by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I had enough time together last night for me to run him a movie, the 1932 Wheeler and Woolsey comedy Hold ’Em Jail, directed by Norman Taurog from a script by Walter DeLeon, S. J. Perelman (!), Eddie Welch and an uncredited Mark Sandrich, on his way up at RKO from writer to shorts director to maker of Wheeler and Woolsey comedies himself as well as Melody Cruise and, ultimately, five of RKO’s nine Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals. Wheeler and Woolsey play Curly Harris and “Spider” Robbins, respectively, novelty salesman who end up in prison as part of a plot by Bidemore State Penitentiary to recruit top-notch football players so their team can beat their historic rivals, Lynwood, in the big annual prison-against-prison football game.
The whole absurdity of this ridiculous premise promised a considerably funnier movie than this one, but this is still pretty good, essentially moving the template of the Marx Brothers’ film Horse Feathers (made just a few months before Hold ’Em Jail, and on which Perelman was also one of the screenwriters) from a college to a prison and thereby more or less cross-breeding it with Laurel and Hardy’s Pardon Us. It helps that the warden is Edgar Kennedy, and that he lives on-site at the prison along with his sister (the marvelous dry-wit comedienne Edna May Oliver) and his daughter (played by a young woman who would later grow up to be Betty Grable — she’s only faintly recognizable in the severe bobbed hair that was at the tail end of fashion in 1932, and she doesn’t get either to show her legs or to sing and dance — in fact there aren’t any musical numbers in this film, and it could have used some; even Laurel and Hardy found excuses to sing and dance beautifully in Pardon Us!) — and the romantic complications, with Wheeler pairing off with Grable and Woolsey with Oliver, lead to some of the funniest gags in the film.
The best one is when Wheeler arranges to meet Grable “in the courtyard at 9 o’clock” and the other cons, overhearing it, think it’s the signal for when and where to begin their escape attempt — they tell each other in a man-to-man daisy chain and eventually one of them tells Woolsey, who tells the warden, who of course orders the guard around the wall doubled, with the result that poor Wheeler gets fired upon when he’s just out there to get a bouquet to Betty Grable. Many of the gags come from the guilelessness of the Wheeler and Woolsey characters — time and time again they either foil an escape attempt by innocently notifying the authorities (and, of course, earning the enmity of the other prisoners they’re snitching on, though the writing committee could have made more of that than they did!) or blow the football game by … well, there’s one scene in which Wheeler seems headed for a touchdown when a member of the other team politely asks him for the ball, and he gives it to him!
While hardly in the same league as either Pardon Us (or its even funnier Spanish-language version, De Bote En Bote) or Horse Feathers — as usual, Wheeler and Woolsey’s football game is an amusing comedy routine while the Marxes’ is a comedic holocaust — this is still a clever and funny film, though frankly the wise-cracking Woolsey is consistently more amusing than the rather whiny milquetoast Wheeler and it’s a real pity Woolsey died of kidney failure in 1938, ending one of RKO’s more reliable bread-and-butter film series (though the American Film Insitute Catalog records that Hold ’Em Jail actually lost $55,000 on its initial release and RKO shipped them to Columbia for their next film, So This Is Africa, which featured two women who also made films with the Marx Brothers, Raquel Torres and Esther Muir).
Friday, September 5, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Bonnie Scotland (Hal Roach/MGM, 1935)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I wanted a comedy, and having just recorded virtually all the Laurel and Hardy marathon on TCM a week ago last Saturday (omitting only the films Pack Up Your Troubles and Sons of the Desert, which I already had on DVD) I reached out for a film I’d never seen before and found it in Bonnie Scotland. This was a feature made in 1935, directed by James W. Horne with the working titles Kilts, Laurel and Hardy in India and McLaurel and McHardy. According to the American Film Institute Catalog, the movie was made after one of the many contract disputes between Stan Laurel and Hal Roach; the Hollywood Reporter stories said that Laurel was claiming he’d been fired and Roach that he’d quit because of “story objections” to the new film. Roach announced plans for a series called “The Hardy Family” (two years before MGM actually launched one!) with Hardy and Patsy Kelly as the parents and Spanky McFarland from the Our Gang/Little Rascals comedies as their kid — plans that were abandoned when Laurel settled with Roach in April, less than a month after he’d either been fired or had quit.
The screenplay for Bonnie Scotland was by Frank Butler and Jeff Moffitt and was apparently intended as a parody of Paramount’s film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. It begins (much like Laurel and Hardy’s last film, Atoll K, made 17 years later) with Laurel and Hardy stowing away on a cattle boat to reach Scotland, where they’ve been promised an inheritance by Stan’s ancestor, the recently deceased Angus Ian McLaurel. Not surprisingly, instead of the McLaurel estate, all they actually inherit is a set of bagpipes supposedly blown at Waterloo and a snuff box allegedly presented to the McLaurels by Mary, Queen of Scots herself. The estate actually goes to Stan’s cousin, Lorna McLaurel (June Lang), and following Angus’s wishes his attorney and executor, Mr. Miggs (David Torrence), has put the estate in trust with Col. Gregor McGregor (Vernon Steele) as trustee.
He’s also trying to arrange a marriage between McGregor and Lorna, but Lorna loves Miggs’ clerk, poor but nice Alan Douglas (William Janney). Unable to return to America because they escaped from prison to make the trip to Scotland, and unable to leave their hotel room because Stan has ruined Ollie’s last pair of pants, they end up fleeing their ferocious, rent-seeking landlady Mrs. Bickerdike (Mary Gordon, later Mrs. Hudson in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies at Universal) with Hardy still in his nightgown, and answering what they think is an ad for a tailor promising a 30-day free trial for a suit, they actually end up enlisting in the British army and being sent to serve in India (then still the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire). Alan Douglas also ends up enlisting in the Indian regiment after he learns Lorna has been sent there to be with Col. McGregor, and eventually true love wins out, of course — though William Janney is such a boring, whiny actor it’s hard not to believe she’d be better off with charming, handsome, dashing, David Niven-esque Vernon Steele as Col. McGregor.
Once pre-production on Bonnie Scotland (a title that’s kind of a cheat because only the first half of the film actually takes place in Scotland — and we don’t see the one real card-carrying Scot in the cast, James Finlayson, until the setting moves to India midway through; but as the sergeant who’s Laurel’s and Hardy’s direct supervisor, he’s great as usual) resumed, the Hollywood Reporter said that Laurel and director Horne were working with writers Charles Rogers and Albert Austin on the script — and while the AFI Catalog couldn’t nail down any contributions from Rogers and Austin, Laurel’s involvement in the writing is apparent from the physically impossible gags he loved and Hal Roach hated. In one sequence, Laurel accidentally pushes Hardy into a creek, and every time Hardy tries to get out he spits out more and more of the water until at the end of the sequence the creek is dry! Later, Laurel masters a trick of being able to blow air through his head and get his military hat to lift itself off his head — Hardy, of course, tries the trick and can’t do it — and at one point both Hardy and we are convinced Laurel is doing this just by leaning against the side of a building and pushing the hat up that way, but then he does it when he’s free-standing.
The plot is a bit of a bring-down — another Hollywood Reporter story claimed that after the film was first previewed, a good chunk of it was reshot to reduce the amount of time devoted to the plot and increase that devoted to the Laurel and Hardy comedy audiences were actually paying to see — but the film is quite handsomely produced, reflecting how much the profits from Laurel and Hardy’s films were enabling Roach to expand his operation from a penny-ante producer of comedy two-reelers into a semi-major studio; supposedly they borrowed the Scottish sets from RKO (which had built them for the 1934 film The Little Minister with Katharine Hepburn and John Beal), though it looked to me like they might have done some second-unit shooting in Scotland — and the scenes in India are quite splendid, well produced, with hundreds of extras playing both the British army and the indigenous forces that they fight (apparently the American Legion provided the “British” extras), a whole crew of bagpipers directed by John Sutherland, and a fair assortment of dancing girls for the sequence in which Laurel, Hardy, Finlayson and Janney are sent to the native court as a diversion; pretending to be McGregor and his top staff, their purpose is to decoy the Indians into thinking that their attack plan is still secret, when in fact the British have learned of it by torturing — excuse me, using “enhanced interrogation” on — an Indian detainee and have turned it around so it will be a trap for the native army instead.
