by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our first movie last night was Road to Happiness, an item I’d downloaded from archive.org (http://www.archive.org/details/road_to_happiness) and burned to a DVD, which was billed on their site as a 1934 musical starring John Boles as an aspiring singer who makes it as a radio star. Curiously, I found out from imdb.com that the movie was actually made in 1942 — which explains why Boles looked a decade older than he had in his early-1930’s films (he was a decade older!) — though one could readily see where the mistake came from because this movie, a production of second-iteration (post-1937) Monogram, actually seemed much closer philosophically and thematically to the early 1930’s than the early 1940’s. (The release date for Road to Happiness given on imdb.com was January 9, 1942, which means it was almost certainly finished before the U.S. entered World War II and probably seemed dated to audiences once it finally hit theatres.)
The plot has aspiring opera singer Jeff Carter (John Boles) scraping up the money to return from Lisbon, where he ended up after spending several years in Europe studying the baritone repertoire and gaining experience in small opera companies, to the U.S., where he hopes to parlay his European experience into major opera stardom. He’s saddled with obnoxious manager Charley Grady (Roscoe Karns),who seems better at alienating his potential employers than wooing them; and the man on whose approval his career depends is temperamental conductor Pietro Pacelli (Paul Porcasi, who seems to be enacting the popular image of Arturo Toscanini as a crazed maniac who insulted his musicians and treated everyone else like shit), but those are the least of his problems. His biggest problem is that he’s totally broke — so much so that he has to ask his former landlady Mrs. Price (Lillian Elliott) for his old room back — and his wife Millie (Mona Barrie) has divorced him (though she continued to write to him in Europe, giving him the false impression that once he returned to the U.S. they’d get back together) and remarried. Her new husband is a wealthy stockbroker, Sam Rankin (Selmer Jackson), and the two of them have sent Jeff’s son Danny (Billy Lee in a refreshingly un-sentimental performance for a child actor just after the Age of Temple) to military school, where he’s doing well and he’s well-liked. Daddy goes to the school to fetch him, and Danny is glad to see him and eagerly agrees to leave the school and move in with dad even though all dad has to offer him is a room in a boardinghouse (which he can’t even pay for — Mrs. Price is giving him credit, as she had done when he and his wife lived there years earlier) and whatever presents and treats he can get by pawning his belongings.
In bare outline, the plot of Road to Happiness sounds like rancidly sentimental treacle, but as actually played the film is surprisingly tough-minded and emotionally moving; writers Matt Taylor (story) and Robert Hardy Andrews (script) play against many of the usual clichés and avoid the easy movie devices many writers would have plugged into this story. What’s more, they give the tale a deep sense of class consciousness fairly common in the movies of the early 1930’s (at the height of the Great Depression) but surprising as late as 1942 (no wonder the folks at archive.org thought this movie was eight years older than it was!) and they make Millie a surprisingly bitchy character, totally heedless of the welfare and needs of her son and interested only in being a socialite and hanging out with worthless drinking buddies. The first weekend Jeff sends Danny back to see his mom, she turns him away with a note — given to him by her butler — that she’s too busy to see him.
The second weekend she lets him in — and her new husband plies him with presents and evinces far more caring and interest in his welfare than his mom does — but at 5:15 p.m., when he wants to listen to the “Laughing Cowboy” radio show because his dad is playing the star’s faithful Indian companion (unable to find a job as a singer he’s taken the first thing he was offered, and he’s nobly renounced his operatic ambitions to make sure he’s making some money to take care of his son), mom trundles in her cocktail-party companions and they drown out the radio. Danny is so humiliated he insists on walking all the way back to his dad’s boardinghouse — even turning down his stepfather’s offer of a ride — out of a believable mixture of trauma and hurt pride that’s one of the many elements that makes this movie ring true emotionally instead of seeming manipulated for the tear ducts. (Charles pointed out that she’s probably the nastiest mother figure in classic Hollywood who wasn’t an out-and-out crook like the even more irresponsible mother in the 1931 film Night Nurse.)
Director Phil Rosen, who at this time was making mostly Monogram’s usual garbage, handles this story with the delicacy and the dedication it needs and shows that the two great movies he made in the early 1930’s (The Phantom Broadcast for first-iteration Monogram in 1933 and Dangerous Corner for RKO a year later) weren’t flukes. Only towards the end of the movie, when the writers have to let things start breaking Jeff’s way at long last so he can achieve success and raise his son as a single parent without having to worry about that bitch mother of his hurting him anymore, do they fall back into cliché; the great (and egomaniacal) singer Almonti (Antonio Filauri) shows up for his weekly program at the same station where Jeff is rehearsing his latest “Laughing Cowboy” script, only he’s too drunk to perform, so Jeff goes on in his place, sings “Vision fugitive” from Massenet’s Hérodiade (an odd feature for a baritone — even in an era in which more people listened to and followed opera than do now, one might have expected him to sing a bit of Rigoletto, the Toreador Song from Carmen, or another more famous baritone aria), is an instant star and gets the offer from tempermental conductor Pacelli (ya remember Pacelli?) he’s been waiting for all along.
Until then, though, Road to Happiness has been quite an engaging film that’s well worth watching (even though the print on archive.org, along with being misdated, is about 10 minutes shorter than the original release, and some of the cuts — including one of Boles’ three songs, “America” — are all too obvious) and surprisingly moving emotionally even though it’s not really a musical — there’s no production number and all Boles gets to sing in this print is the Massenet aria at the end and “Danny Boy” (it seems almost certain that the writers named his son after this song, as an excuse to get it into the movie!) early on over the dinner table at the boardinghouse.
Friday, December 11, 2009
The Magic Carpet (Columbia, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The second film I ended up running last night was one I’d screened before and which had also turned out to be surprisingly good: not a classic by any means but an entertaining movie with a lot of charm. The film was The Magic Carpet, an Arabian Nights tale made by Columbia in 1951. It was a sleazy little project, produced by Sam Katzman and directed by Lew Landers, and the female lead — Narah, sister of the usurping Caliph Ali (Gregory Gaye), who in the opening sequence murdered the rightful Caliph Omar and his wife Yashima (Doretta Johnson), who was able to send her newborn baby to the safety of the home of her uncle, Dr. Ahkmid (William Fawcett), via the titular magic carpet — was offered to, of all people, Lucille Ball. This was Harry Cohn working at his Machiavellian best: Ball had just accepted a major role in Cecil B. DeMille’s circus extravaganza The Greatest Show on Earth but that was a Paramount production and she still owed Columbia one more film on the three-picture deal under which she’d made The Fuller Brush Girl and Miss Grant Takes Richmond.
