The Producers (Crossbow Productions, Springtime Productions, U-M Productions, Avco Embassy Pictures, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 5 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies for a double bill of two of the movies Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder made together, The Producers and Blazing Saddles, and I turned on The Producers in the middle of the movie’s most confusing and least amusing scene, in which down-on-his-luck Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel in a role Mel Brooks should have played himself, but he had so much trouble getting this film green-lighted at all it would probably have never been made if he’d insisted on playing the lead) is wooing a woman dressed in blue who wants Max to enact the silliest and most hackneyed sexual fantasies with her Mel Brooks could dream up at his writing table. The woman he has to do this with is simply called “Hold Me Touch Me” in the cast list and is played by Estelle Winwood. Fortunately things get better – or at least more watchable – when Gene Wilder enters the picture as Leo Bloom, an accountant who’s there to audit the books of Max’s latest production. Leo realizes that Max collected $60,000 from his backers but only spent $58,000 to produce the show – but Max thunders, “But it was a flop! Nobody cared!” Then Leo hits on the idea that if they stage a deliberately bad play, sell 25,000 percent of it to various backers, put it on Broadway and bomb, they can abscond to Rio de Janeiro (which they celebrate with a duo dance to the song “Flying Down to Rio” that looks like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers … in a really bad nightmare) with 24,000 percent of their backers’ money. Only, of course, the show actually becomes a smash hit and the intrepid plotters find themselves staring at big-time prison sentences for fraud.

The plot premise of The Producers was actually an urban legend on Broadway for decades before Mel Brooks filmed it; in 1935 Groucho Marx had solicited young writer George Oppenheimer to write a script for the Marx Brothers based on that very premise. That didn’t get made – Irving Thalberg, then head of production at MGM, went with the George S. Kaufman/Morrie Ryskind script for A Night at the Opera instead – but in 1944 RKO’s “B” movie department got hold of it and made it the basis of a (relatively) serious detective film, The Falcon in Hollywood (see my review at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-falcon-in-hollywood-rko-1944.html). Much of the fun of The Producers comes from the weird encounters Max and Leo go through as they search for the worst possible play, director and star. The worst possible play is called Springtime for Hitler by unrepentant Nazi Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars) – the last name means “love child,” by the way – and it’s an attempt to portray Hitler and Eva Braun as a joyous, fun-loving couple whose leadership is making Germany great again and winning World War II. The irony of two Jewish producers attempting to buy a play from a neo-Nazi without either offending him or making them angry is delicious, and fortunately Brooks at least this early in his career was a circumspect enough director not to push this plot point for more than it’s worth.

The worst director is Roger De Bris (Christopher Hewitt), who when Max and Leo show up at his lavish apartment is in full drag – he’s doing it to win a contest at a charity ball, he explains – and his assistant is Carmen Ghia (Andreas Voutzinas), more butch but just as obviously (and stereotypically) Gay. (I remember quite a few critics were surprised when Brooks introduced a sympathetic Gay character, a hairdresser played by Tim Matheson, who was fleeing Nazi persecution in his remake of To Be or Not to Be, since all his previous depictions of Queer folk had been basically as fag jokes – sometimes quite funny fag jokes, but fag jokes nonetheless.) The worst actor is Lorenzo St. Dubois (Dick Shawn), universally known by his initials “L.S.D.,” who wins the part of Adolf Hitler in an open audition by singing a song called “Love Flower” that’s a screamingly funny parody of psychedelic rock. (Dick Shawn did a rock parody with Jim Backus, of all people, in the 1956 film The Opposite Sex – a remake of The Women – and it was so ghastly I remember joking to Charles, “Frankly, I liked him better as Hitler.” The best part of The Producers is the opening number of the show-within-the-film, “Springtime for Hitler,” a marvelous send-up of big musical production numbers (it reaches its high point when Brooks inserts a Busby Berkeley-like overhead shot of the dancers forming a swastika on stage) whose bouncy melody and insipid lyrics (“We’re marching to a faster pace/Watch out, here comes the master race”) give new meaning to Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about real Nazi Adolf Eichmann, “the banality of evil.”

For some reason Mel Brooks never bothers to explain, a new musical with the title Springtime for Hitler (also Brooks’ original working title for the film) actually attracts a sold-out audience, though as soon as the “Springtime for Hitler” number finishes the audience starts walking out in disgust and we hear a woman’s voice on the soundtrack declare, “Talk about bad taste!” (That would be far from the first or last time we would hear that complaint about something by Mel Brooks.) Then some of the audience members stop walking out and start returning to their seats as L.S.D. hilariously fractures playwright Liebkind’s lines; as Eva Braun (Renée Taylor) picks at a flower and goes, “Er liebt mir, er liebt mir nicht,” Dick Shawn’s Hitler goes, “I lieb ya, I lieb ya, dir. Now lieb me alone!” “It’s funny!” one theatregoer calls out, and the first act of the play proceeds to lavish merriment while Max and Leo get drunk in a nearby bar and toast to the first and only performance of Springtime for Hitler. When it becomes clear that they have a hit-by-mistake on their hands (“one of those hits by mistake that eternally plague show business,” said Joe Adamson in his biography of the Marx Brothers), Max and Leo try to blow up the theatre to force the play to close – only they blow it by using the quick fuse on their bomb. The last scene shows them in prison, once again promoting a new show called Prisoners in Love and selling their fellow cons 25,000 percent of it.

According to Mel Brooks’ own account in the PBS bio-documentary Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, he had a hard time getting The Producers before the public. He originally conceived of it as a novel, but one publisher rejected it saying, “It’s all dialogue and no descriptions. Why not try to do it as a play?” Brooks rewrote it as a play, only Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden told him, “It won’t work as a play; it has too many locations. Why not try to do it as a movie?” Brooks, who’d worked on TV (in the writers’ room of Sid Caesar’s 1950’s series Your Show of Shows with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart, and later co-creator with Buck Henry of Get Smart!, still the funniest spoof of the whole James Bond mythos) and made best-selling comedy albums with Reiner – notably their series in which Brooks played a 2,000-year-old man and Reiner was the journalist interviewing him about his life, but had never made a movie before, got it green-lighted by Joseph E. Levine, of whom Dwight Macdonald once said, “He’s proof that they didn’t break the mold after they made Louis B. Mayer.” Levine had made his money with a distribution company called Avco Embassy; in the late 1950’s he bought the U.S. rights to a cheaply made Italian swords-and-sandals movie called Hercules starring American-born muscleman Steve Reeves, spent more money promoting it than the Italian producers had spent making it in the first place, and had a huge hit. He financed Brooks’ comedy but then got cold feet about releasing it, apparently fearful that the political leaders of America’s Jewish community would come down on him for a movie that was not only called Springtime for Hitler but asked people to laugh at him. (So had Charlie Chaplin in his 1940 film The Great Dictator, made while Hitler was still alive and the Nazis were at the peak of their power.)

