Sunday, January 31, 2021

The Impatient Maiden (Universal; 1932)


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

Last night I’d planned a long night of movie-watching including the next two items in sequence on our run-through of the James Whale oeuvre and a film being shown on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley,” the fascinating 1964 remake of The Killers. The next film in the Whale canon – and his first after the smash success of Frankenstein – was an oddball item called The Impatient Maiden, based on a 1931 book by Donald Henderson Clarke which Carl Laemmle, Jr. (who’d been put in charge of Universal by his father in 1930 when he was just 20 years old) bought while it was still in galley proofs and hadn’t been officially published. Clarke’s novel was called The Impatient Virgin and dealt with a young woman who had decided that the personal, professional and especially sexual limitations put on the female sex by the mores of the time weren’t for her. Laemmle originally bought the book as a vehicle for Clara Bow, the 1920’s flapper star whom he hoped to borrow from her home studio, Paramount. Then the project collapsed: first Bow decided she didn’t like the story and wouldn’t do it unless the script were completely rewritten to her specifications. Then Bow got embroiled in a scandal that began when she caught her personal assistant, Daisy DeVoe, embezzling from her and fired her. DeVoe filed an unlawful-termination lawsuit and alleged during it that Bow was a nymphomaniac who had had various sexual adventures, including taking on the entire UCLA football team in one night. DeVoe ultimately lost her lawsuit but the lies she made about Bow stuck – and are still being repeated as “truth” by otherwise sober, responsible historians of Hollywood.

Paramount fired Bow, but given that scandal cuts both ways in the entertainment industry a number of other studios got interested in Bow, including MGM (who wanted her for Red-Headed Woman, which ultimately became the star-making vehicle for Jean Harlow even though Harlow had to darken her hair for the role, whereas Bow really was a redhead) and RKO (who wanted her for What Price Hollywood?, the beta version of A Star Is Born, which eventually got made with Constance Bennett). Eventually in 1932 Bow signed with Fox because she had just married Western actor Rex Bell; he had a ranch in Nevada which he needed money to save, and while the other studios interested in her wanted her to sign long-term contracts Fox was willing to hire her for just two films, and she figured with the money from them she could save her husband’s ranch and retire, which she did. (The first of Bow’s two Fox films, Call Her Savage, surfaced a decade or so ago on TCM and turned out to be a masterpiece, one of the best films to come out of Hollywood’s relative period of sexual freedom on screen between 1930 and 1934, thanks to John Francis Dillon’s knowing direction and a superb, rangy performance by Bow which showed she could do far more than the rather limited good-time girls she’d played at Paramount.)

That relative period of freedom is often – erroneously – referred to in film histories as the “pre-Code” era because it came before the draconian level of enforcement the Motion Picture Production Code Administration imposed after the Legion of Decency, a lobbying organization founded by the Roman Catholic Church, came down on the film business in 1934 – but anyone who thinks the 1930-34 period was truly “pre-Code” is in for a rude awakening if they read the account James Curtis tells of the making of The Impatient Maiden in his biography of James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters. No sooner had Carl Laemmle, Jr. closed on the rights to The Impatient Virgin and sent the novel off to the Production Code Administration for review than he got back a scathing letter to the effect that under no circumstances would they approve such a sex-driven story for film. Laemmle countered with a letter which essentially said that under his treatment, the film would be a stern morality tale against any woman who attempted any degree of independence or any adult life other than that of a wife and mother: “The whole philosophy of the picture will be that a girl who tries to buck the social conventions, to live her own life, have a career, is foredoomed to unhappiness and futility, which she finally recognizes after bitter experience and ends up marrying the boy whom she really loves and wants to marry her after she realizes the silliness and stupidity of fighting her own lover for the sake of a modern and false idea.” Eventually after several script rewrites, a title change (the “V-word” remained so verboten under the Production Code that as late as 1953 Otto Preminger’s film The Moon Is Blue was denied a Code Seal of Approval because its dialogue contained the words “virgin” and “pregnant”) and at least three directors, including William Wyler and Cyril Gardner, The Impatient Maiden finally went before the cameras in early 1932 with Whale directing a script by Richard Schayer and Winifred Dunn.

Most Whale fans dismiss The Impatient Maiden as a studio assignment he had little to do with and which wasn’t very interesting, but it turned out to be a better film than its history would lead one to believe – even though there were better movies around the same time that dealt with the same issues raised by a woman using her sexuality to get ahead, including MGM’s The Easiest Way and the film Clara Bow had the good sense to make instead, Call Her Savage. The Impatient Maiden begins as almost a parody of Waterloo Bridge, with the same female star, Mae Clarke, playing Ruth Robbins (her name had been “Rollins” in the book), a career woman who works as the secretary to a divorce lawyer, Albert Hartman (John Halliday). She’s acquired a cynical view of marriage from listening to all the formerly loving spouses heatedly denounce each other in Hartman’s office while she’s had to take notes of their diatribes against each other. She also has a marriage-minded roommate named Betty Merrick (Una Merkel, playing her usual comic ditz after her surprisingly serious and moving turn as Ann Rutledge in D. W. Griffith’s 1930 biopic Abraham Lincoln).

The plot kicks off when a woman who lives in the same building as Ruth and Betty attempts to commit suicide by gas after she gets pregnant and her husband responds by leaving her. Ruth and Betty call the authorities and they send out a young doctor who’s still doing his residency, Myron Brown (Lew Ayres), and a male nurse who works with him, Clarence Howe (Andy Devine). Today they’d be called EMT’s (Emergency Medical Technicians). They come out in an ambulance whose windshield has the word “AMBULANCE” on it in normal lettering (in other early-1930’s movies we’ve seen ambulances with the word printed in mirror image so it would read correctly when a driver in front of it saw it in his rear-view mirror) and they make a bet with each other for 50¢ over whether they’ll be able to save her life with the emergency ventilator they brought with them. (This part of the movie sounds all too relevant today!) Ruth takes an interest in Myron but he explains he can’t marry her for at least two years; first he has to complete his residency and then it will take him at least a year to set up enough of a practice to support a wife. Betty falls head over heels for Clarence and couldn’t care less whether he can support her or not, though he’s convinced the new zippered straitjacket he’s invented will make him and Dr. Brown (who’s put what little money he has into it) enough to marry and support their girlfriends.

In what was the one shard of sexual content left over from the original novel by the time the platoons of screenwriters had got through chopping, channeling and making it acceptable to the Code authorities, Ruth’s employer Albert Hartman shows her a beautiful and lavish Art Deco apartment and says that it can be hers if only she … and, horrified, Ruth not only turns down Albert’s offer to “keep” her as a mistress but walks out on her legitimate job with him too. (Once again, in the age of #MeToo, this part of The Impatient Maiden seems all too relevant now.) Broke, Ruth visits an employment agency but is told they can’t place her without a reference from her previous employer. She starts feeling run-down and barely makes it home (she and Betty live in a building on top of Los Angeles’s legendary Angel’s Flight two-block railway, whose cars are slanted to match the acute inline they cover; the Angel’s Flight was a common sight in late-1940’s movies, especially films noir, but it was a surprise to see it in a movie this early and with no noir elements, though one could well imagine James Whale being a great noir director if he’d kept his career going long enough) when suddenly we realize that Schayer and Dunn are holding to Anton Chekhov’s dictum to aspiring playwrights that if you introduce a pistol in act one, you have to have it go off in act three.

Only in this movie the “pistol” is Ruth Robbins’ appendix; when she and Dr. Brown first met he felt her abdomen and warned her her appendix was about to rupture, and it duly does so in the last reels, forcing Betty to call an ambulance and take her to the hospital – where Dr. Brown is forced to operate on her alone since there’s been a multi-car collision and all the other E.R. doctors there are working to save the lives of its victims. So a film that started out more as a screwball comedy than anything else and then veered into romantic melodrama ends up as The Magnificent Obsession three years early: the good doctor has to save the life of his girlfriend and in the process win her back to being his girlfriend, and in the finale Dr. Brown writes a note to her on his prescription pad prescribing love, marriage and children – expressing the moral lesson Junior Laemmle promised the Production Code Administration that any woman who deviates from the fate of love, marriage and motherhood God (or at least the PCA’s version of God) hath decreed for her is going to suffer ruination, damnation, unemployment and even appendicitis. Ironically, the writers had done such a good job of purging the story out of anything racy that the only trouble it had with state censor boards (who were often even stricter than the PCA) came from the medical porn at the end, in which Whale depicted the operation with a surprising degree of depth (and gave Lew Ayres a warm-up for his recurring role as Dr. Kildare in an MGM film series in the late 1930’s). Whale had a friend named Dr. Stanley Immerman, whom he gave bit parts to in several of his movies and also used as a technical advisor when he needed help with a medical scene – and according to Curtis, a year after he advised Whale and Ayres on how to depict Mae Clarke undergoing a fictional appendectomy, he removed her appendix for real.

The Impatient Maiden comes off as actually a reasonably good film, and though it wasn’t a personal project Whale clearly liked its frequent changes of genre
and managed them quite well. He also got a nicely edgy performance from Lew Ayres even though he and Whale didn’t get along and Ayres complained to Curtis that Whale never gave him any indication after a take of whether or not he thought it was any good. The Impatient Maiden is hardly a great film by any means (and as I noted above quite a few other movies of the 1930-34 period dealt with these situations and moral issues more honestly and dramatically), but it’s a good deal better than its reputation and once again it makes me wish Whale had cast Lew Ayres instead of the wooden Kent Douglass in Waterloo Bridge. One can see why Whale fans are disappointed in it, especially given its position in his canon between two highly personal films that are acknowledged masterpieces, Frankenstein and The Old Dark House, but as a stage director Whale had handled a wide variety of projects and he didn’t see why his film career should be any different. Whale would go on to make a superb mystery thriller, The Kiss Before the Mirror (a “Hitchcock” film well before Alfred Hitchcock had developed his style to the level of Whale’s work); one of the greatest screwball comedies of all time, Remember Last Night? (an unjustly neglected film that ramped up both the drinking and the overall devil-may-care irresponsibility of The Thin Man, its obvious model, well past what MGM ever dared!); and one of the great musicals, the 1936 Show Boat. Whale is obviously best known for his horror films, but he could do a lot more than that!

