certainly finished before the U.S. entered World War II and probably seemed dated to audiences once it finally hit theatres.)

The plot has aspiring opera singer Jeff Carter (John Boles) scraping up the money to return from Lisbon, where he ended up after spending several years in Europe studying the baritone repertoire and gaining experience in small opera companies, to the U.S., where he hopes to parlay his European experience into major opera stardom. He’s saddled with obnoxious manager Charley Grady (Roscoe Karns),who seems better at alienating his potential employers than wooing them; and the man on whose approval his career depends is temperamental conductor Pietro Pacelli (Paul Porcasi, who seems to be enacting the popular image of Arturo Toscanini as a crazed maniac who insulted his musicians and treated everyone else like shit), but those are the least of his problems. His biggest problem is that he’s totally broke — so much so that he has to ask his former landlady Mrs. Price (Lillian Elliott) for his old room back — and his wife Millie (Mona Barrie) has divorced him (though she continued to write to him in Europe, giving him the false impression that once he returned to the U.S. they’d get back together) and remarried. Her new husband is a wealthy stockbroker, Sam Rankin (Selmer Jackson), and the two of them have sent Jeff’s son Danny (Billy Lee in a refreshingly un-sentimental performance for a child actor just after the Age of Temple) to military school, where he’s doing well and he’s well-liked. Daddy goes to the school to fetch him, and Danny is glad to see him and eagerly agrees to leave the school and move in with dad even though all dad has to offer him is a room in a boardinghouse (which he can’t even pay for — Mrs. Price is giving him credit, as she had done when he and his wife lived there years earlier) and whatever presents and treats he can get by pawning his belongings.

In bare outline, the plot of Road to Happiness sounds like rancidly sentimental treacle, but as actually played the film is surprisingly tough-minded and emotionally moving; writers Matt Taylor (story) and Robert Hardy Andrews (script) play against many of the usual clichés and avoid the easy movie devices many writers would have plugged into this story. What’s more, they give the tale a deep sense of class consciousness fairly common in the movies of the early 1930’s (at the height of the Great Depression) but surprising as late as 1942 (no wonder the folks at archive.org thought this movie was eight years older than it was!) and they make Millie a surprisingly bitchy character, totally heedless of the welfare and needs of her son and interested only in being a socialite and hanging out with worthless drinking buddies. The first weekend Jeff sends Danny back to see his mom, she turns him away with a note — given to him by her butler — that she’s too busy to see him.

The second weekend she lets him in — and her new husband plies him with presents and evinces far more caring and interest in his welfare than his mom does — but at 5:15 p.m., when he wants to listen to the “Laughing Cowboy” radio show because his dad is playing the star’s faithful Indian companion (unable to find a job as a singer he’s taken the first thing he was offered, and he’s nobly renounced his operatic ambitions to make sure he’s making some money to take care of his son), mom trundles in her cocktail-party companions and they drown out the radio. Danny is so humiliated he insists on walking all the way back to his dad’s boardinghouse — even turning down his stepfather’s offer of a ride — out of a believable mixture of trauma and hurt pride that’s one of the many elements that makes this movie ring true emotionally instead of seeming manipulated for the tear ducts. (Charles pointed out that she’s probably the nastiest mother figure in classic Hollywood who wasn’t an out-and-out crook like the even more irresponsible mother in the 1931 film Night Nurse.)

Director Phil Rosen, who at this time was making mostly Monogram’s usual garbage, handles this story with the delicacy and the dedication it needs and shows that the two great movies he made in the early 1930’s (The Phantom Broadcast for first-iteration Monogram in 1933 and Dangerous Corner for RKO a year later) weren’t flukes. Only towards the end of the movie, when the writers have to let things start breaking Jeff’s way at long last so he can achieve success and raise his son as a single parent without having to worry about that bitch mother of his hurting him anymore, do they fall back into cliché; the great (and egomaniacal) singer Almonti (Antonio Filauri) shows up for his weekly program at the same station where Jeff is rehearsing his latest “Laughing Cowboy” script, only he’s too drunk to perform, so Jeff goes on in his place, sings “Vision fugitive” from Massenet’s Hérodiade (an odd feature for a baritone — even in an era in which more people listened to and followed opera than do now, one might have expected him to sing a bit of Rigoletto, the Toreador Song from Carmen, or another more famous baritone aria), is an instant star and gets the offer from tempermental conductor Pacelli (ya remember Pacelli?) he’s been waiting for all along.

Until then, though, Road to Happiness has been quite an engaging film that’s well worth watching (even though the print on archive.org, along with being misdated, is about 10 minutes shorter than the original release, and some of the cuts — including one of Boles’ three songs, “America” — are all too obvious) and surprisingly moving emotionally even though it’s not really a musical — there’s no production number and all Boles gets to sing in this print is the Massenet aria at the end and “Danny Boy” (it seems almost certain that the writers named his son after this song, as an excuse to get it into the movie!) early on over the dinner table at the boardinghouse.

The Magic Carpet (Columbia, 1951)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:05:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second film I ended up running last night was one I’d screened before and which had also turned out to be surprisingly good: not a classic by any means but an entertaining movie with a lot of charm. The film was The Magic Carpet, an Arabian Nights tale made by Columbia in 1951. It was a sleazy little project, produced by Sam Katzman and directed by Lew Landers, and the female lead — Narah, sister of the usurping Caliph Ali (Gregory Gaye), who in the opening sequence murdered the rightful Caliph Omar and his wife Yashima (Doretta Johnson), who was able to send her newborn baby to the safety of the home of her uncle, Dr. Ahkmid (William Fawcett), via the titular magic carpet — was offered to, of all people, Lucille Ball. This was Harry Cohn working at his Machiavellian best: Ball had just accepted a major role in Cecil B. DeMille’s circus extravaganza The Greatest Show on Earth but that was a Paramount production and she still owed Columbia one more film on the three-picture deal under which she’d made The Fuller Brush Girl and Miss Grant Takes Richmond.

Ball asked for a loanout and Cohn refused; then Cohn sent her the script of The Magic Carpet, thinking she’d turn it down and he’d be able to fire her without paying her the contract salary he owed her for a third film. On the advice of a friend, Ball accepted the script, thinking that since it was a “B” and her role was small (Patricia Medina actually has more screen time in the final film than Ball does, and it is Medina who ends up with the hero, played with his usual stiffness by John Agar) she could make it in a hurry and finish it quickly enough to keep her date with Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount. Only as she started making The Magic Carpet, Columbia’s wardrobe people kept having to let out her Arab princess’s costume again and again, and Ball finally realized that after 11 childless years she and husband Desi Arnaz were about to have their first baby, Lucie. (So Lucie Arnaz joins the ranks of future stars, including Liza Minnelli and Mia Farrow, who made their screen debuts — sort of — before they were born.) So she had to drop out of The Greatest Show on Earth (Gloria Grahame replaced her) and all she had left to show for her year’s work was a big paycheck from Harry Cohn and the promise of TV mega-stardom once I Love Lucy debuted that fall.

Given that background — and the presence of hacky micro-talents like director Lew Landers and male star John Agar — one would expect The Magic Carpet to be almost unwatchable trash. Surprise: it’s actually good fun, thanks mainly to its screenwriter, David Mathews, who manages on a far smaller budget and scale to achieve the balance all the mega-talents involved in the 1967 Casino Royale tried for and failed dismally at; his script follows the Arabian Nights conventions closely enough that the pre-pubescent boys in the 1951 movie audiences would have taken it as an exciting “straight” tale of derring-do, while the adults reluctantly accompanying their kids to the theatre would have enjoyed it as a campy spoof. Agar’s role, Ramoth a.k.a. “The Scarlet Falcon,” is of course the son of the martyred Omar and Yashima and the apprentice of his foster-father, Ahkmid; and he insinuates his way into the palace of the Caliph of Baghdad by slipping the Caliph (who by the way is drawn as yet another Iraqi precursor of Saddam Hussein, ruthlessly suppressing any hint of political dissent and taxing the population unmercifully to pay for his royal palaces — no wonder it was so easy for both Presidents Bush to demonize Saddam: he was playing the Hollywood script of a villainous Arab ruler!) a drug that gives him hiccups, then “curing” him by being the only one there with the antidote.

