The Penal Code (Freuler/Monarch, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was The Penal Code, an archive.org download I’d burned to the same DVD as Captured in Chinatown, expecting Captured in Chinatown to be a cheesy wanna-be “exotic” melodrama and The Penal Code an exciting gangster film — only the quality turned out to be the reverse: Captured in Chinatown turned out to be a workmanlike, atmospheric thriller with well-staged action sequences and The Penal Code a dreary bore. The film began with a foreword — cut off by framing problems with the archive.org download, which also cut off the opening credits — which was apparently (at least according to the American Film Institute Catalog — their reviewers didn’t get to see the film but they researched the contemporary reviews and found the attribution in Variety) the work of Edward J. Mulrooney, then New York’s police commissioner, to the effect that crime doesn’t pay and the story we were about to see would illustrate that the youth of 1932 need “more sympathetic direction to keep them off the streets.”

Exactly how the story of The Penal Code was supposed to demonstrate that crime does not pay is something of a mystery, since it begins with an interminable scene set in a small town in which Mrs. Sarah Palmer (Virginia True Boardman) announces she has just received a letter from her son Robert (Regis Toomey, top-billed) who’s taking a trip around the world and is currently in Brisbane, Australia. Mrs. Palmer shares the letter with Robert’s girlfriend Marguerite “Margie” Shannon (Helene Cohan), who works at the local bank and is fending off the advances of bank executive James Forrester (Robert Ellis) out of loyalty to Robert, who’s expected home soon. Given the title of the film, it’s not surprising that we then have a jump cut which reveals that Robert really isn’t in Australia; he’s in prison but has made arrangements with an agency to forward his letters overseas and mail them there to make his mother and girlfriend believe he’s out of the country rather than in stir.

If this plot gimmick sounds familiar, it should; writer Maurine Watkins (Chicago) had used it two years earlier in the 1930 film Up the River, which John Ford directed and producer William Fox called a “comedy-drama,” and while it’s a flawed movie it’s several orders of magnitude superior to The Penal Code. In Up the River we were clearly told what had happened to put our young (ambiguous) hero in prison — on the eve of his scheduled departure for China, he had got into a fight, someone had been killed and he had been charged with, and convicted of, manslaughter — whereas in The Penal Code, scripted by Edward T. Lowe and F. Hugh Herbert (both of whom were later associated with much better movies) and directed by George Melford (whose superb atmospherics in the three other films of his I’ve seen — the Valentino vehicles The Sheik and Moran of the ‘Lady Letty’ and the Spanish-language version of the 1930 Dracula — hardly prepared me for the mind-numbing boredom of this film; he sneaks in a few cool camera angles but virtually all the actors speak in that mind-numbingly slow first-day-of-drama-school monotone that was de rigueur in the early days of the talkies but was pretty passé  by 1932), we have no idea just what landed Robert in prison, though Bender (Pat O’Malley), the cop who arrested him, tells the prison warden (John Ince) that his only real “crime” was hanging out with gangsters and the warden agrees and holds high hopes for Robert’s success on the outside once his sentence runs out and he’s released.

Once that happens, Robert returns to his small town, regains his old bank job and starts dating Margie again — only he’s still determined to keep her and his mother from finding out he’s an ex-con. There’s an ambiguous scene that suggests the people running the international mail agency are blackmailing their clients, reading the letters and using the information in them to figure out who’s an ex-con trying to hide that status from their loved ones, but that gets dropped in a hurry; instead it’s Forrester who turns out to know about Robert’s status, and he decides to pay off a particularly obnoxious creditor (we presume it’s an illegal debt, possibly gambling, but once again we’re never told that) by embezzling from the bank and framing Robert for the crime — only Robert figures it out and holds a gun on him, Forrester reaches for it, they struggle for it and, no, Forrester doesn’t die, but the cops, having found that Forrester himself has a record, figure it out too and arrive at the bank to arrest Forrester and exonerate Robert.

 The Penal Code has the makings of a decent movie but they’re done in by the implacable slowness with which Melford directs it — when the prison scenes at the beginning seemed deadly dull, at first I thought Melford was pulling the stunt Howard Hawks did in The Criminal Code, making the sequences boring on purpose to depict the drudgery of prison life; but then the script has the prisoners attempt an escape (which Robert virtuously refuses to participate in) and that isn’t any more exciting than the rest of the prison scenes! (The prison itself looks surprisingly solid for a 1932 indie on a tiny budget, and I suspect producer John R. Freuler — the man who 16 years earlier had been the studio head at Mutual and signed Charlie Chaplin to a contract for 12 films that remain among Chaplin’s best — arranged to shoot at a real one rather than building a set: either that or he rented a prison set and studio time from a major company that had made prison movies of their own.) It doesn’t help that we have Up the River to compare this with — or that in Up the River the young man desperately trying to conceal his convict status from his family was played by Humphrey Bogart (surprisingly well, in a role which gave him a more complex, well-rounded character than virtually anything else he played until High Sierra 10 years later) whereas in The Penal Code it’s Regis Toomey, who comes off better than most of the cast simply because his line readings are mediocre instead of downright awful.

 The Penal Code is bad in ways that seem pretty much unique to early-1930’s indies: dull performances, little camera movement, flat, grey lighting even in scenes that would seem to demand atmosphere, lousy sound (in the silent era an independent director on a shoestring budget could, with enough command of lighting and other skills, make a movie that on sheer visual grounds could compete with major-studio product; once sound came in, the hissy, distorted recording of the cheap sound systems available to independent producers versus the far crisper, clearer sound of the major studios drew a wedge between Hollywood’s haves and its have-nots, and it would take the development of portable tape recorders and small, flexible cameras in the 1950’s and 1960’s to make high-quality independent filmmaking possible again) and an overall feeling that the people involved in the film on both sides of the camera really didn’t care whether it was any good, as long as the company they were working for paid them their salaries out of their flat fees for distributing it.

Prohibition (Florentine Films/PBS, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I spent a large chunk of this morning watching the first episode of Ken Burns’ new series on Prohibition, a short — at least by his standards, just six hours — mini-series that actually traced the roots of the Prohibitionist movement to the 1830’s and the reform movements that were sweeping the country then, and made clear that though prohibition generally (in lower-case referring not only to the “experiment noble in purpose” of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act but the still ongoing, and equally ineffective and counterproductive, “war on drugs”) is considered a Right-wing cause today, the roots of Prohibition were actually progressive. The early abolitionists, including minister Henry Ward Beecher and Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose father, Reverend Lyman Beecher, had delivered the anti-alcohol sermons that kicked off the movement in the 1830’s), were also Prohibitionists (Beecher père, who wasn’t an abolitionist, co-founded the American Temperance Society) and regarded opposition to alcohol as part of the same movement towards moral uplift and reform as opposing slavery and supporting women’s rights. Indeed, as this show chronicles, the entire political awakening of women in the U.S. — women’s discovery that they could be activists in their own right and didn’t have to live their entire lives in subservience first to their fathers and then their husbands — was bound up with the rise of Prohibition.

The first-wave feminists were ardent Prohibitionists because they saw alcohol as the direct cause of female poverty and domestic violence — they saw alcohol as evil because all too many men cashed their week’s paycheck on a Saturday afternoon and headed for the saloon and drank it up (indeed, in an era in which banking services were available only to the most affluent, the saloon often cashed the worker’s paycheck), coming home drunk and often verbally or even physically lashed out at their wives, who had to figure out how to keep themselves and their children going on no money for the next week — and the Prohibition and women’s suffrage movements were so closely associated (the founding mothers of American feminism, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, were also ardent Prohibitionists) that one of the reasons it took so damned long for women to get the vote in the U.S. was the opposition of the major brewers and distillers, who realized that votes for women would mean far more votes for Prohibition. One of the most interesting phenomena in this show was the “Washingtonian Societies,” founded in 1840 by what would now be called recovering alcoholics; they held meeting at which people who’d had drinking problems met and recounted their experiences to each other — essentially the first iteration of Alcoholics Anonymous, 95 years before today’s AA was founded by Bill Wilson in 1935 (two years after Prohibition was repealed). At the same time there was a parallel anti-drinking movement, the Anti-Saloon League, which was run by men and was essentially the prototype of the single-issue lobbies of today; the architect of their strategy was Wayne Wheeler, their legislative director, who perfected the now-common approach of mobilizing people to vote for or against politicians based solely on their stand on the issue his group was pushing. Needless to say, the program also profiled Carrie Nation, whose direct attacks on saloons with hatchets make her come off in the show as the strategic and tactical ancestor of ACT UP, with a quite familiar-seeming obsession with pushing what she considered a mass health issue by any means necessary.