Ball asked for a loanout and Cohn refused; then Cohn sent her the script of The Magic Carpet, thinking she’d turn it down and he’d be able to fire her without paying her the contract salary he owed her for a third film. On the advice of a friend, Ball accepted the script, thinking that since it was a “B” and her role was small (Patricia Medina actually has more screen time in the final film than Ball does, and it is Medina who ends up with the hero, played with his usual stiffness by John Agar) she could make it in a hurry and finish it quickly enough to keep her date with Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount. Only as she started making The Magic Carpet, Columbia’s wardrobe people kept having to let out her Arab princess’s costume again and again, and Ball finally realized that after 11 childless years she and husband Desi Arnaz were about to have their first baby, Lucie. (So Lucie Arnaz joins the ranks of future stars, including Liza Minnelli and Mia Farrow, who made their screen debuts — sort of — before they were born.) So she had to drop out of The Greatest Show on Earth (Gloria Grahame replaced her) and all she had left to show for her year’s work was a big paycheck from Harry Cohn and the promise of TV mega-stardom once I Love Lucy debuted that fall.
Given that background — and the presence of hacky micro-talents like director Lew Landers and male star John Agar — one would expect The Magic Carpet to be almost unwatchable trash. Surprise: it’s actually good fun, thanks mainly to its screenwriter, David Mathews, who manages on a far smaller budget and scale to achieve the balance all the mega-talents involved in the 1967 Casino Royale tried for and failed dismally at; his script follows the Arabian Nights conventions closely enough that the pre-pubescent boys in the 1951 movie audiences would have taken it as an exciting “straight” tale of derring-do, while the adults reluctantly accompanying their kids to the theatre would have enjoyed it as a campy spoof. Agar’s role, Ramoth a.k.a. “The Scarlet Falcon,” is of course the son of the martyred Omar and Yashima and the apprentice of his foster-father, Ahkmid; and he insinuates his way into the palace of the Caliph of Baghdad by slipping the Caliph (who by the way is drawn as yet another Iraqi precursor of Saddam Hussein, ruthlessly suppressing any hint of political dissent and taxing the population unmercifully to pay for his royal palaces — no wonder it was so easy for both Presidents Bush to demonize Saddam: he was playing the Hollywood script of a villainous Arab ruler!) a drug that gives him hiccups, then “curing” him by being the only one there with the antidote.
The elements are pretty predictable — Ramoth has a comic-relief sidekick, Razi (George Tobias); Razi’s daughter Lida (Patricia Medina, Mrs. Joseph Cotten), is a tomboy who wants to join the band of the “Scarlet Falcon” (in which guise Ramoth stages daring raids on the Caliph’s caravans and, like an Arab Robin Hood, distributes stolen grain to the starving people of Baghdad) and also is in love with Ramoth and has some jealous hissy-fits towards Narah; and bad Caliph Ali has a Karl Rove-like grand vizier, Boreg al Buzzar (Raymond Burr — interesting to find two 1950’s TV icons in this film! — who isn’t as good as the superb George Zucco in a similar role in Sudan but is certainly acceptable), whom Ramoth defeats in the climactic swordfight to regain his rightful throne but only after he uses the titular magic carpet to take Lida on a honeymoon ride while Ali and Narah are taken to Abu Ghraib (or whatever was serving that purpose in this particular part of Iraqi history). The carpet itself is quite convincing; Columbia’s special-effects people were able to get it to fly without any discernible flaws in the process work (like the black lines — caused by shrinkages in one of the films before a scene is double-printed — that generally marked attempts at this kind of shot at cheaper studios) — and so is Agar as the hero; he was never any great shakes as an actor and he can’t compare to Douglas Fairbanks or even Jon Hall, but he’s far better than the outrageously miscast Tony Curtis in the contemporaneous The Prince Who Was a Thief and his well-known friendship with John Wayne led him to imitate Wayne’s famous halting cadences whenever he wanted to sound butch — to surprisingly good effect.
Lucille Ball seems hardly to be in the film at all; she doesn’t get any comedy scenes, her manner is too modern to suit an Arab costume drama (though she does haughtiness and jealousy quite well) and her flaming-red Sydney Guilaroff hair seems odd in the court of Baghdad, though at least it makes her stand out in the sometimes murky Supercinecolor process in which this film was shot. (David Mathews actually offered to write more scenes for Ball and fatten her part, but Lucy — whose only motive for making this film was a quick paycheck, the quicker the better — turned him down and said she’d accept the part as it stood.) Though it tends to drag towards the end as the plot lurches towards its predictable resolution (I was rather hoping that since this was taking place in a Muslim country, Ramoth would be allowed to marry both female leads — but the Production Code would have rendered that unthinkable even to a writer with his tongue so firmly in his cheek as David Mathews), overall The Magic Carpet is a surprisingly fun, engaging minor film that pleasantly fills 83 minutes.
The second film I ended up running last night was one I’d screened before and which had also turned out to be surprisingly good: not a classic by any means but an entertaining movie with a lot of charm. The film was The Magic Carpet, an Arabian Nights tale made by Columbia in 1951. It was a sleazy little project, produced by Sam Katzman and directed by Lew Landers, and the female lead — Narah, sister of the usurping Caliph Ali (Gregory Gaye), who in the opening sequence murdered the rightful Caliph Omar and his wife Yashima (Doretta Johnson), who was able to send her newborn baby to the safety of the home of her uncle, Dr. Ahkmid (William Fawcett), via the titular magic carpet — was offered to, of all people, Lucille Ball. This was Harry Cohn working at his Machiavellian best: Ball had just accepted a major role in Cecil B. DeMille’s circus extravaganza The Greatest Show on Earth but that was a Paramount production and she still owed Columbia one more film on the three-picture deal under which she’d made The Fuller Brush Girl and Miss Grant Takes Richmond.
Ball asked for a loanout and Cohn refused; then Cohn sent her the script of The Magic Carpet, thinking she’d turn it down and he’d be able to fire her without paying her the contract salary he owed her for a third film. On the advice of a friend, Ball accepted the script, thinking that since it was a “B” and her role was small (Patricia Medina actually has more screen time in the final film than Ball does, and it is Medina who ends up with the hero, played with his usual stiffness by John Agar) she could make it in a hurry and finish it quickly enough to keep her date with Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount. Only as she started making The Magic Carpet, Columbia’s wardrobe people kept having to let out her Arab princess’s costume again and again, and Ball finally realized that after 11 childless years she and husband Desi Arnaz were about to have their first baby, Lucie. (So Lucie Arnaz joins the ranks of future stars, including Liza Minnelli and Mia Farrow, who made their screen debuts — sort of — before they were born.) So she had to drop out of The Greatest Show on Earth (Gloria Grahame replaced her) and all she had left to show for her year’s work was a big paycheck from Harry Cohn and the promise of TV mega-stardom once I Love Lucy debuted that fall.