The elements are pretty predictable — Ramoth has a comic-relief sidekick, Razi (George Tobias); Razi’s daughter Lida (Patricia Medina, Mrs. Joseph Cotten), is a tomboy who wants to join the band of the “Scarlet Falcon” (in which guise Ramoth stages daring raids on the Caliph’s caravans and, like an Arab Robin Hood, distributes stolen grain to the starving people of Baghdad) and also is in love with Ramoth and has some jealous hissy-fits towards Narah; and bad Caliph Ali has a Karl Rove-like grand vizier, Boreg al Buzzar (Raymond Burr — interesting to find two 1950’s TV icons in this film! — who isn’t as good as the superb George Zucco in a similar role in Sudan but is certainly acceptable), whom Ramoth defeats in the climactic swordfight to regain his rightful throne but only after he uses the titular magic carpet to take Lida on a honeymoon ride while Ali and Narah are taken to Abu Ghraib (or whatever was serving that purpose in this particular part of Iraqi history). The carpet itself is quite convincing; Columbia’s special-effects people were able to get it to fly without any discernible flaws in the process work (like the black lines — caused by shrinkages in one of the films before a scene is double-printed — that generally marked attempts at this kind of shot at cheaper studios) — and so is Agar as the hero; he was never any great shakes as an actor and he can’t compare to Douglas Fairbanks or even Jon Hall, but he’s far better than the outrageously miscast Tony Curtis in the contemporaneous The Prince Who Was a Thief and his well-known friendship with John Wayne led him to imitate Wayne’s famous halting cadences whenever he wanted to sound butch — to surprisingly good effect.

Lucille Ball seems hardly to be in the film at all; she doesn’t get any comedy scenes, her manner is too modern to suit an Arab costume drama (though she does haughtiness and jealousy quite well) and her flaming-red Sydney Guilaroff hair seems odd in the court of Baghdad, though at least it makes her stand out in the sometimes murky Supercinecolor process in which this film was shot. (David Mathews actually offered to write more scenes for Ball and fatten her part, but Lucy — whose only motive for making this film was a quick paycheck, the quicker the better — turned him down and said she’d accept the part as it stood.) Though it tends to drag towards the end as the plot lurches towards its predictable resolution (I was rather hoping that since this was taking place in a Muslim country, Ramoth would be allowed to marry both female leads — but the Production Code would have rendered that unthinkable even to a writer with his tongue so firmly in his cheek as David Mathews), overall The Magic Carpet is a surprisingly fun, engaging minor film that pleasantly fills 83 minutes.

Christmas in Connecticut (Warner Bros., 1945)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:01:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film we watched last night was one Charles had requested: Christmas in Connecticut, which I knew I had on an old commercial VHS tape and it turned out I had on DVD, too — I had recorded it on December 24, 2008 from TCM right after the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol directed by Edwin L. Marin with Reginald Owen as Scrooge. Christmas in Connecticut is a modern-dress comedy, directed by Peter Godfrey from a script by Adele Commandini (writer of Deanna Durbin’s early vehicles, and it shows) and Lionel Houser from a story by Aileen Hamilton. According to imdb.com, it was based on a columnist in Family Circle magazine named Gladys Taber, who lived in Connecticut on a farm called Stillmeadow (as opposed to all those moving meadows we’ve seen lately?) and wrote a column on cooking and farm life and taking care of a family.

The conceit Hamilton, Commandini and Houser came up with was that their character, Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), really lives in a ratty New York City apartment and can’t cook at all — this would-be Martha Stewart (the modern-day person people who watch Christmas in Connecticut today are instantly reminded of) is faking it all, getting her recipes from local restaurateur Felix Bassenak (S. Z. Sakall) and making the rest of it up. Meanwhile — in fact, this is how the movie opens — sailors Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) and “Sinky” Sinkiewicz (Frank Jenks) are shipwrecked when their destroyer is torpedoed and they spend 18 days on a raft without food. (In an hilarious and inventive sequence, Jones dreams that he’s sitting at a table on the raft and being served a gourmet meal by Sinky in waiter’s drag.) Recuperating in a naval hospital, Jones gets upset that he’s being fed only milk while Sinky is getting full-course meals, and on Sinky’s advice he decides that the way to get decent food is to cruise the nurse who’s taking care of them, Mary Lee (Joyce Compton).

Only Mary is so resistant that in order to get to her he has to promise to marry her — and she decides that the problem with him is that he’s never had a family (he was an artist and a drifter before he enlisted) and therefore she’ll write a letter to Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), publisher of the Smart Housekeeping magazine for which Elizabeth writes her column, and get her boyfriend invited to Elizabeth’s farm for the Christmas holiday. Since she already knows Yardley — she once took care of his granddaughter — the plan works, and now Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham (Robert Shayne), have to come up with a Connecticut farm, a husband, an eight-month-old baby (since Elizabeth has written in her columns that she has one) and some absolutely astonishing holiday meals to fool Jones and also Yardley, who will fire them instantly if he realizes they’ve been faking her columns. In a way the opening of this movie is a parody of Meet John Doe — another film in which Stanwyck played a journalist who faked a big story and then worried about the reaction of her corpulent, hard-hearted boss when he found out — though soon enough Dudley comes up with solutions to the various dilemmas involved.

The farm will come from John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner), foofy architect who’s been after Elizabeth to marry him for years — though he lets out a homoerotic yelp of delight when he finds out that his Christmas guest will be a sailor — the baby will be one of the local kids, whom Sloan’s maid Norah (Una O’Connor) babysits; and the dinners will come from Felix, who’ll be invited to tag along and pose as Elizabeth’s uncle. Complications ensue — including the rather delightful one that there are two babies, of different hair colors, facial appearances and, most importantly, genders — and Yardley himself also comes up for the weekend, while John and Dudley summon the local justice of the peace (Dick Elliott) to tie the knot between John and Elizabeth — only they’re always getting interrupted, and any hardened moviegoer will realize that’s because Elizabeth is destined to fall for that hot, hunky sailor and want to marry him at the end.

Christmas in Connecticut isn’t exactly on the level of It’s a Wonderful Life or the various Christmas Carols as a holiday institution, but on its own merits it’s a quite good movie — surprising from a usually lackluster director like Peter Godfrey. No, he’s not Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks (for whom Stanwyck made her two best comedies — The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, respectively), and Christmas in Connecticut would have been an even better movie than it is if they’d let Sturges loose on it (though it would also have been considerably quirkier and possibly less of a box-office hit), but on its own merits it’s a quite charming film and noteworthy not only for Stanwyck’s comedic skills but Greenstreet’s as well.

On stage Greenstreet had been best known as a comedian — his signature role was Shakespeare’s Falstaff — but when he was recruited for his film debut (at age 61!) it was as the black-hearted criminal mastermind of The Maltese Falcon and that became his film “type.” Seeing him here is a real treat and makes the whole idea of Greenstreet as Falstaff seem much more credible than it does in his other movies. The movie is generally well acted — though Dennis Morgan is a bit hard to take as the irresistible man who’s got both sex appeal and war-hero status on his side in the romantic conflict (Sturges would probably have wanted Joel McCrea for the part, which would have been better) — and Godfrey actually moves the camera and dollies through the house to discover the characters (and give this an air of French-style bedroom farce at times) instead of just doing traditional shot-reverse shot edits.

The real hero(ine) of this film behind the camera, though, is probably Commandini — she gave Stanwyck’s character here the same nervy combination of indomitability and vulnerability she’d given to Deanna Durbin in her Universal vehicles a decade earlier, and though she had two collaborators the general aura of the story seems to be hers. Christmas in Connecticut was remade for cable TV in 1992 with Arnold Schwarzenegger directing (his only shot behind the cameras) and Dyan Cannon in the Stanwyck role, and according to imdb.com another version is slated for next year, but this one is quite good enough and a welcome holiday-themed audience diversion.

Racket Busters (Warner Bros., 1938)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:22:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I caught this morning was Racket Busters, a typical Warners programmer from 1938 written by two estimable scribes — Robert Rossen and Leonardo Bercovici — not that that helped much, and directed in his usual unsubtle slam-bang style by Lloyd Bacon. Humphrey Bogart is top-billed — though not above the title — as Martin (his first name is John but that’s not revealed until he’s arrested and tried at the end), a “racketeer” in the literal sense of the word: one who organizes phony “associations” — ostensibly unions or business groups, but actually shakedowns in which the members are forced to pay up or else have their livelihoods destroyed and sometimes get killed. Walter Abel plays Hugh Allison, the prestigious attorney who’s drafted as a special prosecutor to try to bust the rackets for good — he got a similar appointment previously but was unable to make his charges stick because the judges and juries were successfully intimidated — and who runs up against a wall of silence from the people whom the rackets are exploiting.

