by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we watched last night was a really terrible one: Secret Agent Super Dragon, an incredibly lame James Bond ripoff from an Italian producer, Roberto Amoroso (“he’s a very loving producer,” I joked), though in a co-production arrangement common in Europe then and now common in the U.S. as well, as production costs have ballooned to the point where almost no single company can afford to finance a major feature, it had four studio credits — Films Borderie, Fono Roma, Gloria-Film GmbH, and Ramo Film — while the U.S. distributor (and probably the people responsible for the terrible English dubbing) was an outfit called “United Screen Arts.” We were watching it on a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 archive disc, and while dullness seems to have been one of the things the MST3K crew decided to look for when determining what films were bad enough for them to mock on air, this time they overdid it.
Secret Agent Super Dragon is one of those incredibly lame Italian production where some of the names of the people in the credits were “Anglicized” — director (or at least camera-pointer) Giorgio Ferroni was billed as “Calvin Jackson Padget” — and some weren’t; Ferroni took his co-writing credit under his real Italian name. Most of Secret Agent Super Dragon was filmed in Amsterdam — though a lot of the cityscapes were pretty obviously process work — still, the authentic Dutch locations (including a building with a mock windmill on its side and the English-language sign “Holland Souvenirs” — one of the MST3K crew joked that they had a miniature golf course on the second floor) were by far the most interesting parts of the movie. The star, if you can call him that (on one of their later shows the MST3K crew joked about a credit saying a film was “starring” so-and-so, “Is he really a star, or do we just see him on camera a lot?”), was Ray Danton, most of whose credits were on American TV series and whose biggest moment in film was probably playing George Raft in a 1960 biopic.
The film opens with a mystery woman (Marisa Mell) dressed entirely in pink — when she takes off her pink jacket she reveals a pink shirt, and under that she’s wearing pink underwear — visiting a rather tacky-looking home we’re supposed to think is a villa and seeing Bryan Cooper, a.k.a. Super Dragon (Ray Danton), lying by the pool, dressed in nothing but a pair of blue swim trunks (he’s not bad looking at all, though alas we don’t get a clear frontal view of his crotch), and when he gets up his response to her presence is to throw her into the pool. Things go downhill from there as the writers — Bill Coleman (the same Bill Coleman as the expatriate African-American jazz musician who lived in Europe for decades and appeared on some quite beautiful records? I hope not!), Remigio del Grosso, Giorgio Ferroni and Mike Mitchell (probably “Coleman” and “Mitchell” are two more Italians passing as Anglos) — prove utterly unable either to create or sustain any dramatic interest in a weird farrago of a plot involving a murdered colleague of Super Dragon’s, a series of patently fake Ming vases being sold at auction and apparently all being bought by members of the bad guys’ organization, and a dangerous drug that, like the Feenamint laxative that George Gershwin famously hawked on the radio in his 1934 series, is in the form of chewing gum, apparently because studies have shown that a highly toxic hallucinogen is more effectively absorbed when you chew it.
It’s true that Alfred Hitchcock, outlining his theory of the “MacGuffin,” famously said that nobody in the audience cares what the spies are after — the spies have to be after something for you to have a plot at all, but it doesn’t matter what it is — but the makers of Secret Agent Super Dragon took the “MacGuffin” to a level of blissful absurdity in which even audience members who did care what it was would have been hard-pressed to figure it out. It also doesn’t help that there’s a horrendously offensive comic-relief character, a fat schlub whose special talents (whatever they are, since we don’t really get much of an idea of them in the movie — all we know for sure is he made the hero a cool-looking bulletproof vest) are so essential for the operation (whatever it is) that the hero has arranged with his superiors to have him released from prison long enough to complete the mission, following which he’s supposed to be returned (bringing a whole new meaning to the concept of work furlough). This actor is so annoying one looks back wistfully to the relative subtlety of Allen Jenkins and Frank McHugh in their comic-relief performances in 1930’s Warners films.
Add to the mix a villain (Carlo d’Angelo as “Fernand Lamas” — I’m not making this up, you know!) who looks strikingly like the hero except that he’s a bit sexier, and who in the climactic sequence (again, as Dwight MacDonald might have said if he had ever deigned to see or review this movie, using those terms for courtesy) seems to be attempting to kill the hero by roasting him in a combination oven and aquarium — a pathetic attempt of a producer on a strangulation-level budget to duplicate the famously baroque killing methods of the Bond films. (One night, while we were watching one of the real Bond movies and the villain attempted to off Bond in an incredibly complicated way that just gave Bond time to escape, Charles said, “Hey, the next time you capture James Bond, just shoot him!”).
The MST3K crew did Secret Agent Super Dragon in one of the last shows before Joel Hodgson’s departure, when their own skills at ridicule were at their peak — and they showed through in some of the interstital segments, notably one at the beginning in which Tom Servo and Crow build Joel a truly annoying robot that just takes a few steps forward and issues a greeting in a nails-on-chalkboard voice (and the unseen woman who announced “commercial sign in 15 seconds” added, “And keep that thing away from me or I’ll kill it”); an hilarious skit in which Joel, Servo and Crow jam out on a jazz version of the film’s theme music; and a final wrap-up in which Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV Frank hold a seminar on super-villainry and decide that the problem with the villain in Secret Agent Super Dragon was that he didn’t have a companion animal. (There was also a neat “invention exchange” segment in which TV Frank offered something called “virtual comedy,” a sort of karaoke machine for aspiring stand-up comics — and Dr. Forrester altered the controls so TV Frank’s faux stand-up act would bomb instead of hit.) But overall the movie was so boring even the MST3K mockery could keep it interesting, and both Charles and I did a lot of nodding off while it was on!
Monday, May 24, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Scandal Sheet (Columbia, 1951, rel. 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Scandal Sheet began life as a 1944 novel called The Dark Page by Samuel Fuller — and though the screenplay and direction were both by other hands (Ted Sherdeman, Eugene Ling and James Poe, writers; Phil Karlson, director) Scandal Sheet comes off very much like a Sam Fuller movie, full of toughly drawn characters, a cynical view of the newspaper business (and capitalism in general) and a plot that turns on the exposure of a murder motivated by a sexual secret. The New York Express was once a respected and rather dull paper until a new chair of its board, overruling the objections of some of the long-time minority shareholders, brought in hard-charging editor Mark Chapman (Broderick Crawford) to change the paper into a tabloid and up its circulation.
In fact, Chapman has been promised a large personal bonus as soon as the paper’s circulation goes up to 750,000 — and he’s well on his way there, thanks to his nauseous mix of sensational true-crime stories and ugly staged “reality” events like the “Lonelyhearts Ball” at which up to 200 over-the-hill and excessively unattractive people of both sexes are paired off, with whoever wins the contest for an on-the-spot wedding gets a present of a bed with a TV set built-in. (Were there actually such products back then? Or was it originally a bed with a built-in radio and making it a TV — a far less likely product to be built into a bed — a misbegotten idea on the part of the screenwriters to update Fuller’s novel?) Chapman leaves most of the job of covering the “Lonelyhearts Ball” to his star reporter and protégé, Steve McCleary (John Derek, reunited with Crawford after they’d played father and son in the 1949 All the King’s Men); his photographer, Biddle (Henry Morgan, who always came off as avuncular even when he was young — perhaps because he was always being cast as sidekicks, from George Raft’s sidekick in Race Street to Chummy MacGregor to James Stewart’s Glenn Miller in The Glenn Miller Story); and feature writer Julie Allison (Donna Reed), who was hired by the Express’s previous editor and makes no secret of her distaste for Chapman and his policies.
