by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ended the evening watching a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1980 film called Hangar 18, which turned out to be a not-bad movie rendered suitable MST3K fare less from problems with the basic concept than an ultra-low budget and faulty execution. It starts out on the space shuttle (which an imdb.com trivia commentator noted had not actually flown yet when the movie was made); two astronauts, Steve Bancroft (Gary Collins) and Lew Price (James Hampton), are flying the craft and a third, Col. Judd Gates (J. R. Clark), is outside in the cargo bay (“Look! They’ve got the top open!” joked one of the MST3K’ers) fiddling with the satellite and trying to get it to launch on cue. Then Bancroft and Price see a bunch of triangle-shaped blips on their radar and conclude they’re being stalked by a UFO — and when the satellite is supposed to launch it blows up instead and Gates is killed (his body floats in space — with the helmet of his space suit blown off just so we know he’s dead — in what’s obviously director James L. Conway’s rip-off of Stanley Kubrick’s famous shot of the death of Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey).
The UFO lands in Bannon County, Arizona (leading Charles and I to make the almost too obvious jokes about “aliens” in Arizona these days!) and on orders of the piece’s principal villain, Presidential assistant Gordon Cain (Robert Vaughn, who proves as effective as a villain as he was as a hero on the Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series), is shipped to Hangar 18, a “lunar receiving station” (“just in case the moon ever lands on earth,” I joked, though it obviously meant the place the astronauts who went to the moon — you remember — ended up after their flights landed), where it can be investigated and its existence kept secret for the two weeks remaining to the Presidential election. This is important because the incumbent, Duncan Tyler (when the last name appeared on the soundtrack Charles joked, “John Tyler had a space program?” — and I said, “Yes, but he was so unpopular it was hushed up”), had publicly ridiculed his major-party opponent for believing in UFO’s, and therefore if he had to admit that one had actually landed it would have been devastating to Tyler’s re-election campaign.
So the government puts out a story blaming Bancroft and Price for the loss of Gates and the satellite, and Bancroft and Price set out to find the truth — which essentially turns this story into a sort of interstellar version of The Fugitive, with the two astronauts racing to put together the clues faster than Cain’s agents can destroy them — which leads to the deaths of several people, including two of Cain’s men (they try to run Bancroft and Price off the road — which shouldn’t have been that difficult since they had a shiny new Lincoln Continental while the astronauts were driving a grungy old rented pickup they’d obtained from a typically stereotyped rustic “character” — but the astronauts outsmarted them and ran them off a bridge instead) and, ultimately, Price. The scenes with the astronauts on the run looking for the one-armed man — oops, I mean the UFO — are intercut with sequences showing scientists and other intellectual types hanging out at Hangar 18 trying to figure out how the UFO worked and what happened to the people flying it — who conveniently died from an accidental release of poisonous gases from the shock of the impact when their ship landed — but doctors doing autopsies found out that except for having only four fingers on each hand they’re otherwise biologically identical to humans.
It turns out that this planet had sent spaceships to the Earth before — which is established by their alphabet, which is identical to letters found on Native American carvings — and, in a plot twist obviously cribbed from Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods? (the film version of which was distributed by the same studio that made Hangar 18, Sunn International, in 1974, six years before Hangar 18 was made), it’s established that the aliens once established a colony on earth and used the indigenous primates as slaves, mating with the earth females and thereby breeding a new race that jump-started human evolution. Meanwhile, back at the White House, Gordon Cain (ya remember Gordon Cain?) decides to eliminate his boss’s UFO problem once and for all by outfitting a private plane with a bomb and destroying Hangar 18 and all its contents while passing it off as a routine aviation accident, but Bancroft and the scientists studying the UFO are saved because they’re in it at the time and it’s built to withstand an attack from human explosives — so the cover-up is blown and presumably Duncan Tyler gets his ass handed to him at the ballot box (just as the real President Tyler ended his unhappy tenure with almost no political support).
Hangar 18 isn’t that bad a movie — it’s cheap and its awfully slow (for something that’s supposed to be an edge-of-your-seat suspense thriller, it moves awfully slowly under the leaden hand of director Conway, who also co-wrote the “original” story with Thomas C. Chapman, though three other scribes — Steven Thornley, Stephen Lord and an uncredited David O’Malley — turned it into a script) but the central premise is compelling and it’s the sort of bad movie that could have been good with more money and, perhaps more importantly, more care. The MST3K version came from early in the show’s run when it was just a local program on a Minneapolis station — it was basically a way some people working there figured out to turn their library of lemon movies into lemonade by mocking them on the air — and it was a fun show, though both the appearance of the robots (this early they still looked like they’d been built with an Erector set, which maybe they had been!) and the quality of the crew’s jokes improved over time — and they did redo some of the movies they’d mocked earlier when they were on Comedy Central and had a slightly slicker production and were doing better writing.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
The Hucksters (MGM, 1947)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Hucksters, a 1947 MGM movie based on a best-selling novel by Frederic Wakeman that was an attack on the advertising industry. Indeed, not only did it contribute the word “hucksters” to the language but it set the clichés for virtually every fictional depiction of advertising since; though one thinks of the 1950’s rather than the 1940’s as the decade in which people started to be concerned and critical about advertising and its long-term effects on the American people and culture, The Hucksters indicates that at least one best-selling book and successful film went there well before these critiques became the clichés they did in the 1950’s. The Hucksters deals with Victor Norman (Clark Gable, his hair done up in what looks like shoe polish to conceal his advancing age), who has just got out of the Army following World War II and is seeking to get back into advertising, in which he had worked before the war (for a small agency with a presence in both New York and Hollywood), but he wants a job at a bigger, more prestigious company that can afford to pay him more than he got before the war.
He sets his sights on the Kimberly agency and its owner and CEO, Mr. Kimberly (Adolphe Menjou), and Kimberly agrees to try him out if he can successfully sell the Beautee [sic] Soap account. That means dealing with Beautee’s egomaniacal CEO, Evan Llewellyn Evans (Sydney Greenstreet) — a character based on real-life tobacco company head George Washington Hill, who coined the slogan “LSMFT” (“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) and, like his fictional counterpart, believed that the secret to successful advertising was to make your commercials so irritating that the public wouldn’t be able to forget the name of your product and would therefore be led subliminally to buy it. Evans begins the first meeting with Kimberly’s staff that Victor attends by spitting something out of his mouth onto the meeting table, then squashing it, then pouring the contents of a water pitcher all over the table. Evans also has both his own staff and the Kimberly executives (he keeps reminding them that, with $1.2 million worth of bookings, he’s their biggest client) chanting in unison when he asks rhetorical questions and demands instant agreement — a game which Victor, apparently the only person in the room with a conscience, stuns Evans (and oddly impresses him) by refusing to play.
Parallel to the story of Victor’s growing success at Kimberly is his romance with Kay Dorrance (Deborah Kerr) a widow (her husband was a U.S. general) with two kids who accepted Victor’s offer of $5,000 to endorse Beautee Soap because she needed the money, but resolutely refused to wear the sheer nightgown in which Evans wanted her to pose for the ad. There’s a bit of a romantic triangle in that Victor is also interested in an aspiring singer, Jean Ogilvie (Ava Gardner — who, despite coming to this film fresh from her success in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers — was billed only fifth, after Gable, Kerr, Greenstreet and Menjou), whom he uses for some of Beautee’s commercials and also dates when he and Kay are on the outs — as happens after a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to get her to spend the weekend with him at the Blue Penguin Inn in Connecticut. The problem is that Victor remembers this place as the classy establishment it was before the war — only in the meantime the woman who owned it then has retired and sold it to Blake (Jimmy Conlin), who has basically changed it into an oceanfront version of the No Tell Motel, and never having been there before Kay gets the wrong impression of Victor’s motives in inviting her there and walks out without ever bothering to see him.
In the middle of the movie Victor is obliged to go to Hollywood and use his old movie contacts to get the services of Buddy Hare (Keenan Wynn), a singularly unfunny comedian (when he tells his ancient jokes to Victor, Victor keeps beating him to the punch lines) whom Evans has decided is a major talent. This means having to deal with Hare’s agent, Dave Lash (Edward Arnold) — a character supposedly based on real-life agent Jules Stein, founder of Music Corporation of America (MCA), though according to a trivia poster on imdb.com the portrayal of Stein is considerably softened from Wakeman’s book, probably because by 1947 the studio system was already disintegrating and agents were becoming crucially important to the studios as representatives and packagers of filmmaking talent (indeed, MCA pioneered the “package deal” by which everyone creatively involved in a film — the actors, director, writers, etc. — would be their clients; they would put together a package containing story, writers, director, stars and crew and then offer it to the studios on a take-it-or-leave-it basis), and even the people running a studio like MGM that was still clinging to a retrograde business model realized they couldn’t afford to alienate the most powerful agency in Hollywood by negatively depicting it in a film.
Seeking to make a silk purse out of Hare’s sow’s ear, Victor hires two good comedy writers who create a characterization fitting Hare’s meager talents, and Victor gets them to write a dummy show which he records as a demo — without clearing either the script or the final recording with Evans and thereby pissing him off. Evans likes the program and it looks like Victor’s reputation is made and he can have the job with Kimberly at a good salary — only Victor has a crisis of conscience and, anticipating the walkouts of many a 1960’s movie protagonist, he stalks out of the 2 a.m. Sunday meeting Evans insisted on and walks out of his dream job, supported by Kay who — unlike most movie heroines of her vintage — is willing to marry him even though he doesn’t have a dime.