Given that background — and the presence of hacky micro-talents like director Lew Landers and male star John Agar — one would expect The Magic Carpet to be almost unwatchable trash. Surprise: it’s actually good fun, thanks mainly to its screenwriter, David Mathews, who manages on a far smaller budget and scale to achieve the balance all the mega-talents involved in the 1967 Casino Royale tried for and failed dismally at; his script follows the Arabian Nights conventions closely enough that the pre-pubescent boys in the 1951 movie audiences would have taken it as an exciting “straight” tale of derring-do, while the adults reluctantly accompanying their kids to the theatre would have enjoyed it as a campy spoof. Agar’s role, Ramoth a.k.a. “The Scarlet Falcon,” is of course the son of the martyred Omar and Yashima and the apprentice of his foster-father, Ahkmid; and he insinuates his way into the palace of the Caliph of Baghdad by slipping the Caliph (who by the way is drawn as yet another Iraqi precursor of Saddam Hussein, ruthlessly suppressing any hint of political dissent and taxing the population unmercifully to pay for his royal palaces — no wonder it was so easy for both Presidents Bush to demonize Saddam: he was playing the Hollywood script of a villainous Arab ruler!) a drug that gives him hiccups, then “curing” him by being the only one there with the antidote.
The elements are pretty predictable — Ramoth has a comic-relief sidekick, Razi (George Tobias); Razi’s daughter Lida (Patricia Medina, Mrs. Joseph Cotten), is a tomboy who wants to join the band of the “Scarlet Falcon” (in which guise Ramoth stages daring raids on the Caliph’s caravans and, like an Arab Robin Hood, distributes stolen grain to the starving people of Baghdad) and also is in love with Ramoth and has some jealous hissy-fits towards Narah; and bad Caliph Ali has a Karl Rove-like grand vizier, Boreg al Buzzar (Raymond Burr — interesting to find two 1950’s TV icons in this film! — who isn’t as good as the superb George Zucco in a similar role in Sudan but is certainly acceptable), whom Ramoth defeats in the climactic swordfight to regain his rightful throne but only after he uses the titular magic carpet to take Lida on a honeymoon ride while Ali and Narah are taken to Abu Ghraib (or whatever was serving that purpose in this particular part of Iraqi history). The carpet itself is quite convincing; Columbia’s special-effects people were able to get it to fly without any discernible flaws in the process work (like the black lines — caused by shrinkages in one of the films before a scene is double-printed — that generally marked attempts at this kind of shot at cheaper studios) — and so is Agar as the hero; he was never any great shakes as an actor and he can’t compare to Douglas Fairbanks or even Jon Hall, but he’s far better than the outrageously miscast Tony Curtis in the contemporaneous The Prince Who Was a Thief and his well-known friendship with John Wayne led him to imitate Wayne’s famous halting cadences whenever he wanted to sound butch — to surprisingly good effect.
Lucille Ball seems hardly to be in the film at all; she doesn’t get any comedy scenes, her manner is too modern to suit an Arab costume drama (though she does haughtiness and jealousy quite well) and her flaming-red Sydney Guilaroff hair seems odd in the court of Baghdad, though at least it makes her stand out in the sometimes murky Supercinecolor process in which this film was shot. (David Mathews actually offered to write more scenes for Ball and fatten her part, but Lucy — whose only motive for making this film was a quick paycheck, the quicker the better — turned him down and said she’d accept the part as it stood.) Though it tends to drag towards the end as the plot lurches towards its predictable resolution (I was rather hoping that since this was taking place in a Muslim country, Ramoth would be allowed to marry both female leads — but the Production Code would have rendered that unthinkable even to a writer with his tongue so firmly in his cheek as David Mathews), overall The Magic Carpet is a surprisingly fun, engaging minor film that pleasantly fills 83 minutes.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Christmas in Connecticut (Warner Bros., 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we watched last night was one Charles had requested: Christmas in Connecticut, which I knew I had on an old commercial VHS tape and it turned out I had on DVD, too — I had recorded it on December 24, 2008 from TCM right after the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol directed by Edwin L. Marin with Reginald Owen as Scrooge. Christmas in Connecticut is a modern-dress comedy, directed by Peter Godfrey from a script by Adele Commandini (writer of Deanna Durbin’s early vehicles, and it shows) and Lionel Houser from a story by Aileen Hamilton. According to imdb.com, it was based on a columnist in Family Circle magazine named Gladys Taber, who lived in Connecticut on a farm called Stillmeadow (as opposed to all those moving meadows we’ve seen lately?) and wrote a column on cooking and farm life and taking care of a family.
The conceit Hamilton, Commandini and Houser came up with was that their character, Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), really lives in a ratty New York City apartment and can’t cook at all — this would-be Martha Stewart (the modern-day person people who watch Christmas in Connecticut today are instantly reminded of) is faking it all, getting her recipes from local restaurateur Felix Bassenak (S. Z. Sakall) and making the rest of it up. Meanwhile — in fact, this is how the movie opens — sailors Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) and “Sinky” Sinkiewicz (Frank Jenks) are shipwrecked when their destroyer is torpedoed and they spend 18 days on a raft without food. (In an hilarious and inventive sequence, Jones dreams that he’s sitting at a table on the raft and being served a gourmet meal by Sinky in waiter’s drag.) Recuperating in a naval hospital, Jones gets upset that he’s being fed only milk while Sinky is getting full-course meals, and on Sinky’s advice he decides that the way to get decent food is to cruise the nurse who’s taking care of them, Mary Lee (Joyce Compton).
Only Mary is so resistant that in order to get to her he has to promise to marry her — and she decides that the problem with him is that he’s never had a family (he was an artist and a drifter before he enlisted) and therefore she’ll write a letter to Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), publisher of the Smart Housekeeping magazine for which Elizabeth writes her column, and get her boyfriend invited to Elizabeth’s farm for the Christmas holiday. Since she already knows Yardley — she once took care of his granddaughter — the plan works, and now Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham (Robert Shayne), have to come up with a Connecticut farm, a husband, an eight-month-old baby (since Elizabeth has written in her columns that she has one) and some absolutely astonishing holiday meals to fool Jones and also Yardley, who will fire them instantly if he realizes they’ve been faking her columns. In a way the opening of this movie is a parody of Meet John Doe — another film in which Stanwyck played a journalist who faked a big story and then worried about the reaction of her corpulent, hard-hearted boss when he found out — though soon enough Dudley comes up with solutions to the various dilemmas involved.
The farm will come from John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner), foofy architect who’s been after Elizabeth to marry him for years — though he lets out a homoerotic yelp of delight when he finds out that his Christmas guest will be a sailor — the baby will be one of the local kids, whom Sloan’s maid Norah (Una O’Connor) babysits; and the dinners will come from Felix, who’ll be invited to tag along and pose as Elizabeth’s uncle. Complications ensue — including the rather delightful one that there are two babies, of different hair colors, facial appearances and, most importantly, genders — and Yardley himself also comes up for the weekend, while John and Dudley summon the local justice of the peace (Dick Elliott) to tie the knot between John and Elizabeth — only they’re always getting interrupted, and any hardened moviegoer will realize that’s because Elizabeth is destined to fall for that hot, hunky sailor and want to marry him at the end.
Christmas in Connecticut isn’t exactly on the level of It’s a Wonderful Life or the various Christmas Carols as a holiday institution, but on its own merits it’s a quite good movie — surprising from a usually lackluster director like Peter Godfrey. No, he’s not Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks (for whom Stanwyck made her two best comedies — The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, respectively), and Christmas in Connecticut would have been an even better movie than it is if they’d let Sturges loose on it (though it would also have been considerably quirkier and possibly less of a box-office hit), but on its own merits it’s a quite charming film and noteworthy not only for Stanwyck’s comedic skills but Greenstreet’s as well.