But Chapman attends the event himself and the MC introduces him from the stage — and he’s recognized by Charlotte Grant (Rosemary DeCamp), whom he married two decades earlier when he was still using his real name, George Grant. Bracing himself for a blackmail demand, Chapman agrees to go home with her to discuss the matter — only the confrontation turns violent and Chapman shoves her against a steampipe, bashing her head into a large nut holding the pipe together and thereby killing her. From then on the story turns into a two-way chase as McCleary attempts to solve the murder ahead of the police so he can turn in a big story for the Express, while Chapman supports him but at the same time tries to cover up the investigation so it won’t lead to him. McCleary gets his first lead when he sees a bit of a badge pinned to Charlotte’s corpse that indicates she was at the Lonelyhearts Ball, even though Chapman tore off most of the badge and dropped it down a sewer grate, along with the wedding ring he found on Charlotte’s finger that could have been traced back to him. An alcoholic ex-newspaperman named Charlie Barnes (Henry O’Neill) traces the crime to Chapman when Chapman, who’s routinely been giving Charlie handouts to dodge his persistent requests for a job at the Express so he can make a journalistic comeback, finds a pawn ticket mixed in with the bills Chapman has just given him, uses Chapman’s money to redeem the ticket and finds that the pawned item was Charlotte’s suitcase, complete with two photos of the wedding of Mark Chapman, t/n George Grant, and his wife Charlotte. In one of the photos Chapman is turned away from the camera and is therefore unrecognizable, but in the other he’s facing front and clearly visible.
Charlie takes the photo in which Chapman is recognizable and offers it first to the Express, and when McCleary hangs up on him he decides to take it to another paper — only Chapman catches him on the way and kills him, but not before Charlie has stashed the suitcase and the rest of its contents, including the wedding photo with Chapman’s face obscured, with the bartender at one of his favorite haunts. McCleary and Julie recover the suitcase and, at McCleary’s urging, Chapman runs the photo as a cover and allows McCleary to go to Connecticut, where the wedding took place, to see if he can trace the person who officiated and thereby get a line on the identity of both victim and killer. Chapman calls to the town where the wedding took place and satisfies himself that no one could trace the justice of the peace who married him and Charlotte 20 years earlier, but McCleary and Julie trace him anyway — he’s retired and moved to another town — and bring him back to the office to identify the killer. The judge (Griff Barnett) says he doesn’t recognize the man visually but, since he got into an argument with his wife right after the wedding, he remembered the man’s voice and would recall it if he heard it again. Needless to say, the moment Chapman starts barking at his star reporter, the judge recognizes that angry snarl instantly and Chapman is exposed; he tries to escape by pulling a gun on his staff members, but the police come in, take his gun away and arrest him — and, in a marvelously cynical final scene that fully reflects Sam Fuller’s vision, the popularity of the issue in which the Express exposes its own editor as a murderer finally pushes its circulation over 750,000.
Scandal Sheet had a tangled history on its way to the screen; the movie rights were originally purchased by Howard Hawks, who wanted Edward G. Robinson as the murderous editor (not surprisingly, since Robinson had already played tabloid editors — albeit more guilt-ridden and less psychopathic ones — in Five Star Final and Unholy Partners) and Humphrey Bogart as the reporter. Then Hawks had one of his weirder brainstorms and wanted to cast Cary Grant against type as the editor — which might have been interesting, only with Jack Warner to contend with he could no more cast Grant as a murderer as Alfred Hitchcock had been four years earlier in Suspicion (in which, much to Hitchcock’s disgust, RKO’s “suits” insisted on a last-minute rewrite which absolved Grant’s character of murder) — and the movie rights filtered from Hawks and Warners to Columbia, where the project lay fallow until the studio made All the King’s Men with Broderick Crawford (who only got the part when MGM cancelled Columbia’s deal to borrow Spencer Tracy at the last minute!) and started looking for vehicles for an ugly middle-aged character actor with a gravely voice and proletarian but still imperious manner.
Scandal Sheet works brilliantly mainly due to Karlson’s direction — unlike Douglas Sirk with Shockproof, another Fuller story, at the same studio, Karlson had a producer (Edward Small) who believed in Fuller’s vision and allowed it to be presented on the screen without compromise, and Karlson responded by directing very much the way Fuller would have: atmospheric night shots, tight closeups and a deliberate playing against any glamour elements another, less committed director might have tried to inject into the story. John Derek isn’t much of a help — Bogart would have been too old for the role and it really needed someone like Montgomery Clift (who’d play a similar part seven years later in Lonelyhearts) or James Dean; Derek is so callow one can readily believe in his naïveté towards Chapman, whom he regards as a great editor and a role model, but the rest of his performance doesn’t really work.
Still, Scandal Sheet is strong enough in its other particulars that it can survive a weak male lead — especially since Crawford is so authoritative, nailing the character’s unscrupulousness as well as a fierce ambition that makes him understandable and almost likable: he lashes out at Charlotte less out of any lingering anger at her from their days as a couple than out of fear that her reappearance will cost him the good life he’s worked so hard for. The other fascinating thing about Scandal Sheet is its almost uncanny anticipations of both later movies and real-life events — it seems creepy to be watching a movie in which a fictional character named “Mark Chapman” commits murder in New York city 28 years before a real Mark Chapman killed John Lennon in New York City — and though at times the film might seem like a ripoff of The Big Clock (star reporter/editor for a magazine conglomerate investigates and is suspected of a murder actually committed by his publisher) Fuller’s novel beat Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock to publication by two years, while the New York Express’s transformation from historically respected newspaper to sleazy tabloid eerily anticipates the similar change Rupert Murdoch and his minions wreaked on the real-life New York Post.
Scandal Sheet began life as a 1944 novel called The Dark Page by Samuel Fuller — and though the screenplay and direction were both by other hands (Ted Sherdeman, Eugene Ling and James Poe, writers; Phil Karlson, director) Scandal Sheet comes off very much like a Sam Fuller movie, full of toughly drawn characters, a cynical view of the newspaper business (and capitalism in general) and a plot that turns on the exposure of a murder motivated by a sexual secret. The New York Express was once a respected and rather dull paper until a new chair of its board, overruling the objections of some of the long-time minority shareholders, brought in hard-charging editor Mark Chapman (Broderick Crawford) to change the paper into a tabloid and up its circulation.
