by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Larceny on
the Air, a product of the
short-lived interregnum between Mascot Studio and its successor, Republic
Pictures. Republic was formed in 1935 by Herbert Yates, owner of Consolidated
Film Industries, which didn’t make pictures but was actually the film
developing lab used by virtually all companies who couldn’t afford to maintain
one on their own sites. Several independent companies, including Mascot and
Monogram as well as Liberty Pictures, Majestic Pictures, Chesterfield Pictures
and Invincible Pictures, were into Yates for a lot of money for film developing
they hadn’t paid for, and so Yates forced their owners to sell him their
studios or risk him foreclosing on them. Monogram was the largest company Yates
absorbed this way but Mascot had the most technically sophisticated studio
plant, so Yates based his new operation at the Mascot site (which previously
had been Mack Sennett’s studio) and used Mascot production chief Nat Levine to
run Republic — only Levine bailed after the first year and took with him a $1
million payment for Mascot which he apparently blew on bad horse-racing bets.
W. Ray Johnston left the Republic combine and reactivated Monogram in 1937, but
Larceny on the Air was one
of the films Levine produced during his one year as Republic studio head (along
with the Marion Talley vehicle Follow Your Heart and the first Dick Tracy serial). It’s one of those films (originally
released at 60 to 67 minutes but now extant only in a 52-minute version cut
down from the original for release to TV stations in the 1950’s) that has
nothing particularly original about it but is still good entertainment despite
its predictability.
The star is Robert Livingston, who generally appeared in
Republic’s Westerns (the company’s mainstay), including as the leader of “The
Three Mesquiteers” (when he left that series he was replaced by another
Republic contractee, John Wayne), but this time out got a modern-dress role as
Dr. Lawrence Baxter, who has a one-hour per week radio show on which he exposes
potentially dangerous patent medicines, particularly ones containing radium as
an ingredient. He singles out an alleged rejuvenation pill sold by a company
owned by Kennedy (Pierre Watkin), who along with his attorney Thompson (Wilbur
Mack) has been careful to stay just barely on the right side of the law,
avoiding making out-and-out health claims for the product and relying on
consumer testimonials for most of his advertising. Dr. Baxter is convinced that
if he can find one consumer who’s actually been harmed by the product — preferably a long-time user who
has got radium poisoning and had no other risk factor for it (like working for
a paint company or a watch company — well into my childhood watches with
glow-in-the-dark hands and numbers painted with radium were still being sold) —
he can bust Kennedy’s company. But in the meantime Kennedy and Thompson go to
the owner of Dr. Baxter’s station and buy out his time slot, putting him off
the air — until Dr. Baxter gets a visit from Jean Sterling (Grace Bradley,
attractive and with the appealing spunkiness of a lot of female leads in
Republic’s serials), who says her dad, Professor Rexford Sterling (Granville
Bates), is willing to finance a daily program for Dr. Baxter on another station with the earnings from his
magazine, Your Good Health.
The moment we see Prof. Sterling holding a copy of his magazine (with a
hot-looking drawing of a presumably healthy male on the cover) and get that
writers Endré Boehm and Richard English have modeled him on the real-life
“health” publisher and tabloid sleaze artist Bernarr MacFadden, we know that
his offer to Dr. Baxter is too good to be true. Later we learn just what the
professor and his comic-relief sidekick Jimmy (Smiley Burnette, who was just
barely tolerable as Gene Autry’s sidekick in Republic Westerns but is way too hard to take as a comic-relief villain!) are up to: they go to the companies making
radium-based products that Dr. Baxter blasts on the air and extorts advertising
from them by saying they can stop the attacks on them from Dr. Baxter. Dr.
Baxter learns this and, rather than virtuously refuse to go along with it — as
Jean, who hadn’t known about her dad’s misdeeds until Dr. Baxter briefed her
about them, had expected him to — he demands half the proceeds. Of course it’s
all a trick, worked out by Dr. Baxter and his friend, FBI agent “Mac” McDonald
(Willard Robertson), to allow Dr. Baxter to infiltrate Kennedy’s operation and
bring it down from within. Meanwhile, Kennedy and Thompson kidnap the
radium-poisoning victim Dr. Baxter found, Pete Andorca (Byron Foulger, for once
not playing a criminal
sidekick himself), and take him to a house in the country that’s part of
Kennedy’s far-flung headquarters — another one of Kennedy’s establishments is
an open-to-the-public enterprise called the “Restorium” which features a vegan menu
and a dance band, and where Dr. Baxter goes (with a disgusted Jean in tow) to
sell Kennedy on his latest brainstorm, a common-cold remedy containing radium.
Only Dr. Baxter is “outed” when, acting on a tip from him, McDonald arrests the
black-market dealer from whom Kennedy was going to acquire the radium, and
there’s a series of confrontations in which Kennedy accidentally kills his own
man, Andrews (William Newell) — whom Dr. Baxter tricked into revealing where
the gang was hiding Pete Andorca by convincing Andrews that he himself was sick
with radium poisoning and the only cure was a serum for which Dr. Baxter needed
Andorca’s blood — and the police arrive just in time to take out Kennedy’s
hired gunman before he can take out the good guys. Kennedy is arrested and
Prof. Sterling promises to start a new magazine and run it on the up-and-up
this time, and of course Dr. Baxter and Jean get together. It’s not much of a
movie — though there’s a certain degree of novelty in the use of radium-laced
medicines as the MacGuffin (the only other movie I can think of offhand from
this era that used dangerous pharmaceuticals was the 1934 Warners film The
Big Shakedown, and that was different:
the bad guys were making ineffective counterfeit versions of genuinely efficacious
drugs and their victims were dying because they thought their diseases were being treated when they really
weren’t) and Charles liked the gimmick towards the end in which Dr. Baxter
alerted the police to the fact that they were being held by the bad guys by
writing a message to a pharmacist, disguised as a prescription, and writing the
warning in Latin. Larceny on the Air is a clever movie and it’s a lot of fun — and somehow Robert Livingston
out of Western drag is a matter-of-fact everyman sort of hero one can believe
in, while Grace Bradley shows potential for better roles she didn’t end up
getting, while the direction by veteran character actor Irving Pichel, like the movie itself, is unoriginal and uninspired but workmanlike and still entertaining.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
China Venture (Columbia, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was China Venture, a 1953 Columbia “B” (though fairly long — 83 minutes) war movie directed by Don Siegel, who said in his book-length interview with Stuart Kaminsky that it was his first time working at Columbia and everyone he knew warned him about Columbia’s notoriously tyrannical studio head, Harry Cohn. As things turned out, Siegel found Cohn far less tyrannical than his reputation — “To me, he was a pussycat compared to Jack Warner,” he told Kaminsky (reflecting Siegel’s long years in the Warners’ salt mines as their montage specialist and ultimately director first of shorts and then of two features before he was let go in Warners’ great purge of 1949, during which Jack Warner also fired John Huston and Jean Negulesco and decided the future of his studio lay with Doris Day and her big, splashy Technicolor musicals) — and his big problem with this film was with its star, Edmond O’Brien. Siegel liked to get his casts together just before shooting for a start-to-finish out-loud read-through of the entire script — it was his way of getting the actors comfortable with their characters and the overall arc of the story, and also it gave the actors the opportunity to ask for dialogue changes without having to use up valuable (and expensive) shooting time — and he was angry with O’Brien when O’Brien refused to participate. Later Siegel found out why: O’Brien was nearly blind from cataracts and he couldn’t actually read a script himself. Instead, every night during a shoot, he would have his wife read him the scenes he was supposed to film the next day and he would learn his lines from her reading them to him. O’Brien was scared shitless that word of his disability would leak out and he’d lose parts because of it.
China Venture is a pretty standard-issue war movie, set in 1944 during World War II — when the Chinese were still our allies instead of our bitter, mysterious “Red Chinese” enemies (San Francisco Chronicle satirical columnist Art Hoppe once did a marvelous column about a Rip Van Winkle going to sleep in 1948 and waking up in 1968 and finding out that China was now our enemy, Japan our friend, and that two men named Wallace and McCarthy were running for president but it was Wallace who was the Right-winger and McCarthy the progressive) but China was not only facing Japanese occupation but still in the middle of a three-way civil war between the Nationalists (Kuomintang), the Communists and a large number of free-lance warlords who controlled a large part of the country. The plot deals with a Japanese plane that crash-lands in the territory of warlord Wu King (Leon Askin), whose forces kill the rest of its crew but keep alive its highest-value passenger, Japanese Admiral Amara (Philip Ahn, who probably resented the fact that though he was actually Chinese he was still being cast as a Japanese military official eight years after World War II had ended!), in the hope that he can start a bidding war between the Americans (who want to fly Amara to Washington and debrief him on what U.S. forces might be up against in an invasion of Japan) and the Japanese and get the highest ransom he can for the admiral. An American Marine unit headed by Captain Matt Reardon (Edmond O’Brien) finds out about this when a runner from Wu King’s forces arrives at his camp and tells him; Reardon reports this to his commanders and they decide to send out a team to capture Amara, bring him back to health and move him out — only they decide that since he’s ill they’re going to send out a doctor, Dr. Masterson (Dayton Lummis), and a supply of surgical gear, and they’re going to put a Navy commander, Bert Thompson (Barry Sullivan), in charge of the mission. They head for the coast and pick up the extra personnel from a submarine, then are strafed by Japanese Zero fighters as they try to row the boats from the sub to land.
The doctor turns out to have brought along his assistant, and there’s the usual “You’re a woman!” gag when she turns out to be a double-X’er, Lieutenant Ellen Wilkins (Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister — who for my money totally out-acts her brother: she delivers her lines in a clean, crisp voice that renders every one of them understandable and proves that Marlon’s infamous mumbling was not a family trait, and her performance is dignified, assertive and blessedly free of the “Method” quirks that usually sunk Marlon’s work, even in such well-regarded projects as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront), something we’d just seen in the first Jungle Jim movie and could have done without seeing again. The intrepid little commando band sets out into the jungle (actually all-too-familiar “B” movie locations, including some we recognized from Republic Westerns and serials) and they get it from all sides; not only have the Japanese struck their base camp while they were at the sub, killing the guide who was supposed to lead them to Amara and booby-trapping the compound (including one explosion triggered when a radio, blasting Tokyo Rose’s swing-music program full-blast, is turned off), but it seems like they even have the weather booby-trapped: when Rearden encounters a spider web with a tarantula inside (a mistake because tarantulas don’t spin webs), he hacks at it with a machete and immediately a lightning storm starts that ends up with the crew being totally drenched with rain. They finally make it to the site of the plane crash with the $10,000 in cash Wu King’s lieutenant, Chang Sung (Richard Loo, who at least got to play his real-life Chinese ethnicity but was still being cast as a villain!), negotiated as the price for Amara, only Wu King himself shows up, heralded by a drum corps that makes it seem as if he’d seen a Nelson Eddy movie and thought it would be a really cool idea to be a musical warlord — especially when he holds the unit hostage and makes them drink and sing, telling them in the meantime that he’s decided to up the price and ask for $50,000 more before he’ll allow the Americans to take Amara … otherwise he’ll sell him to the waiting Japanese instead.