On stage Greenstreet had been best known as a comedian — his signature role was Shakespeare’s Falstaff — but when he was recruited for his film debut (at age 61!) it was as the black-hearted criminal mastermind of The Maltese Falcon and that became his film “type.” Seeing him here is a real treat and makes the whole idea of Greenstreet as Falstaff seem much more credible than it does in his other movies. The movie is generally well acted — though Dennis Morgan is a bit hard to take as the irresistible man who’s got both sex appeal and war-hero status on his side in the romantic conflict (Sturges would probably have wanted Joel McCrea for the part, which would have been better) — and Godfrey actually moves the camera and dollies through the house to discover the characters (and give this an air of French-style bedroom farce at times) instead of just doing traditional shot-reverse shot edits.
The real hero(ine) of this film behind the camera, though, is probably Commandini — she gave Stanwyck’s character here the same nervy combination of indomitability and vulnerability she’d given to Deanna Durbin in her Universal vehicles a decade earlier, and though she had two collaborators the general aura of the story seems to be hers. Christmas in Connecticut was remade for cable TV in 1992 with Arnold Schwarzenegger directing (his only shot behind the cameras) and Dyan Cannon in the Stanwyck role, and according to imdb.com another version is slated for next year, but this one is quite good enough and a welcome holiday-themed audience diversion.
The film we watched last night was one Charles had requested: Christmas in Connecticut, which I knew I had on an old commercial VHS tape and it turned out I had on DVD, too — I had recorded it on December 24, 2008 from TCM right after the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol directed by Edwin L. Marin with Reginald Owen as Scrooge. Christmas in Connecticut is a modern-dress comedy, directed by Peter Godfrey from a script by Adele Commandini (writer of Deanna Durbin’s early vehicles, and it shows) and Lionel Houser from a story by Aileen Hamilton. According to imdb.com, it was based on a columnist in Family Circle magazine named Gladys Taber, who lived in Connecticut on a farm called Stillmeadow (as opposed to all those moving meadows we’ve seen lately?) and wrote a column on cooking and farm life and taking care of a family.
The conceit Hamilton, Commandini and Houser came up with was that their character, Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), really lives in a ratty New York City apartment and can’t cook at all — this would-be Martha Stewart (the modern-day person people who watch Christmas in Connecticut today are instantly reminded of) is faking it all, getting her recipes from local restaurateur Felix Bassenak (S. Z. Sakall) and making the rest of it up. Meanwhile — in fact, this is how the movie opens — sailors Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) and “Sinky” Sinkiewicz (Frank Jenks) are shipwrecked when their destroyer is torpedoed and they spend 18 days on a raft without food. (In an hilarious and inventive sequence, Jones dreams that he’s sitting at a table on the raft and being served a gourmet meal by Sinky in waiter’s drag.) Recuperating in a naval hospital, Jones gets upset that he’s being fed only milk while Sinky is getting full-course meals, and on Sinky’s advice he decides that the way to get decent food is to cruise the nurse who’s taking care of them, Mary Lee (Joyce Compton).
Only Mary is so resistant that in order to get to her he has to promise to marry her — and she decides that the problem with him is that he’s never had a family (he was an artist and a drifter before he enlisted) and therefore she’ll write a letter to Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), publisher of the Smart Housekeeping magazine for which Elizabeth writes her column, and get her boyfriend invited to Elizabeth’s farm for the Christmas holiday. Since she already knows Yardley — she once took care of his granddaughter — the plan works, and now Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham (Robert Shayne), have to come up with a Connecticut farm, a husband, an eight-month-old baby (since Elizabeth has written in her columns that she has one) and some absolutely astonishing holiday meals to fool Jones and also Yardley, who will fire them instantly if he realizes they’ve been faking her columns. In a way the opening of this movie is a parody of Meet John Doe — another film in which Stanwyck played a journalist who faked a big story and then worried about the reaction of her corpulent, hard-hearted boss when he found out — though soon enough Dudley comes up with solutions to the various dilemmas involved.
The farm will come from John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner), foofy architect who’s been after Elizabeth to marry him for years — though he lets out a homoerotic yelp of delight when he finds out that his Christmas guest will be a sailor — the baby will be one of the local kids, whom Sloan’s maid Norah (Una O’Connor) babysits; and the dinners will come from Felix, who’ll be invited to tag along and pose as Elizabeth’s uncle. Complications ensue — including the rather delightful one that there are two babies, of different hair colors, facial appearances and, most importantly, genders — and Yardley himself also comes up for the weekend, while John and Dudley summon the local justice of the peace (Dick Elliott) to tie the knot between John and Elizabeth — only they’re always getting interrupted, and any hardened moviegoer will realize that’s because Elizabeth is destined to fall for that hot, hunky sailor and want to marry him at the end.
Christmas in Connecticut isn’t exactly on the level of It’s a Wonderful Life or the various Christmas Carols as a holiday institution, but on its own merits it’s a quite good movie — surprising from a usually lackluster director like Peter Godfrey. No, he’s not Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks (for whom Stanwyck made her two best comedies — The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, respectively), and Christmas in Connecticut would have been an even better movie than it is if they’d let Sturges loose on it (though it would also have been considerably quirkier and possibly less of a box-office hit), but on its own merits it’s a quite charming film and noteworthy not only for Stanwyck’s comedic skills but Greenstreet’s as well.
On stage Greenstreet had been best known as a comedian — his signature role was Shakespeare’s Falstaff — but when he was recruited for his film debut (at age 61!) it was as the black-hearted criminal mastermind of The Maltese Falcon and that became his film “type.” Seeing him here is a real treat and makes the whole idea of Greenstreet as Falstaff seem much more credible than it does in his other movies. The movie is generally well acted — though Dennis Morgan is a bit hard to take as the irresistible man who’s got both sex appeal and war-hero status on his side in the romantic conflict (Sturges would probably have wanted Joel McCrea for the part, which would have been better) — and Godfrey actually moves the camera and dollies through the house to discover the characters (and give this an air of French-style bedroom farce at times) instead of just doing traditional shot-reverse shot edits.
The real hero(ine) of this film behind the camera, though, is probably Commandini — she gave Stanwyck’s character here the same nervy combination of indomitability and vulnerability she’d given to Deanna Durbin in her Universal vehicles a decade earlier, and though she had two collaborators the general aura of the story seems to be hers. Christmas in Connecticut was remade for cable TV in 1992 with Arnold Schwarzenegger directing (his only shot behind the cameras) and Dyan Cannon in the Stanwyck role, and according to imdb.com another version is slated for next year, but this one is quite good enough and a welcome holiday-themed audience diversion.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Racket Busters (Warner Bros., 1938)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I caught this morning was Racket Busters, a typical Warners programmer from 1938 written by two estimable scribes — Robert Rossen and Leonardo Bercovici — not that that helped much, and directed in his usual unsubtle slam-bang style by Lloyd Bacon. Humphrey Bogart is top-billed — though not above the title — as Martin (his first name is John but that’s not revealed until he’s arrested and tried at the end), a “racketeer” in the literal sense of the word: one who organizes phony “associations” — ostensibly unions or business groups, but actually shakedowns in which the members are forced to pay up or else have their livelihoods destroyed and sometimes get killed. Walter Abel plays Hugh Allison, the prestigious attorney who’s drafted as a special prosecutor to try to bust the rackets for good — he got a similar appointment previously but was unable to make his charges stick because the judges and juries were successfully intimidated — and who runs up against a wall of silence from the people whom the rackets are exploiting.