The Hucksters has a lot of felicitous moments, including Ava Gardner’s song, “Don’t Tell Me” (imdb.com lists Eileen Wilson as her voice double both here and in The Bribe, two years later, where she sang an even better song, “Situation Wanted,” but the voice is a good match for Gardner’s speaking voice and she did have enough of a voice that she originally did her own singing in the 1951 Show Boat and it was only just before the film’s release that her vocals were taken off the soundtrack and replaced with voice double Annette Warren’s; still, MGM was notorious for voice-doubling even actresses who unquestionably could sing, like Angela Lansbury), and a chilling bit of dialogue in which Kimberly tells Victor that he got his own agency started and won the Beautee Soap account by denouncing his previous employer to the FBI for corruption. Ironic that the same year (1947) Menjou played an informer in this film he became one in real life as a “friendly witness” in the House Un-American Activities Committee’s initial hearings on alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood!
The Hucksters is a good, though not great, movie; Wakeman’s novel was discernibly softened in the script by Luther Davis and even more softened by the director, Jack Conway, a “safe” MGM veteran who usually got put on chancy projects because he was a highly moralistic man who could be trusted to tone down potentially racy material like Anita Loos’s Red-Headed Woman (Loos said that Conway refused to direct one scene in that film and told her, “If you want that scene in the movie you’ll have to direct it yourself” — which she did), and the moral superiority of Clark Gable’s character over everyone else in the movie gets wearisome — especially since he plays the role as a straightforward hero and doesn’t leave us in much suspense as to whether he’ll stand on principle or sell out (the part really needed a more morally ambiguous actor like Robert Mitchum or the noir-era Dick Powell) — but as Charles pointed out, it’s sufficiently creatively plotted that for much of it we really don’t know what’s going to happen next, and as the first film to deal even remotely frankly with the soullessness of the advertising business and its coarsening of American culture (in one scene Victor says that radio advertisers are essentially invited guests in American homes and should therefore act responsibly and sell their products in a low-keyed fashion rather than irritating potential customers into submission) The Hucksters is certainly historically important.
The film was The Hucksters, a 1947 MGM movie based on a best-selling novel by Frederic Wakeman that was an attack on the advertising industry. Indeed, not only did it contribute the word “hucksters” to the language but it set the clichés for virtually every fictional depiction of advertising since; though one thinks of the 1950’s rather than the 1940’s as the decade in which people started to be concerned and critical about advertising and its long-term effects on the American people and culture, The Hucksters indicates that at least one best-selling book and successful film went there well before these critiques became the clichés they did in the 1950’s. The Hucksters deals with Victor Norman (Clark Gable, his hair done up in what looks like shoe polish to conceal his advancing age), who has just got out of the Army following World War II and is seeking to get back into advertising, in which he had worked before the war (for a small agency with a presence in both New York and Hollywood), but he wants a job at a bigger, more prestigious company that can afford to pay him more than he got before the war.
He sets his sights on the Kimberly agency and its owner and CEO, Mr. Kimberly (Adolphe Menjou), and Kimberly agrees to try him out if he can successfully sell the Beautee [sic] Soap account. That means dealing with Beautee’s egomaniacal CEO, Evan Llewellyn Evans (Sydney Greenstreet) — a character based on real-life tobacco company head George Washington Hill, who coined the slogan “LSMFT” (“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) and, like his fictional counterpart, believed that the secret to successful advertising was to make your commercials so irritating that the public wouldn’t be able to forget the name of your product and would therefore be led subliminally to buy it. Evans begins the first meeting with Kimberly’s staff that Victor attends by spitting something out of his mouth onto the meeting table, then squashing it, then pouring the contents of a water pitcher all over the table. Evans also has both his own staff and the Kimberly executives (he keeps reminding them that, with $1.2 million worth of bookings, he’s their biggest client) chanting in unison when he asks rhetorical questions and demands instant agreement — a game which Victor, apparently the only person in the room with a conscience, stuns Evans (and oddly impresses him) by refusing to play.
Parallel to the story of Victor’s growing success at Kimberly is his romance with Kay Dorrance (Deborah Kerr) a widow (her husband was a U.S. general) with two kids who accepted Victor’s offer of $5,000 to endorse Beautee Soap because she needed the money, but resolutely refused to wear the sheer nightgown in which Evans wanted her to pose for the ad. There’s a bit of a romantic triangle in that Victor is also interested in an aspiring singer, Jean Ogilvie (Ava Gardner — who, despite coming to this film fresh from her success in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers — was billed only fifth, after Gable, Kerr, Greenstreet and Menjou), whom he uses for some of Beautee’s commercials and also dates when he and Kay are on the outs — as happens after a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to get her to spend the weekend with him at the Blue Penguin Inn in Connecticut. The problem is that Victor remembers this place as the classy establishment it was before the war — only in the meantime the woman who owned it then has retired and sold it to Blake (Jimmy Conlin), who has basically changed it into an oceanfront version of the No Tell Motel, and never having been there before Kay gets the wrong impression of Victor’s motives in inviting her there and walks out without ever bothering to see him.
In the middle of the movie Victor is obliged to go to Hollywood and use his old movie contacts to get the services of Buddy Hare (Keenan Wynn), a singularly unfunny comedian (when he tells his ancient jokes to Victor, Victor keeps beating him to the punch lines) whom Evans has decided is a major talent. This means having to deal with Hare’s agent, Dave Lash (Edward Arnold) — a character supposedly based on real-life agent Jules Stein, founder of Music Corporation of America (MCA), though according to a trivia poster on imdb.com the portrayal of Stein is considerably softened from Wakeman’s book, probably because by 1947 the studio system was already disintegrating and agents were becoming crucially important to the studios as representatives and packagers of filmmaking talent (indeed, MCA pioneered the “package deal” by which everyone creatively involved in a film — the actors, director, writers, etc. — would be their clients; they would put together a package containing story, writers, director, stars and crew and then offer it to the studios on a take-it-or-leave-it basis), and even the people running a studio like MGM that was still clinging to a retrograde business model realized they couldn’t afford to alienate the most powerful agency in Hollywood by negatively depicting it in a film.
Seeking to make a silk purse out of Hare’s sow’s ear, Victor hires two good comedy writers who create a characterization fitting Hare’s meager talents, and Victor gets them to write a dummy show which he records as a demo — without clearing either the script or the final recording with Evans and thereby pissing him off. Evans likes the program and it looks like Victor’s reputation is made and he can have the job with Kimberly at a good salary — only Victor has a crisis of conscience and, anticipating the walkouts of many a 1960’s movie protagonist, he stalks out of the 2 a.m. Sunday meeting Evans insisted on and walks out of his dream job, supported by Kay who — unlike most movie heroines of her vintage — is willing to marry him even though he doesn’t have a dime.
The Hucksters has a lot of felicitous moments, including Ava Gardner’s song, “Don’t Tell Me” (imdb.com lists Eileen Wilson as her voice double both here and in The Bribe, two years later, where she sang an even better song, “Situation Wanted,” but the voice is a good match for Gardner’s speaking voice and she did have enough of a voice that she originally did her own singing in the 1951 Show Boat and it was only just before the film’s release that her vocals were taken off the soundtrack and replaced with voice double Annette Warren’s; still, MGM was notorious for voice-doubling even actresses who unquestionably could sing, like Angela Lansbury), and a chilling bit of dialogue in which Kimberly tells Victor that he got his own agency started and won the Beautee Soap account by denouncing his previous employer to the FBI for corruption. Ironic that the same year (1947) Menjou played an informer in this film he became one in real life as a “friendly witness” in the House Un-American Activities Committee’s initial hearings on alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood!
The Hucksters is a good, though not great, movie; Wakeman’s novel was discernibly softened in the script by Luther Davis and even more softened by the director, Jack Conway, a “safe” MGM veteran who usually got put on chancy projects because he was a highly moralistic man who could be trusted to tone down potentially racy material like Anita Loos’s Red-Headed Woman (Loos said that Conway refused to direct one scene in that film and told her, “If you want that scene in the movie you’ll have to direct it yourself” — which she did), and the moral superiority of Clark Gable’s character over everyone else in the movie gets wearisome — especially since he plays the role as a straightforward hero and doesn’t leave us in much suspense as to whether he’ll stand on principle or sell out (the part really needed a more morally ambiguous actor like Robert Mitchum or the noir-era Dick Powell) — but as Charles pointed out, it’s sufficiently creatively plotted that for much of it we really don’t know what’s going to happen next, and as the first film to deal even remotely frankly with the soullessness of the advertising business and its coarsening of American culture (in one scene Victor says that radio advertisers are essentially invited guests in American homes and should therefore act responsibly and sell their products in a low-keyed fashion rather than irritating potential customers into submission) The Hucksters is certainly historically important.
Accused at 17 (Lifetime, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I also watched a surprisingly intriguing TV-movie on Lifetime with the odd title Accused at 17 — they gave it its premiere showing on the network last Saturday, May 1, programming it right after the previously screened Dead at 17 because of their similar titles. For the first half-hour or so this film was so vapid one got the impression it could have been called When Valley Girls Go Bad — it basically alternates between two sources of angst in the life of high-school senior Bianca (Nicole Gale Anderson). One plot strand concerns Bianca’s troubled relationship with her mother, Jacqui (Cynthia Gibb, top-billed); it takes us a while before writers Ken Sanders (story) and Lifetime reliable Christine Conradt (script) bother to explain to us why the mother-daughter relationship is so troubled, but eventually we learn that Bianca’s parents broke up after Jacqui discovered that Bianca’s dad was having an affair, refused to forgive him, threw him out of the house — and afterwards he died in an apartment fire, so Bianca has never forgiven her mom for causing her dad’s death. (Can you say “Electra complex”?)
