by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Voodoo Man, yet another of the Bela Lugosi films for Monogram and Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions, eighth of the nine-film series and actually a surprisingly good one. I’d seen it only once before, on a very bad over-the-air picture from UHF Channel 44 in San Francisco in the presence of my then-girlfriend Cat, who found it utterly ridiculous and for years afterwards quoted the words of the stupid ritual by which the film’s protagonist, Dr. Richard Marlowe (Bela Lugosi), was attempting to revive his catatonic wife Evelyn (Ellen Hall) by draining the life force from young girl Stella Saunders (Louise Currie, back for more punishment in a second lead after having played the heroine in Lugosi’s immediately preceding Monogram film, The Ape Man): “Soul from body to body … emotion to emotion … life to death.” This time around, on an archive.org public-domain download that was no great shakes technically but was at least better than the snowy picture I’d dealt with in the late 1970’s, I liked it a lot better.
Though William Beaudine returned as director following The Ape Man, at least this time he had a different cinematographer, Marcel le Picard, who seemed to have far more of a clue about how to create a genuinely Gothic atmosphere than Monogram house hack William Sickner had had in The Ape Man, and probably more due to le Picard than to Beaudine Voodoo Man emerges as the first Monogram Lugosi since Joseph H. Lewis’s The Invisible Ghost with any visual distinction whatsoever. The script by one Robert Charles is the usual farrago of silliness — it’s a close reworking of Lugosi’s earlier Monogram, The Corpse Vanishes, only instead of using a medical procedure to kick-start his half-dead wife back to life, Lugosi is using a voodoo ritual taught to him by Nicholas (George Zucco), involving dressing up in long black robes with obscure symbols on them (this may be where the makers of the unspeakably awful Manos: The Hands of Fate got the idea for the costume of that film’s protagonist) while Zucco speaks, at first in tongues (or at least in gibberish) and then in English (more or less) to invoke the voodoo god Ramboona before Lugosi takes his turn and does the soul-from-body-to-body, emotion-to-emotion bit.
In order to make all this work they need the presence of a young, attractive woman, and to get them Marlowe and Nicholas have worked out a series of subterfuges: every time a good-looking prospect drives up to the Mobil gas station Nicholas runs when he’s not being Marlowe’s personal voodoo priest, Nicholas calls Marlowe’s house on a secret line, then Marlowe’s servants Toby (John Carradine, inexplicably cast as a retard on the order of Lennie in Of Mice and Men) and Grego (Pat McKee) go out and rig up a phony “Detour” sign that diverts the poor girl onto a secret road (usually hidden by a fence covered with fake bushes, which the henchmen move as needed), where an electronic gadget Marlowe works from his home disables the car’s motor and forces the girl to stop so Toby and Grego can kidnap her. The good people are Tod Andrews (Michael Ames), a screenwriter for the Banner studio; his fiancée Betty Benton (Wanda McKay); her mother (Mary Currier) and her cousin Stella Saunders (Louise Currie). Tod gets involved when his car runs out of gas after a visit to Nicholas’s station — fortunately for him, Nicholas wasn’t in but his assistant Sam (Ralph Littlefield, who played Zippo the comic-relief character who appeared at the end of The Ape Man as the screenwriter) waited on him and was so eager to check his windshield, oil and tires that he forgot to pump the six gallons of gas Tod asked, paid for and (even more important in 1944) presented ration coupons for — he thinks Tod was an idiot for driving off without getting his gas while Tod thinks Sam deliberately ripped him off.
Nicholas runs out of gas and just then Stella pulls up and offers him a ride, saying that she’s going to be going to a wedding in the area very soon — she’s going to be the maid of honor when her cousin marries “some Hollywood sap.” The byplay is genuinely amusing and Robert Charles turns out to be that rarity — a Monogram writer who can make you laugh when he’s actually trying to — but soon enough Stella’s car gets the treatment (despite Marlowe seeing her on his closed-circuit television — a then ultra-high-tech gadget Lugosi’s characters had in Bowery at Midnight and The Ape Man as well — and cursing out Nicholas in absentia for having set the trap for a woman who was not in fact alone) and both she and the car disappear, much to the discomfiture of Tod, who ends up having to walk two miles to another gas station for fuel to get his own car going.
Stella gets outfitted in a costume clearly modeled on the ones the brides of Dracula wore back in Lugosi’s star-making film in 1931 for her debut as Marlowe’s pigeon in the Ramboona ritual, though Toby gets the hots for her and accidentally lets her out of her cage (she and the other kidnapped women are housed in what look like phone booths but may have been based on the sarcophagus in which Boris Karloff kept the corpse of Lugosi’s ex-wife in the 1934 The Black Cat — which I’ve long suspected was in turn based on the real-life Lenin’s tomb). This allows Stella to escape and return to the Bartons’ home, only Marlowe comes by pretending to be a doctor who’s made a special study of catatonia and can help her. Rather than act like most corrupt movie doctors and lure her back to his place with the promise of treatment, Marlowe returns to his place and hypnotizes Stella long-distance into returning — and Tod and the Bartons seek the aid of the local sheriff (Henry Hall) and his deputy, Elmer (Dan White), two country-bumpkin lawmen of such thoroughgoing doofusness they make Andy Griffith and Don Knotts look like two Law and Order squad members by comparison.
At the finale, Marlowe’s hypnotic power lures Betty Barton to the house to take her place in the ritual — Marlowe having decided that because of her resemblance to his wife that she has the right “affinity” to have her will to live drained and put into Evelyn’s body, and as before with Stella he gets his wife back in full consciousness for a few seconds only to lose her again. The sheriff and deputy crash the party at this point and Marlowe picks up something — it looked to me like a knife he was going to throw at them — only they fire before he can, Marlowe falls to the ground dying and he tells Evelyn that he will finally be with her in death since he couldn’t manage it in life. As Marlowe dies, he takes Evelyn with him and Stella and the other kidnap victims all come out of their trances and are returned to normal. There’s a tag scene at the office of the Banner studio, in which Tod announces that his real-life experience on his vacation has inspired his latest horror script, called The Voodoo Man, which he plunks on the desk of his producer, “S.K.” (the initials are those of this film’s real-life producer, Sam Katzman, though the person we see on screen is actor John Ince), proclaiming that “that horror actor, what’s his name? Bela Lugosi,” will be the perfect person to star in it.
Voodoo Man is a typical Monogram in that its plot doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it’s better than the series average because the demented silliness almost achieves camp, while Lugosi himself actually has something of a chance to act in this one — as in The Invisible Ghost (and, even more so, in his 1934 Principal serial The Return of Chandu), Lugosi gets to portray emotions of love and warmth that usually weren’t part of his screen persona: Marlowe is no great shakes as a character but he’s still considerably deeper than Brewster in The Ape Man, who was willing to kill as many people as it took to get his ape-like posture and beard reduced to those of a normal human. Between that, Marcel le Picard’s artful cinematography and a script by Charles that is actually funny some of the times he wants it to be (though the so-called “comic relief” of the sheriff and his deputy is a drag on the film and the movie would have been better without them), Voodoo Man achieves a bit of stylishness that sets it apart from the truly dreadful Lugosi Monograms like The Corpse Vanishes and The Ape Man that had preceded it.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Postal Inspector (Universal, 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Friday night Charles and I had run the film Postal Inspector, made at Universal in 1936 and made available on archive.org as “the only musical featuring Bela Lugosi,” which it isn’t: the 1932 film International House, made at Paramount, is a much better movie both as a musical and a Lugosi vehicle (he plays a Russian trade representative in the Chinese city of Woo-Hoo to bid on an ancient inventor’s new remote TV; he’s also the ex-husband of real-life gold-digger Peggy Hopkins Joyce, who was top-billed in the film to capitalize on her off-screen fame, and he delivers a marvelous comic-villain performance even though what people remember about International House is neither Lugosi nor the musical numbers, but the absolutely brilliant comic performance by W. C. Fields in the latter half of the film).
Postal Inspector isn’t much of a musical — it only features two songs, “Let’s Have Bluebirds” and “Hot Towels,” with music by Irving Actman and lyrics by Frank Loesser (Bela Lugosi and Frank Loesser, no degrees of separation — who knew?), both sung by Patricia Ellis — and as a film about the United States Postal Inspectors (the Postal Service’s own private police force) it’s hardly as good as the Alan Ladd vehicle Appointment with Danger from 1951 — but it’s an interesting curiosity. Basically, Postal Inspector is an attempt by Universal to poach on Warners territory: a loosely fact-based story that incorporates documentary-style footage on what the Postal Inspectors do (it opens with a private radio broadcast to the Postal Inspectors by President Franklin D. Roosevelt — played by a voice actor whose impersonation is pretty good but readily discernible as not the voice of the real Roosevelt — congratulating them on moving the nation’s gold reserves), including breaking up frauds conducted through the mails.
One of the film’s oddest running gags involves women who come in to report work-at-home scams — actually the same one: they’ve been sent a weird-looking gadget that looks like two egg beaters having sex but which is supposedly a machine for making socks; the fraud is that the people who sold them this item promised to buy any socks they made with this equipment, then reneged — and there’s another item about a woman who sends pictures, ostensibly of herself, to would-be husbands, extracts money from them and then never shows up, and when she’s brought in she’s sixty-something and looks it. (So the gimmick of posting decades-old photos to Internet social-network sites to woo potential relationship or sex partners online is nothing new; it’s an old scam and only the technology has changed!) The film’s main intrigue is introduced when an airplane approaches a fictitious city called “Milltown” in a heavy fog that makes visibility almost totally impossible. Aboard are ace postal inspector Bill Davis (Ricardo Cortez) and nightclub singer Connie Larrimore (Patricia Ellis); he’s returning to his main job assignment after having been part of the elect of the postal inspector service that got to hear President Roosevelt’s remote thank-you — while she’s flying in for a gig at the nightclub owned by Gregory Benez (Bela Lugosi), who’s waiting for her at the airport and getting anxious about whether her plane is going to crash.