In fact, Chapman has been promised a large personal bonus as soon as the paper’s circulation goes up to 750,000 — and he’s well on his way there, thanks to his nauseous mix of sensational true-crime stories and ugly staged “reality” events like the “Lonelyhearts Ball” at which up to 200 over-the-hill and excessively unattractive people of both sexes are paired off, with whoever wins the contest for an on-the-spot wedding gets a present of a bed with a TV set built-in. (Were there actually such products back then? Or was it originally a bed with a built-in radio and making it a TV — a far less likely product to be built into a bed — a misbegotten idea on the part of the screenwriters to update Fuller’s novel?) Chapman leaves most of the job of covering the “Lonelyhearts Ball” to his star reporter and protégé, Steve McCleary (John Derek, reunited with Crawford after they’d played father and son in the 1949 All the King’s Men); his photographer, Biddle (Henry Morgan, who always came off as avuncular even when he was young — perhaps because he was always being cast as sidekicks, from George Raft’s sidekick in Race Street to Chummy MacGregor to James Stewart’s Glenn Miller in The Glenn Miller Story); and feature writer Julie Allison (Donna Reed), who was hired by the Express’s previous editor and makes no secret of her distaste for Chapman and his policies.
But Chapman attends the event himself and the MC introduces him from the stage — and he’s recognized by Charlotte Grant (Rosemary DeCamp), whom he married two decades earlier when he was still using his real name, George Grant. Bracing himself for a blackmail demand, Chapman agrees to go home with her to discuss the matter — only the confrontation turns violent and Chapman shoves her against a steampipe, bashing her head into a large nut holding the pipe together and thereby killing her. From then on the story turns into a two-way chase as McCleary attempts to solve the murder ahead of the police so he can turn in a big story for the Express, while Chapman supports him but at the same time tries to cover up the investigation so it won’t lead to him. McCleary gets his first lead when he sees a bit of a badge pinned to Charlotte’s corpse that indicates she was at the Lonelyhearts Ball, even though Chapman tore off most of the badge and dropped it down a sewer grate, along with the wedding ring he found on Charlotte’s finger that could have been traced back to him. An alcoholic ex-newspaperman named Charlie Barnes (Henry O’Neill) traces the crime to Chapman when Chapman, who’s routinely been giving Charlie handouts to dodge his persistent requests for a job at the Express so he can make a journalistic comeback, finds a pawn ticket mixed in with the bills Chapman has just given him, uses Chapman’s money to redeem the ticket and finds that the pawned item was Charlotte’s suitcase, complete with two photos of the wedding of Mark Chapman, t/n George Grant, and his wife Charlotte. In one of the photos Chapman is turned away from the camera and is therefore unrecognizable, but in the other he’s facing front and clearly visible.
Charlie takes the photo in which Chapman is recognizable and offers it first to the Express, and when McCleary hangs up on him he decides to take it to another paper — only Chapman catches him on the way and kills him, but not before Charlie has stashed the suitcase and the rest of its contents, including the wedding photo with Chapman’s face obscured, with the bartender at one of his favorite haunts. McCleary and Julie recover the suitcase and, at McCleary’s urging, Chapman runs the photo as a cover and allows McCleary to go to Connecticut, where the wedding took place, to see if he can trace the person who officiated and thereby get a line on the identity of both victim and killer. Chapman calls to the town where the wedding took place and satisfies himself that no one could trace the justice of the peace who married him and Charlotte 20 years earlier, but McCleary and Julie trace him anyway — he’s retired and moved to another town — and bring him back to the office to identify the killer. The judge (Griff Barnett) says he doesn’t recognize the man visually but, since he got into an argument with his wife right after the wedding, he remembered the man’s voice and would recall it if he heard it again. Needless to say, the moment Chapman starts barking at his star reporter, the judge recognizes that angry snarl instantly and Chapman is exposed; he tries to escape by pulling a gun on his staff members, but the police come in, take his gun away and arrest him — and, in a marvelously cynical final scene that fully reflects Sam Fuller’s vision, the popularity of the issue in which the Express exposes its own editor as a murderer finally pushes its circulation over 750,000.
Scandal Sheet had a tangled history on its way to the screen; the movie rights were originally purchased by Howard Hawks, who wanted Edward G. Robinson as the murderous editor (not surprisingly, since Robinson had already played tabloid editors — albeit more guilt-ridden and less psychopathic ones — in Five Star Final and Unholy Partners) and Humphrey Bogart as the reporter. Then Hawks had one of his weirder brainstorms and wanted to cast Cary Grant against type as the editor — which might have been interesting, only with Jack Warner to contend with he could no more cast Grant as a murderer as Alfred Hitchcock had been four years earlier in Suspicion (in which, much to Hitchcock’s disgust, RKO’s “suits” insisted on a last-minute rewrite which absolved Grant’s character of murder) — and the movie rights filtered from Hawks and Warners to Columbia, where the project lay fallow until the studio made All the King’s Men with Broderick Crawford (who only got the part when MGM cancelled Columbia’s deal to borrow Spencer Tracy at the last minute!) and started looking for vehicles for an ugly middle-aged character actor with a gravely voice and proletarian but still imperious manner.
Scandal Sheet works brilliantly mainly due to Karlson’s direction — unlike Douglas Sirk with Shockproof, another Fuller story, at the same studio, Karlson had a producer (Edward Small) who believed in Fuller’s vision and allowed it to be presented on the screen without compromise, and Karlson responded by directing very much the way Fuller would have: atmospheric night shots, tight closeups and a deliberate playing against any glamour elements another, less committed director might have tried to inject into the story. John Derek isn’t much of a help — Bogart would have been too old for the role and it really needed someone like Montgomery Clift (who’d play a similar part seven years later in Lonelyhearts) or James Dean; Derek is so callow one can readily believe in his naïveté towards Chapman, whom he regards as a great editor and a role model, but the rest of his performance doesn’t really work.
Still, Scandal Sheet is strong enough in its other particulars that it can survive a weak male lead — especially since Crawford is so authoritative, nailing the character’s unscrupulousness as well as a fierce ambition that makes him understandable and almost likable: he lashes out at Charlotte less out of any lingering anger at her from their days as a couple than out of fear that her reappearance will cost him the good life he’s worked so hard for. The other fascinating thing about Scandal Sheet is its almost uncanny anticipations of both later movies and real-life events — it seems creepy to be watching a movie in which a fictional character named “Mark Chapman” commits murder in New York city 28 years before a real Mark Chapman killed John Lennon in New York City — and though at times the film might seem like a ripoff of The Big Clock (star reporter/editor for a magazine conglomerate investigates and is suspected of a murder actually committed by his publisher) Fuller’s novel beat Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock to publication by two years, while the New York Express’s transformation from historically respected newspaper to sleazy tabloid eerily anticipates the similar change Rupert Murdoch and his minions wreaked on the real-life New York Post.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Baby Face Morgan (PRC, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night came from the 50-film DVD boxed set “Dark Crimes” but, like Half a Sinner from the same box, turned out to be a comedy — and a surprisingly funny one given that it was from PRC and didn’t involve any of the prestigious (or at least cult-favorite) people that worked there from time to time — the director was Arthur Dreifuss (who’d later switch from one Poverty Row company to another and do Gale Storm’s vehicles for Monogram) rather than Edgar G. Ulmer, Steve Sekely or Douglas Sirk, and the writers -— Jack Rubin, Oscar Brodney and Edward Dein — were competent but didn’t have especially good reputations either for comedy or drama. Nonetheless they turned in a little gem of a film, a one-joke movie but one that spun a lot of clever and amusing variations on the one joke. It starts with a stock shot of the New York corner containing the Flatiron Building and, superfluously but also almost glorying in its campy superfluity, a title comes on and says, “In the East … ”
The gimmick is that a nationwide protection racket that’s shown in operation “In the East,” “In the West,” “In the North” and “In the South” has fallen on hard times since the recent death of its leader, Mike Morgan (a painting of him holding a tommy gun in mock-heroic pose is shown and saluted by his surviving lieutenants). The second-in-command, “Doc” Rogers (Robert Armstrong, more corpulent than we remember him from King Kong and sporting a rather silly moustache but still evincing powerful, don’t-mess-with-me authority and stealing the film out from under the nominal juvenile leads), hits on the idea of recruiting Morgan’s son Edward to come to “Central City” and take over nationwide leadership of the gang — only Edward (Richard Cromwell, a bit twinkie-ish but considerably better looking and at least somewhat more skilled as an actor than most PRC leading men) is a nice young kid who has no idea his dad was a gangster and who can only be recruited to take over the gang if it can be made to appear to be a legitimate business.