The Old Dark House (Universal, 1932)


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

After The Impatient Virgin I cracked open a Blu-Ray disc I’d just bought of James Whale’s next film in sequence, The Old Dark House, a truly great movie which for years was the stepchild of Whale’s four horror classics (the other three being Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein) because for decades it was unshown. The Old Dark House began as a novel by British author J. B. Priestley, published in his own country in 1927 under the title Benighted but not available in the U.S. for two years after that. The American publisher changed the title to The Old Dark House because of the fear U.S. audiences wouldn’t know what “benighted” meant (though that word appears in the dialogue for the film) and it was a best-seller that seemed to have the makings of an important and commercial movie. Universal had already become known for movies taking place in old, dark houses filled with eccentric characters, notably German director Paul Leni’s 1927 hit The Cat and the Canary (Leni, making his first American film, took a typical Broadway melodrama about an heiress who’s deliberately being driven insane by relatives who covet her fortune and threw at it the entire armamentarium of expressionistic effects he’d learned in his native Germany) and Rupert Julian’s 1930 part-sound remake, The Cat Creeps.

Meanwhile, Universal had offered Boris Karloff a long-term contract after the huge success of Frankenstein, though they had hardly used him to advantage – they had given him the part of a New York nightclub owner in a gangster “B” called Night World (which contained a musical number called “Who’s Your Little Whosis?,” choreographed and directed by Busby Berkeley, not a name one expects to see associated with a Karloff film!) and cast him as himself in an episode of their popular “Cohens and Kellys” series, The Cohens and the Kellys in Hollywood. The Old Dark House was to be his second all-out horror production for Universal, and the original prints included this notice even before the studio logo and the official credits: “Karloff, the mad butler in this production, is the same Karloff who created the part of the mechanical monster in ‘Frankenstein.’ We explain this to settle all disputes in advance, even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility.” Alas, the Cohen Media Group, the current owners of the rights, have deleted this credit, ostensibly because Morgan, Karloff’s character in The Old Dark House, is not all that different from the monster: they’re both in heavy makeup and are mute except for making pre-verbal groans, grunts and screeches. But it still seems unfair to be deprived of a quirky credit the original audiences for this film got to see. The original ads for The Old Dark House also began Universal’s practice of billing Karloff only under his last name – later films would be promoted with trailers which billed him as “KARLOFF – The Uncanny!,” as if he were himself some monstrous being instead of simply a normal human actor with a special gift for these sorts of roles.

With a British setting and a mostly British cast as well as a British director, original story writer and screenwriter (James Whale’s friend Benn W. Levy), The Old Dark House often seems like a British film in exile, filled with scares and also the dry wit the Brits love in their humor that leavens the horror and makes the scary parts that much scarier. I confess I can’t separate The Old Dark House from the odd circumstances in which I first saw it: at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1970 on a late-night double bill with another then-recently rediscovered horror classic, Mystery of the Wax Museum (the 1933 film, the last feature made in two-strip Technicolor, which was more famously remade in 1953 as House of Wax, the first horror film in 3-D – but Mystery is a much, much better movie), and the uncertainty as to just how I was to get home from the screening only added to the unsettled mood the film put me in as I watched a movie I’d never heard of that turned out to be a masterpiece, fully the equal of the Whale horror movies I had heard of before: Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein.

The Old Dark House takes place on the proverbial dark and stormy night in Wales in which three people are caught in a major storm: they are married couple, Philip (Raymond Massey, who was Canadian but counted as “British” by extension because Canada is part of the British Commonwealth) and Margaret (Gloria Stuart) Waverton, and their friend Penderel (Melvyn Douglas), who it’s mentioned in passing is part of the so-called “Lost Generation” of the 1920’s because he’s suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder from his experiences in World War I. (World War I would be a lodestar for James Whale: he served in the British army until he was captured by the Germans, he spent the last two years in a POW camp where the only entertainment available was amateur theatricals the prisoners wrote, directed and acted in themselves – which Whale enjoyed so much he decided to make the theatre his career after the war – his first big stage success was the World War I play Journey’s End and his first three films, Hell’s Angels, Journey’s End and Waterloo Bridge, were all about the war.) An avalanche (staged surprisingly effectively by Universai’s special effects person, John P. Fulton) cuts them off and forces them to seek shelter at the Femm family home. Later they’re joined by two other people who’ve been stranded in the storm, working-class kid turned financier Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his companion Gladys Perkins (Lillian Bond), a former chorus girl who in order to pursue a career in showbiz took the name “Gladys Duquesne.” (This reminds one of Mae Clarke’s character in Waterloo Bridge, who also took a French-sounding last name, “Deauville,” to further her career as an entertainer.) Of course, when Gladys says that Sir William is nice to her because he only wants her as a companion and never tries to “do” anything with her, Charles and I couldn't help but joke, “Of course not! He’s Charles Laughton! He’s Gay!”

The Femms themselves, as I said in a previous blog post on The Old Dark House, are the most relentlessly dysfunctional fictional family since Edgar Allan Poe made up the Ushers: their apparent head is Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger, an actor Whale had known in England for over a decade when he brought him over for this, his first American film; later he would brilliantly portray the mad but also quite personable and charming Dr. Praetorius in The Bride of Frankenstein), a prissy and evidently repressed old man. His sister Rebecca (Eva Moore) is partially deaf and a hugely judgmental Christian who in one of the film’s most remarkable scenes points to Gloria Stuart’s diaphanous white dress (an outrageously impractical garment she had to put on because her other clothes got wet in the storm before they arrived – James Curtis’s Whale biography ridiculed him and his costume designer for putting her in something so ridiculous for the environment and missed the point that she’s wearing that because all her other clothes are wet) and her even more white skin and says that both of them will rot and she will be consigned to hell unless she finds God in a hurry. Rebecca mentions a long-dead Femm sister named Rachel who supposedly led a dissolute lifestyle and died in her 20’s, and there’s a fourth Femm sibling: Saul (Brember Wills), who’s kept in a room whose doors are locked from the outside because if he were let out he’d try to burn the Femm house down.

Though all these people are quite old, it turns out their father, Sir Roderick Femm – an obvious reference to Poe’s Roderick Usher – is still alive, and when two of the visitors discover him, ancient and bedridden, it is he who gives them the key exposition about who Saul Femm is and explains that, though Morgan is nothing but a brute, they have to keep him on staff to keep Saul under control. The other surprise about Sir Roderick Femm is that, though he’s a male character, Whale cast him with a woman, an aged veteran of the British stage named Elspeth Dudgeon, though to preserve her male incognito he not only had makeup artist Jack Pierce put spirit-gum whiskers on her face, he billed her in the credits as John Dudgeon. During The Old Dark House Morgan the butler gets drunk and tries to rape Gloria Stuart’s character – it’s Penderel, not her husband, who pulls him off and rescues her – and Morgan also unlocks the door to Saul’s room and lets him out. Saul turns out [surprise!] to be a harmless-looking old man who [double surprise!] is as crazy as the father said he was, babbling his delusions in a sort of matter-of-fact way that’s quite like how real crazy people talk and unlike how the movies usually depicted insanity, then or since, and ultimately grabbing a torch and setting fire to two old curtains in the house. In a major plot hole, the next scene takes place at daybreak, with the storm having ended and the roads dried out enough that the unwelcome guests can leave, but there’s no sign of the fire and we have no idea how it got put out. During the night chorus-girl Gladys has transferred her affections from the rich Sir William to the broke Penderel – a development Sir William is downright philosophical about – but that and the death of Saul in his struggle with Penderel are about the only things that have changed the status quo from the beginning of the film.

The Old Dark House is very much more a film about character than plot, and as a Boris Karloff vehicle it leaves a lot to be desired (about the only scene in which he shows pathos is when he sadly cradles the body of his dead friend Saul) and was probably a disappointment to viewers after his still impressive performance in Frankenstein. But it’s also one of the fullest expressions of Whale’s peculiar dry-wit sense of humor. Even in a film as blatantly patched together as The Impatient Maiden one can see Whale’s unusual ability to blend drama and humor, making films that even if they aren’t out-and-out laugh-inducing are still stunning in their smooth ability to make myself laugh, cry and fear at the same time. According to James Curtis’s Whale biography, The Old Dark House was a financial disappointment for Universal – though fortunately Karloff’s next big horror spectacular, The Mummy (superbly directed by Dracula cinematographer Karl Freund and featuring a script by the great John L. Balderston perfectly balanced between horror and romantic fantasy, which gave Karloff not only a chance to use his full speaking voice but to project love, warmth and the pathos of a doomed romance, opportunities he wouldn’t get that often as he later went pretty much from one cookie-cutter “horror” role to another), was a huge hit and restored his commercial reputation.

Maybe The Old Dark House wasn’t a hit in the U.S., but in Britain it did so well that General Films, Universal’s British distributor, had it in near-permanent release as a Sunday night feature from 1932 to 1945, when all the British prints had worn out. The reason it disappeared almost totally from circulation between 1945 and 1970 was that instead of selling Universal the movie rights to his novel outright, J. B. Priestley had leased them to the studio for 25 years, and when the 25 years were up Priestley regained the rights. William Castle licensed them for a 1963 remake which I’ve never seen but which is reported to be ghastly – the delicate balance between comedy and terror Whale got superbly right apparently totally eluded Castle – and the script was so bad that when Castle offered Karloff the chance to repeat his role from the earlier film, Karloff angrily turned it down. The Old Dark House wasn’t re-seen until 1970 and didn’t get on TV until the 1990’s, so it’s taken a long time for this film to return to the public’s attention and gain the reputation it deserves – and as much as I like Boris Karloff and am willing to watch him in virtually anything (even as out-and-out a piece of garbage as one of his last films, Isle of the Snake People), I’ve long argued that the summits of his artistic career are the three films he did for James Whale in the 1930’s (Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Bride of Frankenstein) and the three he did for producer Val Lewton in the 1940’s (The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead, Bedlam).