Needless to say, what makes this film are the comedy sequences: an early one in which, forced to cook a fish secretly in their hotel room (which must have brought back memories of Laurel’s real-life antics when he and Charlie Chaplin roomed together as part of Fred Karno’s British comedy company before either of them made films: Laurel would cook them meals over the gas jets, forbidden by the terms of their leases in the various hotels in which they stayed, and Chaplin would practice on the violin or cello to conceal the noise made by the cooking, which sounds like a gag either of them could have used in their films!), they end up nearly wrecking the place; a later sequence in which, ordered to clean up some garbage at the Indian fort while a military band is playing, Laurel and Hardy turn it into a dance number (a gag they’d already pulled with a piano roll of patriotic songs in The Music Box); a marvelous sequence in which Laurel disrupts a march by deciding it’s more comfortable to skip instead of march, and everyone else in the line of march also starts skipping (a much more creative gag than the usual inept-private-messes-up-everyone-else one we expect in a service comedy); and a final scene in which Laurel and Hardy defeat the native army by throwing beehives at them, then can’t stop the bees (actually cartoons drawn by Roach special-effects artist Roy Seawright) from attacking their own forces as well.
Laurel and Hardy made better feature-length films than this (ironically, when Laurel had his contract dispute with Roach one of his complaints was that Roach was still having them do two- and three-reelers even though they were feature stars by then; by the 1960’s, he had changed his tune and told biographer John McCabe, “We should have stayed in two-reelers”) but this is still incredibly funny and unusually creative, especially for a Hal Roach comedy.
I wanted a comedy, and having just recorded virtually all the Laurel and Hardy marathon on TCM a week ago last Saturday (omitting only the films Pack Up Your Troubles and Sons of the Desert, which I already had on DVD) I reached out for a film I’d never seen before and found it in Bonnie Scotland. This was a feature made in 1935, directed by James W. Horne with the working titles Kilts, Laurel and Hardy in India and McLaurel and McHardy. According to the American Film Institute Catalog, the movie was made after one of the many contract disputes between Stan Laurel and Hal Roach; the Hollywood Reporter stories said that Laurel was claiming he’d been fired and Roach that he’d quit because of “story objections” to the new film. Roach announced plans for a series called “The Hardy Family” (two years before MGM actually launched one!) with Hardy and Patsy Kelly as the parents and Spanky McFarland from the Our Gang/Little Rascals comedies as their kid — plans that were abandoned when Laurel settled with Roach in April, less than a month after he’d either been fired or had quit.
The screenplay for Bonnie Scotland was by Frank Butler and Jeff Moffitt and was apparently intended as a parody of Paramount’s film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. It begins (much like Laurel and Hardy’s last film, Atoll K, made 17 years later) with Laurel and Hardy stowing away on a cattle boat to reach Scotland, where they’ve been promised an inheritance by Stan’s ancestor, the recently deceased Angus Ian McLaurel. Not surprisingly, instead of the McLaurel estate, all they actually inherit is a set of bagpipes supposedly blown at Waterloo and a snuff box allegedly presented to the McLaurels by Mary, Queen of Scots herself. The estate actually goes to Stan’s cousin, Lorna McLaurel (June Lang), and following Angus’s wishes his attorney and executor, Mr. Miggs (David Torrence), has put the estate in trust with Col. Gregor McGregor (Vernon Steele) as trustee.
He’s also trying to arrange a marriage between McGregor and Lorna, but Lorna loves Miggs’ clerk, poor but nice Alan Douglas (William Janney). Unable to return to America because they escaped from prison to make the trip to Scotland, and unable to leave their hotel room because Stan has ruined Ollie’s last pair of pants, they end up fleeing their ferocious, rent-seeking landlady Mrs. Bickerdike (Mary Gordon, later Mrs. Hudson in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies at Universal) with Hardy still in his nightgown, and answering what they think is an ad for a tailor promising a 30-day free trial for a suit, they actually end up enlisting in the British army and being sent to serve in India (then still the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire). Alan Douglas also ends up enlisting in the Indian regiment after he learns Lorna has been sent there to be with Col. McGregor, and eventually true love wins out, of course — though William Janney is such a boring, whiny actor it’s hard not to believe she’d be better off with charming, handsome, dashing, David Niven-esque Vernon Steele as Col. McGregor.
Once pre-production on Bonnie Scotland (a title that’s kind of a cheat because only the first half of the film actually takes place in Scotland — and we don’t see the one real card-carrying Scot in the cast, James Finlayson, until the setting moves to India midway through; but as the sergeant who’s Laurel’s and Hardy’s direct supervisor, he’s great as usual) resumed, the Hollywood Reporter said that Laurel and director Horne were working with writers Charles Rogers and Albert Austin on the script — and while the AFI Catalog couldn’t nail down any contributions from Rogers and Austin, Laurel’s involvement in the writing is apparent from the physically impossible gags he loved and Hal Roach hated. In one sequence, Laurel accidentally pushes Hardy into a creek, and every time Hardy tries to get out he spits out more and more of the water until at the end of the sequence the creek is dry! Later, Laurel masters a trick of being able to blow air through his head and get his military hat to lift itself off his head — Hardy, of course, tries the trick and can’t do it — and at one point both Hardy and we are convinced Laurel is doing this just by leaning against the side of a building and pushing the hat up that way, but then he does it when he’s free-standing.
The plot is a bit of a bring-down — another Hollywood Reporter story claimed that after the film was first previewed, a good chunk of it was reshot to reduce the amount of time devoted to the plot and increase that devoted to the Laurel and Hardy comedy audiences were actually paying to see — but the film is quite handsomely produced, reflecting how much the profits from Laurel and Hardy’s films were enabling Roach to expand his operation from a penny-ante producer of comedy two-reelers into a semi-major studio; supposedly they borrowed the Scottish sets from RKO (which had built them for the 1934 film The Little Minister with Katharine Hepburn and John Beal), though it looked to me like they might have done some second-unit shooting in Scotland — and the scenes in India are quite splendid, well produced, with hundreds of extras playing both the British army and the indigenous forces that they fight (apparently the American Legion provided the “British” extras), a whole crew of bagpipers directed by John Sutherland, and a fair assortment of dancing girls for the sequence in which Laurel, Hardy, Finlayson and Janney are sent to the native court as a diversion; pretending to be McGregor and his top staff, their purpose is to decoy the Indians into thinking that their attack plan is still secret, when in fact the British have learned of it by torturing — excuse me, using “enhanced interrogation” on — an Indian detainee and have turned it around so it will be a trap for the native army instead.
Needless to say, what makes this film are the comedy sequences: an early one in which, forced to cook a fish secretly in their hotel room (which must have brought back memories of Laurel’s real-life antics when he and Charlie Chaplin roomed together as part of Fred Karno’s British comedy company before either of them made films: Laurel would cook them meals over the gas jets, forbidden by the terms of their leases in the various hotels in which they stayed, and Chaplin would practice on the violin or cello to conceal the noise made by the cooking, which sounds like a gag either of them could have used in their films!), they end up nearly wrecking the place; a later sequence in which, ordered to clean up some garbage at the Indian fort while a military band is playing, Laurel and Hardy turn it into a dance number (a gag they’d already pulled with a piano roll of patriotic songs in The Music Box); a marvelous sequence in which Laurel disrupts a march by deciding it’s more comfortable to skip instead of march, and everyone else in the line of march also starts skipping (a much more creative gag than the usual inept-private-messes-up-everyone-else one we expect in a service comedy); and a final scene in which Laurel and Hardy defeat the native army by throwing beehives at them, then can’t stop the bees (actually cartoons drawn by Roach special-effects artist Roy Seawright) from attacking their own forces as well.
Laurel and Hardy made better feature-length films than this (ironically, when Laurel had his contract dispute with Roach one of his complaints was that Roach was still having them do two- and three-reelers even though they were feature stars by then; by the 1960’s, he had changed his tune and told biographer John McCabe, “We should have stayed in two-reelers”) but this is still incredibly funny and unusually creative, especially for a Hal Roach comedy.
Edison, the Man (MGM, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Later we ran the 1940 film Edison, the Man, partly because I had just recorded it off the Spencer Tracy tribute on TCM and partly because Charles had mentioned that he’d looked up on the Internet important things that happened on his birthday (August 31, the same as my brother’s, though three years later) and the most significant item was that on that date Edison got his patent for the Kinetoscope, his pioneering movie camera. MGM bought the rights to Thomas Edison’s life story and, after deciding that a single film based on his entire life would be too long, split the project into two separate movies, Young Tom Edison (1939), with Mickey Rooney as Edison, and this one, with Spencer Tracy. Ironically, Young Tom Edison was an enormous hit (it was made at the height of Rooney’s fame, at a time when he was making more money for MGM than any other contract player except Clark Gable) while Edison, the Man was a flop.
