by Mark Gabrish Conlan • © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film at the San Diego Public Library June 9 was Stay, which I especially wanted to see because two of my favorite people in contemporary film were involved in it: Ryan Gosling played a leading role and Marc Forster was the director. Ralph DeLauro invoked The Twilight Zone as a comparison point in his introduction and certainly the parallels were there. The movie begins with a tire-less auto wheel working itself free from a burning car — at first I thought this was the logo for one of the multitude of production companies seemingly involved in producing any film that gets made today — and the auto belongs to Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), a suicidal, schizophrenic art student who burned it on purpose (at least we think that’s what happened — later we get other clues). He’s been seeing a female psychiatrist who has a nervous breakdown of her own (caused, it’s hinted later — a lot of dramatic issues in David Benioff’s script are merely hinted at instead of being spelled out for us — by Henry’s intractability as a patient), and one day he shows up for his appointment and she’s not there.
Instead there’s a “substitute shrink,” Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan MacGregor, top-billed), whose commonality with Henry has already been established visually by a match cut in which Gosling’s face so perfectly turns into MacGregor’s I was beginning to wonder either if the two were going to turn out to be the same person or one was going to be the delusion of the other à la The Sixth Sense. Dr. Foster’s real point of identification with his new patient is that his own live-in girlfriend, Lila Culpepper (Naomi Watts), is an artist who attempted suicide by slashing her arms (down the long way rather than the far less dangerous across the wrists). Henry is obsessed with a deceased artist who on his 21st birthday burned all his paintings and committed suicide as his ultimate artistic statement. He’s also obsessed with a lot of things — as are the writer and director who created him: we get a lot of shots of spiral staircases (a favorite movie image since the film of that title and, even more so, Hitchcock’s Vertigo — and it’s a testament to Forster’s and Benioff’s ability to create a mood that the visual quotes from Vertigo add to the mood instead of distracting us by seeming to say, “See how clever we are?”).
There are a lot of recurring images — including one of an engagement ring — and characters who may or may not be alive, including Dr. Foster’s mentor, Dr. Leon Patterson (Bob Hoskins), a blind man (until he mysteriously recovers his sight later in the film) with whom Dr. Foster plays chess, calling out his moves so Patterson can “see” them (an evocation of the chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal?), and whom Henry is convinced is his father even though he’s earlier told Dr. Foster (and us) that both his parents are dead. (Later we meet someone who may or may not be his mother as well.)
I usually can’t stand movies like this that are so disconnected from reality that anything can happen in their plots — as Dwight Macdonald wrote of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (a movie that really isn’t that disconnected at all, especially by comparison with what’s been made since!), “If all the cards are wild, you can’t play poker.” And you can’t play with audience expectations unless you first set up some to begin with. Nonetheless, though it didn’t strike me as in the same league as Finding Neverland or Stranger Than Fiction (which might almost be read as a parody of Stay), this is a remarkable film, visually stunning and powered by Gosling’s marvelously enigmatic performance — even though, as my partner Charles said when it was over (a thought that had occurred to me as well), one wonders if Gosling always has to play picturesquely doomed psychotics or people on the edge. Isn’t someone, someday going to cast him as a nice, ordinary, normal human being?
Friday, June 13, 2008
Law of the Tropics (Warners, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles and I got home I was already pretty dog-tired but I ended up running him another film: Law of the Tropics, which I’d stumbled on in the DVD collection wondering if I should bother recording the similarly titled Lady of the Tropics — and which turned out to be a 1941 Warners’ “B” that was an uncredited remake of Oil for the Lamps of China, with the setting moved from China to an unspecified South American country (probably Brazil), the oil changed to rubber, and Constance Bennett top-billed in the role of Joan Madison, a down-and-out woman who fled the U.S. because of a murder charge against her and ended up singing in a sleazy nightclub and looking over her shoulder for the detective who’s been sent down to Wherever, South America to apprehend her and bring her back for trial.
She sees a way out in the person of Jim Conway (Jeffrey Lynn), assistant manager of Station 3 of the King Rubber Company, who’s come to the coast city to meet his future wife — only said future wife, Laura, has sent him a telegram saying she’s had second thoughts and isn’t about to join him and live in a country she’s never been to and has no idea whether she could stand. Unwilling to face the teasing of his co-workers and the natives if he returns without a wife, he proposes a sexless marriage to Joan as long as she impersonates Laura and answers to that name. Meanwhile, the owner of the King Rubber Company, Alfred King, Sr. (Paul Harvey) has been concerned about the slow growth rate of production in this country and plans to solve the problem by sending his no-account son to take over Station 3 from the beloved old foreman who’s been running it for a quarter-century, Frank Davis (Hobart Bosworth).
For the most part Law of the Tropics is played for screwball comedy more than anything else, and it’s a real shock when something sad and dramatic happens (Davis, broken by the news that the boss has fired him and replaced him with the boss’s son, shoots himself) — an accidental disorientation almost as jarring as the intentional ones in Stay! There are a few shards of anti-corporatism (apparently these were more important in the original film and the Alice Tisdale Hobart novel on which it was based) but for the most part Law of the Tropics is agreeable light entertainment that nails the clichés but doesn’t really do anything dramatic with them — and the title makes no sense at all since the only “law” involved comes very much from outside the tropics.
When Charles and I got home I was already pretty dog-tired but I ended up running him another film: Law of the Tropics, which I’d stumbled on in the DVD collection wondering if I should bother recording the similarly titled Lady of the Tropics — and which turned out to be a 1941 Warners’ “B” that was an uncredited remake of Oil for the Lamps of China, with the setting moved from China to an unspecified South American country (probably Brazil), the oil changed to rubber, and Constance Bennett top-billed in the role of Joan Madison, a down-and-out woman who fled the U.S. because of a murder charge against her and ended up singing in a sleazy nightclub and looking over her shoulder for the detective who’s been sent down to Wherever, South America to apprehend her and bring her back for trial.
She sees a way out in the person of Jim Conway (Jeffrey Lynn), assistant manager of Station 3 of the King Rubber Company, who’s come to the coast city to meet his future wife — only said future wife, Laura, has sent him a telegram saying she’s had second thoughts and isn’t about to join him and live in a country she’s never been to and has no idea whether she could stand. Unwilling to face the teasing of his co-workers and the natives if he returns without a wife, he proposes a sexless marriage to Joan as long as she impersonates Laura and answers to that name. Meanwhile, the owner of the King Rubber Company, Alfred King, Sr. (Paul Harvey) has been concerned about the slow growth rate of production in this country and plans to solve the problem by sending his no-account son to take over Station 3 from the beloved old foreman who’s been running it for a quarter-century, Frank Davis (Hobart Bosworth).
For the most part Law of the Tropics is played for screwball comedy more than anything else, and it’s a real shock when something sad and dramatic happens (Davis, broken by the news that the boss has fired him and replaced him with the boss’s son, shoots himself) — an accidental disorientation almost as jarring as the intentional ones in Stay! There are a few shards of anti-corporatism (apparently these were more important in the original film and the Alice Tisdale Hobart novel on which it was based) but for the most part Law of the Tropics is agreeable light entertainment that nails the clichés but doesn’t really do anything dramatic with them — and the title makes no sense at all since the only “law” involved comes very much from outside the tropics.
Gamera vs. Barugon (Daiei International, 1966)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • © Copyright 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My partner Charles had mentioned that he’d downloaded the fourth-ever episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and the earliest known to exist — no tapes of the very first shows (the ones done for local stations in Minneapolis) were preserved by the studio and the only ones extant are home VHS recordings made by fans. The film featured on it was Gamera vs. Barugon, a 1966 production of the Daiei International company in Japan (they seem to have been Toho’s biggest competitor; I think at one point or another Akira Kurosawa worked for both of them, in this quirky period in film history in which the Japanese were making some of the greatest films in the world and some of the absolute worst, and using the profits from the awful ones to finance the great ones), and I got the impression that Gamera — a giant-sized turtle with the ability to fly (to become airborne, it has four flame jets that spurt rocket blasts and revolve it so it lifts off like a flying saucer) — was Daiei’s attempt to come up with an ongoing giant-monster character to compete with the enormous success of Toho’s Gojira (Godzilla to us).
The imdb.com entry on Gamera vs. Barugon mentioned that it was the first Gamera film in color and the only one that did not feature a child as the main human character (the latter was just as well as far as I was concerned!), and the movie as a whole was one of those monster-fests with no redeeming qualities whatsoever (though the fact that we were watching an awful copy from a VHS tape in a context where the film was being mocked — though not especially well; given how brilliant the MST3K crew became later it’s amazing that there were few jokes during the movies in these early episodes, and the jokes there were were often embarrassingly lame and unfunny — certainly didn’t help). We get a few stock clips of Gamera in action, presumably from previous films in the series elaborately tinted to match a film that’s otherwise in color — and those are the most genuinely exciting moments in this film!
Then Gamera disappears from the movie and we get instead a dull tale of skullduggery involving three Japanese veterans of World War II (one of whom, which his slicked-back black hair and sunglasses, bears a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley) who in the middle of the war found what they thought was a humongous opal in a cave on one of the islands where they were fighting. They go back for it and discover it, though two of their number are killed by deadly scorpions and the one survivor uses an infrared lamp to treat his athlete’s foot. Needless to say, the “opal” is really a dinosaur egg and the infrared energy from the lamp is just the power source needed to induce it to hatch and generate Barugon, a pretty generic dinosaur-shaped monster with a flame-thrower tongue and an ability to emit a rainbow-like ray that’s a weapon of mass destruction.
A woman the lead explorer for the “opal” met on her home island (apparently either the daughter or the ward of a middle-aged man who’s “gone native” and seems to have stepped out of a story by W. Somerset Maugham — and would probably like to get back!) rigs up a diamond-powered laser to try to kill Barugon, but the attempt merely evaporates the diamond and returns millions of dollars’ worth of gem back to its original status as carbon atoms. Later they rig up an array of mirrors to try to get Barugon’s “rainbow” energy (lampooned by one of the MST3K crew singing the opening lines of the Sesame Street song “The Rainbow Connection,” their funniest gag in the film) turned back in on itself to destroy it, but Barugon survives even that and it’s left for Gamera to do his Seventh Cavalry impression and come in at the end of the film to destroy Barugon (in a surprisingly ill-staged action scene that the guys who did Ultra-Man probably could have done better) and then fly back into space without waiting for a thank-you, something like the Lone Ranger.
Gamera vs. Barugon was the sort of annoying bad movie that reminds you of all too many great ones — when the protagonists arrive on the South Pacific island and the natives greet them with undisguised hostility, one can’t help but recall King Kong and how once in the distant past someone actually made a masterpiece about an oversized animal monster.
