by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles one of the videos I’d just ordered from
amazon.com: what was billed as the 25th anniversary Blu-Ray edition
of the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands.
This was a movie that had somehow eluded me when it came out — and Charles
hadn’t seen it either, mainly because when it came out he was living with his
mother in Grass Valley, California and ironically it was easier to see
obscurities and art films there (an amateur ran his own pocket cinema under the
stars and booked oddball fare) than a mainstream movie (for which he’d have to
go to Nevada City) — even though Edward Scissorhands is a “mainstream movie” only in that it was made by
an established studio (20th Century-Fox) and featured a director
(Tim Burton) who already had mainstream hits under his belt (the original
trailers advertised it as “From the Director of Batman and Beetlejuice”) as well as at least an “A-minus list,” if not an “A-list,” cast. The
star is Johnny Depp, who had made his feature-film debut in the original 1984 A
Nightmare on Elm Street and had had the
lead role in John Waters’ Cry-Baby
but was best known for his role on the TV series 21 Jump Street. Ironically, Tim Burton had never seen 21
Jump Street when he agreed to cast Depp in
the title role of Edward Scissorhands — replacing either his or the studio’s first choice, Tom Cruise, who
would have been terrible in the role. (Cruise wanted Burton and his co-writer,
Caroline Thompson, to rewrite the story to have a happy ending.) This was the
beginning of the long-term collaboration between Burton and Depp, which strikes
me as one of the strongest and most interesting director-star partnerships in
film history, alongside George Cukor/Katharine Hepburn, John Ford/John Wayne,
John Huston/Humphrey Bogart, and Douglas Sirk/Rock Hudson. It was also the
first collaboration between Burton and composer Danny Elfman, who started in music
as the leader of the band Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (later abbreviated
simply to “Oingo Boingo”) and who, like the star, was only a second choice.
Burton made Edward Scissorhands’ hair resemble that of Robert Smith, leader of
the rock band The Cure (whose music was so notoriously depressing they were
sometimes jokingly referred to as “Music to Commit Suicide By”), and he also
wanted Smith to do the film’s score. But Smith turned it down and Burton hired
Elfman, who took to writing an orchestral film score after an experience doing
little but rock like the proverbial duck to water, supplying a score that
perfectly captured the bittersweet mood of the story.
Plotwise, Edward
Scissorhands is an interesting variation on
Frankenstein — though like the original
film of Blade Runner, Edward Scissorhands actually captures more of the pathos and dramatic sophistication of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel
than any of the direct adaptations (though, thanks to the genius of director
James Whale and writer John L. Balderston, The Bride of Frankenstein came close). The film starts with vistas of a
haunted old castle looming over a modern suburban development (though exactly when
Edward Scissorhands takes place isn’t clear
— judging from the cars, room décors and hairstyles, my guess is the
mid-1970’s) which is first represented by an overhead shot of a model of such
deliberate obviousness Charles couldn’t help but quote the line from Monty
Python and the Holy Grail: “It’s only a
model.” When we see the actual homes of the characters — or at least the
clapboard false fronts representing them — they’re not much more realistic than
that model: like Jim Sharman in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (another Frankenstein knockoff!), Burton and his set designer, Bo Welch, deliberately
made the “normal” settings of the story look artificial and phony to send the
message that it is the fantasy characters who have the more “real” (and
realistically portrayed) inner lives. After a brief establishing shot of that
mystery castle and then the model shot of suburbia, Edward
Scissorhands opens with Avon saleslady Peg
(Dianne Wiest, three years after she similarly interacted with fantastic
characters in The Lost Boys)
having a frustrating day of turn-downs (her low point was when she demonstrated
her entire catalog in front of a 12-year-old girl who burst her bubble when she
said, “You really don’t think I have any money, do you?”) and finally deciding
to drive up the long, winding road to that old haunted castle. When she arrives
she discovers Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp), alone in that old house,
wearing a studded black leather jumpsuit that looks like one of Michael
Jackson’s stage outfits and shocking Peg because he has scissor blades instead
of hands. He can manipulate these as if they were fingers but he can’t actually
grip anything with them — though he keeps trying — and about the one thing he
can do with his hands the way they are is trim bushes into fantastic topiary
sculptures. Peg immediately takes pity on Edward and offers to take him in
without bothering to ask anyone else in her family, which includes her husband
Bill (Alan Arkin) and their kids, teenage daughter Kim (Winona Ryder,
second-billed to Depp) and prepubescent son Kevin (Robert Oliveri).
There are
some charming fish-out-of-water scenes of Edward trying to eat normal human
food (he ultimately gives up on tableware and spears individual peas with the
ends of his scissor fingers) and poking holes in Kim’s waterbed when he tries
to sleep in it. Bill warns Edward that if he wants to survive in the normal
world he needs to figure out how to make some money, and the opportunity comes
along when one of the women in town asks Edward to clip her poodle. He does
such a stunning job he’s in-demand as a dog groomer, and when one of his female
customers asks if he can do her
hair as well, he’s got a new career as a hairdresser. One of the local women
offers to open a salon with him — she’ll run the business end, Edward will do
the hair styling and Peg can have a cosmetics counter — but she’s really after Edward’s body. She takes him into the back
room of the space in the local mall she’s thinking of renting, and while there
she sexually assaults him, only just as the situation is heating up and one
wonders how Burton and Thompson are going to write themselves out of the
predicament they’ve written themselves into, the chair they’re making out on
(with Edward expressing the same naïve inability to comprehend just what this woman wants from him that Stan Laurel did in
similar seduction sequences in the Laurel and Hardy movies) collapses. Then it
turns out that no one in Peg’s circle has the money for seed capital for
Edward’s salon, and after the local bank turns them down Kim’s boyfriend Jim
(the hot, hunky Anthony Michael Hall) concocts a scheme by which Edward, whose
scissorhands make him an ace lock-picker, will burglarize Jim’s father and get
around the elaborate security systems his dad has installed. Only it’s a trap:
what Jim really wants is to get
Edward arrested and disgraced because he’s jealous of how Kim is responding to
him. Jim’s scheme not only works, it leads to the humiliation and ostracism of
Peg’s and Kim’s entire family. No one comes to their annual Christmas party, and eventually Edward is driven
out of the community and the villagers — oops, I mean the suburbanites — chase
him to the haunted castle from whence he came.
In the meantime we’ve got two
flashbacks relating Edward’s origins: he’s an artificial human, created by the
castle’s previous occupant, a mystery man known only as “The Inventor” (Vincent
Price, in his final film — like Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green, the terminally ill Price was cast and delivered a
moving death scene as his final work in films — though Burton signed Leonard
Nimoyto take over the part in case Price croaked before he shot all the
character’s footage; certainly Price got a better exit than Boris Karloff did
in that wretched Snake People and
the three other films he shot for Azteca Studios in the last month of his
life!), who gave Edward everything else he needed (including a heart the
Inventor made from a heart-shaped cookie!) and was just about to install hands,
replacing the scissors he’d intended only as temporary place-holders, when he
suddenly died. Jim and his friends, driving a black van with “fire” trim that
reminded me of the one in the TV cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, nearly run down Kim’s brother Kevin. Edward saves
Kevin’s life from the runaway van but in the process scratches Kevin’s face,
and that just inflames the locals even more. Jim and his crew hunt down Edward
and Jim carries a gun, intending to kill him. Edward kills Jim instead and Kim
descends from the mountain with one of Edward’s scissorhands, saying they
killed each other —and then the film flashes back to its opening with Kim as an
old woman (Winona Ryder in heavy age makeup) reading Edward’s tale as a bedtime
story to her granddaughter, and we get a final sequence of Edward skulking
around That Castle, presumably for eternity because as a mechanical contraption
instead of a living being, he need never die.
I suspect I avoided Edward
Scissorhands when it was new because the
concept seemed too grotesque to be entertaining, but it turned out to be a
quite remarkable movie with a lot of marvelous touches — and I think it
especially affected me because I’ve spent most of my adult life helping people
with various disabilities even though it was frustrating that over half a
minute of screen time elapsed between the time Bill poured a drink for Edward
and the time it finally occurred
to him to give Edward a straw so he could drink it without being able to grip
the glass and lift it to his mouth. The most moving scene in that regard is the
one that got used in all the trailers — Kim, who’s realized she’s in love with
Edward, asks him to hold her, he briefly ponders the mechanics of this and
finally says, sadly, “I can’t,” before she takes charge and pulls his arms
around her. Edward
Scissorhands holds up as quite a beautiful
movie, full of pathos and dramatic richness (one wishes someone would actually
have directed an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with the sensitivity director Burton and co-writer
Thompson brought to this film!), with an understated but nonetheless quite
evident bit of social satire of the dullness of suburbia and the way it’s
killed the imaginations of virtually everyone who lives there.
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Thursday, November 14, 2019
A Kiss for Corliss, a.k.a. Almost a Bride (Strand Productions/United Artists, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s film was an independent production by James Nasser from 1949 originally released as A Kiss for Corliss and later retitled Almost a Bride for legal reasons surrounding its origins as a sequel to a 1944 film called Kiss and Tell. It’s mainly known as the last film ever made by Shirley Temple (her imdb.com filmography lists a late-1950’s TV series she hosted called Shirley Temple’s Storybook and a final appearance as a guest star on Red Skelton’s TV show in 1963) before she retired from show business at age 21. She and Deanna Durbin are my Exhibits A and B in my contention that the only way a child star can have a rational, sane aduithood is to get the hell out of show business altogether, though Temple said in her autobiography Child Star that she took that decision after she turned 21, legally became an adult, and found that the trust fund that had supposedly collected her earnings as a child star had been so systematically looted by her parents (despite the passage of “Coogan’s Law” by the California legislature in the 1930’s that was supposed to keep that from happening) she only had $10,000 left from a career that had literally earned millions. The few movies Temple made as a teenager in the 1940’s reveal a performer who wasn’t readily able to adapt to the challenges of playing adult roles (as Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood would do), and casting directors seemed thrown by her. A Kiss for Corliss is generally written off as an artistic disaster, but it turned out to be a much better movie than its reputation, suffering from some of the problems of teen movies then as now but mostly an agreeable light entertainment. It begins with attorney Harry P. Archer (Tom Tully) arguing in court that the defendant he’s going after is the most despicable character he’s ever encountered in his career: “Seldom in my long career as an attorney have I ever encountered a man who can claim no virtue. But I say to you, you have such a man in your courtroom today. Cold-blooded and ruthless, unmoved by the pain he has caused, Kenneth Marquis smugly sits there gloating.” At first we think Kenneth Marquis (David Niven) must be a serial killer Archer is prosecuting, but he turns out to be the defendant in a divorce case brought by his third wife, whom Archer is representing. Archer’s daughter Corliss (Shirley Temple) wants to watch her dad’s trial but he’s barred her —she tries an ineffectual disguise to sneak into the courtroom but the bailiff recognizes her immediately and bars her.