Among these are independent truck driver Denny Jordan (George Brent) and his pregnant wife Nora (Gloria Dickson, someone Warners clearly was trying to build into a star, but it didn’t take), along with his sidekick Skeets Wilson (Allen Jenkins) and Skeets’ girlfriend Gladys (Penny Singleton, pre-Blondie). It’s pretty much a standard by-the-numbers Warners gangster flick, with exciting chase scenes, elaborate montages to advance the story (including one in which Bogart’s face looms spectrally over the actions committed by his hired thugs, running rebellious truck drivers off the road and pouring gasoline over produce owned by commodity merchants who refuse to pay tribute to his gang) and a down-the-middle plot line that acknowledges the existence of honest labor unions while strongly suggesting that the Teamsters Union wasn’t an honest union later taken over by gangsters, but was a gangster-led enterprise from the get-go.

Racket Busters is unevenly acted — Bogart, in the nominal lead, does little more than snarl (he was clearly getting tired of these cookie-cutter gangster parts and this was around the time he joked that he could write all his lines on 3” x 5” cards because he said the same things in every movie and all that varied was the order in which he had to say them); Gloria Dickson tries hard but shows why she never became a major star; Allen Jenkins is his typical self until the end — when he tries to rouse his fellow truckers to break a gangster-called strike, gets picked off by a Martin assassin for his pains, and has a surprisingly moving and finely acted death scene reminiscent of Jimmy Durante’s in The Wet Parade. But the big problem with this movie is that the role of Denny Jordan cried out for James Cagney and got George Brent, who not only fails to convince us that he’s a proletarian but also is utterly incapable of tracing the character’s arc from heroic resister of Martin’s machine to Martin’s stooge and back to decent human being again.

The Snow Creature (Planet Productions/United Artists, 1954)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:18:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I screened The Snow Creature, a 1954 film from director/producer W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder’s cousin, though imdb.com mistakenly identifies him as the more famous Wilder’s brother — in fact “Wilhelm” was the original first name of both of them so they couldn’t have had the same parents) that actually had the potential to be an interesting and different film if the budget hadn’t approached strangulation level; one gets the impression Wilder and his son Myles, who wrote the script, were panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard for the money to keep shooting.

A couple of white guys, botanist Dr. Frank Parrish (Paul Langton) and Peter Wells (Leslie Denison), organize an expedition into the Himalayas for reasons Wilder Söhn never quite makes clear. But when their lead Sherpa guide, Subra (Teru Shimada), loses … well, at first it’s his sister-in-law but later it’s his wife — anyway, whoever she is and however they’re related, she’s kidnapped and carried off by a Yeti (an Abominable Snowman to you), a giant guy in a carpet sample who is part of a race of legendary beings living in the mountains, Subra and his fellow Sherpas stage a mutiny, take over the expedition and send it off in the mountains to hunt the Yeti.

After about 40 minutes’ worth of screen time walking around the mountain set (actually the familiar Bronson Canyon Western location, liberally strewn with ground-up cornflakes or whatever they were using then to simulate snow), they finally capture a Yeti — alive — and bring it back to San Francisco (where, through the magic of stock footage, they fly from Nepal via New York à la Spider Island), whereupon the film turns into a chintzy remake of King Kong without the Kong-Fay Wray love story (indeed, there are no principal female characters in the movie!). The Yeti escapes captivity, kills a few women on the streets and is ultimately hunted down and killed — and that’s the end of it.

The Snow Creature gets a few things right — like the appearance of the Yeti, whom they keep quite effectively in shadow to make him look more sinister and keep us focused on the monster itself and not the chintziness of his makeup; and the fact that, unlike a lot of more highly regarded directors who shot mountaineering scenes, Wilder managed to make it believable that these people were in a highly cold and unforgiving climate. (The fact that we were watching this movie on a cold night and there were bits of real-life drafts in our room helped the verisimilitude, too.) But there are a lot more things that go wrong, including the fact that whenever the Yeti appears, he does so in the exact same piece of footage: a shot of the actor in shadow walking straight towards the camera. (The imdb.com entry on The Snow Creature tentatively lists Lock Martin — the unusually tall stunt person who played Klaatu in the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still — as the Yeti, but stresses that that’s unconfirmed.)

It also doesn’t help that the language of the Sherpas sounds an awful lot like Japanese — for a reason that isn’t revealed until the credit roll at the end: they were all played by Japanese actors and therefore they were speaking Japanese! I don’t know if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ever gave The Snow Creature the “treatment” — it would have deserved it and they could probably have done quite a number on it, but at the same time, as dull and uninspiring a movie as it is, there’s a kind of likability about it that really makes you wish it were a better film.

Three Episodes of “Beulah” and Other 1950’s TV Shows and Earlier Cartoons

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:51:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

About a week ago Charles and I watched a miscellany of 1950’s TV shows he’d downloaded, including two prize episodes of the early-1950’s sitcom Beulah. My understanding was that this was originally produced as a vehicle for Hattie McDaniel in the lead role of Beulah, the wise-mammy maid to Harry and Alice Henderson (played by early-1940’s Universal veterans David Bruce and Jane Frazee) — essentially a modern-dress version of her Academy Award-winning role from Gone With the Wind — but McDaniel died after the first season and Louise Beavers replaced her in the role. The series entry on imdb.com is more ambiguous and seems to be saying that McDaniel only shot two episodes of the series, not an entire season. Fortunately, one of the episodes Charles downloaded featured her: a marvelous show in which the Hendersons’ son Donnie (Stuffy Singer) is doing poorly in his grade-school dance class because he finds the music he’s expected to dance to — a tea-dance waltz record of amazing insipidity — totally uninspiring.

In a plot twist that eerily anticipates the rock ’n’ roll craze of the mid-1950’s, Beulah and her boyfriend Bill (played by an actor billed as Ernest Whitman who turned out to be Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman, Armed Forces Radio Service announcer during World War II, who in between jokes about his weight got to announce a lot of great performances by Billy Eckstine’s band and many of the other great Black acts of the mid-1940’s), who in this episode runs a garage — in the later show with Louise Beavers he seemed to be a colleague of Beulah’s on the Hendersons’ household staff — get together, put on a Black boogie-woogie record and show Donnie how to do jazz dance. Donnie becomes the sensation of the school’s dance recital and, of course, pisses off the teachers and other authority figures no end, while the kids find this “new” music liberating.

The other Beulah episode — which we watched earlier — featured Louise Beavers and also centered around Donnie (a typically obnoxious movie kid but still a more interesting character than his parents), who needed baby-carriage wheels for his soap-box racer and got them by having the local store owner sell him a baby carriage on credit and bill his mom — leading everyone to the misunderstanding that his mom was pregnant. This one wasn’t as sharply written as the other — its writers were old Hollywood hack Harry Clork and a colleague named James Hill, whereas the “Waltz” episode was written by Ian McClellan Hunter (who became legendary not for any of his own scripts but from “fronting” for Dalton Trumbo on the film Roman Holiday — just before the release of the movie Hunter was blacklisted himself and was told that Paramount was taking his name off the movie; he complained to Trumbo and Trumbo got indignant and said, “They can’t do this to you!” Hunter replied, “But, Dalton, you wrote that script!” Trumbo was doing so much under-the-table work with so many “fronts” he himself had lost track of what he had and hadn’t written).

Though imdb.com lists Jean Yarbrough as the director of Beulah, both these episodes were directed by Richard Bare (also a “B”-movie director keeping alive by working for television, though at least Bare had got to make his “B”’s for a major studio, Warners). The show started with Beulah (whichever actress played her) speaking right to the camera and bemoaning the fact that Bill kept putting off their marriage, and it also had a third regular Black character: Oriole (played by Dorothy Dandridge’s sister Ruby in a chirpy-voiced manner reminiscent of Butterfly McQueen, who played a similar role opposite McDaniel in Gone With the Wind), a maid at one of the neighbors’ homes whom Beulah used as a friend and confidante.

According to Archive.org, only seven episodes of Beulah now exist even though the show ran for three seasons, and they have only three on their site, but even on the basis of these two shows it’s a quite remarkable sitcom and holds up well — and it’s interesting, noting Black bandleader Andy Kirk’s bitter remark that “civil rights worked in reverse in the music business” (he meant that Southern venue owners had been willing to hire Black bands when they could still segregate the audience, but once they had to integrate the audience they went with white bands exclusively), that according to the evidence of Beulah civil rights worked in reverse on TV as well: when they recycled this concept in the 1960's as Hazel, they picked a white actress, Shirley Booth, to play the all-knowing maid.