My partner Charles had mentioned that he’d downloaded the fourth-ever episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and the earliest known to exist — no tapes of the very first shows (the ones done for local stations in Minneapolis) were preserved by the studio and the only ones extant are home VHS recordings made by fans. The film featured on it was Gamera vs. Barugon, a 1966 production of the Daiei International company in Japan (they seem to have been Toho’s biggest competitor; I think at one point or another Akira Kurosawa worked for both of them, in this quirky period in film history in which the Japanese were making some of the greatest films in the world and some of the absolute worst, and using the profits from the awful ones to finance the great ones), and I got the impression that Gamera — a giant-sized turtle with the ability to fly (to become airborne, it has four flame jets that spurt rocket blasts and revolve it so it lifts off like a flying saucer) — was Daiei’s attempt to come up with an ongoing giant-monster character to compete with the enormous success of Toho’s Gojira (Godzilla to us).
The imdb.com entry on Gamera vs. Barugon mentioned that it was the first Gamera film in color and the only one that did not feature a child as the main human character (the latter was just as well as far as I was concerned!), and the movie as a whole was one of those monster-fests with no redeeming qualities whatsoever (though the fact that we were watching an awful copy from a VHS tape in a context where the film was being mocked — though not especially well; given how brilliant the MST3K crew became later it’s amazing that there were few jokes during the movies in these early episodes, and the jokes there were were often embarrassingly lame and unfunny — certainly didn’t help). We get a few stock clips of Gamera in action, presumably from previous films in the series elaborately tinted to match a film that’s otherwise in color — and those are the most genuinely exciting moments in this film!
Then Gamera disappears from the movie and we get instead a dull tale of skullduggery involving three Japanese veterans of World War II (one of whom, which his slicked-back black hair and sunglasses, bears a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley) who in the middle of the war found what they thought was a humongous opal in a cave on one of the islands where they were fighting. They go back for it and discover it, though two of their number are killed by deadly scorpions and the one survivor uses an infrared lamp to treat his athlete’s foot. Needless to say, the “opal” is really a dinosaur egg and the infrared energy from the lamp is just the power source needed to induce it to hatch and generate Barugon, a pretty generic dinosaur-shaped monster with a flame-thrower tongue and an ability to emit a rainbow-like ray that’s a weapon of mass destruction.
A woman the lead explorer for the “opal” met on her home island (apparently either the daughter or the ward of a middle-aged man who’s “gone native” and seems to have stepped out of a story by W. Somerset Maugham — and would probably like to get back!) rigs up a diamond-powered laser to try to kill Barugon, but the attempt merely evaporates the diamond and returns millions of dollars’ worth of gem back to its original status as carbon atoms. Later they rig up an array of mirrors to try to get Barugon’s “rainbow” energy (lampooned by one of the MST3K crew singing the opening lines of the Sesame Street song “The Rainbow Connection,” their funniest gag in the film) turned back in on itself to destroy it, but Barugon survives even that and it’s left for Gamera to do his Seventh Cavalry impression and come in at the end of the film to destroy Barugon (in a surprisingly ill-staged action scene that the guys who did Ultra-Man probably could have done better) and then fly back into space without waiting for a thank-you, something like the Lone Ranger.
Gamera vs. Barugon was the sort of annoying bad movie that reminds you of all too many great ones — when the protagonists arrive on the South Pacific island and the natives greet them with undisguised hostility, one can’t help but recall King Kong and how once in the distant past someone actually made a masterpiece about an oversized animal monster.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Gang War (Million Dollar Productions, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1940 movie Gang War, an all-Black “race” movie by the ridiculously misnamed “Million Dollar Productions” studio, which didn’t have anybody of any lasting importance in the cast — the only names are recognized were Ralph Cooper, the lead (and him I only knew because he’d previously starred in the film The Duke Is Tops with a female singer who did achieve lasting importance, Lena Horne) and Maceo B. Sheffield, who’d played the lead in one of the earliest all-Black Westerns (in which Herb Jeffries was the villain before they promoted him to hero status in the later films in the series). Surprise: the film actually turned out to be pretty good, afflicted with a poverty-row budget that made the studio name not only inappropriate but laughable and hissy sound (two sound men, Earl Cille and Lambert Day, are credited, but given the great fog of surface noise through which we hear this film’s dialogue, or try to, it’s anybody’s guess why anyone would want to take credit for recording it), Gang War was produced by Harry C. Popkin (who later made classic noir movies like D.O.A. and Impact) and directed by his brother Leo.
What separated this from other race movies we’ve seen was the competence of the cast — nobody here, with the possible exception of Jesse C. Brooks as police lieutenant Holmes, who both looked and sounded so much like James Earl Jones I found myself wondering if they were related, is a genuinely powerful actor, but they’re all fully competent; there aren’t any of the halting, porn-like deliveries we’ve seen in other race films — and the pace of the direction. Though there are way too many montages of newspaper headlines taking the place of scenes that should have been shown (and no doubt would have been had the filmmakers been able to afford it), there are a few genuine action scenes that do appear on screen, and Leo Popkin moves the film along at a smart, quick pace that helps zip us past the plot holes too fast to notice them and makes the film at least as entertaining as your average white movie from a studio like PRC or Monogram.
The plot is essentially a Black version of Little Caesar: aspiring gangster Bob “Killer” Meade (Ralph Cooper) aims to rise to the top of the Harlem rackets no matter how many people in his way he has to kill. First he gets the men of gangster “Bull” Brown (Maceo B. Sheffield) to throw in with him; they take the gang away from Brown and Meade murders Brown personally; the crime is witnessed but, much like the Black gang-bangers of today, Meade is acquitted because witnesses and jurors are intimidated by his omnipresent posse. After killing a few other small fry, Meade sets his sights on Lew Baron (Lawrence Creiner), and the bulk of the film consists of the brutal war between them in which each orders the other’s men knocked off at the slightest provocation, or none at all. Just how the gangs in Harlem make their money is only hinted at in this film — the only racket we actually see in operation is the sale of jukeboxes — but there’s a plot twist that, though not exactly original, gives this film a rather odd aura: Meade has a chorus-girl girlfriend, Maizie “Sugar” Walford (Gladys Snyder, probably the role Lena Horne would have played if she hadn’t moved out of the “race” world and into white showbiz by then, first as Teddy Wilson’s band singer and then at MGM), who is totally clueless about his gang involvement and heatedly denies that Meade has ever killed anyone.
Among the most interesting features of the movie is the actual footage of Harlem as it appeared in 1940, by both day and night — including glimpses of such legendary nightspots as Small’s Paradise and the Savoy Ballroom (where I think Jimmie Lunceford was playing at the time — that’s what it looked like during a brief shot of the marquee) — the use of real locations rather than studio fakes being one of the few good aspects of the limited budget on which this film was made. There’s also a very long production number that supposedly takes place at a nightclub where Meade takes Maizie on one of their dates — and it’s impressively produced, a deep-Congo sort of thing that looks surprisingly like one of the numbers from Josephine Baker’s musicals (and also is reminiscent of Marshall Stearns’ account in his book The Story of Jazz of what the Cotton Club productions Duke Ellington’s “jungle” music accompanied) — before the plot hurtles towards resolution: Maizie turns Meade in to the cops rather than let him murder Baron, and it seems as if he’s going to give himself up to Lieutenant Holmes — only at the last minute Meade knocks Holmes down and attempts an escape across the rooftops before he’s shot down and falls to the ground to his death.
Though hardly a great movie, this version of Gang War (a title that was used for some white gangster movies, too) is a pretty good one, a fast-moving piece that still holds up as entertainment (which most race movies don’t unless they have someone in the cast who either had been a major entertainment star earlier, like blues pioneer Mamie Smith, or would be one later, like Paul Robeson, Herb Jeffries and Lena Horne).
I ran the 1940 movie Gang War, an all-Black “race” movie by the ridiculously misnamed “Million Dollar Productions” studio, which didn’t have anybody of any lasting importance in the cast — the only names are recognized were Ralph Cooper, the lead (and him I only knew because he’d previously starred in the film The Duke Is Tops with a female singer who did achieve lasting importance, Lena Horne) and Maceo B. Sheffield, who’d played the lead in one of the earliest all-Black Westerns (in which Herb Jeffries was the villain before they promoted him to hero status in the later films in the series). Surprise: the film actually turned out to be pretty good, afflicted with a poverty-row budget that made the studio name not only inappropriate but laughable and hissy sound (two sound men, Earl Cille and Lambert Day, are credited, but given the great fog of surface noise through which we hear this film’s dialogue, or try to, it’s anybody’s guess why anyone would want to take credit for recording it), Gang War was produced by Harry C. Popkin (who later made classic noir movies like D.O.A. and Impact) and directed by his brother Leo.
What separated this from other race movies we’ve seen was the competence of the cast — nobody here, with the possible exception of Jesse C. Brooks as police lieutenant Holmes, who both looked and sounded so much like James Earl Jones I found myself wondering if they were related, is a genuinely powerful actor, but they’re all fully competent; there aren’t any of the halting, porn-like deliveries we’ve seen in other race films — and the pace of the direction. Though there are way too many montages of newspaper headlines taking the place of scenes that should have been shown (and no doubt would have been had the filmmakers been able to afford it), there are a few genuine action scenes that do appear on screen, and Leo Popkin moves the film along at a smart, quick pace that helps zip us past the plot holes too fast to notice them and makes the film at least as entertaining as your average white movie from a studio like PRC or Monogram.
The plot is essentially a Black version of Little Caesar: aspiring gangster Bob “Killer” Meade (Ralph Cooper) aims to rise to the top of the Harlem rackets no matter how many people in his way he has to kill. First he gets the men of gangster “Bull” Brown (Maceo B. Sheffield) to throw in with him; they take the gang away from Brown and Meade murders Brown personally; the crime is witnessed but, much like the Black gang-bangers of today, Meade is acquitted because witnesses and jurors are intimidated by his omnipresent posse. After killing a few other small fry, Meade sets his sights on Lew Baron (Lawrence Creiner), and the bulk of the film consists of the brutal war between them in which each orders the other’s men knocked off at the slightest provocation, or none at all. Just how the gangs in Harlem make their money is only hinted at in this film — the only racket we actually see in operation is the sale of jukeboxes — but there’s a plot twist that, though not exactly original, gives this film a rather odd aura: Meade has a chorus-girl girlfriend, Maizie “Sugar” Walford (Gladys Snyder, probably the role Lena Horne would have played if she hadn’t moved out of the “race” world and into white showbiz by then, first as Teddy Wilson’s band singer and then at MGM), who is totally clueless about his gang involvement and heatedly denies that Meade has ever killed anyone.