Corliss concocts a plot to make her age-peer boyfriend Dexter Franklin (Darryl Hickman) jealous; with the help of her friend Mildred Pringle (Virginia Welles — no relation) she concocts a phony diary suggesting that she and Marquis are lovers and she’s headed for the altar to be his wife number four. Only she gives it to another local kid, Raymond Pringle (Robert Ellis), to be rebound in leather — and Raymond photostats the pages, leaks them to Dexter — who publishes a small-scale paper of his own — and Dexter in turn shows them to Marquis to wangle an ad out of him. Marquis, who was so offended by Harry Archer’s victory in court (he won Marquis’ ex a $200,000 property settlement) he’s been looking for ways to needle him and seized on the idea of making it look like he’s dating Archer’s daughter as a good tactic to get under Harry Archer’s skin. Corliss and Dexter actually spent a night together, albeit a Production Code-licit one, when they tried to sneak into a gambling establishment called the Penguin Club and got locked in its basement overnight after they went there to hide out from a police raid on the place (engineered by a citizens’ committee led by Harry Archer that was determined to close down the club), but thanks to a whole lot of lying by the other characters Harry Archer and his wife Janet (Gloria Holden, who never had the star career playing the title role in the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter should have given her), everyone gets the impression that that was when she spent the wild night with Kenneth Marquis described in her diary. At one point Corliss tries to fake amnesia to try to convince her parents she doesn’t remember That Night, and Shirley Temple spends about a reel of the film acting like the pre-pubescent Temple from a decade earlier — the one the world had fallen in love with and made the biggest movie star of the 1930’s.
Marquis himself leaks the diary to the mainstream press, a weekly magazine called Glimpse (i.e., Life) publishes the news that little Corliss Archer is about to become the fourth Mrs. Kenneth Marquis, Corliss’s uncle George (Roy Roberts) — a Navy chaplain — agrees to perform the ceremony despite his loathing for the groom — only at the end everyone comes to their senses and Corliss ends up innocently paired with Dexter while Kenneth ends up with a black eye (literally!) from Corliss’s dad. Written by Howard Dimsdale with F. Hugh Herbert getting a “characters created by” credit for having written Kiss and Tell, the film this was a sequel to (which is neatly referred to here when Kenneth sends Corliss an ornate box with a nightgown, each one embroidered with the day of the week on which she’s supposed to wear it, though after we see five white nightgowns labeled “Monday” through “Friday” the sixth drawer in the box contains a black nightgown embroidered “Kiss and Tell”), and directed by Richard Wallace, A Kiss for Corliss turns out to be a quite droll comedy with a marvelous comic-villain performance by David Niven, of whom we see surprisingly (and disappointingly) little even though he’s second-billed. Temple is O.K. playing a trope that was actually quite common in the 1940’s — a teenage girl cruising an older man in an attempt to make her teenage boyfriend jealous — Jane Powell’s lumbering (124-minute) MGM musical Holiday in Mexico had told much the same story, only in that one Powell was being raised by a single father (Walter Pidgeon) and the older man was pianist José Iturbi (playing himself!). But what came off as engaging precocity in the 1930’s when Temple was actually a child just seems like annoying immaturity here, and one can tell why Temple chose to make this her last film and get the hell out of the business.
Last night’s film was an independent production by James Nasser from 1949 originally released as A Kiss for Corliss and later retitled Almost a Bride for legal reasons surrounding its origins as a sequel to a 1944 film called Kiss and Tell. It’s mainly known as the last film ever made by Shirley Temple (her imdb.com filmography lists a late-1950’s TV series she hosted called Shirley Temple’s Storybook and a final appearance as a guest star on Red Skelton’s TV show in 1963) before she retired from show business at age 21. She and Deanna Durbin are my Exhibits A and B in my contention that the only way a child star can have a rational, sane aduithood is to get the hell out of show business altogether, though Temple said in her autobiography Child Star that she took that decision after she turned 21, legally became an adult, and found that the trust fund that had supposedly collected her earnings as a child star had been so systematically looted by her parents (despite the passage of “Coogan’s Law” by the California legislature in the 1930’s that was supposed to keep that from happening) she only had $10,000 left from a career that had literally earned millions. The few movies Temple made as a teenager in the 1940’s reveal a performer who wasn’t readily able to adapt to the challenges of playing adult roles (as Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood would do), and casting directors seemed thrown by her. A Kiss for Corliss is generally written off as an artistic disaster, but it turned out to be a much better movie than its reputation, suffering from some of the problems of teen movies then as now but mostly an agreeable light entertainment. It begins with attorney Harry P. Archer (Tom Tully) arguing in court that the defendant he’s going after is the most despicable character he’s ever encountered in his career: “Seldom in my long career as an attorney have I ever encountered a man who can claim no virtue. But I say to you, you have such a man in your courtroom today. Cold-blooded and ruthless, unmoved by the pain he has caused, Kenneth Marquis smugly sits there gloating.” At first we think Kenneth Marquis (David Niven) must be a serial killer Archer is prosecuting, but he turns out to be the defendant in a divorce case brought by his third wife, whom Archer is representing. Archer’s daughter Corliss (Shirley Temple) wants to watch her dad’s trial but he’s barred her —she tries an ineffectual disguise to sneak into the courtroom but the bailiff recognizes her immediately and bars her.
Corliss concocts a plot to make her age-peer boyfriend Dexter Franklin (Darryl Hickman) jealous; with the help of her friend Mildred Pringle (Virginia Welles — no relation) she concocts a phony diary suggesting that she and Marquis are lovers and she’s headed for the altar to be his wife number four. Only she gives it to another local kid, Raymond Pringle (Robert Ellis), to be rebound in leather — and Raymond photostats the pages, leaks them to Dexter — who publishes a small-scale paper of his own — and Dexter in turn shows them to Marquis to wangle an ad out of him. Marquis, who was so offended by Harry Archer’s victory in court (he won Marquis’ ex a $200,000 property settlement) he’s been looking for ways to needle him and seized on the idea of making it look like he’s dating Archer’s daughter as a good tactic to get under Harry Archer’s skin. Corliss and Dexter actually spent a night together, albeit a Production Code-licit one, when they tried to sneak into a gambling establishment called the Penguin Club and got locked in its basement overnight after they went there to hide out from a police raid on the place (engineered by a citizens’ committee led by Harry Archer that was determined to close down the club), but thanks to a whole lot of lying by the other characters Harry Archer and his wife Janet (Gloria Holden, who never had the star career playing the title role in the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter should have given her), everyone gets the impression that that was when she spent the wild night with Kenneth Marquis described in her diary. At one point Corliss tries to fake amnesia to try to convince her parents she doesn’t remember That Night, and Shirley Temple spends about a reel of the film acting like the pre-pubescent Temple from a decade earlier — the one the world had fallen in love with and made the biggest movie star of the 1930’s.
Marquis himself leaks the diary to the mainstream press, a weekly magazine called Glimpse (i.e., Life) publishes the news that little Corliss Archer is about to become the fourth Mrs. Kenneth Marquis, Corliss’s uncle George (Roy Roberts) — a Navy chaplain — agrees to perform the ceremony despite his loathing for the groom — only at the end everyone comes to their senses and Corliss ends up innocently paired with Dexter while Kenneth ends up with a black eye (literally!) from Corliss’s dad. Written by Howard Dimsdale with F. Hugh Herbert getting a “characters created by” credit for having written Kiss and Tell, the film this was a sequel to (which is neatly referred to here when Kenneth sends Corliss an ornate box with a nightgown, each one embroidered with the day of the week on which she’s supposed to wear it, though after we see five white nightgowns labeled “Monday” through “Friday” the sixth drawer in the box contains a black nightgown embroidered “Kiss and Tell”), and directed by Richard Wallace, A Kiss for Corliss turns out to be a quite droll comedy with a marvelous comic-villain performance by David Niven, of whom we see surprisingly (and disappointingly) little even though he’s second-billed. Temple is O.K. playing a trope that was actually quite common in the 1940’s — a teenage girl cruising an older man in an attempt to make her teenage boyfriend jealous — Jane Powell’s lumbering (124-minute) MGM musical Holiday in Mexico had told much the same story, only in that one Powell was being raised by a single father (Walter Pidgeon) and the older man was pianist José Iturbi (playing himself!). But what came off as engaging precocity in the 1930’s when Temple was actually a child just seems like annoying immaturity here, and one can tell why Temple chose to make this her last film and get the hell out of the business.
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Wicker Park (MGM, Lakeshore Entertainment, 2004)
by Mark Gabrish Conlsn • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 9 p.m. last night I ran us a DVD from the extensive backlog of items I’ve acquired over the years: Wicker Park, a 2004 U.S.-Canadian co-production (the exteriors were shot in Chicago, where the story takes place, but the interiors were shot in Québec and many of the below-the-line personnel had French names) and a vehicle for Josh Hartnett during his brief run at stardom. This was three years after what should have been his star-making role in the 2001 Michael Bay Pearl Harbor, and it’s clear MGM and their co-producers, Lakeshore Entertainment, were pushing him as the star attraction: he’s billed above the title on the DVD (and in the film’s opening credits as well — back when movies still had opening credits!) while his co-stars, Rose Byrne, Matthew Lillard and Diane Kruger, are below the title. Wicker Park was based on a 1996 French film called The Apartment (a title the U.S. filmmakers probably decided not to use because it would have caused confusion with Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine), and the writing credits list Gilles Mimouni as writer of the original French film as well as Brandon Boyce for adapting it into the script for this one. From the online synopsis at imdb.com — “Matthew (Josh Hartnett), a young advertising executive in Chicago, puts his life and a business trip to China on hold when he thinks he sees Lisa (Diane Kruger), the love of his life who walked out on him without a word two years earlier, walking out of a restaurant one day. With a little help from his friend Luke (Matthew Lillard), Matthew obsessively and relentlessly tracks Lisa down and while doing so, runs into another young woman calling herself Lisa whom, unknown to Matthew, is an actress named Alex (Rose Byrne), and may hold the key to Lisa’s disappearance, and discovery” — I had expected a knock-off of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but that wasn’t the only Hitchcock movie the writers and director Paul McGuigan were ripping off.
