Wake Up and Dream (Universal, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Wake Up and Dream, a 1934 production by Universal starring Russ Columbo, the legendary crooner whom they’d just signed in hopes of building him up as their answer to Bing Crosby’s incredible success at Paramount. Universal wasn’t the only company in the fall of 1934 that was hoping Columbo would be “their” Crosby; after two years during which litigation with his previous record company, Victor, had kept him from recording, Brunswick, smarting from having just lost Crosby to the newly formed U.S. Decca label, signed him and did a four-song session with him, including three songs from Wake Up and Dream. All these hopes came to an abrupt end when Columbo met his death on September 2, 1934 in what, at least according to the official explanation, was one of the most bizarre accidents of all time: he was visiting his friend, photographer Lansing Brown, at Brown’s home when Brown decided he wanted a cigarette. Brown struck his match on an antique French dueling pistol that was part of his collection, and the match set off a long-forgotten charge inside the pistol, launching a ball (the gun was so old it didn’t even use bullets!) that found its way to Columbo’s forehead, piercing his skull and killing him almost instantly. The sheer unlikeliness of this story sparked decades of rumors about Columbo’s death, the most common of which was that he’d been killed by the Mafia because he wouldn’t give them a piece of his money — though not only is this the sort of rumor that gets spread whenever any celebrity with an Italian surname dies well before his or her time, one would think that if the Mob actually hit Columbo, they would have come up with a more credible cover story.

When he died Columbo had been dating Carole Lombard, and for the next eight years — until her own early death in a plane crash — she and Columbo’s friends participated in a subterfuge designed to keep Columbo’s mother from finding out that her son had died, sending her bogus reports on his career and treating her much the way the central character treated his mom in the movie Good Bye, Lenin! to keep her from finding out that her beloved East German state had ceased to exist. Columbo’s death also sparked a cult that, though hardly on the same level as the one that formed around James Dean after his death 21 years later, was large enough that his records stayed in print until the 1970’s and enough of it is still going on that the post of Wake Up and Dream to archive.org included a note from the Russ Columbo Society (Web address www.russcolumbo.org) asking people to lobby for Columbo’s inclusion in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (It’s not likely because that’s an honor that’s almost never given posthumously: one gimmick behind it is that the star is always laid in a ceremony that the honoree attends, and though I can’t say for sure they’ve never awarded a star to a deceased performer, they would probably require that a living relative attend the star-laying ceremony.)

Wake Up and Dream wasn’t released until Columbo had already been dead for a month, and that probably hurt it at the box office, though as it stands it’s a quite workmanlike film even though it seems as if John Meehan, Jr., credited with an “original” story and screenplay, actually compiled it from several different accounts in the cliché bank. It starts with Paul Scotti (Russ Columbo — and it’s interesting that not only did Columbo keep his real Italianate name but his character had an Italian name as well: ironic in light of the fights Frank Sinatra had at the outset of his career in 1939 with Harry James and others, who told him to change his name on the ground that no one with an Italian surname would ever make it as a singing star!) as part of a vaudeville team with his friend Charles Sullivan (Roger Pryor, more tolerable as a supporting player than he was as the male lead in Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties) and their female partner, Toby Brown (June Knight). Of course, Sullivan has the hots (in a decorous Production Code way, anyway) for Toby but she only has eyes for Scotti (who’s addressed throughout by his last name, as if it were the nickname “Scotty”). Their current engagement comes to an abrupt ending when the theatre owner pays them only half the salary he promised, and Sullivan tries to bluff Scotti’s way into a job with a touring company of a Broadway revue by posing as a man from the revue producer’s New York office — only the actual performer New York hired to replace their incompetent road-company guy shows up, Sullivan gets him drunk and takes him to an abandoned house in the sticks, then is caught and the three have to flee because Sullivan is now wanted for kidnapping and stealing the man’s car.

They stow away in the back of a truck and make their way from Atlantic City (where the film opened) to New York, where Sullivan does a tightrope-walking stunt to get them $200 so they can flee to California. (Meehan’s script had previously established that he had worked as a tightrope walker in a circus, so at least we’re not asked to believe that someone with no experience had somehow managed this daring and dangerous feat.) Arrogantly pushing away anyone with a camera for fear that a photograph would get published and let the Atlantic City cops know where he was, Sullivan collects the money and the three set off on a bus trip to California, with Scotti’s foster father Giovanni Cellini (Henry Armetta) — he took Scotti in when Scotti’s parents died back in Italy (Columbo himself was U.S.-born but here he’s playing an immigrant) — and on the bus they get mixed up with fortune-teller Madame Rose (Catherine Doucet), who has a big bankroll that she doles out a dollar at a time to her traveling companion Joe “Egghead” Egbert (Andy Devine). The leads urge Cellini to court Madame Rose, not only to cover his food bills — he quickly depletes their traveling fund with the huge meals he orders every time the bus stops for food — but because Madame Rose has a place in L.A. where, if Cellini plays his cards right, they can stay while they try to break into pictures. They hear of a restaurant that will hire them as entertainers and give them a dinner for one night — and keep them on with a small salary and a free meal each night if they go over with the audience — and they’re a hit, but their chances for a meal, let alone a long engagement, get blown when Cellini insults the owner.