This leaves the crew with the difficult task of actually getting Wu King the money; today a warlord would have a numbered Swiss bank account and could be paid off with a wire transfer, but either that technology didn’t exist during World War II (actually the Internet may not have existed but wire transfers of money were actually pretty routine) or Wu King doesn’t have it. Instead he insists that the U.S. servicemembers must stay with him as his “guests” until he actually gets the cash on hand — only Reardon talks him into sending some of his own men to the beach with the unit and the disabled Amara and leaving one of their soldiers as a hostage. At first Wu King wants Ellen Wilkins to be the hostage — and there’s the expected sinister glint in his eye that lets us know why he wants it to be the woman — but later on he’s willing to settle for Commander Thompson, who’s given a bottle of mineral oil by Dr. Masterson in the hope it will allow him to survive Wu King’s drinking bouts without becoming drunk or incapacitated. In the end the Japanese arrive and kill Thompson, who manages to shoot Wu King for his treachery just before the Japanese off him, but the rest of the unit gets to shore safely and there’s a weird postlude containing stock footage of the atomic bomb tests and O’Brien as narrator explaining that thanks to Amara’s information, the U.S. knew that the Japanese would fight an invasion of their home islands to the death and therefore the only way we could end the war without an invasion was to use the atomic bomb. (The script even quotes former President Truman to that effect, offering his well-known justifications for O.K.’ing the bomb; in the last two decades of his life, between his leaving the presidency and his death, Truman said that was one decision of his administration he’d never had any doubts about — discomfiting a lot of progressive Democrats who otherwise admired him.)
China Venture is a workmanlike “B” made by people who went on to biggers and betters — not only director Siegel but cinematographer Sam Leavitt, who shortly would be given the assignment to shoot the George Cukor/Judy Garland/James Mason version of A Star Is Born — it’s not as obsessive as it might have been with John Huston or Sam Fuller directing (though set in the Korean War, Fuller’s The Steel Helmet is a similarly plotted but much more intense movie) but there’s an air of professional competence about it, a movie made by people who were doing a job as efficiently as possible about people who were doing a job as efficiently as possible. The producer was Anson Bond (I couldn’t resist the obvious joke, “Bond … Anson Bond”), who also wrote the story, though two other writers, George Worthing Yates and Richard Collins, did the script — and aside from a love scene between Edmond O’Brien and Jocelyn Brando which I could have done without, it’s a well-constructed story even though it’s a bit surprising that after all the trouble the unit had getting to the plane crash site, they don’t seem to experience any difficulties getting back again (but then the film was getting long and Columbia no doubt had set a strict limit on its allowable running time, so it had to end in a hurry) — and overall China Venture is a good but unmemorable movie that gives O’Brien a good showcase (and knowing that he was virtually blind it’s amazing how well he maneuvers through the “jungle” locations!) and provides reliable entertainment even though on the quality list of war movies it’s pretty much in the middle.
The film was China Venture, a 1953 Columbia “B” (though fairly long — 83 minutes) war movie directed by Don Siegel, who said in his book-length interview with Stuart Kaminsky that it was his first time working at Columbia and everyone he knew warned him about Columbia’s notoriously tyrannical studio head, Harry Cohn. As things turned out, Siegel found Cohn far less tyrannical than his reputation — “To me, he was a pussycat compared to Jack Warner,” he told Kaminsky (reflecting Siegel’s long years in the Warners’ salt mines as their montage specialist and ultimately director first of shorts and then of two features before he was let go in Warners’ great purge of 1949, during which Jack Warner also fired John Huston and Jean Negulesco and decided the future of his studio lay with Doris Day and her big, splashy Technicolor musicals) — and his big problem with this film was with its star, Edmond O’Brien. Siegel liked to get his casts together just before shooting for a start-to-finish out-loud read-through of the entire script — it was his way of getting the actors comfortable with their characters and the overall arc of the story, and also it gave the actors the opportunity to ask for dialogue changes without having to use up valuable (and expensive) shooting time — and he was angry with O’Brien when O’Brien refused to participate. Later Siegel found out why: O’Brien was nearly blind from cataracts and he couldn’t actually read a script himself. Instead, every night during a shoot, he would have his wife read him the scenes he was supposed to film the next day and he would learn his lines from her reading them to him. O’Brien was scared shitless that word of his disability would leak out and he’d lose parts because of it.
China Venture is a pretty standard-issue war movie, set in 1944 during World War II — when the Chinese were still our allies instead of our bitter, mysterious “Red Chinese” enemies (San Francisco Chronicle satirical columnist Art Hoppe once did a marvelous column about a Rip Van Winkle going to sleep in 1948 and waking up in 1968 and finding out that China was now our enemy, Japan our friend, and that two men named Wallace and McCarthy were running for president but it was Wallace who was the Right-winger and McCarthy the progressive) but China was not only facing Japanese occupation but still in the middle of a three-way civil war between the Nationalists (Kuomintang), the Communists and a large number of free-lance warlords who controlled a large part of the country. The plot deals with a Japanese plane that crash-lands in the territory of warlord Wu King (Leon Askin), whose forces kill the rest of its crew but keep alive its highest-value passenger, Japanese Admiral Amara (Philip Ahn, who probably resented the fact that though he was actually Chinese he was still being cast as a Japanese military official eight years after World War II had ended!), in the hope that he can start a bidding war between the Americans (who want to fly Amara to Washington and debrief him on what U.S. forces might be up against in an invasion of Japan) and the Japanese and get the highest ransom he can for the admiral. An American Marine unit headed by Captain Matt Reardon (Edmond O’Brien) finds out about this when a runner from Wu King’s forces arrives at his camp and tells him; Reardon reports this to his commanders and they decide to send out a team to capture Amara, bring him back to health and move him out — only they decide that since he’s ill they’re going to send out a doctor, Dr. Masterson (Dayton Lummis), and a supply of surgical gear, and they’re going to put a Navy commander, Bert Thompson (Barry Sullivan), in charge of the mission. They head for the coast and pick up the extra personnel from a submarine, then are strafed by Japanese Zero fighters as they try to row the boats from the sub to land.
The doctor turns out to have brought along his assistant, and there’s the usual “You’re a woman!” gag when she turns out to be a double-X’er, Lieutenant Ellen Wilkins (Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister — who for my money totally out-acts her brother: she delivers her lines in a clean, crisp voice that renders every one of them understandable and proves that Marlon’s infamous mumbling was not a family trait, and her performance is dignified, assertive and blessedly free of the “Method” quirks that usually sunk Marlon’s work, even in such well-regarded projects as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront), something we’d just seen in the first Jungle Jim movie and could have done without seeing again. The intrepid little commando band sets out into the jungle (actually all-too-familiar “B” movie locations, including some we recognized from Republic Westerns and serials) and they get it from all sides; not only have the Japanese struck their base camp while they were at the sub, killing the guide who was supposed to lead them to Amara and booby-trapping the compound (including one explosion triggered when a radio, blasting Tokyo Rose’s swing-music program full-blast, is turned off), but it seems like they even have the weather booby-trapped: when Rearden encounters a spider web with a tarantula inside (a mistake because tarantulas don’t spin webs), he hacks at it with a machete and immediately a lightning storm starts that ends up with the crew being totally drenched with rain. They finally make it to the site of the plane crash with the $10,000 in cash Wu King’s lieutenant, Chang Sung (Richard Loo, who at least got to play his real-life Chinese ethnicity but was still being cast as a villain!), negotiated as the price for Amara, only Wu King himself shows up, heralded by a drum corps that makes it seem as if he’d seen a Nelson Eddy movie and thought it would be a really cool idea to be a musical warlord — especially when he holds the unit hostage and makes them drink and sing, telling them in the meantime that he’s decided to up the price and ask for $50,000 more before he’ll allow the Americans to take Amara … otherwise he’ll sell him to the waiting Japanese instead.
This leaves the crew with the difficult task of actually getting Wu King the money; today a warlord would have a numbered Swiss bank account and could be paid off with a wire transfer, but either that technology didn’t exist during World War II (actually the Internet may not have existed but wire transfers of money were actually pretty routine) or Wu King doesn’t have it. Instead he insists that the U.S. servicemembers must stay with him as his “guests” until he actually gets the cash on hand — only Reardon talks him into sending some of his own men to the beach with the unit and the disabled Amara and leaving one of their soldiers as a hostage. At first Wu King wants Ellen Wilkins to be the hostage — and there’s the expected sinister glint in his eye that lets us know why he wants it to be the woman — but later on he’s willing to settle for Commander Thompson, who’s given a bottle of mineral oil by Dr. Masterson in the hope it will allow him to survive Wu King’s drinking bouts without becoming drunk or incapacitated. In the end the Japanese arrive and kill Thompson, who manages to shoot Wu King for his treachery just before the Japanese off him, but the rest of the unit gets to shore safely and there’s a weird postlude containing stock footage of the atomic bomb tests and O’Brien as narrator explaining that thanks to Amara’s information, the U.S. knew that the Japanese would fight an invasion of their home islands to the death and therefore the only way we could end the war without an invasion was to use the atomic bomb. (The script even quotes former President Truman to that effect, offering his well-known justifications for O.K.’ing the bomb; in the last two decades of his life, between his leaving the presidency and his death, Truman said that was one decision of his administration he’d never had any doubts about — discomfiting a lot of progressive Democrats who otherwise admired him.)