Bianca’s other problem is at school; she’s friends with Fallyn Werner (Janet Montgomery) and Sarah Patterson (Stella Maeve), and they’re trying to get her to go to a big weekend party at which there’ll be enough booze to launch the entire Pacific Fleet (given Lifetime’s penchant for movies about the problem of teenage drinking it’s surprising that this script takes such a cavalier attitude about it) — only Bianca can’t go because that night her mom’s boyfriend, Trevor Lautten (Jason Brooks, a better-looking guy than the lanky, sandy-haired male blanks Lifetime usually casts in roles like this), has invited Bianca to eat with them at his house and has had lobsters and other exotic foods flown in for the occasion. So Bianca endures Trevor’s “stupid” dinner party — and Bianca’s boyfriend Chad (Reiley McClendon, who looks like an odd cross between a young John Lennon and a young Jay Leno) gets waylaid in the bathroom by the school’s “fast” girl, Dory Holland (Lindsay Taylor), who goes after him sexually (she’s clearly the aggressor, because in a hot soft-core porn scene nicely staged by director Doug Campbell she’s shown unzipping his pants, obviously preparing to give him head) and stays with him 45 minutes, long enough to do the dirty deed. The next day Fallyn and Sarah tell Bianca that Chad cheated on her with Dory, and they goad Bianca into leaving a threatening message on Chad’s cell phone and then concoct a rather nasty revenge plot.
Claiming to be taking Dory to a party with college-age frat boys, they drive her out to a deserted canyon (which looks quite like one of the old Republic Western locations, making one wonder where John Wayne is when Dory clearly needs him) and intend to strand her there. Bianca, who drove out separately from the car containing Fallyn, Sarah and Dory, angrily shoves Dory to the ground after Dory throws a rock at her (Dory throws it from behind but it still lands on Bianca’s forehead), and after Bianca leaves Fallyn bashes Dory’s head in with a rock and then she and Sarah realize that Fallyn has killed Dory. They plot to cover it up by swearing each other to secrecy, but the police assigned to investigate Dory’s disappearance (which becomes a murder investigation after a couple of hikers — a Black man and a white woman, and it’s an indication of how far we’ve come racially that the combination is treated routinely and raises no particular eyebrows — find Dory’s body in the canyon) quickly trace it to Bianca after Chad plays them her threatening message on his cell phone. Thus Bianca is “accused at 17” and Fallyn and Sarah plot a cover-up by lying — and getting their parents to lie for them — that they were at Fallyn’s place watching DVD’s all day Saturday. It gets nastier as Fallyn finds Dory’s hair clip in her car and plants it in Bianca’s to frame her outright — and when Sarah gets a note from Jacqui and decides to stop covering up for her friend and go to the police with the truth (that Dory was still alive when Bianca left the scene and it was Fallyn who killed her), Fallyn murders her by withholding Sarah’s asthma medication and firing her inhaler into the air, exhausting it, as Sarah goes into an asthma attack that, without the inhaler, quickly turns fatal.
It’s the most chilling scene in the film, and it also leads to Fallyn’s final comeuppance when she reveals to Jacqui and her own parents (William R. Moses and Barbara Niven) that she knew Sarah died in her back yard (something Jacqui, who went to Sarah’s home but arrived too late to save her, hadn’t mentioned) — and an hysterical finale in which Fallyn pulls a gun on her own father but can’t pull the trigger, so dad grabs the gun away from her and they turn her over to the police. As silly as a lot of it is, Accused at 17 gains from Campbell’s straightforward, un-flashy direction and even more from Janet Montgomery’s superb performance — she actually convinces us that her character has turned from a rather bratty teenager to an out-and-out psychopath and she’s mastered the chilling look of silent indifference that powered many of the great femme fatale performances in 1940’s film noir. This type of story frequently shows a villain who’s more interesting than the hero, and so it does here — Nicole Gale Anderson’s acting is pretty wimpy and she and Cynthia Gibb hardly look like one could have begotten the other, but Montgomery’s work here establishes her as an actress to watch.
This morning I also watched a surprisingly intriguing TV-movie on Lifetime with the odd title Accused at 17 — they gave it its premiere showing on the network last Saturday, May 1, programming it right after the previously screened Dead at 17 because of their similar titles. For the first half-hour or so this film was so vapid one got the impression it could have been called When Valley Girls Go Bad — it basically alternates between two sources of angst in the life of high-school senior Bianca (Nicole Gale Anderson). One plot strand concerns Bianca’s troubled relationship with her mother, Jacqui (Cynthia Gibb, top-billed); it takes us a while before writers Ken Sanders (story) and Lifetime reliable Christine Conradt (script) bother to explain to us why the mother-daughter relationship is so troubled, but eventually we learn that Bianca’s parents broke up after Jacqui discovered that Bianca’s dad was having an affair, refused to forgive him, threw him out of the house — and afterwards he died in an apartment fire, so Bianca has never forgiven her mom for causing her dad’s death. (Can you say “Electra complex”?)
Bianca’s other problem is at school; she’s friends with Fallyn Werner (Janet Montgomery) and Sarah Patterson (Stella Maeve), and they’re trying to get her to go to a big weekend party at which there’ll be enough booze to launch the entire Pacific Fleet (given Lifetime’s penchant for movies about the problem of teenage drinking it’s surprising that this script takes such a cavalier attitude about it) — only Bianca can’t go because that night her mom’s boyfriend, Trevor Lautten (Jason Brooks, a better-looking guy than the lanky, sandy-haired male blanks Lifetime usually casts in roles like this), has invited Bianca to eat with them at his house and has had lobsters and other exotic foods flown in for the occasion. So Bianca endures Trevor’s “stupid” dinner party — and Bianca’s boyfriend Chad (Reiley McClendon, who looks like an odd cross between a young John Lennon and a young Jay Leno) gets waylaid in the bathroom by the school’s “fast” girl, Dory Holland (Lindsay Taylor), who goes after him sexually (she’s clearly the aggressor, because in a hot soft-core porn scene nicely staged by director Doug Campbell she’s shown unzipping his pants, obviously preparing to give him head) and stays with him 45 minutes, long enough to do the dirty deed. The next day Fallyn and Sarah tell Bianca that Chad cheated on her with Dory, and they goad Bianca into leaving a threatening message on Chad’s cell phone and then concoct a rather nasty revenge plot.
Claiming to be taking Dory to a party with college-age frat boys, they drive her out to a deserted canyon (which looks quite like one of the old Republic Western locations, making one wonder where John Wayne is when Dory clearly needs him) and intend to strand her there. Bianca, who drove out separately from the car containing Fallyn, Sarah and Dory, angrily shoves Dory to the ground after Dory throws a rock at her (Dory throws it from behind but it still lands on Bianca’s forehead), and after Bianca leaves Fallyn bashes Dory’s head in with a rock and then she and Sarah realize that Fallyn has killed Dory. They plot to cover it up by swearing each other to secrecy, but the police assigned to investigate Dory’s disappearance (which becomes a murder investigation after a couple of hikers — a Black man and a white woman, and it’s an indication of how far we’ve come racially that the combination is treated routinely and raises no particular eyebrows — find Dory’s body in the canyon) quickly trace it to Bianca after Chad plays them her threatening message on his cell phone. Thus Bianca is “accused at 17” and Fallyn and Sarah plot a cover-up by lying — and getting their parents to lie for them — that they were at Fallyn’s place watching DVD’s all day Saturday. It gets nastier as Fallyn finds Dory’s hair clip in her car and plants it in Bianca’s to frame her outright — and when Sarah gets a note from Jacqui and decides to stop covering up for her friend and go to the police with the truth (that Dory was still alive when Bianca left the scene and it was Fallyn who killed her), Fallyn murders her by withholding Sarah’s asthma medication and firing her inhaler into the air, exhausting it, as Sarah goes into an asthma attack that, without the inhaler, quickly turns fatal.
It’s the most chilling scene in the film, and it also leads to Fallyn’s final comeuppance when she reveals to Jacqui and her own parents (William R. Moses and Barbara Niven) that she knew Sarah died in her back yard (something Jacqui, who went to Sarah’s home but arrived too late to save her, hadn’t mentioned) — and an hysterical finale in which Fallyn pulls a gun on her own father but can’t pull the trigger, so dad grabs the gun away from her and they turn her over to the police. As silly as a lot of it is, Accused at 17 gains from Campbell’s straightforward, un-flashy direction and even more from Janet Montgomery’s superb performance — she actually convinces us that her character has turned from a rather bratty teenager to an out-and-out psychopath and she’s mastered the chilling look of silent indifference that powered many of the great femme fatale performances in 1940’s film noir. This type of story frequently shows a villain who’s more interesting than the hero, and so it does here — Nicole Gale Anderson’s acting is pretty wimpy and she and Cynthia Gibb hardly look like one could have begotten the other, but Montgomery’s work here establishes her as an actress to watch.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
This Filthy World (Red Envelope Entertainment, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles’ mother wanted to show us a recording she’d been saving on her digital video recorder (this new gimcrack which is sort of like a DVD recorder only it records onto a hard drive and you don’t have a permanent medium to store it on; instead you hold it on the hard drive and erase it once you’ve seen it — something which rubs me the wrong way because I still don’t feel I’ve collected something unless I have it as a physical object, though younger people don’t have a problem with the evanescence of digital storage media either for video or audio): This Filthy World, a performance by film director John Waters in New York in 2006 (you could tell it was that old because Waters made jokes that only made sense when George W. Bush was still President and Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett Majors were still alive) which was essentially a stand-up comedy routine, referencing the production history of some of his films (both the early underground ones with Divine and the later ones that — while he still insists on shooting in his native Baltimore — have star names in their casts and union extras and crews, with all the work rules pertaining thereto) as well as some of his observations about the rest of life.