Certainly the two Beulah shows were a lot better than the third sitcom item Charles put on this disc: an episode of an early-1950’s sitcom variously known as The Stu Erwin Show and Trouble with Father, in which the whiny-voiced comedian from all too many 1930’s movies got to play a school principal and his real-life wife June Collyer played his on-screen wife — though the show wasn’t really I Love Lucy except in reverse: she was the level-headed one and he was the scatterbrain who came up with various mad schemes — in this show, running his own chicken farm on his premises so he doesn’t have to buy eggs. It was a perfectly decent but pretty uninspired show — and let’s face it, as a real-life married couple playing husband and wife on a sitcom they were a far cry below either Lucy and Desi or George and Gracie.

Charles’ disc also included a couple of other items, one of which was a half-hour show called Joe Santa Claus in which the central character is Joe Peters (Ray Montgomery), who’s appointed to play Santa Claus at the department store where he works because he’s considered the most expendable — he’s had a series of jobs he’s walked out on, and he doesn’t seem to be long for this one either. In a series of flashbacks it’s revealed that he served in World War II and brought home a German war bride, Maria (Maria Palmer), fathered a daughter by her and attempted to maintain a family, but his scattered work history, exaggerated sense of his own importance and general failure to Play Well With Others led to a separation, and at the moment he’s drafted to play Santa he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his wife and daughter. Needless to say, daughter herself shows up at the store to see Santa Claus and, with neither knowing who the other is, she pours out her heart to the department-store Santa and says all she wants for Christmas is her daddy back. This could have been insufferably treacly but for the writer and director, Alex Gruenberg (adapting a story by Howard J. Green), who not only plays down the obvious opportunities for cheap sentimentality but even gets a refreshingly hard-nosed performance out of the actress who plays the girl, Jeri James — she’s more bitter than sad over her dad’s disappearance and she pleads for his return with a grim determination that probably softens Joe’s heart far more than a more openly emotional tear-jerking one would have. It certainly moved me more than a more sentimental presentation of this material would have!

Also on the disc was an intriguing excerpt from the famous 1957 TV special that introduced the Edsel — it would be interesting to see the whole thing if it survives “complete” — featuring Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong in a sort-of duet on the song “The Birth of the Blues.” It’s mainly Sinatra singing it to the George Siravo arrangement he’d recorded it with five years earlier and Armstrong doing his level best to squeeze himself into it somehow — and it doesn’t help that Armstrong cracks on a few trumpet notes (his intonation was usually astonishingly close to perfect) or that the balance is pretty wretched, favoring Frank Sinatra’s singing over Armstrong’s contributions (it figures) and Armstrong’s trumpet playing over his singing. Given the beauty of Armstrong’s duets with Bing Crosby (they seem to have played well together because they’d both come up in the 1920’s and they’d known each other since 1931, when Crosby frequently played hooky from his own engagement at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. to see Armstrong perform at Sebastian's New Cotton Club — an establishment that got put out of business when the gangsters who owned the original Cotton Club in New York sued Frank Sebastian for plagiarizing the name!) it’s rather disappointing that he and Sinatra didn’t do better together — they both seemed nervous, as if all too aware that this was a Big Event and it was going out live to a presumably enormous audience (though the post-show ratings were as disappointing as the sales of the Edsel itself), and they were both so scared of making a mistake that they couldn’t relax and show off their talents at their best. Still, this clip is well worth having, especially since Armstrong and Sinatra did almost nothing together — even when they were all in the film High Society it was Crosby, not Sinatra, who partnered Armstrong in the duets!

••••••••••

One of the items we watched last night was a third episode of Beulah that I’d spotted on archive.org, “Beulah Goes Gardening,” from the Hattie McDaniel season, in which the Hendersons, Beulah’s employers, decide to economize by firing their gardener. Supposedly dad Harry (David Bruce) is going to mow the lawn, mom Alice (Jane Frazee) is going to trim the rose bush (a particularly prized possession of Harry’s) and son Donnie (Stuffy Singer) is going to pull the weeds — but on the first Saturday when they have to do all this, they go out on various (separate) outings and each one in turn sticks Beulah with their job. There’s also a subplot in which Beulah takes the rose bush to a plant store to have it resuscitated — and the owner sells it instead, leading Beulah to take a couple of “loaner” rose bushes that are successively larger than the old one, which earns her an inaccurate reputation as a green thumb. While hardly in the same league as “The Waltz” episode, this is still an incredibly warm, funny show highlighted by the marvelous acting of McDaniel, who as she did throughout her career turned the “Mammy” stereotype into Earth Mother, all-seeing, all-knowing and telling us through a loving wink at the camera that she knows she’s really in charge, even though she’s nominally the maid, and without her all these white people would hardly be able to find the floor with thelr legs when they got out of bed in the morning. (Like the other two Beulah episodes on archive.org, this one was directed by Richard Bare — and the script is by Nathaniel Curtis, a reasonable enough author but hardly in the same league as Ian McClellan Hunter.)

I also paired this with a cartoon from Universal from about 1940 to 1940 called Scrub Me, Mama, with a Boogie Beat — essentially a cartoon video for the song of that title, which was recorded both by Will Bradley’s band and the Andrews Sisters. I thought it would be an interesting companion piece for Beulah since it was criticized on the archive.org Web site for its demeaning depictions of Black people — but while that’s there (the opening scene is of a stereotypically shiftless, lazy Black guy with a prominent nose getting stung in it by a bee, and him barely waking up long enough to say “ouch” and then going back to sleep), so is a dazzling use of color (by the time this was made Walt Disney’s three-year monopoly of three-strip Technicolor for animation was long over) and a fast, energetic presentation quite suited to the exuberance of the song by Don Raye. (I’d thought he wrote this one with his frequent collaborator, Gene DePaul, but no-o-o-o-o: this one is credited to Raye solo.) This cartoon, produced by Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz, is also noteworthy for a dazzling color palette, mostly greens and reds, and for one of the rare times the “New Universal” (1937-1946) studio logo was shown in color (the sky was dark green — not deep blue or black, as I’d have expected — and the Universal letters were a kind of blue-white, while the stars in the sky were orange. Nice going!

••••••••••

In my researches into songwriter Arthur Johnston on archive.org I had run across a 1939 Popeye cartoon called It’s the Natural Thing to Do, a typical cross-promotion from Paramount (the song was written by Johnston and Sam Coslow for Bing Crosby’s 1937 film Double or Nothing) with a fascinating and surprisingly modern-sounding premise: Popeye and Bluto receive a fan letter saying that the author likes their movies but wants an end to the roughhouse stuff between them; instead they should treat each other with decency and decorum because “it’s the natural thing to do.” They reach a level of exquisite boredom with each other Dorothy Parker joked about when she reviewed Emily Post’s Etiquette — until Popeye and Bluto start crashing into each other as homoerotically as the Fleischer brothers and their animators dared, and soon they’ve abandoned all pretense of etiquette and “the natural thing to do” as they go at each other hammer-and-tongs. It’s a clever movie and has its share of physically impossible gags — including Popeye flying through the air from one of Bluto’s punches, landing inside a portrait of a woman and then her face dissolves into his — that made 1930’s cartoons watchable and readily distinguishable from the live-action silent comedies that had preceded them.

After that I screened the other “filler” on my disc, an episode of the rather interesting 1950’s British TV show The Invisible Man (ostensibly based on the character created by H. G. Wells but really a hero rather than a villain — his street name was Peter Brady and, like the modern-day superheroes but not the ones in the classic canon, he’s known to almost everybody else in the dramatis personae — the moment he shows up at an airport in the telltale bandages around his neck, everyone knows who he is) called “The Mink Coat,” featuring a relatively prestigious guest star, Hazel Court, as a ventriloquist puppeteer who’s en route to Paris to perform in a French nightclub when she’s waylaid at the airport by a man who’s part of a two-person team who sneaked into a secret installation, photographed some important plans (they’re shown as blueprints and I joked he had actually taken pictures of the plant head’s plans to remodel his house rather than getting the nuclear secrets he was clearly after) and put them into a small canister, only to avoid a security screening he sneaked up behind this woman, cut open the liner of her mink coat and put the microfilm inside.

Once all the principals — including Brady and his girlfriend — were in Paris, the man made some incredibly clumsy passes at the woman to try to get close enough to her to recover her microfilm — she puts him off the first time (it’s obvious she doesn’t realize he’s a spy; he just thinks he’s harassing her to try to get in her pants) and her husband (the spy didn’t realize she had one), a juggler on the same bill as her, blocks the second. It’s a nice, fast little vest-pocket adventure — it had to be because it was shot for a half-hour time slot (it times out as a little over 26 minutes to make room for commercials — gradually a half-hour commercial TV show shrank to 24 minutes and now the standard is 22!) and the hero has to get the villains quickly; the coolest moment in the show is towards the end, when the Invisible Man grabs the precious microfilm from one of the villains (the husband found it in the wife’s mink coat and, curious about what it was, took it to a film director friend of theirs and had it developed) and sets it afire, thereby preserving whatever the atomic secrets were — and it’s a delight (the sort of delight one watches invisible-man movies for) to see it go up in flames in mid-air.