China Venture is a workmanlike “B” made by people who went on to biggers and betters — not only director Siegel but cinematographer Sam Leavitt, who shortly would be given the assignment to shoot the George Cukor/Judy Garland/James Mason version of A Star Is Born — it’s not as obsessive as it might have been with John Huston or Sam Fuller directing (though set in the Korean War, Fuller’s The Steel Helmet is a similarly plotted but much more intense movie) but there’s an air of professional competence about it, a movie made by people who were doing a job as efficiently as possible about people who were doing a job as efficiently as possible. The producer was Anson Bond (I couldn’t resist the obvious joke, “Bond … Anson Bond”), who also wrote the story, though two other writers, George Worthing Yates and Richard Collins, did the script — and aside from a love scene between Edmond O’Brien and Jocelyn Brando which I could have done without, it’s a well-constructed story even though it’s a bit surprising that after all the trouble the unit had getting to the plane crash site, they don’t seem to experience any difficulties getting back again (but then the film was getting long and Columbia no doubt had set a strict limit on its allowable running time, so it had to end in a hurry) — and overall China Venture is a good but unmemorable movie that gives O’Brien a good showcase (and knowing that he was virtually blind it’s amazing how well he maneuvers through the “jungle” locations!) and provides reliable entertainment even though on the quality list of war movies it’s pretty much in the middle.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
The Drum (London Films/United Artists, 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Drum, a 1937 production by the Korda brothers (producer Alexander, director Zoltan and set designer Vincent) and their company London Films, whose studio was located in Denham (Charles joked, “That’s like having a company called ‘Los Angeles Films’ build their studios in Bakersfield!”). They were Hungarian émigrés and they tended to hire other Hungarians whenever possible, including screenwriter Lajos Biró (who worked on this film) and composer Miklós Rósza (who didn’t, but who got his start in film scoring on other Korda productions). The Drum began life as a 1937 novel by A. E. W. Mason, whose 1902 adventure The Four Feathers had made his international reputation with a tale glorifying British imperialism in the Third World; The Four Feathers had already been filmed successfully three times (1915, 1921 and 1929, the last a semi-documentary version from Paramount co-directed by documentarians Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and studio hack Lothar Mendes) and the Kordas would take it up themselves in 1939 for what’s probably the best known film of it (more recent versions include a TV-movie from 1978 and a feature film from 2002), and in the meantime Alexander Korda was ransacking Mason’s more recent output for other stories he could film, including Fire Over England (1936), a tale of British resistance to the Spanish invasion in 1588 that was the first film in which Laurence Olivier and his wife-to-be Vivien Leigh co-starred.
The Drum got made mainly because of the sensational success of another Korda production, Elephant Boy (1937), which had been co-directed by documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty as an attempt to marry his sort of real-life filmmaking to a studio production and a pre-set story, Rudyard Kipling’s Toomai of the Elephants. To play Toomai, Flaherty scouted a real-life “elephant boy,” who’d taken over his late father’s job as mahout (elephant driver) at age nine, whose full name is given in various sources as Sabu Dastagir and Selar Shaik Sabu, and signed him for the role. Flaherty’s biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall noted that during his career his focus shifted from male authority figures like Nanook and Tiger King in Man of Aran to cute young boys, partly because “a beautiful boy, like a beautiful dog, went straight to the heart of a very large public. It provided a way of avoiding in his sort of picture the conventional love interest which the exhibitors wanted.” When Flaherty’s rushes for Elephant Boy arrived back in Denham, Alexander Korda was disappointed in the movie itself — he ended up reshooting half of it in England and scouring London for suitably dark-skinned extras to play East Indians in crowd scenes — but he immediately saw what he had in Sabu, signed him to a contract and got him lessons to improve his English (his part in Elephant Boy had been virtually silent).
“The studio went wild about him,” Flaherty’s wife Frances recalled later. “His acting amazed them. They insured his life for 50,000 pounds and set their best writers to work writing for him the story of another film.” That story was The Drum, based on Mason’s 1937 novel (and actually set in 1937 — before I saw this film I’d always assumed it took place in the 1890’s, the time of The Four Feathers and also of the “great game” between Britain and Russia over control of Afghanistan, in which Dr. John H. Watson was wounded in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story), “adapted” by Lajos Biró and with screenplay credit going to three British writers: Arthur Wimperis, Patrick Kirwan and Hugh Gray. It’s a quite typical tale of the time, essentially a 93-minute propaganda infomercial promoting British imperialism in general and their (supposedly) God-given right to rule India in particular. Sabu plays Prince Azim of the fictitious kingdom of Tokot (“played” by the principality of Chitral, whose ruler, the Mehtar, gets a special-thanks credit for allowing Zoltan Korda and his crew to film there) in the northwest border region — what is now the Northwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan and a place in which today, as when this movie was made, there is virtually no government other than the traditional tribes and where people seeking to wage terrorist campaigns against the imperialist occupiers can hide out and do so with virtual impunity (and where the U.S. is currently trying to combat this by sending drone aircraft, often killing innocent civilians while the terrorists themselves escape unharmed and thank us for the propaganda opportunity to do more recruitment).
Just before the film begins, Azim’s father has been murdered by his brother, Prince Ghul (Raymond Massey), whose idea is to unite all the small states along the Indian-Afghan border into a military confederation, stage a sneak attack against the British garrison at Tokot and eventually drive the British occupiers out of India — an ambition a modern audience might actually see as laudable if Massey weren’t playing him as so much the out-and-out villain, his face slathered in makeup and coated with phony whiskers to make him look authentically Indian and his acting over several tops. Azim is determined to warn the British because he’s befriended several of them —including Col. Carruthers (Roger Livesey, actually turning in a quite good performance that makes one forget he got most of his roles as consolation prizes when producers couldn’t get Laurence Olivier!) and his wife (Valerie Hobson, considerably spunkier and more independent than she was in her best-known credit as Elizabeth in The Bride of Frankenstein, where for all the perversity, wry wit and Code subversion in the other parts she was still pretty much playing the normal damsel-in-distress of a horror film), as well as a red-haired kid his own age, Bill Holder (Desmond Tester), who plays drums both in the regimental band and in a dance orchestra the people running the British base have organized for their own entertainment (and whose leader is an irascible Scot who insists that Holder keep a strict beat and not throw any jazz licks into his playing). Though he was only 14 Sabu comes off as quite sexy in this film, going topless throughout most of it and showing enough of a basket he even looks hot through a shalwar kameez, the name of the loose-fitting, billowing pants that are standard male attire in that part of the world.
The Drum — oddly retitled Drums (plural) when it was released in the U.S., though there are enough drummers in the film (including a whole corps of them that accompanies the British army on the march) that one could make a case for giving it a plural title — is one of those mediocre films that could have been a good deal better: if the British weren’t shown as virtually omniscient (they have the entire native resistance so honeycombed with spies — including some Brits who have acquired suntans, grown beards and adopted native dress so they can “pass” — that no sooner has Sabu leaked the plan of Ghul’s attack and the British commandant has told him he won’t send an army to Tokot until he gets confirmation, the confirmation arrives from another British spy) and if Ghul had been a more ambiguous character, credibly posing as a freedom fighter even though he’s really a thug. As it is, The Drum is of interest mainly for Sabu’s child-man performance (he was virtually always playing a boy more mature than his chronological age — and perhaps part of the inspiration for casting him as an orphan who’d had to take over from a dead father at a tender age was that he had had to do that himself — and his career started to go downhill when he grew up and his visible age started catching up to his characterizations), for Valerie Hobson’s remarkably assertive characterization and for the gorgeous cinematography by Osmond Borradaile (who had shot Elephant Boy and who did the scenes shot in India) and Georges Périnal (who did the scenes shot in England) in three-strip Technicolor — so far as I know, the first time a British producer used it. The Drum is an O.K. movie that could have been a lot better, but given that it was made for a British company for an Anglo-American audience, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s an uncritical paean to British imperialism and lacks the ambiguity with which one would expect a similar story to be handled today.
The film was The Drum, a 1937 production by the Korda brothers (producer Alexander, director Zoltan and set designer Vincent) and their company London Films, whose studio was located in Denham (Charles joked, “That’s like having a company called ‘Los Angeles Films’ build their studios in Bakersfield!”). They were Hungarian émigrés and they tended to hire other Hungarians whenever possible, including screenwriter Lajos Biró (who worked on this film) and composer Miklós Rósza (who didn’t, but who got his start in film scoring on other Korda productions). The Drum began life as a 1937 novel by A. E. W. Mason, whose 1902 adventure The Four Feathers had made his international reputation with a tale glorifying British imperialism in the Third World; The Four Feathers had already been filmed successfully three times (1915, 1921 and 1929, the last a semi-documentary version from Paramount co-directed by documentarians Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and studio hack Lothar Mendes) and the Kordas would take it up themselves in 1939 for what’s probably the best known film of it (more recent versions include a TV-movie from 1978 and a feature film from 2002), and in the meantime Alexander Korda was ransacking Mason’s more recent output for other stories he could film, including Fire Over England (1936), a tale of British resistance to the Spanish invasion in 1588 that was the first film in which Laurence Olivier and his wife-to-be Vivien Leigh co-starred.
The Drum got made mainly because of the sensational success of another Korda production, Elephant Boy (1937), which had been co-directed by documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty as an attempt to marry his sort of real-life filmmaking to a studio production and a pre-set story, Rudyard Kipling’s Toomai of the Elephants. To play Toomai, Flaherty scouted a real-life “elephant boy,” who’d taken over his late father’s job as mahout (elephant driver) at age nine, whose full name is given in various sources as Sabu Dastagir and Selar Shaik Sabu, and signed him for the role. Flaherty’s biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall noted that during his career his focus shifted from male authority figures like Nanook and Tiger King in Man of Aran to cute young boys, partly because “a beautiful boy, like a beautiful dog, went straight to the heart of a very large public. It provided a way of avoiding in his sort of picture the conventional love interest which the exhibitors wanted.” When Flaherty’s rushes for Elephant Boy arrived back in Denham, Alexander Korda was disappointed in the movie itself — he ended up reshooting half of it in England and scouring London for suitably dark-skinned extras to play East Indians in crowd scenes — but he immediately saw what he had in Sabu, signed him to a contract and got him lessons to improve his English (his part in Elephant Boy had been virtually silent).