Among these are independent truck driver Denny Jordan (George Brent) and his pregnant wife Nora (Gloria Dickson, someone Warners clearly was trying to build into a star, but it didn’t take), along with his sidekick Skeets Wilson (Allen Jenkins) and Skeets’ girlfriend Gladys (Penny Singleton, pre-Blondie). It’s pretty much a standard by-the-numbers Warners gangster flick, with exciting chase scenes, elaborate montages to advance the story (including one in which Bogart’s face looms spectrally over the actions committed by his hired thugs, running rebellious truck drivers off the road and pouring gasoline over produce owned by commodity merchants who refuse to pay tribute to his gang) and a down-the-middle plot line that acknowledges the existence of honest labor unions while strongly suggesting that the Teamsters Union wasn’t an honest union later taken over by gangsters, but was a gangster-led enterprise from the get-go.
Racket Busters is unevenly acted — Bogart, in the nominal lead, does little more than snarl (he was clearly getting tired of these cookie-cutter gangster parts and this was around the time he joked that he could write all his lines on 3” x 5” cards because he said the same things in every movie and all that varied was the order in which he had to say them); Gloria Dickson tries hard but shows why she never became a major star; Allen Jenkins is his typical self until the end — when he tries to rouse his fellow truckers to break a gangster-called strike, gets picked off by a Martin assassin for his pains, and has a surprisingly moving and finely acted death scene reminiscent of Jimmy Durante’s in The Wet Parade. But the big problem with this movie is that the role of Denny Jordan cried out for James Cagney and got George Brent, who not only fails to convince us that he’s a proletarian but also is utterly incapable of tracing the character’s arc from heroic resister of Martin’s machine to Martin’s stooge and back to decent human being again.
The film I caught this morning was Racket Busters, a typical Warners programmer from 1938 written by two estimable scribes — Robert Rossen and Leonardo Bercovici — not that that helped much, and directed in his usual unsubtle slam-bang style by Lloyd Bacon. Humphrey Bogart is top-billed — though not above the title — as Martin (his first name is John but that’s not revealed until he’s arrested and tried at the end), a “racketeer” in the literal sense of the word: one who organizes phony “associations” — ostensibly unions or business groups, but actually shakedowns in which the members are forced to pay up or else have their livelihoods destroyed and sometimes get killed. Walter Abel plays Hugh Allison, the prestigious attorney who’s drafted as a special prosecutor to try to bust the rackets for good — he got a similar appointment previously but was unable to make his charges stick because the judges and juries were successfully intimidated — and who runs up against a wall of silence from the people whom the rackets are exploiting.
Among these are independent truck driver Denny Jordan (George Brent) and his pregnant wife Nora (Gloria Dickson, someone Warners clearly was trying to build into a star, but it didn’t take), along with his sidekick Skeets Wilson (Allen Jenkins) and Skeets’ girlfriend Gladys (Penny Singleton, pre-Blondie). It’s pretty much a standard by-the-numbers Warners gangster flick, with exciting chase scenes, elaborate montages to advance the story (including one in which Bogart’s face looms spectrally over the actions committed by his hired thugs, running rebellious truck drivers off the road and pouring gasoline over produce owned by commodity merchants who refuse to pay tribute to his gang) and a down-the-middle plot line that acknowledges the existence of honest labor unions while strongly suggesting that the Teamsters Union wasn’t an honest union later taken over by gangsters, but was a gangster-led enterprise from the get-go.
Racket Busters is unevenly acted — Bogart, in the nominal lead, does little more than snarl (he was clearly getting tired of these cookie-cutter gangster parts and this was around the time he joked that he could write all his lines on 3” x 5” cards because he said the same things in every movie and all that varied was the order in which he had to say them); Gloria Dickson tries hard but shows why she never became a major star; Allen Jenkins is his typical self until the end — when he tries to rouse his fellow truckers to break a gangster-called strike, gets picked off by a Martin assassin for his pains, and has a surprisingly moving and finely acted death scene reminiscent of Jimmy Durante’s in The Wet Parade. But the big problem with this movie is that the role of Denny Jordan cried out for James Cagney and got George Brent, who not only fails to convince us that he’s a proletarian but also is utterly incapable of tracing the character’s arc from heroic resister of Martin’s machine to Martin’s stooge and back to decent human being again.
The Snow Creature (Planet Productions/United Artists, 1954)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I screened The Snow Creature, a 1954 film from director/producer W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder’s cousin, though imdb.com mistakenly identifies him as the more famous Wilder’s brother — in fact “Wilhelm” was the original first name of both of them so they couldn’t have had the same parents) that actually had the potential to be an interesting and different film if the budget hadn’t approached strangulation level; one gets the impression Wilder and his son Myles, who wrote the script, were panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard for the money to keep shooting.
A couple of white guys, botanist Dr. Frank Parrish (Paul Langton) and Peter Wells (Leslie Denison), organize an expedition into the Himalayas for reasons Wilder Söhn never quite makes clear. But when their lead Sherpa guide, Subra (Teru Shimada), loses … well, at first it’s his sister-in-law but later it’s his wife — anyway, whoever she is and however they’re related, she’s kidnapped and carried off by a Yeti (an Abominable Snowman to you), a giant guy in a carpet sample who is part of a race of legendary beings living in the mountains, Subra and his fellow Sherpas stage a mutiny, take over the expedition and send it off in the mountains to hunt the Yeti.
After about 40 minutes’ worth of screen time walking around the mountain set (actually the familiar Bronson Canyon Western location, liberally strewn with ground-up cornflakes or whatever they were using then to simulate snow), they finally capture a Yeti — alive — and bring it back to San Francisco (where, through the magic of stock footage, they fly from Nepal via New York à la Spider Island), whereupon the film turns into a chintzy remake of King Kong without the Kong-Fay Wray love story (indeed, there are no principal female characters in the movie!). The Yeti escapes captivity, kills a few women on the streets and is ultimately hunted down and killed — and that’s the end of it.