The political alignments of Prohibition look familiar in some ways and wildly different from those of today in others: as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, including some Zenger’s editorials, in the 1890’s and the 1930’s the Left was actually associated with what would now be called social conservatism — the 1890’s and 1930’s were times of mass Left movements in the U.S. and also times in which the Left united economic progressivism and social conservatism, linking the moral excesses of the 1880’s and the 1920’s with the exploitation of working-class and poor people and calling for a more conservative, more Puritan personal morality, a combination that has been inconceivable since the 1960’s reshuffled the political deck and instead linked progressive economic policies with personal (especially sexual) liberation. A figure like William Jennings Bryan — who, as this show chronicles, originally was for temperance rather than Prohibition (i.e., allowing alcohol to be sold but not using it personally and organizing to encourage people to abstain) but soon realized that he could rebuild his political reputation after three failed Presidential candidacies by putting himself at the head of Prohibition (and later, after his side won that one, anti-evolution) — an economic and public-policy liberal verging on radical and an intense religious and social conservative — would be virtually unimaginable today. Prohibition the movie is a fascinating film on many levels, including showcasing how a determined minority with sufficient organization and discipline can reshape American society through both electoral activism and direct action (the Prohibitionists staged the first March on Washington, an event later copied by the African-American civil rights movement, the anti-Viet Nam War movement, the Queer movement and many others), and it’s also at least something of a retreat from Ken Burns’ previous filmmaking strategy — there are fewer titles and fewer cutesie-poo sequences of unseen voices reading published quotes or letters from the participants — though there’s one annoying cliché he didn’t duck: the use of 1920’s jazz as the basis for his soundtrack (even, rather anachronistically, before his story actually reaches the 1920’s).

At one point we hear Wynton Marsalis (who, because of his anointing as the authority on jazz by Burns and the people running Lincoln Center, has become the most powerful figure in jazz history in terms of defining what is and isn’t considered jazz, and who’s used that power to impose a racialist view of jazz history in which African-Americans are considered not the primary but the only true creators of jazz and all sorts of “fusion” between jazz and contemporary pop are ruled illegitimate — this is a man who actually disowned his own brother Branford for doing an album and tour with Sting!) and a pianist do a pretty good recreation of the 1924 recording of “King Porter Stomp” by King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, and indeed so much of Morton’s music is heard (possibly from his piano rolls, more likely from a modern pianist copying his style) he practically deserves credit for scoring the film. There’s also the almost unbearable irony of Paul Whiteman’s 1928 recording of “Sugar” being used as underscoring and heard (unlike most of the recordings sampled in Burns’ Jazz series) start-to-finish — including the great solo playing by Bix Beiderbecke, who really did drink himself to death on illegal booze … — 10/4/11

••••••••••

Charles and I had the chance to screen the second episode of Prohibition, the documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and the episode that first got us into the 1920’s, when Prohibition actually went into effect — and, given that this was an era of fiscally and socially conservative Republican Presidencies and Congresses, the level of funding necessary for any serious enforcement efforts was far from forthcoming; Fiorello La Guardia, a progressive Congressmember from New York City at the time, estimated that in order to enforce Prohibition in New York you would need 250,000 police officers — “and 250,000 other men to watch the police” — and instead only 200 agents were assigned for the entire state (not just the city but also the Long Island coastline and the border with Canada through which legal liquor could relatively easily be smuggled). This show has caused enough consternation among the modern-day prohibitionists in the “War on Drugs” that a former official in Obama’s drug policy office published a Los Angeles Times op-ed trying to blow apart the comparison modern day legalization advocates are making between the failure of alcohol prohibition and the ongoing failure of drug prohibition — but the parallels are so inescapable even the usual hysterical “war on drugs” rhetoric can’t mask them, especially the power criminal organizations acquired from the income from the illicit trade and their ability to use their money to bribe law enforcement and be let alone, often to settle their differences on the streets in drive-by shootings and kill innocent people.

This episode was less interesting than the first one in that it focused less on the politics of Prohibition and more on the personalities involved, though some of the personalities were absolutely fascinating. The story of George Remus, an attorney turned bootlegger and liquor czar, would have made a great 1940’s film noir — one could readily imagine Edward G. Robinson playing him and Barbara Stanwyck playing his wife. Remus represented a husband accused of killing his wife and tried — and failed — to get him off by pleading temporary insanity, and when he realized he could make a lot more money (to please the high-maintenance trophy wife he’d just married after dumping his first one) running an illegal liquor business than being a criminal defense attorney, he searched the Volstead Act (the implementation law for Prohibition) for loopholes and found a big one: whiskey already distilled at the time Prohibition went into effect was grandfathered in and stored in government-bonded warehouses. The key to getting it out again was having a government permit to withdraw it, which involved swearing an affidavit that it would only be used for medicinal purposes (the patent-medicine lobby had been strong enough to get an exception into the Volstead Act that alcohol sold for purely medicinal purposes was still legal) — and by getting an assistant to Harry Daugherty, President Warren G. Harding’s (corrupt) Attorney General, on his payroll, Remus got all the permits he wanted, and then had “gangs” on his payroll “hijack” the shipments of “medicinal” whiskey and divert them to distributors. Eventually he got caught when his man in Daugherty’s office committed suicide and the Prohibition Bureau launched an enforcement effort — and Remus’s trophy wife fell in love with the male Prohibition agent involved in the case, and the two of them looted Remus’s entire fortune so when he returned from his four-year prison sentence, he was penniless. So he waylaid his wife and stepdaughter while they were driving one day, forced their car off the road, killed his wife and got off on the same “temporary insanity” defense he had once unsuccessfully used on a client.

Oddly, the most heroic characters in this story keep turning up on the Prohibition side — in episode one Carrie Nation came off as a spiritual ancestor of ACT UP, heroically using direct action and crimes against property to advance what she saw as the cause of public health; and in this episode Mabel Walker Willebrandt, another heroic woman, was appointed by President Harding as assistant attorney general and put in charge of Prohibition enforcement, a duty she took ultra-seriously (she even insisted on conducting part of George Remus’s prosecution herself!) — which led to one writer of the time commenting that Prohibition was a big joke but someone had forgot to let Ms. Willebrandt in on it. The show also told the story of Roy Olmstead, the “good bootlegger” of Seattle, who made it a point of pride never to palm off adulterated or potentially toxic goods on his customers (of course, living in a state easily accessible from Canada by both land and sea, he didn’t have to!) and who was finally caught by wiretaps on his phone (“whispering wires,” the press of the time called them), and his conviction was upheld by a 5-4 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court even though the calls were not actually recorded (the recording technology of 1924 would probably not have been able to record them) and the only documents offered were stenographic transcripts of the calls made “live” by the private detective who was running the taps.