While not a patch on the movies Universal made in the 1930’s and 1940’s on this premise, the Invisible Man TV show (one of my most curious memories from my childhood is of Peter Brady driving a convertible down a freeway — and he’s dressed but his head is invisible) is well done and reasonably engaging — it holds up pretty well, and to see an actress with the reputation of Hazel Court as guest star was a special treat.

The Monster Walks (Action/Mayfair/International/Commonwealth, 1932)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 01:07:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Monster Walks was a 1932 independent film — essentially a murder mystery disguised as a horror movie — whose entry in the American Film Institute Catalog lists it as a Ralph M. Like production for Action Pictures, Inc. (quite a misnomer given how little action there actually is in this film!) but which Carlos Clarens’ history of horror films identified as a Mayfair production (according to the AFI that was because Action Pictures went bankrupt while the film was in release — it was the middle of the Depression, after all — and Mayfair bought the rights), the AFI’s vaunted “modern sources” say Ralph M. Like owned a studio called International Film Corporation, and the print we were watching, a download from archive.org, had a credit on the title card to “Commonwealth Pictures.”

The Monster Walks was made the same year as The Old Dark House, and the two stand together as examples of what to do (The Old Dark House) and not to do (The Monster Walks) with the old-dark-house genre. There aren’t really any stars in this movie — the male lead is Rex Lease, a “B”-lister during the silent era (mostly in Westerns) who was already on his way down in 1932 without ever having been that high up in the first place. The story and script are by Robert Ellis and the director is Frank Strayer, who made some quite atmospheric little horror films for better indie studios — The Vampire Bat in 1933 for Majestic and the very impressive Condemned to Live in 1935 for Chesterfield — before signing with Columbia and wasting his flair for horror by taking the reins of the long-running Blondie series based on the comic strip.

The film centers around the Earlton brothers, one of whom has just died when the film begins while the other one, Robert Earlton (Sheldon Lewis, who played in the 1920 Louis B. Mayer version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — a film overshadowed then and now by the bigger-budgeted Paramount production of the same story the same year with John Barrymore, but one which has its points), is wheelchair-bound. The dead Earlton brother’s estranged daughter Ruth (Vera Reynolds) comes to the Earlton mansion to collect her inheritance — much to the bitterness of her uncle Robert, who believes she means to take over the entire estate and throw him out of it. Since he’s also the next in line for the estate if she should die before him, he’s got an obvious motive for her murder. As if that weren’t enough of a plot, it also turns out that the late Earlton was a research scientist who kept an ape in a cage in his basement and was planning to use it for an experiment in a human-to-ape brain transplant (not that old gimmick, again!).

Earlton’s will left a pension to the elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Krug (Martha Mattox), and her son and assistant Hanns (Mischa Auer — I was going to say “cast against type” but he played so many of these sinister, skulking hangers-on in the early 1930’s that it was actually his later comic roles, for which he’s best known now, that were against his early “type”). Also in the cast is Willie Best, the Black comedian who was still being billed as “Sleep ’n Eat” — he later rebelled and insisted studios credit him under his real name, but he still had to play the stupid shuffling servant stereotype — and he actually gets a few funny moments in this one (notably in which his foot gets caught in the jaw of a bearskin rug and he thinks he’s being attacked by the ape on the premises) but mostly it’s the same racist dreck he always played.

Indeed the biggest problem with The Monster Walks is that almost nothing actually happens — it’s mostly just people skulking around an old-dark-house set and acting mildly afraid of each other. There are a few red herrings — like the hairy, apelike arm that emerges in Ruth’s room one night and tries to strangle her, leading us to wonder if Robert Ellis is going to tell us that the supposedly “dead” Earlton brother is still alive but did one of his human-to-ape transplants on himself and became a were-ape — and a few good points, like the filmmakers’ resistance to using the gimmick of having Robert Earlton only fake his disability.

In the end, if you cared, Hanns Krug was the attempted strangler of Ruth, he tried again later but ended up killing his mom because she and Ruth had switched rooms, then killed Robert because he blamed Robert for having made him kill his mom, and finally trapped Ruth in the basement with the ape (a chimpanzee — a real one — instead of the usual gorilla-suited human who generally got cast in these roles), tried to get it to kill her, but the ape decided to play deus ex machina and kill Hanns instead. The closing gag contains a reference to Darwin and yet another racist gag for Willie Best, who’s told that he’s descended from apes and says he knew creatures like that in his family, “but they was less active.” The Monster Walks was just another Poverty Row quickie, clearly sucking off whatever star blood was left in Rex Lease’s bone marrow, and though it was only an hour long it still managed to bore.

Peggy Lee, June Christy & All-Women Bands (Idem, c. 1950)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:31:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve been wanting to do a comment on the two movies Charles and I watched Wednesday night. One was a fascinating release from a European company called Idem (I think they’re the ones who were responsible for a fascinating, if not always especially well documented, series of live jazz LP’s released in Italy in the 1970’s, usually with more than one artist featured on each LP) billed as by Peggy Lee and actually combining six “Snader Telescriptions” by Lee and her husband Dave Barbour’s quartet; four “Snader Telescriptions” by June Christy and a band led by jazz accordionist Ernie Felice (for some reason misspelled “Filice” on Snader’s opening credits) and some older but still quite fascinating footage (mostly from band shorts, though at least one clip is from a feature film called Accent on Girls) of all-women bands: six by Ina Ray Hutton, one by Lorraine Page and four by Rita Rio. The Snader films are billed here as “soundies” — three-minute music videos made to be played on a “panoram,” a video jukebox briefly popular in the 1940’s (Orson Welles biographer Frank Brady calls them “somewhat of an unenthusiastic fad during the war years,” but they preserve quite a few great musicians and bands that otherwise we’d have no visual record of), but I suspect from the relatively late copyright date (1950) and the title “telescriptions” that they were meant as video equivalents of radio transcription discs, playable either in sequence to make up a TV program or one song at a time to fill in gaps in the broadcast schedule.

Many of the Lee songs are pieces she recorded commercially for Capitol in the late 1940’s — including her hits “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and “I Don’t Know Enough about You” — but her performances are clearly looser here, and are yet another testament to the superb quality of the musical team of Mr. and Mrs. Barbour — they almost literally make love in sound the way Billie Holiday and Lester Young did. What’s more, the Snader people weren’t just staging these as film clips; some of the songs are done in sets and costumes that suggest a story, much in the manner of later music videos — and at least one of these productions, “I Cover the Waterfront,” tries too hard: Lee is a wharf rat and Barbour the sailor she’s waiting for in what’s depicted as a pretty loveless coupling. Neither Lee’s voice nor her acting are world-weary enough to suggest the concept the director had in mind — Billie Holiday would have been ideal on both counts — but at least it’s a nice try, and the other “staged” videos, particularly “I Only Have Eyes for You” (set atmospherically outdoors against a night sky in New York — even though it was clearly filmed inside a studio and the buildings in the background are models — it’s not as dementedly imaginative as Busby Berkeley’s staging of the same song in the 1934 Warners musical Dames, but within the budget available to Snader’s director it’s a quite marvelous and atmospheric clip that supports the song), are far superior.

The Christy tracks aren’t as interesting, less because of her — she’s in good voice and the songs (“He’s Funny That Way,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” “Imagination” — though no one who’s sung this since has recaptured the beautifully prayerful quality of Frank Sinatra’s original record with Tommy Dorsey — and “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”) are suitable for her, but the stagings are straight performance clips and an accordion-led small ensemble just doesn’t give her the “oomph” she got from the Stan Kenton band and the small groups drawn from it with which she was making most of her records at the time. Also she’s cursed with one of the most unflattering hairdos ever inflicted on a basically attractive woman by a moviemaker.