Waters proclaimed himself totally baffled by the “bear” phenomenon in the Gay male community — particularly the penchant of bears in relationships with other bears to refer to their partners as “husbear” or “significant otter” and their insistence that there’s a second coming-out process involved (“Please don’t tell your parents that you’re a bear,” he pleaded). Waters also did a routine about poppers as the one drug he actually likes — he joked about taking a hit of poppers while climbing up on a roller-coaster so he can feel the rush as it descends — and he insisted that Divine really did eat dogshit in the infamous scene at the end of his notorious film Pink Flamingos (a moviegoing experience I have yet to subject myself to). I must admit that I like the idea of John Waters even though Hairspray and Cry-Baby are the only films of his I’ve actually seen (interestingly he claimed credit for making Johnny Depp a star in the latter — before he’d been known only for his role in the TV series 21 Jump Street but it was after seeing him in Cry-Baby that Tim Burton decided to cast Depp in the title role of Edward Scissorhands, his breakthrough role in films — though I remember reading Traci Lords’ memoir and noting that, while she had nothing but praise for Waters and his sensitive direction of her in her first non-porn role, she said that already Depp was totally surrounded by an entourage and therefore she didn’t get to see or talk to him at all except when they actually had a scene together) — indeed, I found myself wishing the Burton/Depp Ed Wood had done well enough to merit a sequel because Waters would have been the perfect director for Ed Wood, Part 2.
Waters comes off as quite charming, disarmingly frank about how he worked and why his films are so sleazy — though about the only time he let down the mask and got at all personal was his grief over the death of Divine just one week after Hairspray opened, his joy at having the biggest hit of his career irreparably tainted by the loss of the unlikely star with whom he’d risen and to whom he’d given a superlative showcase (in Hairspray Divine played two parts, one female and one male). Waters also lamented the death of the “midnight movie” at the hands of videos and DVD’s, and expressed his admiration for beyond-the-pale filmmakers like William Castle (particularly the gimmick films like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler — Waters said that when The Tingler played Baltimore and only a few seats were wired with the joy-buzzers that administered mild electric shocks to the people sitting in them, he got to the theatre early and felt under each seat just to make sure he would get a wired one, then sat through every showing of the film that day) and the virtually forgotten Kroger Babb, who in the 1940’s made a movie with the innocuous title Mom and Dad that got condemned by the Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency and priests were instructed to tell their parishioners on Sunday that it was a major sin to see Mom and Dad.
I’d heard of Kroger Babb elsewhere — he was essentially to the 1940’s what Dwain Esper was to the 1930’s, making sleazy exploitation movies and carting prints and projectors around because, with regular movie theatres closed to him and his product, he had to rent bingo halls and other non-traditional locations and show his films in them. (Waters said that Babb specialized in going to towns too small to have a movie theatre at all and offering them his sort of entertainment because they otherwise didn’t have any way to see a movie other than a long drive to a city big enough to have a normal theatre.) What made Mom and Dad unique was that following a pretty ordinary story about unwed motherhood shot in black-and-white, Babb spliced on a full-color film of a woman giving birth to a baby (it was supposedly the heroine of his story but actually came from a company making medical films designed to help educate doctors and nurses) — and Waters marveled at the ability of the straight guys seeing this film to tune out the baby and just focus on the vagina. (What Waters didn’t mention about Babb was that in addition to producing exploitation films like Mom and Dad, he was also the first distributor to release a film by Ingmar Bergman in the U.S.)
Waters also had a lot of colorful anecdotes about making his early movies — including one for which he needed a farm; unencumbered by union rules and cheerily ignorant of the usual protocols about shooting on someone else’s property (like offering them payment and signing a release), he just walked his cast, crew and equipment onto a farm and shot in a pigsty, with the unforgettable response that for some reason the pigs found the sight of humans making a film sexually stimulating and started fucking each other — while the farm family that owned the place stayed indoors for the entire eight hours Waters and company were there and, if they had any idea their farm was being used as a film set, they ignored it and didn’t try to stop it. It would have been nice if This Filthy World had been more like a usual public appearance like a filmmaker — particularly if it had featured clips from Waters’ films — but as it stands This Filthy World is quite amusing and a neat glimpse into one of filmdom’s quirkier figures — and I especially liked his joke that instead of having directors do DVD commentaries on their own films, they hire some of the other crew members: “How about a really disgruntled editor saying, ‘Would you believe the shit that director gave me to work with?’” It’s also worth noting that Red Envelope Entertainment is actually a subsidiary of Netflix, the company that rents DVD’s by mail — I’d certainly had no idea that Netflix had a subsidiary that did theatrical distribution!
Charles’ mother wanted to show us a recording she’d been saving on her digital video recorder (this new gimcrack which is sort of like a DVD recorder only it records onto a hard drive and you don’t have a permanent medium to store it on; instead you hold it on the hard drive and erase it once you’ve seen it — something which rubs me the wrong way because I still don’t feel I’ve collected something unless I have it as a physical object, though younger people don’t have a problem with the evanescence of digital storage media either for video or audio): This Filthy World, a performance by film director John Waters in New York in 2006 (you could tell it was that old because Waters made jokes that only made sense when George W. Bush was still President and Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett Majors were still alive) which was essentially a stand-up comedy routine, referencing the production history of some of his films (both the early underground ones with Divine and the later ones that — while he still insists on shooting in his native Baltimore — have star names in their casts and union extras and crews, with all the work rules pertaining thereto) as well as some of his observations about the rest of life.
Waters proclaimed himself totally baffled by the “bear” phenomenon in the Gay male community — particularly the penchant of bears in relationships with other bears to refer to their partners as “husbear” or “significant otter” and their insistence that there’s a second coming-out process involved (“Please don’t tell your parents that you’re a bear,” he pleaded). Waters also did a routine about poppers as the one drug he actually likes — he joked about taking a hit of poppers while climbing up on a roller-coaster so he can feel the rush as it descends — and he insisted that Divine really did eat dogshit in the infamous scene at the end of his notorious film Pink Flamingos (a moviegoing experience I have yet to subject myself to). I must admit that I like the idea of John Waters even though Hairspray and Cry-Baby are the only films of his I’ve actually seen (interestingly he claimed credit for making Johnny Depp a star in the latter — before he’d been known only for his role in the TV series 21 Jump Street but it was after seeing him in Cry-Baby that Tim Burton decided to cast Depp in the title role of Edward Scissorhands, his breakthrough role in films — though I remember reading Traci Lords’ memoir and noting that, while she had nothing but praise for Waters and his sensitive direction of her in her first non-porn role, she said that already Depp was totally surrounded by an entourage and therefore she didn’t get to see or talk to him at all except when they actually had a scene together) — indeed, I found myself wishing the Burton/Depp Ed Wood had done well enough to merit a sequel because Waters would have been the perfect director for Ed Wood, Part 2.
Waters comes off as quite charming, disarmingly frank about how he worked and why his films are so sleazy — though about the only time he let down the mask and got at all personal was his grief over the death of Divine just one week after Hairspray opened, his joy at having the biggest hit of his career irreparably tainted by the loss of the unlikely star with whom he’d risen and to whom he’d given a superlative showcase (in Hairspray Divine played two parts, one female and one male). Waters also lamented the death of the “midnight movie” at the hands of videos and DVD’s, and expressed his admiration for beyond-the-pale filmmakers like William Castle (particularly the gimmick films like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler — Waters said that when The Tingler played Baltimore and only a few seats were wired with the joy-buzzers that administered mild electric shocks to the people sitting in them, he got to the theatre early and felt under each seat just to make sure he would get a wired one, then sat through every showing of the film that day) and the virtually forgotten Kroger Babb, who in the 1940’s made a movie with the innocuous title Mom and Dad that got condemned by the Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency and priests were instructed to tell their parishioners on Sunday that it was a major sin to see Mom and Dad.
I’d heard of Kroger Babb elsewhere — he was essentially to the 1940’s what Dwain Esper was to the 1930’s, making sleazy exploitation movies and carting prints and projectors around because, with regular movie theatres closed to him and his product, he had to rent bingo halls and other non-traditional locations and show his films in them. (Waters said that Babb specialized in going to towns too small to have a movie theatre at all and offering them his sort of entertainment because they otherwise didn’t have any way to see a movie other than a long drive to a city big enough to have a normal theatre.) What made Mom and Dad unique was that following a pretty ordinary story about unwed motherhood shot in black-and-white, Babb spliced on a full-color film of a woman giving birth to a baby (it was supposedly the heroine of his story but actually came from a company making medical films designed to help educate doctors and nurses) — and Waters marveled at the ability of the straight guys seeing this film to tune out the baby and just focus on the vagina. (What Waters didn’t mention about Babb was that in addition to producing exploitation films like Mom and Dad, he was also the first distributor to release a film by Ingmar Bergman in the U.S.)
Waters also had a lot of colorful anecdotes about making his early movies — including one for which he needed a farm; unencumbered by union rules and cheerily ignorant of the usual protocols about shooting on someone else’s property (like offering them payment and signing a release), he just walked his cast, crew and equipment onto a farm and shot in a pigsty, with the unforgettable response that for some reason the pigs found the sight of humans making a film sexually stimulating and started fucking each other — while the farm family that owned the place stayed indoors for the entire eight hours Waters and company were there and, if they had any idea their farm was being used as a film set, they ignored it and didn’t try to stop it. It would have been nice if This Filthy World had been more like a usual public appearance like a filmmaker — particularly if it had featured clips from Waters’ films — but as it stands This Filthy World is quite amusing and a neat glimpse into one of filmdom’s quirkier figures — and I especially liked his joke that instead of having directors do DVD commentaries on their own films, they hire some of the other crew members: “How about a really disgruntled editor saying, ‘Would you believe the shit that director gave me to work with?’” It’s also worth noting that Red Envelope Entertainment is actually a subsidiary of Netflix, the company that rents DVD’s by mail — I’d certainly had no idea that Netflix had a subsidiary that did theatrical distribution!