Brooks sneaked a print to Peter Sellers, who screened it in his home theatre and loved it so much he took out an ad in one of the Hollywood trade papers saying he’d just seen the funniest movie he’d ever watched, Mel Brooks’ Springtime for Hitler, and it was a total shame that the people reading his trade-paper ad would never get to see it because of Joseph E. Levine’s obstinacy in refusing to release it. (In 1940 John O’Hara had similarly helped shame RKO studios into releasing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane by writing an article announcing he regretted having just seen the greatest movie ever made, with the greatest lead performance he’d ever seen, and adding, “Reason for regret: You, my dears, may never get to see this picture.”) Levine got the message loud and clear and agreed to release the film as long as Brooks would take the “H”-word out of the title, so they agreed to call it The Producers. It went out to an underwhelming reception at the box office, but as soon as it made it onto network television (which is how I first saw it), it became hailed as a comedy classic. Some parts of The Producers age pretty badly – Mostel seems to overact so relentlessly one wonders what solvent they used to get him off the camera lens after he’d glued himself to it. Brooks also overdid the immaturity gags surrounding Gene Wilder’s character – including giving him a Linus-style security blanket he’s had since he was a baby – and he did one of his sexist gags of having Max and Leo hire as a “receptionist” a blonde Swedish woman who can’t type and doesn’t know English but looks great in a bikini and is willing to go to motels and do “bouncy-bouncy” with the boss. But as with many of Mel Brooks’ films, you forgive him his bad taste because most of it is screamingly funny, and The Producers has held up surprisingly well both as a movie and as what Brooks originally intended it to be, a Broadway play (a musical with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in the leads) that eventually got filmed itself. The Producers is an acknowledged comedy classic and it helped launch Mel Brooks’ career and reputation as a filmmaker.

Blazing Saddles (Crossbow Productions, Warner Bros., 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next Mel Brooks movie TCM showed Saturday night came about through an even weirder set of circumstances than The Producers. After The Producers did O.K. at the theatrical box office and then attracted major attention on TV, Joseph E. Levine green-lighted Brooks’ next film, a satirical farce about Russia during the early days of the Revolution called The Twelve Chairs. It dealt with an aristocratic family whose members decide to hide their jewelry collection into one of 12 fancy chairs so the Bolsheviks don’t seize it – only the chairs are dispersed all over Russia and the dispossessed aristocrat who was the son-in-law of their original owner chases throughout the country for them. I remember Levine’s ads for this movie, which featured various strangely dressed actors running around on a beach containing the titular 12 chairs, only they weren’t persuasive enough to get people to see the movie and it was a terrific flop. At least part of the reason it flopped was that Mel Brooks had written the part of the son-in-law for Gene Wilder, but Wilder had a divo hissy-fit and insisted he’d only be in the movie if he could play the drop-dead gorgeous leading man ultimately cast with Frank Langella – so Ron Moody ended up in the lead and, while he was perfectly acceptable, he was no Gene Wilder and the movie suffered from it, especially since it was quite obvious that Brooks was directing Moody to act as much like Wilder as possible and Moody wasn’t rangy enough to pull it off. After The Twelve Chairs Brooks ended up in what’s been called “movie hell,” in which you’re still technically a filmmaker but no producer will actually back you in a film.

He got out of movie hell when Warner Bros. offered him the chance to make a film called Tex X, a Western spoof in which a Black man is offered the job of sheriff in a Western town and saves it from greedy land barons despite the townspeople’s racist qualms about his color. At first Brooks turned down on the ground that he didn’t want to direct a movie he hadn’t written himself. But when Warners offered $100,000 for his services, Brooks decided that for once he could set aside his qualms about directing someone else’s script – though he grabbed hold of the project and thoroughly remodeled it. The original writer was Andrew Bergman, but the final writing credits went to Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Bergman, Richard Pryor and Alan Uger. Pryor was involved not only because Brooks wanted a Black person involved in the project to write the Black characters’ dialogue but also because he was hoping Pryor would play the lead. But Warners’ staff, leary about casting Pryor because of his already legendary drug use, vetoed him and so drop-dead gorgeous Cleavon Little got the lead instead.

I’ve loved Blazing Saddles ever since my mother, my brother and I saw it in a theatre on its original release in 1974, and I’ve often hailed it with the words I had about it then: “It has the courage of its own bad taste.” Brooks assembled a superb cast top to bottom, including Little as the sheriff; Slim Pickens as the racist boss of a railroad crew who discovers quicksand along the proposed rail route and therefore has to re-route it through the town of Rock Ridge (which sets off the action); Mel Brooks as grafting and sex-obsessed governor William J. LePetomane (who, like Zero Mostel’s character in The Producers, has a big-bosomed secretary whose talents appear to be exclusively physical); Harvey Korman as attorney general Hedley Lamarr (throughout the movie there’s a running gag about the similarity of his name to that of 1940’s movie star Hedy Lamarr, including one in which after he’s corrected someone who’s called him “Hedy Lamarr” and he’s said, “That’s Hedley,” the person he was talking to says, “Don’t worry! This is 1870! You can sue her!” Hedy Lamarr actually sued, though I have no knowledge whether she actually got any money), the principal villain; Madeline Kahn in the delightful role of “Lili von Schtupp,” a parody of Marlene Dietrich who’s sent by Hedley Lamarr to seduce Bart but ends up his sex slave instead (she wonders aloud whether Black men are really better hung than white ones and when she experiences him, she cries out in ecstasy, “It’s twue! It’s twue! It’s twue!”); Alex Karras as Mongo, yet another one of Lamarr’s thugs who changes sides when Bart bests him in a contest of wits by sending him an explosive candygram; Dom DeLuise as Gay dance director “Buddy Bizarre”; and a whole bunch of townspeople named “Johnson” because one of the script’s conceits is that everyone in Rock Ridge has the last name “Johnson.”