The all-women band clips are in some ways even more fascinating than the ones with Lee and Christy. Charles pointed out that as leaders of all-women bands, Ina Ray Hutton and Rita Rio had their pick of a relatively small talent pool — there weren’t many women instrumentalists but there weren’t many opportunities for them either; Woody Herman briefly had a woman trumpeter in the early 1940’s but most of the instrumental ranks of the big bands remained all-male. In the six clips presented here, Ina Ray Hutton reminded me a great deal of Ginger Rogers: tall, leggy, blonde, a fantastic dancer and a quite serviceable singer (indeed, one could readily imagine her holding her own in a film with Fred Astaire!), and Rita Rio seemed to have copied a good deal of Hutton’s act. Though Rio was dark-haired (as befit her Latina-sounding name) she also sang, also danced, and also conducted her orchestra with a very long baton that arced and curved like a whip when she waved it.

What came through from the clips is that Hutton and Rio seemed to have quite different priorities in terms of hiring musicians and running their bands: Hutton, like Jimmie Lunceford, went for a precise instrumental ensemble and gave her bandswomen few chances to solo (only two of the six songs here include improvised-sounding solos); Rio, like Duke Ellington and Count Basie, seemed more interested in picking inspired solo voices and giving them a chance to show off. Rio also sings a vocal duet, “I Look at You,” with — of all people — Alan Ladd; anyone who’d seen the Paramount film Variety Girl, in which he sings a lovely song called “Tallahassee,” wouldn’t be surprised that he had a voice, but here he’s quite a bit better than some more highly promoted crooners and one wishes that at some point Paramount had cast Ladd in a musical. (Well, if Dick Powell could move from musicals to films noir, why couldn’t Ladd have done the reverse?)

Port of New York (Aubrey Schenck Productions, 1949)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:27:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the Idem video Charles and I put on Port of New York, a 1949 film gris from Aubrey Schenck Productions noteworthy as one of the first films to depict the work of agents from what was then the Bureau of Narcotics attempting to halt the smuggling of illegal drugs into the country — or, failing that, to find drugs that had already been smuggled and confiscate them and arrest the criminals before they could market the drugs and do social damage. It’s a blending of film noir and pseudo-documentary naturalism — though a lot of other movies, including Boomerang, Kiss of Death, Call Northside 777 and T-Men, were doing this blend considerably better at the time.

It benefits from actually having been shot in New York and from some decent noir atmospherics by cinematographer George Diskant (the go-to guy for New York-based productions at the time), but it isn’t helped by an even more stentorian and overwrought narration than usual in the genre, surprisingly flat and dull direction by Laslo Benedek (who later made The Wild One after the originally set director, Joseph Losey, was blacklisted) and a pretty weak pair of male leads, Scott Brady and Richard Rober. What saves this one are some pretty marvelous supporting players — even though only one of them went on to major stardom. That was Yul Brynner, billed fourth (this was his first film and he didn’t make another for six years, until The King and I), who plays the head of the drug ring — at least the highest-ranking member we actually see; there are the usual veiled (or not-so-veiled) allusions to the “Big One” that gives him his marching orders and who’s the one the agents would really like to bust, but we never actually see him and he certainly isn’t apprehended by the end of the film.

Brynner still had hair then, though his hairline was clearly receding and he was having his male-pattern baldness way early — reason enough that after shaving his head to play King Mongkut in The King and I, first on the Broadway stage and then in the film, he decided to keep doing it and make baldness a trademark. What’s more, this early he was also an incredibly charismatic actor who dominates every scene of the film that he’s in — and he’s especially chilling in the withering coldness with which he disposes of people who are no longer convenient to him, including his combination girlfriend and mule (K. T. Stevens, in a pretty cool performance of her own that ought to have marked her for biggers and betters, but didn’t) once he realizes she’s about to turn state’s evidence on him and meet with the narcotics agents. The other especially remarkable performance in this movie comes from Arthur Blake as a homely, heavy-set nightclub comedian with a rather mincing air about him — he’s shown doing an impression of Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty (pretty damned well, too) — who’s part of the ring and also an addict himself who gets caught when he diverts some of the recently imported shipment to his own use. Blake is a remarkable actor who creates real pathos out of a character written as just an unimportant subsidiary bad guy.

But aside from these nice performances from the supporting cast, Port of New York is just another movie, one which doesn’t really look all that noir (except in a few scenes showing Diskant’s gift for mood lighting even in a naturalistic outdoor environment) and ends with one of the agents getting killed and the other impersonating a crook to get in with the drug ring, only the Blake character’s girlfriend “outs” him and it ends with a shootout in which the good guys get the drugs and the bad guys end up arrested or dead. It’s really just another movie except for Brynner, Stevens and Blake — but they’re enough to make it worth watching.

Corruption (William Berke Productions/Imperial, 1933)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 11:07:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our first feature of the night was Corruption, a 1933 film that was the sort of frustrating bad movie because one senses a good movie in it struggling to get out — and because its themes, involving politics, graft and sex, seem all too timely today even though the film’s style and technique are both horrendously dated. Produced by William Berke Productions for a distributing company called Imperial — Berke had a fascinating career path, from independent filmmaker in the 1930’s to RKO house director in the 1940’s (as which he did a lot of the later films in the Falcon series) and then back to the indies in the 1950’s (where he did the first two films based on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels before he died in 1958) — Corruption was a wild story about political graft and, well, corruption, written and directed by C. Edward Roberts. Gorman (Tully Marshall), boss of an unnamed city’s Tammany Hall-like political machine, looked for a new mayoral candidate to defeat a genuine reformer and found him in Tim Butler (Preston Foster), an attorney who got a lot of good press for defending a personal-injury victim against a major corporation.

Like the political boss played by Edward Arnold in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — a film whose central plot device Corruption anticipates by six years — Gorman thinks he’ll be able to control Butler’s idealistic tendencies by exploiting his naïveté and keeping good, corrupt party hacks around him — particularly Regan (Warner Richmond), Gorman’s principal lieutenant in running the machine — but Butler turns the tables on him and within a year he’s cleaned up much of the graft that is making Gorman’s machine its money and has his sights set on nailing Regan. Then the Gorman machine strikes back and sets up Butler in a phony sex scandal — he’s caught by two reporters he’s befriended, Charlie Jasper (Charles Delaney) and his photographer, who supply the film’s supposedly “necessary” comic relief (this seems to have been a bizarre delusion that gripped most of Hollywood in the 1930’s and well into the 1940’s: the idea that serious, intense dramas and horror films needed so-called “comic relief” characters who usually weren’t even genuinely funny and just reduced the tension level of otherwise good films), who feel guilty about having been led to expose him but do so just the same — and Butler is removed from office and is forced to re-establish his law practice.

He’s also jilted by Gorman’s daughter Sylvia (Natalie Moorhead) — much to the undisguised joy of his secretary, Ellen Manning (Evalyn Knapp, top-billed), who’s in unrequited love with him and who has followed him down and is still working for him even though he can’t afford to pay her. (She donates $250 she’s saved up herself to keep his office going, falsely telling him it’s a contribution from his friend Dr. Robbins — played by Sidney Bracey in a refreshing change from his usual typecasting as butlers and valets.) Butler’s friends in law enforcement manage to extract a confession from the woman he was supposedly having the affair with and her confederate, and he’s about to be exonerated and appointed state’s attorney by the governor (a long-time political enemy of Gorman’s who’s anxious to shut down his machine) when he’s set up in another scandal; Regan and a henchman confront Butler in the lobby of his office building, Regan pulls a gun on Butler, who grabs for it and wrests it away, but just then somebody else — armed with a pistol which has a long barrel extension that appears to be a silencer — shoots Regan and Butler is arrested for the murder.

The case gets mysterious when Dr. Robbins, acting as medical examiner for the coroner, announces that even though there was no exit wound he was unable to find a bullet inside Regan’s body. Butler is convicted of the murder — the trial is blatantly rigged against him by a judge who’s obviously in the pay of the machine — and is sentenced to life imprisonment, but other members of Gorman’s gang are killed the same way even while Butler is serving his sentence, and eventually the killer turns out to be Voikov (Mischa Auer), a friend and former associate of Butler’s who during Butler’s term as mayor had frequently told him that it wasn’t enough to arrest the members of Gorman’s machine: the only way to get rid of them was to kill them permanently. To do this, Voikov, a research scientist, invented a bullet made of a liquid that turned super-hard when frozen and could be shot out of a gun and remain solid long enough to kill the person it was shot at, then melt inside their body and leave no trace. (Charles pointed out that the only way to fire such a bullet would be with a gun that worked by compressed air, since a normal gunpowder explosion would create such intense heat it would instantly melt the bullet — but given that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had written a compressed-air gun into “The Adventure of the Empty House” over three decades earlier, it’s not impossible that C. Edward Roberts borrowed the idea from him — or from Chester Gould, who had used the ice-bullet gimmick in an early Dick Tracy series in 1931, the year the comic debuted and two years before this film was made.)