Produced by Orville O. Dull (whose name was, predictably, the source of jokes — during the time he was billing himself simply as “O. O. Dull” the inevitable bon mot was that his name was actually a warning about the quality of his films: “Oh-oh! Dull!”) and directed by Clarence Brown (who was too good a director to be written off as a hack but not good or innovative enough to be considered a major creative artist either), Edison, the Man suffers from the attempts of scenarists Dore Schary and Hugo Butler (story) and Talbot Jennings and Bradbury Foote (screenplay) to shoehorn Edison’s life into the usual movie clichés, but it also benefits from the quiet strength of Brown’s direction and Tracy’s performance.
If it does nothing else, it certainly manages to dramatize Edison’s famous definition of genius as “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” (at least that’s how it’s given in the film: other versions of the quote have the relative percentages of inspiration and perspiration at 2 and 98, and even 10 and 90); though the only things we actually see Edison invent are the phonograph and the electric light, the film certainly depicts the arduous struggle behind every advance in science and technology. The film also depicts Edison’s laboratory at Menlo Park filled with various assistants, helpers and fellow researchers — a far cry from the usual conceit of Hollywood biopics that the subject did all his important work heroically alone, without any help at all!
Indeed, there are quite a few effective character actors in the movie, including Lynne Overman (a boy named Lynne, a fine comedy character player who had the misfortune to be stuck in supporting roles while the friends he’d scuffled with on the New York stage in the late 1920’s, Tracy and James Cagney, became superstars) as Edison’s business manager and Felix Bressart as one of his assistants. They help make up for the relative dramatic nullity of Rita Johnson as Mary, Edison’s wife, who gets one charming scene in which Edison taps out his proposal to him by hammering Morse code on the pipes of the telegraph building where they both work, and she communicates her acceptance similarly. (In real life Mr. and Mrs. Edison communicated by tapping Morse code on each other’s shoulders, not as an endearment the way this film presents it but because Edison was so deaf — the result of a boxing on the ears he got from his dad when he was a boy — that was the only way they could talk to each other.)
Not surprisingly, the film downplays Edison’s deafness — the film is set in flashback from the “Light’s Golden Jubilee” in 1929 at which an M.C. narrates Edison’s life (though no voiceover is used) while waiting for him to arrive at the hall, and he’s shown as hard of hearing in the framing sequences but not during the bulk of the film, and it appears he’s simply lost part of his hearing with advancing age. (Violinist Louis Kaufman, who made his first recording for Edison’s label, recalled that, unable to hear anything by the 1920’s, Edison monitored his recordings by watching how much the cutting stylus vibrated as it bit into the master disc — and as Kaufman poured on the vibrato à la Fritz Kreisler, Edison decided the vibrations were too extreme and fired Kaufman on the spot.)
Aside from that, the film is a succession of contrived but nonetheless entertaining scenes showing Edison and his lab constantly on the verge of bankruptcy — Edison even has a hideout on the ground where he can secrete himself when the sheriff and/or the creditors come a-calling — from which a new invention suddenly bails them out, and the climax is an exciting suspense-filled sequence in which Edison, given six months to wire one block of New York City for electric lights, watches in horror as his generators break down five hours before the deadline and then hits on an idea to fix them and finally gets the lights on with literally a minute to spare. Most of Edison’s own inventions are shown merely towards the end of the film, in a montage depicting scenes of them in action while written titles tell us what they are (one would have thought a movie studio would have made more of Edison’s invention of motion pictures than just a brief glimpse in a montage sequence!), and the montage contains one major error.
Edison is credited with inventing “electric power transmission” over a shot of a long-distance powerline, a technology Edison not only didn’t invent but actively fought against. Edison insisted on running his lighting system on direct current, which means the generators have to be close by to the power users; it was Edison’s great rival, Elihu Thomson, who relied on alternating-current generators because alternating current, unlike direct, could be “transformed” — i.e., its voltage could be changed so it could move great distances at high speed and then changed back to a level suitable for consumer use — and therefore made the current electrical grid of large, centralized power plants and massive networks of wires to communicate the power to its users possible.
Nonetheless, it’s ironic that for all the talk about 20th century inventions and how they shaped our lives, the two most important inventions that shaped life in the 20th century were both made towards the end of the 19th: the automobile and the electric power grid. One may debate the relative merits of radio, TV, appliances and whatnot, but the fact is none of them would have been possible without (virtually) every home having access to a reliable source of electricity with which to make them work. (As I write this, my computer and my fan are both wired to the power grid — as are the machines I’m using to record a film, another Edison invention; and earlier I was playing recorded music that, though I was listening to it via the CD technology that superseded Edison’s stylus-and-groove system, was originally recorded for stylus-and-groove release, albeit on flat, lateral-cut disc records rather than Edison’s vertical-cut cylinders.)
Later we ran the 1940 film Edison, the Man, partly because I had just recorded it off the Spencer Tracy tribute on TCM and partly because Charles had mentioned that he’d looked up on the Internet important things that happened on his birthday (August 31, the same as my brother’s, though three years later) and the most significant item was that on that date Edison got his patent for the Kinetoscope, his pioneering movie camera. MGM bought the rights to Thomas Edison’s life story and, after deciding that a single film based on his entire life would be too long, split the project into two separate movies, Young Tom Edison (1939), with Mickey Rooney as Edison, and this one, with Spencer Tracy. Ironically, Young Tom Edison was an enormous hit (it was made at the height of Rooney’s fame, at a time when he was making more money for MGM than any other contract player except Clark Gable) while Edison, the Man was a flop.
Produced by Orville O. Dull (whose name was, predictably, the source of jokes — during the time he was billing himself simply as “O. O. Dull” the inevitable bon mot was that his name was actually a warning about the quality of his films: “Oh-oh! Dull!”) and directed by Clarence Brown (who was too good a director to be written off as a hack but not good or innovative enough to be considered a major creative artist either), Edison, the Man suffers from the attempts of scenarists Dore Schary and Hugo Butler (story) and Talbot Jennings and Bradbury Foote (screenplay) to shoehorn Edison’s life into the usual movie clichés, but it also benefits from the quiet strength of Brown’s direction and Tracy’s performance.
If it does nothing else, it certainly manages to dramatize Edison’s famous definition of genius as “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” (at least that’s how it’s given in the film: other versions of the quote have the relative percentages of inspiration and perspiration at 2 and 98, and even 10 and 90); though the only things we actually see Edison invent are the phonograph and the electric light, the film certainly depicts the arduous struggle behind every advance in science and technology. The film also depicts Edison’s laboratory at Menlo Park filled with various assistants, helpers and fellow researchers — a far cry from the usual conceit of Hollywood biopics that the subject did all his important work heroically alone, without any help at all!
Indeed, there are quite a few effective character actors in the movie, including Lynne Overman (a boy named Lynne, a fine comedy character player who had the misfortune to be stuck in supporting roles while the friends he’d scuffled with on the New York stage in the late 1920’s, Tracy and James Cagney, became superstars) as Edison’s business manager and Felix Bressart as one of his assistants. They help make up for the relative dramatic nullity of Rita Johnson as Mary, Edison’s wife, who gets one charming scene in which Edison taps out his proposal to him by hammering Morse code on the pipes of the telegraph building where they both work, and she communicates her acceptance similarly. (In real life Mr. and Mrs. Edison communicated by tapping Morse code on each other’s shoulders, not as an endearment the way this film presents it but because Edison was so deaf — the result of a boxing on the ears he got from his dad when he was a boy — that was the only way they could talk to each other.)
Not surprisingly, the film downplays Edison’s deafness — the film is set in flashback from the “Light’s Golden Jubilee” in 1929 at which an M.C. narrates Edison’s life (though no voiceover is used) while waiting for him to arrive at the hall, and he’s shown as hard of hearing in the framing sequences but not during the bulk of the film, and it appears he’s simply lost part of his hearing with advancing age. (Violinist Louis Kaufman, who made his first recording for Edison’s label, recalled that, unable to hear anything by the 1920’s, Edison monitored his recordings by watching how much the cutting stylus vibrated as it bit into the master disc — and as Kaufman poured on the vibrato à la Fritz Kreisler, Edison decided the vibrations were too extreme and fired Kaufman on the spot.)
Aside from that, the film is a succession of contrived but nonetheless entertaining scenes showing Edison and his lab constantly on the verge of bankruptcy — Edison even has a hideout on the ground where he can secrete himself when the sheriff and/or the creditors come a-calling — from which a new invention suddenly bails them out, and the climax is an exciting suspense-filled sequence in which Edison, given six months to wire one block of New York City for electric lights, watches in horror as his generators break down five hours before the deadline and then hits on an idea to fix them and finally gets the lights on with literally a minute to spare. Most of Edison’s own inventions are shown merely towards the end of the film, in a montage depicting scenes of them in action while written titles tell us what they are (one would have thought a movie studio would have made more of Edison’s invention of motion pictures than just a brief glimpse in a montage sequence!), and the montage contains one major error.