Thus we have John Hillerman as “Howard Johnson,” owner of the town’s orange-roofed ice cream parlor (apparently we’re supposed to believe this was the start of the Howard Johnson’s chain). George Furth as “Van Johnson” (after another 1940’s movie star), Jack Starrett as “Gabby Johnson” (after the real-life 1940’s Western star George “Gabby” Hayes, whose dialogue is so unintelligible one of the other characters praises it as “authentic Western gibberish”); and the one that particularly amused me, David Huddleston as “Olsen Johnson.” This rather back-handed tribute to the great 1930’s and 1940’s comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson gives this movie two links to Olsen and Johnson’s 1943 film Crazy House, since Count Basie and his band appear in both films. In Blazing Saddles Basie and his band are in the middle of the Western desert, playing to absolutely no one, until Bart rides by fully decked out in his buckskin outfit (complete with saddle bags labeled “Gucci”) – the first time we’ve seen him in this movie not covered in mud – and he high-fives Basie as Basie and the band play his famous start-and-stop arrangement of “April in Paris.”

Next to Bart, the main character is Jim, also known as the Waco Kid, a former gunfighter who tumbled down from his reputational pedestal as the fastest gun in the West because every person he met tried to hijack his reputation by knocking him off (a plot point borrowed from Henry King’s great 1950 film The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck as Johnny Ringo – whose name inspired Beatles’ drummer Richard Starkey to call himself Ringo Starr) – until a six-year-old kid challenged him to draw and ended up shooting him in the ass. It’s a measure of Mel Brooks’ confidence in his own skills as a laugh-maker that he could take a character that was already a parody in another movie (Lee Marvin’s role as good-guy gunslinger Kid Shelleen in the 1965 Western spoof Cat Ballou) and make him even funnier – just as, in his next collaboration with Gene Wilder, Young Frankenstein, he would take the British Gay-camp humor of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein and fuse it with his own Borscht-belt humor to create another comedy masterpiece. The part of the Waco Kid ended up being played by Gene Wilder even though he and Brooks were probably still on the outs with each other after the debacle of The Twelve Chairs, and before that Brooks had wanted to hire an authentic Western star for the part. He even offered it to John Wayne, who not surprisingly turned it down. The first actor Brooks signed for the part was Gig Young, who was already so far down the primrose path due to the alcohol abuse that destroyed his career that when he came to shoot the character’s first scene – the Waco Kid, hanging upside down from a bed rail in his cell, sees Bart and when Bart asks him, “How are we?,” he answers, “I don’t know. Are we … Black?” – nothing intelligible came out of Young’s mouth.

So Brooks fired him and let bygones be bygones about Wilder, inviting him to take the part over – which he did – even though we can see the seeds of disagreement between the two that would flare up in open conflict as they made Young Frankenstein. According to Newsweek magazine, Brooks and Wilder constantly argued during Young Frankenstein, always over the same thing: Wilder wanted the humor more subtle and Brooks wanted it more broad. Among the other touches Brooks brought to Blazing Saddles was to hire Frankie Laine to sing the film’s theme song over the opening credits without bothering to tell the singer that the movie was a spoof. So Laine brought to the song the same intensity he’d done with the themes from such 1950’s Westerns as High Noon (even though it was country star Tex Ritter, not Laine, who sang in the actual film) and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as well as the TV series Rawhide, which loosed Clint Eastwood on the entertainment world. Blazing Saddles remains a very funny film, though it probably couldn’t get remade today because of the relentless use of the “N”-word – today’s P.C. Thought Police would damn this film on that ground alone and miss the point that all the uses of the “N”-word are satirical and it’s the racists that are the butts of the jokes. I hadn’t expected to write this much about my recent go-round with Blazing Saddles since I’d already done a previous moviemagg blog post about it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/09/blazing-saddles-crossbow-productions.html, but it remains an all-time favorite film of mine despite lapses like the bean-eating cowboys’ fart scene, which on its own is actually funny but has launched a thousand bad imitations by writers and directors who seem to think the mere mention or sound of flatulence is funny.

The Killer That Stalked New York (Columbia, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Producers and Blazing Saddles came time for TCM’s weekly “Noir Alley” showing – and an unusual film “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller readily admitted he’d scheduled because the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has given it new relevance. It was The Killer That Stalked New York, made by Columbia Pictures in 1950 and a combination noir-style thriller and medical story with an emphasis on public health. It was made right after 20th Century-Fox had released Panic in the Streets, starring Richard Widmark as a public-health doctor searching the underworld of New Orleans to find a carrier of plague. In this movie (which Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn held back for six months until Panic in the Streets finished its theatrical run) the “Patient Zero” is Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes, who’s superb), a nightclub singer who married her accompanist, Matt Krane (Charles Korwin), only Matt turned out to be a no-good rotter who took her to Cuba so she could receive diamonds he planned to use her to smuggle into the U.S. While there she also contracted smallpox, and when she finally got so sick she was hospitalized she spread it around to quite a few other people, from a young boy who drank at the same water fountain she had to a young girl she met in the hospital and, thinking it was a kind gesture, gave her the pin she was wearing which she’d bought in Cuba and, of course, contained smallpox virus. In the real 1947 New York smallpox epidemic the original carrier was a rug merchant named Eugene Le Bar, who stopped in New York City after vacationing in Mexico with his wife before returning to their home in Maine, but a sleazy nightclub singer and her unscrupulous criminal accompanist/husband (who is also cruising Sheila’s sister Francie, played superbly by Lola Albright, and has been having an affair with her while Sheila has been out of the country) is obviously better “movie” than a decent carpet salesman.