Among the most interesting features of the movie is the actual footage of Harlem as it appeared in 1940, by both day and night — including glimpses of such legendary nightspots as Small’s Paradise and the Savoy Ballroom (where I think Jimmie Lunceford was playing at the time — that’s what it looked like during a brief shot of the marquee) — the use of real locations rather than studio fakes being one of the few good aspects of the limited budget on which this film was made. There’s also a very long production number that supposedly takes place at a nightclub where Meade takes Maizie on one of their dates — and it’s impressively produced, a deep-Congo sort of thing that looks surprisingly like one of the numbers from Josephine Baker’s musicals (and also is reminiscent of Marshall Stearns’ account in his book The Story of Jazz of what the Cotton Club productions Duke Ellington’s “jungle” music accompanied) — before the plot hurtles towards resolution: Maizie turns Meade in to the cops rather than let him murder Baron, and it seems as if he’s going to give himself up to Lieutenant Holmes — only at the last minute Meade knocks Holmes down and attempts an escape across the rooftops before he’s shot down and falls to the ground to his death.
Though hardly a great movie, this version of Gang War (a title that was used for some white gangster movies, too) is a pretty good one, a fast-moving piece that still holds up as entertainment (which most race movies don’t unless they have someone in the cast who either had been a major entertainment star earlier, like blues pioneer Mamie Smith, or would be one later, like Paul Robeson, Herb Jeffries and Lena Horne).
Picture Palace (Warners/Vitaphone, 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Girls on Probation TCM showed one of those charming Hal LeRoy shorts from 1934, Picture Palace, about a young man (LeRoy) and a young woman (Dawn O’Day) who meet at the beach. It turns out they both work at the Grand Majestic movie theatre, he as an usher and she as a chorus dancer in the live shows that still regularly took place between film showings, only he makes it sound like he’s a big wheel in the theatre management and when she spots him from the stage in his usher’s uniform, she freaks out and interrupts the dance number, resulting in both of them getting fired. Undaunted, they devise a vaudeville act, become stars and in the final sequence take a nicely piquant revenge against the Grand Majestic’s manager when they’re booked to appear there as performers. It’s an extremely predictable movie but also a quite entertaining one, and why Warners didn’t pull Hal LeRoy out of shorts and make him their answer to Fred Astaire at RKO is beyond me.
After Girls on Probation TCM showed one of those charming Hal LeRoy shorts from 1934, Picture Palace, about a young man (LeRoy) and a young woman (Dawn O’Day) who meet at the beach. It turns out they both work at the Grand Majestic movie theatre, he as an usher and she as a chorus dancer in the live shows that still regularly took place between film showings, only he makes it sound like he’s a big wheel in the theatre management and when she spots him from the stage in his usher’s uniform, she freaks out and interrupts the dance number, resulting in both of them getting fired. Undaunted, they devise a vaudeville act, become stars and in the final sequence take a nicely piquant revenge against the Grand Majestic’s manager when they’re booked to appear there as performers. It’s an extremely predictable movie but also a quite entertaining one, and why Warners didn’t pull Hal LeRoy out of shorts and make him their answer to Fred Astaire at RKO is beyond me.
Girls on Probation (Warners, 1938)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I stayed up and watched a movie that’s an old quirky favorite of mine: Girls on Probation, a 1938 assembly-line “B” from Warners, written by silent-era veteran Crane Wilbur and directed by William McGann, who actually got a couple of genuinely creative-looking setups (Arthur Todd, whose best-known credit was probably the Marx Brothers’ film Monkey Business, was the cinematographer) into his otherwise coolly professional, workmanlike direction. The American Film Institute Catalog helpfully notes that previously Wilbur had written Alcatraz Island (men in prison) and Crime School (boys in prison), so he knew all the formulae for a girls-in-prison movie, and within the limits of a 64-minute running time and some surprisingly cheesy stock-music cues, he came up with a solid one: unbelievably innocent 22-year-old laundry bookkeeper Connie Heath (Jane Bryan, top-billed) gets mixed up on the wrong side of the law when her friend and co-worker Hilda Engstrom (Sheila Bromley) “borrows” a dress that they’ve cleaned for a customer so the two can go dancing one night.
Alas, at the “Hula Club” where they go, stuck-up society bitch Gloria Adams (Susan Hayward, in an early credit she probably forgot about completely by the time she became a star) notices Connie wearing her dress and goes ballistic to her date, rising young attorney Neil Dillon (Ronald Reagan) — who in the meantime has been instantly smitten with Connie and is unwilling to believe anything bad about her, like she filched herself a dress from the laundry just to party one night. As (bad) luck would have it, when Connie and Hilda get out of the cab taking them home, the cab door slams on the dress and it’s torn; Hilda tries her best to mend it, but when Gloria picks it up the next day the patchwork is all too obvious. What complicates matters is that not only is Connie still living with her parents — though she’s so goody-good she’s paying them board — but, though her mom Kate (Elisabeth Risdon) is understanding, her dad Roger (Sig Rumann) is a total fascist, viciously tearing into her whenever she wants to go out or do anything for herself, and tearing into everyone she tries to befriend as well.
Anyway, when Connie is busted for stealing the dress, thanks to Neil’s intervention she’s let off with a warning but her dad throws her out of their house and she’s forced to relocate to another small New York town 500 miles away. There she gets a secretarial job and makes regular payments to Neil to cover the cost of the ruined dress, until who should show up in town but bad ol’ Hilda Engstrom, in the company of her bad-news boyfriend Tony Rand (Anthony Averill), who’s there to rob the Union National Bank. Connie sees Hilda in the car and they get into an argument — Connie wants Hilda to write a letter declaring Connie innocent of the dress theft and Hilda, of course, wants no such thing, especially since at the moment she’s waiting behind the wheel of the getaway car while her boyfriend is inside the bank robbing it. The whole altercation is witnessed by a boy selling movie magazines, but he goes unremembered and unrecalled as Tony comes out of the bank, Hilda forces Connie into the car at gunpoint, the three of them lead the cops on a merry chase, Hilda breaks out the back window of the car while Tony drives and starts firing at the cops chasing them, Connie reaches for the gun (not that again!) and gets it away from Hilda, then holds it to Tony’s head and forces him to stop the car so all three will be arrested. Connie is convicted of being part of the robbery gang — since there’s no independent evidence to back up her story — and she’s put in the county jail for a year, where Hilda makes Connie into her virtual slave by threatening to write her dad and tell him she’s been convicted.
Eventually Connie is contacted by probation officer Jane Lennox (Dorothy Peterson), who digs up the newsboy and manages to get Connie probation, whereupon she does the thing she should have in the first place — she goes home and seeks out that nice young lawyer played by Ronald Reagan, who in the meantime has become a deputy district attorney and immediately hires Connie to be his secretary with, of course, no idea of her past. This lasts for about a year and a half, during which Neil and Connie start dating and end up engaged — until who should show up but sleazy young Hilda Engstrom, newly paroled and helping Tony, who’s just escaped from prison (a highly dramatic sequence but one probably padded out greatly with stock footage from previous Warners’ prison epics), by hiding him out and blackmailing Connie into pawning Neil’s engagement ring for a getaway nut — only Connie slips the pawnbroker a note explaining the situation and telling him to call Neil, who of course calls the police, with the result that Tony is shot trying to clamber down on the fire escape of Hilda’s building, and Hilda takes a bullet to save Connie and gets one of the great bad exit lines in the history of Hollywood: seeing a priest while she’s being loaded into an ambulance, she says, “Pretty soon I’ll be seeing your boss!”
By any normal standards Girls on Probation is a pretty mediocre movie — the title is an obvious misnomer since Connie is the only girl on probation we actually see (indeed, the title was such a stock one that Warners actually used it for another film just six months earlier, a teen drama with Bonita Granville, only they ended up calling that film The Beloved Brat instead and thereby freed up the Girls on Probation name for this one) and there are holes galore in the plot, notably Hilda’s abrupt transformation from man-crazy slacker ditz in the opening scenes to hardened gun moll later on. (Give Crane Wilbur a break; he only had a 64-minute running time to work with.) We also end up wondering how someone with so thick a German accent, and so Nazi-like a demeanor to go with it, as Sig Rumann’s character here ended up with so Anglo a character name as “Roger Heath” — though maybe we’re supposed to believe the family’s real name is Harzfeld or something and they changed it during World War I.
Nonetheless, its sheer overwroughtness makes this a haunting movie — that and Jane Bryan’s blithe innocence in the lead role; her very limited acting skills, particularly her utter inability to play anything other than sticky-sweet goodness (in her best-known role she was Bette Davis’s impossibly sweet kid sister in Marked Woman, whose murder at the hand of Davis’s gangland employers leads Davis to turn state’s evidence against them), make her oddly right for this part: we really believe in her fundamental decency as a human being despite the criminal things that happen to her, and at the same time we get frustrated that the rest of the people in the movie — particularly her dad and Hilda’s mom (Esther Dale), cut from the same cloth as Margaret Hamilton’s Miss Gulch persona in The Wizard of Oz (if Connie had had a dog Mrs. Engstrom would have tried to take it away from her), an interesting anticipation of the later J.D. movies that also made the parents the principal villains — can’t see her essential goodness like we can. Girls on Probation also has an interesting cast; Reagan and Hayward both went on to biggers and betters, and judging from her performance here Sheila Bromley should have too. Her performance, especially when she’s playing the cold-bitch sleazebag of the later reels, is entertainingly edgy and quite the best in the film. I remember when my partner Charles and I first watched this one, we were amused at the written foreword which, in the usual fustian tone of these things, said that for some women probation was the only thing “between happiness and degradation” — and we couldn’t decide whether being married to Ronald Reagan constituted happiness or degradation!
I stayed up and watched a movie that’s an old quirky favorite of mine: Girls on Probation, a 1938 assembly-line “B” from Warners, written by silent-era veteran Crane Wilbur and directed by William McGann, who actually got a couple of genuinely creative-looking setups (Arthur Todd, whose best-known credit was probably the Marx Brothers’ film Monkey Business, was the cinematographer) into his otherwise coolly professional, workmanlike direction. The American Film Institute Catalog helpfully notes that previously Wilbur had written Alcatraz Island (men in prison) and Crime School (boys in prison), so he knew all the formulae for a girls-in-prison movie, and within the limits of a 64-minute running time and some surprisingly cheesy stock-music cues, he came up with a solid one: unbelievably innocent 22-year-old laundry bookkeeper Connie Heath (Jane Bryan, top-billed) gets mixed up on the wrong side of the law when her friend and co-worker Hilda Engstrom (Sheila Bromley) “borrows” a dress that they’ve cleaned for a customer so the two can go dancing one night.