Edison is credited with inventing “electric power transmission” over a shot of a long-distance powerline, a technology Edison not only didn’t invent but actively fought against. Edison insisted on running his lighting system on direct current, which means the generators have to be close by to the power users; it was Edison’s great rival, Elihu Thomson, who relied on alternating-current generators because alternating current, unlike direct, could be “transformed” — i.e., its voltage could be changed so it could move great distances at high speed and then changed back to a level suitable for consumer use — and therefore made the current electrical grid of large, centralized power plants and massive networks of wires to communicate the power to its users possible.
Nonetheless, it’s ironic that for all the talk about 20th century inventions and how they shaped our lives, the two most important inventions that shaped life in the 20th century were both made towards the end of the 19th: the automobile and the electric power grid. One may debate the relative merits of radio, TV, appliances and whatnot, but the fact is none of them would have been possible without (virtually) every home having access to a reliable source of electricity with which to make them work. (As I write this, my computer and my fan are both wired to the power grid — as are the machines I’m using to record a film, another Edison invention; and earlier I was playing recorded music that, though I was listening to it via the CD technology that superseded Edison’s stylus-and-groove system, was originally recorded for stylus-and-groove release, albeit on flat, lateral-cut disc records rather than Edison’s vertical-cut cylinders.)
Beginning of the End (AB-PT Pictures, 1957)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked was a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of the film Beginning of the End (note the absence of a definite article at the beginning of the title), a particularly favorite bad movie of mine because of the marvelous scene towards the end of the film in which a clutch of giant grasshoppers — inadvertently created by not-so-mad scientist Dr. Ed Wainwright (Peter Graves) when he exposed plants to radiation, hoping they’d grow bigger and thereby end world hunger, not knowing that the little insects were also taking in radiation and growing to be not-so-little (hadn’t this guy seen Them!?) — attack Chicago.
In order to show the grasshoppers attacking the Wrigley Building, where Wainwright and his crew have their headquarters, Bert I. Gordon — director, producer and special-effects guru — had actual normal-sized grasshoppers walk across a photo of the Wrigley Building, and naturally they frequently set foot on the parts of the photo that were supposed to represent sky. Needless to say, the entire grasshopper invasion force was done with real-life grasshoppers cavorting on miniature sets — though (surprisingly for such a teeny-budgeted movie) the process work was actually pretty good: yes, the grasshoppers had the tell-tale black lines around their bodies (meaning that one film shrank relative to the others when the components were printed together), but the effect was still relatively convincing and probably better than Gordon could have done with stop-motion models given the budget he had (or didn’t have).
The MST3K crew had a lot of fun with this one — though I could have done without Crow’s repeated imitations of Graves’s voice as the host of A&E Biography — especially at the end, in which they showed some postcards that had been (supposedly) sent to them by viewers, maneuvered toy grasshoppers across them and said (Mike Nelson said, anyway), “And you can use these postcards to do Bert I. Gordon special effects!” Beginning of the End was produced by an infinitesimal production company called AB-PT Pictures Corporation, which only made this and three other movies, though it was originally released by Republic (probably because the film processing had been done at Republic’s parent company, Consolidated Film Industries, and someone at the company probably realized that if they wanted to get paid for developing it they had to ensure that this film got released somewhere!) and has made the rounds of other companies since; on the print MST3K showed there was a copyright notice but the AB-PT name had been blacked out.
Beginning of the End suffered from the attempts of writers Fred Freiberger (yes, that Fred Freiberger, the one who fucked up The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and the third season of the original Star Trek) and Lester Gorn to give it “significance,” starting with that doomy title (though at least it gave the film a cheap patina of distinction that calling it Attack of the Giant Grasshoppers wouldn’t have) and some of the most pretentious dialogue heard in a cheapo monster movie from the 1950’s, though they also gave the film a nicely cheeky female protagonist: Audrey Aimes, a former Life (though the name was carefully not mentioned) photojournalist turned photographer for the National Wire Service (and how the MST3K missed the obvious joke on that name — “Our wires are just fine, thank you” — is a mystery to me), played by Peggie Castle, whose blonde good looks and cool, efficient manner while refusing to take the inevitable patronization from the male characters is an appealing throwback to Joan Blondell’s and Glenda Farrell’s similar roles in 1930’s Warners films.
The film I picked was a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of the film Beginning of the End (note the absence of a definite article at the beginning of the title), a particularly favorite bad movie of mine because of the marvelous scene towards the end of the film in which a clutch of giant grasshoppers — inadvertently created by not-so-mad scientist Dr. Ed Wainwright (Peter Graves) when he exposed plants to radiation, hoping they’d grow bigger and thereby end world hunger, not knowing that the little insects were also taking in radiation and growing to be not-so-little (hadn’t this guy seen Them!?) — attack Chicago.
In order to show the grasshoppers attacking the Wrigley Building, where Wainwright and his crew have their headquarters, Bert I. Gordon — director, producer and special-effects guru — had actual normal-sized grasshoppers walk across a photo of the Wrigley Building, and naturally they frequently set foot on the parts of the photo that were supposed to represent sky. Needless to say, the entire grasshopper invasion force was done with real-life grasshoppers cavorting on miniature sets — though (surprisingly for such a teeny-budgeted movie) the process work was actually pretty good: yes, the grasshoppers had the tell-tale black lines around their bodies (meaning that one film shrank relative to the others when the components were printed together), but the effect was still relatively convincing and probably better than Gordon could have done with stop-motion models given the budget he had (or didn’t have).
The MST3K crew had a lot of fun with this one — though I could have done without Crow’s repeated imitations of Graves’s voice as the host of A&E Biography — especially at the end, in which they showed some postcards that had been (supposedly) sent to them by viewers, maneuvered toy grasshoppers across them and said (Mike Nelson said, anyway), “And you can use these postcards to do Bert I. Gordon special effects!” Beginning of the End was produced by an infinitesimal production company called AB-PT Pictures Corporation, which only made this and three other movies, though it was originally released by Republic (probably because the film processing had been done at Republic’s parent company, Consolidated Film Industries, and someone at the company probably realized that if they wanted to get paid for developing it they had to ensure that this film got released somewhere!) and has made the rounds of other companies since; on the print MST3K showed there was a copyright notice but the AB-PT name had been blacked out.
Beginning of the End suffered from the attempts of writers Fred Freiberger (yes, that Fred Freiberger, the one who fucked up The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and the third season of the original Star Trek) and Lester Gorn to give it “significance,” starting with that doomy title (though at least it gave the film a cheap patina of distinction that calling it Attack of the Giant Grasshoppers wouldn’t have) and some of the most pretentious dialogue heard in a cheapo monster movie from the 1950’s, though they also gave the film a nicely cheeky female protagonist: Audrey Aimes, a former Life (though the name was carefully not mentioned) photojournalist turned photographer for the National Wire Service (and how the MST3K missed the obvious joke on that name — “Our wires are just fine, thank you” — is a mystery to me), played by Peggie Castle, whose blonde good looks and cool, efficient manner while refusing to take the inevitable patronization from the male characters is an appealing throwback to Joan Blondell’s and Glenda Farrell’s similar roles in 1930’s Warners films.
Friday, August 22, 2008
I Am the Law (Columbia, 1938)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie Charles and I watched last night was one I hadn’t seen before but it came from Turner Classic Movies’ recent “Summer Under the Stars” day-long tribute to Edward G. Robinson — I Am the Law, made at Columbia in 1938 and inspired, like Warners’ Marked Woman and quite a lot of other films back then, by Thomas E. Dewey’s more or less successful crusades against gangsters and racketeers in New York City. This isn’t set in New York, but in a small university town in Hollywood’s generic version of the Midwest, in which Robinson’s character, John Lindsay — an ironic character name! — is a law professor who’s understandably proud of the caliber of students he’s graduated over the years, and in particular of newly minted young lawyer Paul Ferguson (John Beal, looking even more like James Stewart than usual). Lindsay has been forced into taking a sabbatical year and his wife Jerry (Barbara O’Neil) has booked them on a round-the-world cruise, but when Lindsay goes to a movie theatre to relax one afternoon and arrives just as the place has been smoke-bombed and the patrons are fleeing in panicked disgust, he realizes that the city is infested with racketeers and nobody being victimized will testify against them for fear of retaliation. Paul Ferguson’s father Eugene (Otto Kruger) wangles an appointment for him as special prosecutor with authority to go after the rackets in the city, and Lindsay eagerly accepts.