And early on during The Old Dark House I mentioned to my husband Charles, “This entire cast is one degree of separation from James Dean and Leonardo di Caprio!” Raymond Massey acted with Dean in East of Eden (1955) and Gloria Stuart was in Titanic (1997), though she was supposed to be the older version of Kate Winslet’s character and therefore had no actual scenes with di Caprio. What I hadn’t realized was that The Old Dark House and Titanic have another thing in common besides Gloria Stuart’s presence: both feature newly come-together couples making love inside a parked car.

The Killers (Universal, 1964)


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

Following The Old Dark House last night I turned on the TV to TCM’s Saturday night “Noir Alley” for a quite different movie, though one that certainly engaged in the darker sides of human life: The Killers, a 1964 film directed by Don Siegel from a script by future Star Trek writer Gene L. Coon and a remake of a 1946 film, also called The Killers, that like this one took its basic inspiration from a story of that name Ernest Hemingway had written and published in 1927. “The Killers” was an economical tale, just seven pages long, about a young man who witnesses two people who obviously are hired guns for some mobster or another come to his small town and confront their intended victim. The key to the story is that instead of either pleading with the hit men to spare his life or trying to escape them, the victim – referred to in the story only as “The Swede” – waits there stoically and accepts his inevitable fate. Director Siegel had been interested in shooting this story as a film as early as 1946, when he was a montage specialist and second-unit director at Warner Bros. and was looking to make a transition to full-fledged director. He tried to get Jack Warner to buy “The Killers” for him, but Warner wasn’t interested and instead Universal-International producer Mark Hellinger bought it.

There was an obvious problem with filming The Killers as a feature, and that was its brevity; Hellinger, Siodmak and writer Anthony Veiller had first to show the Swede actually getting murdered and then invent a backstory to explain why someone had taken out a contract on a seemingly insignificant man and why he hadn’t tried to stop them from killing him. They invented a character named Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), an insurance investigator on the trail of armed robbers who had committed a crime and got away with the loot, thereby costing his company a lot of money in claims. In 1946 Hellinger cast Burt Lancaster, a former circus acrobat who was making his first film, as the Swede and Ava Gardner as the femme fatale who lured this rather dumb would-be boxer into a criminal plot. When Siegel finally got to do a remake at Universal in 1964 – a film originally intended as a made-for-TV movie but ultimately released as a feature – he and Coon changed the plot. The pigeon was Johnny North (John Cassavetes), a former racing driver lured into driving a car as part of a mail-truck robbery after he fell for femme fatale Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson, quite effective in a cool, efficient way closer to Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon than Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Ann Savage in Detour).

Sheila crashes the pits as North and his business partner, mechanic Earl Sylvester (Claude Akins) are preparing for a big race whose $15,000 prize they need to expand their speed shop. She successfully seduces him and keeps him up all night on the eve of the race, in which he suffers a big crash that destroys his car and leaves him with his eyesight permanently damaged enough that he can’t drive race cars anymore. Using the name “Jerry Riordan,” he signs up to drive in whatever skuzzy sorts of motor sports will have him, including demolition derbies, until Sheila tracks him down and offers him a job driving a fake police car in an elaborate mail-truck robbery Sheila’s main man, Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan, in his final film and his only villain role; according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster Reagan hated playing a bad guy, but he’s excellent in the part: the smarmy self-righteousness I couldn’t stand about him as a politician is just what this character, a fundamentally corrupt man with the ability to put on a good face, needed), has set up in order to provide himself seed capital to start a development company and be able to claim to people that he rose to success “the hard way” through his own honest effort. \

The robbery is an elaborately planned affair in which one of Browning’s gang members, George Fleming (Robert Phillips), rehearses by driving a car at the 25 mph speed the mail truck will take on a deserted mountain road. Browning plans to set up false detour signs and ambush the truck as it turns onto the side road, but to do that he needs both a driver and a car that can do the run in less than two minutes. Sheila remembers that racing driver she once toyed with as an affair partner – she and Browning have an “arrangement” by which she can have brief affairs as long as she comes back to him in the end (her previous tricks have included a bullfighter and a boxer – the latter may be an ironic reference to the Swede’s occupation in the 1946 film, and the former might be a reference to Ava Gardner’s notorious real-life infatuations with bullfighters) – and figures he’ll be sufficiently down on his luck he’ll be willing to join their criminal conspiracy in exchange for $100,000, one-tenth of the $1 million loot they think the crime will net. Only after the robbery Sheila agrees to double-cross Browning and help North make up with all the money – but it’s a trap; she’s really working with Browning to freeze out their other partners and dispose of North. She shoves him out of her car at high speed and he falls into a gully by the roadside, and while he recovers his will to live is spent and he’s a sitting duck for the two hit people Browning sends to kill him.

The killers are Charlie Strum (Lee Marvin) and his partner Lee (Clu Gulager), and instead of an outside investigator it’s the killers themselves in this version who, fascinated by why their victim put up no resistance and quietly let them kill him, investigate the circumstances of the crime and follow the trail to the man who took out the contract. Eddie Muller’s host commentaries made it seem like this was a new idea for a movie, but it wasn’t; just six years earlier Siegel and writer Sterling Silliphant had made a film called The Lineup, in which Eli Wallach and Robert Keith played a team of hit men who likewise become fascinated with the circumstances of their latest job (finding and hunting down innocent cruise passengers who unknowingly were used as mules by a gang of drug smugglers who secreted their package into their victims’ luggage) and hunt down and ultimately kill the man who hired them. “At no time during the shooting of The Killers was I aware of the similarities with The Lineup,” Siegel said – but later when he re-saw the two films he “got” how many elements, particularly the kinky relationships between the killers, from The Lineup he had used in The Killers.

The Killers
was also sandbagged by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred while the film was in production; when news of the assassination reached the set Angie Dickinson, a close friend of the Kennedy family, broke down, cried and was unable to work for several days. The assassination also led NBC, which had planned to air The Killers as a movie for television, to cancel it because they thought showing a film with this much violence would be considered tasteless and exploitative after the shootings not only of President Kennedy but his alleged assassin two days later. And the connections became even more macabre when one of the actors in The Killers not only was elected President himself but was also the victim of an assassination attempt supposedly motivated by the killer’s obsession with a movie star. Director Siegel didn’t actually want his film to be called The Killers – he had wanted it to be called Johnny North and had worked out an idea for the opening credit in which North’s alias “Jerry Riordan” would be flashed on screen and then dissolve into the character’s real name – but he said Universal’s executives insisted on The Killers because they thought an association with Ernest Hemingway would make the film seem more “important.”

Under whatever name, The Killers is an excellent thriller, a major stop on Lee Marvin’s quirky rise from out-and-out villain in films like Violent Saturday (1955) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 1962) to anti-hero here, to dual role as sinister villain (with a similar character name to his one here, “Tim Straum”) and comic hero in the Western spoof Cat Ballou (1965), to out-and-out hero (albeit flawed and morally ambiguous) in films like The Dirty Dozen and Point Blank. I must admit that part of the appeal for this movie to me is Ronald Reagan’s appearance as the villain; I first saw this film while Reagan was President and it was great fun, as someone who’d never liked either Reagan’s personality or his politics, to see his character hypocritically declaim that “I made it the hard way” when we’ve seen he really made it from an armed robbery was great fun and politically and personally satisfying. But even this long after Reagan’s presidency became history, seeing him blown away by Lee Marvin in a final shoot-out that eliminates all the principals in front of a picture-perfect cookie-cutter suburban home (one of many such fronts maintained on the Universal backlot – when my then-partner and I took the Universal tour in the 1980’s we got to see a whole lot of them, and the tour guide explained that some of them had stickers with a fire design and the legend “HOT!,” indicating that a director on the lot had selected that one for use) remains deeply gratifying. Charles mentioned that there was a British film from the 1980’s called The Hit (I haven’t seen it but its director, Stephen Frears, is a longtime favorite of mine) that is in essence a third version of The Killers, and that one might well be worth seeing some day.

Saturday, January 30, 2021

Waterloo Bridge (Universal, 1931)


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

One good piece of news yesterday was that the copy I’d ordered from amazon.com of James Whale’s second film, Waterloo Bridge, had finally arrived and so I was able to start my planned go-through of all Whale’s movies in chronological order, slotting his famous horror films – Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein – where they fit amongst his other movies instead of keeping them separate. It also gave me an excuse to open the Blu-Ray box of all Universal’s classic “series” monster films from the 1930’s and 1940’s and start running them (I’d earlier collected them on DVD but at a time when Universal’s quality control was going through a problem, so the discs had a lot of glitches and rather than replace the glitchy ones piecemeal I decided to grab the Blu-Ray box because it was on an excellent sale price around Hallowe’en 2019). James Whale’s second film (or third, if you count his co-director credit on Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels) was Waterloo Bridge, a 1931 Universal production (Whale’s first for that company) based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood set in London in the early years of World War I, in which an American soldier on leave in London (the U.S. hadn’t entered the war yet but his involvement in it is due to the fact that after his father died, his mom married a British citizen and the son enlisted while in England to see his family) falls in love and has a doomed affair with a young woman who turned to prostitution after jobs as a chorus dancer dried up due to the war.

Charles and I had seen this version of Waterloo Bridge once before on a VHS I recorded from Turner Classic Movies, and my impression then had been that it was a potentially great film, superbly atmospheric and with excellent players in the supporting roles, undone by a surprisingly weak pair of leads: Mae Clarke as the heroine, Myra Deauville (the latter, she explains, is just a stage name) and a multi-named actor originally named Robert Douglass Montgomery but billed here as “Kent Douglass” as the soldier Roy Cronin who meets her while London is being bombed by Zeppelins in the early part of the war. (Later the Germans built a long-range bombing plane called the Gotha and used that to bomb London; Charles had a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that Britain had been bombed during the First World War.) I came to Waterloo Bridge this time around prepared to be more kindly disposed to Mae Clarke after having read in James Curtis’s biography of Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, how carefully he worked with her to explore the part and the character’s tangled emotions. At the same time, according to Curtis’s account, he pretty much gave up on Kent Douglass, realizing that all he’d ever be is a nice-looking leading man but one unable to sound any particular character depths.