“The studio went wild about him,” Flaherty’s wife Frances recalled later. “His acting amazed them. They insured his life for 50,000 pounds and set their best writers to work writing for him the story of another film.” That story was The Drum, based on Mason’s 1937 novel (and actually set in 1937 — before I saw this film I’d always assumed it took place in the 1890’s, the time of The Four Feathers and also of the “great game” between Britain and Russia over control of Afghanistan, in which Dr. John H. Watson was wounded in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story), “adapted” by Lajos Biró and with screenplay credit going to three British writers: Arthur Wimperis, Patrick Kirwan and Hugh Gray. It’s a quite typical tale of the time, essentially a 93-minute propaganda infomercial promoting British imperialism in general and their (supposedly) God-given right to rule India in particular. Sabu plays Prince Azim of the fictitious kingdom of Tokot (“played” by the principality of Chitral, whose ruler, the Mehtar, gets a special-thanks credit for allowing Zoltan Korda and his crew to film there) in the northwest border region — what is now the Northwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan and a place in which today, as when this movie was made, there is virtually no government other than the traditional tribes and where people seeking to wage terrorist campaigns against the imperialist occupiers can hide out and do so with virtual impunity (and where the U.S. is currently trying to combat this by sending drone aircraft, often killing innocent civilians while the terrorists themselves escape unharmed and thank us for the propaganda opportunity to do more recruitment).
Just before the film begins, Azim’s father has been murdered by his brother, Prince Ghul (Raymond Massey), whose idea is to unite all the small states along the Indian-Afghan border into a military confederation, stage a sneak attack against the British garrison at Tokot and eventually drive the British occupiers out of India — an ambition a modern audience might actually see as laudable if Massey weren’t playing him as so much the out-and-out villain, his face slathered in makeup and coated with phony whiskers to make him look authentically Indian and his acting over several tops. Azim is determined to warn the British because he’s befriended several of them —including Col. Carruthers (Roger Livesey, actually turning in a quite good performance that makes one forget he got most of his roles as consolation prizes when producers couldn’t get Laurence Olivier!) and his wife (Valerie Hobson, considerably spunkier and more independent than she was in her best-known credit as Elizabeth in The Bride of Frankenstein, where for all the perversity, wry wit and Code subversion in the other parts she was still pretty much playing the normal damsel-in-distress of a horror film), as well as a red-haired kid his own age, Bill Holder (Desmond Tester), who plays drums both in the regimental band and in a dance orchestra the people running the British base have organized for their own entertainment (and whose leader is an irascible Scot who insists that Holder keep a strict beat and not throw any jazz licks into his playing). Though he was only 14 Sabu comes off as quite sexy in this film, going topless throughout most of it and showing enough of a basket he even looks hot through a shalwar kameez, the name of the loose-fitting, billowing pants that are standard male attire in that part of the world.
The Drum — oddly retitled Drums (plural) when it was released in the U.S., though there are enough drummers in the film (including a whole corps of them that accompanies the British army on the march) that one could make a case for giving it a plural title — is one of those mediocre films that could have been a good deal better: if the British weren’t shown as virtually omniscient (they have the entire native resistance so honeycombed with spies — including some Brits who have acquired suntans, grown beards and adopted native dress so they can “pass” — that no sooner has Sabu leaked the plan of Ghul’s attack and the British commandant has told him he won’t send an army to Tokot until he gets confirmation, the confirmation arrives from another British spy) and if Ghul had been a more ambiguous character, credibly posing as a freedom fighter even though he’s really a thug. As it is, The Drum is of interest mainly for Sabu’s child-man performance (he was virtually always playing a boy more mature than his chronological age — and perhaps part of the inspiration for casting him as an orphan who’d had to take over from a dead father at a tender age was that he had had to do that himself — and his career started to go downhill when he grew up and his visible age started catching up to his characterizations), for Valerie Hobson’s remarkably assertive characterization and for the gorgeous cinematography by Osmond Borradaile (who had shot Elephant Boy and who did the scenes shot in India) and Georges Périnal (who did the scenes shot in England) in three-strip Technicolor — so far as I know, the first time a British producer used it. The Drum is an O.K. movie that could have been a lot better, but given that it was made for a British company for an Anglo-American audience, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s an uncritical paean to British imperialism and lacks the ambiguity with which one would expect a similar story to be handled today.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Fingers at the Window (MGM, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Fingers at the Window, a 1942 oddball “B” from MGM that Turner Classic Movies recently showed in an all-day tribute to Basil Rathbone and made it sound in their schedule like an MGM attempt to poach on Universal horror territory: “A magician uses hypnosis to create an army of murderers.” Actually Rathbone played a mad scientist and was billed third — after the nominal leads, Lew Ayres and Laraine Day (Ayres made this movie just before declaring himself a conscientious objector during World War II; before that he’d been under contract to MGM to make the Dr. Kildare movies, but Louis B. Mayer was so incensed by his refusal to fight that he not only fired him but cut out all his footage from a recently completed Kildare film and had it rewritten and reshot to eliminate his character — and to add to the irony, Ayres agreed to serve in the war as a combat medic, thereby becoming in real life what he’d been playing in the Kildare movies.) The movie opens with a marvelously Gothic sequence that makes it seem like MGM’s model for the film wasn’t the Universal horrors but Val Lewton’s recently released Cat People from RKO; after a brief bit of exposition establishing that five people have been mysteriously murdered by ax-wielding killers who are invariably captured at the scene, but are mentally too far gone even to identify themselves, much less explain their motives, we see a shadowy sequence of yet another murderer stalking yet another victim, while out-of-work actor Oliver Duffy (Lew Ayres) comes along in the nick of time to keep Edwina Brown (Laraine Day) from becoming victim number seven — though, natch, she misunderstands his intentions and thinks he’s trying to pick her up.
The sequence is directed by Charles Lederer (usually a screenwriter, but in the early 1940’s after Preston Sturges’ directorial debut, The Great McGinty, was a box-office smash, a number of long-time studio writers got chances to direct; some of them, like John Huston and Billy Wilder, did so well they made a permanent career change from writing to direction, but others, like Lederer and Ben Hecht, bombed as directors and went back to writing) in shadowy Gothic style with such Lewtonian trademarks as spooky sound effects and ironically used source music (a choir from a Salvation Army-style mission) instead of a tacky background score, and even a cat (Edwina loses her pet black cat and barely finds it in time to scoop it up and get it and herself into her apartment before the killer can strike — a scene Suzanne Collins used seriously in the third Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay). Alas, the movie goes downhill from there, hamstrung by a weak story and script by Rose Caylor and Lawrence P. Bachmann (Caylor wrote the story solo and they worked on the script together) — one wonders if Lederer, who might have been able to fix the holes in the script if he’d been allowed to rewrite it himself, was instead handed the script and told to shoot it come scritto. Rathbone is billed third but is barely in the film at all; there’s a brief scene in the opening in which he’s giving sotto voce hypnotic instructions to his latest killer (he’s recruiting them from a mental hospital where he works as a psychiatrist), then another in the middle and he reappears about 10 minutes before the end for the final climactic confrontation. The writers also err by making Laraine Day’s character utterly stupid; had they made her spunkier and braver, as well as smarter, they could have had a better and more suspenseful movie. As it is, it’s one of those films that keeps the characters in total ignorance of what’s going on while making us, the audience, all too aware — we may not know all the details of Rathbone’s plot or his motives, but we know he’s the bad guy minutes into the film.
There are some pretty basic plot holes in this one, including the insistence of the police that the six ax murders are totally unrelated crimes that just happen to be occurring consecutively — one would think that somebody would notice that all the arrested killers were being treated for schizophrenia at the same asylum, just as one would think the cops would investigate the backgrounds of the victims looking for connections — which provide the motive for the killings, though we don’t learn that until the end. It seems that Rathbone’s character is a doctor named Caesar Ferrari who lived for years in Paris, where he dated and ultimately proposed to Edwina Brown (we know that because even though in the main part of the movie she’s slowly falling for Oliver Duffy, she’s got a picture of Rathbone in a small suitcase in her room), only to break off with her when an announcement of an upcoming wedding appears in a newspaper. Anxious to flee Paris and also to get his hands on a multi-million dollar inheritance, he murders one Dr. Santelle and assumes his identity, then travels to the U.S. and sets up shop in Chicago — and brainwashes inmates of the asylum where he works (all of whom seem to have last names beginning with “B” — we find that out when Lew Ayres’ character infiltrates the asylum and notices all their file cards in the appropriate drawer for that letter) to kill anybody in Chicago who knew him when he was in Paris and could therefore expose his money-making imposture as Dr. Santelle. There are quite a few good scenes in Fingers at the Window — including a really funny one in which Oliver fools Dr. Kurt Immelmann (Miles Mander) into thinking he’s crazy so he can rifle through the doctor’s files with impunity, and another gag scene in which he and Edwina infiltrate a medical meeting to try to find Santelle, then have to leave in a hurry when Immelmann is about to recognize him — but the fact that this film has as many laughs as chills is in itself an indication of what’s wrong with it: yet another example of a movie imbalanced against itself and not sure whether it wants to be a serious drama or a spoof.
Rathbone is properly chilling in his scenes — especially the one in which he administers Oliver an unnecessary injection of insulin to kill him in the hospital (where he’s resting after Rathbone caught up with him on the El and pushed him into the path of an incoming train — fortunately Oliver was able to save himself by grabbing onto one of the cross-rails, but he was injured when he lost his grip and fell to the street) — and there are other clever scenes, including one in which Rathbone keeps up his imposture by introducing someone else as Dr. Santelle and Edwina tells Oliver (rightly) that she hasn’t seen that man before, as well as a gag scene in which a montage of newspaper headlines details the impact of the murders on Chicago’s economy and the last is a headline in Variety explaining in Variety‑speak that the murders have had a devastating effect on Chicago’s theatre attendance (this is the way the writers introduce Ayres’ character — dressed throughout in top hat and tails because that was his costume in the play he and his troupe were performing until the company closed because nobody was going out anymore — though it also calls up yet another plot hole: at one point Ayres is shown giving his last money, a nickel, to a newsboy to buy a paper containing an account of the latest murder, but later on he has the money to hire Edwina a taxi to take her home when “unforeseen circumstances,” we’re never told precisely what, force him to break a date with her; that’s the sequence in which she’s being stalked and nearly doesn’t get inside her building in time because her cat runs off and she won’t go in without the animal) — and Lederer directs with a real flair for Gothic horror and suspense but at the mercy of a script that trips him up at several plot points and turns Fingers at the Window into a creaky melodrama instead of the horror-suspense thriller we were expecting and for which we were hoping.