Nonetheless, they get discovered by a “slumming” movie producer, Roger Babcock (Richard Carle), who’s there with actress Mae La Rue (Wini Shaw, in one of her few appearances for a studio other than Warner Bros.) and her sister, who’s being passed off as his “secretary.” La Rue gets Babcock to sign Scotti to a movie contract, they make two films together that are hits, Babcock laments that instead of firing his mistress’s new boyfriend he has to make him a star, and it looks like Scotti is “going Hollywood” and romancing Ms. La Rue off screen as well as on, but in the end Sullivan realizes that Toby has always loved Scotti and engineers it so they get back together and announce their engagement at the end. It’s not much of a movie, but it has its points: for all its traveling down well-worn paths, Meehan’s script is rather unique in just how many near-misses at the brass ring it puts its hero through before he finally grasps it, and director Kurt Neumann, no doubt aware that on a Universal budget he couldn’t bring in Busby Berkeley or one of his imitators and star Columbo in big production numbers, keeps his camera in almost constant motion during many scenes that would otherwise look static and dull. This is one movie musical from the early 1930’s in which we don’t have to sit through reams of soporific exposition scenes before the characters start singing and dancing! Neumann even copies the famous scene from Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, using an elevator crane in the set of the boarding house where the leads are staying in the opening scenes.

Just about everyone who writes about Wake Up and Dream, or about Columbo generally, can’t help but wonder how his career might have gone if he had lived, and in particular whether he would actually have been a threat to Crosby (whom he’d actually been linked to before either of them were major stars: when Crosby was a featured entertainer with Gus Arnheim’s orchestra at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Hollywood in 1930-31, Columbo was in Arnheim’s band … as a violinist, and though he doesn’t play that instrument in this movie he was a skilled enough piano that during one of the pre-recorded numbers he sits at the piano and his fingers go to the right places on the keyboard even though it’s highly unlikely what we hear on the soundtrack is actually his playing). Probably not: Columbo had a darkly handsome overall look (especially given his ethnicity, one could well imagine him going after an updated version of the Valentino image) but an oddly craggy face and a receding hairline which, as Charles noted, was only emphasized by the odd three-quarter camera angles director Neumann and cinematographer Charles J. Stumar shot him from through much of the film. But though he was probably better-looking in the flesh than the short, jug-eared Crosby, the camera simply didn’t love him the way it loved Bing — and, quite frankly, neither did the microphone.

Columbo had a perfectly pleasant, if rather groaning, baritone voice, and on romantic ballads he could be quite haunting — but even on romantic ballads Crosby’s voice, with its superb breath control and legato, beat Columbo’s, and Crosby could also do jazz numbers and other sorts of songs that would have left Columbo totally at sea. For someone who came up during the so-called “Jazz Age,” there’s almost no hint of jazz phrasing in Columbo’s voice and absolutely no sense of jazz rhythm (not surprising when you consider that Crosby started out as a drummer and Columbo as a violinist). About the best he could have done if he’d lived a normal span was hung in Crosby’s wake the way Perry Como did in Sinatra’s 10 to 20 years later. Wake Up and Dream is a well-made movie, and had Columbo lived it would probably have been a good launching pad for him (imdb.com lists eight acting credits for him, including an important supporting role in Broadway Thru a Keyhole for 20^th Century pre-Fox just before this), but as it stands the spectre of Columbo’s death hangs over it the way other stars’ deaths do with other posthumous releases like Jean Harlow’s Saratoga, Carole Lombard’s To Be or Not to Be, Laird Cregar’s Hangover Square, James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, Peter Finch’s Network and Brandon Lee’s The Crow.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century-Fox, Chernin Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had watched the DVD version of an excellent recent film that had got much better reviews than one expects from a popcorn blockbuster that’s a “reboot” of a franchise dating back to 1968: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, not a deathlessly great movie but a solid piece of entertainment that shows how good the modern sci-fi action movie can be in the right hands. The extensive hype on this film when it was released last year made virtually all America aware of its plot, but in case you’ve been living in Timbuktu since this film was released last August, here goes: scientist Will Rodman (James Franco, who should have learned all about discoveries that go horribly wrong from his stint in the Spider-Man movies) works for a giant pharmaceutical company and has developed a proposed treatment for Alzheimer’s called ALZ-112. It’s reached the stage where it’s ready for trials in chimpanzees, only one of the test chimps, Bright Eyes, goes out of control, crashes the company’s board meeting (at which Rodman was going to ask that the drug be given human trials) and triggers an order from Rodman’s supervisor, department head Steven Jacobs (played by Black actor David Oyelowo and named after the producer of the original run of Planet of the Apes movies, Arthur Jacobs), to terminate the project and have all the chimps who’d been given ALZ-112 “put down.” Rodman manages to keep Bright Eyes from this fate long enough for her to give birth to a baby chimp whom he names Caesar — he reasons that she freaked out not because of an adverse drug reaction but because she was protecting her unborn cub — and he takes Caesar home with him. He also steals some ampules containing ALZ-112 and injects them into his father, Charles Rodman (John Lithgow), whose own battle with Alzheimer’s had inspired Will’s research; Charles recovers but his gains are temporary and he soon slips back into Alzheimer’s-related dementia. Meanwhile, Will raises Caesar as if he were a human child, and the ape develops cognitive capabilities beyond those of human babies of the same age. He also takes Caesar with him as if he were his own son, and on one of those excursions — a trip to Muir Woods in Marin County, just north of San Francisco — the two have a meet-cute with Caroline Aranha (Freida Pinto), who eventually becomes Will’s girlfriend and Caesar’s co-parent.