What makes the might-have-beens around Waterloo Bridge even more heartbreaking is that buried in the cast list as Roy Cronin’s sister, billed sixth and shown more often with her back to the camera than facing it, was a young actress named Bette Davis who, as she told her later biographer Whitney Stine, “yearned all through shooting to play Myra – I could have!” Indeed she could have, and had Whale cast Davis as Myra and Universal’s hottest leading man, Lew Ayres, as Roy he could have had a masterpiece and Davis might have ended up becoming a star and making millions of dollars for Universal instead of leaving the studio after her option ran out and ultimately becoming a star and making millions of dollars for Warner Bros. (It’s interesting that when I looked up the 1931 Waterloo Bridge on imdb.com, the “others like this” that came up were all other early Bette Davis credits: Bad Sister at Universal, Way Back Home at RKO on a loanout from Universal, and Three On a Match, The Dark Horse, The Working Man and So Big at Warners.) Seeing it now I was better able to appreciate the film Waterloo Bridge for what it is instead of wishing for what it might have been with a stronger pair of leads – though there’s an intriguing scene in which Bette Davis is lurking above Mae Clarke on a staircase, and I imagined she was thinking, “Some day I’m going to be where she is!”

The film, reflecting its stage origins (Benn W. Levy, one of Whale’s favorite writers, and Tom Reed did the adaptation), is in three acts: the first is the meet-cute between Myra and Roy as they both help an old potato seller (Rita Carlisle) pick up her wares after she’s dropped them in the middle of a German air raid and their subsequent tense meeting at her apartment where she owes four pounds sixpence in back rent and he offers to pay it but she’s morally torn as to whether or not to accept. The second takes place at the country home of Roy’s family, with his stepfather Major Wetherby (Frederick Kerr, the other person besides Clarke to be in both Waterloo Bridge and Frankenstein), his mother (Enid Bennett), and his sister Janet (Bette Davis). He’s brought Myra there to see if his family will accept her as his wife, but the visit goes so wretchedly and she feels so out of place that she high-tails it back to London and her old existence. The third act shows her back at her old apartment, still being hounded by her landlady (the marvelous character actress Ethel Griffies) for back rent, and at one point she picks up another servicemember who offers to pay her for a night together, but she turns her back on him, then changes his mind but only after he’s gone away in a cab, obviously in search of someone with fewer moral scruples.

Out of place in her old existence and also convinced that there’s no permanent place for her in Roy’s life, she reacts when he turns up and tells her that he’s being shipped off to the front in a few hours but he still wants to marry her in the brief time he has available before he has to go back to the war. She angrily turns him down and leaves behind a note saying that it’s best this way. Roy asks the landlady rather frantically just where she might have been likely to go, and she says, “Waterloo Bridge” – where, of course, Roy and Myra had met in the first place. He goes there and just as he sees her the truck that’s supposed to pick him and the other members of his unit up to drive them to the train that will take them to Dover to be shipped back to France arrives, and he once again reiterates his proposal. They frantically kiss – the only physical contact we’ve seen between these two doomed lovers all movie – and she accepts his proposal, but we’re not sure whether that’s because she really wants to or only to get him to leave so he doesn’t miss his troop train and get himself court-martialed. Roy gets on the truck, and just as it’s pulling away Whale and his cinematographer, Arthur Edeson, use the super-camera crane Universal had built two years earlier for the 1929 musical Broadway to pull us away from the action and give us a surprisingly clinical view as Myra is literally blown up in a direct hit on Waterloo Bridge by a German bomb. (Seeing this shortly after Whale’s previous film, Journey’s End – which also ends with the principals dying from an enemy bomb – I was struck not only by the similarity but the irony that the Germans missed the troop truck, whose destruction will be at least of some help to their war effort, and took out a civilian who was no help to them at all except as part of the terror campaign at the root of the decision to do air attacks on cities and their civilian populations.)

Waterloo Bridge is a success on almost every level – even Mae Clarke, whom I’ve come down hard on before (at least partly because the only two films of hers that circulate much today are The Public Enemy, where she’s the recipient of the grapefruit James Cagney shoves in her face, and Frankenstein, where she’s little more than the usual damsel-in-distress in a horror film), seems excellent in portraying the character’s tumbled emotions and in particular her self-loathing that causes her to turn down true love even when it’s offered to her. The film’s one failure – and a surprising one, given that the director had previously done Journey’s End on both stage and screen – is that Kent Douglass utterly fails to dramatize the effect serving in the World War I trenches generally had on the people who had to do it. He’s an empty-headed good-looking man who doesn’t seem to have been affected at all by the war, and this time around I wondered what this movie might have been if Whale had been able to get his Journey’s End star, Colin Clive, to play the lead. Clive would later prove he could play effectively in romantic films like Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933) – a soap opera story given surprising weight and power by the anti-type casting of Clive and the film’s female lead, Katharine Hepburn – and Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night (1937), though in both those movies he was a driven, neurotic romantic lead instead of an ordinary one.

Having both leads be among the walking wounded – he suffering from PTSD due to the war and she from her moral traumas about how she was making her living – would have made Waterloo Bridge an even more interesting story than it is, but even so it’s a quite remarkable movie and a worthy competitor to MGM’s remake from 1940, which had a far stronger female lead (Vivien Leigh – she had just made Gone With the Wind and the Hollywood Xerox machine was going full bore: “Hey, she just had a hit with a doomed romance set against the backdrop of a major war. Let’s give her another doomed romance set against the backdrop of a major war!”), a moderately stronger male lead (Robert Taylor, cast after Leigh vetoed the studio’s first choice, Clark Gable, because she’d grown to hate him while making Gone With the Wind), superb direction by Mervyn LeRoy and, inevitably, a much more romantic gloss over the story in which Myra’s involvement in the world’s oldest profession had to be even more “fudged” than it is here.

Frankenstein (Universal, 1931)


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

After screening Waterloo Bridge Charles and I watched Frankenstein, a movie that has become so ubiquitous it’s almost beyond criticism – even people who’ve never seen it know about it and certainly know what the Monster looks like – and which had a fascinating genesis that James Curtis detailed in his Whale biography. It’s also an indication of the extent of Hollywood’s sexism that the credits list the author of the original Frankenstein novel not as Mary Shelley but as “Mrs. Percy B. Shelley” (maybe someone at Universal thought his name was more box-office than hers – and at least one writer, John Lauritsen, has argued that it was really Mr. Shelley, not Mrs. Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein). I’ve commented extensively on Frankenstein in previous installments of my movie journal, though I don’t seem to have posted previously on it to this blog (I have written about some of the later Frankenstein films in the Universal sequence), and it’s a quite remarkable film I’ve loved ever since I first saw it in 1970. It’s a film that has acquired a mythic aura and power that keeps it compelling even though the image of the Monster has become so commonplace it’s lost its ability to scare – apparently it was so frightening to its original audience that after the first preview screening either Whale or the owner of the theatre where it was shown received a phone call from an irate viewer sometime between 2 and 3 a.m. saying, “Ever since I saw Frankenstein I haven’t been able to sleep – and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you getting any sleep either!”

Curtis’s account of the making of Frankenstein describes the project as being run through the usual set of theatre and Hollywood hands – from British playwright Peggy Webling to John L. Balderston, who had hoped to adapt Webling’s play for American audiences the way he had with Hamilton Deane’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula – to Robert Florey (who apparently thought up the gimmick of having the Monster receive a so-called “criminal brain”), to Garrett Fort – and in each new script the pathos Mary Shelley built up in the Monster’s character (especially in the high point of the book, the stunning three chapters actually narrated by the Monster, who in the book is fully articulate and literate, reads John Milton’s Paradise Lost and sees himself as Adam and Frankenstein as God) was reduced until by the time Whale got assigned to the project he was little more than an unmotivated engine of destruction. Then Whale read through all the scripts and told his partner, David Lewis, “You know, I feel sorry for the goddamned Monster.” Whale took Fort’s draft and put on another writer, Francis Edward Faragoh, who had been one of the writers on Warner Bros.’ gangster classic Little Caesar the year before (and there are strikingly similar scenes in both films of the brutal killer approaching the camera straight-on with murder in his eyes), who got credit for the final script.

The result was a viscerally exciting and highly complex movie in which audience sympathies are pulled in different directions at once – and also what I’ve long thought was a quite obvious Gay metaphor in that Frankenstein (Colin Clive, whom Whale had to fight the studio to use – they wanted Leslie Howard because he was a bigger “name” but it’s impossible to imagine nice Leslie Howard as a neurotically driven scientist, whereas Clive was utterly ideal for the role and was essentially playing his Captain Stanhope character from Journey’s End, though this time driven mad not by the strains of war but by the temptation of advancing humankind’s knowledge of its origins) retires to an abandoned lighthouse with a male companion, Fritz (Dwight Frye) – in the novel Frankenstein worked alone – to create a life artificially, while his fussbudget father (Frederick Kerr) goes around the ancestral mansion demanding that his son marry fiancée Elizabeth Lavenza (Mae Clarke) and father “a son to the house of Frankenstein” in the normal heterosexual fashion. (James Curtis in his book has little patience for people who look for Gay metaphors in Whale’s work just because Whale was himself Gay – but they’re there, and in the sequel The Bride of Frankenstein they become even more obvious than they are here.)

Watching Frankenstein after Journey’s End and Waterloo Bridge offered insights into the movie that I hadn’t noticed before – like the parallels between the friendship of Henry Frankenstein and his best friend Victor Moritz (John Boles) in Frankenstein and that between Captain Stanhope and Second Lieutenant Raleigh (David Manners) in Journey’s End. There are also fascinating parallels in the movie – early on Frankenstein boasts that he’s going to create a living being “with my own hands” and later, after his creation has escaped and is terrorizing the countryside, he says, “With my own hands I created him, and with my own hands I will destroy him.” Frankenstein the movie uses almost none of Frankenstein the book but the central premise and some of the character names, but it has its own stunning charms, including a script that makes a lot of the irony that though the Monster physically is a fully developed adult, mentally he’s still a baby, reacting to stimuli in an affectingly child-like fashion that becomes lethal only – literally – because he doesn’t know his own strength. In some ways Frankenstein is a movie at war with itself, between all those previous scripts that made the creature just a monster and the efforts of Whale and the actor who played the Monster, Boris Karloff (his star-making part at age 42 after over a decade in the Hollywood salt mines as a character actor), to build sympathy for him.