It lands safely, but (anticipating a gag done in one of the Airport movies at Universal decades later) Connie, backed by an obnoxious kid (Billy Burrud) on the harmonica, calms down some panicky passengers by singing “Let’s Have Bluebirds.” (I must say that Frank Loesser’s daughter Emily was under no illusions about this phase of her dad’s career; in her biography of him, A Most Remarkable Fella, in an authorial voice dripping with irony she describes the films he worked on at the time as “such unforgettable classics as Turkey Dinner, Postal Inspector, and Freshman Year.”) Benez, seeing a public-relations bonanza that will boost his business when Connie opens at his club, releases the story about how Connie’s singing helped calm the passengers of a seemingly doomed airplane as its pilots and the air traffic controllers at the Milltown airport guided it in to a safe landing.
Once she opens at the club, Connie meets Bill’s younger brother Charlie (Michael Loring), also a postal inspector, and they fall in love. Connie also casually mentions to Benez that one of Charlie’s assignments was delivering a batch of worn-out currency bills to the Federal Reserve for replacement by new bills — and Benez, who until now hasn’t done anything even remotely criminal or given any evidence of being crooked, suddenly hatches a plan to steal the next shipment of such bills and use it to pay off the debts he’s run up at his club. (Had screenwriter Horace McCoy — later famous for his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? — established Benez as a former criminal and fugitive from justice before he opened his club, the way Howard da Silva’s character was in Raymond Chandler’s script for The Blue Dahlia in 1946, his turning crooked would at least make narrative sense.)
Meanwhile, a flood inundates the neighboring town of Yarborough (where Bill goes to help them relocate their post office to higher ground) and threatens to engulf Milltown as well, which gives director Otto Brower a chance to raid the Universal newsreel archives for lots of stock footage, most of it coming from the Mississippi River floods of 1927 (which we’ve seen in PBS documentaries about that event as well as other dramatic films, notably Abel Gance’s 1929 Fin du Monde) and Benez the idea that he can take advantage of the flood to make his getaway by speedboat. Eventually, aided by Ritter (Harry Beresford), yet another fraud victim who complained to the postal inspectors, the inspectors trace Benez to his hideout and, after an argument between the Davis brothers (Bill was convinced Connie was in on the robbery and Charlie of course defended his girlfriend’s honor and honesty), Charlie and Connie, driving their own speedboat through the floodwaters, see a beam holding up the building Benez and his gang are in and realize that if they crash into it, they can knock down the whole building and collapse it into the water, making the crooks easy to catch. This duly happens — in a model scene expertly staged by Universal’s special effects whiz, John P. Fulton — and the movie ends more or less happily.
Postal Inspector is one of those annoying movies that attempts to crowd too much into its slender running time (58 or 60 minutes, says the American Film Institute Catalog, though the archive.org print runs a shade under 57 minutes, probably because of all the footage missing due to splices — this is one of the jumpiest movies we’ve ever seen) — at once an action thriller, a semi-documentary story, a romantic comedy, a musical and a disaster picture, and McCoy and his collaborator Robert Presnell simply aren’t good enough constructionists to move us smoothly from one plot strand to another — and as a Lugosi item it’s a real disappointment, moving him from decent guy to crook with utterly no opportunity to show a coherent motivation for the change. Lugosi could do other things besides horror — his performance in The Return of Chandu is a quite remarkable romantic lead and shows he could play a fully sympathetic character when given the chance — but his straight-gangster roles, here as in Black Friday (where he appeared with Boris Karloff but was demoted from a co-lead to a meager supporting role for which he was singularly overqualified), tended to be dull.
On Friday night Charles and I had run the film Postal Inspector, made at Universal in 1936 and made available on archive.org as “the only musical featuring Bela Lugosi,” which it isn’t: the 1932 film International House, made at Paramount, is a much better movie both as a musical and a Lugosi vehicle (he plays a Russian trade representative in the Chinese city of Woo-Hoo to bid on an ancient inventor’s new remote TV; he’s also the ex-husband of real-life gold-digger Peggy Hopkins Joyce, who was top-billed in the film to capitalize on her off-screen fame, and he delivers a marvelous comic-villain performance even though what people remember about International House is neither Lugosi nor the musical numbers, but the absolutely brilliant comic performance by W. C. Fields in the latter half of the film).
Postal Inspector isn’t much of a musical — it only features two songs, “Let’s Have Bluebirds” and “Hot Towels,” with music by Irving Actman and lyrics by Frank Loesser (Bela Lugosi and Frank Loesser, no degrees of separation — who knew?), both sung by Patricia Ellis — and as a film about the United States Postal Inspectors (the Postal Service’s own private police force) it’s hardly as good as the Alan Ladd vehicle Appointment with Danger from 1951 — but it’s an interesting curiosity. Basically, Postal Inspector is an attempt by Universal to poach on Warners territory: a loosely fact-based story that incorporates documentary-style footage on what the Postal Inspectors do (it opens with a private radio broadcast to the Postal Inspectors by President Franklin D. Roosevelt — played by a voice actor whose impersonation is pretty good but readily discernible as not the voice of the real Roosevelt — congratulating them on moving the nation’s gold reserves), including breaking up frauds conducted through the mails.
One of the film’s oddest running gags involves women who come in to report work-at-home scams — actually the same one: they’ve been sent a weird-looking gadget that looks like two egg beaters having sex but which is supposedly a machine for making socks; the fraud is that the people who sold them this item promised to buy any socks they made with this equipment, then reneged — and there’s another item about a woman who sends pictures, ostensibly of herself, to would-be husbands, extracts money from them and then never shows up, and when she’s brought in she’s sixty-something and looks it. (So the gimmick of posting decades-old photos to Internet social-network sites to woo potential relationship or sex partners online is nothing new; it’s an old scam and only the technology has changed!) The film’s main intrigue is introduced when an airplane approaches a fictitious city called “Milltown” in a heavy fog that makes visibility almost totally impossible. Aboard are ace postal inspector Bill Davis (Ricardo Cortez) and nightclub singer Connie Larrimore (Patricia Ellis); he’s returning to his main job assignment after having been part of the elect of the postal inspector service that got to hear President Roosevelt’s remote thank-you — while she’s flying in for a gig at the nightclub owned by Gregory Benez (Bela Lugosi), who’s waiting for her at the airport and getting anxious about whether her plane is going to crash.
It lands safely, but (anticipating a gag done in one of the Airport movies at Universal decades later) Connie, backed by an obnoxious kid (Billy Burrud) on the harmonica, calms down some panicky passengers by singing “Let’s Have Bluebirds.” (I must say that Frank Loesser’s daughter Emily was under no illusions about this phase of her dad’s career; in her biography of him, A Most Remarkable Fella, in an authorial voice dripping with irony she describes the films he worked on at the time as “such unforgettable classics as Turkey Dinner, Postal Inspector, and Freshman Year.”) Benez, seeing a public-relations bonanza that will boost his business when Connie opens at his club, releases the story about how Connie’s singing helped calm the passengers of a seemingly doomed airplane as its pilots and the air traffic controllers at the Milltown airport guided it in to a safe landing.
Once she opens at the club, Connie meets Bill’s younger brother Charlie (Michael Loring), also a postal inspector, and they fall in love. Connie also casually mentions to Benez that one of Charlie’s assignments was delivering a batch of worn-out currency bills to the Federal Reserve for replacement by new bills — and Benez, who until now hasn’t done anything even remotely criminal or given any evidence of being crooked, suddenly hatches a plan to steal the next shipment of such bills and use it to pay off the debts he’s run up at his club. (Had screenwriter Horace McCoy — later famous for his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? — established Benez as a former criminal and fugitive from justice before he opened his club, the way Howard da Silva’s character was in Raymond Chandler’s script for The Blue Dahlia in 1946, his turning crooked would at least make narrative sense.)
Meanwhile, a flood inundates the neighboring town of Yarborough (where Bill goes to help them relocate their post office to higher ground) and threatens to engulf Milltown as well, which gives director Otto Brower a chance to raid the Universal newsreel archives for lots of stock footage, most of it coming from the Mississippi River floods of 1927 (which we’ve seen in PBS documentaries about that event as well as other dramatic films, notably Abel Gance’s 1929 Fin du Monde) and Benez the idea that he can take advantage of the flood to make his getaway by speedboat. Eventually, aided by Ritter (Harry Beresford), yet another fraud victim who complained to the postal inspectors, the inspectors trace Benez to his hideout and, after an argument between the Davis brothers (Bill was convinced Connie was in on the robbery and Charlie of course defended his girlfriend’s honor and honesty), Charlie and Connie, driving their own speedboat through the floodwaters, see a beam holding up the building Benez and his gang are in and realize that if they crash into it, they can knock down the whole building and collapse it into the water, making the crooks easy to catch. This duly happens — in a model scene expertly staged by Universal’s special effects whiz, John P. Fulton — and the movie ends more or less happily.
Postal Inspector is one of those annoying movies that attempts to crowd too much into its slender running time (58 or 60 minutes, says the American Film Institute Catalog, though the archive.org print runs a shade under 57 minutes, probably because of all the footage missing due to splices — this is one of the jumpiest movies we’ve ever seen) — at once an action thriller, a semi-documentary story, a romantic comedy, a musical and a disaster picture, and McCoy and his collaborator Robert Presnell simply aren’t good enough constructionists to move us smoothly from one plot strand to another — and as a Lugosi item it’s a real disappointment, moving him from decent guy to crook with utterly no opportunity to show a coherent motivation for the change. Lugosi could do other things besides horror — his performance in The Return of Chandu is a quite remarkable romantic lead and shows he could play a fully sympathetic character when given the chance — but his straight-gangster roles, here as in Black Friday (where he appeared with Boris Karloff but was demoted from a co-lead to a meager supporting role for which he was singularly overqualified), tended to be dull.