What he doesn’t know — but we’re told almost immediately — is that Eugene Ferguson is actually the rackets boss of the entire city and has engineered Lindsay’s appointment to keep the state governor from calling in a militia or doing any sort of stronger response to the crime problem. The elder Ferguson is counting on Lindsay’s naïveté to make sure he doesn’t actually prosecute anything, but just to make sure he’s also infiltrated spies into Lindsay’s staff, particularly one especially creepy stool pigeon who’d been a career D.A. staff member for six years and who’s on the phone to Ferguson when Lindsay is about to do anything that might jeopardize the interests of the gangs — of which, though Ferguson is in overall control, there are basically two, led by rival gangsters Eddie Girard (Marc Lawrence) and Kom Cronin (Joe Downing), both of whom are hitting up the same restaurateurs, merchants, soda fountain owners, milkmen and other small fry for “protection” money and essentially fighting out their gang war on neutral turf and creating quite a lot of collateral damage. Between them, they’ve got the townspeople so intimidated that nobody will testify against them.
Lindsay hooks up with Frankie Ballou (Wendy Barrie in an intriguing good-bad girl performance) and makes her a sort of Baedeker’s to the local rackets, unaware that she, a former reporter, is also the mistress of Eugene Ferguson (and their rather kinky scenes together prefigure the ones between Louis Calhern and Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle 12 years later). He finds out about their connection when he goes through a file of old newspaper clippings and finds that she did an interview with him during her days as a reporter, and he’s concerned to keep from Paul Ferguson, who’s now his number one assistant on the investigation, that his dad is a crook. Meanwhile, Lindsay’s wife Jerry seeks out the wife (Fay Helm) of dairyman J. W. Butler (Louis Jean Heydt, a striking-looking, charismatic and talented actor who should have become much bigger than he was) and convinces her to get him to testify — only when Paul Ferguson goes to the Butlers’ home to fetch him, a member of the gang beats him to it, kidnaps Butler and kills him.
This leads the city government to cut off funding for Lindsay’s investigation — only he decides to continue independently, firing his spy-ridden staff and using his former law students instead, getting the money from loan sharks (figuring he’ll never have to pay them back since he’s going to be putting them out of business) and swearing that he’ll use whatever methods he has to, including gangland’s own, to stop them. (This makes I Am the Law a sort of semi-remake of The Beast of the City — though without that film’s almost hallucinatory power — and, surprisingly given Robinson’s real-life politics, this movie takes a Right-wing position that the war on crime is too important to maintain constitutional liberties and due-process guarantees.) It all ends in a confrontation in which Lindsay invites the witnesses to his home, has all the gangsters arrested on shaky grounds, and gives the witnesses the now-or-never pitch that it’s time for them to identify the gangsters who’ve been terrorizing and extorting from them. Eugene Ferguson commits suicide in a roundabout way — he accepts the loan of Lindsay’s car, aware that his gang members have wired it to explode as soon as it’s started — after Lindsay has extracted a will from him deeding most of his ill-gotten fortune to a crime victims’ fund, so Paul can continue his illustrious career without the burden of a crooked father holding him back.
I Am the Law was made at Columbia under a clause in Robinson’s Warners contract that allowed him to do one film a year elsewhere, though why he should have used that to make so conventional a movie — and one so much in the Warners’ vein — while he was simultaneously pressuring Jack Warner to green-light his personal project, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, is a mystery. It’s basically your standard-issue Edward G. Robinson as good guy fighting the gangsters (instead of playing one) movie, and it suffers from uncertainty of tone and a miscast screenwriter. Jo Swerling was best known as a comedy writer — and a damned good one, too — but he’s the wrong scribe for a tough gangster picture; throughout the movie he tries to inject quirky humor into the story and it falls flat. The director, Alexander Hall, was also known mostly for comedies, and though his 1949 Bob Hope vehicle The Great Lover is surprisingly dark for a Hope film, it’s clear he’s more at home in lighter fare than I Am the Law is clearly supposed to be.
Aside from those weird streaks of comedy, some of which work (like the kinky scenes between Otto Kruger and Wendy Barrie, and the scene William K. Everson recalled in his book The Detective in Film in which Robinson seems to intuit via ESP that Byron Foulger was the mole in his office who fingered the dairyman who was about to turn state’s evidence and gives him a thorough tongue-lashing about his “shifty eyes and weak chin”) and more of which don’t (like the almost slapsticky fight between rival gangsters at a posh nightclub where Mrs. Lindsay runs into Mr. Lindsay with Frankie and, of course, leaps to the wrong impression), I Am the Law is a Warners-type movie that isn’t as good as it would have been back at Robinson’s home studio, though it’s still reliably entertaining and there are some clichés Swerling (adapting a news story called “Tracking New York’s Crime Barons” by Fred Allhoff in the October 31, 1936 issue of Liberty — you know, the one that just about then predicted that Alf Landon would beat Franklin D. Roosevelt in that year’s Presidential election) wisely avoided. He didn’t have Frankie seduce Paul Ferguson into betraying the investigation, nor did he have her turn good at the end and/or fall genuinely in love with Paul — all of which I was anticipating, and dreading.
The movie Charles and I watched last night was one I hadn’t seen before but it came from Turner Classic Movies’ recent “Summer Under the Stars” day-long tribute to Edward G. Robinson — I Am the Law, made at Columbia in 1938 and inspired, like Warners’ Marked Woman and quite a lot of other films back then, by Thomas E. Dewey’s more or less successful crusades against gangsters and racketeers in New York City. This isn’t set in New York, but in a small university town in Hollywood’s generic version of the Midwest, in which Robinson’s character, John Lindsay — an ironic character name! — is a law professor who’s understandably proud of the caliber of students he’s graduated over the years, and in particular of newly minted young lawyer Paul Ferguson (John Beal, looking even more like James Stewart than usual). Lindsay has been forced into taking a sabbatical year and his wife Jerry (Barbara O’Neil) has booked them on a round-the-world cruise, but when Lindsay goes to a movie theatre to relax one afternoon and arrives just as the place has been smoke-bombed and the patrons are fleeing in panicked disgust, he realizes that the city is infested with racketeers and nobody being victimized will testify against them for fear of retaliation. Paul Ferguson’s father Eugene (Otto Kruger) wangles an appointment for him as special prosecutor with authority to go after the rackets in the city, and Lindsay eagerly accepts.
What he doesn’t know — but we’re told almost immediately — is that Eugene Ferguson is actually the rackets boss of the entire city and has engineered Lindsay’s appointment to keep the state governor from calling in a militia or doing any sort of stronger response to the crime problem. The elder Ferguson is counting on Lindsay’s naïveté to make sure he doesn’t actually prosecute anything, but just to make sure he’s also infiltrated spies into Lindsay’s staff, particularly one especially creepy stool pigeon who’d been a career D.A. staff member for six years and who’s on the phone to Ferguson when Lindsay is about to do anything that might jeopardize the interests of the gangs — of which, though Ferguson is in overall control, there are basically two, led by rival gangsters Eddie Girard (Marc Lawrence) and Kom Cronin (Joe Downing), both of whom are hitting up the same restaurateurs, merchants, soda fountain owners, milkmen and other small fry for “protection” money and essentially fighting out their gang war on neutral turf and creating quite a lot of collateral damage. Between them, they’ve got the townspeople so intimidated that nobody will testify against them.
Lindsay hooks up with Frankie Ballou (Wendy Barrie in an intriguing good-bad girl performance) and makes her a sort of Baedeker’s to the local rackets, unaware that she, a former reporter, is also the mistress of Eugene Ferguson (and their rather kinky scenes together prefigure the ones between Louis Calhern and Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle 12 years later). He finds out about their connection when he goes through a file of old newspaper clippings and finds that she did an interview with him during her days as a reporter, and he’s concerned to keep from Paul Ferguson, who’s now his number one assistant on the investigation, that his dad is a crook. Meanwhile, Lindsay’s wife Jerry seeks out the wife (Fay Helm) of dairyman J. W. Butler (Louis Jean Heydt, a striking-looking, charismatic and talented actor who should have become much bigger than he was) and convinces her to get him to testify — only when Paul Ferguson goes to the Butlers’ home to fetch him, a member of the gang beats him to it, kidnaps Butler and kills him.
This leads the city government to cut off funding for Lindsay’s investigation — only he decides to continue independently, firing his spy-ridden staff and using his former law students instead, getting the money from loan sharks (figuring he’ll never have to pay them back since he’s going to be putting them out of business) and swearing that he’ll use whatever methods he has to, including gangland’s own, to stop them. (This makes I Am the Law a sort of semi-remake of The Beast of the City — though without that film’s almost hallucinatory power — and, surprisingly given Robinson’s real-life politics, this movie takes a Right-wing position that the war on crime is too important to maintain constitutional liberties and due-process guarantees.) It all ends in a confrontation in which Lindsay invites the witnesses to his home, has all the gangsters arrested on shaky grounds, and gives the witnesses the now-or-never pitch that it’s time for them to identify the gangsters who’ve been terrorizing and extorting from them. Eugene Ferguson commits suicide in a roundabout way — he accepts the loan of Lindsay’s car, aware that his gang members have wired it to explode as soon as it’s started — after Lindsay has extracted a will from him deeding most of his ill-gotten fortune to a crime victims’ fund, so Paul can continue his illustrious career without the burden of a crooked father holding him back.