Corruption is a frustrating film because its story premise is inherently exciting, but the film itself is surprisingly dull; probably because he was hamstrung by the substandard budgets and equipment independent producers had to work with, Roberts’ direction is dull, static, with almost no camera moves and absolutely no music except for an inappropriately bouncy main theme over both opening and closing credits. In other words, Corruption looks much more like a film from 1929 than one from 1933, and while Roberts turns out to be a talented director in at least one respect — he gets far more animated and intense performances from both Knapp and Foster than they usually gave in their major-studio films at the time — he’s also slow and has virtually no sense of pace. In a story that cries out for the rich, chiaroscuro atmospherics of film noir, the only sequences that aren’t plainly lit are the courtroom scenes — which are filmed with the faces of the characters spotlit against a black backdrop. Obviously this was due to budgetary limitations — William Berke Productions clearly had neither access to a stock set of a courtroom nor the money to build one — but it gives those scenes an odd visual distinction lacking in the rest of the movie,

As with so many dull so-called “thrillers” from the 1930’s, one can’t help but wish Corruption had been made at Warner Bros., with one of their speedfreak directors and James Cagney as Butler (generally Cagney did quite well in stories that had him framed by political bosses, like Each Dawn I Die and The Strawberry Blonde); no matter how much Roberts was able to goose up Preston Foster from his usual on-screen torpor, he still wasn’t Cagney and he didn’t have the depth and power as an actor to play the role for maximum effect.

Chasing Rainbows (MGM, 1930)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:37:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Corruption I screened Charles Chasing Rainbows, a musical MGM filmed in 1929 but didn’t release until 1930 — at a time when Hollywood was starting to run scared from the musical genre because, aside from Depression-related jitters that economically stressed people might simply stop going to movies altogether (which didn’t really start to happen until about 1931 or so), audiences were beginning to get tired of the flood of musicals they had been inundated with starting with The Jazz Singer and the advent of sound, since the musical was the one common film genre that really couldn’t be done in the silent era. Chasing Rainbows was clearly an attempt by MGM to duplicate the incredible success of The Broadway Melody — they used two of the same stars, Charles King and Bessie Love, and in a committee-written script (“dialogue” by Charles Riesner, who also directed, and Kenyon Nicholson, based on a “scenario” by Bess Meredyth and Al Boasberg, based on an “adaptation” by Wells Root of an original story, Road Show, by Meredyth and Robert Hopkins) they tried to strike the same combination of musical and soap opera that had made The Broadway Melody appealing and popular.

MGM production chief Irving Thalberg also cast Jack Benny in it after Benny’s success as the MC in the plotless Hollywood Revue of 1929, and interestingly he picked a story that, though it’s a backstage musical, takes place not in the weeks leading up to a big show’s Broadway opening but on a later and far less “sung” phase of show business: the touring companies that are sent out after a show’s run on Broadway, usually with much less prestigious cast members. Chasing Rainbows also has a refreshing honesty about people’s sex lives characteristic of the so-called “pre-Code” era; the show’s leading lady, Peggy (Gwen Lee), leaves the cast in mid-tour to go off with a sugar daddy (Eugene Borden), leading stage manager Eddie Rock (Jack Benny) scrambling for a replacement. At first we think he’s going to give the part to chorus member Carlie Semour (Bessie Love), who joined the cast with her former vaudeville partner Terry Fay (Charles King) when he got offered the male lead, but in fact he sends to New York for a new star, Daphne Wayne (Nita Martan). Carlie is in love with Terry, but Terry can’t keep his eyes off other women; Daphne notices this and vamps him, figuring that she can get him to marry her and the two of them can become Broadway stars together — and once she’s established on the Main Stem she can dump him and go off with the man she’s really in love with, Don Cordova (Eddie Phillips), who’s playing the second male lead.

As if that weren’t confusing enough, there are also comic-relief parts for Marie Dressler — as the show’s comedian (she sings two songs, reminding viewers with long memories that she’d been a singer on Broadway and had starred in the musical Tillie’s Nightmare, in which she’d made the song “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl” one of the biggest hits of the early 20th century, though that’s probably not well known by people who know the show only from the movie Mack Sennett made of it, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, in which Dressler made her film debut but the movie was stolen by Charlie Chaplin, for whom it was a star-making part even though he was playing a villain instead of his sympathetic “tramp”) — and Polly Moran as the dresser. MGM actually built up Dressler and Moran into a comedy team for a while, patterning them loosely after Laurel and Hardy — Moran the skinny, flighty one and Dressler the larger and presumably more grounded one — and on the strength of this movie they were put into a series of vehicles, mostly with one-word titles (Politics, Prosperity, Reducing) and with George K. Arthur (who’s also in this film) as their male sidekick and stooge.

A major problem with Chasing Rainbows as it stands is that the big musical numbers, “Happy Days Are Here Again” (this was the film that introduced that song), “Everybody Tap,” “Love Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues” (which was recorded by Frank Trumbauer’s orchestra on September 18, 1929 with Smith Ballew singing) and one of Dressler’s big features, “My Dynamite Personality,” aren’t in the extant print. They were shot in the two-strip Technicolor process and have completely disappeared — they don’t even survive in black-and-white like the color numbers from The Broadway Melody and Sunnyside Up do — so the Turner Classic Movies print puts production stills accompanied by instrumental versions of the film’s score (at least one of which is a jarringly modern recording) and runs subtitles describing the numbers (and the plot action that’s supposed to be happening during them) to fill in the gaps left by the missing numbers.

This obviously doesn’t help a modern viewer assess whether this was a good movie in 1930 — especially since cutting out four of the numbers unbalances the movie and makes it seem less musical and more soap opera than it no doubt did “complete” — but on the evidence it seems like Chasing Rainbows was a good but disjointed and clunky film that didn’t always take full advantage of the talents of its cast. Bessie Love is good but she gets way too many moments of intense emotional traumas, mostly over Charles King’s faithlessness — she’s good but all those scenes get awfully wearing after a while! Marie Dressler dominates the cast — as she did even up against Greta Garbo in Anna Christie — mainly because as a veteran of both stage and silent film, she instinctively understood acting for talkies far better than most of her co-stars — and while they’re not a patch on Laurel and Hardy, she and Moran work well together and generate sustained merriment if not too much out-and-out laughter. Though only one of Dressler’s songs, “Poor but Honest,” survives in the extant print, it’s a great novelty number and makes it clear that she had real musical talent as a comedy singer.

Nita Martan as Daphne also gets a novelty song, “Do I Know What I’m Doing?” (later reprised in a gag version by Dressler and Moran), and she’s surprisingly good as both singer and actress and we wish we could see more of her. As for Jack Benny, he’s there — he’s a bit hard to recognize at first (mainly because he isn’t wearing the glasses he wore by the time his radio show made it onto TV) and, though he’s doing some of his familiar gestures and vocal inflections (the finger on the cheek, the “Wel-l-l-l … ” vocable) and his timing is excellent, the script (even with one of his future radio writers, Al Boasberg, as his gag man) gives him precious little to say or do and Benny is handicapped (as he generally was in his early films) by the fact that he hadn’t yet developed his radio character, which put all his talents in a frame that was devastatingly entertaining and hilarious. Chasing Rainbows was a box-office flop — in his memoir Benny wrote, “The exhibitors renamed it Chasing Customers” — and “Happy Days Are Here Again” had to wait two years for Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign to adopt it as a theme song and make it a hit.

Ironically, Thalberg renewed Benny’s contract and even gave him a raise from $850 to $1,000 a week (in 1930!), but didn’t give him anything to do; apparently seeking to squirrel Benny away from anyone else who might help him become a movie star, he neither gave him an MGM assignment nor allowed him a loanout to work at another studio, and it was only when Earl Carroll offered Benny the comic lead in the 1931 edition of his Vanities that Thalberg, reasoning that the New York stage wasn’t a competitor he needed to worry about, released Benny from his contract and allowed him to resume his career.

Horror Island (Universal, 1941)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:45:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I ended up running was Horror Island, yet another item in the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive box and a rather quirky exercise in doing an old-dark-house thriller without any real horror stars. It’s the old chestnut about the young layabout who doesn’t want to hold down a normal job, and who happens to have inherited a mysterious island that was once used as a hideout for pirates. The layabout is Bill Martin (Dick Foran) and he’s partner with the comic-relief character, Stuff Oliver (Fuzzy Knight), in what appears to be a deep-sea fishing business but also encompasses any wild scheme Bill thinks is going to make him money at the moment. He’s also in the habit of denying that he’s ever in because most of the people who want to see him are bill collectors or process servers, but one man who does get through his defenses is a one-legged sailor named Tobias Clump — an odd character name for someone who’s made up to look like a Gypsy and is played by a Latino actor, Leo Carrillo — who claims that the island Bill inherited was once the hideout of the legendary Henry Morgan and that there’s a buried treasure worth $2 million.