Alas, at the “Hula Club” where they go, stuck-up society bitch Gloria Adams (Susan Hayward, in an early credit she probably forgot about completely by the time she became a star) notices Connie wearing her dress and goes ballistic to her date, rising young attorney Neil Dillon (Ronald Reagan) — who in the meantime has been instantly smitten with Connie and is unwilling to believe anything bad about her, like she filched herself a dress from the laundry just to party one night. As (bad) luck would have it, when Connie and Hilda get out of the cab taking them home, the cab door slams on the dress and it’s torn; Hilda tries her best to mend it, but when Gloria picks it up the next day the patchwork is all too obvious. What complicates matters is that not only is Connie still living with her parents — though she’s so goody-good she’s paying them board — but, though her mom Kate (Elisabeth Risdon) is understanding, her dad Roger (Sig Rumann) is a total fascist, viciously tearing into her whenever she wants to go out or do anything for herself, and tearing into everyone she tries to befriend as well.
Anyway, when Connie is busted for stealing the dress, thanks to Neil’s intervention she’s let off with a warning but her dad throws her out of their house and she’s forced to relocate to another small New York town 500 miles away. There she gets a secretarial job and makes regular payments to Neil to cover the cost of the ruined dress, until who should show up in town but bad ol’ Hilda Engstrom, in the company of her bad-news boyfriend Tony Rand (Anthony Averill), who’s there to rob the Union National Bank. Connie sees Hilda in the car and they get into an argument — Connie wants Hilda to write a letter declaring Connie innocent of the dress theft and Hilda, of course, wants no such thing, especially since at the moment she’s waiting behind the wheel of the getaway car while her boyfriend is inside the bank robbing it. The whole altercation is witnessed by a boy selling movie magazines, but he goes unremembered and unrecalled as Tony comes out of the bank, Hilda forces Connie into the car at gunpoint, the three of them lead the cops on a merry chase, Hilda breaks out the back window of the car while Tony drives and starts firing at the cops chasing them, Connie reaches for the gun (not that again!) and gets it away from Hilda, then holds it to Tony’s head and forces him to stop the car so all three will be arrested. Connie is convicted of being part of the robbery gang — since there’s no independent evidence to back up her story — and she’s put in the county jail for a year, where Hilda makes Connie into her virtual slave by threatening to write her dad and tell him she’s been convicted.
Eventually Connie is contacted by probation officer Jane Lennox (Dorothy Peterson), who digs up the newsboy and manages to get Connie probation, whereupon she does the thing she should have in the first place — she goes home and seeks out that nice young lawyer played by Ronald Reagan, who in the meantime has become a deputy district attorney and immediately hires Connie to be his secretary with, of course, no idea of her past. This lasts for about a year and a half, during which Neil and Connie start dating and end up engaged — until who should show up but sleazy young Hilda Engstrom, newly paroled and helping Tony, who’s just escaped from prison (a highly dramatic sequence but one probably padded out greatly with stock footage from previous Warners’ prison epics), by hiding him out and blackmailing Connie into pawning Neil’s engagement ring for a getaway nut — only Connie slips the pawnbroker a note explaining the situation and telling him to call Neil, who of course calls the police, with the result that Tony is shot trying to clamber down on the fire escape of Hilda’s building, and Hilda takes a bullet to save Connie and gets one of the great bad exit lines in the history of Hollywood: seeing a priest while she’s being loaded into an ambulance, she says, “Pretty soon I’ll be seeing your boss!”
By any normal standards Girls on Probation is a pretty mediocre movie — the title is an obvious misnomer since Connie is the only girl on probation we actually see (indeed, the title was such a stock one that Warners actually used it for another film just six months earlier, a teen drama with Bonita Granville, only they ended up calling that film The Beloved Brat instead and thereby freed up the Girls on Probation name for this one) and there are holes galore in the plot, notably Hilda’s abrupt transformation from man-crazy slacker ditz in the opening scenes to hardened gun moll later on. (Give Crane Wilbur a break; he only had a 64-minute running time to work with.) We also end up wondering how someone with so thick a German accent, and so Nazi-like a demeanor to go with it, as Sig Rumann’s character here ended up with so Anglo a character name as “Roger Heath” — though maybe we’re supposed to believe the family’s real name is Harzfeld or something and they changed it during World War I.
Nonetheless, its sheer overwroughtness makes this a haunting movie — that and Jane Bryan’s blithe innocence in the lead role; her very limited acting skills, particularly her utter inability to play anything other than sticky-sweet goodness (in her best-known role she was Bette Davis’s impossibly sweet kid sister in Marked Woman, whose murder at the hand of Davis’s gangland employers leads Davis to turn state’s evidence against them), make her oddly right for this part: we really believe in her fundamental decency as a human being despite the criminal things that happen to her, and at the same time we get frustrated that the rest of the people in the movie — particularly her dad and Hilda’s mom (Esther Dale), cut from the same cloth as Margaret Hamilton’s Miss Gulch persona in The Wizard of Oz (if Connie had had a dog Mrs. Engstrom would have tried to take it away from her), an interesting anticipation of the later J.D. movies that also made the parents the principal villains — can’t see her essential goodness like we can. Girls on Probation also has an interesting cast; Reagan and Hayward both went on to biggers and betters, and judging from her performance here Sheila Bromley should have too. Her performance, especially when she’s playing the cold-bitch sleazebag of the later reels, is entertainingly edgy and quite the best in the film. I remember when my partner Charles and I first watched this one, we were amused at the written foreword which, in the usual fustian tone of these things, said that for some women probation was the only thing “between happiness and degradation” — and we couldn’t decide whether being married to Ronald Reagan constituted happiness or degradation!
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Michael Shayne: The Fox Box and Two TV Episodes
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
A lot of the "B" detective films — particularly the series with recurring characters (aside from Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan) — have been stepchildren in the home video and DVD markets, but 20th Century-Fox has been rectifying that with a series of boxed sets of their Chan, Mr. Moto and Michael Shayne films. Here are notes on all four films in the Fox box "Michael Shayne, Volume 1" as well as a Critics' Choice DVD of two episodes from the Michael Shayne TV series:
I ran my partner Charles a movie, the first film in the 20th Century-Fox box of Michael Shayne films — of which they made seven from 1940-1942, of which only the first, Michael Shayne, Private Detective was actually based on one of the Shayne novels by “Brett Halliday” (and I refuse to believe that was that writer’s real name — it sounds so transparently phony he might as well have called the detective character “Brett Halliday” and signed the books “Michael Shayne,” and I had joked to Charles that his real name was probably something like Isidor Weinstein, though according to the Wikipedia entry on him he was actually “Davis Dresser”!).
For the later films in the series they raided books by writers like Frederick Nebel (whose Sleepers East, a hit for Fox in 1932, was remodeled into the Shayne vehicle Sleepers West), Clayton Rawson and even Raymond Chandler (his third Philip Marlowe book, The High Window, was bought by Fox for the Shayne movie Time to Kill and then, like Farewell, My Lovely — originally bought by RKO for The Falcon Takes Over — was later remade as a Marlowe story). I haven’t been able to nail down which Dresser/“Halliday” book this film was based on; some sources say it was the first one, Dividend on Death (published in 1939 by Henry Holt four years after Dresser had finished it) and some (including some on the same Web site!) say it was the second, The Private Practice of Michael Shayne.
Whichever, it relocates Shayne from Florida (where he was based in the novels and on the short-lived — one season — Michael Shayne TV show on NBC from 1960-61, of which we saw two episodes recently on a Critics’ Choice DVD) to California and casts Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. Though Nolan’s hair photographs raven-black and it’s impossible to believe he’s a redhead (as Shayne was described in the books), he’s otherwise a quite good choice for a wisecracking private eye in a film made on the cusp of the noir cycle. William K. Everson was so impressed by Nolan’s performances in the Shayne films and as the crooked cop Degarmo in The Lady in the Lake (in which he stole the film right out from under the principals and gave a marvelously human reading to a character Raymond Chandler wrote as a stock villain) that he lamented that Nolan had never got a chance to play Marlowe or Sam Spade on film. Shayne certainly doesn’t have the depth of Spade or Marlowe, but Nolan could probably have done justice to either part: he has the world-weary alienation right (even though through most of this film he’s shepherding an irresponsible young rich girl at the behest of her father rather than mixing in the lowlife and going down those famously mean streets) and tossed off the wisecracks with the right tired air.
Michael Shayne, Private Detective opens at a horse race, in which flighty young Phyllis Brighton (Marjorie Weaver) loses a bundle of money on one race and then pleads with her dad, racing commission member Hiram P. Brighton (Clarence Kolb), to loan her $200 so she can bet on a 15-to-1 long-shot in the next race. When he says no, she offers her brooch worth $500 as security for the bet with an on-track but unofficial bookmaker, and Shayne comes along — he’s a friend of her father — and tells the bookie the brooch is a phony (it isn’t). She returns to her dad in a huff and gets even huffier when her horse comes in, so dad immediately orders an investigation on the assumption that such a lousy horse couldn’t have won a race unless he was drugged. Dad also hires Shayne to keep an eye on Phyllis and especially to keep her away from the gambling casino owned by Benny Gordon (Douglass Dumbrille — and after his villainy in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, letting him anywhere near a racetrack was asking for trouble!) and from Harry Grange (George Meeker), the boyfriend who takes her there and lends her money to feed her gambling jones.
The plot is one of those mind-numbingly complicated travesties of mystery tropes, with so many suspects and motives it’s easy to imagine screenwriters Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Connor totally losing it trying to keep track of them all (and maybe that’s the reason none of the other Shaynes made at Fox used Dresser’s writings as story sources!). Suffice it to say that in order to scare Phyllis away from him, Shayne fakes a scene to make it look like Grange has been murdered — and while he’s passed out in Shayne’s car with ketchup dripping from his shirt front, someone actually does shoot him. Among the suspects are Gordon; his daughter Marsha (played by Joan Valerie, an actress who looked so old I thought we were supposed to believe she was Gordon’s wife instead of his daughter), who’d been after Grange herself and resented Phyllis for taking him away from her; Elliott Thomas (Walter Abel), another gambler and boyfriend of Phyllis; and Larry Kincaid (Robert Emmett Keane), who in an early scene offered Shayne a job strong-arming Grange on behalf of Gordon.
Eventually it turns out that Thomas secretly imported a horse from Australia and substituted it for the real horse, so it won fair and square but not under its real identity (had the writers seen Charlie Chan at the Race Track, which also used that gimmick — as, in a way, did A Day at the Races?), and he killed Grange because Grange was blackmailing him about this. It’s a good, if overly convoluted, story, and for once in one of these “B” detective movies the comic relief is actually funny — especially the marvelous Elizabeth Patterson as Phyllis’s Aunt Grace, who’s a devotee of mystery fiction and keeps comparing the real murder case that’s unfolding around her to the ones in her “Baffle Book,” particularly the one about a victim found under a piano, strangled with piano wire and with his head severed from his body. There are some surprisingly tame gags about Shayne’s alleged nakedness — we see Lloyd Nolan in his baggy underwear in a few scenes and we’re supposed to believe he’s put out at both Phyllis and Aunt Grace seeing him in Production Code-hailing distance of the altogether (“Don’t worry, I’ve taken art classes,” Grace assures him in the funniest line in the film) — and there’s also one sequence in which Nolan as Shayne is searching one of the suspects’ home that actually comes close to noir even though this film lacks the moral ambiguity required for noir. (Film noir didn’t really begin until John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon, made a year later, and though there are a few precursors to the noir spirit in the 1930’s this really isn’t one of them — though as I said earlier it’s on the cusp.)