Sheila is being tracked both by U.S. Treasury agents hoping to arrest her and her accomplices (whoever they may be) for the diamond smuggling, and by the New York Public Health Department, represented mainly by William Bishop as Dr. Ben Wood and the young (or at least youngish) Dorothy Malone as his nurse, who gradually realize they have the potential for a mass epidemic on their hands and need not only to warn the entire population of New York City about the dangers but also to get them vaccinated. The Killer That Stalked New York began when Columbia bought the movie rights to a Cosmopolitan magazine article on the real epidemic by Milton Lehman, though it was Harry Essex who got tabbed to write the actual script.The director was Earl MacAvoy, who’d worked as an assistant director on several films but only made three as full-fledged director: Cargo to Capetown (1950), a good but not great adventure film; this one and something called The Barefoot Mailman, and he died in 1959 at just age 45 after not having worked in films for eight years. It seems a pity his career was so short because he’s incredible, keeping the plot moving effectively and getting dramatic performances from his actors – even the child ones and the ones in very small parts. As the movie tells its story the two plot lines eventually merge and the cops finally trace Sheila Bennet after Matt kills Anthony Moss (Art Smith), the jeweler who was supposed to fence the stones for him (but refused because they were too “hot”), and the cops finally corner Sheila on the ledge of a building. The police don’t really care whether they get Sheila dead or alive, but the public health doctors want to keep her alive so they can do contact tracing.

The most fascinating part of the movie from a modern-day COVID-era point of view is the mass vaccination campaign ordered by the New York City government, headed by a mayor (Roy Roberts) who in order to set a good example for his people gets the first vaccine dose himself and invites all the media to photograph him doing so – how like Joe Biden and unlike Donald Trump! The city government is determined to vaccinate all eight million New Yorkers and to offer the vaccine free, and whenever they run into the problems that have become all too familiar to us today – lack of trained medical personnel, lack of locations to give the shots in, and midway through the campaign the exhaustion of the available vaccine supply – they run right through them and see what they can do to overcome them. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is the one in which the mayor summons the CEO’s of the leading pharmaceutical companies and essentially demands that they drop everything else during the present emergency and just produce smallpox vaccine – and his shame campaign works. There’s also a brief acknowledgment of an anti-vaccine campaign similar to the ones we’ve seen around COVID – though unlike today’s anti-vaxxers, the ones in the movie stop at legal demonstrations and don’t actually try to disrupt the vaccinations. Though the New York vaccine campaign – both as depicted in this film and the real one that occurred in 1947 – had several advantages over the one today (they were only trying to vaccinate a city, not an entire country; and the smallpox vaccine was an established product that companies knew how to produce, and it required only one vaccine dose instead of the two needed for COVID), the biggest difference between then and now was an aggressive government response that grabbed the emergency by the proverbial tail and did not allow the disease to become a political football.

If today’s health crisis is virtually an object lesson in how not to respond to a public-health emergency – especially in the contemptible response of ex-President Trump and his consistent belittling of the threat and anyone who wanted to take it seriously – the depiction of one in The Killer That Stalked New York is an example of how to deal with one. It’s amazing that to this day the Republicans in the current Congress are balking at a COVID aid package that includes help for state and local governments – why? At a time when we’re depending on state and local governments to distribute what vaccines we have and coordinate with their medical systems to get the shots in people’s arms, is this really the time to whine about alleged local government corruption and play “starve the beast”? Indeed, one of the reasons the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been worse in the U.S. than anywhere else – we have 4 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the cases – was the decades of anti-government propaganda issued by the American Right in general and the Republican Party in particular that has undermined people’s faith in government’s ability to respond to anything, even the kind of sweeping emergency that only governments have the reach and scope to respond to effectively. I don’t usually get on my political soapbox in my moviemagg blog – that’s what the zengersmag blog is for – but it’s irresistible after seeing a movie like The Killer That Stalked New York in which the public response to an epidemic gets it right to be angry and shocked at how badly we muffed COVID-19 for almost a year and how the Biden administration has its work cut out for it not only in mobilizing the response that should have been made but cleaning up the garbage left behind by the Trumpites and their nihilism.

One thing that startled me about The Killer That Stalked New York in comparison to the present-day situation is that no one in the movie, including the doctors and nurses, is wearing a mask – that public-health precaution apparently eluded the folks in this movie even though there are accounts of the medieval plagues in which the main public-health measures that were urged on people were keeping apart from each other (people then even carried sticks with which to push away anyone else who got too close) and wearing masks. Charles and I first watched The Killer That Stalked New York nine years ago and we liked it (my comments then are at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/01/killer-that-stalked-new-york-columbia.html) but didn’t see it as anything special; now it comes forth with chilling relevance as a warning as well as an example.

The Kiss Before the Mirror (Universal, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I continued our progress through the complete films of James Whale (though I haven’t yet received my grey-label orders of his last two features, Green Hell and They Dare Not Love) with his tw o productions from 1933, The Kiss Before the Mirror and The Invisible Man. I’ve written about both these films on the moviemagg blog before – my previous post on The Kiss Before the Mirror is at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/04/kiss-before-mirror-universal-1933.html) – and I’m grateful that Universal Home Video has made this one available on an official DVD, perhaps because the cast features at least two people recent moviegoers are likely to have heard of: Frank Morgan from The Wizard of Oz and Gloria Stuart from James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic. The Kiss Before the Mirror is a quite good movie but also an oddly schizoid onityy, and it’s occurred to me as we make our way through James Whale’s film in chronological order, it’s pointed up his one weakness as a director: his love of the British theatrical tradition, from which he emerged as a director first on stage and then on film (in the movie version of his star-making play, R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End), was so complete that when he hired an actor from it, he would let them overact big-time.

The Kiss Before the Mirror is a movie that could easily be remade today with only minor changes: celebrated Viennese criminal attorney Paul Held (Frank Morgan – a quite good serious role for the man best known today as the title character in The Wizard of Oz) is asked to defend his friend Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) for the murder of Bernsdorf’s wife Lucy (Gloria Stuart). We know he did it because we saw him in the film’s opening scene stalking his wife as she went to the home of her lover (Walter Pidgeon), was admitted and the two started to romance each other. In a later flashback scene Walter tells Held that the reason he suspected his wife was having an affair, and decided to follow her while holding a gun, was that earlier in the day he had seen her primping in front of a mirror in their home. He had leaned over to kiss her and she had recoiled, claiming he had spoiled her makeup and leading him to realize that the reason she was so elaborately prettying herself up was to meet an illicit lover. As Held prepares his case, mostly working at home (that sounds pretty contemporary!), he notices his own wife doing the same thing, getting herself ready for what appears to be a hot date with another man. He leans over to kiss her and gets the same reaction Walter did – she accuses him of ruining her makeup and drives him away – and he likewise stalks her and spots the other man in her life but decides to wait. His plan is to get Walter an acquittal on what would now be called a diminished-capacity defense, saying basically that he was driven so mad by jealousy that he shouldn’t be held legally responsible; and then, once he sets that as a court precedent, Paul will murder his own wife and make a similar claim.