Friday, December 17, 2010
The Ape Man (Monogram, 1943)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Ape Man, a 1943 film from Monogram starring Bela Lugosi in what was probably the worst movie in the nine-film cycle producer Sam Katzman made with him there — indeed, probably Lugosi’s all-time worst movie until his even more embarrassing credits from the 1950’s, films like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and the Ed Wood efforts. I remember seeing this for the first time when I was still in high school and being disappointed that director William Beaudine, whom I knew at the time mostly for his delightful 1934 comedy The Old-Fashioned Way with W. C. Fields, could have made such a crappy movie. This was before I realized that most of Beaudine’s credits were at or near the quality level of The Ape Man than The Old-Fashioned Way, or that it really didn’t take much directorial skill to make a W. C. Fields movie: all you had to do was make sure the cameras were pointed at him and in focus, and the mikes were recording his dialogue audibly.
The Ape Man was based on an “original” story by Karl Brown — “original” in quotes because like the Frankenstein monster (which Lugosi had just played in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man immediately before shooting this), it’s spliced together from bits and pieces, not of dead bodies but of dead movie clichés — and scripted by the film’s associate producer, Barney Sarecky (that’s how his name is spelled in his writing credit: as producer he added an initial and billed himself as Barney A. Sarecky), whose last name appropriately rhymes with “drecky.” It opens with some stock footage of a New York pier and a steamship approaching it, and then with some dull expository dialogue between reporter Jeff Carter (a homely-looking Wallace Ford) and his photographer, Barney (Charles Ford), which lets us know that one of the passengers on the ship is Agatha Brewster (Minerva Urecal), who’s returning to the U.S. from Europe to inquire about the whereabouts of her missing brother, world-renowned glandular specialist Dr. James Brewster (Bela Lugosi).
A tall, thin, rather cadaverous-looking middle-aged man, Dr. George Randall (Henry Hall), a former research partner of Dr. Brewster, runs through the press gantlet (all two people of it) and tells Agatha Brewster that her brother isn’t missing at all, “except to this world; he’s hidden away in Springdale, in the old mansion. He’d be better off in the family crypt,” he ominously adds, explaining that six months earlier Dr. Brewster developed a super-serum and injected it into himself. Dr. Randall explains that the serum was a great success — though we’re never let in on what the h--- it was supposed to do; its actual effect was to turn Dr. Brewster into a sort of were-ape, still recognizably human but with a lot of crêpe stuck on his scalp and cheeks to give his face a half-human, half-simian appearance (when I first saw this film in 1970 I thought he looked like he’d gone for the hippie look and way overdone it) and with his posture permanently locked in a hunched-over position.
He’s actually living in a secret basement under the old Springdale mansion (a set readily recognizable from Lugosi’s other Monograms) — though the house appears to be located close enough to New York City that Dr. Brewster and the real ape he’s got living with him in the basement (played by ape specialist Emil Van Horn in a costume that’s relatively convincing except for the immobile mask-like head) can pop over to an urban environment any time they like and terrorize the locals — and about a third of the way through the movie Brewster learns that the only thing that can cure him is to extract the spinal fluid from a living (or recently deceased) human and inject it into himself at the base of his own spine. Accordingly he first murders Dr. Randall’s butler and extracts his spinal fluid, then gets Dr. Randall to perform the injection — and he straightens up for about a reel or two, though he still has all that unwanted facial hair, until the original serum kicks in again and he realizes he has to collect the spinal fluid of many victims and inject it all at once.
With the help of his pet ape, he kills off enough people to fill an ordinary home-canning jar full of the spinal fluid and then breaks into Dr. Randall’s place, demanding that he perform the injection, only Dr. Randall, not willing to do any more enabling of Dr. Brewster’s habit (as Tom Weaver noted in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, there’s a macabre and ultimately pathetic, in both senses of the word, parallel between the plot of this movie and the real Lugosi’s later drug addiction), smashes the bottle to bits and, for reasons that remain unclear, retreats from Dr. Russell’s home to his own, where reporter Carter and his new photographer, Billie Mason (Louise Currie) — with whom, of course, he’s had a hate-at-first-sight relationship that blossomed into love after his old photographer was fired for bringing in a double-exposed negative — are waiting for him: Billie ends up on the wrong side of the trap door (behind a mobile fireplace) that admits people into Brewster’s secret basement lab, and in an attempt to let in Jeff, who’s in the main part of the house trying to figure out a way into the basement to rescue her, she inadvertently releases the lock of the door to the cage containing the ape, and the ape kills Brewster, the police arrive and force Agatha to tell them how to open the basement door, and they kill the ape in the nick of time to save Billie.
A comic tag features an oddball character — not named in the actual movie but called “Zippo” in the official cast list — a rather nerdy guy played by Ralph Littlefield who’s turned up in several scenes stalking the other characters — they ask him who he is and Zippo says, “Me? I’m the author of the story. Screwy idea, wasn’t it?” Then Zippo rolls up the side window of his convertible car and the words “The End” appear on it, likely spelled out with masking tape. This final scene — which Sarecky probably ripped off from the original Seven Keys to Baldpate (where a similarly wild and unlikely story is revealed at the end as the novel the central character has just written) — is the cleverest part of this movie, which (like other Monograms we’ve seen, including ones outside the horror genre), seems to have been less written than compiled.
The basic premise — a scientist gives himself a toxic drug that has a horrible effect on both his appearance and his morals — is clearly a ripoff of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (though since we never see Brewster revert to normal humanity it lacks the pathos of Stevenson’s story). Lugosi’s make up is clearly derived from his appearance as the victim of mad surgeon Charles Laughton in The Island of Lost Souls, the first (1933) and best film version of The Island of Dr. Moreau, though in Lost Souls Lugosi was an ape-to-man Transspecific person instead of a man-to-ape as he is here. The business of a mad scientist needing to drain the spinal fluid of living people to perform a super-operation was Monogram ripping off itself — in this case The Ape, an equally wretched Boris Karloff vehicle from 1940, though in that one Karloff was a man in an ape suit instead of half a murder team with a real ape, and the person he was trying to save by knocking off all those people and draining their spinal fluid wasn’t himself but a local polio victim (Maris Wrixon), the daughter of a friend of his.
What’s really annoying about The Ape Man — and it’s true of a lot of “B” horrors not only from the 1940’s but later as well — is it’s simply dull: scenes that could have been genuinely scary (and often were in the other movies from which they were, shall we say, derived) are shot flatly and edited dully and mechanically. It doesn’t help that the archive.org download we were watching offered decent picture quality but murky and sometimes unintelligible sound — though it wasn’t that hard to figure out what was going on (Lugosi’s unwillingness to learn more than the simplest English and insistence on learning his scripts phonetically encouraged his producers, especially his “B” ones, to have the writers give his characters as little dialogue as possible) — but to my mind The Ape Man is the worst of Lugosi’s Monogram films (and the competition in that department is truly formidable!) and probably his most embarrassing credit until the really pathetic (in both senses, again) movies he had to make to support himself and his drug habit in the 1950’s.
The film was The Ape Man, a 1943 film from Monogram starring Bela Lugosi in what was probably the worst movie in the nine-film cycle producer Sam Katzman made with him there — indeed, probably Lugosi’s all-time worst movie until his even more embarrassing credits from the 1950’s, films like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and the Ed Wood efforts. I remember seeing this for the first time when I was still in high school and being disappointed that director William Beaudine, whom I knew at the time mostly for his delightful 1934 comedy The Old-Fashioned Way with W. C. Fields, could have made such a crappy movie. This was before I realized that most of Beaudine’s credits were at or near the quality level of The Ape Man than The Old-Fashioned Way, or that it really didn’t take much directorial skill to make a W. C. Fields movie: all you had to do was make sure the cameras were pointed at him and in focus, and the mikes were recording his dialogue audibly.
The Ape Man was based on an “original” story by Karl Brown — “original” in quotes because like the Frankenstein monster (which Lugosi had just played in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man immediately before shooting this), it’s spliced together from bits and pieces, not of dead bodies but of dead movie clichés — and scripted by the film’s associate producer, Barney Sarecky (that’s how his name is spelled in his writing credit: as producer he added an initial and billed himself as Barney A. Sarecky), whose last name appropriately rhymes with “drecky.” It opens with some stock footage of a New York pier and a steamship approaching it, and then with some dull expository dialogue between reporter Jeff Carter (a homely-looking Wallace Ford) and his photographer, Barney (Charles Ford), which lets us know that one of the passengers on the ship is Agatha Brewster (Minerva Urecal), who’s returning to the U.S. from Europe to inquire about the whereabouts of her missing brother, world-renowned glandular specialist Dr. James Brewster (Bela Lugosi).
A tall, thin, rather cadaverous-looking middle-aged man, Dr. George Randall (Henry Hall), a former research partner of Dr. Brewster, runs through the press gantlet (all two people of it) and tells Agatha Brewster that her brother isn’t missing at all, “except to this world; he’s hidden away in Springdale, in the old mansion. He’d be better off in the family crypt,” he ominously adds, explaining that six months earlier Dr. Brewster developed a super-serum and injected it into himself. Dr. Randall explains that the serum was a great success — though we’re never let in on what the h--- it was supposed to do; its actual effect was to turn Dr. Brewster into a sort of were-ape, still recognizably human but with a lot of crêpe stuck on his scalp and cheeks to give his face a half-human, half-simian appearance (when I first saw this film in 1970 I thought he looked like he’d gone for the hippie look and way overdone it) and with his posture permanently locked in a hunched-over position.