The director is Eugene Forde — which may be part of the problem; Fox didn’t give this series their best directors (not even their best “B” directors!) and as this film plodded on from situation to situation I found myself liking H. Bruce Humberstone a whole lot better all of a sudden — and the cinematographer is the great George Schneiderman, who photographed most of John Ford’s silents for Fox in the 1920’s and, though he probably lamented that he was working with the wrong Ford(e) on this film, was almost certainly responsible (far more responsible than his director!) for the vivid anticipations of noir in some of the visuals. Michael Shayne, Private Detective is probably best seen as a transitional film between the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s and the noir private-eye movies of the 1940’s, with Shayne (especially as interpreted by Nolan) catching some of the world-weariness of Spade or Marlowe but hamstrung by a script that really didn’t require them; still, it’s a better-than-average mystery, and the official police are shown as dull and unimaginative (homicide captain Painter is played by Donald MacBride — another actor with a Marx Brothers movie, in his case Room Service, in his past) but not as the utterly stupid ninnies they usually were in 1930’s private-eye films. I’m looking forward to seeing the other three films in the box and hoping Fox will release the remaining three (including the Chandler adaptation!) in a second DVD boxed set. — 3/13/08
•••••
I ran Sleepers West, a 1941 20th Century-Fox “B” and the second in the Michael Shayne series featuring Lloyd Nolan as the raven-haired (red-haired in the books) Irish detective (you see, on my St. Patrick’s Day journal entry I’d finally get around to mentioning something Irish!) created by Davis Dresser under the pen name “Brett Halliday.” Oddly, only the first of the seven Fox Michael Shayne films actually adapted a Dresser/“Halliday” novel; the others all were adapted from other detective novels featuring other characters and were adapted into Shayne stories by the Fox writing staff. (The most intriguing transposition in this group was undoubtedly Time to Kill, based on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel The High Window and remade by Fox as a Marlowe film, The Brasher Doubloon, in 1947, five years after the Shayne version).
For Sleepers West, a mystery set on a train, they took a novel by Frederick Nebel called Sleepers East which Fox had already filmed successfully in 1932 and simply reversed the title to reflect the reversed direction of travel. Shayne is assigned to protect a secret witness in a murder case in San Francisco; the defendant, Callahan (whom we never see as an on-screen character), is an habitual criminal — Shayne knows this because years before he busted him for robbery — but is innocent of this particular charge, but is being railroaded by the political machine promoting gubernatorial candidate Wentworth (also an unseen character) because Callahan can blow the whistle on Wentworth’s machine and destroy his chances.
The witness is vampy B-girl Helen Carlson (Mary Beth Hughes, whose later femme fatale performance in The Great Flamarion rivals Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour among the greatest embodiments of this particular cliché and who shows signs of that promise here), whom Shayne sneaks on board wearing a dark wig and being carried on a stretcher — his idea was that she would pretend to be an invalid and lock herself in her room through the entire ride from Denver to San Francisco, but Helen was way too willful for that: she ends up in a relationship with mystery man Everett Jason (Louis Jean Heydt in a performance that made me think, “I know I’ve seen this actor before,” though here he was playing a stronger characterization and bringing more power to his part than usual), who has $10,000 in cash in an attaché case. The film is full of sinister people on the train, some of whom are there to protect the heroine, some are there to kill her and some are there for agendas of their own that have nothing to do with her — and also on board is Denver reporter and former Shayne girlfriend Kay Bentley (Lynn Bari, who as usual looks sultry enough but doesn’t act), who wants to get to Helen Carlson so her paper can scoop the world on the story and who’s using Shayne’s continued interest in her to accomplish that — despite the presence of her fiancé, Tom Linscott (Donald Douglas), who works for Wentworth’s organization and therefore has a vested interest in making sure Carlson does not turn up in South America to testify.
There also is a railroad engineer who’s on his last run and is obsessed with getting his final train to its destination on time — and in the film’s most spectacular scene (though it’s clearly done with models that look all too obvious), an oil tanker gets stuck on the tracks and the train crashes into it and catches fire, forcing everyone else off the train while the railroad sends a fire-fighting crew and getting Shayne, Kay, Helen and Tom to flee by car to a nearby farmhouse whose owner is played by Ferike Boros, a fascinating character actress we’ve encountered before. Sleepers West is an intriguing thriller that’s rather daringly staged with almost no background music — odd for a 1941 film in an era in which even far better thrillers like The Maltese Falcon were going out relentlessly overscored — and it’s entertaining, though it could have been a lot more exciting and more fun with a better director than Eugene Forde. By then H. Bruce Humberstone, who brought so much to the three Charlie Chan films he made at Fox, had graduated to “A” films like I Wake Up Screaming and Pin-Up Girl, both with Betty Grable; Norman Foster was off working with Orson Welles on the unfinished It’s All True; and it’s hard to think who else on the Fox “B’ list could have done this better, though if they’d reached outside the way Columbia did for Robert Florey on the first Lone Wolf series film with Warren William they could have had a more interesting product. It also makes me curious to see the original Sleepers East sometime! — 3/17/08
•••••
We eventually ran a movie: Blue, White and Perfect, the fourth and last film in the Michael Shayne boxed set from 20th Century-Fox — and, like the others, a disappointing film in that it wasted a potentially thrilling story and an appealingly authoritative star, Lloyd Nolan, on a workmanlike but rather dull production. Part of the problem was the director, Herbert I. Leeds — as we learned watching all those detective “B” films from Columbia, never trust a director whose name looks as if it should have the initials “D.D.S.” after it! — and though Glen MacWilliams (an American despite his Scottish name and his fame in British films, notably most of Jessie Matthews’ star vehicles) was the cinematographer, his lighting is quite competent but mostly undramatic; a story that cries out for noir effects and compositions doesn’t get them, and suffers by their lack.
The story: Michael Shayne returns to L.A. (where the Fox films relocated him from Florida, his home in the original novels by “Brett Halliday,” t/n Davis Dresser) from a case that took him to San Francisco and Seattle, to find that his girlfriend, beauty-shop owner Mavis Garland (a recurring role for Mary Beth Hughes, disappointingly used in these films as a good girl when she was so much better three years after this film as a femme fatale in the 1945 Republic thriller The Great Flamarion, co-starring Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea and vividly directed by the young Anthony Mann), has jilted him and accepted the proposal of smarmy Continental Alexis Fournier (Ivan Lebedeff). Shayne looks him up and finds Fournier is a con artist and a bigamist (!) as well as selling Mavis’s beauty shop a wart removing cream that doesn’t work — as Mavis’s sidekick Ethel (an good and way too short comic performance by Marie Blake) explains after she tells Shayne that the authentic pronunciation of his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend is “fonay,” “He sells us the Fournier One-Minute Wart Remover. And, boy, is it fo-nay!”
Told by Mavis (after Fournier’s arrest on the steps of the building where they were supposed to get their marriage license) that she’ll only marry him if he quits detective work and finds a real job (“I want to be your wife, not your widow!” she says), he agrees to go to work for the Thomas Aircraft Company, telling her he’s going to be a riveter (he even fakes a phone call to make it appear as if he’s phoning her from the shop floor, in a scene reminiscent of Groucho Marx’s pose as the Florida Medical Board representative in A Day at the Races) but really signing on as an undercover security officer investigating who stole $100,000 in industrial diamonds from the company’s safe. (The film’s title turns out not to be a patriotic reference; at the very end Nolan as Shayne uses the phrase to demonstrate that the stolen diamonds are not gem-quality.) The person in charge of the safe actually was part of the gang — a band of saboteurs anxious to make sure the Axis gets hold of the diamonds and uses them in their war production — which was easy enough to guess because his name was Vanderhoefen and he was played by Steven Geray (let’s see, we have a Russian playing a Frenchman and a Frenchman playing a Dutchman) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Geray movie in which he wasn’t a bad guy!
The diamonds are being smuggled to Hawai’i aboard an ocean liner and, in order to get the money to get on it, Shayne embezzles $1,000 from Mavis (she thinks the money is going to buy them a ranch where’ll they’ll live as a couple) and ends up in a shipboard romance with an old flame, Helen Shaw (Helene Reynolds), who’s also being chased by a half-Latino, improbably named Juan Arturo O’Hara and even more improbably played by future Superman George Reeves, decked out with a moustache and a lot of shoe polish in his hair to make him look appropriately swarthy and dark. The overall tenor of this film isn’t that different from the Saint and the Falcon movies RKO was churning out at the same time, but it seems wrong because Michael Shayne isn’t a debonair, romantic character; he’s a grungier sort of guy being played by an American actor and this rather superficial style of mystery film doesn’t really play to the strengths either of Brett Halliday’s (t/n: Davis Dresser) character or Nolan’s performance. Still, I hope 20th Century-Fox reissues the rest of their Michael Shayne movies on DVD if only so I can see Time to Kill, which their writers based on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel The High Window and which just might bring some depth to the series the way RKO’s appropriation of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely did to their 1942 film The Falcon Takes Over. — 6/8/08
•••••
Afterwards Charles and I went straight (pardon the expression) home and ended up running another movie: The Man That Wouldn’t Die, which despite the title is a Michael Shayne mystery (albeit one with a Frankenstein-like subplot) rather than a horror film and seemed to me to be the best of the ones we’ve seen so far. While its director, Herbert I. Leeds, is a hack about on the level of Eugene Forde, he does get some appealingly Gothic shots into the film — and the script, written by Arnaud d’Usseau based on the novel No Coffin for the Corpse by Clayton Rawson (one of his Merlini the Great series about a stage magician who was also an amateur detective: one of his other books, Death from a Top Hat, became the basis of Tod Browning’s last film, Miracles for Sale, in 1939), is genuinely charming and largely evocative of The Thin Man even though Michael Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) is merely posing as the husband of his client, Catherine Wolff (Marjorie Weaver), not actually married to her.
The film begins with a peculiar scene in which a group of men sneak out of a large mansion in the dead of night, dig a grave on the grounds and bury a body — or at least a body-shaped parcel — in it. The mansion belongs to tycoon Dudley Wolff (Paul Harvey), who’s under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee for allegedly defrauding the government on war contracts (remember when people in the government actually cared whether or not it was being defrauded on war contracts?), who’s married to trophy wife Anna (Helene Reynolds) — Catherine is his daughter by a previous wife — and is giving house room to mad scientist Dr. Haggard (Henry Wilcoxon), who’s outfitted his basement with lab equipment similar to Kenneth Strickfaden’s great props for the Frankenstein films in an experiment Dudley Wolff is bankrolling in hopes Dr. Haggard will figure out a way to make him immortal.