Accordingly, “Doc” revives a dummy insurance company the gang founded as a cover for their protection racket and puts Edward and his home-town best friend, Ollie Harrison (Chick Chandler), in nominal charge. Edward is instructed to sit in his office all day and do nothing while the gang creates a powerful, mysterious image for the reclusive “Baby Face Morgan” who’s come to take over his father’s criminal enterprise. They’re so good at doing this that Edward has no idea he’s the mysterious “Baby Face Morgan” the newspapers are writing about in such sinister terms. Edward falls in love with Virginia Clark (Mary Carlisle, top-billed) from a trucking company that has courageously resisted paying “protection,” and the two of them start selling “racketeer insurance” to all the trucking companies that have been targeted by the gang — with the result that every time the gangsters blow up a truck, their accumulated cash reserves go down as Edward taps their treasury to pay off the truckers and compensate them for their losses.
The whole fiasco attracts the attention of rival gangster Torelli (Ralf Harolde), who sees this as his opportunity to push Rogers’ outfit aside and take over the racket for himself — and it all ends with Edward’s shocked realization that he is “Baby Face Morgan,” the police arresting Rogers’ gang but then realizing that they have nothing to hold them for because they haven’t done anything illegal under Edward’s unwitting leadership, and of course Edward and Virginia hooking up. While not laugh-out-loud funny, Baby Face Morgan is a quite charming and amusing film start to finish, well worth watching and a far cry from the dreck that constituted most of PRC’s output.
The film Charles and I watched last night came from the 50-film DVD boxed set “Dark Crimes” but, like Half a Sinner from the same box, turned out to be a comedy — and a surprisingly funny one given that it was from PRC and didn’t involve any of the prestigious (or at least cult-favorite) people that worked there from time to time — the director was Arthur Dreifuss (who’d later switch from one Poverty Row company to another and do Gale Storm’s vehicles for Monogram) rather than Edgar G. Ulmer, Steve Sekely or Douglas Sirk, and the writers -— Jack Rubin, Oscar Brodney and Edward Dein — were competent but didn’t have especially good reputations either for comedy or drama. Nonetheless they turned in a little gem of a film, a one-joke movie but one that spun a lot of clever and amusing variations on the one joke. It starts with a stock shot of the New York corner containing the Flatiron Building and, superfluously but also almost glorying in its campy superfluity, a title comes on and says, “In the East … ”
The gimmick is that a nationwide protection racket that’s shown in operation “In the East,” “In the West,” “In the North” and “In the South” has fallen on hard times since the recent death of its leader, Mike Morgan (a painting of him holding a tommy gun in mock-heroic pose is shown and saluted by his surviving lieutenants). The second-in-command, “Doc” Rogers (Robert Armstrong, more corpulent than we remember him from King Kong and sporting a rather silly moustache but still evincing powerful, don’t-mess-with-me authority and stealing the film out from under the nominal juvenile leads), hits on the idea of recruiting Morgan’s son Edward to come to “Central City” and take over nationwide leadership of the gang — only Edward (Richard Cromwell, a bit twinkie-ish but considerably better looking and at least somewhat more skilled as an actor than most PRC leading men) is a nice young kid who has no idea his dad was a gangster and who can only be recruited to take over the gang if it can be made to appear to be a legitimate business.
Accordingly, “Doc” revives a dummy insurance company the gang founded as a cover for their protection racket and puts Edward and his home-town best friend, Ollie Harrison (Chick Chandler), in nominal charge. Edward is instructed to sit in his office all day and do nothing while the gang creates a powerful, mysterious image for the reclusive “Baby Face Morgan” who’s come to take over his father’s criminal enterprise. They’re so good at doing this that Edward has no idea he’s the mysterious “Baby Face Morgan” the newspapers are writing about in such sinister terms. Edward falls in love with Virginia Clark (Mary Carlisle, top-billed) from a trucking company that has courageously resisted paying “protection,” and the two of them start selling “racketeer insurance” to all the trucking companies that have been targeted by the gang — with the result that every time the gangsters blow up a truck, their accumulated cash reserves go down as Edward taps their treasury to pay off the truckers and compensate them for their losses.
The whole fiasco attracts the attention of rival gangster Torelli (Ralf Harolde), who sees this as his opportunity to push Rogers’ outfit aside and take over the racket for himself — and it all ends with Edward’s shocked realization that he is “Baby Face Morgan,” the police arresting Rogers’ gang but then realizing that they have nothing to hold them for because they haven’t done anything illegal under Edward’s unwitting leadership, and of course Edward and Virginia hooking up. While not laugh-out-loud funny, Baby Face Morgan is a quite charming and amusing film start to finish, well worth watching and a far cry from the dreck that constituted most of PRC’s output.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Uncertainty (independent, © 2008, rel. 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Uncertainty turned out to be a production by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the real-life Gay couple who made the marvelous 2001 neo-noir The Deep End, a remake of Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment in which the straight daughter of the central character was turned into a Gay son — a great movie and one of the few recent attempts at noir to capture the moral ambiguity of the originals while at the same time updating the genre enough to make it credible in the modern era. Alas, Uncertainty was hardly in the same league as The Deep End, perhaps because this script was a McGehee-Siegel original instead of one based on a previous film that was itself an adaptation of a novel (Elizabeth Saxnay Holding’s The Blank Wall); it’s an oddball combination of Dangerous Corner and Run, Lola, Run which deals with two possible fates for the central characters, Bobby Thompson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his girlfriend Kate (Lynn Collins).