Also, unlike Hitchcock and his writer, Samuel Taylor, McGuigan and Boyce made their movie non-linear — it’s often hard to tell when a particular scene is taking place and our only even semi-reliable clue is that Josh Hartnett is generally better dressed in the current scenes than he is in the flashbacks. When he first met Lisa two years before he was an aspiring photographer who worked in a video repair store — they met, in fact, when she brought in a camcorder and asked him to fix it because it wasn’t recording sound — and he wore T-shirts and casual pants. By the time they re-meet he’s moved to New York, hooked up with an advertising agency and become engaged to his boss’s daughter, Rebecca (Jessica Paté), and so the “modern” Matthew wears a suit and tie. He’s just been relocated back to Chicago and as the film begins he’s scheduled to fly out to Shanghai to nail down a big account with a Chinese company — only he never leaves because while having dinner at Bellucci’s Restaurant (apparently an in-joke reference to Monica Bellucci, the female star of the original French film, though so many scenes take place at that restaurant one wonders whether there aren’t any other eating places in Chicago besides that one and a Wicker Park diner, and why the characters don’t go somewhere else given all the dire things that happen to them at Bellucci’s) he sees Lisa, or thinks he does, after hearing her voice tell someone off in the corridor leading to the restrooms and also a room that’s marked “Telephone.” (This film takes place in a sort of technological in-between when cell phones existed but enough people didn’t have them that an infrastructure of public pay phones still survived.) He traces her to her apartment and they hook up — only the woman he hooks up with isn’t the original Lisa, though she says her name is Lisa, and it turns out only many reels of confusion later that she’s really the actress Alex, who’s in Lisa’s apartment because she’s Lisa’s roommate. The film is full of highly symbolic and “charged” objects, including a silver compact Lisa supposedly inherited from her grandmother (and the klutzy Luke drops it and breaks its mirror) and the key to the apartment, which Matthew accidentally drops down a storm drain and then has to retrieve in a scene all too obviously copied from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.
Wicker Park is the sort of movie you want to like but it won’t let you because, despite some quite impressive scenes, it’s just too confusing. We’re constantly being kept off-balance as to when we are — if the Charlie Kaufman-Michel Gondry Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Pedro Almódovar’s Talk to Her are models of how a non-linear film should be done, this is a model for how one shouldn’t — and it also doesn’t help that Josh Hartnett, whom I quite liked during his brief vogue, seems miscast. He comes across like the sort of actor who in the 1930’s and 1940’s got built up to replace a potentially recalcitrant star — and the star they seemed to be aiming him to replace was Tom Cruise, not exactly the greatest actor or most romantic figure either (and with Cruise in the lead Wicker Park would be even weaker than it is). It also doesn’t help that the payoff for all the strange incidents of the plot seems rather silly — it seems that Alex, even though she was dating Matthew’s friend Luke, formed an instant, obsessive crush on Matthew the first time she laid eyes on him and determined to break him and Lisa up so she could get him on the rebound. And the final meet-up between Matthew and the real Lisa at O’Hare Airport just when he’s hanging out there and still pretending to have taken that flight to China (ya remember the flight to China?), and he’s run into Rebecca and broken off their engagement, just smacked of old-time movie convention. Frankly, this film would have been more powerful dramatically with them never getting back together and Matthew spending the rest of his life thinking he recognizes her in various crowds — something like the beautiful “A Needle in a Haystack” scene in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film The Gay Divorcée, whose writers eventually brought the Astaire and Rogers characters (back) together in a way far more credible dramatically than anything Paul McGuigan (yet another director who thinks he’s Alfred Hitchcock, and isn’t) or Brendan Boyce could manage.
At 9 p.m. last night I ran us a DVD from the extensive backlog of items I’ve acquired over the years: Wicker Park, a 2004 U.S.-Canadian co-production (the exteriors were shot in Chicago, where the story takes place, but the interiors were shot in Québec and many of the below-the-line personnel had French names) and a vehicle for Josh Hartnett during his brief run at stardom. This was three years after what should have been his star-making role in the 2001 Michael Bay Pearl Harbor, and it’s clear MGM and their co-producers, Lakeshore Entertainment, were pushing him as the star attraction: he’s billed above the title on the DVD (and in the film’s opening credits as well — back when movies still had opening credits!) while his co-stars, Rose Byrne, Matthew Lillard and Diane Kruger, are below the title. Wicker Park was based on a 1996 French film called The Apartment (a title the U.S. filmmakers probably decided not to use because it would have caused confusion with Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine), and the writing credits list Gilles Mimouni as writer of the original French film as well as Brandon Boyce for adapting it into the script for this one. From the online synopsis at imdb.com — “Matthew (Josh Hartnett), a young advertising executive in Chicago, puts his life and a business trip to China on hold when he thinks he sees Lisa (Diane Kruger), the love of his life who walked out on him without a word two years earlier, walking out of a restaurant one day. With a little help from his friend Luke (Matthew Lillard), Matthew obsessively and relentlessly tracks Lisa down and while doing so, runs into another young woman calling herself Lisa whom, unknown to Matthew, is an actress named Alex (Rose Byrne), and may hold the key to Lisa’s disappearance, and discovery” — I had expected a knock-off of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but that wasn’t the only Hitchcock movie the writers and director Paul McGuigan were ripping off.
Also, unlike Hitchcock and his writer, Samuel Taylor, McGuigan and Boyce made their movie non-linear — it’s often hard to tell when a particular scene is taking place and our only even semi-reliable clue is that Josh Hartnett is generally better dressed in the current scenes than he is in the flashbacks. When he first met Lisa two years before he was an aspiring photographer who worked in a video repair store — they met, in fact, when she brought in a camcorder and asked him to fix it because it wasn’t recording sound — and he wore T-shirts and casual pants. By the time they re-meet he’s moved to New York, hooked up with an advertising agency and become engaged to his boss’s daughter, Rebecca (Jessica Paté), and so the “modern” Matthew wears a suit and tie. He’s just been relocated back to Chicago and as the film begins he’s scheduled to fly out to Shanghai to nail down a big account with a Chinese company — only he never leaves because while having dinner at Bellucci’s Restaurant (apparently an in-joke reference to Monica Bellucci, the female star of the original French film, though so many scenes take place at that restaurant one wonders whether there aren’t any other eating places in Chicago besides that one and a Wicker Park diner, and why the characters don’t go somewhere else given all the dire things that happen to them at Bellucci’s) he sees Lisa, or thinks he does, after hearing her voice tell someone off in the corridor leading to the restrooms and also a room that’s marked “Telephone.” (This film takes place in a sort of technological in-between when cell phones existed but enough people didn’t have them that an infrastructure of public pay phones still survived.) He traces her to her apartment and they hook up — only the woman he hooks up with isn’t the original Lisa, though she says her name is Lisa, and it turns out only many reels of confusion later that she’s really the actress Alex, who’s in Lisa’s apartment because she’s Lisa’s roommate. The film is full of highly symbolic and “charged” objects, including a silver compact Lisa supposedly inherited from her grandmother (and the klutzy Luke drops it and breaks its mirror) and the key to the apartment, which Matthew accidentally drops down a storm drain and then has to retrieve in a scene all too obviously copied from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.
Wicker Park is the sort of movie you want to like but it won’t let you because, despite some quite impressive scenes, it’s just too confusing. We’re constantly being kept off-balance as to when we are — if the Charlie Kaufman-Michel Gondry Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Pedro Almódovar’s Talk to Her are models of how a non-linear film should be done, this is a model for how one shouldn’t — and it also doesn’t help that Josh Hartnett, whom I quite liked during his brief vogue, seems miscast. He comes across like the sort of actor who in the 1930’s and 1940’s got built up to replace a potentially recalcitrant star — and the star they seemed to be aiming him to replace was Tom Cruise, not exactly the greatest actor or most romantic figure either (and with Cruise in the lead Wicker Park would be even weaker than it is). It also doesn’t help that the payoff for all the strange incidents of the plot seems rather silly — it seems that Alex, even though she was dating Matthew’s friend Luke, formed an instant, obsessive crush on Matthew the first time she laid eyes on him and determined to break him and Lisa up so she could get him on the rebound. And the final meet-up between Matthew and the real Lisa at O’Hare Airport just when he’s hanging out there and still pretending to have taken that flight to China (ya remember the flight to China?), and he’s run into Rebecca and broken off their engagement, just smacked of old-time movie convention. Frankly, this film would have been more powerful dramatically with them never getting back together and Matthew spending the rest of his life thinking he recognizes her in various crowds — something like the beautiful “A Needle in a Haystack” scene in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film The Gay Divorcée, whose writers eventually brought the Astaire and Rogers characters (back) together in a way far more credible dramatically than anything Paul McGuigan (yet another director who thinks he’s Alfred Hitchcock, and isn’t) or Brendan Boyce could manage.
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Sweet Smell of Success (Norma-Curtleigh Productions, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions, United Artists, 1957)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a fascinating movie last night that was being shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of “Noir Alley”: Sweet Smell of Success, a thoroughly acrid story centered around a desperate publicity agent, Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), whose entire livelihood depends on his ability to place items about his clients into the New York Globe column written by all-powerful arbiter, tastemaker and what would today be called an “influencer” J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster, who also produced this film with his business partners Harold Hecht and James Hill). The story began as a Collier’s magazine fiction piece by Ernest Lehman, though the magazine rejected Lehman’s original title and called it “Tell Me About It Tomorrow.” Lehman actually called the story “Sweet Smell of Success,” but the Collier’s editors didn’t like the idea of publishing something with the word “smell” in the title — but when Lehman republished the piece as a novel he reverted to his preferred title, and that’s the one that was used for the film. Lancaster originally considered other actors for the role of Hunsecker, including Frank Sinatra (whose still-diminutive frame would have come closer to the character’s real-life model, Walter Winchell) and Orson Welles (who would probably have wanted to direct the film as well, especially since the story deals with his favorite theme — the power of the media — that informed his most famous works, the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast and the 1941 film Citizen Kane), before deciding to play the part himself.