He’s actually living in a secret basement under the old Springdale mansion (a set readily recognizable from Lugosi’s other Monograms) — though the house appears to be located close enough to New York City that Dr. Brewster and the real ape he’s got living with him in the basement (played by ape specialist Emil Van Horn in a costume that’s relatively convincing except for the immobile mask-like head) can pop over to an urban environment any time they like and terrorize the locals — and about a third of the way through the movie Brewster learns that the only thing that can cure him is to extract the spinal fluid from a living (or recently deceased) human and inject it into himself at the base of his own spine. Accordingly he first murders Dr. Randall’s butler and extracts his spinal fluid, then gets Dr. Randall to perform the injection — and he straightens up for about a reel or two, though he still has all that unwanted facial hair, until the original serum kicks in again and he realizes he has to collect the spinal fluid of many victims and inject it all at once.
With the help of his pet ape, he kills off enough people to fill an ordinary home-canning jar full of the spinal fluid and then breaks into Dr. Randall’s place, demanding that he perform the injection, only Dr. Randall, not willing to do any more enabling of Dr. Brewster’s habit (as Tom Weaver noted in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, there’s a macabre and ultimately pathetic, in both senses of the word, parallel between the plot of this movie and the real Lugosi’s later drug addiction), smashes the bottle to bits and, for reasons that remain unclear, retreats from Dr. Russell’s home to his own, where reporter Carter and his new photographer, Billie Mason (Louise Currie) — with whom, of course, he’s had a hate-at-first-sight relationship that blossomed into love after his old photographer was fired for bringing in a double-exposed negative — are waiting for him: Billie ends up on the wrong side of the trap door (behind a mobile fireplace) that admits people into Brewster’s secret basement lab, and in an attempt to let in Jeff, who’s in the main part of the house trying to figure out a way into the basement to rescue her, she inadvertently releases the lock of the door to the cage containing the ape, and the ape kills Brewster, the police arrive and force Agatha to tell them how to open the basement door, and they kill the ape in the nick of time to save Billie.
A comic tag features an oddball character — not named in the actual movie but called “Zippo” in the official cast list — a rather nerdy guy played by Ralph Littlefield who’s turned up in several scenes stalking the other characters — they ask him who he is and Zippo says, “Me? I’m the author of the story. Screwy idea, wasn’t it?” Then Zippo rolls up the side window of his convertible car and the words “The End” appear on it, likely spelled out with masking tape. This final scene — which Sarecky probably ripped off from the original Seven Keys to Baldpate (where a similarly wild and unlikely story is revealed at the end as the novel the central character has just written) — is the cleverest part of this movie, which (like other Monograms we’ve seen, including ones outside the horror genre), seems to have been less written than compiled.
The basic premise — a scientist gives himself a toxic drug that has a horrible effect on both his appearance and his morals — is clearly a ripoff of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (though since we never see Brewster revert to normal humanity it lacks the pathos of Stevenson’s story). Lugosi’s make up is clearly derived from his appearance as the victim of mad surgeon Charles Laughton in The Island of Lost Souls, the first (1933) and best film version of The Island of Dr. Moreau, though in Lost Souls Lugosi was an ape-to-man Transspecific person instead of a man-to-ape as he is here. The business of a mad scientist needing to drain the spinal fluid of living people to perform a super-operation was Monogram ripping off itself — in this case The Ape, an equally wretched Boris Karloff vehicle from 1940, though in that one Karloff was a man in an ape suit instead of half a murder team with a real ape, and the person he was trying to save by knocking off all those people and draining their spinal fluid wasn’t himself but a local polio victim (Maris Wrixon), the daughter of a friend of his.
What’s really annoying about The Ape Man — and it’s true of a lot of “B” horrors not only from the 1940’s but later as well — is it’s simply dull: scenes that could have been genuinely scary (and often were in the other movies from which they were, shall we say, derived) are shot flatly and edited dully and mechanically. It doesn’t help that the archive.org download we were watching offered decent picture quality but murky and sometimes unintelligible sound — though it wasn’t that hard to figure out what was going on (Lugosi’s unwillingness to learn more than the simplest English and insistence on learning his scripts phonetically encouraged his producers, especially his “B” ones, to have the writers give his characters as little dialogue as possible) — but to my mind The Ape Man is the worst of Lugosi’s Monogram films (and the competition in that department is truly formidable!) and probably his most embarrassing credit until the really pathetic (in both senses, again) movies he had to make to support himself and his drug habit in the 1950’s.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
The Devil’s Daughter (Lenwal Productions, Domino Films, Sack Amusement Enterprises, 1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Devil’s Daughter, a 1939 “race” production made by a company alternately identified as Lenwal Productions and Domino Film Corporation, and released through Sack Amusement Enterprises — the largest and most extensive distributor of these all-Black productions for showings in theatres in African-American areas. It was set in Jamaica and, according to the American Film Institute Catalog, was actually filmed there — the first and only time a Black film company went there. Like a lot of white “B” movies, the race films were cast with people on their way up (Paul Robeson, Herb Jeffries, Lena Horne) and, as in this case, people on their way down — the star of The Devil’s Daughter was Nina Mae McKinney, 10 years after her memorable performance as the “bad” girl in King Vidor’s Hallelujah!
This time she’s playing Isabelle Walton, daughter of a planter in Jamaica whose father left her in charge of the banana plantation while he and his other daughter, Sylvia (played by Ida James, a quite talented singer who doesn’t get a chance to sing here — her only other film appearances were in a 1944 “Soundie” with the Nat “King” Cole trio on Louis Jordan’s hit “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?,” during which she magnificently holds her own in a vocal duet with Cole; a 1944 “B” musical called Trocadero, in which she sings another Jordan song, “Shoo Shoo Baby,” and a 1947 Cab Calloway vehicle called, almost inevitably, Hi-De-Ho, in which she joins Cab and Augustus Smith on a song called “Don’t Falter at the Altar”), moved to New York so Sylvia could get a white person’s education. When the film begins, dad has just died and has told Sylvia on his deathbed that his will stipulates that she and Isabelle will co-inherit the plantation, but Isabelle wants the plantation all to herself and so she and her overseer, Philip Ramsay (Jack Carter), have hatched a scheme to start a phony “obeah” (an alternative name for “voodoo”) cult and scare Sylvia away from the island.
There’s also a bit of a romantic quadrilateral in that Sylvia briefly abandons her American boyfriend John Lowden (Emmett Carter), who came down from New York with her, to fall for Ramsay — who, we’re not at all surprised to find out later, is really a crook who’s been skimming from the plantation — while for some even less explicable reason Isabelle decides she loves John. As Charles pointed out, the biggest mistake the movie makes is letting us know almost from the outset that the voodoo cult is a fake — not that we actually get to see much of it, though the soundtrack is drenched in voodoo drums (and has very little other music aside from some of the same sort of “West Indian” pop instrumental stuff Sidney Bechet and Willie “The Lion” Smith recorded around this time in an album for Moe Asch’s Stinson label, and a rather shrilly recorded song sung by McKinney); about all we see of the cult in action is a silly gag involving the comic-relief character Percy Jackson (James Carl “Hamtree” Harrington), who’s told by Isabelle that in order to keep his soul safe from the cultists, they will transfer it to a pig — though the downside of this, as it’s explained to him, is if the pig dies he will die too. There’s one dorky shot during the representation of this ceremony in which Isabelle refers to the pig as “he” — only the shot of the pig herself shows her upside down, a long row of nipples in place, and thereby “outs” her as female. (Well, I guess if a male dog could play Lassie … )
The climax shows Isabelle attempting to drug Sylvia’s drink so they can shock her by doing an “obeah” death ritual on her and having her come to in mid-ceremony — only John keeps her from drinking the spiked drink and the film ends with John beating up Philip, Philip confessing all and fleeing so he doesn’t get prosecuted for stealing from the plantation, John and Sylvia reuniting and the remaining principals sitting down to a dinner of roast pork once Percy is convinced that his soul really wasn’t transferred to its porcine receptacle. The Devil’s Daughter was promoted on archive.org (from whence we downloaded it) as a “race” horror film, but it’s really a not very thrilling thriller set in an exotic location, though one thing that can be said for it is that it’s a quite sophisticated piece of filmmaking for a race movie. Stuck with a plot (George F. Terwilliger is credited with the original story but no one ’fessed up to writing the actual script) that offers little opportunity for action, suspense or thrills (imdb.com identifies the film as a remake of an earlier all-Black voodoo drama, Ouanga, but I remember that as a much better movie than this!), director Arthur Leonard and cinematographer Jay Rescher liven it up with moving-camera shots, traveling-car shots and an interesting attempt at an exotic atmosphere that probably looked a good deal better in 1939 than it does in the murky prints that are all that survive of The Devil’s Daughter.
It’s too bad that the acting doesn’t live up to the visuals: Ida James is barely competent — she reads all her lines in a first-day-of-drama-school monotone — and Nina Mae McKinney, despite her history of having been in the first all-Black movie done by a major studio (and acquitting herself beautifully in it), doesn’t seem that much better. Also, even more than most “race” movies The Devil’s Daughter uncomfortably mirrors the racist attitudes of white producers towards Blacks: the light-skinned Blacks are the leads while the dark-skinned Blacks are relegated to villains or comic-relief parts — and Hamtree Harrington does the same stupid servant stereotype he’d have been playing if he’d landed a part in a white movie in 1939. Also, though the film was originally released at 67 minutes, a 52-minute version is all that survives. It’s an engagingly quirky movie but also one of those annoying films that should have been better than it is.