Monday, May 3, 2010
The Star Witness (Warners, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I got out by 9 a.m. to catch a movie on Turner Classic Movies: Star Witness, a 1931 Warners programmer which I wanted to see because it’s one of my “doubles” movies: it co-stars Walter Huston and rural character actor Charles “Chic” Sale, both of whom also played Abraham Lincoln (Huston in D. W. Griffith’s 1930 film and Sale in the MGM two-reeler The Perfect Tribute). For the first 10 minutes or so it is a pretty banal family movie, what with the hard-working father, hausfrau mother, ne’er-do-well son, daughter who can’t stop necking with the son-in-law to be (not shown), two insufferable little boys and campy old grandfather (the Sale role) who can’t stop reminiscing about his days in Lincoln’s army in the Civil War. Then all of a sudden a gang war erupts outside the street of the house where all these people live, and we’re suddenly reminded that this is supposed to be a crime film.
It turns out that a vicious gangster in a yellow raincoat just shot a police officer and a former gangster who was about to turn state’s evidence, then fled through the home of Our Family and gave them all a good look at him before leaving through the back door and getting himself arrested. From then on it’s a clash of conscience between upright D.A. Huston and the family as to whether they’ll testify in court or whether the gangsters will successfully intimidate them into silence — which they do first by abducting the father and beating him up, then kidnapping the son and holding him until the preliminary hearing is over. While the ending was pretty far-fetched (Old Granddad wanders the streets where the kid is being held and the kid throws a baseball out the window to let his grandfather know where he is), in the main it was a good programmer in the Warners house style, well directed by William A. Wellman (the same year he made The Public Enemy) from an Academy Award-nominated script by Lucien Hubbard (who later moved to MGM and became a producer, handling what at any other studio would have been called the “B”-picture unit). — 3/26/98
•••••
I picked the film that immediately followed The Ruling Voice on TCM’s recent birthday tribute to Walter Huston: The Star Witness (virtually none of the documentation on this film includes the definite article in its title, but the opening credit does), in which Huston was back on the right side of the law as crusading prosecutor Whitlock (if the character has a first name I don’t remember hearing it and the American Film Institute Catalog doesn’t list it, nor does imdb.com) who’s anxious to convict at least one gangster of murder and get him executed. He gets his chance when Maxey Campo (Ralph Ince) guns down a police officer and an informant just when the officer is escorting the informant to Whitlock’s office to turn state’s evidence against Campo. Campo and his gang members escape through the home of the Leeds family, a typically repulsive slice of Warners urbia containing father George “Pa” Leeds (Grant Mitchell, Warners’ go-to guy in the early 1930’s for pathetic middle-class family weaklings), his wife Abby (Frances Starr), their ne’er-do-well son Jackie (Edward J. Nugent), their adult daughter Sue (Sally Blane, real-life sister of The Ruling Voice co-star Loretta Young) and two pre-pubescent kids of the usual mix of treacly sweetness and rambunctious obnoxiousness: Donny (George Ernest) and Ned (Dickie Moore).
Aside from Sue, who’s in the cellar getting a jar of preserves when the killings happen, all the Leedses get a good view of Campo doing the killing — and they all, including Sue, get an even better look at him when he and his henchmen escape through the house and go out the back way, where, tipped off by the Leedses, the police capture and arrest them. At first the Leedses are ready and eager to testify against Campo, but things abruptly change when the Campo gang first kidnap George at his workplace, take him back to their hideout (at the “Ideal Paper Box Company”!), offer him a bribe and then, when he refuses, beat him up; and then when Donny slips out of the police cordon around the Leedses’ home to play in his school’s baseball game and the gang kidnaps him on the eve of Campo’s trial, thus intimidating the Leedses into silence. The only person willing to testify against Campo is Abby’s father, Civil War veteran Private Summerill — played by well-known (at the time) rustic comedian Charles “Chic” Sale, who gets a special “and” credit in the opening roll — who was staying with the Leedses for two days after getting a furlough from the old soldiers’ home where he normally lives, and who also witnessed both the murders and Campo’s flight through the Leeds home — and who insists that just as he fought as a young man to keep the Union together, it’s now his duty to fight against the gangsters by testifying against them no matter what the risk to other members of the family.
Whitlock isn’t all that confident about Summerill as a witness because he drinks — he says he just takes an occasional hit of bitters to treat his game leg — and he’s even less confident when Summerill disappears on the day he’s supposed to testify because he’s got a lead on where Donny is being held. In the end Summerill traces Donny — he plays his fife as he’s walking past the Ideal Paper Box Company and Donny hears the sound, recognizes it and signals back by throwing his baseball, into which he’s etched his initials, through a window of the factory, thereby showing Summerill where he’s being held and attracting the police — who at first, showing the usual cluelessness of movie police, want to arrest Summerill for busking (he wasn’t, but after hearing his fife solo a woman pitched a penny into his open hat), and it’s only when the smarter set of cops Whitlock assigned to guard the Leedses show up that it’s all sorted out. Whitlock’s men have a shoot-out with Campo’s gang and it looks for a bit as if Summerill (who’s boldly charged into the line of fire as if reliving his days as a war hero) has been wounded or even killed, but he’s alive, he testifies and, with Donny safe, sound and out of the clutches of the gang, the other Leedses do too and Whitlock gets his conviction and death sentence.
The Star Witness is one of the quirkiest “doubles” movies ever made because it features two actors who also played Abraham Lincoln — Huston in the 1930 D. W. Griffith-directed biopic and Sale in The Perfect Ttibute, a 1935 MGM two-reel short about the Gettysburg Address — and it’s one of the few Warners movies of the period that had just one writer: Lucien Hubbard, who contributed both story and dialogue and won an Academy Award nomination for it. Between them, Hubbard and director William A. Wellman effectively dramatize the grim irony of the fate of the Leedses, particularly the way in which they’re being essentially kept under house arrest so the Campo gang can’t eliminate them before the trial. Add some surprisingly proto-noir setups by cinematographer James Van Trees and one has yet another film that slips into normal movie grooves but also deploys the clichés sufficiently inventively that through much of the film one’s in real uncertainty as to how it’s going to turn out — and the effective finale, with the key witness strolling the streets while the district attorney is virtually apoplectic about having the person he needs to break his case wide open for retribution and elimination by the baddies — was repeated almost exactly 20 years later in The Enforcer, Humphrey Bogart’s last film for Warners, in which he played the crusading D.A. out to put Murder, Incorporated out of business.
Though Chic Sale’s brand of comedy gets a bit wearing after a while and his “rustic” act badly dates this film, The Star Witness is pretty good overall, Hubbard’s script expertly meshing domestic comedy with gangster melodrama and making us feel for the fates of the innocent people caught up in a crime war and forced to suffer because they wanted to do their civic duty and help put a bad guy away. Interestingly, Warners put this film in production after a real-life incident in Harlem that was considerably more brutal than the one in the movie — a drive-by shooting in which several children were shot and police were unable to get witnesses to talk — and the film opened at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, where Warners made the first two performances a benefit for the families of five children who had been killed by gangsters in New York. — 5/3/10
I got out by 9 a.m. to catch a movie on Turner Classic Movies: Star Witness, a 1931 Warners programmer which I wanted to see because it’s one of my “doubles” movies: it co-stars Walter Huston and rural character actor Charles “Chic” Sale, both of whom also played Abraham Lincoln (Huston in D. W. Griffith’s 1930 film and Sale in the MGM two-reeler The Perfect Tribute). For the first 10 minutes or so it is a pretty banal family movie, what with the hard-working father, hausfrau mother, ne’er-do-well son, daughter who can’t stop necking with the son-in-law to be (not shown), two insufferable little boys and campy old grandfather (the Sale role) who can’t stop reminiscing about his days in Lincoln’s army in the Civil War. Then all of a sudden a gang war erupts outside the street of the house where all these people live, and we’re suddenly reminded that this is supposed to be a crime film.
It turns out that a vicious gangster in a yellow raincoat just shot a police officer and a former gangster who was about to turn state’s evidence, then fled through the home of Our Family and gave them all a good look at him before leaving through the back door and getting himself arrested. From then on it’s a clash of conscience between upright D.A. Huston and the family as to whether they’ll testify in court or whether the gangsters will successfully intimidate them into silence — which they do first by abducting the father and beating him up, then kidnapping the son and holding him until the preliminary hearing is over. While the ending was pretty far-fetched (Old Granddad wanders the streets where the kid is being held and the kid throws a baseball out the window to let his grandfather know where he is), in the main it was a good programmer in the Warners house style, well directed by William A. Wellman (the same year he made The Public Enemy) from an Academy Award-nominated script by Lucien Hubbard (who later moved to MGM and became a producer, handling what at any other studio would have been called the “B”-picture unit). — 3/26/98
•••••
I picked the film that immediately followed The Ruling Voice on TCM’s recent birthday tribute to Walter Huston: The Star Witness (virtually none of the documentation on this film includes the definite article in its title, but the opening credit does), in which Huston was back on the right side of the law as crusading prosecutor Whitlock (if the character has a first name I don’t remember hearing it and the American Film Institute Catalog doesn’t list it, nor does imdb.com) who’s anxious to convict at least one gangster of murder and get him executed. He gets his chance when Maxey Campo (Ralph Ince) guns down a police officer and an informant just when the officer is escorting the informant to Whitlock’s office to turn state’s evidence against Campo. Campo and his gang members escape through the home of the Leeds family, a typically repulsive slice of Warners urbia containing father George “Pa” Leeds (Grant Mitchell, Warners’ go-to guy in the early 1930’s for pathetic middle-class family weaklings), his wife Abby (Frances Starr), their ne’er-do-well son Jackie (Edward J. Nugent), their adult daughter Sue (Sally Blane, real-life sister of The Ruling Voice co-star Loretta Young) and two pre-pubescent kids of the usual mix of treacly sweetness and rambunctious obnoxiousness: Donny (George Ernest) and Ned (Dickie Moore).