The film was Fingers at the Window, a 1942 oddball “B” from MGM that Turner Classic Movies recently showed in an all-day tribute to Basil Rathbone and made it sound in their schedule like an MGM attempt to poach on Universal horror territory: “A magician uses hypnosis to create an army of murderers.” Actually Rathbone played a mad scientist and was billed third — after the nominal leads, Lew Ayres and Laraine Day (Ayres made this movie just before declaring himself a conscientious objector during World War II; before that he’d been under contract to MGM to make the Dr. Kildare movies, but Louis B. Mayer was so incensed by his refusal to fight that he not only fired him but cut out all his footage from a recently completed Kildare film and had it rewritten and reshot to eliminate his character — and to add to the irony, Ayres agreed to serve in the war as a combat medic, thereby becoming in real life what he’d been playing in the Kildare movies.) The movie opens with a marvelously Gothic sequence that makes it seem like MGM’s model for the film wasn’t the Universal horrors but Val Lewton’s recently released Cat People from RKO; after a brief bit of exposition establishing that five people have been mysteriously murdered by ax-wielding killers who are invariably captured at the scene, but are mentally too far gone even to identify themselves, much less explain their motives, we see a shadowy sequence of yet another murderer stalking yet another victim, while out-of-work actor Oliver Duffy (Lew Ayres) comes along in the nick of time to keep Edwina Brown (Laraine Day) from becoming victim number seven — though, natch, she misunderstands his intentions and thinks he’s trying to pick her up.
The sequence is directed by Charles Lederer (usually a screenwriter, but in the early 1940’s after Preston Sturges’ directorial debut, The Great McGinty, was a box-office smash, a number of long-time studio writers got chances to direct; some of them, like John Huston and Billy Wilder, did so well they made a permanent career change from writing to direction, but others, like Lederer and Ben Hecht, bombed as directors and went back to writing) in shadowy Gothic style with such Lewtonian trademarks as spooky sound effects and ironically used source music (a choir from a Salvation Army-style mission) instead of a tacky background score, and even a cat (Edwina loses her pet black cat and barely finds it in time to scoop it up and get it and herself into her apartment before the killer can strike — a scene Suzanne Collins used seriously in the third Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay). Alas, the movie goes downhill from there, hamstrung by a weak story and script by Rose Caylor and Lawrence P. Bachmann (Caylor wrote the story solo and they worked on the script together) — one wonders if Lederer, who might have been able to fix the holes in the script if he’d been allowed to rewrite it himself, was instead handed the script and told to shoot it come scritto. Rathbone is billed third but is barely in the film at all; there’s a brief scene in the opening in which he’s giving sotto voce hypnotic instructions to his latest killer (he’s recruiting them from a mental hospital where he works as a psychiatrist), then another in the middle and he reappears about 10 minutes before the end for the final climactic confrontation. The writers also err by making Laraine Day’s character utterly stupid; had they made her spunkier and braver, as well as smarter, they could have had a better and more suspenseful movie. As it is, it’s one of those films that keeps the characters in total ignorance of what’s going on while making us, the audience, all too aware — we may not know all the details of Rathbone’s plot or his motives, but we know he’s the bad guy minutes into the film.
There are some pretty basic plot holes in this one, including the insistence of the police that the six ax murders are totally unrelated crimes that just happen to be occurring consecutively — one would think that somebody would notice that all the arrested killers were being treated for schizophrenia at the same asylum, just as one would think the cops would investigate the backgrounds of the victims looking for connections — which provide the motive for the killings, though we don’t learn that until the end. It seems that Rathbone’s character is a doctor named Caesar Ferrari who lived for years in Paris, where he dated and ultimately proposed to Edwina Brown (we know that because even though in the main part of the movie she’s slowly falling for Oliver Duffy, she’s got a picture of Rathbone in a small suitcase in her room), only to break off with her when an announcement of an upcoming wedding appears in a newspaper. Anxious to flee Paris and also to get his hands on a multi-million dollar inheritance, he murders one Dr. Santelle and assumes his identity, then travels to the U.S. and sets up shop in Chicago — and brainwashes inmates of the asylum where he works (all of whom seem to have last names beginning with “B” — we find that out when Lew Ayres’ character infiltrates the asylum and notices all their file cards in the appropriate drawer for that letter) to kill anybody in Chicago who knew him when he was in Paris and could therefore expose his money-making imposture as Dr. Santelle. There are quite a few good scenes in Fingers at the Window — including a really funny one in which Oliver fools Dr. Kurt Immelmann (Miles Mander) into thinking he’s crazy so he can rifle through the doctor’s files with impunity, and another gag scene in which he and Edwina infiltrate a medical meeting to try to find Santelle, then have to leave in a hurry when Immelmann is about to recognize him — but the fact that this film has as many laughs as chills is in itself an indication of what’s wrong with it: yet another example of a movie imbalanced against itself and not sure whether it wants to be a serious drama or a spoof.
Rathbone is properly chilling in his scenes — especially the one in which he administers Oliver an unnecessary injection of insulin to kill him in the hospital (where he’s resting after Rathbone caught up with him on the El and pushed him into the path of an incoming train — fortunately Oliver was able to save himself by grabbing onto one of the cross-rails, but he was injured when he lost his grip and fell to the street) — and there are other clever scenes, including one in which Rathbone keeps up his imposture by introducing someone else as Dr. Santelle and Edwina tells Oliver (rightly) that she hasn’t seen that man before, as well as a gag scene in which a montage of newspaper headlines details the impact of the murders on Chicago’s economy and the last is a headline in Variety explaining in Variety‑speak that the murders have had a devastating effect on Chicago’s theatre attendance (this is the way the writers introduce Ayres’ character — dressed throughout in top hat and tails because that was his costume in the play he and his troupe were performing until the company closed because nobody was going out anymore — though it also calls up yet another plot hole: at one point Ayres is shown giving his last money, a nickel, to a newsboy to buy a paper containing an account of the latest murder, but later on he has the money to hire Edwina a taxi to take her home when “unforeseen circumstances,” we’re never told precisely what, force him to break a date with her; that’s the sequence in which she’s being stalked and nearly doesn’t get inside her building in time because her cat runs off and she won’t go in without the animal) — and Lederer directs with a real flair for Gothic horror and suspense but at the mercy of a script that trips him up at several plot points and turns Fingers at the Window into a creaky melodrama instead of the horror-suspense thriller we were expecting and for which we were hoping.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Jungle Jim (Columbia, 1948)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I eventually ran a movie, and with me in the mood for something light but not necessarily funny (at least by intention) I put on the 1948 Jungle Jim, the first in a series of 13 films of that title made by Columbia (or rather by producer Sam Katzman releasing through Columbia) starring Johnny Weissmuller, who was still a nice-looking hunk of man-meat but had got too hefty to be swinging on jungle vines in a loincloth. (One imdb.com reviewer speculated that this was the first movie Weissmuller ever made in which he actually wore a shirt and trousers!) MGM had pulled the plug on the Tarzan series he’d made there after 12 installments (though I think some of those were done at other studios — Edgar Rice Burroughs licensed the Tarzan character to any studio that would pay him enough and at one point there were at least three parallel Tarzan series going, including the one Burroughs himself produced in which Herman Brix, later Bruce Bennett, played Tarzan) and Columbia signed him to play Jungle Jim, a big-game hunter in Africa who’d originally been the hero of a comic strip written and drawn by Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond. The opening sequence shows a native boy — for some reason almost none of the actors playing “natives” were Black even though this was supposed to be taking place in Africa (it reminded me after a while of the Mad magazine parody of the 1960’s Tarzan TV show, in which the big thing Mad decided to lampoon was the fact that the series was shot in Mexico — so the Mad article started with a map of Mexico with “Mexico” erased and “Africa” written in, and throughout the strip the “native” characters looked Latino and spoke Spanish) — running for his life to escape a man-eating leopard which, unfortunately, gets him because Jungle Jim doesn’t notice what’s going on in time — and the whole sequence is narrated by jungle photographer Bruce Edwards (George “Superman” Reeves), though we don’t know who he is until after the opening sequence is over and the scene cuts to the jungle office of Commissioner Geoffrey Marsden (Holmes Herbert).
Charles and I eventually ran a movie, and with me in the mood for something light but not necessarily funny (at least by intention) I put on the 1948 Jungle Jim, the first in a series of 13 films of that title made by Columbia (or rather by producer Sam Katzman releasing through Columbia) starring Johnny Weissmuller, who was still a nice-looking hunk of man-meat but had got too hefty to be swinging on jungle vines in a loincloth. (One imdb.com reviewer speculated that this was the first movie Weissmuller ever made in which he actually wore a shirt and trousers!) MGM had pulled the plug on the Tarzan series he’d made there after 12 installments (though I think some of those were done at other studios — Edgar Rice Burroughs licensed the Tarzan character to any studio that would pay him enough and at one point there were at least three parallel Tarzan series going, including the one Burroughs himself produced in which Herman Brix, later Bruce Bennett, played Tarzan) and Columbia signed him to play Jungle Jim, a big-game hunter in Africa who’d originally been the hero of a comic strip written and drawn by Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond. The opening sequence shows a native boy — for some reason almost none of the actors playing “natives” were Black even though this was supposed to be taking place in Africa (it reminded me after a while of the Mad magazine parody of the 1960’s Tarzan TV show, in which the big thing Mad decided to lampoon was the fact that the series was shot in Mexico — so the Mad article started with a map of Mexico with “Mexico” erased and “Africa” written in, and throughout the strip the “native” characters looked Latino and spoke Spanish) — running for his life to escape a man-eating leopard which, unfortunately, gets him because Jungle Jim doesn’t notice what’s going on in time — and the whole sequence is narrated by jungle photographer Bruce Edwards (George “Superman” Reeves), though we don’t know who he is until after the opening sequence is over and the scene cuts to the jungle office of Commissioner Geoffrey Marsden (Holmes Herbert).
It seems that when he
died the jungle boy’s fingers were clutched around a small vial of pure gold
decorated with hieroglyphics (I was tempted to joke that they spelled out the
opening words of The Book of Mormon)
and containing a foul-smelling black paste-like substance that in large
quantities is poisonous but if diluted enough becomes an effective treatment
for polio. (I wondered if the screenwriter, Carroll Young, had heard of
homeopathy.) Marsden announces that he wants Jungle Jim to go on an expedition
into the jungle to find the lost temple of Zimbalu (a name which provoked me to
do a Desi Arnaz impression: “Zimbalu — ZIM-BAAH-LU!”) and see if they had any
more of this ointment available. Also scheduled to accompany Jungle Jim on this
expedition are photographer Bruce Edwards and scientist Dr. Hillary Parker,
whom Our Hero assumes will be a man but in fact is a woman (she’s played by
actress Virginia Grey), albeit a severely butch-looking woman with bad glasses.