James Curtis debunked Karloff’s own account of how he got the part – his version was that Whale noticed him in the Universal commissary one day while Karloff was eating lunch during the filming of the Universal film Graft, noticed Karloff’s tall stature and rather boxy head, and decided he’d be worth testing for the Monster – by pointing out that Whale was actually on vacation back home in England while Graft was shooting. Curtis suggests that it was David Lewis, who’d seen Karloff live on stage in the play The Criminal Code as a prisoner whose big scene was murdering a fellow inmate who had squealed on their big escape plan, and had also seen the film version in which Karloff had recreated the role. According to Curtis, one night at dinner Whale was bemoaning the fact that he was about to start shooting Frankenstein and he still hadn’t found an actor to play the Monster. “What about Boris Karloff?” Lewis said. “Boris who?” Whale replied. The Monster’s makeup was devised by Universal’s makeup head Jack P. Pierce (more than once I’ve walked up to someone who was wearing a T-shirt with the Monster’s face and called out, “Jack Pierce!”, and then explained who that was) and consisted of 42 pounds – much of which was padding to fill out Karloff’s body to make him look monstrous (the Monster’s boots were made with thick rubber soles so people spreading asphalt paving can walk on it safely as they work) and the rest was the facial makeup, built from 24 pounds of face putty and collodion. It was applied over a cheesecloth face wrapping – the normal material was linen, but Pierce chose cheesecloth because the makeup would seep through the holes in the cloth and look like it had the pores of real skin – and Pierce had to be on the set for emergency repair work since the makeup was frequently damaged during takes.

One thing that’s surprising about the original Frankenstein is how agile the Monster is; instead of the slow, shambling gait the Monster acquired in later Universal films, here he’s quite light on his feet even though he’s also barely coordinated, obviously because he’s still learning how his body works and what this walking business is all about. And of course there’s the still-chilling scene in which the Monster befriends a little girl named Maria (Marilyn Harris), who picks some daisies and gives a few to the Monster. “I can make a boat,” she says, throwing a daisy on the surface of the lake where they’ve met (the only actual exterior work in this movie, by the way; the other “exteriors” were built inside Universal’s soundstages and the Blu-Ray format allows home-video viewers for the first time to see what some of the original reviewers were complaining about when they said they noticed creases in the painted cloth backdrops that represented sky) and inviting the Monster to do the same. He does, but then he runs out of daisies and throws Maria into the lake, leading to her death by drowning. It was the one scene in Frankenstein in which Karloff quarreled with Whale’s direction: in the film as it stands (with this scene, cut in virtually all the prints shown between 1957 and 1985, now restored) Karloff gives Harris an underhanded toss with both hands. Karloff had wanted the Monster merely to set the girl onto the water’s surface as he’d done with the daisies, then frantically paw the water as she (unlike the flowers) sinks. Karloff had already become known as an actor who would challenge a director if he thought there was something wrong; in the play The Criminal Code his character had strangled the “squealer” with his back to the audience. In the film, Howard Hawks (a director with a far more “major” reputation than James Whale!) wanted to insert a close-up of Karloff’s face as he strangled the man. No, said Karloff; it will be much scarier if the audience doesn’t see my face – and Hawks conceded the point and shot the scene the way it had been done on stage.

During Frankenstein7 Karloff complained to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – whose original purpose was not to hand out awards but to serve as an industry-wide company union and thereby prevent real unions from organizing Hollywood – that Universal was violating the Academy’s work rule that actors could do 12 hours but then needed at least that long off by taking up so much time making him up, and the Academy ruled that the hours he was spending in Pierce’s make-up chair should be counted as work. Still later Karloff was one of the 12 founding members of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933, along with such others as Robert Montgomery and James Cagney. Though I would still hope that someday someone will film Frankenstein exactly as Mary Shelley wrote it – with its fully articulate Milton-quoting Monster (and I also regard it as a major cultural tragedy that no one recorded an audiobook of Frankenstein with Karloff reading it – obviously his association with the story would have given it commercial appeal), Whale’s two movies, this one and the immediate sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (which is even better) come closer than any others to the spirit of what Shelley wrote and in particular to the sympathetic portrayal of the Monster, driven mad not by a “criminal brain” but by his rejection by the humans he reached out to, including his creator.

Friday, January 29, 2021

The Wedding March (Patrick Powers Productions, Paramount, filmed 1926, released 1928)


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

The film Charles and I watched last night was an underground copy of Erich von Stroheim’s vehicle The Wedding March, filmed in 1926 but not released until 1928 and the only one of Stroheim’s directorial efforts I hadn’t seen until now. Von Stroheim’s career has been surrounded by so much myth-making it’s difficult to unpack all the mythology and separate it from what he actually accomplished. He was an Austrian who joined the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1900’s (while also taking acting lessons from Josef Kainz, who had retired to Vienna after running the court theatre in Munich during the reign of King Ludwig II and being one of the Gay Ludwig’s lovers) until he ran up such a large sum in gambling debts he was forced to flee the country. Stroheim ended up in the U.S. doing odd jobs until 1914, when he was hired by D. W. Griffith as a stunt person in The Birth of a Nation – and he even got a small part as one of the monstrous Black men (all played by whites in blackface) drooling over and threatening to rape innocent Southern white women in Griffith’s racist masterpiece. He started working his way up in the movie business – thanks largely to the sponsorship of writer Anita Loos and her husband, director John Emerson – and when the U.S. entered World War I Stroheim’s career got a sudden boost.

Somebody had to play the villainous Germans in all the patriotic movies Hollywood was making to support and propagandize for the war effort, and Stroheim – with his close-cropped hair, fetishistic uniforms and overall military bearing – fit the bill so perfectly that Universal, who had him under contract (though they loaned him out a lot), started billing him as “The Man You Love to Hate.” When World War I ended Stroheim realized that the market for dastardly Huns was going to dry up, so he decided to salvage his career by writing an original story called The Pinnacle which he offered to Universal president Carl Laemmle on condition that he both star in it and direct. The story cast Stroheim as a Continental seducer who goes after a young American married couple honeymooning in the Swiss Alps and who in the final scene takes the male half of this couple on a mountaineering expedition, intending to kill him, but in the end it’s Stroheim’s character who takes a tumble off the pinnacle and the couple reunite, sadder but considerably wiser. The film also features Stroheim presenting the wife with a sprig of edelweiss on his way to seducing her – a quite different use of edelweiss from its other most famous film appearance in The Sound of Music!

At the insistence of Universal’s distributors, Laemmle changed the film’s title to Blind Husbands but otherwise released it in Stroheim’s cut – the only time in his directorial career that happened – and after making a now-lost film called The Devil’s Passkey Stroheim cast himself as a no-good Russian crook and seducer in a film set in Monte Carlo called Foolish Wives. That was advertised by Universal as “The First Million-Dollar Picture” (which it wasn’t; D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, which Stroheim had been in, had cost $2 million) and as the budget skyrocketed Universal started posting notices in neon with the film’s cost and the “S” in Stroheim’s name replaced with a dollar sign. Laemmle pulled the plug on Foolish Wives before it was quite finished and Stroheim pieced it together as best he could from what he’d shot. The film was a huge hit and Stroheim planned another movie called The Merry-Go-Round set in Vienna immediately before the war, with a huge set representing Vienna’s famous amusement park, the Prater. Alas, Universal had hired a young man named Irving Thalberg as production manager, and Thalberg first banned Stroheim from being in The Merry-Go-Round and then fired him as director.

Stroheim ended up at the Goldwyn studio, where he got the green light for Greed, a close adaptation of Frank Norris’s grim working-class novel McTeague which in its first cut ran nine hours. Contrary to the mythology surrounding this film, Stroheim was willing to cut it – he spent a year boiling it down to four hours (without pay, since his contract didn’t cover post-production) and his friend Rex Ingram, the director who’d discovered Rudolph Valentino and given him his big break in the 1919 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, took it down still further to three hours. Alas, while all this was going on the Goldwyn company was absorbed into what became MGM and Irving Thalberg was hired as production manager – and he ordered Greed to be cut further to just 100 minutes. Though hailed today (even in its shrunken form) as a masterpiece and featuring acid-etched performances by Gibson Gowland as McTeague, ZaSu Pitts as his wife Trina and Jean Hersholt as the villain, Greed flopped on its initial release. Thalberg assigned Stroheim to do a film of Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow with stars Mae Murray and John Gilbert, and it was a commercial hit but Stroheim hated working at MGM so much he asked for a release from his contract, and got it.

The Wedding March came about when an independent producer named Pat Powers – one of the biggest slimeballs in a business that’s had more of its share of them (among the people he tried to screw over in his career were Carl Laemmle and Walt Disney) – put Stroheim under contract for two films and arranged with Paramount to finance and distribute them. This is a common operation today – indeed, it’s how most major films have got made since the demise of the studio system in the 1950’s – but it was unusual in 1926. Stroheim proposed an elaborate story based at least in part on his own experiences in pre-war Vienna, in which he would break his “Man You Love to Hate” typecasting and portray a romantic lead. He planned it as a two-part film, The Wedding March and The Honeymoon, and his story dealt with Prince Nicholas “Nicky” von Wildeliebe-Rauffenberg (Stroheim), who as the film opens is desperately in debt from his gambling and womanizing and is pleading with his parents (Stroheim regulars George Fawcett and Maude George) to bail him out. They refuse and instead tell him to find a woman from a non-noble but well-to-do family and marry her for her money.

Nicky is on guard duty at the Corpus Christi procession (at least part of which is filmed in two-strip Technicolor – the only time Stroheim directed in color and I think the only time he appeared in color, too) when he spots a young woman named Mitzi (Fay Wray, who regarded this as the greatest film she was in; in later years she would talk about working with Stroheim and “A”-list actors like Gary Cooper, and all the people who interviewed her wanted to ask her about was King Kong), who thanks to an accident at the parade is taken to a hospital. Nicky gets Mitzi’s address and continues to see her after she recovers, including taking her to an outdoor night spot where the two are covered with apple blossoms, lit by cinematographer Hal Mohr (who liked the movie so much that when he married actress Evelyn Venable, he insisted the ceremony take place in front of the outdoor set of St. Stephen’s Cathedral used for this film) in a way that they almost literally sparkle and glow on screen. A reporter who came on the set to interview Stroheim while this scene was being prepared got a quote from him to the effect that the failure of Greed had convinced him moviegoers didn’t want sordid stories about real life, so “I am going to drown them in apple blossoms.”