Aside from Sue, who’s in the cellar getting a jar of preserves when the killings happen, all the Leedses get a good view of Campo doing the killing — and they all, including Sue, get an even better look at him when he and his henchmen escape through the house and go out the back way, where, tipped off by the Leedses, the police capture and arrest them. At first the Leedses are ready and eager to testify against Campo, but things abruptly change when the Campo gang first kidnap George at his workplace, take him back to their hideout (at the “Ideal Paper Box Company”!), offer him a bribe and then, when he refuses, beat him up; and then when Donny slips out of the police cordon around the Leedses’ home to play in his school’s baseball game and the gang kidnaps him on the eve of Campo’s trial, thus intimidating the Leedses into silence. The only person willing to testify against Campo is Abby’s father, Civil War veteran Private Summerill — played by well-known (at the time) rustic comedian Charles “Chic” Sale, who gets a special “and” credit in the opening roll — who was staying with the Leedses for two days after getting a furlough from the old soldiers’ home where he normally lives, and who also witnessed both the murders and Campo’s flight through the Leeds home — and who insists that just as he fought as a young man to keep the Union together, it’s now his duty to fight against the gangsters by testifying against them no matter what the risk to other members of the family.
Whitlock isn’t all that confident about Summerill as a witness because he drinks — he says he just takes an occasional hit of bitters to treat his game leg — and he’s even less confident when Summerill disappears on the day he’s supposed to testify because he’s got a lead on where Donny is being held. In the end Summerill traces Donny — he plays his fife as he’s walking past the Ideal Paper Box Company and Donny hears the sound, recognizes it and signals back by throwing his baseball, into which he’s etched his initials, through a window of the factory, thereby showing Summerill where he’s being held and attracting the police — who at first, showing the usual cluelessness of movie police, want to arrest Summerill for busking (he wasn’t, but after hearing his fife solo a woman pitched a penny into his open hat), and it’s only when the smarter set of cops Whitlock assigned to guard the Leedses show up that it’s all sorted out. Whitlock’s men have a shoot-out with Campo’s gang and it looks for a bit as if Summerill (who’s boldly charged into the line of fire as if reliving his days as a war hero) has been wounded or even killed, but he’s alive, he testifies and, with Donny safe, sound and out of the clutches of the gang, the other Leedses do too and Whitlock gets his conviction and death sentence.
The Star Witness is one of the quirkiest “doubles” movies ever made because it features two actors who also played Abraham Lincoln — Huston in the 1930 D. W. Griffith-directed biopic and Sale in The Perfect Ttibute, a 1935 MGM two-reel short about the Gettysburg Address — and it’s one of the few Warners movies of the period that had just one writer: Lucien Hubbard, who contributed both story and dialogue and won an Academy Award nomination for it. Between them, Hubbard and director William A. Wellman effectively dramatize the grim irony of the fate of the Leedses, particularly the way in which they’re being essentially kept under house arrest so the Campo gang can’t eliminate them before the trial. Add some surprisingly proto-noir setups by cinematographer James Van Trees and one has yet another film that slips into normal movie grooves but also deploys the clichés sufficiently inventively that through much of the film one’s in real uncertainty as to how it’s going to turn out — and the effective finale, with the key witness strolling the streets while the district attorney is virtually apoplectic about having the person he needs to break his case wide open for retribution and elimination by the baddies — was repeated almost exactly 20 years later in The Enforcer, Humphrey Bogart’s last film for Warners, in which he played the crusading D.A. out to put Murder, Incorporated out of business.
Though Chic Sale’s brand of comedy gets a bit wearing after a while and his “rustic” act badly dates this film, The Star Witness is pretty good overall, Hubbard’s script expertly meshing domestic comedy with gangster melodrama and making us feel for the fates of the innocent people caught up in a crime war and forced to suffer because they wanted to do their civic duty and help put a bad guy away. Interestingly, Warners put this film in production after a real-life incident in Harlem that was considerably more brutal than the one in the movie — a drive-by shooting in which several children were shot and police were unable to get witnesses to talk — and the film opened at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, where Warners made the first two performances a benefit for the families of five children who had been killed by gangsters in New York. — 5/3/10
Sunday, May 2, 2010
The Ruling Voice (Warners as “First National,” 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Ruling Voice, a genuinely quirky 1931 gangster movie from Warner Bros. in “First National” drag that TCM showed early last month as part of a day-long tribute to Walter Huston. Based on a story by Rowland V. Lee (who also directed) and his brother Donald W. Lee, and scripted by Byron Morgan, The Ruling Voice goes against “type” from the get-go in casting Walter Huston as the gangland boss, not the incorruptible prosecutor going after the rackets that he played in The Beast of the City, Star Witness and other films of the period. His name is Jack Bannister, and he was a building contractor who was ruined by resisting the demands of gangsters for “protection” money — so he decided that if he couldn’t beat them, he’d take over the rackets himself with Snead (Dudley Digges in an unusually kempt performance from him — he’s nattily dressed in a snug-fitting suit instead of casual white clothes and he’s clean-shaven instead of sporting a couple of days’ worth of beard) as his right-hand man.
The film’s title comes from the metal isolation room he puts underlings in when he wants to relay orders without being seen — he locks his minions in this room and then opens a slot, where all that can be seen are his eyes, though he makes no attempt to disguise his voice, either naturally or electronically (a plot point that will become significant later). Once he realized that he was making his living in a dishonest way she would be ashamed of if she ever found out, Bannister sent his daughter Gloria (Loretta Young) away for a decade to be educated in France. Now she’s returning with a boyfriend, Dick Cheney (David Manners) — and yes, it was weird given its modern-day associations to be hearing the name “Dick Cheney” in a 1931 movie, especially attached to a character we were clearly supposed to like! — the son of a well-known and formerly well-heeled banking family which lost its entire fortune in the Depression. The film opens with a powerful montage sequence showing the intense harm the racket Bannister runs, which he calls “The System,” is doing to ordinary people as merchants and retailers bid up the price of food to cover their “protection” payments and still have a fair shot at a profit, and in typically economical Warners fashion the montage makes the point effectively and juxtaposes newspaper headlines and images showing people going without food and grocers reluctantly hiking their prices while the rackets fatten themselves and their participants, down to running off the road two trucks belonging to grocer Joe Palermo (Hector Sarno) because he made the “mistake” of buying produce from a dealer, Ed Bailey (Willard Robertson), who’d been blacklisted by Bannister and his “System.”
Next we meet Bannister and from the get-go we like him — until we realize what he’s up to — and by casting a courtly actor like Huston, best known for sympathetic roles (this was, after all, only a year after he’d played Lincoln!), as the racket boss the film takes on a very different tone from what it would have been with Edward G, Robinson bullying and snarling his way through the part. The film is at least in part the story of how Bannister is torn between loyalty to “The System” and the lavish life it’s funded for him, and loyalty to his daughter and genuinely caring what she thinks of him. Indeed, rather than try to lie to her, on their first meeting in 10 years he tells her exactly what sort of business he’s in and how it works — and it’s not clear what reaction he was hoping for, but the one he gets is her total rejection of him. She virtuously hands back the bracelet he’s just bought for her and says she no longer intends to take any money from him but will get a job and make her own way in the world. She also tells Dick Cheney she can’t marry him, leaving him befuddled as to why — obviously she’s scared that her father’s secret will taint him as well. We see Bannister in both modes, soft-hearted when it comes to his daughter and tough-minded when it comes to his business and any threats to it, including a Secret Six-like group of businesspeople headed by Consolidated Milk Company CEO Andrew Gregory (Gilbert Emery) out to destroy him and put his “System” out of business. Bannister learns about this group and recruits one of its members, Dexter Burroughs (John Halliday), to be his inside man and report who else is in the organization and just how they plan to destroy him and “The System.” He gives Burroughs a special phone number to call connected to a Dictaphone on which he can record his messages containing the secret information, but instead of either going through with the deal (Bannister had evidence of a stock manipulation involving Burroughs and his former company and used it to blackmail him) or refusing, he commits suicide while on the phone and the gunshot noise registers on the recording.
Having destroyed Bailey’s business, Bannister thinks he can be used as a pawn and summons him to the secret room — only Bailey memorizes what Bannister’s voice sounds like and starts carrying a gun, intending to shoot the owner of that voice should he ever hear it again. Gregory decides not to pay Bannister any more protection money and this starts an all-out war between “The System” and Consolidated that results in drying up the entire milk supply of the unnamed city where all this is taking place. While all this is going on, Bannister has secretly arranged for his daughter Gloria to get a job as French tutor to the young son (Douglas Scott) of Mrs. Stanton (Doris Kenyon), a contractor who took over her late husband’s business and has also been struggling under the demands of the System for “protection” money — Gloria, of course, has no idea either that her dad got her this job or that he paid off Mrs. Stanton’s previous butler and installed an agent of his own in the job — and it all comes to a climax when Gloria realizes everything and tries to get her dad to stop the milk war. Dad unexpectedly agrees but then runs into resistance from his board of directors (yes, he has one, just like a legal corporation!) — and he threatens to expose their racket and turn himself in to the police, with all the evidence needed to convict the lot of them, if they continue the war.