The Kiss Before the Mirror began life as a play by Hungarian author Ladislas Fodor which premiered in Vienna in September 1932 – just eight months before the release of Whale’s film. The adaptation and screenplay for Whale’s film was done by William Anthony McGuire, who was best known as a writer of stage musicals – so, like the film’s star, its writer was someone being cast against “type” – and McGuire retained the theatricality of the original material. So did Whale; there are quite long scenes in which Morgan and Lukas stand in the center of the screen and declaim endlessly the way they would have in a play, and Morgan’s jailhouse interview with Lukas (which takes place, ironically, in a recycled set from Frankenstein; it was the cell in which Colin Clive and Edward Van Sloan locked up the Monster right after its creation) is actually one of the better parts of the film precisely because of the fruitiness of the performances, the degree to which the actors are savoring every word and every exchange. At the same time The Kiss Before the Mirror is quite a cinematically innovative film in many of its particulars. At a time in which cameramen were trying to talk directors out of using moving-camera shots – James Curtis’s biography of James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, describes a bizarre meeting of the American Society of Cinematographers in which directors defended the use of the moving camera and cinematographers made the arguments against it (mostly that it added too much time to film schedules and made it harder for cameramen to keep the image in focus) – Whale moved the camera more often and more elaborately in The Kiss Before the Mirror than in any of his previous films, including the marvelous Frankenstein-esque shots of Gloria Stuart heading through the woods towards the home of her lover and Paul Lukas following behind in a world of similarly fake trees and painted backdrops. At one point, to emphasize the appeal Paul Held is making in his closing argument and saying that the emotions that led Walter to kill his wife are ones we all share, Whale and cinematographer Karl Freund do a 360-degree pan shot around the entire courtroom – which was considered a huge innovation for Stanley Kramer when he did it in Judgment at Nuremberg in 1960.

There are other aspects of The Kiss Before the Mirror that anticipate Alfred Hitchcock: not only the killing off of a major star of the time early in the movie the way Whale did with Gloria Stuart did here and HItchcock did with Janet Leigh in Psycho in 1960 (and at least Hitchcock let Leigh live until the mid-point whereas in The Kiss Before the Mirror Stuart gets knocked off in the first reel) but the richly detailed cameo parts he creates, notably in the courtroom scene in which a huge woman insists on standing up – much to the disgust of the much smaller man sitting behind her – and one man is initially barred from entering the courtroom because the guards are checking for passes, until he explains that he’s the defendant … in an entirely different case. The Kiss Before the Mirror is a haunting movie and the issues it raises – the clash between marriage and career, the extent to which sexual exclusivity should or shouldn’t be the sine qua non of a marriage, and the whole role of the legal process in policing sexual morality and whether the well-to-do like Walter and Paul get breaks in the treatment of their spouses people with money don’t get (Whale was not a politically conscious director but the relative affluence of their characters is emphasized in Charles Hall’s set designs: the rooms in this movie are so overwhelmingly huge one could readily imagine Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and a chorus line dancing through them) – are au courant today.

The Kiss Before the Mirror is on the whole surprisingly well-acted – Nancy Carroll as Paul Held’s wife Maria is nicely understated and a welcome counterpoint to the highly theatrical playing of Frank Morgan as her husband and Paul Lukas as the defendant (Carroll was an actress who became prominent in the late silent era and managed to keep her career going after the transition to sound, at least partially because she was an excellent dancer and she got into quite a few musicals, including one of my quirky favorites, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round) – and it’s also an unusual movie in that it’s enough off the beaten path you’re not quite sure just how it’s going to end. We don’t know in advance whether Held’s strategy for defending his client will work and we certainly don’t know whether he will kill his wife, divorce her or forgive and reconnect with her. All too many movies are so clichéd and predictable in their writing, we think midway through, “Oh, we know where this is going.” In this one we really don’t know which of the many possibilities the writers will select. The Kiss Before the Mirror may be one of those movies I love more than it really deserves – it’s sufficiently theatrical (especially in Morgan’s and Lukas’s overripe delivery of dialogue) that even if you didn’t know in advance it was based on a stage play, you would probably guess it – and yet the overall atmosphere of the piece, the careful buildup of the minor characters and the surprising starkness with which the central conflicts are portrayed make this a particularly good film of its time and a story modern audiences could relate to if it were carefully and respectfully updated. James Whale did a surprisingly compelling remake in 1938 called Wives Under Suspicion in which he and his new writer, Myles Connolly, made an intriguing change in the story: instead of a defense attorney who worries that his wife is cuckolding him the same way as his client’s did, the central character is a prosecutor who’s obliged to prosecute a wife-murderer and then finds himself tempted to kill his own wife for the same reasons. It’s also worth noting that the original title of the play on which The Kiss Before the Mirror was based was Suspicion, and that was the title James Whale wanted to use for the remake – but Universal’s marketing department insisted on adding “Wives Under … ” to the title, so Suspicion was saved for Alfred Hitchcock to use for his 1941 movie in which Joan Fontaine plays a recently married woman who grows to suspect (correctly in Hitchcock’s cut, incorrectly in the film as it stands with a cop-out ending the producing studio, RKO, forced him to shoot) that her new husband means to kill her for her family’s money.

The Invisible Man (Universal, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008, 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Kiss Before the Mirror, Charles and I watched the next James Whale film in sequence and an acknowledged classic, The Invisible Man, based on H. G. Wells’ novel and an extraordinary film that despite some surprising slip-ups from a British director (the pub in Iping where the film begins has an American-style dartboard and barrels reading “Whiskey” and “Rye” – one imdb.com “Goofs” contributor said that in Britain the former drink is called “Whisky,” without the “e,” and “Rye” is not sold under that name), manages to do full justice to the original story and include some quirky bits of wit from Whale and his writer, Journey’s End author R. C. Sherriff, notably the famous scene in which Jack Griffin (Claude Rains), the invisible man, details the difficulties of being invisible: it’s hard to walk down stairs because “we are so used to watching our feet,” he can be seen in fog or smoke “like a bubble,” he can only be invisible while naked (which causes the obvious difficulties on cold nights) and he can’t go out as an invisible man for an hour or so after eating because “the food is visible in me until it is digested.”