Only this bizarre family grouping comes to an abrupt end when Caesar fights back against a taunting neighbor and gets sent to the San Bruno facility for rebellious primates — by this time, in a rather awkward jump cut that’s an exception to the generally excellent direction by Rupert Wyatt, Caesar has gone from being played by a real baby chimp to being Andy Serkis, once again undergoing “motion capture” as he did as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Kong in the most recent King Kong remake, so he looks absolutely credible as a full-grown chimp while still retaining the ability to move, take direction and act like a human performer. (20^th Century-Fox was planning an Academy Award campaign for Serkis, claiming that it’s time to recognize motion capture as a form of live human acting as legitimate as any other, but that went precisely nowhere with the Screen Actors’ Guild — and in the movie, though he’s obviously far more credible than Roddy MacDowell, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans and the other inhabitants of those outrageously phony ape suits in the original films, it’s unclear, to say the least, whether Caesar’s powerful facial expressions are the work of Andy Serkis or the digital animators who “ape-ified” him.) San Bruno, which is the sort of facility Charles Dickens would have dreamed up had he taken up animal rights as a cause, puts Caesar in contact with other apes for the first time and also oppresses him so much that he rebels and uses his superior intellect to organize the other apes to fight back. He also teaches them how to speak via sign language (it seems odd that this movie would come out at around the same time as Project Nim, a documentary about the “Nim Chimpsky” experiment that pretty much debunked the idea that apes can acquire human language and communicate via sign) and eventually he’s able to expose them to the latest generation of the wonder drug, ALZ-113, producing a whole race of super-intelligent giant apes.

From this point the movie essentially becomes a horror film, a successor to Them! and the other 1950’s movies in which humankind was faced with giant invasion forces from ordinarily unthreatening terrestrial animals which had become either artificially intelligent or way bigger than normal (or both) due to exposure to atomic radiation. Director Wyatt and writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver are able to strike a delicate balance, giving the apes the capability to strategize without making them so smart that they can handle advanced human weapons; in the climactic fight scene on the Golden Gate Bridge the apes outpoint the humans through sheer animal instinct, improvising crude clubs and projectiles from the materials at hand rather than actually stealing the humans’ guns. Meanwhile, back at the drug company, the people in charge have given ALZ-113 to humans without realizing that it has a vicious side effect in people that it doesn’t have in apes: it gives them a plague-like disease that causes virtually certain death, though it keeps them alive long enough for them to spread the artificial virus that’s at the heart of the treatment, which turns out to be casually communicable and airborne. The movie ends not only with the apes kicking our butts in the first battle of the species but with a chilling post-credits sequence showing the speed with which modern air travel allows the disease to spread worldwide (an interesting postlude to our recent viewing of the smallpox movie The Killer That Stalked New York ­— here it’s a man-made virus that’s stalking the entire world and obviously setting up a sequel in which virtually the entire human race dies out and the apes take over).

What’s remarkable about Rise of the Planet of the Apes is that it’s consistently entertaining and gripping start-to-finish; the exposition is genuinely interesting and compelling drama and the whole piece comes off as a well-integrated, exciting movie rather than a work of action-porn with insufferably dull scenes setting up the action highlights. It’s also gratifying to see James Franco in the lead of a major-studio blockbuster; I still think the Spider-Man movies would have been better with him as Spider-Man and Tobey Maguire (who was actually considered for Franco’s role here) as his friend-turned enemy instead of the other way around — and though Franco has established an odd alternate niche playing real-life Queers in biopics (so far he’s done James Dean, Allen Ginsberg and Hart Crane!), here he’s credible as both an intellectual and an action hero (a balance most actors, especially modern ones, can’t manage) and he remains quite easy on the eyes. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is everything a modern-day blockbuster should be: a compelling premise, veiled social commentary, strong acting (the performances by the malevolent neighbor and the nasty blond guy who terrorizes Caesar at San Bruno stand out, as does Lithgow’s work as the father and the appealing Freida Pinto — and fortunately we’ve reached far enough into the 21^st century that a major movie can depict an interracial relationship and nobody either in the film or the audience makes a big deal about it!) and, above all, taut direction that never lets the excitement flag — and a total running time of 105 minutes (long enough to do the story justice, short enough not to stretch it out longer than it can sustain) rather than the 135 minutes or even longer Andy Serkis’s previous employer, Peter Jackson, would have wasted on this story if he’d been in charge.

All Over Town (Republic, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I eventually ran a movie last night, a download from archive.org called All Over Town, a 1937 film for Republic that was the second and last film made for them by the comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. “Not in the wide open spaces nor in the depths of the vast wilderness,” reads the printed foreword — thereby eliminating the two most common settings for Republic movies! — “but in a remote section of Manhattan Island struggle the last of their tribe … the true vanishing Americans.” The true vanishing Americans turn out to be vaudeville performers, living at a boarding house owned by the battle-axe Mrs. Wilson (Blanche Payson, one of those formidably butch landladies in 1930’s Hollywood movies whose fearsome demeanors made it hard to believe that there had ever been a Mr. Wilson), who’s trying to eject her newest tenants, Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (playing themselves, or at least using their own names for their characters à la Laurel and Hardy), not only for being behind on their rent but also for harboring “Sally, the World’s Only Singing Seal” (she doesn’t actually “sing,” she just bites a set of taxi horns in succession to produce something vaguely resembling a melody), who’s a key part of their act. Olsen and Johnson hear about a potential job at the Eldridge Theatre, and they and singer/songwriter/pianist Don Fletcher (Harry Stockwell, a tall, rail-thin juvenile with an oddly shaped face that probably kept him away from major stardom — he was originally slated for the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races and actually performed on the live tryout tour the Marxes did to hone the material before they made the actual film, but by the time it became a movie the better-known Allan Jones had replaced him) set out for said theatre, only to find that it’s been boarded up for two years, ever since an actor was murdered by a mysterious assailant during rehearsals for an upcoming show, and the place has acquired a reputation for being both haunted and jinxed.