The film was The Devil’s Daughter, a 1939 “race” production made by a company alternately identified as Lenwal Productions and Domino Film Corporation, and released through Sack Amusement Enterprises — the largest and most extensive distributor of these all-Black productions for showings in theatres in African-American areas. It was set in Jamaica and, according to the American Film Institute Catalog, was actually filmed there — the first and only time a Black film company went there. Like a lot of white “B” movies, the race films were cast with people on their way up (Paul Robeson, Herb Jeffries, Lena Horne) and, as in this case, people on their way down — the star of The Devil’s Daughter was Nina Mae McKinney, 10 years after her memorable performance as the “bad” girl in King Vidor’s Hallelujah!
This time she’s playing Isabelle Walton, daughter of a planter in Jamaica whose father left her in charge of the banana plantation while he and his other daughter, Sylvia (played by Ida James, a quite talented singer who doesn’t get a chance to sing here — her only other film appearances were in a 1944 “Soundie” with the Nat “King” Cole trio on Louis Jordan’s hit “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?,” during which she magnificently holds her own in a vocal duet with Cole; a 1944 “B” musical called Trocadero, in which she sings another Jordan song, “Shoo Shoo Baby,” and a 1947 Cab Calloway vehicle called, almost inevitably, Hi-De-Ho, in which she joins Cab and Augustus Smith on a song called “Don’t Falter at the Altar”), moved to New York so Sylvia could get a white person’s education. When the film begins, dad has just died and has told Sylvia on his deathbed that his will stipulates that she and Isabelle will co-inherit the plantation, but Isabelle wants the plantation all to herself and so she and her overseer, Philip Ramsay (Jack Carter), have hatched a scheme to start a phony “obeah” (an alternative name for “voodoo”) cult and scare Sylvia away from the island.
There’s also a bit of a romantic quadrilateral in that Sylvia briefly abandons her American boyfriend John Lowden (Emmett Carter), who came down from New York with her, to fall for Ramsay — who, we’re not at all surprised to find out later, is really a crook who’s been skimming from the plantation — while for some even less explicable reason Isabelle decides she loves John. As Charles pointed out, the biggest mistake the movie makes is letting us know almost from the outset that the voodoo cult is a fake — not that we actually get to see much of it, though the soundtrack is drenched in voodoo drums (and has very little other music aside from some of the same sort of “West Indian” pop instrumental stuff Sidney Bechet and Willie “The Lion” Smith recorded around this time in an album for Moe Asch’s Stinson label, and a rather shrilly recorded song sung by McKinney); about all we see of the cult in action is a silly gag involving the comic-relief character Percy Jackson (James Carl “Hamtree” Harrington), who’s told by Isabelle that in order to keep his soul safe from the cultists, they will transfer it to a pig — though the downside of this, as it’s explained to him, is if the pig dies he will die too. There’s one dorky shot during the representation of this ceremony in which Isabelle refers to the pig as “he” — only the shot of the pig herself shows her upside down, a long row of nipples in place, and thereby “outs” her as female. (Well, I guess if a male dog could play Lassie … )
The climax shows Isabelle attempting to drug Sylvia’s drink so they can shock her by doing an “obeah” death ritual on her and having her come to in mid-ceremony — only John keeps her from drinking the spiked drink and the film ends with John beating up Philip, Philip confessing all and fleeing so he doesn’t get prosecuted for stealing from the plantation, John and Sylvia reuniting and the remaining principals sitting down to a dinner of roast pork once Percy is convinced that his soul really wasn’t transferred to its porcine receptacle. The Devil’s Daughter was promoted on archive.org (from whence we downloaded it) as a “race” horror film, but it’s really a not very thrilling thriller set in an exotic location, though one thing that can be said for it is that it’s a quite sophisticated piece of filmmaking for a race movie. Stuck with a plot (George F. Terwilliger is credited with the original story but no one ’fessed up to writing the actual script) that offers little opportunity for action, suspense or thrills (imdb.com identifies the film as a remake of an earlier all-Black voodoo drama, Ouanga, but I remember that as a much better movie than this!), director Arthur Leonard and cinematographer Jay Rescher liven it up with moving-camera shots, traveling-car shots and an interesting attempt at an exotic atmosphere that probably looked a good deal better in 1939 than it does in the murky prints that are all that survive of The Devil’s Daughter.
It’s too bad that the acting doesn’t live up to the visuals: Ida James is barely competent — she reads all her lines in a first-day-of-drama-school monotone — and Nina Mae McKinney, despite her history of having been in the first all-Black movie done by a major studio (and acquitting herself beautifully in it), doesn’t seem that much better. Also, even more than most “race” movies The Devil’s Daughter uncomfortably mirrors the racist attitudes of white producers towards Blacks: the light-skinned Blacks are the leads while the dark-skinned Blacks are relegated to villains or comic-relief parts — and Hamtree Harrington does the same stupid servant stereotype he’d have been playing if he’d landed a part in a white movie in 1939. Also, though the film was originally released at 67 minutes, a 52-minute version is all that survives. It’s an engagingly quirky movie but also one of those annoying films that should have been better than it is.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Battle Hymn (Universal-International, 1957)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Battle Hymn, a really peculiar 1956 Universal-International production directed by Douglas Sirk from a script by Charles Grayson and Vincent B. Evans in turn based on the true story of Col. Dean “Killer” Hess (Rock Hudson), a U.S. airman in World War II who accidentally bombed a church and an orphanage in the German town of Kaiserberg — which, by one of those coincidences one can’t help but wonder whether it’s part of the true story or a ghostwriter’s (or screenwriter’s) invention, was also the home town of the Hess family before it emigrated from Germany to the U.S. He was so overcome with conscience and guilt that after the war he left the service and studied for the priesthood, and got to the point of settling in a small town in Ohio and getting a job as pastor in a church, only to have the deacon (Carl Benton Reid) complain that his sermons are too downbeat and don’t emphasize the hope God offers for humanity.
This happens in 1950, just as the U.S. is getting involved in the Korean War — and, fed up and unfulfilled with his gig as a minister, he decides to answer a government call for veterans willing to be reactivated and deployed to Korea. He’s assigned to a base that’s little more than a patch of dirt and a decayed runway left over by the Japanese when they occupied Korea during World War II, and his official responsibility is to train local pilots for a future Korean air force (when he was ordered to train “rock pilots” I was briefly confused until I realized what I was hearing was “ROK” — the initials of “Republic of Korea,” the official name of the South Korean state). One of the officers already there is Captain Skidmore (Don DeFore), whom Hess served with in World War II and who expects a free ride from his old friend — and is thoroughly disappointed. Another is Sgt. Herman (Dan Duryea), who becomes basically Hess’s straw boss as he commandeers whatever road-working equipment he can find to get his runway in shape so the Korean pilots he and the other Americans are supposed to be training can fly the meager allotment of 10 planes he’s been given (old P-51 Mustangs from World War II — Korea was supposed to have been the first war fought with jet planes on both sides, but at the level Col. Hess was working he had to make do with the old propeller-driven technology instead of the new), with a solemn warning that he’s not supposed to do anything that would jeopardize the planes’ existence because if he loses one he’s S.O.L.
Hess also finds out that most of the towns in the area have been destroyed by the various occupiers — first the Japanese and then the North Koreans — and virtually the only two adult Koreans left in the area are En Soon Yang (Anna Kashfi, the first Mrs. Marlon Brando — their relationship was so tempestuous Humphrey Bogart and Mayo Methot looked like placid lovebirds by comparison) and an itinerant monk or something, listed in the credits only as “Old Man” (Philip Ahn — and yes, Charles and I were amused at seeing both him and Richard Loo in another war movie about a different war so soon after watching them in Submarine Raider), who start bringing children to the base. Hess, still guilt-ridden about having killed children in his last war, ultimately opens the base to them and feeds them, to the point where he has 400 children more or less living there by the time changing fortunes in the overall war lead the U.S. command to abandon the area and retreat. Meanwhile, despite their solemn orders to avoid combat, the unit has successfully attacked a North Korean supply convoy — only, under the impression (thanks to a misleading order from Captain Skidmore) that a truck off to the side had been part of the convoy and was trying to get away, Lieutenant Maples (James Edwards, African-American star of the pioneering war movie Home of the Brave and the man who should have become the first major Black male movie star — though for some reason he never caught on as a personality and Sidney Poitier had that honor instead) bombed a truck full of, you guessed it, orphans and ended up with the same guilt monkey on his back as his C.O.
The finale is a race against time as Hess seeks transport for 400 orphans under his care to fulfill his promise to Yang to take them to her native island, Che-Ju, and after initial turn-downs from both the Air Force and the Navy (the naval officer who deals with Hess turning up on his office doorstep and asking, “Where are your ships?,” fires right back at Hess and says, “You’re with the Air Force — where are your planes?”), Hess gets five troop transport planes ex machina and successfully gets the kids out of the war zone and sets up the Orphans’ Home of Korea, 25 of whose residents got a trip to Hollywood to be in the movie as themselves. Battle Hymn is a really schizoid movie because on the surface it’s a film justifying the U.S. action in Korea — it’s even introduced by General Earle Partridge, real-life commander of the U.S. Air Force in Korea, standing in front of the prop replica of Hess’s plane (director Sirk knew nothing of the prologue until Jon Halliday told him about it for their book-length interview in 1970; “I certainly didn’t shoot it,” he told Halliday, explaining that he never watched any of his movies after he turned in his final cuts “because if you see them you think of tearing them apart and starting all over again”) — and it had the imprimatur of being based on a series of articles in the Reader’s Digest that were later collected into a book.
At the same time, though, one can sense Sirk slipping in an anti-war message every chance he got — the lines in the film (especially from the character of Skidmore) that if a war is just then it doesn’t matter if some people who don’t deserve to die get killed in it are chilling and speak to the dilemma of the U.S. today in Afghanistan and Iraq — an indication that, as with Written on the Wind, the director’s sensibility is far more Left-wing than his material (when I first saw Written on the Wind I joked that it looked as if a Communist had been assigned to direct a Dallas script). Sirk told Halliday that he wasn’t interested in making a biographical film — especially about someone who was still alive, and what’s more was officially credited as a technical adviser and was on the set throughout the filming — but he’d always wanted to make a film about flying. He complained that Rock Hudson was miscast — he’d have wanted Hudson’s co-star from Written on the Wind, Robert Stack, to play Hess — and that “I couldn’t bring out the ambiguity of the character as I would have liked” with Hess hanging around the set telling him what he had and hadn’t done.