The film mentioned the 1924 Democratic National Convention and the epic 103-ballot battle between “dry” candidate William Gibbs McAdoo and “wet” Al Smith — who as governor of New York had signed a law repealing the state’s tough Prohibition statute and attracted the ire of rural America because he was everything they hated: a Catholic, a “wet,” a progressive and the man behind the unsuccessful attempt (it failed by just one vote!) to get the Democratic convention to condemn the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. It also did a passing mention of the famous Prohibition agent Izzy Einstein (he and his partner were the subject of a quite entertaining TV-movie in the 1970’s starring Jackie Gleason — and the photo of the real Einstein included here suggested that Gleason was excellent casting for the role) in which he kept track of how long it would take between the time he arrived in a new city and the time he would be offered his first drink; not surprisingly, the quickest was New Orleans, when within 35 seconds of his arrival the cab driver taking him into town from the train station pulled out a flask from under his car seat and offered him some. One can readily see why the neo-prohibitionists don’t like this program; though it doesn’t really go out of its way to hammer home the message, the unmistakable lesson is that you can’t keep people from doing something that’s bad for them just by making it illegal — and if you try, all you will do (as real-life Prohibition agent turned repeal advocate Col. Ira Reeves wrote in his 1931 book Ol’ Rum River) is raise the substance’s price and lower its quality, along with fostering a general disrespect for the law and making some very nasty criminals insanely rich. — 10/11/11

••••••••••

Charles and I finally got together and watched the third and final episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick film Prohibition, “A Nation of Hypocrites,” which (unlike the first two) carried a may-not-be-suitable-for-children disclaimer based on “scenes of violence” — the film included reproductions of the still photos taken at the scenes of the gangland massacres in Chicago in the late 1920’s and they were pretty horrific (the gangster movies of the time made them look decidedly more clinical and less gory than they were for real). The Prohibition series has today’s prohibitionists — the ones who insist that the U.S. must maintain a life-and-death commitment to the “war on drugs” based on the same stupid idea that motivated the prohibition of alcohol, namely that the best way to control a social vice is simply to make it illegal (we have ample evidence by now from both anti-alcohol and anti-drug prohibition that that’s the worst thing you can do!), which the neo-prohibitionists take seriously enough that one of them, Kevin A. Sabet — former senior policy advisor to President Obama’s “drug czar” — published an op-ed in the October 6 Los Angeles Times that Prohibition wasn’t such a bad thing after all (“Alcohol use plummeted among the general population. Cirrhosis of the liver fell by 66 percent among men. Arrest for public drunkenness declined by half. Yes, organized crime was emboldened, but the mob was already powerful before Prohibition” — no, it wasn’t; before Prohibition the Mafia, to the extent it existed in the U.S. at all, was basically an irritant that did shakedown rackets among fellow Italian-Americans and was a few disorganized gangs in major cities with large populations of Italian immigrants; it wasn’t a national force until illegal booze and the money to be made from it made it one — “and it continued to be long after,” because it used the national infrastructure it had built to take advantage of Prohibition to organize large-scale rackets in gambling, prostitution and drugs, just as the U.S. government turned the infrastructure it had built up to enforce Prohibition to enforcing the laws against marijuana enacted in the 1930’s) and that while “Americans have concluded that the right to drink outweighs public health and safety consequences … there are key differences between [Prohibition] and modern-day drug enforcement that render a comparison almost useless for serious policy analysis.”

Bullshit: though Burns and Novick are too good as filmmakers (and also too cognizant that they are reliant not only on the federal government but also on private corporations like the Bank of America for the money to get their shows on the air) to hammer home the alcohol Prohibition/drug prohibition parallels with propagandistic obviousness, the similarities are glaring and in-your-face to anyone whose knowledge of the real-world effects of both the anti-alcohol and anti-drug laws goes beyond the pro-Prohibition propaganda. Both alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition fueled the expansion of organized crime and led directly to the deaths of innocent bystanders in the gang wars and the terrorization of entire communities (when we watched the show Crips and Bloods: Made in America I observed in my journal afterwards that given that we’re not going to make these gangs go away, especially with the illegal drug trade giving them the money and resources to arm themselves as well or better than the cops, the best thing that could happen might be the “Mafiazation” of the Crips and Bloods, by which I meant encouraging them to meet across the table and set up something like the Mafia’s Commission to sort out disputes about territory so they don’t end up being fought out on the street in their own and other people’s blood).

Both alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition (as former Prohibition agent turned Repeal advocate Col. Ira Reeves wrote in his 1931 book Ol’ Rum River) raised the price of the substances and lowered their quality. Both fostered a fundamental disrespect for law in general, especially among young people. Both made it impossible to regulate and tax the substances — one interviewee in the Prohibition movie noted ruefully that as long as alcohol was totally illegal, you could drink if you were under 21, you could buy alcohol after 2 a.m., and you could drink anywhere you liked under any circumstances, while allowing alcohol to be made and sold legally meant the government could regulate times and places of its use, set a minimum age and tax it. (Kevin Sabet argues that “alcohol use leads to $180 billion in costs associated with health care, the criminal justice system and lost productivity; alcohol taxes, on the other hand — kept outrageously low by a powerful lobby — generate revenue amounting to less than a tenth of these costs.” To my mind, that’s an argument for raising the taxes on alcohol the way we have raised them on tobacco, where they now do come a lot closer to covering the actual social costs of use and make users themselves, not society as a whole, pay those costs. Indeed, the policy we have more or less stumbled onto with tobacco — allow its legal manufacture and sale, regulate the times and places where it can be used so people who don’t want to be exposed to it don’t have to be, and impose high taxes on it so users pay for its social costs — is the model I would want to see followed for the end of drug prohibition.) And both simply didn’t work; while alcohol prohibition may have lowered the total amount of booze consumed in the U.S. (and the repeal of the drug prohibition laws probably would result in an increase in the number of drug users and the amounts they consume), the people who did drink drank more, and more often. (One wonders if the one-third as many people who got diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver when Prohibition was in effect were diagnosed with it at an earlier age than its previous victims.)

 Part three of Prohibition offered some fascinating vignettes, focusing largely (and inevitably) on Al Capone and the rivals he defeated (sometimes by having them killed, sometimes just by intimidating them out of the business and out of town) to control Chicago’s bootleg beer and liquor business before the federal government brought him down for income-tax evasion; Chicago’s Republican Mayor, Big Bill Thompson, who was defeated in 1924 and re-elected in 1928 largely on his promise to ignore the Prohibition laws and let the gangsters operate (though the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 dramatically turned public opinion against the gangsters again even while the public, or large chunks of it, continued to partake of their product). It also mentioned Al Smith and the bizarre hate campaign waged against him by the radical Right when he ran for President in 1928 — showing that the tactics used against Barack Obama (and Bill Clinton before him) come from a well-established and quite venerable playbook — in Smith’s case the canards centered around his well-known opposition to Prohibition as well as his Catholicism (including one rumor, as loony-tunes as the Obama “birther” nonsense and apparently equally as widely believed, that Smith was building a transatlantic tunnel straight to the Vatican, presumably to get his marching orders directly from the Pope), which was largely masterminded by Warren Harding’s honest and incorruptible Prohibition enforcement agent, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who expected Herbert Hoover to appoint her Attorney General in gratitude for her role in the anti-Smith smear campaign (and, when he didn’t, she resigned from the government, became a defense attorney, represented bootleggers and ultimately converted to Roman Catholicism herself).

It also mentioned James Cannon, Jr., who took over the Anti-Saloon League after Wayne Wheeler, who had masterminded the strategy that passed Prohibition in the first place, died in 1927; Cannon was a Virginia Methodist minister who had run the campaign to get state prohibition enacted in Virginia in 1914 and, though he was himself a Democrat, he took an active role in the propaganda campaign against Al Smith in 1928 and, according to the Web page on him in the Encyclopedia Virginia [http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Cannon_James_1864-1944], “Charges of embezzlement, stock-market gambling, and adultery, fanned by Cannon's numerous enemies, dogged the bishop from 1929 until 1934 and diminished his influence thereafter.” (He’s neither the first nor the last holier-than-thou religious leader who’s been revealed as a hypocrite who didn’t practice what he preached.) Among the most fascinating people profiled on this show were Pauline Sabin, who had married a prominent Long Island man and had a fortune in her own right, who got involved in the cause of Repeal after she “was repelled by politicians who voted dry and then turned up at her dinner table expecting a drink” (and whose fortune helped underwrite a Repeal campaign that for the first time could match the financial resources available through the churches to the Prohibitionists — plus ça change, plus ça même chose); and Lois Long, who at age 23 (the daughter of a Congregationalist minister and herself educated at Vassar) landed a job with the newly formed New Yorker magazine and, under the pen name “Lipstick,” wrote a regular column about the city’s nightlife and particularly its speakeasies — in which number counted such famous (and still legendary) establishments as the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn and Small’s Paradise.