I Am the Law was made at Columbia under a clause in Robinson’s Warners contract that allowed him to do one film a year elsewhere, though why he should have used that to make so conventional a movie — and one so much in the Warners’ vein — while he was simultaneously pressuring Jack Warner to green-light his personal project, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, is a mystery. It’s basically your standard-issue Edward G. Robinson as good guy fighting the gangsters (instead of playing one) movie, and it suffers from uncertainty of tone and a miscast screenwriter. Jo Swerling was best known as a comedy writer — and a damned good one, too — but he’s the wrong scribe for a tough gangster picture; throughout the movie he tries to inject quirky humor into the story and it falls flat. The director, Alexander Hall, was also known mostly for comedies, and though his 1949 Bob Hope vehicle The Great Lover is surprisingly dark for a Hope film, it’s clear he’s more at home in lighter fare than I Am the Law is clearly supposed to be.
Aside from those weird streaks of comedy, some of which work (like the kinky scenes between Otto Kruger and Wendy Barrie, and the scene William K. Everson recalled in his book The Detective in Film in which Robinson seems to intuit via ESP that Byron Foulger was the mole in his office who fingered the dairyman who was about to turn state’s evidence and gives him a thorough tongue-lashing about his “shifty eyes and weak chin”) and more of which don’t (like the almost slapsticky fight between rival gangsters at a posh nightclub where Mrs. Lindsay runs into Mr. Lindsay with Frankie and, of course, leaps to the wrong impression), I Am the Law is a Warners-type movie that isn’t as good as it would have been back at Robinson’s home studio, though it’s still reliably entertaining and there are some clichés Swerling (adapting a news story called “Tracking New York’s Crime Barons” by Fred Allhoff in the October 31, 1936 issue of Liberty — you know, the one that just about then predicted that Alf Landon would beat Franklin D. Roosevelt in that year’s Presidential election) wisely avoided. He didn’t have Frankie seduce Paul Ferguson into betraying the investigation, nor did he have her turn good at the end and/or fall genuinely in love with Paul — all of which I was anticipating, and dreading.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
It (Paramount, 1927)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday I ran out of time to write about the movie that was shown at the Organ Pavilion Monday night. Though mistakenly billed in the program as The “It” Girl — actually the sobriquet Paramount’s publicity department tagged on its star, Clara Bow, after its success -— it was really called It and was more or less based on Elinor Glyn’s best-selling novel of that title. I say “more or less” because Glyn wrote two separate stories, one for the novel and one for the movie; the one for the novel was a sort of apolitical prototype of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in which the central character was a super-industrialist named John Gaunt with an infatuation for his secretary and complications involving her brother, an opium addict.
The movie is also a story of an employee — a shopgirl at the huge Waltham’s Department Store in New York — falling in love with the son of her boss, though it’s considerably lighter in tone and, despite all the pretensions around the concept of “It,” is really a prototype of a screwball comedy with a hard right turn into domestic melodrama midway through. In the preface to her novel, Glyn explained, “This is not the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a character study of the story which the people in the picture read and discuss.” (Dorothy Parker, whose review of the book is my only source for all this since I’ve never read, or even seen a copy of, Glyn’s novel, predictably lampooned the whole idea that she was expected to review “a character study of a story,” though that simply may mean that the version of It shown in the book was published in Cosmopolitan magazine and the novel may simply be a longer and more detailed version of the same plot.)
Glyn gave a series of different and sometimes contradictory definitions of what she meant by “It” — indeed, in the movie Glyn herself makes a cameo appearance when the leading characters are dining at the Ritz Hotel’s restaurant and having an animated discussion about just what “It” means, and naturally they recognize the author and decide to query the source directly — but she did say that “It” didn’t just mean “sex appeal” and that anyone who said it did was vulgarizing her concept. Well, she might as well have saved her breath, for it was as a euphemism for “sex appeal” that “It” entered popular language in the 1920’s — and it’s clearly so meant in this film. It the movie was scripted by Hope Loring and future producer Louis M. Lighton from Glyn’s story, with George Marion, Jr. writing the titles (wittier than usual, with some genuinely funny wisecracks — notably when Bow’s character is being accused of having given birth to an illegitimate child and, asked if the effeminate comic-relief type is the father, she says, “Him? He couldn’t even give birth to a suspicion!” — that make this one silent movie in which one misses sound more than usual) and an uncredited assist from one Frederica Sagor.
The plot of It concerns the unrequited love of Waltham’s shopgirl Betty Lou Spence (Clara Bow) for Cyrus Waltham, Jr. (the singularly uncharismatic, un-“It” Antonio Moreno), son of the owner of Waltham’s department store; and her rivalry for him with his childhood friend Adela Van Norman (Jacqueline Gadsdon). With Adela he has staid dates at dull places like the Ritz; with Betty Lou he goes to Coney Island and has laid-back proletarian fun — only after their date he tries to kiss her and she reacts by slapping him, issuing forth with one of Marion’s wisecracking titles: “So you’re one of those Minute Men — the minute you meet a girl you think you can kiss her!”
The plot gets complicated by the fact that Betty Lou is rooming with another girl from Waltham’s sales force, Molly (Priscilla Bonner), who’s had a baby — the exact circumstances by which the kid was conceived and born are discreetly unmentioned — and the two are visited by two middle-aged social workers (whom Betty Lou tells off with the line, reminiscent of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, that instead of messing around with other people’s children they should find men, get married and have some of their own) who threaten to take the child away because her father is unknown and her mother has no job (she had to quit the store when she became ill as the baby was being born) and therefore no means of supporting it. Betty Lou declares that she is actually the baby’s mom and she still has a job, and the commotion is overheard by all the neighbors as well as an enterprising young reporter for the News-Dispatch, who in a stroke of (bad) luck for Our Heroine happens to have its offices on the same block. (The reporter is played by the young Gary Cooper in a bit part that helped make him a star; after seeing him in the rushes Bow decided she wanted him as her leading man for her next film, Children of Divorce.)
As a result of the newspaper article and the resulting scandal, Betty Lou loses her job and she decides to get even. With the help of the effeminate comic-relief guy, Monty Montgomery (William Austin), she wangles an invitation to a cruise on Waltham’s yacht and Waltham, of course, is initially appalled to see her there but ultimately comes around and — after Monty, steering the boat, gets it involved in a mid-sea collision that puts most of the principals overboard — they end up together. It is actually quite creatively directed by Clarence Badger — the opening shot uses both a track and a crane to steer us into the action instead of just starting it — and Bow, though stuck with one of those excessively unattractive hairdos that were all the rage in the 1920’s, does come off as a genuinely charismatic, “It”-bearing star.
Bow’s star fell partly because she got a reputation of being difficult — Dennis James (who mistakenly named this as Gary Cooper’s first film — that was actually The Winning of Barbara Worth, made two years earlier) said she had a nasal Brooklyn accent which recorded badly, and other sources say she was just too hyperactive to be contained in the early sound era (though that’s belied by her first talkie, The Wild Party, in which she’s a co-ed who sets her sights for anthropology professor Fredric March, making his film debut; it’s a quite good film and, once director Dorothy Arzner invented the mike boom — with the sound department stumped by Bow’s willingness to stand in one place and deliver her lines, she brought a fishing pole to the studio, had the microphone tied to one end of it and had a grip hold it by the other end, instructing him to hold it above Bow’s head just out of camera range so her voice would record no matter where she went — Bow’s performance was just fine).
More likely the fall in Bow’s career had more to do with the scandals that surrounded her in the early 1930’s — notably when her former secretary, Daisy DeVoe, leaked a diary to the media that purported to record Bow’s sexual conquests but was probably largely, if not totally, made up — and the sense that with the 1920’s over she was simply no longer fashionable. It is a film rather oddly perched between two eras, the heavy-breathing romanticism of Elinor Glyn’s tale and the screwball machinations that surround it, and one can readily imagine a 1930’s remake with, say, Joan Blondell and Cary Grant.
Yesterday I ran out of time to write about the movie that was shown at the Organ Pavilion Monday night. Though mistakenly billed in the program as The “It” Girl — actually the sobriquet Paramount’s publicity department tagged on its star, Clara Bow, after its success -— it was really called It and was more or less based on Elinor Glyn’s best-selling novel of that title. I say “more or less” because Glyn wrote two separate stories, one for the novel and one for the movie; the one for the novel was a sort of apolitical prototype of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in which the central character was a super-industrialist named John Gaunt with an infatuation for his secretary and complications involving her brother, an opium addict.