But the course of true love between Nicky and Mitzi runs aground on the family’s financial problems, and in a scene set in a whorehouse Nicky’s father and corn-plaster tycoon Fortunat Schweisser (George Nichols) make a deal for Nicky to marry Schweisser’s daughter Cecelia (ZaSu Pitts, who had been “typed” as a comedienne but whom Stroheim regarded as the finest tragic and dramatic actress in Hollywood; though her part in what’s left of The Wedding March is too small to make much of an impression, her role in Greed is one of the greatest performances ever given on screen and it should have broken Pitts out of comedies and earned her a serious reputation the way Sybil and Norma Rae did for Sally Field a half-century later). Meanwhile Mitzi has a suitor of her own to contend with, the butcher Schani (Matthew Betz), who out-and-out rapes her in one scene and then expects to marry her. Schani decides to get his revenge against NIcky by shooting him as he comes out of the church following his wedding to Cecelia – which takes place in a downpour representing the wrongness of the marriage (a metaphor Ernst Lubitsch would recycle in his film Monte Carlo in 1930) – and in a scene that seems contemporary today Mitzi sees that he’s holding a gun inside his jacket pocket and on the spur of the moment agrees to marry Schani if he’ll spare Nicky’s life. That’s how The Wedding March – at least what we have of it – ends, but in Stroheim’s sequel, The Honeymoon (which was actually filmed, though it wasn’t released in the U.S. because the advent of talkies had killed the market for silent films, and no print is known to survive), Cecelia and Schani both die and allow Nicky and Mitzi to get together at long last.

The version of The Wedding March we watched last night was bootlegged off Turner Classic Movies – not only did it feature the TCM logo but there was even a bit of Ben Mankiewicz’ commentary at the end – and it suffered from some weird flashes of static on the soundtrack but was otherwise watchable. The version was based on a 1954 restoration Stroheim himself supervised (three years before his death) at the Cinemathéque Française in Paris, but instead of the original musical score by J. S. Zamecnik (which included a theme for Nicky and Mitzi, “Paradise,” which became a popular song hit in its own right) the print we watched contained a score by Carl Davis slapped together from bits of Johann Strauss, Jr. and other composers associated with Imperial Vienna. (The Wedding March had originally gone out with a synchronized musical score on Vitaphone discs, and it wasn’t until the Paris restoration of 1954 that the original soundtrack was transferred to the standard sound-on-film system – and I’d have preferred to hear either those recordings or a modern remake of Zamecnik’s score.)

The Wedding March isn’t exactly the freshest plot line of all time – as Charles pointed out, it wasn’t then, either – but it’s very much worth seeing for the high style with which Stroheim tells it and also to see him play a (mostly) sympathetic role. It’s also an illustration of Stroheim’s quote about himself and Lubitsch: “Lubitsch first shows you the king on his throne and then the king in his bedroom. I first show you the king in his bedroom so you will know exactly what he is like when you see him on the throne.” The first scene we see shows Nicky’s parents in bed, arguing and puffing away on various tobacco products – Charles was especially taken by Stroheim’s use of smoking as a symbol of moral degeneration at a time when almost all other filmmakers were portraying tobacco use as a sign of culture and refinement – and we quickly get the idea that they see their son not as a human being, but as a bad investment they want to turn into a good one. This is also the one film of Stroheim’s I can recall in which he actually looks handsome, without the affectations he would adopt for his more common roles as a villain.

The Wedding March is a film that hits quite a few of my “Like” buttons: it’s Stroheim, it’s visually stunning, it’s morally honest (in some of Paramount’s attempts to patch together a releasable film from Stroheim’s footage – which lasted so long the film, shot in 1926, wasn’t released until 1928, and in the meantime two of the leading actors had died – his scenes of drinking and whoring were left on the cutting-room floor, much to his disgust) and it even has a well-preserved and utterly gorgeous two-strip Technicolor sequence. (I love two-strip Technicolor; despite its limitations – notably its inability to photograph blue – it has a beautiful, well-rounded, painterly quality that often comes off as more pleasing than the shrieking, over-bright hues of the three-strip process that replaced it in the mid-1930’s.) No one else made movies like Erich von Stroheim; despite his legendary extravagance (exaggerated in the telling; one of the undying myths about Stroheim was his alleged insistence that his extras wear monogrammed underwear to add to their sense of realism even though the monograms would be invisible on screen; this got its start when Norman Kerry, the star of Stroheim’s aborted The Merry-Go-Round, was seen in a monogrammed nightgown getting out of bed, with both the nightgown and its monogram clearly visible), he generally delivered value for money, and his honest depiction of sex and the things it motivates people to do makes his movies seem modern even though some of them, like this one, also seem more or less stuck in silent-movie conventions.

The Wedding March is well worth seeing and a quite remarkable film, as well as a testament to what a wonderful art form the silent movie actually was and how a director with sufficient skill and ability to coax great performances from his actors could make you wonder why anyone ever thought the movies needed sound. Also, one thing Stroheim is often ridiculed for is the length of his films; over and over again in movie histories he’s been criticized for expecting people to sit through a movie lasting nine hours – but in today’s age in which normal-sized novels like The Handmaid’s Tale or Big Little Lies are routinely turned into multi-hour, multi-part cable-TV miniseries, which you can either watch in segments or “binge-watch” all the way through in one sitting, it seems like Stroheim was ahead of his time and technology has finally caught up with him. He’s probably up in heaven thinking, “Damn! Now is the time I should be alive!”

Thursday, January 28, 2021

Spider-Man: Far from Home (Columbia Pictures, Pascal Pictures, Marvel Studios, 2019)


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

Last night I continued my excursion through several recent films about young heroes (or heroines) with the latest Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Far from Home, which judging from the title you might have assumed was a direct sequel to the previous film Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). It’s actually a sequel to the last movie in the Avengers sequence, Avengers: Endgame, which I hadn’t realized ended with the deaths of quite a few of the Avengers, including cult leader Iron Man a.k.a. Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr., who appears in this film in a flashback sequence), who had been building up Peter Parker a.k.a. Spider-Man (Tom Holland) as his protégé and successor. The plot features the 16-year-old Peter Parker enthusiastic about joining several of his high-school classmates on a trip through various European capitals to visit classic sites associated with science or art, like the Eiffel Tower or the Leonardo da Vinci museum in Venice (and director Jon Watts, who also did Homecoming, gives us a nice, charming shot of water seeping up from under a manhole), only the trip keeps getting interrupted by four super-villains called “Elementals” – after the four classic Greek elements of earth, air, water and fire (though water and fire are the only ones we actually see) – who wreak havoc on the various towns on the tour group’s destination list until they’re successfully fought by one of the few surviving Avengers, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal, looking surprisingly sexier than he did in Brokeback Mountain 14 years earlier), a new superhero who says he’s from a parallel-universe Earth (if Jerome Bixby really invented the parallel-universe schtick, or at least the first person to introduce it into science fiction, he’s got a lot to answer for) where the Elementals destroyed everyone and everything, including his family. (He nervously fingers his wedding ring as he says that.)

Tony Stark willed Peter Parker a pair of artificial-intelligence glasses containing an operating system called EDITH (which sounds like Stark Industries was marketing a competitor to Alexa and Siri) which can, among other things, summon drone aircraft to take out anyone or anything the wearer wants to get rid of – only Peter has an awful lot of take-this-cup-from-my-lips dialogue to the effect that he doesn’t want to be a superhero, just a nice, ordinary straight teenager interested mostly in getting laid. The person he most wants to get laid with is Mary Jane Watson (Zendaya), though she’s only referred to as “M.J.” (I got the full name from the comic books), who’s also on the tour but Peter’s attempts to chat her up are interrupted by Brad Davis (Remy Hill). In a fit of jealousy, and without really knowing what he’s doing, Peter uses EDITH to order a drone strike on Brad and then has to abort it in a hurry. Eventually Peter agrees to give up the super-glasses to Mysterio after someone has told him he looks ridiculous with them on (as I joked to Charles, “Nobody made fun of Clark Kent’s glasses!” – to which he replied, “People were nicer then”) – and then the writers (Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers – odd to see a big-budget superhero movie with only two writing credits!) pull the big switcheroo: Mysterio, a.k.a. Quentin Beck, is really a super-villain, who’s leading a group of former employees of Tony Stark who are upset that he claimed credit for all the inventions they produced while under his employ. (It’s hard, at least for someone with my anti-capitalist politics, not to feel for them.)

They’ve hatched a revenge plot whose details aren’t made all that clear, but it involves destroying the last remaining Avengers as well as the people on Peter Parker’s school tour (ya remember the school tour?) because they’ve all realized Peter Parker is Spider-Man (in recent years Marvel has got considerably sloppier in keeping their superheroes’ secret identities truly secret) and they’ve caught on to the plot. For the second half this movie goes through so many head-snapping reversals one wonders if Tony Gilroy made some uncredited contributions to the script, and even after its advertised 129-minute running time is over we get a lot of bonus content, including a bizarre scene in which Nick Fury and his girlfriend turn out to be space aliens and part of the crew of a Star Trek-like starship) and alleged bloopers (I suspect a lot of today’s “blooper reels” aren’t accidents from the original shoot but deliberately created content after the fact).

Though some of this may seem to be carping, I actually quite liked Spider-Man: Far From Home, mainly because a lot of it was quite campy and it didn’t have the leaden attempts at “seriousness” that have weighed down many recent superhero films. It’s hardly in the same league as Black Panther – which is like saying that a conventional 1930’s film about newspapers isn’t Citizen Kane – but it’s a nicely watchable, entertaining film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I must admit that I’ve been somewhat annoyed at the way in which the successive reboots of Spider-Man as a character have turned him younger and less mature each go-round – from Tobey Maguire to Andrew Garfield to Tom Holland in the lead. Yes, a large part of the initial appeal of the Spider-Man comics was the novelty of a superhero who was also a high-school kid with all the usual issues of adolescence – but to my mind the comic-book Spider-Man became a much more interesting character after they aged him out of high school, sent him to college, gave him a new and more mature love interest and made the conflicts in his life more like those of an adult. I do give the filmmakers credit for casting Peter’s guardian, Aunt May Parker, as a relatively young Marisa Tomei and giving her a love interest (Peter’s school science advisor, played by Jon Favreau, who directed the Spider-Man films with Maguire), even though she’s close enough in age to Tom Holland at first I thought she’d turn out to be Peter Parker’s long-lost sister rather than his aunt!