The show quoted her review of the Cotton Club that hailed Duke Ellington’s band, then the club’s house orchestra, as the finest jazz band she’d ever heard, after which she described their music as “barbaric” (and being familiar with Ellington’s music from the records he made at the time one could readily imagine that word coming to mind, not only because it frequently accompanied floor shows purporting to represent goings-on among Blacks in the African jungle but also because those sounds must have been a jolt to a young, well-bred white girl whose previous encounters with “jazz” were probably limited to the safe white dance bands like Paul Whiteman’s, Roger Wolfe Kahn’s and Sam Lanin’s), and though the club scene of her day has long since vanished (some of the nightclubs she covered actually survived Repeal and were still operating in the 1960’s but they’ve died long since), it seems as if a collection of her writings would be worth having as a book: she had the kind of brittle wit New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross liked in his writers and it seems from the quotes from it in this show that her work would still be entertaining reading today. And Burns and Novick also couldn’t resist depicting the stunts Fiorello La Guardia pulled as a Congressmember (a Republican!) from New York City, in one instance taking two legal products to the floor of the house — supposedly non-alcoholic “near beer” (like similar substances today it did contain alcohol, but only in trace amounts) and malt extract — mixing them in a glass and producing illegal beer. A New York Prohibition agent dared La Guardia to try that on home turf, promising that he would be arrested; he did, and he wasn’t.

The episode title “A Nation of Hypocrites” was all too accurate — indeed, it’s all too accurate to describe today’s anti-drug (and especially anti-cannabis) prohibition; the arguments used today to justify the “war on drugs” are about the same as the ones made by the Prohibitionists against alcohol (one can see in the films of the 1930’s made to justify the anti-marijuana prohibition — Reefer Madness, Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell, Assassin of Youth — the same kind of bonkers propaganda the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had pushed on schoolchildren two and three decades before), and in that regard it’s worthy to note Kevin Sabet’s assertion in his Los Angeles Times op-ed that “the key difference between alcohol and drug prohibition … lies in the substance itself. Alcohol, unlike illegal drugs, has a long history of widespread, accepted use in our society, dating back to before Biblical times. Illegal drugs cannot claim such pervasive use by a large part of the planet’s population over such a long period of time.” Actually they can; marijuana is known to have been used as far back as ancient Egypt, opium has been smoked by the Chinese for millennia, and similarly the indigenous people of the coca-growing regions of South America have been chewing on coca leaves (the source of cocaine) and getting a mild, transitory and relatively harmless buzz on it for equally long periods. (The most dangerous drugs of our time are the products of the pharmaceutical industry, which in the late 19^th century figured out how to refine coca leaves into cocaine and opium into morphine and heroin, and in the 20^th century created entirely new drugs, susceptible to abuse, including amphetamines, LSD and a whole pharmacopeia of things like oxycodone, valium, dilaudid and other purely synthetic drugs that, obtainable quasi-legally from doctors, have now become the most commonly abused substances of their strength and potency in the U.S.)

What Sabet is right about is that the perception of these drugs among ordinary Americans is quite different from their perception of alcohol — reason enough why nationwide alcohol prohibition lasted only 13 years while marijuana prohibition (to take the most egregious example because, while not a totally benign substance, marijuana is certainly no more risky or damaging than alcohol or tobacco, and it is profoundly irrational that two of those should be legally obtainable while the third one isn’t) has been pursued steadily since the 1930’s (when all those about-to-be-unemployed Prohibition agents needed another substance the government could ban in order to keep them all working — and keep the corrupt ones supplied with bribes, no doubt) and still has the support of a majority of Americans, probably including many who’ve used it themselves (yet another echo of alcohol prohibition, of which Will Rogers — whose native Oklahoma didn’t get rid of its state prohibition law until 1959! — joked that Prohibition would remain in effect as long as people could get drunk and stagger to the polls to vote dry). — 10/13/11

Captured in Chinatown (Louis Weiss Productions/Consolidated Pictures, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Captured in Chinatown, a 1935 production by Louis Weiss, directed by Elmer Clifton from a script by himself and Arthur Durham, which proved to be unexpectedly good, workmanlike entertainment thanks largely to the presence of Tarzan — no, not the jungle-raised Homo sapiens but a canine Tarzan, also billed as the Police Dog and the Wonder Dog (there were an awful lot of Wonder Dogs in 1920’s and 1930’s movies following the enormous success of Rin Tin Tin — who single-pawedly kept Warner Bros. in business in the 1920’s and who’s the subject of a new biography by Susan Orlean that claims that in the initial balloting for the first Academy Awards, Rin Tin Tin placed first in the Best Actor category, only the Academy didn’t give him the award because they wanted the awards to be taken seriously and they wouldn’t have been if a dog had won the acting award) who sometimes seems to have more smarts than any of the humans in the film. Tarzan’s most delightful scene is one in which he manages to grab the ticket a cop has just written his owner, Chronicle reporter Bob Martin (Charles Delaney), for parking in front of a fire hydrant; he pulls it off the steering wheel (apparently that was a routine place to put it in those days when so many cars had open tops) and rushes down the street with it, finally trashing it down a storm drain while the cop who wrote it gives chase but is easily outwitted.

Captured in Chinatown begins with a marvelously atmospheric sequence (set, alas, to some pretty dreary “Chinese” stock music) far better than anything I’d have expected from an Elmer Clifton film, in which four Chinese people are murdered by having knives or hatchets thrown at them on dark streets. The victims are all members of either the Ling or Wong families, who had been blood enemies in China for hundreds of years and brought their feud with them. The story then rips off Romeo and Juliet as we see Joy Ling (Bo Ling) praying in front of an altar for peace between her family and the Wongs, which has become important to her because she’s fallen in love with Tommy Wong (Wing Foo) and she hopes to get both parents to consent to the marriage and settle their feud at long last. Tommy risks his life by coming to the Ling house and asking Joy’s father, Lieu Ling (Paul C. Fong), to be allowed to marry her. Eventually Lieu Ling and Tommy’s father, who doesn’t have any name in the cast list other than “Wong” (Jimmy Leon, Anglicized from his usual name of James C. Leong), meet and agree to settle their difference and allow their children to marry as long as the Wongs agree to give Joy a $50,000 jade necklace that has been in their families for centuries.

The Chronicle’s rival paper, the Herald, reports this story and it attracts the attention of a gang of crooks, including the ambiguously accented Zamboni (Paul Ellis) and two Anglo-Saxons named Harry (Robert Walker — not the same one!) and Raymond (Philo McCullough), who plan to steal the necklace; Harry and Raymond have already arranged for a fence as soon as Zamboni delivers the necklace, and Zamboni has arranged to infiltrate the wedding ceremony by bringing an audio recorder and offering to make a record of it the families can then copy and send to their relatives in China to document that the feud is now off. Bob Martin gets chewed out by his city editor (John Elliot) for having been scooped by the Herald on the Chinatown wedding story, and he replies that he’d have plenty of time to chase down such leads if his editor didn’t have him training Ann Parker (Marion Shilling, the “good girl” from Lord Byron of Broadway and a charming and personable, if not exactly drop-dead gorgeous, young actress who should have had more of a career; she made her last movie in 1936 but lived until 2004), a female cub reporter who goes with him to cover a polo match to learn how to interview the celebrities presumably in attendance. (There aren’t any.) The three groups of characters eventually converge on the Ling/Wong wedding, in which Zamboni stabs Joy’s brother Li-Foo Ling (no surviving record contains the name of the actor in this role) and puts on his robe to attack Tommy, thereby leading the Wongs to believe the Lings were responsible and threatening to reignite the feud.

Zamboni steals the necklace from Tommy after attacking him but is unable to make the quick getaway he planned on — which leads his confederates to think he’s double-crossing them. Harry is inadvertently killed by an ax thrown into a curtain by one of the Wongs who thought a Ling was hiding there (so, as Charles noted, the plot rips off Hamlet — the murder of Polonius — as well as Romeo and Juliet). Ann gets locked in a room (the closest anyone comes in this movie to actually being “captured in Chinatown”!) but discovers the recording machine, makes a record for Bob and gets Tarzan, who jumps into the room via a skylight window Ann has broken to let him in, to carry it across town to the newspaper office, where Bob has to take it to a record store to be able to play it. (The record sticks in a few places, presumably where Tarzan’s teeth bit through its surface.) Eventually the surviving bad guys get apprehended, the necklace is recovered, Li-Foo Ling is let out of the chest in which Zamboni had stuffed his body, the Tommy Wong/Joy Ling wedding goes through as planned and Bob and Ann — who turns out to be the daughter of the Chronicle’s owner — are also paired off.