Bailey, delivering a message from Snead, comes to Bannister’s home and, recognizing Bannister’s voice and blaming Bannister for the previous death of his son, decides to extract his revenge not by killing Bannister himself but by doing in his daughter — only they both reach for the gun (Maurine Watkins, call your plagiarism attorney!) and Bannister is killed, the evidence reaches the D.A., the rackets are broken and Gloria and Dick Cheney are bound for a low-budget but happy life together. The Ruling Voice doesn’t contain enough of the situation that gives it its title (Warners shot it under the even more awkward working title Upper Underworld) but otherwise it’s a quite good movie: like William A. Wellman, Rowland V. Lee was several cuts above the usual directorial hacks that ground these things out at Warners, and the script contains some pretty clichéd situations but also varies and “spins” the clichés enough that we really don’t know from scene quite where this movie is going — and it’s well acted by a genuinely conflicted Walter Huston, a luminous Loretta Young and a solid Dudley Digges (with the appropriately named David Manners having little to do, as usual, except to provide a sense of decency and dignity to the sordid goings-on around him) and photographed by Sol Polito in his best proto-noir style. It’s the sort of nice little gem that got made under the studio system when the personnel on any given film cared enough about what they were doing to give it an extra measure of quality and interest.
The film was The Ruling Voice, a genuinely quirky 1931 gangster movie from Warner Bros. in “First National” drag that TCM showed early last month as part of a day-long tribute to Walter Huston. Based on a story by Rowland V. Lee (who also directed) and his brother Donald W. Lee, and scripted by Byron Morgan, The Ruling Voice goes against “type” from the get-go in casting Walter Huston as the gangland boss, not the incorruptible prosecutor going after the rackets that he played in The Beast of the City, Star Witness and other films of the period. His name is Jack Bannister, and he was a building contractor who was ruined by resisting the demands of gangsters for “protection” money — so he decided that if he couldn’t beat them, he’d take over the rackets himself with Snead (Dudley Digges in an unusually kempt performance from him — he’s nattily dressed in a snug-fitting suit instead of casual white clothes and he’s clean-shaven instead of sporting a couple of days’ worth of beard) as his right-hand man.
The film’s title comes from the metal isolation room he puts underlings in when he wants to relay orders without being seen — he locks his minions in this room and then opens a slot, where all that can be seen are his eyes, though he makes no attempt to disguise his voice, either naturally or electronically (a plot point that will become significant later). Once he realized that he was making his living in a dishonest way she would be ashamed of if she ever found out, Bannister sent his daughter Gloria (Loretta Young) away for a decade to be educated in France. Now she’s returning with a boyfriend, Dick Cheney (David Manners) — and yes, it was weird given its modern-day associations to be hearing the name “Dick Cheney” in a 1931 movie, especially attached to a character we were clearly supposed to like! — the son of a well-known and formerly well-heeled banking family which lost its entire fortune in the Depression. The film opens with a powerful montage sequence showing the intense harm the racket Bannister runs, which he calls “The System,” is doing to ordinary people as merchants and retailers bid up the price of food to cover their “protection” payments and still have a fair shot at a profit, and in typically economical Warners fashion the montage makes the point effectively and juxtaposes newspaper headlines and images showing people going without food and grocers reluctantly hiking their prices while the rackets fatten themselves and their participants, down to running off the road two trucks belonging to grocer Joe Palermo (Hector Sarno) because he made the “mistake” of buying produce from a dealer, Ed Bailey (Willard Robertson), who’d been blacklisted by Bannister and his “System.”
Next we meet Bannister and from the get-go we like him — until we realize what he’s up to — and by casting a courtly actor like Huston, best known for sympathetic roles (this was, after all, only a year after he’d played Lincoln!), as the racket boss the film takes on a very different tone from what it would have been with Edward G, Robinson bullying and snarling his way through the part. The film is at least in part the story of how Bannister is torn between loyalty to “The System” and the lavish life it’s funded for him, and loyalty to his daughter and genuinely caring what she thinks of him. Indeed, rather than try to lie to her, on their first meeting in 10 years he tells her exactly what sort of business he’s in and how it works — and it’s not clear what reaction he was hoping for, but the one he gets is her total rejection of him. She virtuously hands back the bracelet he’s just bought for her and says she no longer intends to take any money from him but will get a job and make her own way in the world. She also tells Dick Cheney she can’t marry him, leaving him befuddled as to why — obviously she’s scared that her father’s secret will taint him as well. We see Bannister in both modes, soft-hearted when it comes to his daughter and tough-minded when it comes to his business and any threats to it, including a Secret Six-like group of businesspeople headed by Consolidated Milk Company CEO Andrew Gregory (Gilbert Emery) out to destroy him and put his “System” out of business. Bannister learns about this group and recruits one of its members, Dexter Burroughs (John Halliday), to be his inside man and report who else is in the organization and just how they plan to destroy him and “The System.” He gives Burroughs a special phone number to call connected to a Dictaphone on which he can record his messages containing the secret information, but instead of either going through with the deal (Bannister had evidence of a stock manipulation involving Burroughs and his former company and used it to blackmail him) or refusing, he commits suicide while on the phone and the gunshot noise registers on the recording.
Having destroyed Bailey’s business, Bannister thinks he can be used as a pawn and summons him to the secret room — only Bailey memorizes what Bannister’s voice sounds like and starts carrying a gun, intending to shoot the owner of that voice should he ever hear it again. Gregory decides not to pay Bannister any more protection money and this starts an all-out war between “The System” and Consolidated that results in drying up the entire milk supply of the unnamed city where all this is taking place. While all this is going on, Bannister has secretly arranged for his daughter Gloria to get a job as French tutor to the young son (Douglas Scott) of Mrs. Stanton (Doris Kenyon), a contractor who took over her late husband’s business and has also been struggling under the demands of the System for “protection” money — Gloria, of course, has no idea either that her dad got her this job or that he paid off Mrs. Stanton’s previous butler and installed an agent of his own in the job — and it all comes to a climax when Gloria realizes everything and tries to get her dad to stop the milk war. Dad unexpectedly agrees but then runs into resistance from his board of directors (yes, he has one, just like a legal corporation!) — and he threatens to expose their racket and turn himself in to the police, with all the evidence needed to convict the lot of them, if they continue the war.
Bailey, delivering a message from Snead, comes to Bannister’s home and, recognizing Bannister’s voice and blaming Bannister for the previous death of his son, decides to extract his revenge not by killing Bannister himself but by doing in his daughter — only they both reach for the gun (Maurine Watkins, call your plagiarism attorney!) and Bannister is killed, the evidence reaches the D.A., the rackets are broken and Gloria and Dick Cheney are bound for a low-budget but happy life together. The Ruling Voice doesn’t contain enough of the situation that gives it its title (Warners shot it under the even more awkward working title Upper Underworld) but otherwise it’s a quite good movie: like William A. Wellman, Rowland V. Lee was several cuts above the usual directorial hacks that ground these things out at Warners, and the script contains some pretty clichéd situations but also varies and “spins” the clichés enough that we really don’t know from scene quite where this movie is going — and it’s well acted by a genuinely conflicted Walter Huston, a luminous Loretta Young and a solid Dudley Digges (with the appropriately named David Manners having little to do, as usual, except to provide a sense of decency and dignity to the sordid goings-on around him) and photographed by Sol Polito in his best proto-noir style. It’s the sort of nice little gem that got made under the studio system when the personnel on any given film cared enough about what they were doing to give it an extra measure of quality and interest.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Blood and Sand (Paramount, 1922)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched the last of the three Valentino movies they showed on TCM: the 1922 version of Blood and Sand, directed by Fred Niblo and co-starring Lila Lee as the good girl and Nita Naldi as the bad girl who seduces Valentino away from home, hearth and his promising career as a bullfighter into drink, dissipation and an ultimate goring in the ring. (This is the movie Lila Lee’s son, A Chorus Line co-author James Kirkwood, was talking about when he recalled in our interview how his mother told him that Valentino always ate highly spiced Italian food for lunch, and went particularly heavy on the garlic — with the result that his female co-stars always preferred to shoot the big love scenes in the morning rather than have to deal with Valentino’s garlic breath after lunch.)
I came to this movie familiar with the stunning 1941 remake, which starred Tyrone Power as the matador, Linda Darnell as the good girl and Rita Hayworth as the bad girl, and was directed by Rouben Mamoulian in an orgy of non-realistic color painting — and this version just didn’t seem as good. Part of the problem was that Niblo simply wasn’t anywhere near as imaginative a director as Mamoulian (interestingly, Valentino wanted George Fitzmaurice as his director and was upset that the studio palmed off Niblo on him instead), and for a film made as late in the silent era as 1922 the film is surprisingly short on close-ups. (It also doesn’t help that the cinematography is one of the worst photography jobs on Valentino in his entire career — his bulbous nose is particularly prominent throughout much of the film.) Another part of the problem is that June Mathis’ script — at least in the 61-minute version we have (it’s entirely possible that, like a lot of silent films, the first-run version was longer and it’s only the shortened subsequent-run version that has survived — in the days before sound it was incredibly easy to prepare different versions of a film at different lengths) — isn’t particularly insightful in terms of character development (as old-fashioned as the story seemed by 1941, Jo Swerling actually did make the characters more legitimately complex and better motivated in his script for the Mamoulian version). Still, Blood and Sand holds up pretty well — with legitimate action scenes (though to a modern viewer the transitions between the long-shot bullfight material filmed in Tijuana by a second unit and the inserts of Valentino supposedly twirling a cape or aiming a sword at a bull are pretty obvious) and a good story, well told within the limitations of silent film technique. — 5/6/98
•••••
I showed a potted version of the 1922 film Blood and Sand I’d downloaded from archive.org. This was a 26-minute edit of the film (the common version runs 78 minutes and there’s a Kino on Video print that supposedly runs 108 minutes — which would be worth having; when I saw a 61-minute version on TCM long ago I thought the film didn’t hang together well as drama and decided this was one silent classic actually improved upon when it was remade with sound in 1941, with Rouben Mamoulian turning in a visually stunning job of direction, using a frankly artificial color scheme based on the work of Spanish painters, and Tyrone Power to the Valentino manner born in the lead) made in 1959 for the Paul Killiam TV show Silents Please, which introduced me to the joys of silent film in general and in particular to several of the major silent classics, including The Hunchback of Notre-Dame with Lon Chaney and Murnau’s stunning Nosferatu.