At one point Sirk wanted Hess (in the movie) to become an alcoholic and then realize that was a dead-end and try to square himself with his conscience by studying for the priesthood instead, but Hess (the real one) vetoed it by saying, “I didn’t drink.” I can actually sympathize with both parties; giving the character an interlude of dissipation would have made him more interesting and understandable to the audience, but at the same time I like Hess’s attitude, which was essentially, “Don’t resort to a stupid old Hollywood cliché by making me an alcoholic. Work harder and make the audience believe in me and my story as they were.” What’s really at once moving and frustrating about Battle Hymn is that a story that really needed a rough, edgy treatment — black-and-white, hand-held cameras and a more dimensional actor like Montgomery Clift or James Dean as Hess — instead gets the full-gloss Hollywood style, including glossy color, perfect compositions and a thundering music score by Frank Skinner largely based on “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (the obvious source of the title) and the beautiful Korean folk song “Arirang.” (Charles said it would have been a better movie with Duryea playing Hess and Sam Fuller — who made what’s probably the best film about the Korean War, The Steel Helmet — directing.)
Given how God-drenched some of the dialogue is, at times Battle Hymn seems as if Rock Hudson’s character from Magnificent Obsession has gone to war — and at the same time there are wrenching scenes full of the sincerity of Sirk’s movies at their best, including the confrontation between Hess and Skidmore; Hess’s treatment of Maples after he had committed the same crime Hess himself had in the previous war; and the big North Korean attack in which Yang is killed protecting one of the kids. Battle Hymn is a really odd and frustrating movie that seems (as Charles said) to be at odds with itself — a critique of the whole business of war and imperialism at gunpoint masquerading as an inspiring story of the God-centered heroism of a fearless modern-day crusader against the Communist infidels — though Sirk deserves a lot of credit for getting some multidimensionality into it and also for taking Rock Hudson’s limitations as an actor and making them seem like quiet, sincere understatement (it’s no accident that Sirk made eight films with Hudson and was essentially the Rock Hudson director, the way John Ford was the John Wayne director, John Huston the Humphrey Bogart director and Tim Burton the Johnny Depp director).
The film was Battle Hymn, a really peculiar 1956 Universal-International production directed by Douglas Sirk from a script by Charles Grayson and Vincent B. Evans in turn based on the true story of Col. Dean “Killer” Hess (Rock Hudson), a U.S. airman in World War II who accidentally bombed a church and an orphanage in the German town of Kaiserberg — which, by one of those coincidences one can’t help but wonder whether it’s part of the true story or a ghostwriter’s (or screenwriter’s) invention, was also the home town of the Hess family before it emigrated from Germany to the U.S. He was so overcome with conscience and guilt that after the war he left the service and studied for the priesthood, and got to the point of settling in a small town in Ohio and getting a job as pastor in a church, only to have the deacon (Carl Benton Reid) complain that his sermons are too downbeat and don’t emphasize the hope God offers for humanity.
This happens in 1950, just as the U.S. is getting involved in the Korean War — and, fed up and unfulfilled with his gig as a minister, he decides to answer a government call for veterans willing to be reactivated and deployed to Korea. He’s assigned to a base that’s little more than a patch of dirt and a decayed runway left over by the Japanese when they occupied Korea during World War II, and his official responsibility is to train local pilots for a future Korean air force (when he was ordered to train “rock pilots” I was briefly confused until I realized what I was hearing was “ROK” — the initials of “Republic of Korea,” the official name of the South Korean state). One of the officers already there is Captain Skidmore (Don DeFore), whom Hess served with in World War II and who expects a free ride from his old friend — and is thoroughly disappointed. Another is Sgt. Herman (Dan Duryea), who becomes basically Hess’s straw boss as he commandeers whatever road-working equipment he can find to get his runway in shape so the Korean pilots he and the other Americans are supposed to be training can fly the meager allotment of 10 planes he’s been given (old P-51 Mustangs from World War II — Korea was supposed to have been the first war fought with jet planes on both sides, but at the level Col. Hess was working he had to make do with the old propeller-driven technology instead of the new), with a solemn warning that he’s not supposed to do anything that would jeopardize the planes’ existence because if he loses one he’s S.O.L.
Hess also finds out that most of the towns in the area have been destroyed by the various occupiers — first the Japanese and then the North Koreans — and virtually the only two adult Koreans left in the area are En Soon Yang (Anna Kashfi, the first Mrs. Marlon Brando — their relationship was so tempestuous Humphrey Bogart and Mayo Methot looked like placid lovebirds by comparison) and an itinerant monk or something, listed in the credits only as “Old Man” (Philip Ahn — and yes, Charles and I were amused at seeing both him and Richard Loo in another war movie about a different war so soon after watching them in Submarine Raider), who start bringing children to the base. Hess, still guilt-ridden about having killed children in his last war, ultimately opens the base to them and feeds them, to the point where he has 400 children more or less living there by the time changing fortunes in the overall war lead the U.S. command to abandon the area and retreat. Meanwhile, despite their solemn orders to avoid combat, the unit has successfully attacked a North Korean supply convoy — only, under the impression (thanks to a misleading order from Captain Skidmore) that a truck off to the side had been part of the convoy and was trying to get away, Lieutenant Maples (James Edwards, African-American star of the pioneering war movie Home of the Brave and the man who should have become the first major Black male movie star — though for some reason he never caught on as a personality and Sidney Poitier had that honor instead) bombed a truck full of, you guessed it, orphans and ended up with the same guilt monkey on his back as his C.O.
The finale is a race against time as Hess seeks transport for 400 orphans under his care to fulfill his promise to Yang to take them to her native island, Che-Ju, and after initial turn-downs from both the Air Force and the Navy (the naval officer who deals with Hess turning up on his office doorstep and asking, “Where are your ships?,” fires right back at Hess and says, “You’re with the Air Force — where are your planes?”), Hess gets five troop transport planes ex machina and successfully gets the kids out of the war zone and sets up the Orphans’ Home of Korea, 25 of whose residents got a trip to Hollywood to be in the movie as themselves. Battle Hymn is a really schizoid movie because on the surface it’s a film justifying the U.S. action in Korea — it’s even introduced by General Earle Partridge, real-life commander of the U.S. Air Force in Korea, standing in front of the prop replica of Hess’s plane (director Sirk knew nothing of the prologue until Jon Halliday told him about it for their book-length interview in 1970; “I certainly didn’t shoot it,” he told Halliday, explaining that he never watched any of his movies after he turned in his final cuts “because if you see them you think of tearing them apart and starting all over again”) — and it had the imprimatur of being based on a series of articles in the Reader’s Digest that were later collected into a book.
At the same time, though, one can sense Sirk slipping in an anti-war message every chance he got — the lines in the film (especially from the character of Skidmore) that if a war is just then it doesn’t matter if some people who don’t deserve to die get killed in it are chilling and speak to the dilemma of the U.S. today in Afghanistan and Iraq — an indication that, as with Written on the Wind, the director’s sensibility is far more Left-wing than his material (when I first saw Written on the Wind I joked that it looked as if a Communist had been assigned to direct a Dallas script). Sirk told Halliday that he wasn’t interested in making a biographical film — especially about someone who was still alive, and what’s more was officially credited as a technical adviser and was on the set throughout the filming — but he’d always wanted to make a film about flying. He complained that Rock Hudson was miscast — he’d have wanted Hudson’s co-star from Written on the Wind, Robert Stack, to play Hess — and that “I couldn’t bring out the ambiguity of the character as I would have liked” with Hess hanging around the set telling him what he had and hadn’t done.
At one point Sirk wanted Hess (in the movie) to become an alcoholic and then realize that was a dead-end and try to square himself with his conscience by studying for the priesthood instead, but Hess (the real one) vetoed it by saying, “I didn’t drink.” I can actually sympathize with both parties; giving the character an interlude of dissipation would have made him more interesting and understandable to the audience, but at the same time I like Hess’s attitude, which was essentially, “Don’t resort to a stupid old Hollywood cliché by making me an alcoholic. Work harder and make the audience believe in me and my story as they were.” What’s really at once moving and frustrating about Battle Hymn is that a story that really needed a rough, edgy treatment — black-and-white, hand-held cameras and a more dimensional actor like Montgomery Clift or James Dean as Hess — instead gets the full-gloss Hollywood style, including glossy color, perfect compositions and a thundering music score by Frank Skinner largely based on “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (the obvious source of the title) and the beautiful Korean folk song “Arirang.” (Charles said it would have been a better movie with Duryea playing Hess and Sam Fuller — who made what’s probably the best film about the Korean War, The Steel Helmet — directing.)
Given how God-drenched some of the dialogue is, at times Battle Hymn seems as if Rock Hudson’s character from Magnificent Obsession has gone to war — and at the same time there are wrenching scenes full of the sincerity of Sirk’s movies at their best, including the confrontation between Hess and Skidmore; Hess’s treatment of Maples after he had committed the same crime Hess himself had in the previous war; and the big North Korean attack in which Yang is killed protecting one of the kids. Battle Hymn is a really odd and frustrating movie that seems (as Charles said) to be at odds with itself — a critique of the whole business of war and imperialism at gunpoint masquerading as an inspiring story of the God-centered heroism of a fearless modern-day crusader against the Communist infidels — though Sirk deserves a lot of credit for getting some multidimensionality into it and also for taking Rock Hudson’s limitations as an actor and making them seem like quiet, sincere understatement (it’s no accident that Sirk made eight films with Hudson and was essentially the Rock Hudson director, the way John Ford was the John Wayne director, John Huston the Humphrey Bogart director and Tim Burton the Johnny Depp director).