Elmer Clifton, who played “The Rhapsode” in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance and whose directorial career lasted from 1915 to his death in 1949 (he started the 1949 film Not Wanted, an exploitation movie about unwed motherhood, but fell ill a week into the shoot and the producer, Ida Lupino, replaced him as director and turned in a minor gem), was usually pretty much of a hack but here he actually proved capable of staging exciting and creatively photographed action scenes (though the lack of a musical score after the opening is a bit of a handicap and the film is sometimes a bit confusing as to who’s doing what to whom), especially when he didn’t have to deal with dialogue — though, with the exception of Wing Foo as Tommy Wong, the actors are at least capable and deliver their lines relatively naturalistically instead of falling into that first-day-of-drama-school monotone all too many “B” actors in this period resorted to. Captured in Chinatown isn’t much of a movie, but it’s genuinely exciting even when Tarzan the dog isn’t front and center on screen!

The Skydivers (Coleman Francis Productions, 1963)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Charles and I finally ended up watching last night was The Skydivers, the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation we had started the night before but had burned out on out of sheer exhaustion (especially mine). It was the second of three films produced, directed and written by (mostly) actor Coleman Francis, after The Beast of Yucca Flats and before Night Train to Mundo Fine, a.k.a. Red Zone Cuba, who’s acquired a reputation as one of the legendarily bad directors of all time. He was the sort of person who could make a movie on an ultra-low budget and make it even worse than you’d expect. The Skydivers takes place at an aviation school in the middle of the California desert, and their main business is taking people up to skydive — only one of their customers dies in an accident early on in the film, so an official from the Federal Aviation Administration (“a faa-man!” one of the MST3K crew joked) shuts them down and so we get to see precious little skydiving (aside from some stock shots at the beginning) until the very end of the film, when the school hosts a big party and group skydive (I’m not making this up, you know!) at which time the various romantic complications are more or less resolved.

The school is owned by a married couple, Harry (Anthony Cardoza, Francis’s friend and fellow “actor,” if — in Dwight Macdonald’s words, I may use the term for courtesy) and Beth (Kevin Casey — a girl named Kevin?) Rowe, only Harry is fooling around with a blonde bimbo, who disappears quickly about a third of the way through the film, and also another woman, Suzy Belmont (Marcia Knight), who’s got dark curly hair and is a bit slimmer than his wife, who has dark straight hair. Meanwhile, the wife decides that what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, so she cruises at least two other men, Jim (Keith Walton) and Joe Moss (Eric Tomlin) — and she plots with one of her paramours to knock off her husband by pouring acid on his parachute before he goes up on the big group jump at the end (“Double-D Indemnity!” was the MST3K joke about this particular plot twist). About the only genuinely entertaining part of the film is a performance by a rock band called Jimmy Bryant and the Night Jumpers (they appear to have a pedal steel guitar player, though no such instrument is visible on screen) which the MST3K crew mostly shut up during (according to the “soundtrack” listing on imdb.com it’s an instrumental called “HaSo — Stratosphere Boogie,” though they’re also heard on a snatch of a record of a silly vocal song called “Tobacco Worm”).

Otherwise one sits through a series of jump cuts — in one scene one set of principals are in a car and then another set is in a speedboat driving around Lake Mead, which when it docks has magically turned into a sailboat (“The boat’s a shape-shifter!” one of the MST3K’ers exclaimed) — and insufferably dull dialogue delivered in such slow, evenly paced monotones by all the cast members that, whereas some particularly bad race movies make us wonder where all the Black people who could act were, this one makes us wonder where all the white people who could act were. In the early days of the talkies Coleman Francis’s directorial style and in particular the vocal performances (if you can call them that) he evoked from his actors (if you can call them that) would have been completely au courant, and despite all the advances in sound film in the intervening 34 years Coleman Francis still wanted to party (and direct) like it was 1929. At the end our two murderous lovebirds get gunned down by a guy in a helicopter — apparently one of Francis’s weird directorial trademarks (along with airplanes and coffee) was having the villains dispatched by a guy with a gun, with none of that phony Left-wing nonsense about due process of law — perhaps not surprising for someone whose best-known credit as an actor was John Wayne’s infamously Right-wing Viet Nam propaganda film The Green Berets, and one a far more talented filmmaker, Clint Eastwood, also seems into (the vigilantism with which Eastwood ended Mystic River seemed to have been a half-thought-out carryover from one of his Westerns into a modern-dress milieu, where it didn’t really work).

There’s a group of people on imdb.com who are bound and determined to keep The Skydivers rated on the site as the worst film of all time, but sorry, Coleman Francis, you don’t even get that distinction: though boring, stupid and with virtually no redeeming qualities (aside from that hotshot guitar instrumental by Jimmy Bryant and the Night Jumpers), it’s not downright offensive the way Shriek of the Mutilated (my choice for the worst film of all time) or Manos: The Hands of Fate (its principal rival for the worst-of-all-time title on imdb.com) were: it’s just a waste of celluloid that manages to make the idiotic audio-visual short MST3K prefaced it with, a show about “industrial arts” (i.e., shop) classes and how they’re not just for dummies, but they can prepare you for all sorts of careers including architecture, engineering and professional sports, seem like a highly professional and even insightful film by comparison (though, alas, its anonymous makers cut it short just as it was getting interesting — when we were seeing a whole bunch of basketball players in the locker room displaying an enviably hot amount of pale white skin … that’s nostalgia for you, when white people still played basketball). It did evoke some particularly brilliant wisecracks from the MST3K’ers, including one in which one of the characters is getting plastered on beer after beer after beer in the local bar (one of Coleman Francis’s brilliantly realistic cardboard-and-plywood sets) and the voiceover says, “We had Dylan Thomas in here and he didn’t drink this much!,” and again later on when one of the ’bots asked where was the guy in a black hoodie representing Death and playing a chess game with the lead.

Go Into Your Dance (Warners as “First National,” 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I decided to redress the balance by running a couple of the movies Turner Classic Movies showed last January in their Busby Berkeley marathon. One, the 1935 film Go Into Your Dance — the only co-starring vehicle for Al Jolson and his then-wife, Ruby Keeler — was included under false pretenses because Berkeley didn’t choreograph or stage its dance numbers: Bobby Connolly did, though he did so with something at least approaching the Berkeley flair. At the end of their first big number together, “About a Quarter to Nine” — which was so much the “plug song” from the film that Warner Brothers actually started its premiere showing at 8:45 p.m. — Jolson and Keeler magically ascend through the sky and into space until they become the Man and Woman in the Moon, with the faces of 12 chorus girls appearing around the moon’s circumference, forming a clock face as Jolson and Keeler put their own arms into the position of clock hands at — you guessed it — a quarter to nine. Later on, in the film’s other big production, “She’s a Latin from Manhattan,” Keeler and the chorus girls do a marvelous dance on a rotating globe of the world.

The big numbers aside, Go Into Your Dance is distinguished mainly for how the screenwriter, Earl Baldwin (working from a novel by Bradford Ropes, also the author of the book on which 42nd Street was based), incorporated some of the least attractive qualities of the real-life Al Jolson into his character for the film. The real Jolson was known as a massive egomaniac with a total disinterest in the welfare and reputations of the other people who appeared in his shows; he was also a heavy drinker and frequented the racetracks every chance he got. Baldwin took these facts and turned Jolson — as “Al Howard” — into a slimy character who’s rendered himself totally unemployable on Broadway by walking out on show after show, thereby putting whole hordes of chorines and technicians out of work, in order to gamble and play around in the places where the ponies run. Glenda Farrell (the marvelously butch heroine of Mystery of the Wax Museum — the remake of which, House of Wax, suffered majorly from the elimination of her character) plays Jolson’s sister, who discovers him in Aguascalientes after arriving on a cross-country train from New York to San Diego at the Santa Fe depot. (It’s a second-unit shot, to be sure, but at least the Santa Fe Depot where they arrive is recognizable as the real thing — though the train she actually gets off of, after the establishing shot of the real station, is clearly a mock-up on the Warners backlot.)