The movie is also a story of an employee — a shopgirl at the huge Waltham’s Department Store in New York — falling in love with the son of her boss, though it’s considerably lighter in tone and, despite all the pretensions around the concept of “It,” is really a prototype of a screwball comedy with a hard right turn into domestic melodrama midway through. In the preface to her novel, Glyn explained, “This is not the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a character study of the story which the people in the picture read and discuss.” (Dorothy Parker, whose review of the book is my only source for all this since I’ve never read, or even seen a copy of, Glyn’s novel, predictably lampooned the whole idea that she was expected to review “a character study of a story,” though that simply may mean that the version of It shown in the book was published in Cosmopolitan magazine and the novel may simply be a longer and more detailed version of the same plot.)
Glyn gave a series of different and sometimes contradictory definitions of what she meant by “It” — indeed, in the movie Glyn herself makes a cameo appearance when the leading characters are dining at the Ritz Hotel’s restaurant and having an animated discussion about just what “It” means, and naturally they recognize the author and decide to query the source directly — but she did say that “It” didn’t just mean “sex appeal” and that anyone who said it did was vulgarizing her concept. Well, she might as well have saved her breath, for it was as a euphemism for “sex appeal” that “It” entered popular language in the 1920’s — and it’s clearly so meant in this film. It the movie was scripted by Hope Loring and future producer Louis M. Lighton from Glyn’s story, with George Marion, Jr. writing the titles (wittier than usual, with some genuinely funny wisecracks — notably when Bow’s character is being accused of having given birth to an illegitimate child and, asked if the effeminate comic-relief type is the father, she says, “Him? He couldn’t even give birth to a suspicion!” — that make this one silent movie in which one misses sound more than usual) and an uncredited assist from one Frederica Sagor.
The plot of It concerns the unrequited love of Waltham’s shopgirl Betty Lou Spence (Clara Bow) for Cyrus Waltham, Jr. (the singularly uncharismatic, un-“It” Antonio Moreno), son of the owner of Waltham’s department store; and her rivalry for him with his childhood friend Adela Van Norman (Jacqueline Gadsdon). With Adela he has staid dates at dull places like the Ritz; with Betty Lou he goes to Coney Island and has laid-back proletarian fun — only after their date he tries to kiss her and she reacts by slapping him, issuing forth with one of Marion’s wisecracking titles: “So you’re one of those Minute Men — the minute you meet a girl you think you can kiss her!”
The plot gets complicated by the fact that Betty Lou is rooming with another girl from Waltham’s sales force, Molly (Priscilla Bonner), who’s had a baby — the exact circumstances by which the kid was conceived and born are discreetly unmentioned — and the two are visited by two middle-aged social workers (whom Betty Lou tells off with the line, reminiscent of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, that instead of messing around with other people’s children they should find men, get married and have some of their own) who threaten to take the child away because her father is unknown and her mother has no job (she had to quit the store when she became ill as the baby was being born) and therefore no means of supporting it. Betty Lou declares that she is actually the baby’s mom and she still has a job, and the commotion is overheard by all the neighbors as well as an enterprising young reporter for the News-Dispatch, who in a stroke of (bad) luck for Our Heroine happens to have its offices on the same block. (The reporter is played by the young Gary Cooper in a bit part that helped make him a star; after seeing him in the rushes Bow decided she wanted him as her leading man for her next film, Children of Divorce.)
As a result of the newspaper article and the resulting scandal, Betty Lou loses her job and she decides to get even. With the help of the effeminate comic-relief guy, Monty Montgomery (William Austin), she wangles an invitation to a cruise on Waltham’s yacht and Waltham, of course, is initially appalled to see her there but ultimately comes around and — after Monty, steering the boat, gets it involved in a mid-sea collision that puts most of the principals overboard — they end up together. It is actually quite creatively directed by Clarence Badger — the opening shot uses both a track and a crane to steer us into the action instead of just starting it — and Bow, though stuck with one of those excessively unattractive hairdos that were all the rage in the 1920’s, does come off as a genuinely charismatic, “It”-bearing star.
Bow’s star fell partly because she got a reputation of being difficult — Dennis James (who mistakenly named this as Gary Cooper’s first film — that was actually The Winning of Barbara Worth, made two years earlier) said she had a nasal Brooklyn accent which recorded badly, and other sources say she was just too hyperactive to be contained in the early sound era (though that’s belied by her first talkie, The Wild Party, in which she’s a co-ed who sets her sights for anthropology professor Fredric March, making his film debut; it’s a quite good film and, once director Dorothy Arzner invented the mike boom — with the sound department stumped by Bow’s willingness to stand in one place and deliver her lines, she brought a fishing pole to the studio, had the microphone tied to one end of it and had a grip hold it by the other end, instructing him to hold it above Bow’s head just out of camera range so her voice would record no matter where she went — Bow’s performance was just fine).
More likely the fall in Bow’s career had more to do with the scandals that surrounded her in the early 1930’s — notably when her former secretary, Daisy DeVoe, leaked a diary to the media that purported to record Bow’s sexual conquests but was probably largely, if not totally, made up — and the sense that with the 1920’s over she was simply no longer fashionable. It is a film rather oddly perched between two eras, the heavy-breathing romanticism of Elinor Glyn’s tale and the screwball machinations that surround it, and one can readily imagine a 1930’s remake with, say, Joan Blondell and Cary Grant.
The Locked Door (United Artists, 1929)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Among the films TCM showed on its August 19 day-long salute to Barbara Stanwyck was her 1929 talkie debut (imdb.com lists her as playing a fan dancer in a 1927 silent, Broadway Nights), The Locked Door, which if nothing else indicates that Stanwyck got to make her (sound) debut squarely on the “A”-list: second-billed to silent heartthrob Rod LaRocque in a major production for a major studio (United Artists), with a major director (George Fitzmaurice, whose best-known credit is probably The Son of the Sheik, Rudolph Valentino’s last film) and other major talents both before and behind the cameras: William “Stage” Boyd and Betty Bronson are the second leads, Ray June the cinematographer, Hal Kern the editor and William Cameron Menzies the art director.
After watching It it was interesting to see another movie that starts with a woman being romanced by the son of her boss, though in this context it’s totally different: the film starts out with a long shot of a large boat (which frankly looks like it was shot with a toy in someone’s bathtub). The camera approaches and we find out this is a pleasure ship (a “rumboat,” it’s referred to in the dialogue) in which a lot of people with more money than good sense are drinking because the boat is (presumably) outside the 12-mile limit and therefore Prohibition doesn’t apply. Ann Carter (Barbara Stanwyck) is a secretary who’s there on a date with her boss’s son, Frank Devereaux (Rod LaRocque), only she doesn’t know until it’s (almost) too late that he’s a no-good rotter: he takes her to a private room on the boat and locks her in, pocketing the doorknob so she can’t get out, and her virtue is only saved by a gang of cops in a flotilla of speedboats, who raid the rumboat and take in all the customers. A papparazo takes a photo of Frank and Ann being led off the boat but Frank slips him $100 and buys the negative.
Then there’s a title reading, “Eighteen months later,” and it turns out that six months after the incident on the boat Ann got married to a rich but decent man, Lawrence Reagan (William “Stage” Boyd) — incidentally his last name is pronounced “REE-gun,” the way Ronald Reagan did when he was still an actor, instead of the “RAY-gun” pronunciation Ronnie adopted once he got into politics — only the two of them are worried about the man Lawrence’s sister Helen (Betty Bronson) is seeing. Helen duly shows up at her brother’s and sister-in-law’s house with said boyfriend — and of course it’s that dirty, no-good Frank Devereaux, who aside from his personal connection with Ann has aroused Lawrence’s ire by seducing a Mrs. Cohen and getting Mr. Cohen so mad at him Lawrence is desperately trying to talk Mr. Cohen out of murdering him.
Determined to do whatever it takes to keep her nice, sweet, innocent sister-in-law (who did play Peter Pan, after all!) out of the clutches of her almost-despoiler, Ann overhears Frank and Helen plotting to run away together and she goes to Frank’s apartment to try to stop her. Lawrence also shows up there, with the same purpose in mind, and after confronting Frank and learning that he printed the photo of them taken on the rumboat and stashed both the prints and the negative for potential blackmail if necessary, Ann hides in Frank’s bedroom (not the most sensible place for her to go!) when Lawrence shows up, Frank pulls a gun on him, they both reach for it (if Chicago author Maurine Dallas Watkins could have made a nickel every time that plot gimmick was used she’d have been a billionaire!) and eventually Frank is shot and left for dead.