As the film opens they’re walking across the Brooklyn Bridge (by now I’m wary of any film about angst-ridden characters that takes place in New York for fear it’ll just be warmed-over Woody Allen — though whatever the problems with Uncertainty, that isn’t one of them) and they flip a coin, then each tears off and starts running down the bridge’s walkway, in opposite directions, ultimately meeting at the bottom. They then divide into two couples, labeled “Green” and “Yellow” and dressed in green and yellow clothes, driving green and yellow cars (the “green” version actually has a car of their own while the “yellow” version is forced to use taxis — Yellow Cabs, natch — and subways) and moving in largely green and yellow settings, a neat device that enables us to tell the two Bobbys and Kates apart — though I must confess I was in a state of uncertainty myself throughout the film as to whether these were supposed to be the same people or two different couples with similar names and appearances. Anyway, the “green” Bobby and Kate decide to attend a Fourth of July party with Kate’s family — including her scapegrace sister Sophie, played by the marvelous Olivia Thirlby (who played a similar best-friend role in Juno and was the one redeeming feature in the otherwise unwatchable The Wackness, but she’s pretty much wasted here and I might have liked Uncertainty better if Thirlby had played Lynn Collins’ role[s]) — while the “yellow” ones decide to stay in the city and instead attend an urban party hosted by a friend from their own generation.
The “yellow” Bobby and Kate find a cell phone someone left in their cab and start calling the numbers stored on it as part of a Good Samaritan effort to see whom it belonged to and make arrangements to return it — only they start getting callbacks from people with names like Pedro and Dimitri (two Dimitris, in fact), and when one Dimitri orders a hit on the other and Bobby and Kate see one Dimitri shot down in front of the restaurant they’re supposed to meet him at by an Asian hit man hired by the other Dimitri, they realize they’re in over their heads and, in their first even remotely sensible act all movie, decide to turn the phone in to the police. Only a bored receptionist at the police desk inside New York City Hall tells them they have to wait for a sergeant who’s out, and they get tired of waiting and are stimulated by a call offering them $500,000 for the return of the phone to try to sell it for a similar sum to the surviving Dimitri, who instead of paying them decides to send his Asian hit man after them to assassinate them and recover the phone. We receive a clue via a Web site Bobby and Kate encounter that the phone figures prominently in an urban corruption scheme involving the head of the city’s lottery (which begs the question why they don’t look for the name of the prosecutor involved in the case and turn the phone over to him), and they hatch an elaborate scheme to sell the phone in a location with a lot of security and cameras around.
So they pick a branch of the Chase bank (which is inexplicably open on the Fourth of July!) and rent a safety-deposit box, hoping to use it to deposit their own ill-gotten gains without running afoul of the laws requiring bank officials to report depositors of large sums of cash to the authorities — only the scheme forces them to sleep outdoors all night and meet Dimitri in the bank the next morning. True to form, Dimitri doesn’t show but sends his hit man instead, leading Bobby and Kate to run for their lives into and out of old tenement buildings and across New York rooftops until they’re finally chased to the Brooklyn Bridge — the story coming full circle. Meanwhile the “green” Bobby and Kate have encountered far less life-threatening but still significant issues of their own — the big one being that Kate is pregnant and they don’t know whether and how to tell her heavy-duty Latino family, and they’re also uncertain over whether to keep the baby or have an abortion — and the two couples end up on the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time. I kept expecting them to turn out to be two separate couples, only coincidentally having identical names and similar appearances, and for the hit man to blow away the “green” Bobby and Kate out of mistaken identity. Instead the film just ends there, presenting with all the obviousness of a 1950’s “audio-visual” educational film the moral that if your girlfriend’s family invites you for the Fourth of July, you’d better damned well go or you’re going to end up targeted for murder by vicious gangsters.
McGehee and Siegel add one more parallelism to their plot lines: both couples are Good Samaritans who can’t resist trying to help others — the “green” Bobby and Kate pick up a limping dog off the street and adopt it (so they’re going to have to “parent” both a baby and a dog — oh, great) — but the film ultimately doesn’t work, partly because it feels more like a technical exercise than a heartfelt story and partly because the “green” plot line is so much less interesting than the “yellow” one. At least Dangerous Corner — a marvelous, and little-known, RKO programmer from 1934 based on a J. B. Priestley play — didn’t intercut the two separate fates of its characters; instead it presented one plot line and then the other (and the gimmick in that was a burned-out tube on their radio, which in one plot line stayed burned out and in the other was replaced because they happened to have another one on hand — the idea being that, not being able to divert themselves with the music from the radio, the guests at a weekend party had to talk to each other and in the process they let slip their real feelings for each other and, in particular, who was cheating on whom sexually).
The “yellow” plot line of Uncertainty could have made a quite exciting Run, Lola, Run-style thriller if the “green” plot line weren’t dragging it down — after a while I found myself groaning every time McGehee and Siegel cut back from “yellow” to “green” — though even within the confines of the “yellow” story the characters were behaving so stupidly I alternated between rooting for the “yellow” Bobby and Kate to survive and make their sting, and hoping the hit man would hurry up and off them before they did anything else annoying and risible. Uncertainty is that most frustrating of all movies — a bad film that comes heartbreakingly close to being a good one, one that seems to come so close to working as its filmmakers intended that you find yourself sympathetic to it even though you don’t really like it.
Uncertainty turned out to be a production by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the real-life Gay couple who made the marvelous 2001 neo-noir The Deep End, a remake of Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment in which the straight daughter of the central character was turned into a Gay son — a great movie and one of the few recent attempts at noir to capture the moral ambiguity of the originals while at the same time updating the genre enough to make it credible in the modern era. Alas, Uncertainty was hardly in the same league as The Deep End, perhaps because this script was a McGehee-Siegel original instead of one based on a previous film that was itself an adaptation of a novel (Elizabeth Saxnay Holding’s The Blank Wall); it’s an oddball combination of Dangerous Corner and Run, Lola, Run which deals with two possible fates for the central characters, Bobby Thompson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his girlfriend Kate (Lynn Collins).
As the film opens they’re walking across the Brooklyn Bridge (by now I’m wary of any film about angst-ridden characters that takes place in New York for fear it’ll just be warmed-over Woody Allen — though whatever the problems with Uncertainty, that isn’t one of them) and they flip a coin, then each tears off and starts running down the bridge’s walkway, in opposite directions, ultimately meeting at the bottom. They then divide into two couples, labeled “Green” and “Yellow” and dressed in green and yellow clothes, driving green and yellow cars (the “green” version actually has a car of their own while the “yellow” version is forced to use taxis — Yellow Cabs, natch — and subways) and moving in largely green and yellow settings, a neat device that enables us to tell the two Bobbys and Kates apart — though I must confess I was in a state of uncertainty myself throughout the film as to whether these were supposed to be the same people or two different couples with similar names and appearances. Anyway, the “green” Bobby and Kate decide to attend a Fourth of July party with Kate’s family — including her scapegrace sister Sophie, played by the marvelous Olivia Thirlby (who played a similar best-friend role in Juno and was the one redeeming feature in the otherwise unwatchable The Wackness, but she’s pretty much wasted here and I might have liked Uncertainty better if Thirlby had played Lynn Collins’ role[s]) — while the “yellow” ones decide to stay in the city and instead attend an urban party hosted by a friend from their own generation.