Lancaster got upset when he hired Ernest Lehman to adapt his own story for the screen but Lehman got sick and dropped out of the assignment; his replacement, Clifford Odets, if anything made the script even more acid and cynical — and Odets was forced to write in a terrible rush, sometimes sending pages by messenger to the set where the film was being shot and forcing the actors to learn them immediately. This is hardly the best way to make a film, and it pissed off the director Lancaster actually hired, Scottish filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick — who’d previously worked at Ealing Studios and made, among other things, the anti-capitalist satire The Man in the White Suit — but when the BBC bought Ealing’s physical plant and shuttered its production company in 1956 Mackendrick decided to try his luck in Hollywood. Mackendrick was reportedly a William Wyler-style perfectionist — the sort of director who maddened actors by calling for take after take of a scene without giving them a clue as to what he wanted done differently — but, aided by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe (just the right person to create noir atmospherics on actual locations — though some of the film was shot in Hollywood on the Samuel Goldwyn lot, much of it was actually filmed in New York City and incorporates some of the famous nightclubs and restaurants mentioned in the dialogue), Mackendrick turned in a marvelously paced, fast-moving film whose subject is power and corruption. What struck me most about this film in 2019 is how close the character of J. J. Hunsecker is to Donald Trump: egomaniacal, utterly without scruples, constantly dropping the word “favor” (in both its literal meaning of “I want you to do something for me … ” and the symbolic meaning, as in “royal favor,” since the story depicts Hunsecker as literally a person who can make or break people with a few words in his column and everyone around him continually begs him for the royal favor, the nod that will indicate they’re in his good graces and he will help them rather than destroy them) and also literally turning from someone’s fast friend to his bitter enemy. (The parallel between Hunsecker and Trump is even stronger when you consider that seven years after he made this film, Lancaster starred in Seven Days in May as an ambitious U.S. army general who attempts to overthrow the U.S.’s democratically elected government and install himself as the nation’s dictator.)
The plot kicks off when Falco picks up the latest copy of the New York Globe (whose delivery trucks advertise Hunsecker’s column as the main reason people should buy the paper) and notices that for the fifth day in a row an item Hunsecker promised to print for him hasn’t appeared. Approaching Hunsecker to find out why he’s being frozen out — he has to place a phone call from a booth in a restaurant to the phone at Hunsecker’s table, and you hear the chilling sound of Lancaster’s voice in the role even before we see him — Falco finds it’s because Hunsecker assigned him to break up the romance between Hunsecker’s sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and jazz guitarist Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), who’s shown on-screen leading the real-life Chico Hamilton Quintet, an unusual group that featured flute and cello as lead instruments along with a rhythm section of guitar, bass and drums. Just why J. J. is so anxious to break them up is unstated, though we get the hint that Hunsecker has an incestuous attraction to his sister (another Trump parallel: Trump once said his daughter Ivanka was so hot-looking that “if she weren’t my daughter, I would date her”), but it provides the plot line for the entire movie. To smear Steve in the press, Falco writes a “blind item” that doesn’t name him but accuses him of being both a drug user and a Communist (incidentally the filmmakers had the members of the Chico Hamilton Quintet followed for several weeks to ensure that none of them were using drugs, lest the real Winchell expose them in his column to discredit the film), and he shops it around to other columnists. He picks one because previously he had promised Rita (Barbara Nichols), a cigarette girl, an interview for a piece he was doing on the lives of cigarette girls — only the “interview” took place in the columnist’s hotel room and his interest in her was more physical than journalistic. (Just in case anyone thought that the shit Harvey Weinstein pulled on women to get sex was anything new … )
When the columnist not only fails to take the bait but confesses his indiscretion to his wife — who’s right there next to him — Falco tries again with another columnist, Otis Elwell (David White, who would later play a similarly slimy and unscrupulous character as ad boss Larry Tate on the TV series Bewitched), and this time offers Rita to him as a one-night sex toy if he’ll print the item. The item gets Steve and his band fired from their nightclub gig, but when Steve goes to the set of Hunsecker’s TV show to complain to the Great Man — and the Great Man says, “When you insult me, you insult all 65 million people who read my column and watch me on TV” (another Trump parallel: he recently told a rally audience in Mississippi that in attempting to impeach him the Democrats were not only attacking him, they were disenfranchising all 65 million people who voted for him[1] —just as elsewhere in the movie Hunsecker employs another of Trump’s favorite tricks, telling someone that “people are saying” something bad about them, when in fact it’s he who’s saying it and the “people” are figments of his imagination) — Hunsecker abruptly reverses course and decides to play White Knight and help Steve get his job back if he’ll just leave Susan alone. But the stress on Susan of being essentially the rope in a tug-of-war between her brother and her boyfriend leads her to attempt suicide by throwing herself off the balcony of J. J.’s high-rise apartment — and Falco grabs her to keep her from killing himself just as J. J. arrives, instantly comes to the conclusion that Falco was trying to rape Susan, and beats Falco up, leaving Falco back in the gutter just as he thought he had worked himself into J. J.’s good graces and would finally get to enjoy “the sweet smell of success.” Sweet Smell of Success was one of those movies (like The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane and Vertigo) that was a box-office bomb when initially released (though I suspect it wasn’t anywhere near as much a flop as imdb.com’s figures would indicate: they said the film cost $2.6 million, running way over an initial budget of $600,000, and listed a “Cumulative Worldwide Gross” of just $7,336, which must be a typo) but has since become regarded as a classic.
I think it’s a film that just misses greatness: the overall conception is wonderful if you regard it as entertaining to be told for 96 minutes that human beings are nothing but swine (which I do, since it’s awfully close to the truth); Mackendrick’s direction is effective and atmospheric; and Lancaster and Curtis deliver among the greatest performances of their careers, both fully relishing the evil they were called upon to portray — Lancaster the super-bully and Curtis the pathetic sycophant. Barbara Nichols is also excellent as the woman Falco rescues from being sexually exploited by one columnist and then himself “sells” her to another. One problem with this movie is we really don’t get a sense of how Hunsecker and Falco got that way — a bit of Citizen Hunsecker explaining how he started out, how he got so powerful and what is his relationship to the owners of the New York Globe might have made Sweet Smell of Success not only more effective social commentary but more powerful drama (though it’s arguable that we don’t want to see Hunsecker as fallen idealist because he, unlike Charles Foster Kane, never had any ideals to lose. We also don’t get much of a hint about Hunsecker’s sexuality; in the real world someone with as much power over others as we’re told he has uses it to force himself onto barely willing (or sometimes outright unwilling) partners to get his rocks off. We don’t see him do any of that — which reinforces the impression that he’s got an incestuous crush on his sister, either that or he’s totally asexual and power, in the Orwellian definition as “the ability to make others suffer,” is his real turn-on. But the biggest problem with Sweet Smell of Success is the incredibly weak casting of the only two people in the dramatis personae we’re actually supposed to like, Steve and Susan. About all Susan Harrison can do is pose for the camera looking pretty and pout her way through the big moments (based on her work in the similarly themed — and equally unsuccessful commercially — A Face in the Crowd, Lee Remick might have been a better choice for the role), and Martin Milner is simply one of the most boring actors of all time.
When Charles and I watched him a decade later in the film Valley of the Dolls I began to wonder if that film’s director, Mark Robson, ever had a stagehand put a mirror under Milner’s nose to see if he was still breathing after a particularly somnolent take from him, and while he’s not quite as inanimate a presence in this film, he’s awfully damned close. According to the imdb.com “Trivia” posters, Milner was cast at the last minute after the actor originally given the role, Robert Vaughn (later star of the TV James Bond knock-off The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), suddenly got drafted — but with the one actor who’d have been totally right for the role, James Dean, having been dead for two years the filmmakers would have been better advised going for one of the many young men around then trying for the Dean mantle, like Paul Newman, Steve McQueen or even Michael Landon, someone who could have given at least the appearance of trying to fight back against Hunsecker’s obscene power. While watching the film I had at least given Milner credit for putting in the effort to look right in the scenes in which he’s supposedly playing guitar with the Chico Hamilton Quintet — his left arm moved credibly across the guitar neck — but in his outro the TCM host said he really wasn’t doing it: the Hamilton Quintet’s actual guitarist, John Pisano, stood behind him off-screen, reached around him to the neck of the guitar, and fretted it for him. Despite the weaknesses in the casting, though, Sweet Smell of Success is a fascinating film, well worth watching and seeming quite modern in its unremitting cynicism — indeed, according to a brief mention in Steven Bach’s book Final Cut, in the late 1970’s Faye Dunaway approached United Artists about remaking it with her in the Burt Lancaster role of the all-powerful columnist (which would have been interesting) — and it would be interesting to imagine a modern version with Hunsecker a fabulously successful online “influencer” whose word on his Web site could make or break careers!
I watched a fascinating movie last night that was being shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of “Noir Alley”: Sweet Smell of Success, a thoroughly acrid story centered around a desperate publicity agent, Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), whose entire livelihood depends on his ability to place items about his clients into the New York Globe column written by all-powerful arbiter, tastemaker and what would today be called an “influencer” J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster, who also produced this film with his business partners Harold Hecht and James Hill). The story began as a Collier’s magazine fiction piece by Ernest Lehman, though the magazine rejected Lehman’s original title and called it “Tell Me About It Tomorrow.” Lehman actually called the story “Sweet Smell of Success,” but the Collier’s editors didn’t like the idea of publishing something with the word “smell” in the title — but when Lehman republished the piece as a novel he reverted to his preferred title, and that’s the one that was used for the film. Lancaster originally considered other actors for the role of Hunsecker, including Frank Sinatra (whose still-diminutive frame would have come closer to the character’s real-life model, Walter Winchell) and Orson Welles (who would probably have wanted to direct the film as well, especially since the story deals with his favorite theme — the power of the media — that informed his most famous works, the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast and the 1941 film Citizen Kane), before deciding to play the part himself.