One night, while staying at the mansion, Catherine is fired at by an apparition who sneaks into her bedroom with glowing eyes and a gun; she calls it a “ghost” but the gun, and the bullet it fired that lodged into one of her bedposts, are both indisputably real. Eventually it turns out that the “ghost” is magician Zorah Bey (LeRoy Mason), the only person besides Houdini who ever mastered the trick of getting himself buried alive and being able to slow down his breathing so much that he could pass the “mirror test” (when they determined whether a person was alive or dead by holding a pocket mirror under their nose and seeing if vapor from breath formed on it) and survive living burial long enough to figure out how to get the coffin and grave open and escape.
Old man Wolff’s trophy wife was formerly Zorah Bey’s assistant and his wife; she married Wolff thinking that Zorah Bey was dead but later he turned up alive and blackmailed her, and as a result she and her husband killed him — or at least they thought their blow to his head had killed him — and buried him in the opening scene, except he wasn’t dead at all and when he regained consciousness he used his skills as an escape artist to get out of his own grave. There’s also a complication straight out of French farce when Catherine’s real husband, Roger Blake (Richard Derr), turns up and “outs” Shayne as an impostor. The Man Who Wouldn’t Die gains points as a genre-bender and is overall a marvelously entertaining film, a good deal better than the earlier two Shaynes we’d seen (Michael Shayne, Private Detective and Sleepers West), gaining strength from the horror trappings (even though they don’t add much to the plot) and from a whole series of characters running the mental gamut from mildly eccentric to totally bonkers — making Lloyd Nolan’s laconicism as Shayne all that much more appealing! — 4/8/08
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I ran the first of two Michael Shayne: Detective episodes on a Critics’ Choice DVD, “Shoot the Works,” from 1960 with a puffy-looking Kent Smith as one of three partners owning the Medallion Publishing company and looking to make a killing because another publisher is about to acquire them. Unfortunately, one of the partners is killed literally — discovered at home by his wife when she returns a day earlier than expected from an out-of-town trip — and Michael Shayne, a Florida-based detective who unlike most hard-boiled private eyes has a pretty substantial entourage (they include a young reporter, a secretary/girlfriend and his younger brother, whose main interest in life is getting to sit in on bongos with a jazz quartet that plays at the Montmartre nightclub, a favorite hangout of Shayne’s posse and also one that figures importantly in the plot), gets retained by the widow to investigate.
At first I thought she was going to be the prime suspect because she and the nephew were having an affair (the body language between the two actors certainly suggested this), but as it turns out the murdered man was supposedly having an affair of his own — the maître d’ at the Montmartre saw him with a dark-haired woman who turned out to be one of the cover models for the publishing company (there’s a great scene in which Shayne walks into a photographer’s studio and sees another model being menaced by a sinister-looking figure with a knife, and it’s only later that a camera pull-back shows this is just a pose being photographed for the cover of a pulp mystery Medallion is publishing), whose ferociously jealous husband threatens to beat up Shayne (and even goes after him with a broken bottle!) and anyone else he thinks is having sex with her — which, since she’s your typical movie slut (you can tell by the jazz on the soundtrack as she’s introduced, not the nice Nat “King” Cole Trio-ish chamber jazz heard at the Montmartre but something sleazier-sounding and saxophone-driven), is just about any male in the cast she can get.
It turns out that it was actually the third partner in Medallion that this woman was having an affair with, and Kent Smith’s character committed the original murder with the idea of framing one of his fellow partners for the murder of the other, thereby getting rid of both of them and getting the company’s sale price all for himself — only the early return of the victim’s wife upset his plan and later forced him to kill the model to shut her up. Richard Denning played Shayne, considerably older than he was as Mr. North (in which he was the publisher and the detective!) but still easy on the eyes even though, in this episode at least, we don’t get to see him in the exciting states of near-undress he frequently appeared in in Mr. and Mrs. North. Maybe it wasn’t as good a subsequent career as playing Lucille Ball’s husband (they’d done a radio sitcom together called My Favorite Husband, but instead of just transferring the radio show to TV Lucy insisted on having her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, co-star, changed the title to I Love Lucy and made history), but at least it was a living — though the most interesting names on this show weren’t the actors or the director (a hack-of-all-work named Gerald Mayer) but the writers, Richard Levinson and William Link — who would later go to work for Universal and create many of their most memorable TV mysteries, including Columbo.
Here they were adapting one of the published Shayne novels, written by “Brett Halliday” (who was also credited as story consultant on the TV show; I can’t believe either that “Brett Halliday” is his real name or, considering the longevity of the Shayne novels, that there’s only been one person writing under that name: in fact, “Brett Halliday, Private Eye” might have had even more of an appeal, and maybe they should have swapped the character name and the author’s pseudonym), and it was an appealing TV mystery with bits of the noir look, not especially exciting but fun. [Later I looked him up on the Internet and found that “Brett Halliday” was really writer Davis Dresser, who wrote in many different pulp genres and cooked up a different pseudonym for each type of story he wrote.] — 2/19/08
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I played the other Michael Shayne, Detective episode on the Critics’ Choice “volume one” DVD, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” — which turned out to be surprisingly good, much better than “Shoot the Works” even though its writer, Don Brinkley, didn’t go on to biggers and betters the way Richard Levinson and William Link did — and this episode was an original story, not an adaptation of one of the Brett Halliday Shayne novels. Directed effectively by Walter Doniger and photographed with some real noir flair by Keith Smith, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” is centered around the death watch over multimillionaire Fred Endicott, who as the episode opens has just suffered a heart attack and is hanging on death’s door (he’s never actually shown as an on-screen character). His wastrel son Freddie (Robert Harland, in a performance actually owing quite a lot to Robert Walker’s portrayal of a similar character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) can’t wait to get his hands on the old man’s money, but there’s a catch: evidently having seen Buster Keaton’s film Seven Chances in his youth, the elder Endicott put a proviso in his will stipulating that in order to inherit anything from his estate, sonny boy has to be married on the theory that having a wife to support will shape him up and tie him down to some sort of respectability.
This drives Freddie to try to find a prospective wife, pronto — which leads him to a quick proposal to blonde bimbo barfly Topaz McQueen (played by Barbara Nichols in a blatant imitation of Marilyn Monroe, but one that approaches the pathos of the original in roles like Bus Stop and The Misfits), only quick-tempered family servant Vinnie Pico (Michael Forrest) catches Freddie and punches him out to make sure he stands Topaz up instead of marrying her. The same will that gives Freddie a vested interest in finding a wife fast gives his bimbo stepmother Laura (Patricia Barry) an equal interest in stopping him from marrying — if Freddie is still single when his dad croaks, Laura will get all the money and she can share it with Vinnie, with whom it’s strongly intimated she’s having an affair (so it’s the Anna Nicole Smith story grafted onto Strangers on a Train). In one great scene, Freddie confronts stepmom and stepmom’s boyfriend at the Endicott home, and when stepmom says she can’t allow him to sully the family image by marrying a tramp, Freddie fires back, “It runs in the family. My father married one, too.”
Freddie’s next target of marital opportunity is Connie Pico (Nancy Rennick), Vinnie’s sister and also a servant at the Endicott home, and they actually do tie the knot (flying on Freddie’s private plane to Alabama, where “quickie” marriages were available as they weren’t in Florida at the time), only when Freddie lets slip the real reason why he married Connie, she flees from him in disgust. Later Freddie is shot at his beach house, and Shayne — who entered the case when Laura sent Vinnie over with a blank check, trying to hire him to stop Freddie from marrying — investigates. Though Vinnie, a hot-tempered young man with a criminal record (for murder!) and an obvious motive, is the prime suspect, it turns out Connie is the real killer — she hid out in the beach house and shot Freddie as revenge for betraying her dream by marrying her not for love, but for purely mercenary reasons. Driven by the chillingly effective performances of Robert Harland and Barbara Nichols, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” is a nicely done TV series episode with more depth to the format than usual, then or now. — 2/20/08
A lot of the "B" detective films — particularly the series with recurring characters (aside from Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan) — have been stepchildren in the home video and DVD markets, but 20th Century-Fox has been rectifying that with a series of boxed sets of their Chan, Mr. Moto and Michael Shayne films. Here are notes on all four films in the Fox box "Michael Shayne, Volume 1" as well as a Critics' Choice DVD of two episodes from the Michael Shayne TV series:
I ran my partner Charles a movie, the first film in the 20th Century-Fox box of Michael Shayne films — of which they made seven from 1940-1942, of which only the first, Michael Shayne, Private Detective was actually based on one of the Shayne novels by “Brett Halliday” (and I refuse to believe that was that writer’s real name — it sounds so transparently phony he might as well have called the detective character “Brett Halliday” and signed the books “Michael Shayne,” and I had joked to Charles that his real name was probably something like Isidor Weinstein, though according to the Wikipedia entry on him he was actually “Davis Dresser”!).
For the later films in the series they raided books by writers like Frederick Nebel (whose Sleepers East, a hit for Fox in 1932, was remodeled into the Shayne vehicle Sleepers West), Clayton Rawson and even Raymond Chandler (his third Philip Marlowe book, The High Window, was bought by Fox for the Shayne movie Time to Kill and then, like Farewell, My Lovely — originally bought by RKO for The Falcon Takes Over — was later remade as a Marlowe story). I haven’t been able to nail down which Dresser/“Halliday” book this film was based on; some sources say it was the first one, Dividend on Death (published in 1939 by Henry Holt four years after Dresser had finished it) and some (including some on the same Web site!) say it was the second, The Private Practice of Michael Shayne.
Whichever, it relocates Shayne from Florida (where he was based in the novels and on the short-lived — one season — Michael Shayne TV show on NBC from 1960-61, of which we saw two episodes recently on a Critics’ Choice DVD) to California and casts Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. Though Nolan’s hair photographs raven-black and it’s impossible to believe he’s a redhead (as Shayne was described in the books), he’s otherwise a quite good choice for a wisecracking private eye in a film made on the cusp of the noir cycle. William K. Everson was so impressed by Nolan’s performances in the Shayne films and as the crooked cop Degarmo in The Lady in the Lake (in which he stole the film right out from under the principals and gave a marvelously human reading to a character Raymond Chandler wrote as a stock villain) that he lamented that Nolan had never got a chance to play Marlowe or Sam Spade on film. Shayne certainly doesn’t have the depth of Spade or Marlowe, but Nolan could probably have done justice to either part: he has the world-weary alienation right (even though through most of this film he’s shepherding an irresponsible young rich girl at the behest of her father rather than mixing in the lowlife and going down those famously mean streets) and tossed off the wisecracks with the right tired air.