I hadn’t realized until this time around how closely Universal and Whale followed the template of Frankenstein in making The Invisible Man, down to the four protagonists: Claude Rains takes Colin Clive’s role as the mad scientist, Gloria Stuart is in Mae Clarke’s place as the woman who loves him but is fearful of the outcome of the research that has caused him to abandon her (and both films have similar scenes in which the protagonists’ hard, bitter voices audibly grow softer when their girlfriends are mentioned, William Harrigan in John Boles’ place as the mad scientist’s best friend and would-be lover of his fiancée, and Henry Travers as the scientist’s older mentor who’s worried about him and the horror he may have unknowingly unleashed through his experiments. Obviously the main difference between Frankenstein and The Invisible Man is that in The Invisible Man the mad scientist and the monster are the same person – which in turn reflects the huge success of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886 – 11 years before Wells published The Invisible Man. I’ve long argued that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is in essence the first “just say no to drugs” novel, since it was written when morphine, heroin and cocaine were all still legal and their adverse effects were just starting to come to light. There’s a remarkable passage in the book in which Jekyll, reflecting on his history in a combination confession, autobiography and suicide note, says that had he been in a better frame of mind when he first took his transmogrifying drug it might have turned him into someone purely good instead of someone purely evil – an eerie anticipation of some of the pro-drug literature of the 1960’s, in which would-be LSD users were told to make sure they were in a positive frame of mind when they took the drug so the visions it would induce would be pleasant instead of nightmarish. It’s also reflected in some of the dialogue in The Invisible Man, in which the invisible man declaims that at first he was pursuing the experiment only out of scientific curiosity, but eventually the drugs he took changed his consciousness and led him to a megalomaniac pursuit of power.

I’ve been a fan of the movie The Invisible Man ever since one night in my childhood when I was ready to watch a telecast of one of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies (also from Universal) and she insisted I watch The Invisible Man on another channel. One unusual aspect of The Invisible Man is it stays surprisingly close to the original novel – unlike the film of Frankenstein, which used hardly any of Mary Shelley’s book except the basic premise, the setting and some of the character names. R. C. Sherriff told a story that when he showed up at Universal to write The Invisible Man, he asked for a copy of the H. G. Wells novel he was supposed to be adapting. Universal didn’t have one; all they had were a series of “treatments,” including one set in Czarist Russia and one on Mars. He scoured Hollywood’s second-hand bookshops for a copy of Wells’ novel, found one and realized it would make a great film story on its own without much in the way of adaptation (though one change he made was that in Wells’ novel Jack Griffin was an albino, so he was already short of skin pigment even before he began his researches). James Curtis’s Whale biography contained that story but said the writer was not Sherriff but another writer, John Weld. Curtis also said that H. G. Wells was not only still alive (and working) in 1933 but had a clause in his contract with Universal that gave him approval over the script, so the studio couldn’t deviate much from his story without him using his contractual ability to pull the rights and cancel the film.

Once again Whale shows off his love for the British theatrical tradition in his direction of Claude Rains, who’s swathed in bandages for most of the film except when he actually strips and works as the Invisible Man but still gets chances to overact not only via his delivery of the dialogue but his gestures and body language. According to Curtis, Whale actually wanted Rains in the film from the get-go – Rains had made only one previous film, a British silent called Build Thy House in 1920, and apparently Whale liked the idea of using an obscure actor who hadn’t done much film work so audiences wouldn’t recognize but Universal’s leading horror actor was Boris Karloff and the project was first offered to him. He turned it down, apparently simply because he wanted a rest – he’d wanted to visit his family in Britain, though the trip turned into a working vacation when the Gaumont-British company offered him a custom-made script called The Ghoul – though later Karloff would put out the word that he’d turned down The Invisible Man because he wouldn’t actually be seen on screen until the very end of the film. (It’s an interesting counterpoint to Bela Lugosi’s rejection of the part of Frankenstein’s monster because the character had no dialogue; when Lugosi finally played the monster in the film Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man he was given dialogue, but when preview audiences laughed at the monster speaking his dialogue was cut out and erased from the soundtrack.)

The Invisible Man remains one of the very best films in the horror genre – and in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power and joined Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin in the trio of dictators threatening to take over the world through brute force and sheer strength, Jack Griffin’s dialogue and particularly his insistence that “an invisible man could rule the world” probably rang true to a lot of moviegoers. The Invisible Man is also the sort of movie in which, though there are elaborate special effects (in my previous blog post on this film, (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2008/10/invisible-man-universal-1933.html) I described the technique with which Claude Rains was made to look invisible and handle objects without being seen: “John P. Fulton’s special effects are among the most remarkable ever filmed — they were done by wrapping Rains’ body in black cloth and filming him against a black screen; if Rains were to appear partially dressed in the film sequence, or to take his clothes off, his clothes would be put on over the black wrappings; and if he were to manipulate an object with the final effect being one of him, say, lighting and smoking a cigarette with himself invisible and only the cigarette, the pack it came from, and the match visible on screen, he handled these objects against the black screen. What emerged when this film was processed as negative was a clear strip of film in which only his clothes and the objects he was handling registered; and this strip, a reversal print in which the clothes and objects were darkened into black silhouettes, and the camera negative containing the rest of the scene’s action (including any other actors shown in the final scene) were optically printed together.” And yet, unlike all too many special-effects films today, The Invisible Man is so finely written and well directed one doesn’t notice how cool the effects are; you’re engrossed in the story and it’s only after the movie is over than you start thinking, “How did they do that?”

Crazy House (Universal, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night when my husband Charles came home from work early, I looked for a movie I could run us in the time between his arrival and Stephen Colbert’s show. I found a movie for Charles and I to screen from the batch I had just received from a grey-label video source: Crazy House, Universal’s 1943 follow-up to Ole Olsen’s and Chic Johnson’s Hellzapoppin’. Olsen and Johnson were two veteran vaudeville comics who, after years of touring on the vaudeville circuits and occasionally making O.K. movies, had suddenly grabbed the brass ring of stardom when they debuted a longer version of their vaudeville act on Broadway called Hellzapoppin’ in 1938. The show made a huge hit with the Broadway public and got filmed by Universal in 1941 in an oddly schizoid movie that at once chopped and channeled the show into movie conventions and made fun of themselves for doing that. Though any hopes Olsen and Johnson might have had for movie stardom were short-circuited by the simultaneous arrival of Abbott and Costello on the Universal lot – there’s even a gag about that in Crazy House in which Olsen and Johnson take over the intercom of Universal studio head N. G. Wagstaff (Thomas Gomez), and announce, “Universal’s most sensational comedy team is here!” Wagstaff replies, “Oh, Abbott and Costello! Send them right in.”