Lancaster got upset when he hired Ernest Lehman to adapt his own story for the screen but Lehman got sick and dropped out of the assignment; his replacement, Clifford Odets, if anything made the script even more acid and cynical — and Odets was forced to write in a terrible rush, sometimes sending pages by messenger to the set where the film was being shot and forcing the actors to learn them immediately. This is hardly the best way to make a film, and it pissed off the director Lancaster actually hired, Scottish filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick — who’d previously worked at Ealing Studios and made, among other things, the anti-capitalist satire The Man in the White Suit — but when the BBC bought Ealing’s physical plant and shuttered its production company in 1956 Mackendrick decided to try his luck in Hollywood. Mackendrick was reportedly a William Wyler-style perfectionist — the sort of director who maddened actors by calling for take after take of a scene without giving them a clue as to what he wanted done differently — but, aided by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe (just the right person to create noir atmospherics on actual locations — though some of the film was shot in Hollywood on the Samuel Goldwyn lot, much of it was actually filmed in New York City and incorporates some of the famous nightclubs and restaurants mentioned in the dialogue), Mackendrick turned in a marvelously paced, fast-moving film whose subject is power and corruption. What struck me most about this film in 2019 is how close the character of J. J. Hunsecker is to Donald Trump: egomaniacal, utterly without scruples, constantly dropping the word “favor” (in both its literal meaning of “I want you to do something for me … ” and the symbolic meaning, as in “royal favor,” since the story depicts Hunsecker as literally a person who can make or break people with a few words in his column and everyone around him continually begs him for the royal favor, the nod that will indicate they’re in his good graces and he will help them rather than destroy them) and also literally turning from someone’s fast friend to his bitter enemy. (The parallel between Hunsecker and Trump is even stronger when you consider that seven years after he made this film, Lancaster starred in Seven Days in May as an ambitious U.S. army general who attempts to overthrow the U.S.’s democratically elected government and install himself as the nation’s dictator.)
The plot kicks off when Falco picks up the latest copy of the New York Globe (whose delivery trucks advertise Hunsecker’s column as the main reason people should buy the paper) and notices that for the fifth day in a row an item Hunsecker promised to print for him hasn’t appeared. Approaching Hunsecker to find out why he’s being frozen out — he has to place a phone call from a booth in a restaurant to the phone at Hunsecker’s table, and you hear the chilling sound of Lancaster’s voice in the role even before we see him — Falco finds it’s because Hunsecker assigned him to break up the romance between Hunsecker’s sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and jazz guitarist Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), who’s shown on-screen leading the real-life Chico Hamilton Quintet, an unusual group that featured flute and cello as lead instruments along with a rhythm section of guitar, bass and drums. Just why J. J. is so anxious to break them up is unstated, though we get the hint that Hunsecker has an incestuous attraction to his sister (another Trump parallel: Trump once said his daughter Ivanka was so hot-looking that “if she weren’t my daughter, I would date her”), but it provides the plot line for the entire movie. To smear Steve in the press, Falco writes a “blind item” that doesn’t name him but accuses him of being both a drug user and a Communist (incidentally the filmmakers had the members of the Chico Hamilton Quintet followed for several weeks to ensure that none of them were using drugs, lest the real Winchell expose them in his column to discredit the film), and he shops it around to other columnists. He picks one because previously he had promised Rita (Barbara Nichols), a cigarette girl, an interview for a piece he was doing on the lives of cigarette girls — only the “interview” took place in the columnist’s hotel room and his interest in her was more physical than journalistic. (Just in case anyone thought that the shit Harvey Weinstein pulled on women to get sex was anything new … )
When the columnist not only fails to take the bait but confesses his indiscretion to his wife — who’s right there next to him — Falco tries again with another columnist, Otis Elwell (David White, who would later play a similarly slimy and unscrupulous character as ad boss Larry Tate on the TV series Bewitched), and this time offers Rita to him as a one-night sex toy if he’ll print the item. The item gets Steve and his band fired from their nightclub gig, but when Steve goes to the set of Hunsecker’s TV show to complain to the Great Man — and the Great Man says, “When you insult me, you insult all 65 million people who read my column and watch me on TV” (another Trump parallel: he recently told a rally audience in Mississippi that in attempting to impeach him the Democrats were not only attacking him, they were disenfranchising all 65 million people who voted for him[1] —just as elsewhere in the movie Hunsecker employs another of Trump’s favorite tricks, telling someone that “people are saying” something bad about them, when in fact it’s he who’s saying it and the “people” are figments of his imagination) — Hunsecker abruptly reverses course and decides to play White Knight and help Steve get his job back if he’ll just leave Susan alone. But the stress on Susan of being essentially the rope in a tug-of-war between her brother and her boyfriend leads her to attempt suicide by throwing herself off the balcony of J. J.’s high-rise apartment — and Falco grabs her to keep her from killing himself just as J. J. arrives, instantly comes to the conclusion that Falco was trying to rape Susan, and beats Falco up, leaving Falco back in the gutter just as he thought he had worked himself into J. J.’s good graces and would finally get to enjoy “the sweet smell of success.” Sweet Smell of Success was one of those movies (like The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane and Vertigo) that was a box-office bomb when initially released (though I suspect it wasn’t anywhere near as much a flop as imdb.com’s figures would indicate: they said the film cost $2.6 million, running way over an initial budget of $600,000, and listed a “Cumulative Worldwide Gross” of just $7,336, which must be a typo) but has since become regarded as a classic.
I think it’s a film that just misses greatness: the overall conception is wonderful if you regard it as entertaining to be told for 96 minutes that human beings are nothing but swine (which I do, since it’s awfully close to the truth); Mackendrick’s direction is effective and atmospheric; and Lancaster and Curtis deliver among the greatest performances of their careers, both fully relishing the evil they were called upon to portray — Lancaster the super-bully and Curtis the pathetic sycophant. Barbara Nichols is also excellent as the woman Falco rescues from being sexually exploited by one columnist and then himself “sells” her to another. One problem with this movie is we really don’t get a sense of how Hunsecker and Falco got that way — a bit of Citizen Hunsecker explaining how he started out, how he got so powerful and what is his relationship to the owners of the New York Globe might have made Sweet Smell of Success not only more effective social commentary but more powerful drama (though it’s arguable that we don’t want to see Hunsecker as fallen idealist because he, unlike Charles Foster Kane, never had any ideals to lose. We also don’t get much of a hint about Hunsecker’s sexuality; in the real world someone with as much power over others as we’re told he has uses it to force himself onto barely willing (or sometimes outright unwilling) partners to get his rocks off. We don’t see him do any of that — which reinforces the impression that he’s got an incestuous crush on his sister, either that or he’s totally asexual and power, in the Orwellian definition as “the ability to make others suffer,” is his real turn-on. But the biggest problem with Sweet Smell of Success is the incredibly weak casting of the only two people in the dramatis personae we’re actually supposed to like, Steve and Susan. About all Susan Harrison can do is pose for the camera looking pretty and pout her way through the big moments (based on her work in the similarly themed — and equally unsuccessful commercially — A Face in the Crowd, Lee Remick might have been a better choice for the role), and Martin Milner is simply one of the most boring actors of all time.
When Charles and I watched him a decade later in the film Valley of the Dolls I began to wonder if that film’s director, Mark Robson, ever had a stagehand put a mirror under Milner’s nose to see if he was still breathing after a particularly somnolent take from him, and while he’s not quite as inanimate a presence in this film, he’s awfully damned close. According to the imdb.com “Trivia” posters, Milner was cast at the last minute after the actor originally given the role, Robert Vaughn (later star of the TV James Bond knock-off The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), suddenly got drafted — but with the one actor who’d have been totally right for the role, James Dean, having been dead for two years the filmmakers would have been better advised going for one of the many young men around then trying for the Dean mantle, like Paul Newman, Steve McQueen or even Michael Landon, someone who could have given at least the appearance of trying to fight back against Hunsecker’s obscene power. While watching the film I had at least given Milner credit for putting in the effort to look right in the scenes in which he’s supposedly playing guitar with the Chico Hamilton Quintet — his left arm moved credibly across the guitar neck — but in his outro the TCM host said he really wasn’t doing it: the Hamilton Quintet’s actual guitarist, John Pisano, stood behind him off-screen, reached around him to the neck of the guitar, and fretted it for him. Despite the weaknesses in the casting, though, Sweet Smell of Success is a fascinating film, well worth watching and seeming quite modern in its unremitting cynicism — indeed, according to a brief mention in Steven Bach’s book Final Cut, in the late 1970’s Faye Dunaway approached United Artists about remaking it with her in the Burt Lancaster role of the all-powerful columnist (which would have been interesting) — and it would be interesting to imagine a modern version with Hunsecker a fabulously successful online “influencer” whose word on his Web site could make or break careers!
[1] — Actually only 62 million Americans voted for Trump.
The Electoral College and the distribution of voters throughout the country
effectively disenfranchised the 65 million of us who voted for Hillary Clinton to be our President.
Thursday, October 31, 2019
The Walking Dead (Warner Bros., 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009, 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Walking Dead, another in TCM’s Boris Karloff marathon last October 30, and a movie that took some typical Karloff situations (including casting him as a man who dies and is then brought back to life by scientific means) but gave them fresh spins and managed to create a quite somber mood very different from the sensational (for its time) horror of a lot of his better-known vehicles. It was made at Warner Bros., which had just signed Karloff to a five-film contract (at one point in 1939, the height of the studio system, when most Hollywood actors were working for just one company, Karloff had non-exclusive multi-picture contracts with four studios at once: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram.) Indeed, for its first few minutes it seems like a typical Warners crime drama and one wonders just how they’re going to fit Karloff into it: Stephen Martin (Kenneth Harlan) is on trial (without a jury) before Judge Shaw (Joseph King) on the charge of defrauding the government on contracts. Martin is actually part of a gang of high-class criminals headed by his attorney, Nolan (Ricardo Cortez). They mount a campaign of intimidation and threats against Judge Shaw to get him to acquit Martin, but he convicts him anyway. Nolan meets with his associates in the gang — Loder (Barton MacLane), Werner (Henry O’Neill) and Blackstone (Paul Harvey) — and announces he’s hired a hit man named Trigger (Joseph Sawyer) to kill Judge Shaw. When the other gang members protest that this will draw more heat on them, not less, Nolan tells them not to worry: he’s got the perfect fall guy lined up (obviously playing Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon five years earlier had taught Ricardo Cortez a thing or two about finding a fall guy). His patsy is John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who 10 years earlier was sentenced to a long prison term by Judge Shaw for killing a man who accosted his wife. Ellman has just been released two weeks before Trigger’s scheduled hit on Shaw, and they arrange to run Ellman’s car off the road and plant Shaw’s body in it after they kill him.