The theatre is owned by Joan Eldridge (Mary Howard), who inherited it from her late father (no, he wasn’t the guy who was murdered!) but owes money on it to William Bailey (Eddie Kane, the detective from The Stolen Jools, playing essentially the kind of role Walter Woolf King and Douglass Dumbrille played in the MGM Marx Brothers movies), who’s trying to get her to sell the theatre to investor Pete Phillips (Otto Hoffman). Thanks to a conversation Don overheard at Mrs. Wilson’s, he’s convinced that Olsen and Johnson are oil millionaires, and so when they go to Joan’s theatre she thinks they have the financial wherewithal to back her in a show that will enable her to pay off the money she owes Bailey and save the theatre — only Bailey and Phillips have them investigated and find out the only money they had was $150 they got from selling a gas station they owned. The behind-the-scenes personnel — including Franklin Pangborn in a typical (for him) but still marvelous turn as an insufferably queeny costume designer (there’s a particularly funny scene in which he’s illustrated his new design to Olsen and Johnson, he says the dress is going to be “cut on the bias,” and they haven’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about) — are about to walk, and so are the cast members, when Don persuades them that the only way they have of getting paid for the work they’ve already done is to mount the show without pay and hope it hits big enough to make them what they’re owed.

The troupe demonstrates one of the show’s big numbers (a song featuring Olsen, Johnson and Sally the seal that Olsen and Johnson wrote themselves), only as the number is winding down a mystery assailant points a gun through a curtain and fires it, killing Bailey. Phillips has his men seize the sets and costumes, and when Olsen and Johnson ask how they’re going to be able to do a show without them, he sarcastically says, “Over the radio — where they can’t see you!” Olsen and Johnson take him up on the suggestion and sell a radio sponsor, MacDougal’s Mackerels, on a broadcast in which they will launch a new series by revealing Bailey’s murderer on the air — even though they have no idea who that is. At one point Olsen persuades Johnson to confess to the crime himself — they’re fearful that they are responsible, because the killing happened right as Sally, with her nose, “shot” a blank-loaded pistol as the climax of their act — only Johnson can’t get the confession straight (instead of “I killed him because he was a rat,” he keeps saying, “I killed him because I was a rat”) — and it ends with a weird scene in which the police corner the criminal (Phillips, as if you couldn’t have guessed — even though his motive remains on the obscure side) while the show’s band plays a merry tune and Olsen, like Groucho Marx at the end of Monkey Business, provides a sports-style play-by-play description of the shootout.

 All Over Town is one of those movies that seems less written than compiled from the memory banks of old-movie clichés — though Jerome Chodorov, brother of fellow writer Edward Chodorov and a man with some estimable credits in his own right, including the original 1944 documentary version of Memphis Belle and both versions of My Sister Eileen, is one of the credited writers along with Richard English, Jack Townley and “comedy construction” for James Parrott — and in his book Movie Comedy Teams Leonard Maltin says the “general reaction” to All Over Town when it was new was that compared to it, Olsen and Johnson’s previous Republic feature, Country Gentlemen, “was a gem” — but, perhaps because its plot is more trivial and therefore works better as a frame for disconnected gags than the situation comedy of Country Gentlemen, it strikes me as a much funnier movie and a better showcase for the talents of its stars. Part of the improvement may have been from the wholesale raid Republic staged on the talents that had helped make the Laurel and Hardy classics for Hal Roach — the director was James W. Horne, “comedy constructionist” James Parrott had also directed Laurel and Hardy at Roach and was the brother of Roach star Charley Chase, and to play MacDougal Republic borrowed the brilliant character comedian James Finlayson (though they put a singularly ugly toupee on him and only revealed his true baldness at the very end) — while they wisely avoided making Olsen and Johnson lovably dumb in the Laurel and Hardy manner. Republic generally husbanded their stars well — Gene Autry and Roy Rogers worked there virtually forever and they kept their biggest star of all, John Wayne, for a surprisingly long time even while he made movies for bigger studios (Wayne quit Republic in 1952 because he was tired of being assigned movies with studio owner Herbert Yates’s light-o’love, Vera Hruba Ralston) — but after the box-office disappointment of All Over Town (a title explained only in the very last scene, in which the announcer of the broadcast says that the next show in the series will be heard “all over town”) Republic fired Olsen and Johnson.