As with the film of Hellzapoppin’, the opening of Crazy House is the best thing in the movie: as various Universal personnel receive the warning that Olsen and Johnson are coming, they flee the studio. One group of people duck into the set of an air-raid shelter, presumably for a Universal film about the London Blitz, only to dash out again when a skunk follows them into it. On a set from the film Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes receives an interjection from Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson about to give him a warning. “I know, Watson. Olsen and Johnson are here.” “How did you know?” Watson asks. Holmes replies, “I am Sherlock Holmes. I know everything.” The sequence climaxes with the entire Universal security force assembled in front of the gates of the studio to keep Olsen and Johnson from breaching their perimeter and getting into the studio – only to be foiled when the duo roll up a pair of giant cannons and turn themselves into human cannonballs, turning into animated cartoons as they fly into the studio and land in Wagstaff’s office. He books a crane to remove them after telling them that not only are they fired, so is Edmund “Mac” MacLean (Patric Knowles), who worked as an assistant director on Hellzapoppin’ and was slated to direct their next picture.

The three decide to produce the movie themselves, renting studio space from a gang of crooks headed by S. E. Hanley (Richard Lane) and featuring such reliable character actors as Donald Cook and Billy Gilbert (blessedly without his fake German accent and his famous sneeze) and relying for capital on Col Thaddeus Merriweather (Percy Kilbride), only we soon learn – though Olsen and Johnson do not, of course – that he’s a harmless but thoroughly broke eccentric who likes to pretend to have millions. Hanley and his gang soon learn that Olsen’s and Johnson’s supposed backer is broke, but decide to go along and allow the film to be made so they can seize it and sell it themselves when it’s finished. Olsen, Johnson and MacLean form a company called “Miracle Productions” – their promotional slogan is, “If it’s worth seeing … it’s a Miracle” – and start to work assembling a cast, including carhop Marjorie Nelson (Martha O’Driscoll) who MacLean is attracted to both professionally and personally (though, natch, when he first approaches her about going to dinner with him to discuss being in his movie, she thinks he’s just making a pass at her). Mac changes her name to the ridiculous “Marjorie Windingham” and makes her the female star after she sings a swing version of the song “Jealous” at the carhop.

They also sign comedienne Cass Daley, whom Leonard Maltin in his chapter on Olsen and Johnson in the book Movie Comedy Teams described as “a road-company version of Martha Raye,” and who basically assaults the camera in her two big production numbers (one of which depicts her as a woman who’s unemployed because she resisted her boss’s advances – there are an awful lot of #MeToo moments here for a film made in 1943!), only instead of the real Cass Daley they sign her untalented cousin and stand-in, Sadie Silverfish. They try to break Sadie’s contract by subjecting her to an exercise regimen and wearing her out – but, unbeknownst to them, the real Cass Daley substitutes for her cousin and does the number, only just before that Mac had ordered the film to be removed from the cameras so they actually didn’t get the number. (That’s the sort of plot point that always bothers me.) Filming wends its way through 54 days of production and some elaborate, impressive production numbers featuring a wide assemblage of talents, including singer Leighton Noble and his band, dancers Tony and Sally DeMarco, Marion Hutton (Betty Hutton’s similarly-voiced sister) and the Glenn Miller Singers (Miller was still alive when this film was made but he was leading his Army Air Force band during World War II and the folks he’d left behind had to figure out some way to make a living in his absence), and the prize for me, Count Basie and His Orchestra.

Basie participates in two big numbers, one of them on “Tropicana,” a minor-key Latin-style song quite different from Basie’s usual material – though he plays a short solo on it that’s beautiful (and there’s a bit of solo trumpet as well, probably from Buck Clayton). “Tropicana” is danced successively by a Latin troupe, a Black company (with Basie playing under an improvised band shell reading “Count Basie’s Block Party”) and a white one (with Leighton Noble’s band quite a dramatic come-down from Basie’s as a swing outfit!). The other big number featuring Basie is “Got a Pocketful of Pennies,:” which also includes a chorus by the Delta Rhythm Boys, a Black ensemble that tried to adapt the sound of a gospel quartette to secular music; they get several appearances in the film and are a lot of fun, and I was especially amused to see their accompanist’s little piano side by side with Basie’s full-sized one. Though it doesn’t sustain the hilarity of the opening sequence, Crazy House is a marvelously funny genre-bending film that (like W. C. Fields’ Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, made two years earlier, also at Universal) is a sort of comic version of Fellini’s 8 ½ before there was an 8 ½.

The ending takes place in a courtroom in which Hanley is suing Olsen and Johnson for ownership of the film – and of course Olsen and Johnson a) insist on acting as their own attorneys and b) royally screw things up – until Mac pleads with the judge to allow him a week to edit the film, preview it and sell it to the highest bidder among the major studios. (One week seems an awfully short post-production time even for 1943, though perhaps Mac was editing the film as he went along.) Eventually the preview occurs – only Mac discovers that Hanley sent over just the opening reel of the film and blank leader on the other seven reels – so in order to keep the audience in place Olsen and Johnson improvise. They have Marjorie pick up the song she was singing at the end of reel one and continue it “live” (an interesting variation on the ending of Singin’ in the Rain eight years later), and when they see Allan Jones in the audience they call on him and he sings his big hit, “The Donkey Serenade.” (The lyrics seem undecided as to whether the song’s animal is a donkey or a mule – the infertile hybrid of a donkey and a horse.) Eventually Mac finds the rest of the film, the preview continues and Olsen and Johnson rig up an electrical device to shock Wagstaff of Universal and leap out of his chair when they announce that the first studio head who bids $1 million for the film will get it. Everything looks happy until Johnson draws back a curtain to reveal a young man and a young woman locked in an embrace. He aims his cane – which conceals a rifle – at them and shoots them dead, and when Olsen asks him why he did that Johnson says, “This is one picture that isn’t going to have a happy ending!”