The “yellow” Bobby and Kate find a cell phone someone left in their cab and start calling the numbers stored on it as part of a Good Samaritan effort to see whom it belonged to and make arrangements to return it — only they start getting callbacks from people with names like Pedro and Dimitri (two Dimitris, in fact), and when one Dimitri orders a hit on the other and Bobby and Kate see one Dimitri shot down in front of the restaurant they’re supposed to meet him at by an Asian hit man hired by the other Dimitri, they realize they’re in over their heads and, in their first even remotely sensible act all movie, decide to turn the phone in to the police. Only a bored receptionist at the police desk inside New York City Hall tells them they have to wait for a sergeant who’s out, and they get tired of waiting and are stimulated by a call offering them $500,000 for the return of the phone to try to sell it for a similar sum to the surviving Dimitri, who instead of paying them decides to send his Asian hit man after them to assassinate them and recover the phone. We receive a clue via a Web site Bobby and Kate encounter that the phone figures prominently in an urban corruption scheme involving the head of the city’s lottery (which begs the question why they don’t look for the name of the prosecutor involved in the case and turn the phone over to him), and they hatch an elaborate scheme to sell the phone in a location with a lot of security and cameras around.
So they pick a branch of the Chase bank (which is inexplicably open on the Fourth of July!) and rent a safety-deposit box, hoping to use it to deposit their own ill-gotten gains without running afoul of the laws requiring bank officials to report depositors of large sums of cash to the authorities — only the scheme forces them to sleep outdoors all night and meet Dimitri in the bank the next morning. True to form, Dimitri doesn’t show but sends his hit man instead, leading Bobby and Kate to run for their lives into and out of old tenement buildings and across New York rooftops until they’re finally chased to the Brooklyn Bridge — the story coming full circle. Meanwhile the “green” Bobby and Kate have encountered far less life-threatening but still significant issues of their own — the big one being that Kate is pregnant and they don’t know whether and how to tell her heavy-duty Latino family, and they’re also uncertain over whether to keep the baby or have an abortion — and the two couples end up on the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time. I kept expecting them to turn out to be two separate couples, only coincidentally having identical names and similar appearances, and for the hit man to blow away the “green” Bobby and Kate out of mistaken identity. Instead the film just ends there, presenting with all the obviousness of a 1950’s “audio-visual” educational film the moral that if your girlfriend’s family invites you for the Fourth of July, you’d better damned well go or you’re going to end up targeted for murder by vicious gangsters.
McGehee and Siegel add one more parallelism to their plot lines: both couples are Good Samaritans who can’t resist trying to help others — the “green” Bobby and Kate pick up a limping dog off the street and adopt it (so they’re going to have to “parent” both a baby and a dog — oh, great) — but the film ultimately doesn’t work, partly because it feels more like a technical exercise than a heartfelt story and partly because the “green” plot line is so much less interesting than the “yellow” one. At least Dangerous Corner — a marvelous, and little-known, RKO programmer from 1934 based on a J. B. Priestley play — didn’t intercut the two separate fates of its characters; instead it presented one plot line and then the other (and the gimmick in that was a burned-out tube on their radio, which in one plot line stayed burned out and in the other was replaced because they happened to have another one on hand — the idea being that, not being able to divert themselves with the music from the radio, the guests at a weekend party had to talk to each other and in the process they let slip their real feelings for each other and, in particular, who was cheating on whom sexually).
The “yellow” plot line of Uncertainty could have made a quite exciting Run, Lola, Run-style thriller if the “green” plot line weren’t dragging it down — after a while I found myself groaning every time McGehee and Siegel cut back from “yellow” to “green” — though even within the confines of the “yellow” story the characters were behaving so stupidly I alternated between rooting for the “yellow” Bobby and Kate to survive and make their sting, and hoping the hit man would hurry up and off them before they did anything else annoying and risible. Uncertainty is that most frustrating of all movies — a bad film that comes heartbreakingly close to being a good one, one that seems to come so close to working as its filmmakers intended that you find yourself sympathetic to it even though you don’t really like it.
Gun Fury (Columbia, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Fortunately the film Charles and I watched together later in the evening turned out to be surprisingly good. It was part of the batch of early-1950’s action movies I’d recorded off TCM as part of what turned out to be a “Star of the Month” salute to Donna Reed — a 1953 Western called Gun Fury that turned out to be an “A”-list film. Though a Columbia production, it starred Rock Hudson (they must have borrowed him from his home studio, Universal) as Ben Warren, a Civil War veteran (he carefully avoids saying which side he was on) who plans to meet fiancée Jennifer Ballard (Donna Reed) in Arizona and take her to California, where he has a 1,200-acre ranch where he intends to settle and live with her. Only their stagecoach is hijacked by former Confederate guerrillas Frank Slayton (Phil Carey) and Jess Burgess (Leo Gordon), who not only steal the gold the stagecoach is carrying but kidnap Jennifer and take her with them — Frank is obviously out to make her his sex slave (told with the veiled technique needed under the Production Code but still unmistakable), as he’s done previously with two Indian women he’s also kidnapped.
One of the Indian women is dead by the time the film starts but the other, Estella Morales (Roberta Haynes), is still part of Frank’s “stable” and seems genuinely in love with him — enough so that she goes into a jealous hissy-fit when he grabs Jennifer. Frank and Jess have a falling-out and Frank ties Jess to a fence, intending that within a day he’ll die of exposure and the vultures hanging out in the trees and the air above him will eat him. Only Ben, whom the baddies shot and left for dead when they hijacked the stage, comes to, rescues Jess, and the two of them join forces to find Frank and confront him and capture his gang before they can escape to Mexico. They get the aid of Johash (Pat Hogan), brother of the dead Indian woman Frank previously kidnapped, and the unlikely trio trace Frank and company to the border and manage, despite being outnumbered, to take them down in the final showdown. Gun Fury isn’t exactly the freshest Western plot, but Columbia put A-list talent on this one behind the cameras as well as in front of them: the director was Raoul Walsh, the screenwriters were Irving Wallace and Fugitive creator Roy Huggins, the cinematographer was Lester White and they gave Mischa Bakaleinikoff the go-ahead to create an original score for this (co-composed with Arthur Morton) instead of just looking for scraps from the existing Columbia music library. They also authorized this film to be shot in 3-D — something TCM didn’t announce when they showed it but which became quite obvious when Donna Reed started throwing things at the camera to express her disapproval at being kidnapped, and later during the final confrontation when Phil Carey threw a boulder at Rock Hudson and we got to see this from Hudson’s point of view.
Gun Fury was a tough movie, a well done film within the genre that took advantage of not only being set in Arizona but being shot there as well — another indication that Columbia regarded this as an important film rather than just another “B” Western. Gun Fury is one of those movies that isn’t actually great but manages to be reliable entertainment (though it doesn’t help that Fritz Lang made an even better movie on the same basic theme, Rancho Notorious, at RKO the previous year) — and though I haven’t seen any indication that it was actually released in 3-D (a lot of important movies that were shot in 3-D, including Dial “M” for Murder and Kiss Me, Kate, were only released “flat” because within a year or two after the big 3-D boom in the early 1950’s, so many bad 3-D movies had been released that the process itself became box-office poison — an example today’s moguls, infatuated by the grosses of Avatar and tempted to do retroactive 3-D “conversions” on bad movies to beef up their bottom lines, would do well to heed and learn from!), I’d love a chance to see it that way!
