by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was “X” Marks the Spot, a title Hollywood has used several times (including
a 1942 Republic actioner with Dan “Captain America” Purcell that might be worth
seeing), but this one was a 1931
indie from Tiffany Studios that was quite well done. Like later enterprises
like World Wide and Grand National, they were at least trying for the “finish” and polish of a major-studio
production, and this one was unusually good for an early-1930’s indie (alas,
Tiffany was another under-capitalized casualty of the Depression). The story
starts in 1923, when Ted Lloyd (Wallace Ford) is a reporter on a paper called
the Blade in an unnamed
medium-sized city. He’s hoping to land a job in New York, and his hopes tick up
when his editor, George Howard (Lew Cody), gets hired by a New York paper and
promises someday to send for Ted and hire him. Alas, Ted’s kid sister Gloria
(Helen Parrish) is run over by a car and the only way she can keep the ability
to walk is if Ted can raise the $5,000 to send her to Germany to see the one
doctor in the world who knows how to do the operation required. After asking
Howard and several other friends for help, Ted appeals to the one person in
town who seems to have that kind of money available, Riggs (Fred Kohler), the
head of the town’s gangs. At first Riggs turns him down because the two men
can’t stand each other — the Blade
has been attacking gangsters in general and Riggs in particular — but
eventually, as a sort of noblesse oblige, Riggs casually hands Ted a bundle with the money and says he won’t
expect Ted to pay him back but Ted will owe him a favor someday.
The film
flashes forward eight years and moves to New York City, where Howard is editor
of a tabloid called the Gazette
and Ted is the paper’s star columnist — when Howard tells his production people
to take out a story about a Presidential proclamation to make room for more
coverage of a sensational divorce case, both Charles and I thought, “Plus
ça change, plus ça même chose” — and Ted
has just broken a story about chorus girl Vivian Parker (Mary Nolan, with a
spectacular head of platinum-blonde hair that should have had Jean Harlow
worried about the competition) and her sugar daddy. Only said sugar daddy
threatens the paper with a libel suit, and in order to forestall this Ted makes
a date with Vivian at her apartment — thereby understandably pissing off his
secretary and girlfriend, Sue (Sally Blane, Loretta Young’s real-life sister) —
to try to get her to sign a release ending the lawsuit. Vivian crumples the
release form in contempt but doesn’t tear it up — that becomes an important
plot point later — and later, after Ted leaves her apartment, someone else
comes in, steals a few of her jewels and knocks her off. Ted is suspect number
one — after all, he clearly had a motive, revealed to the police when they
uncrumple the release form and decide Ted murdered Vivian in a fit of rage when
she refused to sign it — only he soon learns that the real criminal is Riggs.
Riggs summons Ted and tells him not to reveal to the cops that Riggs was
involved; he also demands $5,000 from Ted so he can escape — and Ted obliges,
but the whole conversation is overheard by, of all people, Ted’s sister Gloria
(now an adult — though still a pretty naïve and stupid one — and played by
Joyce Coad). She reports it to Ted’s bosses at the Gazette and they in turn report it to the police, who stake
out Ted’s bank and follow him once he withdraws the money to find out whom he’s
taking it to. The cops arrest Riggs and he, of course, is convinced Ted
double-crossed him. Riggs goes on trial for the murder, with Ted as a reluctant
witness for the prosecution, and the night before the verdict comes in he
sneaks something into the courtroom which turns out to be a gun. After the
guilty verdict comes in, Riggs grabs the gun he’s previously hidden there,
shoots a court clerk and takes an old man hostage, and it ends with a gun
battle between Riggs and Ted that ends the way you expect it to, though
curiously it takes place in a room full of smoke (the cops have shot tear gas
into the room hoping to incapacitate Riggs and take him alive) and it’s hard to
see what’s going on.
“X” Marks the Spot is a quite good movie, cleverly written by Warren Duff and Gordon
Kahn, full of nice wisecracks — notably the scene in court in which Vivian’s
servant (Clarence Muse) is testifying, the lawyer says, “You’ve established
that there was a fire escape outside the building,” and Muse says, “Yeah, I
said there was, but I didn’t establish it — it was already there before I was”
— and vividly directed by Erle C. Kenton, who includes Venetian-blind shots
(the easy “atmosphere” gimmick used by directors in low-budget films then),
oblique camera angles, lots of close-ups (usually low-budget films skimped on
close-ups because they took time to light properly and these productions were
on ultra-tight schedules) and a sense of pace rare in an indie director of the
time. It’s no wonder within two years Kenton was working at the majors, doing
movies like the 1933 Island of Lost Souls (the first, and by far the best, film of H. G. Wells’ The
Island of Dr. Moreau), and later in the
1940’s he’d be under contract to Universal and do three of their later
Frankenstein cycle films (Ghost of Frankenstein, House of
Frankenstein and House of Dracula), the movies on which rests however much of a
reputation he has today. Though we were watching “X” Marks the Spot in a typically tacky archive.org download — the
images were ghosted and un-crisp, and a couple of times the print they were
transferring jumped the sprocket holes and took a few seconds to settle back in
— the film itself was surprisingly good, though still well within the Hollywood
cliché bank, and for once I could watch an indie crime film without wishing it had been made at Warner Bros. with James
Cagney as star!