The film was The Walking Dead, another in TCM’s Boris Karloff marathon last October 30, and a movie that took some typical Karloff situations (including casting him as a man who dies and is then brought back to life by scientific means) but gave them fresh spins and managed to create a quite somber mood very different from the sensational (for its time) horror of a lot of his better-known vehicles. It was made at Warner Bros., which had just signed Karloff to a five-film contract (at one point in 1939, the height of the studio system, when most Hollywood actors were working for just one company, Karloff had non-exclusive multi-picture contracts with four studios at once: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram.) Indeed, for its first few minutes it seems like a typical Warners crime drama and one wonders just how they’re going to fit Karloff into it: Stephen Martin (Kenneth Harlan) is on trial (without a jury) before Judge Shaw (Joseph King) on the charge of defrauding the government on contracts. Martin is actually part of a gang of high-class criminals headed by his attorney, Nolan (Ricardo Cortez). They mount a campaign of intimidation and threats against Judge Shaw to get him to acquit Martin, but he convicts him anyway. Nolan meets with his associates in the gang — Loder (Barton MacLane), Werner (Henry O’Neill) and Blackstone (Paul Harvey) — and announces he’s hired a hit man named Trigger (Joseph Sawyer) to kill Judge Shaw. When the other gang members protest that this will draw more heat on them, not less, Nolan tells them not to worry: he’s got the perfect fall guy lined up (obviously playing Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon five years earlier had taught Ricardo Cortez a thing or two about finding a fall guy). His patsy is John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who 10 years earlier was sentenced to a long prison term by Judge Shaw for killing a man who accosted his wife. Ellman has just been released two weeks before Trigger’s scheduled hit on Shaw, and they arrange to run Ellman’s car off the road and plant Shaw’s body in it after they kill him.
The frame works and Ellman is
tried, convicted and sentenced to death — Nolan, pretending he’s doing him a
favor, deliberately mishandles the trial so badly as to ensure Ellman’s
conviction (12 years before Orson Welles used the same plot gimmick in The
Lady from Shanghai) — but there’s one
complication. Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill), two young
medical students working as lab assistants to medical researcher Dr. Beaumont
(Edmund Gwenn), actually witnessed the real killer run Ellman’s car off the
road and transfer Shaw’s body to it. Jimmy wants the two to come forward as
witnesses, but Nancy successfully talks him out of it until the night Ellman is
scheduled to be executed, when she finally breaks down and allows him to go to
Nolan with the information that can spare his client’s life. Nolan deliberately
delays reaching anyone in law enforcement with this information so he can make
a show of concern while really sabotaging things so that the governor’s
reprieve reaches the prison just after Ellman is executed. He hasn’t reckoned with Dr. Beaumont, who demands
that instead of being autopsied Ellman’s body be turned over to him at once,
whereupon he takes it to his lab and, with Jimmy and Nancy assisting, plugs it
into a bunch of Frankenstein-like
gizmos (including the so-called “Lindbergh heart,” which the celebrated aviator
and fascist apologist actually co-invented with Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose
real-life experiments with research partner Dr. Robert Cornish in attempting to
revive electrocution victims apparently inspired this film) that bring Ellman
back to life. At first Ellman is incapable of speech — he emits only non-verbal
whines, groans and snarls similar to those he used in Frankenstein — but eventually he comes to and achieves at least a
bit of his former intelligence. He also seems to acquire some sort of
extra-sensory power, because without any actual evidence he intuits the
identities of the people who set him up and starts knocking them off one by
one. Eventually the police close in on him and he’s shot down, and before he
dies the second time Beaumont frantically tries — and fails — to get Ellman to
describe what the experience of death (his first one) was actually like.
The Walking Dead is
an intriguing movie that tends to argue against my general field theory of
cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of
writers; though five people worked on this script (Ewart Adamson and Joseph
Fields get credit for the story and Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews and
Lillie Hayward for the script), it has a lot of felicitious touches. Asked if he has a last
request, Ellman is at first indignant — “You take my life and you want to grant
me a favor?” — but then comes up
with one: he asks that a live musician play his favorite piece as he’s walking
to the electric chair (and as he gets in the chair he gestures up to the
ceiling and says, “He will
forgive me,” meaning God). Indeed, the first half of this film is considerably
more moving and better as drama than the second half — though the whole piece
is presented with a remarkable subtlety for what was pretty obviously intended
as an exploitation piece aimed at Karloff’s core horror audience. Michael Curtiz
is the director, and he’s probably the best one Karloff worked with in the
1930’s other than James Whale (and maybe Edgar G. Ulmer). As Ellman, a
sympathetic victim of both criminals and law enforcement, Karloff underplays throughout the film — a far cry from the snarling
overacting he sometimes fell into with less carefully drafted scripts and less
assertive directors — creating a vivid impression of a sensitive man, not
especially bright but sympathetic and all too aware of what’s happening to him
and why.
The parallels to Frankenstein are there but they’re kept subtle — Ellman, even after he’s
revivified, remains a normal human being (albeit one with quirky
post-resurrection mental powers) and a likable if rather distant character
whose killings are sufficiently well motivated that they don’t cost him the
audience’s sympathy. The cinematographer is Hal Mohr (an Academy Award winner
for the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a far more prestigious name than one would expect on a 62-minute
“B” picture), and even when he has Ellman doing Karloffian things like skulking
around in graveyards, he creates a vivid and somber atmosphere just as
effective as the outdoor scenes in Karloff’s 1930’s films for Universal. The
Walking Dead is a quite good movie, ably
showcasing Karloff’s remarkable sensitivity and subtlety as an actor and using
familiar horror/sci-fi elements in intriguingly different ways. It helps that
Edmund Gwenn’s character is also subtly played — instead of the usual “mad
scientist” he’s a totally benign figure, even avuncular (in fact Gwenn plays
this so much like his role as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street 11 years later — and with his neatly trimmed white
beard he even looks like he did
as Santa Claus — that one half-expects him to announce to his lab assistants
Jimmy and Nancy that as soon as he finishes the experiment he’s going to have
to load his sleigh with toys to deliver them to all the children of the world
on Christmas eve), motivated not by some mad scheme to rule the world or even (as
Karloff was in most of his own mad-scientist roles) by an idea to help humanity
that he pursues in an unethical way, but simply by a sense of atonement for the
guilt of his associates in failing to stop Ellman’s execution. Though it sags a
bit in the second half as the plot turns towards more conventional 1930’s
horror situations, The Walking Dead
is still an estimable movie that contains one of Karloff’s very best
performances. Too bad his later work for Warners was in routine melodramas,
most of them remakes (Invisible Menace, West of Shanghai, Devil’s
Island, British Intelligence) that hardly
“stretched” him the way this one did! — 11/4/09
•••••
Last night at 10 p.m. I caught a short but quite moving film
on Turner Classic Movies, part of a program they were doing for the day before
Hallowe’en of especially short (60 to 70 minutes) horror films. The film I
watched was The Walking Dead, a 1936
movie from Warner Bros. that kicked off a five-film contract the studio had
made with Boris Karloff, who in the middle of the studio era in which actors
were typically under contract to a single company, had simultaneous
non-exclusive contracts with four
studios: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram. The Walking Dead had unusually heavy-duty talent behind the cameras
for a 66-minute “B” — the director was Michael Curtiz and the cinematographer
was Hal Mohr — though the script was committee-written: Ewart Adamson and
Joseph Fields were credited with the story and Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert
Hardy Andrews and Lillie Hayward with the actual screenplay. The
Walking Dead — not to be confused with the
long-running modern AMC series about zombies — was a typically Warners-esque
mashup of horror and gangster tropes, and one quirk about it was it featured
former Sam Spade Ricardo Cortez and future Santa Claus Edmund Gwenn in the
cast. Cortez plays Nolan, corrupt attorney and head of the rackets in the
mid-sized city where this takes place. He and his associates Loder (a
relatively restrained Barton MacLane), Blackstone (Paul Harvey), Merritt
(Robert Strange) and Martin (Kenneth Harlan) decide to get rid of Judge Roger
Shaw (Joseph King) because Shaw, giving a bench trial to a member of the gang
accused of embezzling $350,000 from the city through phony contracts, found him
guilty and sentenced him to 10 years in prison despite the efforts of the gang
to get him to acquit. The gang needs a fall guy — apparently Cortez’s
experience starring in the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon had taught him something — and they find him in John Ellman (Boris Karloff),
a musician who just got out of prison after serving a 10-year sentence for
killing his wife’s lover. Since Shaw presided over Ellman’s trial, the gang
decides he’s the perfect patsy: they set him up by having him surveil Shaw’s
house, ostensibly working for a private detective trying to get the goods on
Shaw on behalf of his wife, and in the end their hit man “Trigger” Smith
(Joseph Sawyer) kills Shaw and stashes the judge’s body in Ellman’s car. The
whole thing is witnessed by Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite
Churchill), a couple who both work as assistants to the great scientist Dr.
Evan Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn, playing his part much the way Lionel Atwill did in
Curtiz’s previous horror films, Doctor “X” and Mystery of the Wax Museum), but the two are intimidated by the gang and don’t come forward until
the day Ellman is scheduled to be executed.