This proved to be a spectacularly ill-timed move, because just a year later, in 1938, Broadway impresario Lee Shubert hired the team to headline a comedy revue called Hellzapoppin’ that turned out to be the biggest hit of their career, a show that ran for three years and essentially anticipated the 1960’s TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In in the sheer relentlessness of its humor and the way it threw its gags at the audience both figuratively and literally from all directions. Olsen and Johnson got a film contract from Universal and shot four films for them in the early 1940’s, and while as a screen team they never reached the heights of their studio-mates Abbott and Costello, the four Universal Olsen and Johnson vehicles (Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House, Ghost Catchers and See My Lawyer) deserve reissue as a two-DVD boxed set along the lines of the first Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies. All Over Town has intimations of the no-holds-barred style of humor that later made Olsen and Johnson Broadway stars — including a routine they couldn’t have done on stage, in which, fearing that Sally the seal has swallowed the murder weapon, they take Sally and Inspector Murphy (Fred Kelsey), the police officer investigating the case, on a roller-coaster ride to get her to cough it up again (and the three homo sapiens naturally end up dizzy and nauseous while Sally eats it up and wants to stay on the roller-coaster!) — as well as the wince-inducing puns that are funny in spite of themselves: when Olsen announces that Sally was born on Christmas day, Johnson says, “Yeah, she’s a Christmas seal.”

The Killer That Stalked New York (Columbia, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Charles and I watched last night was The Killer That Stalked New York, a 1950 thriller with definite noir overtones, released five and one-half months after the movie Panic in the Streets and basically the same plot — only instead of New Orleans, it’s New York; and instead of plague, it’s smallpox. According to a Variety report at the time, the two films were sufficiently similar that Columbia, which made The Killer That Stalked New York, deliberately held it back until the run of Fox’s Panic in the Streets was finished. Like Panic in the Streets, The Killer That Stalked New York (originally shot under the title Frightened City) deals with a criminal who unknowingly brings a fatal disease and the germ that causes it into a major metropolitan area — though in this case it’s a woman, nightclub singer Sheila Bennett (Evelyn Keyes), who has just got back to New York from a trip to Cuba, where she’s been given two large, uncut diamonds as part of a criminal plot masterminded by her husband, Matt Krane (Charles Korvin), who’s also her accompanist at the club where she works. Unbeknownst to her, while Sheila was in Cuba she also contracted a case of smallpox, which she’s been unknowingly spreading to just about everyone she comes in contact with — and also unbeknownst to Sheila, her husband Matt is having an affair with her sister, Francie (a nice performance by Lola Albright), and Matt plans to abscond with all the money from the diamond caper and leave both Bennett girls high and dry.

Sheila is being traced by Treasury agents because she’s a smuggler, and also by Dr. Ben Wood (William Bishop) and other staff members of the New York City Health Department because she’s the vector for an impending smallpox epidemic — though they don’t know who the carrier is and neither the Treasury agents nor the health officials are in touch with each other (a premonition of the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks because the various government agencies who each had pieces of the puzzle weren’t communicating). Panic in the Streets is a good deal better known than The Killer That Stalked New York, partly because it had a “name” director, Elia Kazan — the director of Killer, Earl McEvoy, only made two other feature films (more’s the pity, as he’s quite good) — and a “name” star, Richard Widmark as the doctor trying to stop the epidemic. But though it has its overwrought moments, Killer is actually a subtler, more sinister and less action-driven movie. Working from a script by Harry Essex based on a Collier’s magazine article by Milton Lehman — which in turn was based on an actual smallpox scare in New York in 1946, in which (as happens in the movie) the city government massively mobilized to vaccinate millions of people within days — McEvoy constructs a marvelously staged movie with silent scenes showing exactly how much contact people in a large city have with other people they don’t actually know.

One of the movie’s most powerful scene takes place at a park drinking fountain: Sheila Bennett, looking visibly the worse for wear even if Columbia’s makeup department drew back from accurately depicting a person in late-stage smallpox (the only actual pox we see on Evelyn Keyes are a few small lesions under her neck when she pulls down the neck of her shirt in a late scene; had Bette Davis starred in this movie, she would probably have shoved pictures of actual smallpox victims in front of her makeup artist and said, “Hey, make me up to look like that,” but Keyes wasn’t about to do that and didn’t have the clout with the studio to get away with something like that even if she’d wanted to), takes a drink from the fountain and then two kids fight over the opportunity to be the next to drink from it … and of course we in the audience want them both to lose. Though it’s only 79 minutes long, Killer gives the sense of a surprisingly slow film even though it’s about a quickly spreading epidemic, and it helps that (unlike Richard Widmark, whose performance in Panic in the Streets sometimes looked like Tommy Udo, his sinister hit-man in Kiss of Death, had somehow gone to school and got a medical degree) William Bishop actually looks like we expect a public-health doctor, and acts like we expect one to act.

What’s also interesting is how much The Killer That Stalked New York is a Zeitgeist movie, made when most Americans still believed their government could respond to an emergency quickly and believably, and when they wanted you to do something way out of your way (like get an instant vaccination against smallpox), you shouldn’t argue: you should just do it. There is a brief montage that acknowledges the existence of an anti-vaccine movement then (though it was probably a good deal smaller than it is now), but anything they have to say is swept aside not only by the filmmakers but their characters as well: in the movie, New Yorkers readily flock to public clinics, fire stations, police offices, the Salvation Army and wherever else the vaccine was being administered and eagerly get it. What’s more, the private sector is depicted as equally efficient: when the threat begins New York has easy access to 4 million doses of vaccine, and while that’s only enough for half the population, when the city runs out the drug companies work with the government to get new supplies to the city as fast as they can be made, and without holding them up for some insane amount of money the way a drug company would today!