Michael Shayne, Private Detective opens at a horse race, in which flighty young Phyllis Brighton (Marjorie Weaver) loses a bundle of money on one race and then pleads with her dad, racing commission member Hiram P. Brighton (Clarence Kolb), to loan her $200 so she can bet on a 15-to-1 long-shot in the next race. When he says no, she offers her brooch worth $500 as security for the bet with an on-track but unofficial bookmaker, and Shayne comes along — he’s a friend of her father — and tells the bookie the brooch is a phony (it isn’t). She returns to her dad in a huff and gets even huffier when her horse comes in, so dad immediately orders an investigation on the assumption that such a lousy horse couldn’t have won a race unless he was drugged. Dad also hires Shayne to keep an eye on Phyllis and especially to keep her away from the gambling casino owned by Benny Gordon (Douglass Dumbrille — and after his villainy in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, letting him anywhere near a racetrack was asking for trouble!) and from Harry Grange (George Meeker), the boyfriend who takes her there and lends her money to feed her gambling jones.
The plot is one of those mind-numbingly complicated travesties of mystery tropes, with so many suspects and motives it’s easy to imagine screenwriters Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Connor totally losing it trying to keep track of them all (and maybe that’s the reason none of the other Shaynes made at Fox used Dresser’s writings as story sources!). Suffice it to say that in order to scare Phyllis away from him, Shayne fakes a scene to make it look like Grange has been murdered — and while he’s passed out in Shayne’s car with ketchup dripping from his shirt front, someone actually does shoot him. Among the suspects are Gordon; his daughter Marsha (played by Joan Valerie, an actress who looked so old I thought we were supposed to believe she was Gordon’s wife instead of his daughter), who’d been after Grange herself and resented Phyllis for taking him away from her; Elliott Thomas (Walter Abel), another gambler and boyfriend of Phyllis; and Larry Kincaid (Robert Emmett Keane), who in an early scene offered Shayne a job strong-arming Grange on behalf of Gordon.
Eventually it turns out that Thomas secretly imported a horse from Australia and substituted it for the real horse, so it won fair and square but not under its real identity (had the writers seen Charlie Chan at the Race Track, which also used that gimmick — as, in a way, did A Day at the Races?), and he killed Grange because Grange was blackmailing him about this. It’s a good, if overly convoluted, story, and for once in one of these “B” detective movies the comic relief is actually funny — especially the marvelous Elizabeth Patterson as Phyllis’s Aunt Grace, who’s a devotee of mystery fiction and keeps comparing the real murder case that’s unfolding around her to the ones in her “Baffle Book,” particularly the one about a victim found under a piano, strangled with piano wire and with his head severed from his body. There are some surprisingly tame gags about Shayne’s alleged nakedness — we see Lloyd Nolan in his baggy underwear in a few scenes and we’re supposed to believe he’s put out at both Phyllis and Aunt Grace seeing him in Production Code-hailing distance of the altogether (“Don’t worry, I’ve taken art classes,” Grace assures him in the funniest line in the film) — and there’s also one sequence in which Nolan as Shayne is searching one of the suspects’ home that actually comes close to noir even though this film lacks the moral ambiguity required for noir. (Film noir didn’t really begin until John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon, made a year later, and though there are a few precursors to the noir spirit in the 1930’s this really isn’t one of them — though as I said earlier it’s on the cusp.)
The director is Eugene Forde — which may be part of the problem; Fox didn’t give this series their best directors (not even their best “B” directors!) and as this film plodded on from situation to situation I found myself liking H. Bruce Humberstone a whole lot better all of a sudden — and the cinematographer is the great George Schneiderman, who photographed most of John Ford’s silents for Fox in the 1920’s and, though he probably lamented that he was working with the wrong Ford(e) on this film, was almost certainly responsible (far more responsible than his director!) for the vivid anticipations of noir in some of the visuals. Michael Shayne, Private Detective is probably best seen as a transitional film between the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s and the noir private-eye movies of the 1940’s, with Shayne (especially as interpreted by Nolan) catching some of the world-weariness of Spade or Marlowe but hamstrung by a script that really didn’t require them; still, it’s a better-than-average mystery, and the official police are shown as dull and unimaginative (homicide captain Painter is played by Donald MacBride — another actor with a Marx Brothers movie, in his case Room Service, in his past) but not as the utterly stupid ninnies they usually were in 1930’s private-eye films. I’m looking forward to seeing the other three films in the box and hoping Fox will release the remaining three (including the Chandler adaptation!) in a second DVD boxed set. — 3/13/08
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I ran Sleepers West, a 1941 20th Century-Fox “B” and the second in the Michael Shayne series featuring Lloyd Nolan as the raven-haired (red-haired in the books) Irish detective (you see, on my St. Patrick’s Day journal entry I’d finally get around to mentioning something Irish!) created by Davis Dresser under the pen name “Brett Halliday.” Oddly, only the first of the seven Fox Michael Shayne films actually adapted a Dresser/“Halliday” novel; the others all were adapted from other detective novels featuring other characters and were adapted into Shayne stories by the Fox writing staff. (The most intriguing transposition in this group was undoubtedly Time to Kill, based on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel The High Window and remade by Fox as a Marlowe film, The Brasher Doubloon, in 1947, five years after the Shayne version).
For Sleepers West, a mystery set on a train, they took a novel by Frederick Nebel called Sleepers East which Fox had already filmed successfully in 1932 and simply reversed the title to reflect the reversed direction of travel. Shayne is assigned to protect a secret witness in a murder case in San Francisco; the defendant, Callahan (whom we never see as an on-screen character), is an habitual criminal — Shayne knows this because years before he busted him for robbery — but is innocent of this particular charge, but is being railroaded by the political machine promoting gubernatorial candidate Wentworth (also an unseen character) because Callahan can blow the whistle on Wentworth’s machine and destroy his chances.
The witness is vampy B-girl Helen Carlson (Mary Beth Hughes, whose later femme fatale performance in The Great Flamarion rivals Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour among the greatest embodiments of this particular cliché and who shows signs of that promise here), whom Shayne sneaks on board wearing a dark wig and being carried on a stretcher — his idea was that she would pretend to be an invalid and lock herself in her room through the entire ride from Denver to San Francisco, but Helen was way too willful for that: she ends up in a relationship with mystery man Everett Jason (Louis Jean Heydt in a performance that made me think, “I know I’ve seen this actor before,” though here he was playing a stronger characterization and bringing more power to his part than usual), who has $10,000 in cash in an attaché case. The film is full of sinister people on the train, some of whom are there to protect the heroine, some are there to kill her and some are there for agendas of their own that have nothing to do with her — and also on board is Denver reporter and former Shayne girlfriend Kay Bentley (Lynn Bari, who as usual looks sultry enough but doesn’t act), who wants to get to Helen Carlson so her paper can scoop the world on the story and who’s using Shayne’s continued interest in her to accomplish that — despite the presence of her fiancé, Tom Linscott (Donald Douglas), who works for Wentworth’s organization and therefore has a vested interest in making sure Carlson does not turn up in South America to testify.
There also is a railroad engineer who’s on his last run and is obsessed with getting his final train to its destination on time — and in the film’s most spectacular scene (though it’s clearly done with models that look all too obvious), an oil tanker gets stuck on the tracks and the train crashes into it and catches fire, forcing everyone else off the train while the railroad sends a fire-fighting crew and getting Shayne, Kay, Helen and Tom to flee by car to a nearby farmhouse whose owner is played by Ferike Boros, a fascinating character actress we’ve encountered before. Sleepers West is an intriguing thriller that’s rather daringly staged with almost no background music — odd for a 1941 film in an era in which even far better thrillers like The Maltese Falcon were going out relentlessly overscored — and it’s entertaining, though it could have been a lot more exciting and more fun with a better director than Eugene Forde. By then H. Bruce Humberstone, who brought so much to the three Charlie Chan films he made at Fox, had graduated to “A” films like I Wake Up Screaming and Pin-Up Girl, both with Betty Grable; Norman Foster was off working with Orson Welles on the unfinished It’s All True; and it’s hard to think who else on the Fox “B’ list could have done this better, though if they’d reached outside the way Columbia did for Robert Florey on the first Lone Wolf series film with Warren William they could have had a more interesting product. It also makes me curious to see the original Sleepers East sometime! — 3/17/08
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We eventually ran a movie: Blue, White and Perfect, the fourth and last film in the Michael Shayne boxed set from 20th Century-Fox — and, like the others, a disappointing film in that it wasted a potentially thrilling story and an appealingly authoritative star, Lloyd Nolan, on a workmanlike but rather dull production. Part of the problem was the director, Herbert I. Leeds — as we learned watching all those detective “B” films from Columbia, never trust a director whose name looks as if it should have the initials “D.D.S.” after it! — and though Glen MacWilliams (an American despite his Scottish name and his fame in British films, notably most of Jessie Matthews’ star vehicles) was the cinematographer, his lighting is quite competent but mostly undramatic; a story that cries out for noir effects and compositions doesn’t get them, and suffers by their lack.
The story: Michael Shayne returns to L.A. (where the Fox films relocated him from Florida, his home in the original novels by “Brett Halliday,” t/n Davis Dresser) from a case that took him to San Francisco and Seattle, to find that his girlfriend, beauty-shop owner Mavis Garland (a recurring role for Mary Beth Hughes, disappointingly used in these films as a good girl when she was so much better three years after this film as a femme fatale in the 1945 Republic thriller The Great Flamarion, co-starring Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea and vividly directed by the young Anthony Mann), has jilted him and accepted the proposal of smarmy Continental Alexis Fournier (Ivan Lebedeff). Shayne looks him up and finds Fournier is a con artist and a bigamist (!) as well as selling Mavis’s beauty shop a wart removing cream that doesn’t work — as Mavis’s sidekick Ethel (an good and way too short comic performance by Marie Blake) explains after she tells Shayne that the authentic pronunciation of his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend is “fonay,” “He sells us the Fournier One-Minute Wart Remover. And, boy, is it fo-nay!”
Told by Mavis (after Fournier’s arrest on the steps of the building where they were supposed to get their marriage license) that she’ll only marry him if he quits detective work and finds a real job (“I want to be your wife, not your widow!” she says), he agrees to go to work for the Thomas Aircraft Company, telling her he’s going to be a riveter (he even fakes a phone call to make it appear as if he’s phoning her from the shop floor, in a scene reminiscent of Groucho Marx’s pose as the Florida Medical Board representative in A Day at the Races) but really signing on as an undercover security officer investigating who stole $100,000 in industrial diamonds from the company’s safe. (The film’s title turns out not to be a patriotic reference; at the very end Nolan as Shayne uses the phrase to demonstrate that the stolen diamonds are not gem-quality.) The person in charge of the safe actually was part of the gang — a band of saboteurs anxious to make sure the Axis gets hold of the diamonds and uses them in their war production — which was easy enough to guess because his name was Vanderhoefen and he was played by Steven Geray (let’s see, we have a Russian playing a Frenchman and a Frenchman playing a Dutchman) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Geray movie in which he wasn’t a bad guy!