The Snow Creature gets a few things right — like the appearance of the Yeti, whom they keep quite effectively in shadow to make him look more sinister and keep us focused on the monster itself and not the chintziness of his makeup; and the fact that, unlike a lot of more highly regarded directors who shot mountaineering scenes, Wilder managed to make it believable that these people were in a highly cold and unforgiving climate. (The fact that we were watching this movie on a cold night and there were bits of real-life drafts in our room helped the verisimilitude, too.) But there are a lot more things that go wrong, including the fact that whenever the Yeti appears, he does so in the exact same piece of footage: a shot of the actor in shadow walking straight towards the camera. (The imdb.com entry on The Snow Creature tentatively lists Lock Martin — the unusually tall stunt person who played Klaatu in the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still — as the Yeti, but stresses that that’s unconfirmed.)
It also doesn’t help that the language of the Sherpas sounds an awful lot like Japanese — for a reason that isn’t revealed until the credit roll at the end: they were all played by Japanese actors and therefore they were speaking Japanese! I don’t know if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ever gave The Snow Creature the “treatment” — it would have deserved it and they could probably have done quite a number on it, but at the same time, as dull and uninspiring a movie as it is, there’s a kind of likability about it that really makes you wish it were a better film.
Charles and I screened The Snow Creature, a 1954 film from director/producer W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder’s cousin, though imdb.com mistakenly identifies him as the more famous Wilder’s brother — in fact “Wilhelm” was the original first name of both of them so they couldn’t have had the same parents) that actually had the potential to be an interesting and different film if the budget hadn’t approached strangulation level; one gets the impression Wilder and his son Myles, who wrote the script, were panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard for the money to keep shooting.
A couple of white guys, botanist Dr. Frank Parrish (Paul Langton) and Peter Wells (Leslie Denison), organize an expedition into the Himalayas for reasons Wilder Söhn never quite makes clear. But when their lead Sherpa guide, Subra (Teru Shimada), loses … well, at first it’s his sister-in-law but later it’s his wife — anyway, whoever she is and however they’re related, she’s kidnapped and carried off by a Yeti (an Abominable Snowman to you), a giant guy in a carpet sample who is part of a race of legendary beings living in the mountains, Subra and his fellow Sherpas stage a mutiny, take over the expedition and send it off in the mountains to hunt the Yeti.
After about 40 minutes’ worth of screen time walking around the mountain set (actually the familiar Bronson Canyon Western location, liberally strewn with ground-up cornflakes or whatever they were using then to simulate snow), they finally capture a Yeti — alive — and bring it back to San Francisco (where, through the magic of stock footage, they fly from Nepal via New York à la Spider Island), whereupon the film turns into a chintzy remake of King Kong without the Kong-Fay Wray love story (indeed, there are no principal female characters in the movie!). The Yeti escapes captivity, kills a few women on the streets and is ultimately hunted down and killed — and that’s the end of it.
The Snow Creature gets a few things right — like the appearance of the Yeti, whom they keep quite effectively in shadow to make him look more sinister and keep us focused on the monster itself and not the chintziness of his makeup; and the fact that, unlike a lot of more highly regarded directors who shot mountaineering scenes, Wilder managed to make it believable that these people were in a highly cold and unforgiving climate. (The fact that we were watching this movie on a cold night and there were bits of real-life drafts in our room helped the verisimilitude, too.) But there are a lot more things that go wrong, including the fact that whenever the Yeti appears, he does so in the exact same piece of footage: a shot of the actor in shadow walking straight towards the camera. (The imdb.com entry on The Snow Creature tentatively lists Lock Martin — the unusually tall stunt person who played Klaatu in the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still — as the Yeti, but stresses that that’s unconfirmed.)
It also doesn’t help that the language of the Sherpas sounds an awful lot like Japanese — for a reason that isn’t revealed until the credit roll at the end: they were all played by Japanese actors and therefore they were speaking Japanese! I don’t know if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ever gave The Snow Creature the “treatment” — it would have deserved it and they could probably have done quite a number on it, but at the same time, as dull and uninspiring a movie as it is, there’s a kind of likability about it that really makes you wish it were a better film.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Three Episodes of “Beulah” and Other 1950’s TV Shows and Earlier Cartoons
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
About a week ago Charles and I watched a miscellany of 1950’s TV shows he’d downloaded, including two prize episodes of the early-1950’s sitcom Beulah. My understanding was that this was originally produced as a vehicle for Hattie McDaniel in the lead role of Beulah, the wise-mammy maid to Harry and Alice Henderson (played by early-1940’s Universal veterans David Bruce and Jane Frazee) — essentially a modern-dress version of her Academy Award-winning role from Gone With the Wind — but McDaniel died after the first season and Louise Beavers replaced her in the role. The series entry on imdb.com is more ambiguous and seems to be saying that McDaniel only shot two episodes of the series, not an entire season. Fortunately, one of the episodes Charles downloaded featured her: a marvelous show in which the Hendersons’ son Donnie (Stuffy Singer) is doing poorly in his grade-school dance class because he finds the music he’s expected to dance to — a tea-dance waltz record of amazing insipidity — totally uninspiring.
In a plot twist that eerily anticipates the rock ’n’ roll craze of the mid-1950’s, Beulah and her boyfriend Bill (played by an actor billed as Ernest Whitman who turned out to be Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman, Armed Forces Radio Service announcer during World War II, who in between jokes about his weight got to announce a lot of great performances by Billy Eckstine’s band and many of the other great Black acts of the mid-1940’s), who in this episode runs a garage — in the later show with Louise Beavers he seemed to be a colleague of Beulah’s on the Hendersons’ household staff — get together, put on a Black boogie-woogie record and show Donnie how to do jazz dance. Donnie becomes the sensation of the school’s dance recital and, of course, pisses off the teachers and other authority figures no end, while the kids find this “new” music liberating.
The other Beulah episode — which we watched earlier — featured Louise Beavers and also centered around Donnie (a typically obnoxious movie kid but still a more interesting character than his parents), who needed baby-carriage wheels for his soap-box racer and got them by having the local store owner sell him a baby carriage on credit and bill his mom — leading everyone to the misunderstanding that his mom was pregnant. This one wasn’t as sharply written as the other — its writers were old Hollywood hack Harry Clork and a colleague named James Hill, whereas the “Waltz” episode was written by Ian McClellan Hunter (who became legendary not for any of his own scripts but from “fronting” for Dalton Trumbo on the film Roman Holiday — just before the release of the movie Hunter was blacklisted himself and was told that Paramount was taking his name off the movie; he complained to Trumbo and Trumbo got indignant and said, “They can’t do this to you!” Hunter replied, “But, Dalton, you wrote that script!” Trumbo was doing so much under-the-table work with so many “fronts” he himself had lost track of what he had and hadn’t written).
Though imdb.com lists Jean Yarbrough as the director of Beulah, both these episodes were directed by Richard Bare (also a “B”-movie director keeping alive by working for television, though at least Bare had got to make his “B”’s for a major studio, Warners). The show started with Beulah (whichever actress played her) speaking right to the camera and bemoaning the fact that Bill kept putting off their marriage, and it also had a third regular Black character: Oriole (played by Dorothy Dandridge’s sister Ruby in a chirpy-voiced manner reminiscent of Butterfly McQueen, who played a similar role opposite McDaniel in Gone With the Wind), a maid at one of the neighbors’ homes whom Beulah used as a friend and confidante.