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Submarine Raider (Columbia, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Submarine Raider, a surprisingly interesting 1942 “B” from Columbia that offered an interesting riff on the true-life story of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 that sparked the U.S. entry into World War II. Turner Classic Movies had shown this as the lead-off item on a slate of war movies last December 7 but I hadn’t realized it was so closely tied in to the actual event they were celebrating the anniversary of and wasn’t just a war-themed movie about a submarine crew! The plot gimmick is that Yamanada (Nino Pipitone, whose name sounds Italian but he still manages to look convincingly Japanese), captain of the Japanese aircraft carrier Hiranamu (which incidentally looks like a giant self-moving barge rather than what we think of as an aircraft carrier), is on his way to help launch the attack on Pearl Harbor when he spies an American pleasure yacht in his way.
Fearful that the American pleasure cruisers are going to spot his ship, radio to the U.S. military and thereby spoil the surprise that was the key element in the attack’s success (you remember), the captain orders an all-stops-out attack on the poor, defenseless little yacht, whose occupants were engaged in the usual soap-operaish pursuits (a man was asking a woman to marry him and she was begging off because of the minor little detail that she didn’t love him) when a Japanese ship came at them, all guns blazing, for reasons that were a total mystery to them. Not only do the Japanese sink the yacht, but when three people — two men and a woman — try to escape the wreckage in a lifeboat, Yamanada orders a pilot to take off from the carrier and dive-bomb the lifeboat. His pilot sinks it and kills both men, but the woman, Sue Curry (Marguerite Chapman), is rescued by a U.S. submarine that happens to be in the area. The sub’s commander, Chris Warren (John Howard), and his first officer, Russell (Bruce Bennett), eventually figure out that the Japanese are planning something big and try to radio the information to their superior officers — but the Japanese are jamming all radio frequencies and they attack the submarine, failing to sink it but damaging the radio enough that they can receive but not send — and all they can receive are regular commercial broadcasts from Honolulu, including one from a local nightclub featuring musician Duke Kahola (Juan Varro), whom Warren and Russell futilely try to make contact in hopes he will pass on their warning to the authorities.
Submarine Raider is a surprisingly exciting movie given the black-and-white wartime morality — the good guys are very, very good, the bad guys are very, very bad and scenarist Aubrey Wisberg has the characters go on and on and on bemoaning the dastardly evil of the Japanese — and, as Charles pointed out, it anticipates Tora, Tora, Tora in showing the Pearl Harbor attack from both points of view, cutting back and forth from the submarine to the Hiranamu — and the Japanese carrier’s crew is practically an all-star list of the top male Chinese actors in Hollywood at the time: Philip Ahn, Paul Fung (as the pilot who sinks the lifeboat but leaves one survivor, for which dereliction he’s ordered by Yamanada to throw himself off the carrier and commit suicide by drowning — and, since according to Aubrey Wisberg the Japanese don’t have the reverence for their own lives that we do, a bit of racist twaddle that since has been repeated about Arabs and/or Muslims, he meekly obeys), Richard Loo and Keye Luke.
What’s amazing about Submarine Raider is if you can stomach the racism (obviously intended as wartime morale-boosting agitprop) and the black-and-white characterizations of the opposing sides, the film comes off as quite a neat thriller, with excellent suspense direction by the usually slovenly Lew Landers (though the imdb.com page on the film lists Budd Boetticher as an uncredited co-director) and cinematography by Franz Planer (though he minimizes his association with another Axis country by spelling his first name “Frank” on his credit) that at times is surprisingly noir for a wartime action movie. The music score was assembled by Morris Stoloff from stock sources in Columbia’s library, but most of it is actually intriguingly dissonant — there’s only one really cheesy cue, for a land-based car chase — and even the usual bugbear of cheap war movies, the incorporation of stock footage, is done quite smoothly here.
At times it’s hard to tell what’s new footage, what’s stock (I suspect the scenes of the submarine actually moving through the water were from Frank Capra’s 1928 Columbia silent Submarine), what’s model work and what’s newsreel — though some of the shots of the Pearl Harbor attack itself are almost too familiar from wartime documentaries and some seem to have been the re-creations, done with models, for the War Department’s official film on the Pearl Harbor attack, December 7th (co-directed by John Ford and the great cinematographer Gregg Toland). Submarine Raider wasn’t an important film when it was new and it isn’t one today, either, but it’s an engaging and legitimately exciting war movie — proof that the excellent pre-war RKO “B” Condemned Women wasn’t a fluke and, given the right script and the right circumstances, Lew Landers could make a creditable movie. And of course it’s ironic that, thanks to the marvels of globalization, this viciously anti-Japanese film comes to us now courtesy of … Sony, a Japanese-based multinational corporation.
The film was Submarine Raider, a surprisingly interesting 1942 “B” from Columbia that offered an interesting riff on the true-life story of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 that sparked the U.S. entry into World War II. Turner Classic Movies had shown this as the lead-off item on a slate of war movies last December 7 but I hadn’t realized it was so closely tied in to the actual event they were celebrating the anniversary of and wasn’t just a war-themed movie about a submarine crew! The plot gimmick is that Yamanada (Nino Pipitone, whose name sounds Italian but he still manages to look convincingly Japanese), captain of the Japanese aircraft carrier Hiranamu (which incidentally looks like a giant self-moving barge rather than what we think of as an aircraft carrier), is on his way to help launch the attack on Pearl Harbor when he spies an American pleasure yacht in his way.
Fearful that the American pleasure cruisers are going to spot his ship, radio to the U.S. military and thereby spoil the surprise that was the key element in the attack’s success (you remember), the captain orders an all-stops-out attack on the poor, defenseless little yacht, whose occupants were engaged in the usual soap-operaish pursuits (a man was asking a woman to marry him and she was begging off because of the minor little detail that she didn’t love him) when a Japanese ship came at them, all guns blazing, for reasons that were a total mystery to them. Not only do the Japanese sink the yacht, but when three people — two men and a woman — try to escape the wreckage in a lifeboat, Yamanada orders a pilot to take off from the carrier and dive-bomb the lifeboat. His pilot sinks it and kills both men, but the woman, Sue Curry (Marguerite Chapman), is rescued by a U.S. submarine that happens to be in the area. The sub’s commander, Chris Warren (John Howard), and his first officer, Russell (Bruce Bennett), eventually figure out that the Japanese are planning something big and try to radio the information to their superior officers — but the Japanese are jamming all radio frequencies and they attack the submarine, failing to sink it but damaging the radio enough that they can receive but not send — and all they can receive are regular commercial broadcasts from Honolulu, including one from a local nightclub featuring musician Duke Kahola (Juan Varro), whom Warren and Russell futilely try to make contact in hopes he will pass on their warning to the authorities.
Submarine Raider is a surprisingly exciting movie given the black-and-white wartime morality — the good guys are very, very good, the bad guys are very, very bad and scenarist Aubrey Wisberg has the characters go on and on and on bemoaning the dastardly evil of the Japanese — and, as Charles pointed out, it anticipates Tora, Tora, Tora in showing the Pearl Harbor attack from both points of view, cutting back and forth from the submarine to the Hiranamu — and the Japanese carrier’s crew is practically an all-star list of the top male Chinese actors in Hollywood at the time: Philip Ahn, Paul Fung (as the pilot who sinks the lifeboat but leaves one survivor, for which dereliction he’s ordered by Yamanada to throw himself off the carrier and commit suicide by drowning — and, since according to Aubrey Wisberg the Japanese don’t have the reverence for their own lives that we do, a bit of racist twaddle that since has been repeated about Arabs and/or Muslims, he meekly obeys), Richard Loo and Keye Luke.
What’s amazing about Submarine Raider is if you can stomach the racism (obviously intended as wartime morale-boosting agitprop) and the black-and-white characterizations of the opposing sides, the film comes off as quite a neat thriller, with excellent suspense direction by the usually slovenly Lew Landers (though the imdb.com page on the film lists Budd Boetticher as an uncredited co-director) and cinematography by Franz Planer (though he minimizes his association with another Axis country by spelling his first name “Frank” on his credit) that at times is surprisingly noir for a wartime action movie. The music score was assembled by Morris Stoloff from stock sources in Columbia’s library, but most of it is actually intriguingly dissonant — there’s only one really cheesy cue, for a land-based car chase — and even the usual bugbear of cheap war movies, the incorporation of stock footage, is done quite smoothly here.
At times it’s hard to tell what’s new footage, what’s stock (I suspect the scenes of the submarine actually moving through the water were from Frank Capra’s 1928 Columbia silent Submarine), what’s model work and what’s newsreel — though some of the shots of the Pearl Harbor attack itself are almost too familiar from wartime documentaries and some seem to have been the re-creations, done with models, for the War Department’s official film on the Pearl Harbor attack, December 7th (co-directed by John Ford and the great cinematographer Gregg Toland). Submarine Raider wasn’t an important film when it was new and it isn’t one today, either, but it’s an engaging and legitimately exciting war movie — proof that the excellent pre-war RKO “B” Condemned Women wasn’t a fluke and, given the right script and the right circumstances, Lew Landers could make a creditable movie. And of course it’s ironic that, thanks to the marvels of globalization, this viciously anti-Japanese film comes to us now courtesy of … Sony, a Japanese-based multinational corporation.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Amelia (Avalon, Searchlight, 20th Century-Fox, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Amelia, the 2009 biopic of famed 1930’s aviatrix Amelia Earhart directed by (East) Indian filmmaker Mira Nair and starring Hilary Swank as Earhart and Richard Gere as her promoter, sponsor, publisher (of her best-selling memoirs of her flights) and ultimately husband, George Putnam. Written by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan based on two, count ’em, two Earhart biographies — Susan Butler’s East to the Dawn and Mary S. Lovell’s The Sound of Wings — Amelia was savaged by critics as too slow, too ponderous, too reverential, and between the lousy reviews and the who-cares factor (for all the aviation buffs who still get together and debate what exactly happened to Earhart on that last, doomed flight around the world — neither her body nor the wreckage of her plane were ever found and that’s only fueled the mystery — today’s average young, youth-oriented moviegoer probably couldn’t have cared less about the life of someone who died in 1937) the film bombed at the box office.