Farrell actually steals the first half of the film right out from under the principals, as she arranges for her friend, chorus-girl Keeler (playing a character named “Dorothy Wayne” — according to Jolson’s biographer, Michael Freedland, Jolson blew quite a few takes by addressing his wife as “Ruby” instead of calling her “Dorothy” as per Baldwin’s script), to tour the country with Jolson as both his partner and his keeper. (I could just imagine her billing: “She Sings! She Dances! She’s Co-Dependent!”) They score a job at a Chicago nightclub and from there Jolson gets the backing of a gangster (Barton MacLane) whose wife (Helen Morgan) wants to return to show business; MacLane will finance Jolson in his own Broadway show if he’ll give Morgan a part (for which she auditions by — you guessed it — sitting atop a piano and belting out a torch ballad called “The Little Things You Used to Do”) — and thereupon develop the typical plot complications: MacLane loves Morgan, Morgan gets a crush on Jolson, but Jolson only has eyes for Keeler and turns Morgan down — whereupon, in a totally incomprehensible plot complication, MacLane orders two hit men to go to New York and kill Jolson for turning down his wife’s advances. (Warner Brothers seems to have been interested in combining both the kinds of movies they were best known for at this time — musicals and gangster films.)

Meanwhile, Glenda Farrell gets herself arrested in Philadelphia for being in a hotel room with a female friend while two gangsters mow down a third — an even more unbelievable plot complication involving a character we’ve been led to believe up until then was a paragon of level-headedness — and Jolson puts up the bond money to get her out on bail rather than give Actors’ Equity the bond they wanted to allow him to open the show. In the end, Jolson opens the show after all — the charges against Farrell were dropped with literally minutes to spare — and MacLane tries to call off the hit but can’t reach his killers. So during the intermission, Jolson and Keeler go outside for some air — and the baddies blast away at them, with Keeler getting in front of the bullet meant for Jolson and stopping it with her shoulder. Jolson is about to stop the performance altogether but Keeler convinces him that The Show Must Go On, so the black-faced Jolson goes on and sings the title song (“When you’ve been singing a sad and blue song/Go into your dance”), has a dazzling success, goes backstage to see if Keeler is all right, which she is — The End. For a 1935 musical, it’s a bizarrely melodramatic plot, and Jolson can’t act for beans — it seems odd that he was more effective as an actor in the silent sequences of The Jazz Singer than he was in his all-talkies — but, as with most of his films, once he starts singing the deficiencies in his acting cease to matter. Incidentally, Charles was confused by the trailer for the film, which TCM showed just before it — and so was I, because it showed a scene in which Jolson and Keeler are running through the title song (he singing it and she dancing it) that didn’t appear in the final film! Also, this appeared to be a reissue print — it had the later, more ornate version of the Warner Brothers “shield” logo at the beginning and an opening title which referred to “the show business world of 1935” as if that were already an historic period — possibly one prepared by Warners after the success of the Jolson biopic The Jolson Story from Columbia in 1946 (with Jolson supplying his own voice — and, in the “Swanee” number, his body — for a performance by Larry Parks) rekindled audience interest in Jolson himself. (It’s also interesting to note that in the trailer, which looked like the original one from 1935, Keeler was billed first and Jolson second — while the film itself had Jolson billed above the title and Keeler billed below it!) — 4/5/98

•••••

The film was Go Into Your Dance, the second of the three movies Al Jolson made for Warner Bros. after he re-signed with them in 1934 following the debacle of Hallelujah, I’m a Bum at United Artists the year before. It was also the one time Jolson and his (then) real-life wife, Ruby Keeler, worked in the same movie, and after the relative innovation of Wonder Bar one can tell Warners was “running for cover” and piecing this movie together from elements that had worked for them before, both in Jolson’s movies and in the fabulously successful cycle of films Keeler had been making with Dick Powell as her co-star and Busby Berkeley as dance director: 42^nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and Dames. They even reached for their story to a 1934 novel by Bradford Ropes, another of whose books had provided the story for 42^nd Street, and came up with a wild and woolly tale in which Al Howard (Al Jolson), a mega-talented but also incredibly irresponsible entertainer, has disappeared in the middle of the run of a hit Broadway revue, causing its cancellation and putting the entire rest of the cast, orchestra and crew out of work.

Howard’s level-headed sister Molly (Glenda Farrell, a welcome sight in this film, bringing her usual authority to her role) figures out that he’s probably bailed to go to a racetrack, and it’s only a matter of finding where one is open. Since all the tracks in New York and the East Coast generally are closed, she heads across country and gets off in San Diego at the Santa Fe depot (Charles and I had just visited the Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park, which features at least two models of this depot, and that was one reason I wanted to watch this film again: the sequence was actually shot at the real depot, and at least from the outside it looks today pretty much the way it did in 1935) so she can take a bus across the U.S.-Mexico border (remember when it was that easy to get across?) and trace Al to the track at Aguascalientes. (The track at Aguascalientes was a favored hangout of the real Al Jolson, too. A lot of Hollywood celebrities went there since alcohol was legally available in Mexico while Prohibition was at least technically in force in the U.S., though once Repeal went through in 1933 it lost quite a bit of its appeal.)

She finds him in a bar, where he’s crashed the stage show and is blasting out “Cielito Lindo,” and tells him that there’s no chance of him doing another Broadway show since all the producers have blackballed him and the Actors’ Equity Association won’t let their actors work with him because they’re afraid he’ll pull another walkout and leave them all unemployed. While in San Diego Molly ran into Dorothy Wayne (Ruby Keeler), a chorus girl she knew previously, and hits on the idea of getting her to team up with Al and essentially become his minder. At first Al is reluctant — he’s always worked solo and he doesn’t want to change now — but he’s eventually tricked into it by a nightclub owner in Chicago, who had already cut a deal with Molly to hire Al as long as he came with a partner. The two become a major success in Chicago but Dorothy wants to quit the act because she’s fallen in love with Al, while he doesn’t know or care that she exists outside their performances. Al persuades her to stay because he’s hit on a plan to break the blacklist on him in New York: he’ll rent a disused theatre on Broadway and turn it into a giant cabaret, with dancing, an orchestra and a floor show in which he and Dorothy will star.

There’s only one catch: Al’s backer, Duke (Barton MacLane), is a Chicago gangster with a reputation for having people who cost him money knocked off. He’s also married to Luana Bell (Helen Morgan), a former torch singer who wants to make a comeback, and including her in the show is one of his conditions for financing it. Once the principals move to New York and begin rehearsals — and Al, acutely aware of the responsibilities he’s taken on, abandons his cavalier attitude towards his profession and throws himself into rehearsing the cast and preparing the show — Luana starts cruising Al and Al responds, despite the warnings from both Molly and Dorothy that he’s courting trouble big-time by making moves on a gangster’s wife. (This part of the story oddly — and perhaps deliberately — resembles the way the real-life Jolson and Keeler got together: Keeler was the 19-year-old girlfriend of gangster Johnny Irish when Jolson spotted her in a show and started dating her, and when Jolson’s and Keeler’s affair turned serious Irish was furiously jealous and wanted to have Jolson killed. Then his gangster colleagues, realizing that one of them ordering a hit on a major celebrity would bring a lot of police attention none of them would want, talked Irish out of knocking off Jolson, and he gave Keeler up and let Jolson have her.)

Jackson (Joseph Crehan), the Actors’ Equity representative, insists that Al put up a $30,000 bond to ensure that the cast will still be paid even if he walks out, and Al raises the money but then uses it to bail out his sister Molly, who’s been arrested in Philadelphia on a murder charge of which she’s innocent. Furious both that Al isn’t going to be able to open the show on time and that he’s cruising his wife, Duke calls in a couple of hit men to kill Al on the night the show was supposed to open — only Molly appears for her court date just in time, Al gets his money back, the show goes on as scheduled and Duke, learning this by phone in Chicago, calls Luana and tells her to tell the hit men the contract is off. Only Luana, out of a jealous hissy-fit against Al, lets the assassination go on as scheduled — but in fact Al escapes because Dorothy throws herself in the path of the bullets and gets wounded. Her willingness to give up her life for him finally convinces Al that Dorothy is the woman he belongs with, and the show ends with Dorothy backstage under the care of a doctor who was actually called in from the audience, and Al onstage singing his heart out on the title song, one of those shining-through-adversity pieces and a shameless ripoff of the endings of Jolson’s first three films, all of which finished with him having to give a performance while he was grief-stricken (over the death of his father in The Jazz Singer, the death of his son in The Singing Fool, and the near-death of his son in Say It With Songs).