According to Archive.org, only seven episodes of Beulah now exist even though the show ran for three seasons, and they have only three on their site, but even on the basis of these two shows it’s a quite remarkable sitcom and holds up well — and it’s interesting, noting Black bandleader Andy Kirk’s bitter remark that “civil rights worked in reverse in the music business” (he meant that Southern venue owners had been willing to hire Black bands when they could still segregate the audience, but once they had to integrate the audience they went with white bands exclusively), that according to the evidence of Beulah civil rights worked in reverse on TV as well: when they recycled this concept in the 1960's as Hazel, they picked a white actress, Shirley Booth, to play the all-knowing maid.
Certainly the two Beulah shows were a lot better than the third sitcom item Charles put on this disc: an episode of an early-1950’s sitcom variously known as The Stu Erwin Show and Trouble with Father, in which the whiny-voiced comedian from all too many 1930’s movies got to play a school principal and his real-life wife June Collyer played his on-screen wife — though the show wasn’t really I Love Lucy except in reverse: she was the level-headed one and he was the scatterbrain who came up with various mad schemes — in this show, running his own chicken farm on his premises so he doesn’t have to buy eggs. It was a perfectly decent but pretty uninspired show — and let’s face it, as a real-life married couple playing husband and wife on a sitcom they were a far cry below either Lucy and Desi or George and Gracie.
Charles’ disc also included a couple of other items, one of which was a half-hour show called Joe Santa Claus in which the central character is Joe Peters (Ray Montgomery), who’s appointed to play Santa Claus at the department store where he works because he’s considered the most expendable — he’s had a series of jobs he’s walked out on, and he doesn’t seem to be long for this one either. In a series of flashbacks it’s revealed that he served in World War II and brought home a German war bride, Maria (Maria Palmer), fathered a daughter by her and attempted to maintain a family, but his scattered work history, exaggerated sense of his own importance and general failure to Play Well With Others led to a separation, and at the moment he’s drafted to play Santa he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his wife and daughter. Needless to say, daughter herself shows up at the store to see Santa Claus and, with neither knowing who the other is, she pours out her heart to the department-store Santa and says all she wants for Christmas is her daddy back. This could have been insufferably treacly but for the writer and director, Alex Gruenberg (adapting a story by Howard J. Green), who not only plays down the obvious opportunities for cheap sentimentality but even gets a refreshingly hard-nosed performance out of the actress who plays the girl, Jeri James — she’s more bitter than sad over her dad’s disappearance and she pleads for his return with a grim determination that probably softens Joe’s heart far more than a more openly emotional tear-jerking one would have. It certainly moved me more than a more sentimental presentation of this material would have!
Also on the disc was an intriguing excerpt from the famous 1957 TV special that introduced the Edsel — it would be interesting to see the whole thing if it survives “complete” — featuring Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong in a sort-of duet on the song “The Birth of the Blues.” It’s mainly Sinatra singing it to the George Siravo arrangement he’d recorded it with five years earlier and Armstrong doing his level best to squeeze himself into it somehow — and it doesn’t help that Armstrong cracks on a few trumpet notes (his intonation was usually astonishingly close to perfect) or that the balance is pretty wretched, favoring Frank Sinatra’s singing over Armstrong’s contributions (it figures) and Armstrong’s trumpet playing over his singing. Given the beauty of Armstrong’s duets with Bing Crosby (they seem to have played well together because they’d both come up in the 1920’s and they’d known each other since 1931, when Crosby frequently played hooky from his own engagement at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. to see Armstrong perform at Sebastian's New Cotton Club — an establishment that got put out of business when the gangsters who owned the original Cotton Club in New York sued Frank Sebastian for plagiarizing the name!) it’s rather disappointing that he and Sinatra didn’t do better together — they both seemed nervous, as if all too aware that this was a Big Event and it was going out live to a presumably enormous audience (though the post-show ratings were as disappointing as the sales of the Edsel itself), and they were both so scared of making a mistake that they couldn’t relax and show off their talents at their best. Still, this clip is well worth having, especially since Armstrong and Sinatra did almost nothing together — even when they were all in the film High Society it was Crosby, not Sinatra, who partnered Armstrong in the duets!
••••••••••
One of the items we watched last night was a third episode of Beulah that I’d spotted on archive.org, “Beulah Goes Gardening,” from the Hattie McDaniel season, in which the Hendersons, Beulah’s employers, decide to economize by firing their gardener. Supposedly dad Harry (David Bruce) is going to mow the lawn, mom Alice (Jane Frazee) is going to trim the rose bush (a particularly prized possession of Harry’s) and son Donnie (Stuffy Singer) is going to pull the weeds — but on the first Saturday when they have to do all this, they go out on various (separate) outings and each one in turn sticks Beulah with their job. There’s also a subplot in which Beulah takes the rose bush to a plant store to have it resuscitated — and the owner sells it instead, leading Beulah to take a couple of “loaner” rose bushes that are successively larger than the old one, which earns her an inaccurate reputation as a green thumb. While hardly in the same league as “The Waltz” episode, this is still an incredibly warm, funny show highlighted by the marvelous acting of McDaniel, who as she did throughout her career turned the “Mammy” stereotype into Earth Mother, all-seeing, all-knowing and telling us through a loving wink at the camera that she knows she’s really in charge, even though she’s nominally the maid, and without her all these white people would hardly be able to find the floor with thelr legs when they got out of bed in the morning. (Like the other two Beulah episodes on archive.org, this one was directed by Richard Bare — and the script is by Nathaniel Curtis, a reasonable enough author but hardly in the same league as Ian McClellan Hunter.)
I also paired this with a cartoon from Universal from about 1940 to 1940 called Scrub Me, Mama, with a Boogie Beat — essentially a cartoon video for the song of that title, which was recorded both by Will Bradley’s band and the Andrews Sisters. I thought it would be an interesting companion piece for Beulah since it was criticized on the archive.org Web site for its demeaning depictions of Black people — but while that’s there (the opening scene is of a stereotypically shiftless, lazy Black guy with a prominent nose getting stung in it by a bee, and him barely waking up long enough to say “ouch” and then going back to sleep), so is a dazzling use of color (by the time this was made Walt Disney’s three-year monopoly of three-strip Technicolor for animation was long over) and a fast, energetic presentation quite suited to the exuberance of the song by Don Raye. (I’d thought he wrote this one with his frequent collaborator, Gene DePaul, but no-o-o-o-o: this one is credited to Raye solo.) This cartoon, produced by Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz, is also noteworthy for a dazzling color palette, mostly greens and reds, and for one of the rare times the “New Universal” (1937-1946) studio logo was shown in color (the sky was dark green — not deep blue or black, as I’d have expected — and the Universal letters were a kind of blue-white, while the stars in the sky were orange. Nice going!