Nolan, who’s represented Ellman all
along but deliberately threw the case during his trial, holds up notifying the
state’s governor that there are two witnessed who could exonerate him until
after Ellman is already executed, but Beaumont claims the body and offers to
revive him via a new process he’s invented featuring something called the “Lindbergh
Heart.” This is a real deal, actually invented by former transatlantic flyer
and future Nazi apologist Charles Lindbergh, though in the movie it’s
incorporated into what’s otherwise some pretty familiar lab equipment from
Charles Strickfaden that had already been used to bring Karloff to life in Frankenstein and ditto for Elsa Lanchester in The Bride
of Frankenstein. This undoes the effect of
electrocution and restores Ellman to life, but it also gives him a supernatural
insight that makes him aware of the identities of the men who framed him and
determined to kill them all — though the writing committee makes it clear that
Ellman eliminates these people by scaring them rather than actually killing
them with his own hands. When he’s not doing that Ellman is hanging out at the
Jackson Memorial Cemetery, reflecting his in-between status, not dead but not
fully alive either. In the end the last two surviving gangsters, including
Nolan, confront Ellman at the cemetery and shoot him, and before he dies (permanently
this time) Dr. Beaumont tries to worm out of him the sensations he felt when he
died the first time — he lasts long enough to tell him it was peaceful but not
much more than that, and there’s a bit of religious dialogue repeated by both
Karloff and Gwenn that “the Lord is a jealous God” who zealously guards the
secret of just what happens to people when they make the transition from this
life to whatever may await us in the next one. The Walking Dead is actually one of Karloff’s best films from the period;
not only does it allow him to play a sympathetic character, it’s full of
felicitous touches, like Ellman requesting that a cellist perform his favorite
piece of music, “Kamennoi-Ostrow” by 19th century Russian composer
Anton Rubinstein (a piece that’s heard throughout the film and is the basis for
much of its music score), as he walks to the electric chair, and also turning
his head heavenward as the priest comes to give him last rites and saying, “He will forgive me” — meaning God.
Thanks to Curtiz’s
visually inventive direction and the quiet, dignified performance he got out of
Karloff, The Walking Dead emerges
as quite a good film, a showcase for Karloff that nonetheless remains rooted in
the sorts of gangster stories Warners did well and a good start for his brief
return to a studio where he’d made four films in 1931 (including his great role
as a slimeball reporter who poses as a priest to get a story in Five
Star Final and his brief turn as the father
of a talented boy dancer who essentially sells his kid to John Barrymore’s
club-footed choreographer in The Mad Genius, also directed by Curtiz), though Karloff’s
subsequent films in his Warners’ stint weren’t so interesting: the dull West
of Shanghai (Karloff as a Chinese warlord
in a knock-off of a Western called Three Bad Men), The Invisible Menace (a dull would-be thriller set on a U.S. military
base), Devil’s Island
(essentially a cheap ripoff of John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark
Island, though it pissed off the French
government enough that it received only a minimal release until France fell to
the Nazis in 1940 and after that Warners couldn’t have cared less what the French thought of this particularly sordid part
of their history being dredged up), and British Intelligence (a 1940 remake of Constance Bennett’s 1930 World War
I espionage drama Three Faces East,
the first of two times Karloff would remake a role originally played by Erich
von Stroheim: the second time was Lured). — 10/31/19
The Mummy’s Tomb (Universal, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I ran a double bill of the first two films in Universal’s 1940’s Mummy cycle, The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb. The Mummy’s Hand set the ground rules for this cycle: the unnaturally kept-alive mummy was Kharis, the former squeeze of the Princess Ananka, and he lived in the Temple of Karnak, a remote spot in the Egyptian desert where a cadre of priests headed by Andoheb (George Zucco) still practiced the ancient Egyptian religion. As Andoheb was told by his predecessor as high priest of this cult in The Mummy’s Hand (Eduardo Ciannelli) and he himself relayed to his own successor Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey) at the start of The Mummy’s Tomb, Kharis is being kept alive by a tea brewed from tana leaves: a tea from three leaves administered every month during the full moon will keep Kharis alive in suspended animation, while a tea from nine leaves will allow him to move. The Mummy’s Tomb takes place 30 years after The Mummy’s Hand and is set in the U.S. town of “Mapleton” (its location is unspecified but it’s pretty clearly either in New England or upstate New York), where archaeologist Stephen Banning (Wallace Ford in Jack P. Pierce’s “age” makeup) lives in quiet retirement after he made his fame discovering the tomb of Princess Ananka — which he wasn’t actually shown doing in The Mummy’s Hand.
Andoheb and Kharis (played in The Mummy’s Hand by Western star Tom Tyler but in The Mummy’s Tomb and the subsequent films in the cycle by Lon Chaney, Jr.) somehow survived getting shot and burned, respectively, at the end of The Mummy’s Hand, and an aging Andoheb sends Mehemet to Mapleton with Kharis, instructing him to set the mummy loose on the Americans who desecrated Ananka’s tomb. Andoheb also arranges for Mehemet to have a cover job as assistant to the caretaker of the local cemetery, from which he brews the nine-leaf tana tea and sends Kharis out to kill. Banning’s wife Marta from the first film is already dead (she’s represented by a framed print of Peggy Moran’s head shot) but before she croaked the two had a son, John Banning, who’s trained as a doctor and is about to enter the service as a medic. (This was 1942, after all, and with the U.S. finally involved in World War II the studios were shoe-horning references to the war and the military into all sorts of movies.) One warning Andoheb gave Mehemet before he sent him to the U.S. was never to fall in love — a mistake Andoheb had made himself in The Mummy’s Hand when he kidnapped Marta and told her he was going to make them both into living mummies so they could remain together for all eternity — only, wouldn’t you know it, Mehemet gets the hots for John Banning’s girlfriend Isobel Evans (Elyse Knox) and kidnaps her to give her the mummy treatment before John corners him in an old house (a standing set at Universal that when I first saw this movie in the late 1970’s I thought had been recycled as Norman Bates’s home in Psycho — though this time around it did not look the same to me, albeit it was recognizable as Louise Allbritton’s crumbling Louisiana manse in the far superior Son of Dracula from 1943) and both Mehemet and Kharis die — though, of course, Kharis is only resting until the next movie in the cycle and the next round of Universal screenwriters who had to figure out a way to rescue the monster from the calamity that had beset him in the previous movie.
Directed by Harold Young (not one of Universal’s stronger horror directors) from a script by Neil Varnuck (“original” story) and Griffin Jay and Henry Sucher (script), The Mummy’s Tomb isn’t much of a movie — it’s only a bit over an hour long and much of that running time is taken up by clips from The Mummy’s Hand, some of those themselves recycled from the 1932 classic The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff in one of the most heart-rending performances of his career (it helped that Karloff’s version of the revivified mummy got to speak while Tyler’s and Chaney’s were mute, courtesy of having had their tongues cut out before they were mummified) — but according to Don Miller’s book “B” Movies it was a huge hit for Universal, grossing more than The Mummy’s Hand and spawning two sequelae, as well as establishing that wartime audiences wanted escapist entertainment, the more preposterous the better. Oddly, The Mummy’s Tomb (something of a misnomer because the mummy’s tomb is back in Egypt and the whole film takes place in the U.S.) has been the most elusive film in the cycle for me — I had seen it only once before, in the late 1970’s on a lousy over-the-air TV connection in San Diego, and on our print the first minute or so of the DVD was unplayable and so I didn’t get to see the opening credits (I really miss opening credits), though we got to see enough of the film that at least it made sense … albeit the preposterous level of “sense” it was going to make at all!
Two nights ago Charles and I ran a double bill of the first two films in Universal’s 1940’s Mummy cycle, The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb. The Mummy’s Hand set the ground rules for this cycle: the unnaturally kept-alive mummy was Kharis, the former squeeze of the Princess Ananka, and he lived in the Temple of Karnak, a remote spot in the Egyptian desert where a cadre of priests headed by Andoheb (George Zucco) still practiced the ancient Egyptian religion. As Andoheb was told by his predecessor as high priest of this cult in The Mummy’s Hand (Eduardo Ciannelli) and he himself relayed to his own successor Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey) at the start of The Mummy’s Tomb, Kharis is being kept alive by a tea brewed from tana leaves: a tea from three leaves administered every month during the full moon will keep Kharis alive in suspended animation, while a tea from nine leaves will allow him to move. The Mummy’s Tomb takes place 30 years after The Mummy’s Hand and is set in the U.S. town of “Mapleton” (its location is unspecified but it’s pretty clearly either in New England or upstate New York), where archaeologist Stephen Banning (Wallace Ford in Jack P. Pierce’s “age” makeup) lives in quiet retirement after he made his fame discovering the tomb of Princess Ananka — which he wasn’t actually shown doing in The Mummy’s Hand.
Andoheb and Kharis (played in The Mummy’s Hand by Western star Tom Tyler but in The Mummy’s Tomb and the subsequent films in the cycle by Lon Chaney, Jr.) somehow survived getting shot and burned, respectively, at the end of The Mummy’s Hand, and an aging Andoheb sends Mehemet to Mapleton with Kharis, instructing him to set the mummy loose on the Americans who desecrated Ananka’s tomb. Andoheb also arranges for Mehemet to have a cover job as assistant to the caretaker of the local cemetery, from which he brews the nine-leaf tana tea and sends Kharis out to kill. Banning’s wife Marta from the first film is already dead (she’s represented by a framed print of Peggy Moran’s head shot) but before she croaked the two had a son, John Banning, who’s trained as a doctor and is about to enter the service as a medic. (This was 1942, after all, and with the U.S. finally involved in World War II the studios were shoe-horning references to the war and the military into all sorts of movies.) One warning Andoheb gave Mehemet before he sent him to the U.S. was never to fall in love — a mistake Andoheb had made himself in The Mummy’s Hand when he kidnapped Marta and told her he was going to make them both into living mummies so they could remain together for all eternity — only, wouldn’t you know it, Mehemet gets the hots for John Banning’s girlfriend Isobel Evans (Elyse Knox) and kidnaps her to give her the mummy treatment before John corners him in an old house (a standing set at Universal that when I first saw this movie in the late 1970’s I thought had been recycled as Norman Bates’s home in Psycho — though this time around it did not look the same to me, albeit it was recognizable as Louise Allbritton’s crumbling Louisiana manse in the far superior Son of Dracula from 1943) and both Mehemet and Kharis die — though, of course, Kharis is only resting until the next movie in the cycle and the next round of Universal screenwriters who had to figure out a way to rescue the monster from the calamity that had beset him in the previous movie.