The gag of someone named “Hillary” turning out to be female probably wasn’t
that funny in 1948 and, after Hillary Clinton, certainly isn’t today! Anyway,
the expedition sets out — and the film periodically cuts away from it to a
veritable mountain of stock footage featuring non-human characters who, quite
frankly, out-act the humans. Jungle Jim has two pets of his own, his dog
Skipper (a white poodle, of all unlikely breeds in the jungle) and his crow
Caw-Caw, who at various times lifts Hillary’s glasses and the front panel of
Edwards’ camera.
During the trip Edwards makes a series of idiotically
transparent attempts on Jim’s life — when Jim falls off a mountain and is desperately
hanging on to a branch on its side, Edwards pretends to hold the native who’s
there to pull him to safety but actually lets go, then tries to get everyone to
believe that his hands merely slipped — that alert us, the audience, to the fact that he’s a villain well
before the other characters catch on (and the fact that the actor who today is
most famous as Superman is playing the bad guy is itself the most jarring
aspect of this film; later on the producers of this series cast Buster Crabbe
as a villain, which would probably be worth watching if only for the “doubles”
aspect of seeing a film with two former Tarzans in it); of course, Edwards is
only in it for the money — specifically the golden treasure the Zimbaluans are
supposed to have laying around their city (though their big temple turns out to
be a pretty ordinary jungle shack — I had hoped that a film laden with this much stock footage would have represented it with a
clip of Angkor Wat or something, and it’s all the more odd that the temple is
so unimpressive from outside when it’s quite impressive inside — Columbia must have had a quite elaborate set left
over from something else) — and he wins the natives to his side by taking their
pictures, only when the crow steals the lens off the front of his camera he
can’t do that anymore, the native chief gets pissed at him, Edwards fires his
gun at them and the natives overpower him and take him out. The movie also has
a romantic-triangle subplot between Jim, Hillary and Jim’s native-girl squeeze
Zia (Lita Baron), who at one point does a dance accompanied by a pounding drum
and nothing else (which disturbs Hillary since she’s trying to write) and at
another point, alone with Hillary, seems to be putting the make on her, since she tells Hillary she’s “like man” — though
the Production Code was there to make sure this movie never went anywhere near there!
Hillary is presented as an outwardly composed
woman but one who freaks out whenever a jungle animal gets too close — twice
during the film she screams in panic for Jim to save her from a crocodile (the
first one is real, though obviously from stock footage, while the second one is
an obvious fake that attempts to grab her with its prehensile tail — real
crocodiles barely move their tails; their weapon is their mouth and the sharp
teeth inside it) whereas I was hoping she’d be more indomitable, more like the
Columbia and Republic serial heroines (or maybe Katharine Hepburn in The
African Queen). Jungle Jim is one of those frustrating movies that settles into
a comfortable groove of mediocrity, neither good enough to be genuinely
entertaining nor bad enough to be camp (though I could imagine the Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 crew doing a pretty
good job on it), and Weissmuller is personable and still credible as an action
hero but his delivery of dialogue shows there’s a reason why the writers on the MGM Tarzan movies never let him say much more than “Me Tarzan,
you Jane.” Jungle Jim was
directed by William Berke, who had a weird career moving from independent productions
to studio “B”’s and back again (of his last three films, two were adaptations
of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels and the one I’ve seen is a quite
good, atmospheric thriller), and I’ll say two good things for him here: he’s
excellent at getting the right mood for the jungle scenes and he’s quite
inventive in cutting the stock footage into the main action so it almost looks seamless — but aside from that Jungle
Jim simply isn’t that good a movie and it
wears out its welcome even though it’s only 72 minutes long!
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Times Square Playboy (Warner Bros., 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Times Square Playboy, a 1936 Warners “B” directed by William McGann from a script by Roy Chanslor — both strictly “B” talents — though the basis for the story was a 1926 play called The Home Towners by George M. Cohan, a legendary actor, singer, dancer and writer and very much on the “A” list. It starred Warren William and June Travis, though it was obviously a cheapie Warners threw together just to use up their final commitments to William, who had already served notice he was leaving when his contract expired and going out to freelance. (In 1937 he landed the part as the villainous husband in Madame X at MGM but his subsequent career was disappointing, distinguished only by his droll appearances in the Lone Wolf series films at Columbia and his off-casting as a murderer in Edgar G. Ulmer’s PRC melodrama Out of the Night, a.k.a. Strange Illusion, in 1945 — that was actually a modern-dress reboot of the plot of Hamlet, with Jimmy Lydon as the Hamlet character and William surprisingly effective as the Claudius equivalent.) Anyway, Times Square Playboy turns out to be one of the most misnamed film ever made, since whatever his romantic past had been, Vic Arnold (Warren William) is engaged from the start of the film to marry a woman half his age, Beth Calhoun (June Travis), who works in a nightclub as a singer under the name “Fay Melody” and whom he met when he hired her brother Wally (Dick Purcell) to work at his brokerage firm. He’s also bankrolling Beth’s and Wally’s father Mort (Granville Bates) in his bottle-washing invention and has bought a home for Mort and his wife Nellie (Dorothy Vaughan). The plot kicks off when Vic invites P. H. Bancroft (Gene Lockhart), his old boyhood friend from Big Bend, Texas, to come to New York to be the best man at his wedding — and P. H., who’s generally addressed as “Ben” but whom Vic years before also nicknamed “Pighead,” jumps to all the wrong conclusions and decides that Beth is a gold-digger out to marry a rich man twice her age in order to exploit him for the sake of herself and her no-good family while she tricks around with her former boyfriend, professional football player Joe Roberts (Craig Reynolds).
This is one of the few movies from the 1930’s that even acknowledges the existence of professional football, and we’re later told in the script that Joe is independently wealthy and actually has more money than Vic — though the “roo” moustache Craig Reynolds wears throughout the film (including the brief snippets with titles under them announcing both the actors’ names and the roles they play — common in 1930’s movies, especially at Warners — a welcome form of credits I’m sorry isn’t used anymore) was enough to fool us as well as Ben that he was up to no good. Also in the dramatis personae are Gene Lockhart’s real-life wife Kathleen as his long-suffering wife in the story, and Vic’s butler Casey (Barton MacLane, refreshingly speaking instead of shouting most of his lines and actually showing off a bit of a sense of humor) who’s also what would now be called his personal trainer, since a large part of his duties seems to consist of partnering Vic on his workouts. Anyway, Ben tells off the Calhouns and they want nothing to do with Vic — Beth breaks up with him and Wally threatens to quit his company — and there’s a lot of fooforaw until Beth sends back the $40,000 necklace Vic gave her, the case turns out to be empty and the Calhouns descend on Vic’s penthouse apartment en masse — whereupon Ben, anxious to get the Calhouns together under Vic’s roof to get them back on speaking terms, reveals that he palmed the bracelet (had he seen the 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon?), Vic and the Calhoun family reunite and all ends well with the marriage still on schedule.
The Home Towners was first filmed by Warner Bros. in 1928 as one of their early talkies (it’s unclear whether it was a full-talkie or a part-talkie because it’s lost — apparently not even the soundtrack records survive for this one) and it’s clear that though Warren William is nominally the male lead, Gene Lockhart is playing the central character (I’m assuming his is the role Cohan himself played in the stage production in 1926); he has more screen time than anyone else in the film and it’s clear the focus is on him and his character arc, not William’s. As Charles pointed out, it’s a one-joke movie and the one joke is not particularly funny — three years after William’s key role in Gold Diggers of 1933, a movie with some strong plot similarities to this one (and also a remake of one Warners had made just a few years before when the talkies were new!) but one with genuine irony and wit (his part in Gold Diggers of 1933 has similarities to both male leads here, in that he falls in love with a showgirl himself but still remains committed to seeing that his brother, played by Dick Powell, doesn’t marry one) — but then again both William and Warners were going through the motions on this one (they’d already rewritten the ending of his 1935 film Living on Velvet so that its heroine, Kay Francis, ended up with George Brent rather than William at the end, just to get back at him for his announced intention of leaving the studio once his contract was finished!), with Warners giving him a “B” remake to run out his contract and William essentially “phoning in” his performance. Though the focus of this one is on the men, it’s the women who turn in the best performance: June Travis is attractive, perky and has a nice voice (I’m assuming it’s hers and not a voice double) and Kathleen Lockhart does a nice long-suffering voice-of-reason part in the ZaSu Pitts manner. Still, Times Square Playboy is a 62-minute movie that even at that length tends to overstay its welcome.
The film was Times Square Playboy, a 1936 Warners “B” directed by William McGann from a script by Roy Chanslor — both strictly “B” talents — though the basis for the story was a 1926 play called The Home Towners by George M. Cohan, a legendary actor, singer, dancer and writer and very much on the “A” list. It starred Warren William and June Travis, though it was obviously a cheapie Warners threw together just to use up their final commitments to William, who had already served notice he was leaving when his contract expired and going out to freelance. (In 1937 he landed the part as the villainous husband in Madame X at MGM but his subsequent career was disappointing, distinguished only by his droll appearances in the Lone Wolf series films at Columbia and his off-casting as a murderer in Edgar G. Ulmer’s PRC melodrama Out of the Night, a.k.a. Strange Illusion, in 1945 — that was actually a modern-dress reboot of the plot of Hamlet, with Jimmy Lydon as the Hamlet character and William surprisingly effective as the Claudius equivalent.) Anyway, Times Square Playboy turns out to be one of the most misnamed film ever made, since whatever his romantic past had been, Vic Arnold (Warren William) is engaged from the start of the film to marry a woman half his age, Beth Calhoun (June Travis), who works in a nightclub as a singer under the name “Fay Melody” and whom he met when he hired her brother Wally (Dick Purcell) to work at his brokerage firm. He’s also bankrolling Beth’s and Wally’s father Mort (Granville Bates) in his bottle-washing invention and has bought a home for Mort and his wife Nellie (Dorothy Vaughan). The plot kicks off when Vic invites P. H. Bancroft (Gene Lockhart), his old boyhood friend from Big Bend, Texas, to come to New York to be the best man at his wedding — and P. H., who’s generally addressed as “Ben” but whom Vic years before also nicknamed “Pighead,” jumps to all the wrong conclusions and decides that Beth is a gold-digger out to marry a rich man twice her age in order to exploit him for the sake of herself and her no-good family while she tricks around with her former boyfriend, professional football player Joe Roberts (Craig Reynolds).