 Go Into Your Dance drew on tropes from previous Jolson films (the number with which he opens the big show in New York, “Casino de Paree,” strongly resembles “Vive la France” from Wonder Bar, in which the bar Jolson was both running and entertaining in was in the real “Paree”) and also from previous Warners films (including shoehorning a gangster story into a musical). The mix is surprisingly entertaining even though Jolson and Keeler aren’t exactly the most charismatic real-life couple ever put on screen — it’s interesting how some couples who were married, or at least romantically involved (Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall, Newman and Woodward, Burton and Taylor) struck genuine sparks on screen, while others didn’t (Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks made only one film together, likewise Jeanette MacDonald and Gene Raymond), and in the case of Jolson and Keeler it helps that he was a singer and she was primarily a dancer (so they’re not really in competition with each other) but it decidedly doesn’t help that Tony Gaudio’s cinematography made it all too clear how much older Jolson was than Keeler (Jolson was born May 26, 1886 and Keeler was born August 25, 1910, and he looks a quarter-century older than her on screen) — or that he gave Helen Morgan the same unflattering photography she’d got in Marie Galante the year before. (The next year, director James Whale and cinematographer John Mescall would give Morgan the full glamour treatment in the 1936 version of Show Boat, making her actually look younger than she had in her films the previous two years.)

It also doesn’t help that the song Morgan got, “The Little Things You Used to Do,” isn’t very good; like the rest of the film’s score, it was written by Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin (lyrics), but clearly writing for Jolson, Keeler or Dick Powell turned Warren and Dubin on a lot more than writing for Helen Morgan. The other songs are splendid, particularly the ones that became hits at the time: “She’s a Latin from Manhattan” and “About a Quarter to Nine.” (Warners was so sure that would be the big hit that they even scheduled the film’s premiere to start at 8:45 p.m.) According to Michael Freedland’s book on Jolson, during the shooting he blew many takes by calling Keeler “Ruby” instead of her character name “Dorothy” or “Dot,” and after the film was premiered and was an instant success, Keeler found Jolson literally crying. Naturally she asked why, and he said, “Because they don’t want me anymore. They want us” — which speaks volumes about why they never made another film together and their marriage broke up within a few years.

 Go Into Your Dance is actually a quite good movie, even though Jolson and Keeler make a coolly professional couple rather than a blazingly charismatic one; the direction by the usually hacky Archie L. Mayo is properly atmospheric and moves the story along, the script by Earl Baldwin falls back on pre-tested material but manages to combine some of the clichés in fresh and appealing ways, and the appearances of Glenda Farrell, Helen Morgan and Patsy Kelly (in an all-too-small comic-relief role) add a great deal to the appeal. So do the quite stunning production numbers, credited to Bobby Connolly — though when I first saw this film it was part of a Turner Classic Movies salute to Busby Berkeley and I wondered if they’d just made a mistake. Now I’m not so sure; the dazzling final shots of the “She’s a Latin from Manhattan” number, in which a giant half-globe representing the northern hemisphere revolves around the stage while Keeler dances atop it and the chorus girls cavort around it, seem far more believable as Berkeley’s work than Connolly’s.

Not that the other numbers don’t have their points: the “Quarter to Nine” number, supposedly taking place in the Chicago club before the principals return to New York, has a jump cut straight out of the Lubitsch Merry Widow in which Jolson and his male chorus line (all of whom are carrying walking sticks and wearing top hat, white tie and tails — coincidence or the folks at Warners looking over their shoulders at the competition from Fred Astaire and Top Hat at RKO?) suddenly are in blackface (in The Merry Widow it was Jeanette MacDonald doffing her black widow’s weeds and her entire wardrobe turning in one cut from black to white, with even her black lapdog turning into a white one), and Jolson’s only excursions into blackface in this film are that short bit of “Quarter to Nine” and a longer sequence on the title song towards the end. Go Into Your Dance is an appealing movie, partly on the basis of Jolson’s extraordinary strength as an entertainer and partly because the sweetness and lightness usually associated with musicals are leavened by a bit of darkness; it’s not The Jazz Singer, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum or Wonder Bar but within the limits of a pretty contrived script it manages to work. — 10/6/11

X-Men: First Class (Bad Hat Harry Productions, Donners’ Company, Marv Films, Dune, 20th Century-Fox, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was X-Men: First Class, an odd choice since neither Charles nor I have ever been that interested in the X-Men — we’ve neither read the comics nor seen any of the previous films in the series — though I figured that wouldn’t be that much of a problem since this was supposed to be a prequel and an origin story rather than a sequel. Directed by Matthew Vaughn from a story and script by the usual committee — original (more or less) story by Bryan Singer (who also directed the first two X-Men films and was slated to helm this one as well until he got sidetracked by his schedule on Jack the Giant Killer) and Sheldon Turner, and a script started by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz and finished by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn — this project started out as the origin of the X-Men’s principal villain, Magneto, t/n Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner as a boy, Michael Fassbender as an adult). Instead they decided to make it an overall origin story about the rise of the two X-Men factions (X-Men, in case you’ve been as in the dark about this cultural phenomenon as I was until last night, are mutant humans created by atomic radiation; they first appeared in the 1940’s as children and got together in two factions, one group of evil X-men and one group of good ones, in the 1960’s when the comic book was launched), one led first by Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon, whose star has fallen far enough that his name in the credits is prefaced with “and”) and then by Erik a.k.a. Magneto, and one led by Charles Xavier (Laurence Belcher as a boy, James McAvoy as an adult), who’s both a mutant himself and a geneticist at Oxford University who uses his scientific knowledge to figure out what’s happened to him and the other mutants.

The other mutants include Raven, later Mystique (Morgan Lily as a girl, Jennifer Lawrence as an adult), who’s able to shape-shift to normal human appearance but whose natural state is humanoid in shape but with scaly blue skin and flaming red hair — she and Xavier get a nice meet-cute as kids when she breaks into his kitchen posing as his mother and he sees right through her disguise because she says she’s making him some hot chocolate and his real mom would have had a servant do that instead of doing it, or anything else for him, herself — plus Hank McCoy, a.k.a. Beast (Nicholas Houdt), who has fingers rather than toes on his feet as well as his hands (and who later, thanks to a serum he gives himself to try to retain his powers but take on normal human appearance, transforms into a blue creature with wolfman-like facial hair, though the mutation doesn’t improve his eyesight any: he still needs the nerdy-looking glasses he started out with); Angel (Zoë Kravitz), who’s scouted at a strip club and who joins the good X-Men for a while but then defects to the bad ones; Sean Cassidy a.k.a. Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), whose mutant schtick is being able to deliver a loud, piercing, at least partially ultrasonic scream (he also learns midway through the film how to fly by using his screams to keep himself aloft on artificial wings, which turns out to be important after Angel, the only other mutant who can fly, defects); and Havok a.k.a. Alex Summers (Lucas Till). There’s also a Black mutant, but he’s killed off about halfway through the film, as well as a woman whose natural skin is made of diamonds, but she disappears midway through and only reappears at the end.

The movie is intriguing for a superhero story in that it incorporates actual history — it begins in 1944 and ends in 1962 against the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis, in which the mutants on both sides play an important part: Sebastian tries to manipulate events to spark a nuclear war in which normal humans will die but the mutants will live and eventually take over the world (the fact that given the assumption of the story that radiation created the mutants in the first place, he doesn’t stop to think that a nuclear war will exponentially increase the population of mutants and therefore the number of rivals with the power to bring down the absolute dictatorial rule he was hoping to establish on the future Earth) and the good X-Men try to stop him; they do so but then the U.S. and the Russians mount a joint attack on them and this causes Erik to defect from member of the good X-Men to leader of the bad ones.

There are a lot of interesting references to the language of Queer liberation — including one scene in which Raven assumes her normal blue-skinned appearance and proclaims herself “Mutant and Proud!,” another in which she and Erik are about to make love, only she’s in her blond fair-skinned (white) human’s guise and Erik insists that she’ll only turn him on if she goes blue (at this point I started an MST3K-style interpolation by singing Billy Joel’s song “Just the Way You Are”!); and a lot of rhetoric about how ordinary humans will always be prejudiced against mutants and therefore mutants should demand equality rather than expect to get it by petitioning for it or working to save humans’ butts. There’s also so many references to Nietzsche’s famous quote, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger,” that Nietzsche practically deserved a co-writer credit. X-Men: First Class is a decent superhero movie in the modern manner, though a lot of it (especially the exposition in the first hour) seems to drag on forever, and frankly the mutant powers of the X-Men are simply not as compelling visually as the powers of some of the other Marvel heroes (notably Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and Thor).