Well, that was a fate it decidedly didn’t deserve: like Australia (are films with one-word titles that both begin and end with the letter “a” simply jinxed?), Amelia, if not exactly a deathless masterpiece, was both a vividly entertaining movie and a film of substance, at once a tribute to its subject (a woman defying gender expectations and triumphing in what was then — and largely still is — considered a man’s world), a fascinating meditation on the cult of celebrity and the whole notion of public relations and how stars are manufactured, and an intriguing romantic triangle between Earhart, Putnam and Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), father of Gore Vidal (who appears as a boy in the dramatis personae — how unusual it is to see a biopic about someone who died in 1937 which features a character who’s still very much alive!), with whom she seemed able to escape the bizarre celebrity Putnam had constructed around her and she had gone along with because he had persuaded her (probably correctly) that it was the only way he could get the financing to do the one thing she wanted to do most, which was fly.
Amelia is a first-rate movie all around: handsomely produced (the 1930’s seemed credibly re-created — though some of the rooms and hotel lobbies seemed incredibly overstuffed by comparison with those shown in the actual movies of the period), vividly directed and impeccably acted. Nair was faulted by those stupid critics for going for poetic effects (including long stretches of narration in Earhart’s own voice) at the expense of thrills, but her staging of the flying sequences is marvelously suspenseful and reproduces the way long-distance aviation, like police work, is a lot of boredom occasionally punctuated by desperate crises — and the sequences showing the flyers in genuine peril (particularly a series of shots of Earhart’s first transatlantic trip in 1928 in which first one of her male co-pilots and then Earhart herself nearly fall out of the plane) are as viscerally exciting and effectively dramatized as one would want.
Hilary Swank, who’s always at her best at roles that transgress gender roles and rules — the Transgender person in Boys Don’t Cry, the aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby, the polymorphously perverse prostitute in The Black Dahlia — is virtually ideal casting; at times she looks less like the real Earhart than like Doris Day, freckles and all (suggesting that Day would have been excellent casting for an Earhart biopic if one had been made in the 1950’s), and she manages to command all the character’s conflicting emotions: the love of adventure and risk, the disinclination to be held down to one man (she makes a rather stilted speech to that effect to Putnam when he proposes to her) or one set of expectations, and her rather prickly acquiescence to the star-making machinery Putnam builds to promote and exploit her.
Gere and McGregor play their roles adequately — though Gere’s part seems all too blatantly compounded of movies he’s made before, particularly his best-known credits, Pretty Woman and Chicago — but the actor who stands out among the supporting players is Christopher Eccleston (who was John Lennon in that recent BBC-TV biopic about him, Lennon Naked) as Fred Noonan, the brilliant but alcoholic navigator Earhart took on her doomed last flight: his performance is a sorrowful portrait of a man brilliant at navigation but in over his head at life (change the word “navigation” to “music” and that could have described Lennon as well, at least as he was portrayed in the script Eccleston performed, but he etches the two characters completely differently and he’s a first-rate actor in both films).
Amelia isn’t flawless — Nair and the writers decided to build it as a series of flashbacks with her last flight as the spine, and she cuts so jarringly between past and present it’s not always that easy to tell when we are (a continuing source of irritation for me in modern movies — for every modern-day director like Pedro Almodóvar who actually knows how to do flashbacks and still keep us oriented in time, there seem to be at least 10 out there who feel compelled to try and simply can’t manage it), and at times the self-conscious “poetic” style of the voice-over narration given to Swank to speak in character does begin to pall, but this is such a good movie I’m willing to forgive it its minor flaws, especially the way the critics unfairly savaged it. It seems that a woman director can be accepted as long as her films are safely about male issues and virtually all-male in their dramatis personae — witness Kathryn Bigelow winning the first Academy Award for a female director for The Hurt Locker, a movie that not only has just one even slightly significant female character but has the (male) lead turn his back on her at the end and go back to his buddies and his war — but let a woman director make a movie about an independent and courageous woman, especially from a position of honesty about how the only way she was allowed to pursue her dreams was to allow herself to be manipulated by men, and the Hollywood authorities (who are far less liberal and more racist, sexist and homophobic than they like to pretend) will come down on her and trash her and her movie.
Our “feature” last night was Amelia, the 2009 biopic of famed 1930’s aviatrix Amelia Earhart directed by (East) Indian filmmaker Mira Nair and starring Hilary Swank as Earhart and Richard Gere as her promoter, sponsor, publisher (of her best-selling memoirs of her flights) and ultimately husband, George Putnam. Written by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan based on two, count ’em, two Earhart biographies — Susan Butler’s East to the Dawn and Mary S. Lovell’s The Sound of Wings — Amelia was savaged by critics as too slow, too ponderous, too reverential, and between the lousy reviews and the who-cares factor (for all the aviation buffs who still get together and debate what exactly happened to Earhart on that last, doomed flight around the world — neither her body nor the wreckage of her plane were ever found and that’s only fueled the mystery — today’s average young, youth-oriented moviegoer probably couldn’t have cared less about the life of someone who died in 1937) the film bombed at the box office.
Well, that was a fate it decidedly didn’t deserve: like Australia (are films with one-word titles that both begin and end with the letter “a” simply jinxed?), Amelia, if not exactly a deathless masterpiece, was both a vividly entertaining movie and a film of substance, at once a tribute to its subject (a woman defying gender expectations and triumphing in what was then — and largely still is — considered a man’s world), a fascinating meditation on the cult of celebrity and the whole notion of public relations and how stars are manufactured, and an intriguing romantic triangle between Earhart, Putnam and Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), father of Gore Vidal (who appears as a boy in the dramatis personae — how unusual it is to see a biopic about someone who died in 1937 which features a character who’s still very much alive!), with whom she seemed able to escape the bizarre celebrity Putnam had constructed around her and she had gone along with because he had persuaded her (probably correctly) that it was the only way he could get the financing to do the one thing she wanted to do most, which was fly.
Amelia is a first-rate movie all around: handsomely produced (the 1930’s seemed credibly re-created — though some of the rooms and hotel lobbies seemed incredibly overstuffed by comparison with those shown in the actual movies of the period), vividly directed and impeccably acted. Nair was faulted by those stupid critics for going for poetic effects (including long stretches of narration in Earhart’s own voice) at the expense of thrills, but her staging of the flying sequences is marvelously suspenseful and reproduces the way long-distance aviation, like police work, is a lot of boredom occasionally punctuated by desperate crises — and the sequences showing the flyers in genuine peril (particularly a series of shots of Earhart’s first transatlantic trip in 1928 in which first one of her male co-pilots and then Earhart herself nearly fall out of the plane) are as viscerally exciting and effectively dramatized as one would want.
Hilary Swank, who’s always at her best at roles that transgress gender roles and rules — the Transgender person in Boys Don’t Cry, the aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby, the polymorphously perverse prostitute in The Black Dahlia — is virtually ideal casting; at times she looks less like the real Earhart than like Doris Day, freckles and all (suggesting that Day would have been excellent casting for an Earhart biopic if one had been made in the 1950’s), and she manages to command all the character’s conflicting emotions: the love of adventure and risk, the disinclination to be held down to one man (she makes a rather stilted speech to that effect to Putnam when he proposes to her) or one set of expectations, and her rather prickly acquiescence to the star-making machinery Putnam builds to promote and exploit her.
Gere and McGregor play their roles adequately — though Gere’s part seems all too blatantly compounded of movies he’s made before, particularly his best-known credits, Pretty Woman and Chicago — but the actor who stands out among the supporting players is Christopher Eccleston (who was John Lennon in that recent BBC-TV biopic about him, Lennon Naked) as Fred Noonan, the brilliant but alcoholic navigator Earhart took on her doomed last flight: his performance is a sorrowful portrait of a man brilliant at navigation but in over his head at life (change the word “navigation” to “music” and that could have described Lennon as well, at least as he was portrayed in the script Eccleston performed, but he etches the two characters completely differently and he’s a first-rate actor in both films).
Amelia isn’t flawless — Nair and the writers decided to build it as a series of flashbacks with her last flight as the spine, and she cuts so jarringly between past and present it’s not always that easy to tell when we are (a continuing source of irritation for me in modern movies — for every modern-day director like Pedro Almodóvar who actually knows how to do flashbacks and still keep us oriented in time, there seem to be at least 10 out there who feel compelled to try and simply can’t manage it), and at times the self-conscious “poetic” style of the voice-over narration given to Swank to speak in character does begin to pall, but this is such a good movie I’m willing to forgive it its minor flaws, especially the way the critics unfairly savaged it. It seems that a woman director can be accepted as long as her films are safely about male issues and virtually all-male in their dramatis personae — witness Kathryn Bigelow winning the first Academy Award for a female director for The Hurt Locker, a movie that not only has just one even slightly significant female character but has the (male) lead turn his back on her at the end and go back to his buddies and his war — but let a woman director make a movie about an independent and courageous woman, especially from a position of honesty about how the only way she was allowed to pursue her dreams was to allow herself to be manipulated by men, and the Hollywood authorities (who are far less liberal and more racist, sexist and homophobic than they like to pretend) will come down on her and trash her and her movie.
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