Fortunately the film Charles and I watched together later in the evening turned out to be surprisingly good. It was part of the batch of early-1950’s action movies I’d recorded off TCM as part of what turned out to be a “Star of the Month” salute to Donna Reed — a 1953 Western called Gun Fury that turned out to be an “A”-list film. Though a Columbia production, it starred Rock Hudson (they must have borrowed him from his home studio, Universal) as Ben Warren, a Civil War veteran (he carefully avoids saying which side he was on) who plans to meet fiancée Jennifer Ballard (Donna Reed) in Arizona and take her to California, where he has a 1,200-acre ranch where he intends to settle and live with her. Only their stagecoach is hijacked by former Confederate guerrillas Frank Slayton (Phil Carey) and Jess Burgess (Leo Gordon), who not only steal the gold the stagecoach is carrying but kidnap Jennifer and take her with them — Frank is obviously out to make her his sex slave (told with the veiled technique needed under the Production Code but still unmistakable), as he’s done previously with two Indian women he’s also kidnapped.
One of the Indian women is dead by the time the film starts but the other, Estella Morales (Roberta Haynes), is still part of Frank’s “stable” and seems genuinely in love with him — enough so that she goes into a jealous hissy-fit when he grabs Jennifer. Frank and Jess have a falling-out and Frank ties Jess to a fence, intending that within a day he’ll die of exposure and the vultures hanging out in the trees and the air above him will eat him. Only Ben, whom the baddies shot and left for dead when they hijacked the stage, comes to, rescues Jess, and the two of them join forces to find Frank and confront him and capture his gang before they can escape to Mexico. They get the aid of Johash (Pat Hogan), brother of the dead Indian woman Frank previously kidnapped, and the unlikely trio trace Frank and company to the border and manage, despite being outnumbered, to take them down in the final showdown. Gun Fury isn’t exactly the freshest Western plot, but Columbia put A-list talent on this one behind the cameras as well as in front of them: the director was Raoul Walsh, the screenwriters were Irving Wallace and Fugitive creator Roy Huggins, the cinematographer was Lester White and they gave Mischa Bakaleinikoff the go-ahead to create an original score for this (co-composed with Arthur Morton) instead of just looking for scraps from the existing Columbia music library. They also authorized this film to be shot in 3-D — something TCM didn’t announce when they showed it but which became quite obvious when Donna Reed started throwing things at the camera to express her disapproval at being kidnapped, and later during the final confrontation when Phil Carey threw a boulder at Rock Hudson and we got to see this from Hudson’s point of view.
Gun Fury was a tough movie, a well done film within the genre that took advantage of not only being set in Arizona but being shot there as well — another indication that Columbia regarded this as an important film rather than just another “B” Western. Gun Fury is one of those movies that isn’t actually great but manages to be reliable entertainment (though it doesn’t help that Fritz Lang made an even better movie on the same basic theme, Rancho Notorious, at RKO the previous year) — and though I haven’t seen any indication that it was actually released in 3-D (a lot of important movies that were shot in 3-D, including Dial “M” for Murder and Kiss Me, Kate, were only released “flat” because within a year or two after the big 3-D boom in the early 1950’s, so many bad 3-D movies had been released that the process itself became box-office poison — an example today’s moguls, infatuated by the grosses of Avatar and tempted to do retroactive 3-D “conversions” on bad movies to beef up their bottom lines, would do well to heed and learn from!), I’d love a chance to see it that way!
Monday, May 17, 2010
Raiders of the Seven Seas (Global/United Artists, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I joked to Charles last night that I was going to show him a movie whose title began with “Raiders of the … ” — no, it wasn’t that movie but Raiders of the Seven Seas, which I’d recorded off TCM recently during an afternoon in which they were showing a collection of low-budget action movies, including Smuggler’s Gold. I had expected this to be a Columbia production but Raiders of the Seven Seas was actually a United Artists release of a film by “Global Productions,” whose main proprietor seemed to be Sidney Salkow, who produced, directed and (with John O’Dea) co-wrote this. It should have been a good movie; the plot — dealing with the international pirate Barbarossa, who escapes from Morocco, steals a Spanish ship (absurdly easily, simply by holding its captain at knife-point and getting the prisoners being kept in the hold to mutiny and eject the crew) and heads for the Caribbean, where he kidnaps Spanish princess Alida (Donna Reed), holds her for ransom and finally falls in love with her (and vice versa) — wasn’t exactly the freshest piece of screenwriting in the world but had the potential to be an exciting film.
It had good people behind the camera — the cinematographer was W. Howard Greene (co-Academy Award winner for the 1943 Phantom of the Opera) and the sets (Edward L. Ilou, art director; Howard Bristol, set decorator) were stunning and appropriately lavish looking. The star was John Payne, not an especially great actor but a reasonable choice even if he couldn’t quite play a pirate with the panache of Errol Flynn (but then, who could?) and he looked odd in the red hair and beard he wore to justify the name of his character; and the film benefited from a good sidekick performance by Lon Chaney, Jr. So what went wrong? Mainly, just sheer dullness; as marvelous as Raiders looks it suffers from surprisingly little action, and what little action there is is indifferently staged and hardly projects the thrills we expect from this genre. The most powerful scene is when Alida leaves a message in the sand telling the Spanish authorities where Barbarossa’s hideout is, and Barbarossa returns there to find that virtually all his men’s wives and children have been massacred by the Spaniards (an imdb.com reviewer correctly noted that this plot gimmick was a ripoff of Shakespeare but got the play wrong — it’s Macbeth, not Henry V).
Aside from that, very little of this film stirs the emotions, and not too much of it stirs the senses either; it’s mostly a lot of lovely Technicolor photography of some pretty boring attempts at action, and there’s about zero chemistry between Payne and Reed — they look totally indifferent whether the script says they’re supposed to be loving or hating each other. They were both actors who did better work in other genres — Reed as James Stewart’s wife in It’s a Wonderful Life before and on her TV series afterwards; Payne on a series of compelling noir movies, including Kansas City Confidential and 99 River Street, that gave him much more suitable roles in dark, modern-day melodramas instead of overstuffed period pieces like this. Raiders is a disappointment because it’s not good enough to be genuinely exciting and entertaining on its own merits, and it’s not bad enough to work as camp; instead it just drones on, leaving one to wonder why a group of fairly talented filmmakers working in a genre that’s inherently exciting could produce something this dull.
I joked to Charles last night that I was going to show him a movie whose title began with “Raiders of the … ” — no, it wasn’t that movie but Raiders of the Seven Seas, which I’d recorded off TCM recently during an afternoon in which they were showing a collection of low-budget action movies, including Smuggler’s Gold. I had expected this to be a Columbia production but Raiders of the Seven Seas was actually a United Artists release of a film by “Global Productions,” whose main proprietor seemed to be Sidney Salkow, who produced, directed and (with John O’Dea) co-wrote this. It should have been a good movie; the plot — dealing with the international pirate Barbarossa, who escapes from Morocco, steals a Spanish ship (absurdly easily, simply by holding its captain at knife-point and getting the prisoners being kept in the hold to mutiny and eject the crew) and heads for the Caribbean, where he kidnaps Spanish princess Alida (Donna Reed), holds her for ransom and finally falls in love with her (and vice versa) — wasn’t exactly the freshest piece of screenwriting in the world but had the potential to be an exciting film.