In a bizarre but visually effective scene, Ann maneuvers around the room in semi-darkness and it’s not at all clear what she’s doing, but eventually she picks up the gun and she shoots Frank a couple more times, trying to make it look as if she and not her husband killed him. Then Helen shows up, but only after the police, alerted by the hotel’s switchboard operator (played by ZaSu Pitts, whose first name is spelled “Zazu” on the opening credits), have come and are jumping to all the obvious (wrong) conclusions as usual. Finally one of the cops, who had been working undercover on the raid on the rumboat in reel one (ya remember the raid? Ya remember the rumboat?), absolves Ann of any guilt in her association with Frank, and in a really over-the-top finale Frank himself turns out to be not quite dead, having still enough life left in him to issue a dying declaration that Lawrence was indeed acting in self-defense when he shot him.
Though the showing of this quirky movie on TCM was preceded by Robert Osborne warning us that it was an early talkie and a lot of actors really didn’t have a clue how to handle acting for sound film (which required not only an ability to handle dialogue that silent film hadn’t, but an ability to talk softly and intimately that threw a lot of actors whose experience with dialogue was performing stage plays in big theatres where they needed to PROJECT to the farthest balconies), The Locked Door actually turned out to be an unusually good early sound film from the technical point of view. George Fitzmaurice keeps the camera in motion — it even moves while people are talking, a rare and difficult effect in the early days — and gets some marvelous traveling shots of the rumboat in reel one.
The film betrays its origins as a stage play (The Sign on the Door by Channing Pollock, the playwright who screwed up Metropolis — Paramount assigned him to re-edit Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece for American audiences and he slashed the film so badly that much of the plot made no sense, and reviewers understandably but wrongly blamed the original writer, Thea von Harbou, for inconsistencies that hadn’t existed in her script and for which Pollock was responsible) and was adapted by C. Gardner Sullivan, with George Scarborough and Earle Browne writing the dialogue (a frequent division of labor in early sound films, recalling the distinction between script writing and title writing in the silent days), and once it gets into the titular locked room at the end it gets creaky and stage-bound, but even so much of the acting is relatively naturalistic and Stanwyck, though a bit more chipper than she’d be in her later films (and not flattered by the bobbed hair still fashionable in 1929), delivers quite a good performance, especially in the later reels when her character is desperate to retain her husband’s affections even as she’s lying her way into a murder rap to protect him. Indeed, she out-acts the rest of the cast — especially Rod LaRocque, whose career in the sound era didn’t do the spectacular crash-and-burn of John Gilbert’s but didn’t reach the heights it had in the silent days, either, and I suspect for the same reason. He has a perfectly presentable voice that makes sense for the character, but he hasn’t a clue how to act with his voice, how to vary his inflection and tone to convey the emotion of a scene.
Among the films TCM showed on its August 19 day-long salute to Barbara Stanwyck was her 1929 talkie debut (imdb.com lists her as playing a fan dancer in a 1927 silent, Broadway Nights), The Locked Door, which if nothing else indicates that Stanwyck got to make her (sound) debut squarely on the “A”-list: second-billed to silent heartthrob Rod LaRocque in a major production for a major studio (United Artists), with a major director (George Fitzmaurice, whose best-known credit is probably The Son of the Sheik, Rudolph Valentino’s last film) and other major talents both before and behind the cameras: William “Stage” Boyd and Betty Bronson are the second leads, Ray June the cinematographer, Hal Kern the editor and William Cameron Menzies the art director.
After watching It it was interesting to see another movie that starts with a woman being romanced by the son of her boss, though in this context it’s totally different: the film starts out with a long shot of a large boat (which frankly looks like it was shot with a toy in someone’s bathtub). The camera approaches and we find out this is a pleasure ship (a “rumboat,” it’s referred to in the dialogue) in which a lot of people with more money than good sense are drinking because the boat is (presumably) outside the 12-mile limit and therefore Prohibition doesn’t apply. Ann Carter (Barbara Stanwyck) is a secretary who’s there on a date with her boss’s son, Frank Devereaux (Rod LaRocque), only she doesn’t know until it’s (almost) too late that he’s a no-good rotter: he takes her to a private room on the boat and locks her in, pocketing the doorknob so she can’t get out, and her virtue is only saved by a gang of cops in a flotilla of speedboats, who raid the rumboat and take in all the customers. A papparazo takes a photo of Frank and Ann being led off the boat but Frank slips him $100 and buys the negative.
Then there’s a title reading, “Eighteen months later,” and it turns out that six months after the incident on the boat Ann got married to a rich but decent man, Lawrence Reagan (William “Stage” Boyd) — incidentally his last name is pronounced “REE-gun,” the way Ronald Reagan did when he was still an actor, instead of the “RAY-gun” pronunciation Ronnie adopted once he got into politics — only the two of them are worried about the man Lawrence’s sister Helen (Betty Bronson) is seeing. Helen duly shows up at her brother’s and sister-in-law’s house with said boyfriend — and of course it’s that dirty, no-good Frank Devereaux, who aside from his personal connection with Ann has aroused Lawrence’s ire by seducing a Mrs. Cohen and getting Mr. Cohen so mad at him Lawrence is desperately trying to talk Mr. Cohen out of murdering him.
Determined to do whatever it takes to keep her nice, sweet, innocent sister-in-law (who did play Peter Pan, after all!) out of the clutches of her almost-despoiler, Ann overhears Frank and Helen plotting to run away together and she goes to Frank’s apartment to try to stop her. Lawrence also shows up there, with the same purpose in mind, and after confronting Frank and learning that he printed the photo of them taken on the rumboat and stashed both the prints and the negative for potential blackmail if necessary, Ann hides in Frank’s bedroom (not the most sensible place for her to go!) when Lawrence shows up, Frank pulls a gun on him, they both reach for it (if Chicago author Maurine Dallas Watkins could have made a nickel every time that plot gimmick was used she’d have been a billionaire!) and eventually Frank is shot and left for dead.
In a bizarre but visually effective scene, Ann maneuvers around the room in semi-darkness and it’s not at all clear what she’s doing, but eventually she picks up the gun and she shoots Frank a couple more times, trying to make it look as if she and not her husband killed him. Then Helen shows up, but only after the police, alerted by the hotel’s switchboard operator (played by ZaSu Pitts, whose first name is spelled “Zazu” on the opening credits), have come and are jumping to all the obvious (wrong) conclusions as usual. Finally one of the cops, who had been working undercover on the raid on the rumboat in reel one (ya remember the raid? Ya remember the rumboat?), absolves Ann of any guilt in her association with Frank, and in a really over-the-top finale Frank himself turns out to be not quite dead, having still enough life left in him to issue a dying declaration that Lawrence was indeed acting in self-defense when he shot him.
Though the showing of this quirky movie on TCM was preceded by Robert Osborne warning us that it was an early talkie and a lot of actors really didn’t have a clue how to handle acting for sound film (which required not only an ability to handle dialogue that silent film hadn’t, but an ability to talk softly and intimately that threw a lot of actors whose experience with dialogue was performing stage plays in big theatres where they needed to PROJECT to the farthest balconies), The Locked Door actually turned out to be an unusually good early sound film from the technical point of view. George Fitzmaurice keeps the camera in motion — it even moves while people are talking, a rare and difficult effect in the early days — and gets some marvelous traveling shots of the rumboat in reel one.
The film betrays its origins as a stage play (The Sign on the Door by Channing Pollock, the playwright who screwed up Metropolis — Paramount assigned him to re-edit Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece for American audiences and he slashed the film so badly that much of the plot made no sense, and reviewers understandably but wrongly blamed the original writer, Thea von Harbou, for inconsistencies that hadn’t existed in her script and for which Pollock was responsible) and was adapted by C. Gardner Sullivan, with George Scarborough and Earle Browne writing the dialogue (a frequent division of labor in early sound films, recalling the distinction between script writing and title writing in the silent days), and once it gets into the titular locked room at the end it gets creaky and stage-bound, but even so much of the acting is relatively naturalistic and Stanwyck, though a bit more chipper than she’d be in her later films (and not flattered by the bobbed hair still fashionable in 1929), delivers quite a good performance, especially in the later reels when her character is desperate to retain her husband’s affections even as she’s lying her way into a murder rap to protect him. Indeed, she out-acts the rest of the cast — especially Rod LaRocque, whose career in the sound era didn’t do the spectacular crash-and-burn of John Gilbert’s but didn’t reach the heights it had in the silent days, either, and I suspect for the same reason. He has a perfectly presentable voice that makes sense for the character, but he hasn’t a clue how to act with his voice, how to vary his inflection and tone to convey the emotion of a scene.
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