I’m a bit more familiar with Crazy House than the rest of the Olsen and Johnson oeuvre because in the early 1980’s I made a home recording of it on a Beta machine, which lasted long enough for me to dub Basie’s two numbers onto audio cassette and incorporate them into a Basie mix I later transferred to CD. I hadn’t seen it in years but it was every bit as delightful as I remember it, even though after watching the one surviving episode of the 1949 Olsen and Johnson TV series Fireball Fun-for-All I decided that a little of their humor goes a long, long way and it was probably just as well that in their four films for Universal (Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House, Ghost Catchers and See My Lawyer), the studio leavened the humor with musical interludes that gave viewers’ funnybones a much-needed rest and were frequently quite good in themselves. Leonard Malton bitched in his book Movie Comedy Teams about how Olsen and Johnson’s Universal films were filled with “brassy music that is no longer listenable” – well, I guess I just like swing better than he does because I find the musical interludes not only listenable but welcome as respites from the successive Olsen and Johnson comedy assaults. Also worth noting is the running gag of Shemp Howard (brother of Moe and Curly Howard of the Three Stooges, eventually a Stooge himself and also character comedian in films starring greats like W. C. Fields) as a salesman who keeps walking on the set with preposterous items for sale and even more preposterous sales claims for them: “Wanna buy a stove? It’s hot!” and “Wanna buy a pillow? Nothing down!” Crazy House is a start-to-finish delight and I still wish Universal Home Video would put together all four of the films Olsen and Johnson made for that studio and release them as a boxed set of DVD’s the way they did with the first four Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies.

Battleship Potemkin (Goskino, Mosfilm, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I turned on the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase,” which this time wasn’t an obscure or little-known (or recently rediscovered) movie but a film that has been part of the lingua franca of cinema since it was originally made: Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin from 1925. Commissioned by the government of the Soviet Union to commemorate the unsuccessful revolution against the Tsarist regime in 1905 (in Soviet iconography 1905 was acclaimed as the precursor to 1917, the event that revealed the vulnerability of the Tsarist state and the inevitable – at least in Soviet historiography – success of the Bolsheviks in 1917). I first saw Eisenstein’s revolutionary movies Potemkin and October (the 1928 film that was intended for the 10th anniversary of 1917 but got delayed because Stalin took over and insisted that the actors playing Trotsky and his allies be removed from the film) at the Surf Theatre in San Francisco in 1970 and was as impressed at the sheer rhythm of these films as the sophisticated “montage” style of editing Eisenstein used and a lot of subsequent filmmakers copied.

It’s also a weird time to be watching Battleship Potemkin because – unlike Germany, which overcame its authoritarian history and started a functioning and lasting democracy in 1949 – Russia has remained mired in authoritarianism, first under the Tsars, then under the Soviets and now under the Right-wing dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Right now thousands of Russians are daring the repression of the Putin regime and marching in the streets to protest Putin’s arrest of Alexei Navalny, his principal political opponent, who was poisoned by a Russian nerve agent, was sent to Germany to be treated and for reasons at once admirably heroic and utterly stupid returned to Russia on January 17 and was immediately arrested – as were his family and friends. The reminder that whatever form it takes, Russia remains a relentlessly authoritarian country puts a far different spin on Battleship Potemkin than both Eisenstein and the Soviet cultural bureaucrats who greenlighted it intended: not the triumph of a revolution but a reminder that these battles have to be fought again and again and again in the face of a relentless dictatorship that only seems to hone its repressive skills with each new incarnation.

One of the ironies of Battleship Potemkin is that the ship on which it takes place (and which some incarnations of the film have referred to as an “armored cruiser” rather than a battleship) is named after the chief adviser to Catherine the Great, the founder of the concept of “Potemkin villages” – fake towns he had erected along the way as she made her royal progresses through Russia so she would think her people were living better than they actually were. To add to the irony, the actual Potemkin had been scrapped in 1922 and Eisenstein was forced to shoot his movie on another battleship from the same era called The Twelve Apostles – and one of the principal villains in the movie is an Orthodox priest who serves aboard the ship and tries to talk the sailors out of complaining about their lousy food and overall conditions by saying any questioning of their officers’ authority was “against God.” Battleship Potemkin is also an example of what Russian filmmakers called “typage” – casting people in the movie who looked like (and often actually were) what the script called for instead of using professional actors – and the non-star ensemble casting Eisenstein and his contemporaries used to challenge the whole idea of “great men” and insist that the great social changes were achieved by the masses themselves without traditional “leaders.” (When Stalin took over and started creating his “cult of personality,” that part of the Soviet “line” changed in a hurry!) The closest person this movie has to a star role, the sailor Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov), gets killed midway through when the officer corps impales him on a grappling hook and drowns him as an example to the other sailors to get them to stop their mutiny – and the sailors exhibit his body on the shore of Odessa, with a sign reading “Dead for a Bowl of Borscht” (earlier versions of this film just said “soup,” but this one’s titles specify it) to build popular support for their mutiny.

Battleship Potemkin is in five parts, dealing first with the rotten food the sailors are served, including maggot-infested meat and bread so stale it’s virtually unchewable; their determination to demand better rations and their refusal to eat the spoiled borscht put before them; their successful mutiny (I suspect Eisenstein had seen F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu since there are a couple of long-shots of two officers that make them look like the vampire on board a ship in Murnau’s classic), the gathering of the sailors’ on-shore supporters on the Odessa steps, the famous (and oft-quoted – Woody Allen parodied it in his film Bananas) scene of Tsarist troops massacring the sailors’ supporters; and a final scene in which the sailors on the other ships the Tsarist navy has sent to recapture the Potemkin and kill the mutineers instead refuse to fire on their comrades and join the revolution instead. Battleship Potemkin is an acknowledged classic that holds up even though our current feelings about the Russian revolutions are considerably more mixed than those presented here (it doesn’t help that we’re all too well with the historical sequel – the repression, the political murders, the Gulag). A lot of people who saw it in 1925 were impressed with the movie even if they detested the Soviet regime it was propagandizing for, and it remains a seminal film in movie history and technique even though I think Eisenstein’s next film, October (released in the U.S. as Ten Days That Shook the World to capitalize on John Reed’s best-selling book, even though the book and the film have nothing in common except both being depictions of the same historical events), is his masterpiece.