It had good people behind the camera — the cinematographer was W. Howard Greene (co-Academy Award winner for the 1943 Phantom of the Opera) and the sets (Edward L. Ilou, art director; Howard Bristol, set decorator) were stunning and appropriately lavish looking. The star was John Payne, not an especially great actor but a reasonable choice even if he couldn’t quite play a pirate with the panache of Errol Flynn (but then, who could?) and he looked odd in the red hair and beard he wore to justify the name of his character; and the film benefited from a good sidekick performance by Lon Chaney, Jr. So what went wrong? Mainly, just sheer dullness; as marvelous as Raiders looks it suffers from surprisingly little action, and what little action there is is indifferently staged and hardly projects the thrills we expect from this genre. The most powerful scene is when Alida leaves a message in the sand telling the Spanish authorities where Barbarossa’s hideout is, and Barbarossa returns there to find that virtually all his men’s wives and children have been massacred by the Spaniards (an imdb.com reviewer correctly noted that this plot gimmick was a ripoff of Shakespeare but got the play wrong — it’s Macbeth, not Henry V).
Aside from that, very little of this film stirs the emotions, and not too much of it stirs the senses either; it’s mostly a lot of lovely Technicolor photography of some pretty boring attempts at action, and there’s about zero chemistry between Payne and Reed — they look totally indifferent whether the script says they’re supposed to be loving or hating each other. They were both actors who did better work in other genres — Reed as James Stewart’s wife in It’s a Wonderful Life before and on her TV series afterwards; Payne on a series of compelling noir movies, including Kansas City Confidential and 99 River Street, that gave him much more suitable roles in dark, modern-day melodramas instead of overstuffed period pieces like this. Raiders is a disappointment because it’s not good enough to be genuinely exciting and entertaining on its own merits, and it’s not bad enough to work as camp; instead it just drones on, leaving one to wonder why a group of fairly talented filmmakers working in a genre that’s inherently exciting could produce something this dull.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Smuggler’s Gold (Columbia, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Smuggler’s Gold, a 1951 “B” from Columbia I’d recorded earlier in the week when they were showing a whole stretch of these vest-pocket movies and I decided to grab them for Charles’ late-nights when we would want to watch something short (this timed out at only 62 minutes). The stars were Cameron Mitchell and Amanda Blake (pre-Gunsmoke), which will give you an idea of how cheap a movie this is. Mitchell plays deep-sea diver Mike Sloan, who’s scared to go in the water again after an accident during which he blacked out and another diver he was working with was killed. He’s living in a seaport with his girlfriend Susan Hodges (Amanda Blake) and a character she and everyone else refers to as “Pop” Hodges (Carl Benton Reid) even though he isn’t her father, but her uncle. What neither Mike nor Susan know is that “Pop,” in addition to his above-board business running a fishing boat, is also smuggling gold into the country for gold mine owner Arthur Rayburn (William Forrest). This was back in the day when it was still illegal for American citizens to own gold; if they found any they had to sell it to the government for the legally stipulated price of $35 an ounce, and Rayburn has hired people to “steal” gold from his own mind and smuggle it so he can sell it on the world market and get far more than the U.S. government-stipulated price.
Too scared to take up his previous career as a salvage diver, Mike hires on to Pop’s boat — and witnesses Pop brutally murder Hank Peters (Robert Williams), who in a drunken rage was threatening to blow the whistle on the gang unless he got more money for his participation — which Pop was unable to give him because Rayburn was shorting him. Eventually Mike figures it all out — including that Susan isn’t part of her uncle’s scheme and knows nothing about it — and there’s a big confrontation at the end in which the smugglers are apprehended or killed. The Coast Guard looms as a presence over this film’s action but, like most movie cops, they’re too stupid to put the plot together until the final reel — and that’s true of the crooks as well: this is one of those damnable stories in which the crooks are established for the first half as operating in a careful, cautious manner — and then they lose all self-control and start acting like idiots because they have to be made stupider than the cops in order for the cops to be able to catch them.
Vaguely reminiscent of a far finer film, I Cover the Waterfront, made 18 years earlier and also featuring a hero in love with a girl who doesn’t know her father (instead of her uncle) is a smuggler and killer, Smuggler’s Gold has little to offer other than surprisingly atmospheric direction by the usually hacky William Berke (who both began and ended his career as an independent filmmaker, though he had a substantial if unprestigious career in the major studios in between), taking a story by Prison Shadows author Al Martin turned into a script by one Daniel B. Ullman and making at least a visually engaging story out of it, even though it hardly makes any sense.
The film was Smuggler’s Gold, a 1951 “B” from Columbia I’d recorded earlier in the week when they were showing a whole stretch of these vest-pocket movies and I decided to grab them for Charles’ late-nights when we would want to watch something short (this timed out at only 62 minutes). The stars were Cameron Mitchell and Amanda Blake (pre-Gunsmoke), which will give you an idea of how cheap a movie this is. Mitchell plays deep-sea diver Mike Sloan, who’s scared to go in the water again after an accident during which he blacked out and another diver he was working with was killed. He’s living in a seaport with his girlfriend Susan Hodges (Amanda Blake) and a character she and everyone else refers to as “Pop” Hodges (Carl Benton Reid) even though he isn’t her father, but her uncle. What neither Mike nor Susan know is that “Pop,” in addition to his above-board business running a fishing boat, is also smuggling gold into the country for gold mine owner Arthur Rayburn (William Forrest). This was back in the day when it was still illegal for American citizens to own gold; if they found any they had to sell it to the government for the legally stipulated price of $35 an ounce, and Rayburn has hired people to “steal” gold from his own mind and smuggle it so he can sell it on the world market and get far more than the U.S. government-stipulated price.
Too scared to take up his previous career as a salvage diver, Mike hires on to Pop’s boat — and witnesses Pop brutally murder Hank Peters (Robert Williams), who in a drunken rage was threatening to blow the whistle on the gang unless he got more money for his participation — which Pop was unable to give him because Rayburn was shorting him. Eventually Mike figures it all out — including that Susan isn’t part of her uncle’s scheme and knows nothing about it — and there’s a big confrontation at the end in which the smugglers are apprehended or killed. The Coast Guard looms as a presence over this film’s action but, like most movie cops, they’re too stupid to put the plot together until the final reel — and that’s true of the crooks as well: this is one of those damnable stories in which the crooks are established for the first half as operating in a careful, cautious manner — and then they lose all self-control and start acting like idiots because they have to be made stupider than the cops in order for the cops to be able to catch them.
Vaguely reminiscent of a far finer film, I Cover the Waterfront, made 18 years earlier and also featuring a hero in love with a girl who doesn’t know her father (instead of her uncle) is a smuggler and killer, Smuggler’s Gold has little to offer other than surprisingly atmospheric direction by the usually hacky William Berke (who both began and ended his career as an independent filmmaker, though he had a substantial if unprestigious career in the major studios in between), taking a story by Prison Shadows author Al Martin turned into a script by one Daniel B. Ullman and making at least a visually engaging story out of it, even though it hardly makes any sense.
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