Killiam and his crew were faced with the task of editing feature-length movies to fit a half-hour (less commercials) TV time slot, but they did an effective job in at least giving you a taste of these movies — though at this late date what seeing a Silents Please episode did for me was whet my taste for a complete version of the film as well as sending my nostalgia circuits into overdrive. Blood and Sand was based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, whose The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had provided Valentino with his star-making role, and though Valentino didn’t get the director of his choice (he wanted George Fitzmaurice and had to settle for Fred Niblo) it was a personal project and a film he desperately wanted to do. It gave him a character with more definition than usual; he played Juan Gallardo, poor kid from the sticks of Spain who sees his ticket to wealth and fame in the bull ring. I wanted to see this one because Charles and I had just screened Stan Laurel’s devastating (and quite good) parody of it, Mud and Sand, and as near as one could tell from this heavily edited digest version it’s a good movie, with a well-honed performance by Valentino (though that look he gave when confronted by the vamp — less either moral revulsion or sexual attraction and more a bit of queasiness that looks like he’s about to throw up any moment and one should pass him a Dramamine immediately — is annoying, and a mannerism he repeated in other films) even though the plot isn’t much and Niblo’s direction (in black-and-white) utterly lacks the magnificent atmospherics of Mamoulian’s in the remake. (No wonder Valentino would have preferred Fitzmaurice, who was known as a visually atmospheric director whereas Niblo was an action specialist and a relief director called in when big projects, like the 1926 silent Ben-Hur, were in trouble.)
As the vamp Doña Sol (a role played to perfection by Rita Hayworth in the remake), Nita Naldi seems too matronly to be sexy by today’s standards — frankly, Lila Lee as the nice girl from back home, Carmen, seems more attractive in 2010 — but Naldi had already staked out her claim to roles like this in the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with John Barrymore and her casting was virtually inevitable. For all Niblo’s action credentials, Blood and Sand suffers from surprisingly little bullfighting footage — just a couple of stock clips and a final scene staged in a Tijuana bullring but hampered by the fact that neither Valentino nor his stunt double were all that close to the bull. Still, it’s a film with some surprisingly effective moments — the scenes in which Valentino breaks the stoic, mask-like appearance of that face and actually laughs are treasurable and serve to humanize him, and the final sequence in which Carmen is praying in the bullring’s chapel while Juan Gallardo is having his final, fatal corrida is intensely moving and leads one to want to watch this film “complete.”
Paul Killiam’s narration (I hadn’t realized that in addition to producing the film, he not only wrote but also spoke the narration) not surprisingly made much of the macabre coincidence that, like the character he was playing here, Valentino himself died young, but the narration is competent, workmanlike, fills the gaps in the story and is refreshingly free of either the sentimentality or the cornball humor that has marred other attempts to jazz up silent films for an audience bred to accept and take it for granted that movies have sound. Certainly, when I watched it as a child, Silents Please educated me on the silent-film heritage and prepared me to be able to enjoy silent movies au naturel, and for that I’m grateful just as I thank my mother for listening to classical and jazz music while I was a kid and therefore getting me accustomed to these sorts of music and preparing me to like them all my life. — 5/1/10
This morning I watched the last of the three Valentino movies they showed on TCM: the 1922 version of Blood and Sand, directed by Fred Niblo and co-starring Lila Lee as the good girl and Nita Naldi as the bad girl who seduces Valentino away from home, hearth and his promising career as a bullfighter into drink, dissipation and an ultimate goring in the ring. (This is the movie Lila Lee’s son, A Chorus Line co-author James Kirkwood, was talking about when he recalled in our interview how his mother told him that Valentino always ate highly spiced Italian food for lunch, and went particularly heavy on the garlic — with the result that his female co-stars always preferred to shoot the big love scenes in the morning rather than have to deal with Valentino’s garlic breath after lunch.)
I came to this movie familiar with the stunning 1941 remake, which starred Tyrone Power as the matador, Linda Darnell as the good girl and Rita Hayworth as the bad girl, and was directed by Rouben Mamoulian in an orgy of non-realistic color painting — and this version just didn’t seem as good. Part of the problem was that Niblo simply wasn’t anywhere near as imaginative a director as Mamoulian (interestingly, Valentino wanted George Fitzmaurice as his director and was upset that the studio palmed off Niblo on him instead), and for a film made as late in the silent era as 1922 the film is surprisingly short on close-ups. (It also doesn’t help that the cinematography is one of the worst photography jobs on Valentino in his entire career — his bulbous nose is particularly prominent throughout much of the film.) Another part of the problem is that June Mathis’ script — at least in the 61-minute version we have (it’s entirely possible that, like a lot of silent films, the first-run version was longer and it’s only the shortened subsequent-run version that has survived — in the days before sound it was incredibly easy to prepare different versions of a film at different lengths) — isn’t particularly insightful in terms of character development (as old-fashioned as the story seemed by 1941, Jo Swerling actually did make the characters more legitimately complex and better motivated in his script for the Mamoulian version). Still, Blood and Sand holds up pretty well — with legitimate action scenes (though to a modern viewer the transitions between the long-shot bullfight material filmed in Tijuana by a second unit and the inserts of Valentino supposedly twirling a cape or aiming a sword at a bull are pretty obvious) and a good story, well told within the limitations of silent film technique. — 5/6/98
•••••
I showed a potted version of the 1922 film Blood and Sand I’d downloaded from archive.org. This was a 26-minute edit of the film (the common version runs 78 minutes and there’s a Kino on Video print that supposedly runs 108 minutes — which would be worth having; when I saw a 61-minute version on TCM long ago I thought the film didn’t hang together well as drama and decided this was one silent classic actually improved upon when it was remade with sound in 1941, with Rouben Mamoulian turning in a visually stunning job of direction, using a frankly artificial color scheme based on the work of Spanish painters, and Tyrone Power to the Valentino manner born in the lead) made in 1959 for the Paul Killiam TV show Silents Please, which introduced me to the joys of silent film in general and in particular to several of the major silent classics, including The Hunchback of Notre-Dame with Lon Chaney and Murnau’s stunning Nosferatu.
Killiam and his crew were faced with the task of editing feature-length movies to fit a half-hour (less commercials) TV time slot, but they did an effective job in at least giving you a taste of these movies — though at this late date what seeing a Silents Please episode did for me was whet my taste for a complete version of the film as well as sending my nostalgia circuits into overdrive. Blood and Sand was based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, whose The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had provided Valentino with his star-making role, and though Valentino didn’t get the director of his choice (he wanted George Fitzmaurice and had to settle for Fred Niblo) it was a personal project and a film he desperately wanted to do. It gave him a character with more definition than usual; he played Juan Gallardo, poor kid from the sticks of Spain who sees his ticket to wealth and fame in the bull ring. I wanted to see this one because Charles and I had just screened Stan Laurel’s devastating (and quite good) parody of it, Mud and Sand, and as near as one could tell from this heavily edited digest version it’s a good movie, with a well-honed performance by Valentino (though that look he gave when confronted by the vamp — less either moral revulsion or sexual attraction and more a bit of queasiness that looks like he’s about to throw up any moment and one should pass him a Dramamine immediately — is annoying, and a mannerism he repeated in other films) even though the plot isn’t much and Niblo’s direction (in black-and-white) utterly lacks the magnificent atmospherics of Mamoulian’s in the remake. (No wonder Valentino would have preferred Fitzmaurice, who was known as a visually atmospheric director whereas Niblo was an action specialist and a relief director called in when big projects, like the 1926 silent Ben-Hur, were in trouble.)
As the vamp Doña Sol (a role played to perfection by Rita Hayworth in the remake), Nita Naldi seems too matronly to be sexy by today’s standards — frankly, Lila Lee as the nice girl from back home, Carmen, seems more attractive in 2010 — but Naldi had already staked out her claim to roles like this in the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with John Barrymore and her casting was virtually inevitable. For all Niblo’s action credentials, Blood and Sand suffers from surprisingly little bullfighting footage — just a couple of stock clips and a final scene staged in a Tijuana bullring but hampered by the fact that neither Valentino nor his stunt double were all that close to the bull. Still, it’s a film with some surprisingly effective moments — the scenes in which Valentino breaks the stoic, mask-like appearance of that face and actually laughs are treasurable and serve to humanize him, and the final sequence in which Carmen is praying in the bullring’s chapel while Juan Gallardo is having his final, fatal corrida is intensely moving and leads one to want to watch this film “complete.”
Paul Killiam’s narration (I hadn’t realized that in addition to producing the film, he not only wrote but also spoke the narration) not surprisingly made much of the macabre coincidence that, like the character he was playing here, Valentino himself died young, but the narration is competent, workmanlike, fills the gaps in the story and is refreshingly free of either the sentimentality or the cornball humor that has marred other attempts to jazz up silent films for an audience bred to accept and take it for granted that movies have sound. Certainly, when I watched it as a child, Silents Please educated me on the silent-film heritage and prepared me to be able to enjoy silent movies au naturel, and for that I’m grateful just as I thank my mother for listening to classical and jazz music while I was a kid and therefore getting me accustomed to these sorts of music and preparing me to like them all my life. — 5/1/10
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