The film is, among other things, a tribute to public health officers, and certainly endorses the idea that doctors should have virtually unlimited power to act in case of a health emergency, and the rest of us should just assume that they know what they’re doing and go along with it, without question. The final sequences are over-the-top melodramatically — the last confrontation occurs on a ledge of a tall building, where for some incomprehensible reason Matt Krane has murdered his jewel cutter, Anthony Moss (Art Smith), and Sheila confronts him there — the doctors in the story explain that something she feels she has to do before she croaks is literally keeping her alive and allowing her to make it through to the final reel while many people she contacted have already died — and threatens him, though he actually takes a tumble off the ledge and the disease finally claims her — but until then, and despite the stentorian tone of the narration (which is a lot more moralistic about disease transmission than the movie itself), The Killer That Stalked New York is a film to be reckoned with and one well worth watching.

Here Is Germany (U.S., 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I ran Here Is Germany, a U.S. propaganda film that I recently downloaded from archive.org, along with quite a lot of material on Hitler, the Nazis and World War II — some of it posted from a Holocaust denier who argued that Hitler was really a Zionist (which is not quite as crazy as it sounds: Adolf Eichmann said that within the Nazi circles he originally argued for deporting the Jews as an alternative to killing them — though he wanted to settle them in Madagascar, not Palestine — but when Hitler and Eichmann’s direct superiors, Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, ordered extermination as a policy Eichmann enthusiastically went along and implemented it) and even posted the infamous propaganda film The Führer Gives the Jews a City — about the so-called “model” concentration camp at Theresienstadt, virtually all of whose inmates were sent to Auschwitz as soon as the filming was finished — and presented it at face value! Of course, Here Is Germany was produced by the U.S. to prepare its soldiers for the postwar occupation of Germany (though, according to whoever posted it to archive.org, it was never actually used for that purpose), and it was directed by Frank Capra and written by him and Anthony Veiller (who also narrated) with quite a different perspective and propagandistic intent.

It begins with a series of bucolic images of Germany’s beauty, both natural and architectural, and footage of ordinary Germans in the streets and on the farm (there’s a marvelous Millet-like image of a German farmer sowing seeds by hand) — and then the narrator’s tone turns a lot nastier (indeed, the voice sounds so different I’m not sure whether it was Veiller or someone else) as the film cuts to images of the death camps, the victims who were killed and the incredibly emaciated but barely alive ones who were found when the camps were opened, along with footage of the war itself and other clips documenting Germany’s evil. What’s most fascinating about this movie is that it treats the Nazis not as an aberration in German history but as merely the latest in a series of German leaders who have pushed the idea that Germans are the world’s “master race,” that they have the right to rule the world, and they have the right to start wars and grab anyone else’s land that they can in order to extend German rule as far as possible no matter how much “collateral damage” that does to anyone else. The Capra-Veiller narration traces this strain in German history from Frederick the Great through Otto von Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, whom it describes not as a natural leader or organizer but as a mere stooge of the German Junkers, the Prussian nobility and military class, who had preached German superiority and world domination for generations but needed a front to hide behind when they sought power again after Germany’s defeat of World War I and the resulting Treaty of Versailles.

This was actually quite a common, indeed mainstream, position in American ideology as World War II wound down and was clearly going to result in an Allied victory — on one of Kino on Video’s DVD’s of Erich von Stroheim’s films there was a bonus track, a 1944 U.S. government-sponsored radio broadcast called “The High Command” in which Stroheim played a leader in the Prussian High Command which was plotting ways to stay in power even after the defeat of the Nazi regime. It was reflected most powerfully in the so-called Morgenthau Plan — after Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin Roosevelt — which called for returning Germany to a pre-industrial state of civilization and allowing it to be only an agricultural and “pastoral” country. The narration for this film argues that the Weimar Republic had failed because Germans simply weren’t capable of democracy; it also states that one of the big mistakes the winners of World War I had made was allowing the German army to march back into Berlin and Germany’s other major cities in triumph, as if it had won the war instead of losing it, and argues that this was the basis of the “stab in the back” myth that German arms could have won the war if corrupt “democratic” politicians hadn’t sold it and the country out. It contrasts the footage of the German army marching through German cities at the end of World War I with the footage of Allied occupiers marching through German cities at the end of World War II. Here Is Germany sometimes engages in the unwitting hypocrisy many propagandists fall into — when it depicts the Nazi takeover it shows the Nazis burning books (footage Joseph Goebbels, in one of his rare propaganda miscalculations, made sure was distributed worldwide in hopes the world would be impressed by the Nazis’ resolution — instead people outside Germany were horrified) and we’re clearly meant to disapprove, while at the end it shows the occupation forces burning Nazi flags and regalia and we’re meant to approve.