Bill hits on a brainstorm: he’ll organize a trip on his boat, the Skiddoo, to Morgan’s Island and promise everyone who goes with him a treasure hunt at $50 a throw. He also has Stuff wire up a sound system on the island and put skeletons around the various rooms so people will get the idea the castle is haunted. While all this is going on Bill also crashes his car into a fancy one bring driven by upper-class girl Wendy Creighton (Peggy Moran) and her upper-class-twit boyfriend de jour, Thurman Coldwater — played by Lewis Howard as the sort of effete incompetent John Eldredge usually played, while Eldredge himself is in this movie but in a different sort of role: as Bill’s unscrupulous cousin George who wants to take the island off his hand for $20,000. Tobias claims to have half a pirate treasure map and says that the other half was stolen from him by “The Phantom” (Foy Van Dolsen, the closest thing to an actual horror star in this film), a sinister figure shown only in the shadows and wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a cape to look appropriately sinister. The film takes about 23 minutes of its running time just taking care of all these preliminaries — including a scene that’s supposed to be surprising but would have been a dead giveaway in 1941 to anyone who’d seen The Mummy’s Hand (which used the same plot gimmick) a year earlier: Jasper Quinley (Hobart Cavanaugh), a resident professor who’s an expert on the history of piracy, gets a look at Tobias’s half-map and declares it a fake, so we just know he’s going to be part and parcel of the skullduggery at the end.

The Skiddoo sets sail with a weirdly assorted group of passengers, including Wendy, Thurman, Professor Quinley, a couple of gangster types (one male, one female) who seem to have some sort of design on the treasure, and Our Heroes — who are startled when someone throws a last-minute package to them on the boat and it turns out to be a bomb. They’re even more startled when they arrive on the island and encounter strange sights and sounds that aren’t part of Stuff’s fakery, and after 35 minutes of picturesquely photographed doings (the cinematographer was Elwood “Woody” Bredell, warming up for major credits later) the big revelation is that the professor is the real mastermind behind the plot to do away with the rest of them and grab the treasure for himself — only he’s killed when a booby-trap on the treasure door, an ax that falls when the key is turned on the keyhole along its handle, works and drives itself through his back. Charles was wondering who planted the bomb — my guess was that “The Phantom” was in cahoots with the professor and he did it — and it turns out the “treasure” is just worthless junk but the mysterious man who’s been following Bill around all movie (and who may have been the male “gangster” aboard the boat as well) turns out to be from the U.S. Navy with an offer of $100,000 for the island so they can turn it into a naval base (well, it started as a naval base for the pirate Henry Morgan, so in a weird way this is just returning it to its original function!).

Horror Island is a bit on the dull side — even at just an hour it still comes dangerously close to overstaying its welcome — but the human characters are appealing enough (and well acted by a group of professionals earning their pay without being especially inspired or “artistic”) and what goes on at the island is mildly scary even if hardly “horrific.”

The Black Cat (Universal, 1941)

noreply@blogger.com (mgconlan) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:50:00 +0000

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film last night was The Black Cat, a Universal horror-comedy made in 1941 and not to be confused with the marvelously surreal (it was a spacey script to begin with and got even more confusing when first the American and then the British film censors got through with it!) 1934 horror film The Black Cat, also from Universal, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Karloff isn’t in this one, but Lugosi is — playing a manservant, as he would in the later Night Monster, though this time in thick makeup that seems to have been intended to make him look like a Gypsy and therefore justify his ineradicable Hungarian accent. The plot of the 1941 The Black Cat has nothing to do with that of the 1934 version, and neither has anything to do with the plot of the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Black Cat” which both films claim as their inspiration.

The 1941 The Black Cat is that old familiar chestnut about the greedy relatives waiting impatiently for the family patriarch to die — only in this case it’s a family matriarch, Henrietta Winslow (Cecelia Loftus), who may be in a wheelchair and on death’s door but she’s still determined to give her family members a hard time as they sit around her living room waiting and hoping for her to croak soon. Henrietta is a mad eccentric who built a huge mansion and lived in it alone except for a pride of cats; she took them in, gave them food and houseroom, and built a special crematorium in her backyard (accessible directly from the house through a secret passage that, like most such devices in movies, is only discovered by accident midway through) whereby she could cremate her cats when they died. What’s more, she made the oven big enough to cremate a human, so she could be disposed of in the same way as her cats when the time came. The only wrinkle was that she absolutely forbade any black cats on the premises because she considered them harbingers of death — though she built a statue of a black cat in her crematorium and a black cat has sneaked onto the premises anyway and made itself at home with the other cats.

She ultimately gets stabbed with a knitting needle in the crematorium, after she’s read her will but before she’s revealed that she’s put in a codicil that the money she’s willed her family members will only be paid out once her maidservant Abigail (Gale Sondergaard, who plays in such a superb battle-axe fashion she makes Judith Anderson in Rebecca — a part Sondergaard was actually considered for — seem warm and fuzzy by comparison) — and the cats all die. The family members are a bit hard to get straight — they include her grandson Montague Hartley (Basil Rathbone), his brother Richard (Alan Ladd, billed 11th in the original credits but second in the Realart reissue trailer also included in this DVD — obviously they moved him up after the explosive success of This Gun for Hire made him a superstar at Paramount), Montague’s wife Myrna (Gladys Cooper), a grandson from a different son-in-law named Stanley Borden (John Eldredge as the milquetoast, as usual) whose father was a brilliant architect who passed on none of his talent to his son, and a few other miscellaneous descendants: Elaine Winslow (Anne Gwynne), whom Henrietta wills the bulk of her estate because “you’re the least bad of all of them,” and Margaret Gordon (Claire Dodd).

But the real stars of the film are the ostensible comic-relief players, distant relative “Gil” Smith (Broderick Crawford), who’s hoping to sell Henrietta’s house and all its belongings; and Mr. Penny (Hugh Herbert), the person he’s hoping to sell it to, who comes along with a little hand drill to put holes in the furniture and call them wormholes so they’ll be worth more in the antiques market. Herbert is a good deal funnier than he was in some of his Warners vehicles but he still outwears his welcome pretty quickly, and in turns of screen time the oppressive presence of Broderick Crawford makes him the real star of the film, no matter what it says in the billing. At least two of the writers, Robert Lees and Frederick Rinaldo, were also better known for comedy (they were industriously cranking out the Abbott and Costello vehicles for Universal at the same time this was made, and producer Burt Kelly was also supervising A&C) — the other writers were Eric Taylor and Robert Neville, and the director was Albert S. Rogell, not exactly atop the “A” list of the time but still a better-known filmmaker than most of the hacks who churned out these things for Universal.

The filmmakers were obviously trying for the same marvelously nervy mixture of comedy and horror James Whale and his writers, Benn W. Levy and R. C. Sherriff, hit in the 1932 film The Old Dark House, and though they don’t come anywhere near hailing distance of Whale’s masterpiece the 1941 The Black Cat is a charming little film that tweaks a few of the genre conventions — even though Lugosi is wasted, as he usually was on his rare excursions back to the major studios by 1941, and Rathbone could have made more of an impression with more screen time but still acts the scenes he does have with his usual power and authority. At one point Broderick Crawford’s character says of Rathbone’s, “He thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes” — an in-joke reference to Rathbone’s two films as Holmes for 20th Century-Fox in 1939 (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) and possibly also an advance promotion for his upcoming series of 12 Holmes films for Universal.

The 1941 Black Cat is hardly in the same league as the marvelous 1934 film of the same title, but on its own it’s suitably light-hearted (despite the murders and the mild scare scenes) and entertaining — and Orson Welles saw it when it first came out and decided, on the basis of the marvelous chiaroscuro lighting and atmospheric camera angles, to hire its cinematographer, Stanley Cortez, to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons (also a film about a dysfunctional family inhabiting a crumbling old Victorian mansion). Still, there have been better “takes” on the situation of a bunch of greedy relatives with their hands out awaiting the death of a rich person in their family — and it did occur to me that as long as Universal wanted to do a dark comedy around this situation, they might have been better advised to buy the film rights to Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi and put their legendary comedy star, W. C. Fields, in the lead!