Directed by Harold Young (not one of Universal’s stronger horror directors) from a script by Neil Varnuck (“original” story) and Griffin Jay and Henry Sucher (script), The Mummy’s Tomb isn’t much of a movie — it’s only a bit over an hour long and much of that running time is taken up by clips from The Mummy’s Hand, some of those themselves recycled from the 1932 classic The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff in one of the most heart-rending performances of his career (it helped that Karloff’s version of the revivified mummy got to speak while Tyler’s and Chaney’s were mute, courtesy of having had their tongues cut out before they were mummified) — but according to Don Miller’s book “B” Movies it was a huge hit for Universal, grossing more than The Mummy’s Hand and spawning two sequelae, as well as establishing that wartime audiences wanted escapist entertainment, the more preposterous the better. Oddly, The Mummy’s Tomb (something of a misnomer because the mummy’s tomb is back in Egypt and the whole film takes place in the U.S.) has been the most elusive film in the cycle for me — I had seen it only once before, in the late 1970’s on a lousy over-the-air TV connection in San Diego, and on our print the first minute or so of the DVD was unplayable and so I didn’t get to see the opening credits (I really miss opening credits), though we got to see enough of the film that at least it made sense … albeit the preposterous level of “sense” it was going to make at all!
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
The Mummy’s Hand (Universal, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I relaxed somewhat with Charles and we hit the video collection for what looked like it would be the final movie of the Conlan-Nelson Video Theatre for 1998: The Mummy’s Hand, one of the better “New Universal” horror films. It wasn’t near the 1932 Mummy with Boris Karloff, and Karl Freund’s stunningly moody direction, but it was a lot of fun, with campy performances by Wallace Ford and Cecil Kellaway for comic relief — indeed, the first half of the film is more comedy than anything else — and a fine (as usual) job by George Zucco as the principal villain, who in the opening sequence inherits the mantle of the priests of Karnak, charged with keeping the mummified Kharis (played by Tom Tyler in this one — a former cowboy star, he was billed eighth! — and Lon Chaney, Jr. in the three sequelae) alive with the sacred (and carefully preserved, since the plant had long since become extinct) tana leaves (brew the fluid from three leaves and the mummy remains alive in suspended animation, brew nine leaves and he gets up and moves, brew any more than that and he becomes an uncontrollable monster). Alas, the tape we were watching was a dub from an old Beta recording I made in the mid-1980’s, and the visual and especially sound quality left a lot to be desired (though even through the haze of an old tape one could note that Elwood Bredell’s photography, as good as it was, didn’t have the atmospherics of Charles Stumar’s work in the 1932 film, much of which was spliced into this one as stock footage to pad it out and make it look like it had bigger production values than it did). Still, it was a lot of fun, and the Mummy’s appearance (Karloff biographer Donald Glut has suggested Tyler was cast because he was about the same height and build as Karloff and therefore could more convincingly “double” for him in a new film built largely around the available Karloff footage from 1932) was properly frightening even though Jack Pierce did his face with a phony-looking mask (one could see a shadow between the eye socket and Tyler’s actual eyes, which gave it away) instead of the eight-hour collodion build-up job he’d put Karloff through eight years earlier — and the Mummy didn’t appear often enough to outstay his welcome, but was wisely deployed sparingly by scenarist Griffin Jay and director Christy Cabanne (this may be Cabanne’s finest film ever, not that that’s saying much for it). — 12/31/98
I relaxed somewhat with Charles and we hit the video collection for what looked like it would be the final movie of the Conlan-Nelson Video Theatre for 1998: The Mummy’s Hand, one of the better “New Universal” horror films. It wasn’t near the 1932 Mummy with Boris Karloff, and Karl Freund’s stunningly moody direction, but it was a lot of fun, with campy performances by Wallace Ford and Cecil Kellaway for comic relief — indeed, the first half of the film is more comedy than anything else — and a fine (as usual) job by George Zucco as the principal villain, who in the opening sequence inherits the mantle of the priests of Karnak, charged with keeping the mummified Kharis (played by Tom Tyler in this one — a former cowboy star, he was billed eighth! — and Lon Chaney, Jr. in the three sequelae) alive with the sacred (and carefully preserved, since the plant had long since become extinct) tana leaves (brew the fluid from three leaves and the mummy remains alive in suspended animation, brew nine leaves and he gets up and moves, brew any more than that and he becomes an uncontrollable monster). Alas, the tape we were watching was a dub from an old Beta recording I made in the mid-1980’s, and the visual and especially sound quality left a lot to be desired (though even through the haze of an old tape one could note that Elwood Bredell’s photography, as good as it was, didn’t have the atmospherics of Charles Stumar’s work in the 1932 film, much of which was spliced into this one as stock footage to pad it out and make it look like it had bigger production values than it did). Still, it was a lot of fun, and the Mummy’s appearance (Karloff biographer Donald Glut has suggested Tyler was cast because he was about the same height and build as Karloff and therefore could more convincingly “double” for him in a new film built largely around the available Karloff footage from 1932) was properly frightening even though Jack Pierce did his face with a phony-looking mask (one could see a shadow between the eye socket and Tyler’s actual eyes, which gave it away) instead of the eight-hour collodion build-up job he’d put Karloff through eight years earlier — and the Mummy didn’t appear often enough to outstay his welcome, but was wisely deployed sparingly by scenarist Griffin Jay and director Christy Cabanne (this may be Cabanne’s finest film ever, not that that’s saying much for it). — 12/31/98
•••••
At 9 last night Charles and I took a vacation from watching
the news and I ran him two of the films in Universal’s 1940’s Mummy cycle, The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb. Neither of these movies comes anywhere near the
quality of the first (and best) Mummy movie, the 1932 classic directed by Karl Freund from a script by John
L. Balderston and starring Boris Karloff as a revivified Egyptian mummy,
Imhotep (depicted in the film as a commoner who fell in love with a princess
and for his lese-majesté was
sentenced to be mummified and buried alive, only an inept anthropologist
revived him by reading him the Scroll of Thoth, though the real Imhotep was the
architect who designed the pyramids and was the only human other than the
Pharoahs the ancient Egyptians elevated to godhood), who spends most of the
movie disguised as an Arab trader, Ardath Bey, who attempts to revive the mummy
of his one-time love, Princess Anckesenamon (an equally marvelous piece of
acting by Zita Johann, who should have had much more of a film career than she
did). The Mummy’s Hand is often
listed as a remake of the 1932 version, but it’s really what would now be
called a “reboot” rather than a remake. This time the mummy is named Kharis and
is played by Western star Tom Tyler (who apparently was picked largely because
he was the same height as Karloff and would therefore match the stock clips
director Christy Cabanne spliced in from the 1932 version) and he was a prince
in love with the Princess Ananka, only she died and he stole the Scroll of
Thoth to revive her — only he got caught at it and, like Imhotep in the
original film, he was sentenced to be buried alive and the slaves assigned to
do this were themselves killed so they couldn’t reveal the original location of
his tomb. The good guys are anthropologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran), whose
remarkable list of previous accomplishments includes finding Inca ruins in
Mexico (a neat trick, since the Inca lived in what is now Peru) but who’s now
adrift and unemployed in Cairo with
his comic-relief partner Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford).
The two stumble
across a broken vase which supposedly contains a clue to the location of
Princess Ananka’s tomb, but they’re kept under surveillance by a supposed
beggar who’s actually an agent of Andoheb (George Zucco). We first see Andoheb
walking through the Egyptian desert wearing a fez and looking like he was on
his way to the set of Casablanca
but got lost along the way. It turns out he’s the apprentice to the High Priest
(Eduardo Ciannelli — I was trying to figure out if this is a promotion or a
comedown from Ciannelli’s best-known role, as the Lucky Luciano-like boss of
all New York’s rackets in Marked Woman) of the Temple of Karnak in the Egyptian desert. The High Priest is
about to croak, but before he does so he reveals to Andoheb the secret of the
living mummy Kharis, who’s been kept in suspended animation for 3,000 years by
the regular administration of tea brewed from the sacred tana leaves, which were produced by a tree that has since
become extinct (though the on-screen props looked like eucalyptus leaves to
me). The High Priest explains to Andoheb that a tea from three tana leaves will keep the mummy in suspended animation,
while one brewed from nine leaves will allow him to move. Give him more than
nine leaves and he will become an uncontrollable monster. After we get that
exposition out of the way, we get a series of scenes from writers Griffin Jay
and Maxwell Shane that are closer to screwball comedy than horror film; the
intrepid archaeologists get backing from a stage magician whose real name is
Tim Sullivan but who performs as “Solvani the Great” (Cecil Kellaway, who 13
years later played the idiot scientist who wanted to keep the monster alive for
research purposes in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) despite the conviction of his daughter and stage
assistant Marta (Peggy Moran) that they’re swindlers.
Banning and Jenson show
their broken vase to Professor Petrie (Charles Trowbridge) of the Cairo Museum,
who pronounces it authentic but wants to get a second opinion — only the
Egyptian professor at the Cairo Museum turns out to be Andoheb, and he not only
denounces the vase as a fake but breaks it still further and warns them that
all the members of the previous expeditions that sought Ananka’s tomb were
killed. Despite the warning, Banning, Jenson, both Solvanis, Petrie and their
native guide Ali (Leon Belasco) set out on the expedition — only the tomb they
find is not Ananka’s but Kharis’s, and Andoheb revives the mummy and sends it
out to kill everyone on the expedition. Kharis takes out Ali and Professor
Petrie but in the final confrontation (set on an elaborate stage set built for
James Whale’s 1940 film Green Hell
and reused often by Universal — including as a Tibetan temple in the serial The
Adventures of Smiling Jack) Jenson shoots
Andoheb (who takes a spectacular fall down a flight of stone stairs — most of
the fall is obviously doubled but the real Zucco tumbled down the last three
steps so director Cabanne could dolly in for a close-up) and Banning burns up
the mummy with a torch. The End. The Mummy’s Hand is actually a quite capable movie, lacking the
beautiful air of doomed romanticism of the 1932 version (in which Karloff’s
delivery of his dialogue is utterly heartbreaking and makes us feel sorry for
the poor guy) but fun in its own way even though so much of it is played for
laughs one could readily imagine Bud Abbott in Dick Foran’s role and Lou
Costello in Wallace Ford’s (and Abbott and Costello’s last film for Universal
was 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, which was surprisingly good, genuinely funny and genuinely scary). —10/30/19
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