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Mulan (Walt Disney Pictures, Jason T. Reed Productions, Good Fear Content, 2020)


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

Last night’s movie turned out to be a quite good action-adventure film: Mulan, Walt Disney Studios’ 2020 remake of a 1998 animated film based on an historical legend of ancient China in which the Empire is menaced by an invading army called the Rouran, whose commander, Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee), is assisted by a witch, Xianning (the great Gong Li). He mounts a concerted attack on the garrisons protecting the Silk Road in northern China. To stop him, the Emperor (Jet Li, who’s now a bit too old for martial arts himself but coached the younger cast members) orders a draft in which each family in the affected region of China must submit a male to join the army. Mulan’s family, the Hua, has no young man – it’s just her parents and Mulan and her younger sister – so dad, who was a hero in the previous Chinese war against the Rouran, offers to fight even though he limps and is otherwise too decrepit to be useful on the battlefield. Mulan steals his sword and armor and disguises herself as a man to join the battle, though she’s “outed” about halfway through this 115-minute movie when a young man in her regiment catches her bathing in a nearby stream since she’s refused to shower with the guys and the other recruits are complaining about “his” smell.

Once she’s caught, she’s expelled from the regiment, but the witch Xianning tries to recruit her for the other side and essentially says that strong women like them should stick together. Mulan refuses but learns from Xianning that the attacks on the garrisons are merely diversions; Tung’s real plan is to invade the Imperial City (this would be what we know now as Beijing, though that name is not used in the film), capture the Emperor, kill him and take over the entire country. The second half of the film features the pitched battle for control of the Imperial City, in which Mulan (Yifei Liu) manages to persuade her former commander, Tung (Donnie Yen), that he should send a small commando force in ahead of his main army to warn the Emperor what’s going on and get him to mobilize the Imperial troops. Mulan does so well leading this force and fighting in the battle that the Emperor offers her the job of commanding his personal guard, but she refuses and goes home to her family – though she reconsiders when the Emperor sends a delegation to plead with her (and if she didn’t stay in the army, how could Disney make a Mulan II?).

The film has been blasted for taking a traditional Chinese legend that survives in an anonymous book that has been revered by generations of Chinese readers and turning it into a Walt Disney spectacular – which to my mind is valid but beside the point. Disney has been doing this sort of thing since Walt Disney was alive and still relatively young – the company is notorious for having ransacked the world’s storehouse of classic children’s literature, from Grimm’s fairy tales through Pinocchio, Bambi and Mary Poppins, for stories they can put into their formula – and viewing it “fresh,” with no particular knowledge of the story beyond its basic premise and no cultural attachments to get in the way, I thoroughly enjoyed Mulan. Indeed, after slogging through all three overlong, ponderous episodes of The Hobbit (also a story about an unlikely hero on a quest), Mulan was a breath of fresh air not only figuratively but almost literally, Director Niki Caro (a woman, appropriately enough for a story featuring a feminist heroine) and her four-person writing committee – Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Lauren Hynek and Elizabeth Martin – get the exposition over with in less than 10 minutes, establishing early on who the good guys are, who the bad guys are and that Mulan is a tomboy with a mean sword arm (she practices with a bamboo stake) who can’t stand the normal fate of a young Chinese woman of the time, which was to be set up by a professional matchmaker, married off to a man she’d never met before and essentially made into her property. (At least her traditionalist family didn’t try to have her feet bound.)

Mulan is full of marvelous and charming scenes, even though the dramatic points they make are pretty obvious – like the one in which Mulan’s mother puts her in charge of the tea ceremony with which her family entertains the matchmaker (she ends up breaking the tea set after first showing off her super-powers by catching the tea things in mid-air – there are lines about why she’s never shown off her abilities before, which made me joke, “It’s dangerous for a young woman in a Disney film to reveal her previously unknown powers! Haven’t you guys ever seen Frozen?” There’s also a nice scene in which one of Mulan’s fellow soldiers is pretty obviously cruising her even though at that point she’s still in disguise as a he – which reminded me of similar scenes of a straight guy cruising a woman in FTM drag between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Queen Christina (1933) and Katharine Hepburn and Brian Aherne in Sylvia Scarlett (1936). (Mulan is a good enough movie to remind me of classic films I revere.) Instead of the sheer weight and infuriating complexity of J. R. R. Tolkien’s world we get clear-cut character conflicts and a plot that moves effectively and makes sense, and instead of the dank world of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien movies we get bright sunlight and the sorts of vivid colors that used to be used in color films when they were still a novelty but have fallen by the wayside now that they’ve become standard. Mandy Walker’s cinematography (another woman in a job usually done by a man! Indeed, because the American Society of Cinematographers is so notoriously “closed” and protective a union, it’s been even harder for women cinematographers to break through than it’s been for women directors) and Grant Major’s production designs are stunning and beautiful, and Niki Caro (who, ironically, is from Peter Jackson’s stomping grounds, New Zealand) manages to make the most of them and create a truly beautiful film.

I’m sure there are powerful undertones in this story as traditionally told that got lost in the Disneyfication process, but so what? On its own terms the live-action Mulan is excellent entertainment and virtually a textbook example of how a quest narrative featuring a young character should be done – and it has the major advantage over Jackson’s slogs through Tolkien that it’s only 115 minutes long, enough running time to get its story told cleanly and efficiently without dragging us through ponderous digressions. I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, but Mulan is a film of real quality – and it’s made both Charles and I curious to see the animated version, which (according to the imdb.com “Trivia” page on the 2020 Mulan) differs from it in that Mulan cuts her hair off to disguise herself as a male (this time around the filmmakers decided against that on the ground that a lot of Chinese males in the time period wore their hair long) and it’s full of songs, some of which were used in this film as part of Harry Gregson Williams’ musical score (which itself is better than those of most modern films in this genre, inspirational without being ponderous), though the only noticeable songs in this version were the big rock power ballads (including one called “Loyal, Brave, True” – not a great song but sung spectacularly by Christina Aguilera – and where has she been? Throughout her career her powerful voice has been saddled with weak material) that inevitably got trotted out to be heard under the closing credits. The musical style is anachronistic but, as I said to Charles after the film, no more so than Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 20th century take on 19th century German Romanticism in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), a film set in the 13th century!

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, MGM, WingNut Films, 2014)


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

Two nights ago at 9 p.m. Charles and I ran the last movie in the three-film trilogy based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 young-adult novel The Hobbit, first episode in the Lord of the Rings cycle and the introduction to Middle-Earth and its populations of hobbits, dwarves, elves, orcs, dragons and whatnot. There’s considerable debate among Tolkienites over what place The Hobbit has in the cycle and whether it’s integral or simply a precursor, and as Charles once explained to me part of the confusion is because Tolkien asked his publishers for permission to revise The Hobbit after he completed the three big books that make up The Lord of the Rings and bring it more in line with the rest of the cycle, but the publisher said that The Hobbit was already considered a classic of British children’s literature and so Tolkien was allowed to make only minor changes.

In the early 2000’s writer-director Peter Jackson shot films of the three main Lord of the Rings books back-to-back (after earlier attempts to film the cycle either hadn’t come off at all or had got stuck after book one), and the films were such a fantastic commercial success he got the green light in the early 2010’s to spin three movies out of The Hobbit – which resulted in three ponderous, overloaded dramas that at least for me, a decided non-Tolkien fan (though I think he was being a little unfair, my sympathies are with the BBC Music Magazine critic who said he “wondered, how in a world where Wagner’s Ring exists, anyone can take Tolkien’s seriously”), were more of an endurance test than an entertainment. The three-film cycle began with An Unexpected Journey, continued through The Desolation of Smaug (Smaug – pronounced “Smowg,” by the way – is a dragon that took over the dwarf kingdom inside the Lonely Mountain of Erebor and seized the gold hoard the dwarf-king had forced his subjects to accumulate, killing most of the dwarves and driving the rest into exile) and ended with the movie we just watched, The Battle of the Five Armies. Actually there’d been a passing line in The Desolation of Smaug that there would be seven armies in the final action scene, and I found myself wondering where the other two armies had gone – though in Battle I quickly found myself losing track of just how many armies there were. When we watched videos of Wagner’s Ring together Charles made fun of them for being so thinly populated – “in the first three episodes there seem to be only 12 people in the whole universe,” he joked – but for me Tolkien erred in the other direction, creating so many different races and communities it’s hard for me to keep track of who is who and what side they’re on. It doesn’t help that though one of his species is called “dwarves” they’re not especially small – indeed, Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), is not only not a little person, he’s the sexiest guy in the film and the closest it has to a romantic leading man.

The basic plot of The Hobbit is that Thorin has assembled a guerrilla force of 13 people to help mobilize the dwarves, kill Smaug and reconquer the Lonely Mountain – only the mountain can only be entered through a gate that can only be seen by moonlight when the moon is at a particular phase, and they recruit hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) because they think he’s a particularly skilled burglar who can figure out a way to open the gate so they can go in the Lonely Mountain and confront Smaug. Bilbo gets into the mountain to steal the magic jewel that is the talisman of power for the dwarf kings, and he and Smaug have a long, drawn-out confrontation scene in which the dragon has way too much dialogue for the dragon – I missed the relative taciturnicity of Wagner’s dragon Fafner, who said little more to Siegfried than, “I have and I hold – let me sleep!” I had also expected Smaug to be dispatched at the end of episode two but instead Jackson and his writers (including Guillermo del Toro – and I suspect I would have liked these movies better if he had directed them, if only because he wouldn’t have made them so goddamned long!) decided to keep Smaug alive and have him burn out a city of humans at the foot of the Lonely Mountain before he’s finally killed by a magic arrow that has to be fired on one particular part of his body because that’s his Achilles’ heel or the part of Siegfried’s back where the linden leaf landed (you remember).