This is one of the few movies from the 1930’s that even acknowledges the existence of professional football, and we’re later told in the script that Joe is independently wealthy and actually has more money than Vic — though the “roo” moustache Craig Reynolds wears throughout the film (including the brief snippets with titles under them announcing both the actors’ names and the roles they play — common in 1930’s movies, especially at Warners — a welcome form of credits I’m sorry isn’t used anymore) was enough to fool us as well as Ben that he was up to no good. Also in the dramatis personae are Gene Lockhart’s real-life wife Kathleen as his long-suffering wife in the story, and Vic’s butler Casey (Barton MacLane, refreshingly speaking instead of shouting most of his lines and actually showing off a bit of a sense of humor) who’s also what would now be called his personal trainer, since a large part of his duties seems to consist of partnering Vic on his workouts. Anyway, Ben tells off the Calhouns and they want nothing to do with Vic — Beth breaks up with him and Wally threatens to quit his company — and there’s a lot of fooforaw until Beth sends back the $40,000 necklace Vic gave her, the case turns out to be empty and the Calhouns descend on Vic’s penthouse apartment en masse — whereupon Ben, anxious to get the Calhouns together under Vic’s roof to get them back on speaking terms, reveals that he palmed the bracelet (had he seen the 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon?), Vic and the Calhoun family reunite and all ends well with the marriage still on schedule.
The Home Towners was first filmed by Warner Bros. in 1928 as one of their early talkies (it’s unclear whether it was a full-talkie or a part-talkie because it’s lost — apparently not even the soundtrack records survive for this one) and it’s clear that though Warren William is nominally the male lead, Gene Lockhart is playing the central character (I’m assuming his is the role Cohan himself played in the stage production in 1926); he has more screen time than anyone else in the film and it’s clear the focus is on him and his character arc, not William’s. As Charles pointed out, it’s a one-joke movie and the one joke is not particularly funny — three years after William’s key role in Gold Diggers of 1933, a movie with some strong plot similarities to this one (and also a remake of one Warners had made just a few years before when the talkies were new!) but one with genuine irony and wit (his part in Gold Diggers of 1933 has similarities to both male leads here, in that he falls in love with a showgirl himself but still remains committed to seeing that his brother, played by Dick Powell, doesn’t marry one) — but then again both William and Warners were going through the motions on this one (they’d already rewritten the ending of his 1935 film Living on Velvet so that its heroine, Kay Francis, ended up with George Brent rather than William at the end, just to get back at him for his announced intention of leaving the studio once his contract was finished!), with Warners giving him a “B” remake to run out his contract and William essentially “phoning in” his performance. Though the focus of this one is on the men, it’s the women who turn in the best performance: June Travis is attractive, perky and has a nice voice (I’m assuming it’s hers and not a voice double) and Kathleen Lockhart does a nice long-suffering voice-of-reason part in the ZaSu Pitts manner. Still, Times Square Playboy is a 62-minute movie that even at that length tends to overstay its welcome.
Friday, September 7, 2012
Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010, 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked was Tillie’s Punctured Romance, a 1914 production of the Mack Sennett Studio that was Sennett’s first full-length feature. He bought the rights to a 1910 musical called Tillie’s Nightmare — which, according to imdb.com, only ran 77 performances, though that was long enough to give its star, Marie Dressler, one of the biggest hits of the “teens,” a song called “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.” Sennett also hired Dressler to repeat her role as Tillie — even though it was a silent film and therefore audiences wouldn’t get to hear her sing her big hit — and threw just about everyone else under contract to him into the film, including casting Charlie Chaplin as the principal villain (!) and Mabel Normand as “the other woman.” The plot is pretty simple — Tillie is a big-hearted farm girl who’s seduced by city slicker Chaplin into stealing her father’s (Mack Swain) cash stash and eloping with him to the big city — actually specified as New York — where Chaplin hooks up with girlfriend Normand and the two plot to steal Tillie’s money and leave her alone and broke. (Interestingly, Chaplin reprised this plot seriously in his 1923 film A Woman of Paris, with Edna Purviance as the farm girl and Adolphe Menjou as the villain.) Various versions of this film exist, ranging in length from 55 to 83 minutes — like a lot of other silent features, especially ones that featured people who later became big stars, it got cut, chopped and channeled in various directions and, after sound came in, was outfitted with musical accompaniment ranging from the silly to the generally appropriate.
The version we were watching was about 70 minutes and had recently been shown on TCM, whose host, Robert Osborne, said that Chaplin hadn’t liked making the film. Osborne seemed to think that was because Sennett himself directed — Chaplin had already starting directing his short films himself (and the five-film compilation Chaplin at Keystone, including three films he didn’t direct and two he did, highlights just how much better his comedies got once he was director as well as star) and didn’t want to go back to working for another director (and indeed he never made another film he didn’t direct, unless you count his cameo as himself in King Vidor’s Show People, which he did as a favor to the film’s star, Chaplin’s good friend Marion Davies), but I suspect it was also because Chaplin was all too aware of how totally he was miscast as a villain. Though Chaplin would essentially revive his character here in Monsieur Verdoux 33 years later, he’s simply unbelievable as a black-hearted creep who plans to seduce a farm girl, steal her dad’s fortune and run off with someone else. I remember the first time I saw Tillie’s Punctured Romance — in the early 1970’s, in a hole-in-the-wall revival house (the sort of place you went to see classic films that were too obscure to play on television in the days before cable, videotapes and DVD’s) — and it was one of the few times I’ve sensed a visceral hostility to a movie from an audience, which I think was because they didn’t believe Chaplin, with all his sympathetic and endearing “tramp” gestures, as the bad guy.
What’s more, Tillie’s Punctured Romance simply isn’t a very good movie; about all that happens is a series of scenes in which the three principals travel around L.A. (“playing” New York and giving the film a welcome degree of authenticity from the fact that the city streets are the real thing, not a studio backlot) barely missing each other. There’s an interesting interlude in which Chaplin and Normand take in a movie — this may be the first film in history that has a film-within-the-film, and the gag is that the internal movie, A Thief’s Fate, mimics what Chaplin and Normand are actually doing. (It’s also amazing when you realize how difficult it was to do a film-within-a-film before the invention of process screens and optical effects: either the film-within-the-film had to be acted on the same stage, and in real time, as the main action, the way Buster Keaton did it a decade later in Sherlock, Jr. — or, as I think was done here, a section of the screen had to be matted off in the camera so the scenes involving the film-within-the-film could be shot on the same strip of film, rewound inside the camera, on the part of the screen that had originally been masked out.) It’s a good film and it’s funny, but it remains only moderately amusing and doesn’t really build up the kind of till-it-hurts laughter Sennett regularly achieved in his shorts … until the plot takes a turn by which Tillie inherits a fortune from her millionaire uncle (only temporarily; in this version it turns out the uncle isn’t dead after all, though there’s another cut — the one described by Theodore Huff in his biography of Chaplin — in which the uncle is dead but the will leaving Tillie his fortune is invalidated legally and his money goes to the state).
She throws a party in her uncle’s home and, while there, catches Chaplin — her supposed husband — and Normand necking. Does she merely register jealousy and leave it at that? Oh, no-o-o-o-o: she has a total nervous breakdown that leads her to get out a gun and start shooting it not only at her man who done her wrong, and the girl he done her wrong with, but everybody at her party — and her guests seem to hang out a lot longer and flee a lot less suddenly than one would expect from people at a party whose host has suddenly gone berserk and is shooting at them. Dressler flees and the Keystone Kops (well, they had to be in there somewhere) go after her and the other two principals, and it ends with her nearly drowning off the pier, the harbor patrol (who are at least marginally more competent than the land-based police) rescue her, and Chaplin and Normand are arrested. The End. Tillie’s Punctured Romance was a huge hit — enough so that Dressler reprised the role of Tillie in a series of sequels for another studio, World; and Paramount recycled the title for a 1928 comedy (still a silent) with Louise Fazenda and W. C. Fields that had nothing to do with this one plot-wise — and it elevated Chaplin from minor star to superstar and allowed him to write his own ticket from then on, and to give up villainous roles in favor of the sympathetic “tramp” character he would develop the next year at Essanay studio. But it’s one film from the classic era that, despite the star talent and the brilliantly comic ending, does date rather badly. — 1/2/10
The film I picked was Tillie’s Punctured Romance, a 1914 production of the Mack Sennett Studio that was Sennett’s first full-length feature. He bought the rights to a 1910 musical called Tillie’s Nightmare — which, according to imdb.com, only ran 77 performances, though that was long enough to give its star, Marie Dressler, one of the biggest hits of the “teens,” a song called “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.” Sennett also hired Dressler to repeat her role as Tillie — even though it was a silent film and therefore audiences wouldn’t get to hear her sing her big hit — and threw just about everyone else under contract to him into the film, including casting Charlie Chaplin as the principal villain (!) and Mabel Normand as “the other woman.” The plot is pretty simple — Tillie is a big-hearted farm girl who’s seduced by city slicker Chaplin into stealing her father’s (Mack Swain) cash stash and eloping with him to the big city — actually specified as New York — where Chaplin hooks up with girlfriend Normand and the two plot to steal Tillie’s money and leave her alone and broke. (Interestingly, Chaplin reprised this plot seriously in his 1923 film A Woman of Paris, with Edna Purviance as the farm girl and Adolphe Menjou as the villain.) Various versions of this film exist, ranging in length from 55 to 83 minutes — like a lot of other silent features, especially ones that featured people who later became big stars, it got cut, chopped and channeled in various directions and, after sound came in, was outfitted with musical accompaniment ranging from the silly to the generally appropriate.
The version we were watching was about 70 minutes and had recently been shown on TCM, whose host, Robert Osborne, said that Chaplin hadn’t liked making the film. Osborne seemed to think that was because Sennett himself directed — Chaplin had already starting directing his short films himself (and the five-film compilation Chaplin at Keystone, including three films he didn’t direct and two he did, highlights just how much better his comedies got once he was director as well as star) and didn’t want to go back to working for another director (and indeed he never made another film he didn’t direct, unless you count his cameo as himself in King Vidor’s Show People, which he did as a favor to the film’s star, Chaplin’s good friend Marion Davies), but I suspect it was also because Chaplin was all too aware of how totally he was miscast as a villain. Though Chaplin would essentially revive his character here in Monsieur Verdoux 33 years later, he’s simply unbelievable as a black-hearted creep who plans to seduce a farm girl, steal her dad’s fortune and run off with someone else. I remember the first time I saw Tillie’s Punctured Romance — in the early 1970’s, in a hole-in-the-wall revival house (the sort of place you went to see classic films that were too obscure to play on television in the days before cable, videotapes and DVD’s) — and it was one of the few times I’ve sensed a visceral hostility to a movie from an audience, which I think was because they didn’t believe Chaplin, with all his sympathetic and endearing “tramp” gestures, as the bad guy.