The diamonds are being smuggled to Hawai’i aboard an ocean liner and, in order to get the money to get on it, Shayne embezzles $1,000 from Mavis (she thinks the money is going to buy them a ranch where’ll they’ll live as a couple) and ends up in a shipboard romance with an old flame, Helen Shaw (Helene Reynolds), who’s also being chased by a half-Latino, improbably named Juan Arturo O’Hara and even more improbably played by future Superman George Reeves, decked out with a moustache and a lot of shoe polish in his hair to make him look appropriately swarthy and dark. The overall tenor of this film isn’t that different from the Saint and the Falcon movies RKO was churning out at the same time, but it seems wrong because Michael Shayne isn’t a debonair, romantic character; he’s a grungier sort of guy being played by an American actor and this rather superficial style of mystery film doesn’t really play to the strengths either of Brett Halliday’s (t/n: Davis Dresser) character or Nolan’s performance. Still, I hope 20th Century-Fox reissues the rest of their Michael Shayne movies on DVD if only so I can see Time to Kill, which their writers based on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel The High Window and which just might bring some depth to the series the way RKO’s appropriation of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely did to their 1942 film The Falcon Takes Over. — 6/8/08
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Afterwards Charles and I went straight (pardon the expression) home and ended up running another movie: The Man That Wouldn’t Die, which despite the title is a Michael Shayne mystery (albeit one with a Frankenstein-like subplot) rather than a horror film and seemed to me to be the best of the ones we’ve seen so far. While its director, Herbert I. Leeds, is a hack about on the level of Eugene Forde, he does get some appealingly Gothic shots into the film — and the script, written by Arnaud d’Usseau based on the novel No Coffin for the Corpse by Clayton Rawson (one of his Merlini the Great series about a stage magician who was also an amateur detective: one of his other books, Death from a Top Hat, became the basis of Tod Browning’s last film, Miracles for Sale, in 1939), is genuinely charming and largely evocative of The Thin Man even though Michael Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) is merely posing as the husband of his client, Catherine Wolff (Marjorie Weaver), not actually married to her.
The film begins with a peculiar scene in which a group of men sneak out of a large mansion in the dead of night, dig a grave on the grounds and bury a body — or at least a body-shaped parcel — in it. The mansion belongs to tycoon Dudley Wolff (Paul Harvey), who’s under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee for allegedly defrauding the government on war contracts (remember when people in the government actually cared whether or not it was being defrauded on war contracts?), who’s married to trophy wife Anna (Helene Reynolds) — Catherine is his daughter by a previous wife — and is giving house room to mad scientist Dr. Haggard (Henry Wilcoxon), who’s outfitted his basement with lab equipment similar to Kenneth Strickfaden’s great props for the Frankenstein films in an experiment Dudley Wolff is bankrolling in hopes Dr. Haggard will figure out a way to make him immortal.
One night, while staying at the mansion, Catherine is fired at by an apparition who sneaks into her bedroom with glowing eyes and a gun; she calls it a “ghost” but the gun, and the bullet it fired that lodged into one of her bedposts, are both indisputably real. Eventually it turns out that the “ghost” is magician Zorah Bey (LeRoy Mason), the only person besides Houdini who ever mastered the trick of getting himself buried alive and being able to slow down his breathing so much that he could pass the “mirror test” (when they determined whether a person was alive or dead by holding a pocket mirror under their nose and seeing if vapor from breath formed on it) and survive living burial long enough to figure out how to get the coffin and grave open and escape.
Old man Wolff’s trophy wife was formerly Zorah Bey’s assistant and his wife; she married Wolff thinking that Zorah Bey was dead but later he turned up alive and blackmailed her, and as a result she and her husband killed him — or at least they thought their blow to his head had killed him — and buried him in the opening scene, except he wasn’t dead at all and when he regained consciousness he used his skills as an escape artist to get out of his own grave. There’s also a complication straight out of French farce when Catherine’s real husband, Roger Blake (Richard Derr), turns up and “outs” Shayne as an impostor. The Man Who Wouldn’t Die gains points as a genre-bender and is overall a marvelously entertaining film, a good deal better than the earlier two Shaynes we’d seen (Michael Shayne, Private Detective and Sleepers West), gaining strength from the horror trappings (even though they don’t add much to the plot) and from a whole series of characters running the mental gamut from mildly eccentric to totally bonkers — making Lloyd Nolan’s laconicism as Shayne all that much more appealing! — 4/8/08
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I ran the first of two Michael Shayne: Detective episodes on a Critics’ Choice DVD, “Shoot the Works,” from 1960 with a puffy-looking Kent Smith as one of three partners owning the Medallion Publishing company and looking to make a killing because another publisher is about to acquire them. Unfortunately, one of the partners is killed literally — discovered at home by his wife when she returns a day earlier than expected from an out-of-town trip — and Michael Shayne, a Florida-based detective who unlike most hard-boiled private eyes has a pretty substantial entourage (they include a young reporter, a secretary/girlfriend and his younger brother, whose main interest in life is getting to sit in on bongos with a jazz quartet that plays at the Montmartre nightclub, a favorite hangout of Shayne’s posse and also one that figures importantly in the plot), gets retained by the widow to investigate.
At first I thought she was going to be the prime suspect because she and the nephew were having an affair (the body language between the two actors certainly suggested this), but as it turns out the murdered man was supposedly having an affair of his own — the maître d’ at the Montmartre saw him with a dark-haired woman who turned out to be one of the cover models for the publishing company (there’s a great scene in which Shayne walks into a photographer’s studio and sees another model being menaced by a sinister-looking figure with a knife, and it’s only later that a camera pull-back shows this is just a pose being photographed for the cover of a pulp mystery Medallion is publishing), whose ferociously jealous husband threatens to beat up Shayne (and even goes after him with a broken bottle!) and anyone else he thinks is having sex with her — which, since she’s your typical movie slut (you can tell by the jazz on the soundtrack as she’s introduced, not the nice Nat “King” Cole Trio-ish chamber jazz heard at the Montmartre but something sleazier-sounding and saxophone-driven), is just about any male in the cast she can get.
It turns out that it was actually the third partner in Medallion that this woman was having an affair with, and Kent Smith’s character committed the original murder with the idea of framing one of his fellow partners for the murder of the other, thereby getting rid of both of them and getting the company’s sale price all for himself — only the early return of the victim’s wife upset his plan and later forced him to kill the model to shut her up. Richard Denning played Shayne, considerably older than he was as Mr. North (in which he was the publisher and the detective!) but still easy on the eyes even though, in this episode at least, we don’t get to see him in the exciting states of near-undress he frequently appeared in in Mr. and Mrs. North. Maybe it wasn’t as good a subsequent career as playing Lucille Ball’s husband (they’d done a radio sitcom together called My Favorite Husband, but instead of just transferring the radio show to TV Lucy insisted on having her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, co-star, changed the title to I Love Lucy and made history), but at least it was a living — though the most interesting names on this show weren’t the actors or the director (a hack-of-all-work named Gerald Mayer) but the writers, Richard Levinson and William Link — who would later go to work for Universal and create many of their most memorable TV mysteries, including Columbo.
Here they were adapting one of the published Shayne novels, written by “Brett Halliday” (who was also credited as story consultant on the TV show; I can’t believe either that “Brett Halliday” is his real name or, considering the longevity of the Shayne novels, that there’s only been one person writing under that name: in fact, “Brett Halliday, Private Eye” might have had even more of an appeal, and maybe they should have swapped the character name and the author’s pseudonym), and it was an appealing TV mystery with bits of the noir look, not especially exciting but fun. [Later I looked him up on the Internet and found that “Brett Halliday” was really writer Davis Dresser, who wrote in many different pulp genres and cooked up a different pseudonym for each type of story he wrote.] — 2/19/08
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I played the other Michael Shayne, Detective episode on the Critics’ Choice “volume one” DVD, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” — which turned out to be surprisingly good, much better than “Shoot the Works” even though its writer, Don Brinkley, didn’t go on to biggers and betters the way Richard Levinson and William Link did — and this episode was an original story, not an adaptation of one of the Brett Halliday Shayne novels. Directed effectively by Walter Doniger and photographed with some real noir flair by Keith Smith, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” is centered around the death watch over multimillionaire Fred Endicott, who as the episode opens has just suffered a heart attack and is hanging on death’s door (he’s never actually shown as an on-screen character). His wastrel son Freddie (Robert Harland, in a performance actually owing quite a lot to Robert Walker’s portrayal of a similar character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) can’t wait to get his hands on the old man’s money, but there’s a catch: evidently having seen Buster Keaton’s film Seven Chances in his youth, the elder Endicott put a proviso in his will stipulating that in order to inherit anything from his estate, sonny boy has to be married on the theory that having a wife to support will shape him up and tie him down to some sort of respectability.
This drives Freddie to try to find a prospective wife, pronto — which leads him to a quick proposal to blonde bimbo barfly Topaz McQueen (played by Barbara Nichols in a blatant imitation of Marilyn Monroe, but one that approaches the pathos of the original in roles like Bus Stop and The Misfits), only quick-tempered family servant Vinnie Pico (Michael Forrest) catches Freddie and punches him out to make sure he stands Topaz up instead of marrying her. The same will that gives Freddie a vested interest in finding a wife fast gives his bimbo stepmother Laura (Patricia Barry) an equal interest in stopping him from marrying — if Freddie is still single when his dad croaks, Laura will get all the money and she can share it with Vinnie, with whom it’s strongly intimated she’s having an affair (so it’s the Anna Nicole Smith story grafted onto Strangers on a Train). In one great scene, Freddie confronts stepmom and stepmom’s boyfriend at the Endicott home, and when stepmom says she can’t allow him to sully the family image by marrying a tramp, Freddie fires back, “It runs in the family. My father married one, too.”
Freddie’s next target of marital opportunity is Connie Pico (Nancy Rennick), Vinnie’s sister and also a servant at the Endicott home, and they actually do tie the knot (flying on Freddie’s private plane to Alabama, where “quickie” marriages were available as they weren’t in Florida at the time), only when Freddie lets slip the real reason why he married Connie, she flees from him in disgust. Later Freddie is shot at his beach house, and Shayne — who entered the case when Laura sent Vinnie over with a blank check, trying to hire him to stop Freddie from marrying — investigates. Though Vinnie, a hot-tempered young man with a criminal record (for murder!) and an obvious motive, is the prime suspect, it turns out Connie is the real killer — she hid out in the beach house and shot Freddie as revenge for betraying her dream by marrying her not for love, but for purely mercenary reasons. Driven by the chillingly effective performances of Robert Harland and Barbara Nichols, “Marriage Can Be Fatal” is a nicely done TV series episode with more depth to the format than usual, then or now. — 2/20/08
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