There are some genuinely emotional scenes depicting the impossible love affair between dwarf prince Thorin and elf princess Galadriel (Cate Blanchett – and it’s an indication of how much appeal The Lord of the Rings has that they were able to get a star of her stature for a pretty small role), and there’s a conflict between the elf prince Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and his rival over whether the elves should get involved in this conflict at all. At least The Battle of the Five Armies has less of the interminable exposition that weighed down the first two Hobbit movies – Jackson and his co-writers have finally made clear (as much as it’s ever clear in Tolkien!) who is who and what they’re fighting about, and so he can concentrate on the spectacular action scenes that are the main reason anyone goes to a film like this. I also missed Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, who was central to the first film but was pretty much kept to one side in the next two; though some excellent actors appeared in these movies, McKellen was by far the best cast member in terms of projecting power and authority. And if he looks a decade older here than he did in the Lord of the Rings films … well, he’s a wizard, and he could easily have taken a few years off between the cycles with his magic powers. I can see why there are so many people who have cherished Tolkien’s cycle and taken it to their hearts (including Stephen Colbert, who mentioned it on last Tuesday night’s show and who made a cameo appearance in The Desolation of Smaug), but I found myself unable to make it through The Fellowship of the Ring when I tried to read it in the 1960’s (during the books’ first flush of popularity) and the movies have been something of a trial for me as well.

Monday, January 25, 2021

Rosita (Mary Pickford Company, United Artists, 1923)


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

Last night at 9 p.m. I watched Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” featuring a quite interesting if rather flawed movie called Rosita, made in 1923. It was produced by its star, Mary Pickford, who at the time was one of the founders of United Artists and had complete control over her own career – though she was still stuck by her fans into playing children even though she had just turned 30 and wanted to establish herself as a wider-ranging actress who could play adult characters and depict adult emotions. Rosita began as a play by Philippe Dumanoir and Adolphe d’Ennery that got adapted into a script by Norbert Falk, Edward Knoblock and Hans Kräly, and to direct it Pickford brought Ernst Lubitsch over from Germany. This was a time when Lubitsch was known primarily for elaborate costume melodramas featuring the proverbial casts of thousands and often dramatizing the great sexual scandals of history. When he made Rosita Lubitsch was coming off the international success of his version of Madame Du Barry, starring Pola Negri and released in the U.S. as Passion, and obviously Pickford was hoping for something similar from him to break her “America’s Sweetheart” image.

The story deals with Rosita, a poor street singer in Seville, Spain, whose entire family – her mother (Mathilde Comont), father (Georges Periolet), two brothers (Philippe de Lacey and Donald McAlpin) and a sister (Doreen Turner) – depend for their survival on what she can make as a busker. In an era in which it was common for playwrights to build up anticipation of the star’s appearance by keeping their character off stage (or off screen) for the first 20 minutes or so, we first get glimpses of the Spanish royal court in Madrid, where the king (Holbrook Blinn) is a Don Juan type, far more interested in affairs of the heart (or at least the bedroom) than affairs of state. He’s shown playing patty-cake across a card table with three of his anonymous paramours while his prime minister (Charles Belcher) futilely tries to interrupt him to get him to sign some death warrants. The King hears that a carnival is going on in Seville and it features all sorts of licentious goings-on which his queen (Irene Rich) tells him he has a moral duty to stop. Instead he high-tails it to Seville to partake of the forbidden delights himself, and naturally when he sees Rosita perform he’s immediately smitten and will do just about anything to deflower her. It’s true she’s already got a boyfriend – Don Diego del Alcalá (George Walsh, who was the original choice for the lead in the silent Ben-Hur until Ramon Novarro replaced him), described in the titles as “a penniless nobleman,” but the king doesn’t think that’ll be a problem.

When the king attempts a sexual assault on Rosita and Don Diego draws his sword to protect her, the king has both of them arrested and sentences Don Diego to death (that’s one death warrant he is willing to sign!). He’s willing to let Rosita out on condition that she visit him in his royal digs – and once that happens Rosita shifts gears and changes from the big, bloated period drama that had made Lubitsch’s German reputation to the sort of delightful envelope-pushing romantic comedy that would make him famous in the United States. The king lavishes fancy presents on Rosita and invites her to his villa – and she insists on bringing her whole family, including their dog (there’s a delightful scene of them attempting to squeeze all her relatives, along with the dog, into the royal carriage that was sent for her and her alone), to the villa. She dutifully and virtuously refuses all the fancy proffered gifts – and her relatives, especially her mom, think she’s nuts and keep them anyway. She also pours almost half a bottle of perfume onto a handkerchief and then passes it around to her relatives (I was expecting a sneezing gag here but the writers and Lubitsch blessedly spared us). When the servants act snooty towards her she demands that the king make her a countess – and initially he begs off but then hits on a stratagem: he’ll have her marry Don Diego, but with her veiled and him masked so neither of them will know who the other is, and then he’ll be executed and she’ll inherit his title. Only during the wedding ceremony they lift their face coverings and peek, and once Rosita realizes that she’s just married the man she actually loves, she demands that the king repeal his death sentence. He agrees but explains that for the sake of judicial protocol he can’t just set Don Diego free. Instead he will have to stage a fake execution with blank-loaded guns (the execution is supposed to be by firing squad because, as a member of the hereditary nobility, Don Diego has the right to be shot instead of hanged like a commoner) and Don Diego will have to make it look like he’s really dead.

Well, anyone who’s seen Puccini’s opera Tosca immediately knows where this is going: as soon as Rosita is out of earshot the king countermands his initial order and insists that Don Diego be executed for real. There’s a shot of Rosita lurking in the corridor as the king is giving this order, but it’s not clear whether she understands it or not. In any case, Rosita witnesses from her window as Don Diego is shot by the firing squad and falls dead. She claims the body as his widow and invites the king over for dinner, telling her servants to set the table for three – the third one being death. Pickford’s acting, which has heretofore been serviceable but a little too coy (an occupational hazard for silent-movie heroines), suddenly turns deadly serious as she gives the king some if-looks-could-kill expressions while they’re both drinking wine. From the glumness of Pickford’s countenance I was expecting that she had slipped poison into the wine and therefore she would kill the king and herself in a murder-suicide – and the scene is so starkly acted and shot I suspect that might have been the originally planned ending. But just as Rosita is about to deliver the coup de grâce and stab the king just as he’s about to have sex with her, the “dead” body of Don Diego comes back to life. It seems the queen heard what was going on and decided to intervene, countermanding the countermand and ordering that Don Diego’s execution be faked after all, and in the final scene Rosita and Don Diego are standing on the balcony of the villa the king had given her and waving goodbye to the royal carriage, inside of which the queen is lecturing the king about following the straight and narrow and avoiding extra-relational amours from then on.

Rosita is an intriguing film but also a flawed one, suffering from a lack of character consistency and some neck-snapping reversals, especially in the final reels. It was also a film Pickford herself turned against in later years; it was one of the few Pickford films of which she didn’t retain a copy (though she kept the fourth reel until she donated it to the New York Museum of Modern Art, whose pioneering movie curator in the 1930’s, Iris Barry, first established the idea that motion pictures were a true art form, worthy of preservation: another heroine of American culture you’ve probably never heard of!), and it was thought lost until a print finally turned up in Russia in the 1970’s. There followed a lot of laborious work cleaning up the image quality and also restoring the original titles, since the extant print (except for the fourth reel) carried only Russian-language titles and the English ones had to be reconstructed from whatever records existed (cutting continuities, censorship reports and even contemporary reviews that quoted the “dialogue”). Rosita is a pivotal film in Lubitsch’s career even though it shows him as not an especially innovative director technically – he was still shooting pretty straightforwardly from stationary cameras and using realistic sets while fellow German directors like Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and Paul Leni were exploring elaborate camera movements and frankly unrealistic sets.

Where the film scores is in the romantic and sexual intrigues in and around the king’s court; Erich von Stroheim once compared himself to Lubitsch by saying, “Lubitsch first shows you the king on the throne, then the king in his bedroom. I first show you the king in his bedroom so you will know exactly what he is like when then you see him on the throne.” In Rosita Lubitsch comes closer to Stroheim here, first showing the king in his amorous intrigues – like the king in Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’Amuse (“The King Amuses Himself”) and the Duke of Mantua in Verdi’s Rigoletto, his adaptation of Hugo’s play, the king here is a fornicating bastard willing to fuck anything as long as it’s human, female and will (or can be ordered to) hold still for him. The scenes in which the king tries to force himself on Rosita and she innocently pushes him away – it’s kept ambiguous whether she’s that naïve or she really knows what he’s after and is just feigning innocence – are the best shots in the movie, more interesting than either the spectacle at the beginning or the melodrama at the end. TCM host Jacqueline Stewart said Rosita was a major hit on its initial release (which is not what I’ve read in other sources; I’ve read it was a flop and nearly sank Lubitsch’s U.S. career before it even started; he saved himself by signing with Warner Bros. when it was still a minor studio and working out the high romantic style he’d become known for in films like Forbidden Paradise and The Marriage Circle), and it holds up today as a good but flawed movie.

It’s positive that Mary Pickford was willing to experiment with her image and make a movie so far off the beaten path, but I’m not sure how well the experiment came off and there are scenes of Pickford trying to be “bad” – or at least pose as “bad” – that Gloria Swanson or Greta Garbo could have brought off easily but Pickford struggles to make believable. At least the Museum of Modern Art, which supervised the restoration of Rosita, used a musical accompaniment based on the original score by Louis F. Gottschalk (not to be confused with the 19th century African-American composer Louis M. Gottschalk), including a surprising bit of Bizet’s opera Carmen (also about the sexual shenanigans of a lower-class girl in Seville!), though not one of the Big Tunes you’d expect to hear. Instead Gottschalk appropriated the Flower Song in Act II, which in Bizet’s original is sung by the tenor who complains that he got himself arrested for Carmen’s sake and now she won’t give him a tumble. In Rosita it’s used as a Leitmotif for the love between Rosita and Don Diego.