What’s more, Tillie’s Punctured Romance simply isn’t a very good movie; about all that happens is a series of scenes in which the three principals travel around L.A. (“playing” New York and giving the film a welcome degree of authenticity from the fact that the city streets are the real thing, not a studio backlot) barely missing each other. There’s an interesting interlude in which Chaplin and Normand take in a movie — this may be the first film in history that has a film-within-the-film, and the gag is that the internal movie, A Thief’s Fate, mimics what Chaplin and Normand are actually doing. (It’s also amazing when you realize how difficult it was to do a film-within-a-film before the invention of process screens and optical effects: either the film-within-the-film had to be acted on the same stage, and in real time, as the main action, the way Buster Keaton did it a decade later in Sherlock, Jr. — or, as I think was done here, a section of the screen had to be matted off in the camera so the scenes involving the film-within-the-film could be shot on the same strip of film, rewound inside the camera, on the part of the screen that had originally been masked out.) It’s a good film and it’s funny, but it remains only moderately amusing and doesn’t really build up the kind of till-it-hurts laughter Sennett regularly achieved in his shorts … until the plot takes a turn by which Tillie inherits a fortune from her millionaire uncle (only temporarily; in this version it turns out the uncle isn’t dead after all, though there’s another cut — the one described by Theodore Huff in his biography of Chaplin — in which the uncle is dead but the will leaving Tillie his fortune is invalidated legally and his money goes to the state).
She throws a party in her uncle’s home and, while there, catches Chaplin — her supposed husband — and Normand necking. Does she merely register jealousy and leave it at that? Oh, no-o-o-o-o: she has a total nervous breakdown that leads her to get out a gun and start shooting it not only at her man who done her wrong, and the girl he done her wrong with, but everybody at her party — and her guests seem to hang out a lot longer and flee a lot less suddenly than one would expect from people at a party whose host has suddenly gone berserk and is shooting at them. Dressler flees and the Keystone Kops (well, they had to be in there somewhere) go after her and the other two principals, and it ends with her nearly drowning off the pier, the harbor patrol (who are at least marginally more competent than the land-based police) rescue her, and Chaplin and Normand are arrested. The End. Tillie’s Punctured Romance was a huge hit — enough so that Dressler reprised the role of Tillie in a series of sequels for another studio, World; and Paramount recycled the title for a 1928 comedy (still a silent) with Louise Fazenda and W. C. Fields that had nothing to do with this one plot-wise — and it elevated Chaplin from minor star to superstar and allowed him to write his own ticket from then on, and to give up villainous roles in favor of the sympathetic “tramp” character he would develop the next year at Essanay studio. But it’s one film from the classic era that, despite the star talent and the brilliantly comic ending, does date rather badly. — 1/2/10
•••••
I watched the 1914 movie Tillie’s Punctured Romance on Turner Classic Movies and heard Ben Mankiewicz
(sitting in for Robert Osborne) deliver an introduction in which he stressed
what a radical movie this was for its time. Though foreign companies had been
making features since 1908 (The Assassination of the Duc de Guise, the debut production of the Film d’Art studio in
France, whose producers hired Camille Saint-Saëns to do the musical score for
live performance in the theatres where the silent film was screened — the first
time a “name” composer was hired to write music for a film, blazing the trail later
followed by Britten, Prokofieff, Copland, Bernstein, Shostakovich, Ravel and
virtually every major 20th
century composer except Stravinsky), U.S. studios were still convinced that no
one would sit still for a film longer than one reel (about 10 to 12 minutes at
silent speed) … until D. W. Griffith shot a two-reel version of Enoch
Arden in 1912.
His studio, Biograph,
released the two reels as two separate movies — only audiences demanded to see
the second part immediately after the first, so theatre owners got the message
and booked the two together, whereupon the bosses at Biograph and the other
Edison Trust companies said, “O.K., we were wrong when we thought no one would
sit through a movie longer than 10 minutes. No one will sit through a movie longer
than 20 minutes.” Griffith pushed
the envelope a year later with the film Judith of Bethulia (based on the Biblical story of Judith and
Holofernes), which he shot in four reels — and the “suits” at Biograph
responded by firing him. Then he went to Mutual and shot a five-reeler called The
Avenging Conscience (an anthology film
based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe — later filmmakers would use the same
solution to put Poe’s stories on screen despite their brevity), but at the time
Mack Sennett announced he had bought the movie rights to the Broadway musical
hit Tillie’s Nightmare and was
hiring the stage star, Marie Dressler, to repeat her role on film, just about
everyone in Hollywood thought he was nuts. Even the French (and the Italians,
who pioneered the two-hour blockbuster with films like The Last Days
of Pompeii, Quo Vadis? and Cabiria in 1912-1914) hadn’t thought of making a
feature-length comedy, but
Sennett boldly plunged into the task of shooting a six-reel comedy feature,
though predictably he used little of Tillie’s Nightmare but the central situation: a young, naïve and hefty
woman being lured from her farmer father and small-town life by a nefarious
city slicker only after her money.
What really throws people about this movie when they see it today
— I remember the first time I ever saw it at one of those storefront revival
theatres in the Bay Area that abounded in the days before home video and cable,
and the audience neither laughed nor fidgeted but greeted the movie with a sort
of stony hostility — is that as the nefarious city slicker who’s only after
Tillie’s money, Sennett cast Charlie Chaplin, and instead of his familiar
“Tramp” getup Sennett had him wear a dandyish outfit (though still with pants
too large for him!), and a twin-tufted “roo” moustache instead of the familiar
toothbrush one associated with both Chaplin and Hitler. Sennett also changed
the title to the more “movie-ish” Tillie’s Punctured Romance and cast his own girlfriend, Mabel Normand, as the
vampy girlfriend Chaplin is dating in the city — and naturally she and Tillie
are jealous of each other. I’ve blown hot and cold on this movie — sometimes
I’ve enjoyed it and sometimes it’s seemed like just a long series of barely
connected chase scenes. (In his autobiography, Chaplin recalled being put off
when he first arrived at Sennett’s Keystone studio and Sennett told him that
chase scenes were “the essence of our comedy.” “Personally, I hated a chase,”
Chaplin said. “It dissipated personality; as little as I knew about movies, I knew
that nothing transcended personality.”)
It may help that the version TCM is
showing is a 72-minute restoration of a film that had been badly butchered
along the way by various reissuers, obviously pieced together from several extant prints because
there are some otherwise inexplicably abrupt changes in video quality from
scene to scene and even within a scene, but on this go-round Tillie’s
Punctured Romance emerges as a screamingly
funny and surprisingly well-constructed movie: Marie Dressler’s outfits are
practically laugh-o-ramas in themselves (particularly the hat she wears when
she leaves the farm, with two fake sunflowers sticking out of either end and a
model duck glued to the top) and the plot is a serviceable one with some great
ideas, notably a metafictional scene in which Chaplin and Normand (who’s
saddled with some of the God-awfullest clothes ever draped over a basically
attractive woman; in 1914 she was stuck between the gloriously over-the-top
dresses of the 1890’s and the boyish flapper outfits of the 1920’s and ended up
with clothes that would have worked only on a much larger woman than she) go to a movie theatre and watch a
fictitious Keystone comedy called A Thief’s Fate — and get more and more uncomfortable because its
plot exactly mirrors what they are doing to Tillie. (At the time there were only two ways to do a film-within-a-film — either cut a hole in the set of the back wall of the theatre where the screen would be and have live actors enact the film-within-the-film at the same time, or mask off the part of the camera image representing where the film would be shown and shoot the film-within-the-film separately on the same film, and the latter was obviously the technique used here.)
The plot bounces Tillie
back and forth between rich and poor: when she’s growing up on the farm her dad
has a cash stash which, at Charlie’s behest (Chaplin’s and Normand’s characters
have their real first names, though the imdb.com cast list refers to them only
as “The City Guy” and “The Other Girl,” respectively), she steals. Then he
takes her to a café (Chaplin said he was always inspired by scenes in a café)
and he and Mabel steal her purse with her dad’s money, and stick her with the
bill. Unable to pay it, she’s put in a jail cell (with male prisoners; Tillie
and the matron guarding her are the only women there) — until her rich uncle
(Charles Bennett) hears about her incarceration and bails her out. Then the
rich uncle goes on a mountaineering expedition, reaches the summit of Mount
Baldy (it’s in the L.A. area and therefore it’s quite possible Sennett sent a
second unit and actually shot there, though there’s some pretty obvious stock
footage — even that early! — on the mountaineering trip) and then falls down
the mountain. The newspapers announce his death and that Tillie is the sole
heir to his multi-million dollar pie fortune, and Charlie learns of this when
he buys a newspaper from a newsboy (child actor Gordon Griffith, though years
later Milton Berle claimed in his autobiography that he played this part) and he immediately seeks out
Tillie — who’s working as a singularly inept waitress at the café where she got
busted (maybe it’s supposed to be
another establishment but it’s clearly the same set) — and rushes her to the
altar. Once Tillie hears of her good fortune she, a good deal smarter than most
comedy heroines of the day, thinks (in a title), “I wonder why he rushed me so
fast.”
She celebrates being an heiress by hosting a huge party at the mansion,
and when she catches Charlie and Mabel necking in an alcove she responds by
getting a pistol and firing not only at Charlie and Mabel, but at random at her
other guests as well. Meanwhile (and Sennett, along with Griffith, was actually
one of the pioneers of cross-cutting to indicate that two story strands were
taking place in different locations at the same time) the presumably “dead”
uncle is rescued, still breathing, and brought back to life. Then there’s a
final chase featuring the Keystone Kops and some almost as inept harbor police,
in which the cops chase Tillie, Charlie and Mabel to the Santa Monica Pier and
Tillie falls off the pier. Ultimately she’s rescued and Charlie is arrested. Tillie’s
Punctured Romance is something of an
outlier in Chaplin’s filmography — not only is he playing a villain but he
isn’t directing or writing himself (the five-film Chaplin at Keystone collection, consisting of three films he didn’t
write and direct as well as perform in and two he did, makes it clear how much
Chaplin’s work improved once he became a complete filmmaker and not just a
performer) — and in his autobiography Chaplin dismissed the entire experience
in about one sentence (“It was pleasant working with Marie, but I did not think
the picture had much merit”) — but it was an enormous hit and helped Chaplin
rise from star to superstar. — 9/7/12
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)