What’s interesting about this is how quickly the line changed, especially as the Soviet Union emerged as the principal threat to the U.S. in the postwar world and America’s rulers decided that a strong, non-Nazi, non-Communist conservative German state would be a necessary buffer between the U.S.S.R. and the rest of Western Europe — so the Allies, especially the Americans, pulled back on the harsh anti-German measures this film was advocating. They cancelled the war-crimes trials after 1952, they let ex-Nazis back into the (West) German government and they gave up on trying to hold the Germans accountable for punishing their war criminals. (I recently read Neal Bascomb’s Hunting Eichmann, which included the explanation that the reason Eichmann wasn’t prosecuted by West Germany was that, though there was at least one aggressive state’s attorney who wanted to, he couldn’t trust the justice system in general not to let Eichmann off and even to sympathize with him on some level.) On one hand the new line worked — West Germany became a functioning and long-lasting representative democracy, and when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 it absorbed the former East Germany with some economic dislocations but a smooth transition politically — and on the other hand, West Germany (the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the formal name of the West German state pre-1990 and of all Germany now) built its economy so successfully that its current chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been successful to do with purely economic means what Bismarck, Wilhelm II and Hitler failed to do by force of arms: namely, subject all Europe (at least that part of it that uses the Euro currency) to German control.

Country Gentlemen (Republic, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I dredged up something I’d downloaded from archive.org last August: Country Gentlemen, a 1936 film from Republic that starred the vaudeville comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, helpfully identified with their photos in the film’s opening credits so we can tell which one is which. The American Film Institute Catalog identifies this as their first film — which it wasn’t: they’d made three for Warner Bros. in 1930-31 (Oh! Sailor Behave, Fifty Million Frenchmen and Gold Dust Gertie) — though it’s a considerably better movie than Gold Dust Gertie, the only one of their Warners films I’ve actually seen. In 1938 Olsen and Johnson would break through to a much bigger audience with their Broadway hit Hellzapoppin’, which was essentially a nonpolitical live version of the later TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and they would make four films for Universal in the early to mid-1940’s (Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House, Ghost Catchers and See My Lawyer) that would be well worth reviving as a two-DVD boxed set.

 Country Gentlemen is a surprisingly dark comedy that casts Olsen and Johnson as a couple of swindlers, J. D. Hamilton and Charlie Williams, who in the opening scene are forced to flee New York City ahead of the police, who are about to arrest them and shut down their phony gold-mining operation. At one point Hamilton tells Williams their gold-mine bonds aren’t going to be worth anything until 50 million years; then he says they won’t be worth anything until 15 million years, and Williams said, “That’s a relief. I thought you said 50 million years.” They drive cross-country with their former secretary, Gertie (Joyce Compton), and Gertie’s dog Snuffy (played by “Prince, the Great Dane” — I joked that in his next movie he was billed as “the dog formerly known as Prince”), stowing away in their convertible, and they end up on the outskirts of Los Angeles in a town called Chesterville, whose main attraction for the con artists is a large veterans’ hospital with a lot of veterans who have just received their bonus checks, which Our Anti-Heroes are predictably anxious to relieve them of.

They also meet widow Louise Heath (Lila Lee, mother of A Chorus Line writer James Kirkwood, Jr.) and her son Billy (Sammy McKim), and they start drilling an oil well outside of town, never expecting actually to strike oil — though of course they do, and while they’ve sold the entire oil well to the veterans, their gold bonds also turn out to be for a genuinely valuable and productive mine — thereby providing a predictably happy ending for a comedy that otherwise is surprisingly dark, notably in the scenes towards the end in which the angry veterans, sure that Hamilton and Williams have stolen all their money, advance on them in an angry mob and actually string them up to poles, ready to lynch them, until one of the veterans throws a stick of dynamite down the supposedly dry-hole oil well, causing it to gusher. The film steals from a lot of other comedians, including Laurel and Hardy (when I saw Gold Dust Gertie one of my reflections was how much funnier that film would have been with Laurel and Hardy in it — though Country Gentlemen wouldn’t have worked with Stan and Ollie because the characters needed to be sharp, not stupid) and the Marx Brothers, but it’s still quite charming and amusing, and Lila Lee turns in a sensitive, sympathetic performance as the decent woman caught up in the stars’ schemes that makes one wonder why her career went downhill so fast when sound came in.

Vienna Philharmonic 2012 New Year's Concert (ORF, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, which we’d seen a bit of on PBS New Year’s night in the American version — cut down from the over two-hour full length of the European broadcast from ORF (the legal name of Austria’s public radio and TV network — the initials stand for “Österreichischer Rundfunk,” “Österreich” being the actual German name of Austria and “Rundfunk” being the German word for “broadcasting”) to fit an hour and a half time slot and with an annoyingly chirpy narration by Julie Andrews — who seems to have got the job simply because her most famous movie, The Sound of Music, is set in Austria (but in Salzburg, not Vienna!). The version we watched last night was a download from France, so there was an added narration by a male, unseen on screen, in French — which got a bit annoying, especially for the numbers when there was no on-screen identification of the piece they were playing.

As usual, the concert was dedicated almost entirely to the music of the Strauss family: Johann Strauss, Sr. (referred to in the credits as “Johann Strauss, der Vater”) and his sons Johann Jr. (the Strauss, the famous one who wrote “The Blue Danube,” “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” “Artist’s Life,” et al.), Josef and Eduard. (There was even a Johann Strauss III, who also composed light music, but he wasn’t Johann, Jr.’s son: he was Eduard’s!) All told, three of the pieces were by Johann, Sr. (including the “Radetzky March,” the official march of the Austrian military, which always closes the program — the audience is invited to clap along in time and the conductor, Mariss Jansons, spent as much time during this number conducting the audience as conducting the musicians; Charles marveled at how a bunch of white Europeans can clap in unison to a piece of music, a skill which seems to elude white Americans!), seven by Johann, Jr. (including the “Blue Danube,” which is always the next-to-last piece on the program: the ritual is that the conductor plays the first few bars, then stops, then turns to the audience and says, “The Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish you a — ” and then the orchestra says in unison, “Prosit Neujahr!,” which means — as if you couldn’t guess — “Happy New Year!”), five by Josef, one by Eduard (though not based on themes original with him; it was a twisted sequence of themes from Bizet’s Carmen shoehorned into a quadrille rhythm), two by Johann, Jr. and Josef in collaboration and four by other people.