The two Fantastic Four movies and Thor remain my favorite movies based on the Marvel universe; this one mostly stays free of the insufferable pretensions Christopher Nolan laid onto the Batman movies (though including Nazis and Soviets in the dramatis personae — Erik was the subject of Mengele-like experiments as a child in 1944 Poland — enabled some more subtle political parallels and morals to be inserted into the script) — but it’s also surprisingly draggy in parts and James McAvoy seemed too nerdy an actor for the role of a charismatic professor who assembles the X-Men team and leads it even at the cost of his own mobility at the end (he ends up paralyzed below the waist and in a wheelchair — something that didn’t happen in the comics until the 1980’s but happens in this film in 1962, which got the filmmakers some pissy notes from X-Men comic fans who were upset that it happened so early), and though 10 minutes of the advertised 132-minute running time is taken up by a final credits roll, there isn’t one of the amusing post-credits sequences that have become a trademark in other Marvel movies (so you can safely turn off the DVD when the credits come on and not think you’re going to miss anything).

Once in a Lifetime (Universal, 1932)

 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had screened a quite interesting, if rather obscure, movie from the early 1930’s: Once in a Lifetime, the film adaptation of the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play from 1930 that lampooned Hollywood in the early years of the talkies. I’d been interested in seeing this (again; I had caught it on PBS in the 1970’s in what was ballyhooed as a major rediscovery, before the film just disappeared again!) after seeing Act One, the 1963 film based on Moss Hart’s autobiography, which told the story of how he came to write Once in a Lifetime and Sam H. Harris accepted it for production if he could get the far more experienced and well-known Kaufman to rewrite it with him and direct the production. The movie was one of those stage-writers’ spoofs of Hollywood that made the movie business seem terminally silly — the running gag is that even the most stupid mistakes of a boy-wonder studio executive are hailed as manifestations of genius — that the film was prefaced by a written foreword by Universal’s owner, Carl Laemmle, stating, “When I bought the motion picture rights to Once in a Lifetime, the stage play which so mercilessly and hilariously poked fun at Hollywood and its motion picture people, the critics said I would not dare make use of its best material on the screen. It was too funny, they said, and it would make the world laugh at us! I pity the man who cannot enjoy a laugh at his own expense.”

Ironically, both the New York Times and Variety complained that some of the original wisecracks were bowdlerized or omitted altogether in the film (inevitably, given the typical 2 ½-hour length of a three-act play in 1930 versus the 90 minutes available for the film version), though the biggest surprise in the movie today for anyone who’s read Act One or seen the movie based on it is, contrary to the impression Hart left that the first act jelled really easily while the second and third acts still needed work practically to the moment of the New York premiere, the film actually gets considerably funnier as it goes along. The film opens with a marquee advertising The Jazz Singer (mistakenly called an all-talking film in the dialogue — it was actually a part-talkie with two dialogue scenes and six songs) — itself an oddity because it was unusual in 1932 for one studio even to acknowledge the existence of a film made by another — and then cuts to a vaudeville theater where, because of competition from talking pictures, almost no one has shown up to see the trio of George Lewis (Jack Oakie, top-billed), May Daniels (Aline MacMahon) and Jerry Hyland (Russell Hopton) perform. After their last performance, Jerry goes to see The Jazz Singer at a late-night showing and comes back convinced that the way to salvage their fortunes is to abandon their vaudeville act (which he actually sells to another performer to finance their trip!) and go to Hollywood. He’s not sure what they should do there, but he’s sure they’ll think of something. May remembers an elocution class she once took and suggests they set themselves up as voice teachers, coaching the stars of the silent screen in how to act with their voices.

On the train they meet an ex-vaudevillian, Helen Hobart (Louise Fazenda, funny though hardly used to her best capacity), who’s become a leading movie gossip columnist; and Lawrence Vail (Onslow Stevens, playing a part Kaufman played himself in the original stage production), a frustrated screenwriter who laments the writer’s lot in Hollywood: he’s signed up, offered a fantastic sum of money, ensconced in an office on the studio lot — and then never sent for or given any actual work. For Kaufman, who had never been to Hollywood before he worked on the play — though he’d worked on the script of the Marx Brothers’ film The Cocoanuts, based on the script he and Morrie Ryskind wrote for them as a stage show, since that film was shot in New York — this was a peculiar case of life imitating art: when he was brought out to Hollywood to write another Marx Brothers’ project, A Night at the Opera, he was given an office at MGM and for nearly a year had no contact with anyone in the studio except the anonymous page who shoved his paycheck under his office door every week. Kaufman eventually got bored and decided to walk out on the studio and take a three-month vacation — and when he returned, everything in his office was exactly as he had left it and the only difference was three months’ more paychecks shoved under his door in the interim. A month later, he was finally summoned by MGM production chief Irving Thalberg — and he showed up with no one at the studio the wiser about where he’d been in the meantime!

Vail mentions that the person the vaudevillians are going to Hollywood to see, Herman Glogauer of the Glogauer studios, turned down the Vitaphone (so did a lot of real-life Hollywood moguls who didn’t see any point in adding sound to pictures!) — and Lewis, whose name is now prefaced by “Dr.” because he’s posing as a voice specialist (as which he and his comrades have already failed and been fired), repeats Vail’s anti-Hollywood tirades to the face of Glogauer (Gregory Ratoff) himself, thereby gaining an instant reputation as a genius and winning a job as a production supervisor. He gets to work on a movie directed by the studio’s top director, Rudolf Kammerling (Gregory Gaye), and he’s even able to cast the female lead with Susan Walker (Sidney Fox), a pretty but singularly untalented actress he met on the train and instantly became infatuated with. Lewis starts shooting his film and just about everything goes wrong — the Indian nuts he’s constantly cracking open and eating make clicking noises on the soundtrack, two days’ worth of scenes end up totally dark because he forgot to tell the technicians to turn on the lights, and at the end of the film Glogauer finds out that instead of shooting the backstage story he was supposed to be making, he mistakenly shot a 1910 script originally made with Florence Lawrence and Maurice Costello.

Then the film is previewed — and the reviews are raves, with the critics saying it’s about time Hollywood made something that wasn’t a backstage story, the clicking on the soundtrack is an interesting effect that adds tension to the drama, and the scenes played in total darkness are a refreshing bit of subtlety and artistry in the movies. Even Lewis’s other boners — like blowing up all Glogauer’s silent stages to make room for soundstages (which Glogauer orders filmed for special-effects sequences, anticipating David O. Selznick burning down his backlot at the start of Gone With the Wind — thus clearing the space for the new sets he needed and also creating a spectacular fire sequence used to represent the burning of Atlanta) and buying 2,000 airplanes for the studio in order to get one free for himself (which turns out to be a great move when aviation pictures become the newest rage — no doubt Kaufman and Hart were thinking of the similarly extravagant Howard Hughes and Hell’s Angels here — and, since Glogauer owns all the airplanes in town now, he can make back twice what he paid for them by selling them to other studios) — just add to his reputation and his “genius.”

Once in a Lifetime is a great movie (though Singin’ in the Rain remains the best film about the transition from silent to sound) that gets better as it goes along, and particularly after it moves from the dull opening act (one wonders if the characters will ever get out of that damned train!) to the parts that actually lampoon Hollywood and moviemaking. It could have used a stronger director than Russell Mack (what a pity Universal didn’t put Preston Sturges, then working on the lot as a journeyman screenwriter but with a burning itch to direct, on it!) and possibly a better cast (imagine Groucho Marx in one of the key male roles and ZaSu Pitts, stuck in the minor role of Glogauer’s secretary, in the MacMahon part), but Seton I. Miller’s script preserves the loony wisecrackery of a George S. Kaufman (alone or in collaboration; just about everybody who worked with him ultimately developed his sense of humor) script and the movie is great fun.