In some ways the non-Strauss pieces were among the best items on the program: they included a “Wiener Bürger” piece by Carl Michael Ziehrer, a “Danse Diabolique” by Joseph Hellmesberger, “Copenhagen Steam Railway Galop” by Danish composer Hans Christian Lumbye (whose last name is pronounced “Loom-BEE” — I’d always thought it was “Loom-BYE” but I was wrong) — for which the orchestra’s percussion section got to play with whistles, sandpaper, woodblocks and other accoutrements designed to duplicate the sound of an incoming train (much the same stuff as a radio effects department would have used to do an incoming train during the golden age of radio drama) while the video portion was actual footage of a Copenhagen steam train (most of the cut-in footage was pretty pointless but this was really charming!) and what was by far, musically, the best piece on the program: the panorama and waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. The Strauss family’s fare was effective light music — Johann, Jr.’s unquestioned gift for great tunes has been keeping their legend in business for over a century now — but they rather got shown up as only light-music composers by the inclusion of something by a real master like Tchaikovsky. (Some day I hope a conductor decides to do a really radical number on the Viennese waltz tradition and program Ravel’s “La Valse” — his grim satire on the whole Viennese waltz legend, written while Austria and France were on opposite sides in World War I — at one of these concerts. It would certainly sweep away some cobwebs!)

The conductor was Mariss Jansons, a Latvian-born conductor who came into the world in 1943 after his father and brother had been killed by the Nazis in the ghetto in Riga; since Latvia was annexed to the Soviet Union during the war, he had to come up through the Soviet musical bureaucracy (he was offered an assistant position by Herbert von Karajan in 1969, but the Soviet authorities made sure he never heard of the offer) and he didn’t definitively leave until 1979, when he was offered the directorship of the Oslo Philharmonic — curiously, his Wikipedia page says he and his second wife Irina now live in Saint Petersburg, but doesn’t specify whether that’s the one in Russia or in Florida! (He’s worked in the U.S. as well as Europe, so either is possible.) He conducted the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert once before, in 2006, and judging from his performance this year he seems competent enough without being a supreme master of the Viennese style — and he’s also a man with a surprisingly malevolent-looking face: at the start of one number he looked like the wolf about to eat Little Red Riding Hood and at the start of another I joked that he was saying to the musicians, “And if any one of you makes a mistake, I’ll eat you.” Also it was interesting that the concert featured as many polkas as it did waltzes — one doesn’t think of Vienna as having a great polka tradition, and indeed a Strauss family polka doesn’t sound much like “She’s Too Fat” and the other cornball songs that have given polkas a bad name together, but through the craftsmanship of the Strauss orchestrations one can hear the polka rhythms.

My favorite versions of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (to give it its full-length title) remain the Victor 78 by Ormandy and the Deutsche Grammophon LP version by Karajan (the latter the one that was used for the space-flight scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey); after hearing this piece for years chopped and channeled into a trivial bit of salon music, it was a revelation to hear these versions, in the original Johann Strauss, Jr. orchestration and at the full length he wrote, and hear that the piece is really a miniature tone poem in three-quarter time (and it’s hardly Johann Strauss, Jr.’s fault that in the 20^th century the Danube — the “Donau,” to use its German name — ceased to be beautiful or blue and became one of the dirtiest, most polluted rivers on earth). Janssons’ version was good but hardly at the Ormandy or Karajan level (remember that Ormandy and Karajan came from the two leading states within the Austro-Hungarian empire — Karajan was Austrian and Ormandy, originally named Jenö Blau, was Hungarian!); he tended to take the fast parts too fast and the slow parts too slow — but the piece still made its effect even though the video portion was a rather banal ballet routine: I’d have much rather we stayed in the concert hall (the legendary Musikvereinsaal) and watched the Vienna Philharmonic play one of its trademark works! There was another ballet sequence elsewhere in the program with three men and three women, all of whom looked excessively nellie — I joked that the program director had probably told the queeniest (and cutest!) of the young men, the one with black hair in a pudding-bowl cut, “Can you at least make it look like you like girls?”

When I first started watching these concerts on TV — back when Walter Cronkite was still around to narrate the PBS versions — he went on and on and on about how tradition-bound the programming was and I wondered just how the people could stand performing such a concert when the rules were so specific about what they could or couldn’t play when — but I’ve come to enjoy and look forward to them as a New Year’s tradition and evidence that New Year’s music can be something a little more substantial than Guy Lombardo’s arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” and an assortment of banal modern-day pop acts (for their 1993 New Year’s concert MTV presented Nirvana, but mostly the “rock” New Year’s shows go for the most trivial modern-day rock and pop music instead of the best), even though some of the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s concerts have offered still more substantial fare (this year they did Bernstein and Gershwin, but I recall an especially beautiful show in which they did an all-French program and rang in the new year with a spectacular performance of Ravel’s “Bolero”!).