••••••••••
In my researches into songwriter Arthur Johnston on archive.org I had run across a 1939 Popeye cartoon called It’s the Natural Thing to Do, a typical cross-promotion from Paramount (the song was written by Johnston and Sam Coslow for Bing Crosby’s 1937 film Double or Nothing) with a fascinating and surprisingly modern-sounding premise: Popeye and Bluto receive a fan letter saying that the author likes their movies but wants an end to the roughhouse stuff between them; instead they should treat each other with decency and decorum because “it’s the natural thing to do.” They reach a level of exquisite boredom with each other Dorothy Parker joked about when she reviewed Emily Post’s Etiquette — until Popeye and Bluto start crashing into each other as homoerotically as the Fleischer brothers and their animators dared, and soon they’ve abandoned all pretense of etiquette and “the natural thing to do” as they go at each other hammer-and-tongs. It’s a clever movie and has its share of physically impossible gags — including Popeye flying through the air from one of Bluto’s punches, landing inside a portrait of a woman and then her face dissolves into his — that made 1930’s cartoons watchable and readily distinguishable from the live-action silent comedies that had preceded them.
After that I screened the other “filler” on my disc, an episode of the rather interesting 1950’s British TV show The Invisible Man (ostensibly based on the character created by H. G. Wells but really a hero rather than a villain — his street name was Peter Brady and, like the modern-day superheroes but not the ones in the classic canon, he’s known to almost everybody else in the dramatis personae — the moment he shows up at an airport in the telltale bandages around his neck, everyone knows who he is) called “The Mink Coat,” featuring a relatively prestigious guest star, Hazel Court, as a ventriloquist puppeteer who’s en route to Paris to perform in a French nightclub when she’s waylaid at the airport by a man who’s part of a two-person team who sneaked into a secret installation, photographed some important plans (they’re shown as blueprints and I joked he had actually taken pictures of the plant head’s plans to remodel his house rather than getting the nuclear secrets he was clearly after) and put them into a small canister, only to avoid a security screening he sneaked up behind this woman, cut open the liner of her mink coat and put the microfilm inside.
Once all the principals — including Brady and his girlfriend — were in Paris, the man made some incredibly clumsy passes at the woman to try to get close enough to her to recover her microfilm — she puts him off the first time (it’s obvious she doesn’t realize he’s a spy; he just thinks he’s harassing her to try to get in her pants) and her husband (the spy didn’t realize she had one), a juggler on the same bill as her, blocks the second. It’s a nice, fast little vest-pocket adventure — it had to be because it was shot for a half-hour time slot (it times out as a little over 26 minutes to make room for commercials — gradually a half-hour commercial TV show shrank to 24 minutes and now the standard is 22!) and the hero has to get the villains quickly; the coolest moment in the show is towards the end, when the Invisible Man grabs the precious microfilm from one of the villains (the husband found it in the wife’s mink coat and, curious about what it was, took it to a film director friend of theirs and had it developed) and sets it afire, thereby preserving whatever the atomic secrets were — and it’s a delight (the sort of delight one watches invisible-man movies for) to see it go up in flames in mid-air.
While not a patch on the movies Universal made in the 1930’s and 1940’s on this premise, the Invisible Man TV show (one of my most curious memories from my childhood is of Peter Brady driving a convertible down a freeway — and he’s dressed but his head is invisible) is well done and reasonably engaging — it holds up pretty well, and to see an actress with the reputation of Hazel Court as guest star was a special treat.
About a week ago Charles and I watched a miscellany of 1950’s TV shows he’d downloaded, including two prize episodes of the early-1950’s sitcom Beulah. My understanding was that this was originally produced as a vehicle for Hattie McDaniel in the lead role of Beulah, the wise-mammy maid to Harry and Alice Henderson (played by early-1940’s Universal veterans David Bruce and Jane Frazee) — essentially a modern-dress version of her Academy Award-winning role from Gone With the Wind — but McDaniel died after the first season and Louise Beavers replaced her in the role. The series entry on imdb.com is more ambiguous and seems to be saying that McDaniel only shot two episodes of the series, not an entire season. Fortunately, one of the episodes Charles downloaded featured her: a marvelous show in which the Hendersons’ son Donnie (Stuffy Singer) is doing poorly in his grade-school dance class because he finds the music he’s expected to dance to — a tea-dance waltz record of amazing insipidity — totally uninspiring.
In a plot twist that eerily anticipates the rock ’n’ roll craze of the mid-1950’s, Beulah and her boyfriend Bill (played by an actor billed as Ernest Whitman who turned out to be Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman, Armed Forces Radio Service announcer during World War II, who in between jokes about his weight got to announce a lot of great performances by Billy Eckstine’s band and many of the other great Black acts of the mid-1940’s), who in this episode runs a garage — in the later show with Louise Beavers he seemed to be a colleague of Beulah’s on the Hendersons’ household staff — get together, put on a Black boogie-woogie record and show Donnie how to do jazz dance. Donnie becomes the sensation of the school’s dance recital and, of course, pisses off the teachers and other authority figures no end, while the kids find this “new” music liberating.
The other Beulah episode — which we watched earlier — featured Louise Beavers and also centered around Donnie (a typically obnoxious movie kid but still a more interesting character than his parents), who needed baby-carriage wheels for his soap-box racer and got them by having the local store owner sell him a baby carriage on credit and bill his mom — leading everyone to the misunderstanding that his mom was pregnant. This one wasn’t as sharply written as the other — its writers were old Hollywood hack Harry Clork and a colleague named James Hill, whereas the “Waltz” episode was written by Ian McClellan Hunter (who became legendary not for any of his own scripts but from “fronting” for Dalton Trumbo on the film Roman Holiday — just before the release of the movie Hunter was blacklisted himself and was told that Paramount was taking his name off the movie; he complained to Trumbo and Trumbo got indignant and said, “They can’t do this to you!” Hunter replied, “But, Dalton, you wrote that script!” Trumbo was doing so much under-the-table work with so many “fronts” he himself had lost track of what he had and hadn’t written).
Though imdb.com lists Jean Yarbrough as the director of Beulah, both these episodes were directed by Richard Bare (also a “B”-movie director keeping alive by working for television, though at least Bare had got to make his “B”’s for a major studio, Warners). The show started with Beulah (whichever actress played her) speaking right to the camera and bemoaning the fact that Bill kept putting off their marriage, and it also had a third regular Black character: Oriole (played by Dorothy Dandridge’s sister Ruby in a chirpy-voiced manner reminiscent of Butterfly McQueen, who played a similar role opposite McDaniel in Gone With the Wind), a maid at one of the neighbors’ homes whom Beulah used as a friend and confidante.
According to Archive.org, only seven episodes of Beulah now exist even though the show ran for three seasons, and they have only three on their site, but even on the basis of these two shows it’s a quite remarkable sitcom and holds up well — and it’s interesting, noting Black bandleader Andy Kirk’s bitter remark that “civil rights worked in reverse in the music business” (he meant that Southern venue owners had been willing to hire Black bands when they could still segregate the audience, but once they had to integrate the audience they went with white bands exclusively), that according to the evidence of Beulah civil rights worked in reverse on TV as well: when they recycled this concept in the 1960's as Hazel, they picked a white actress, Shirley Booth, to play the all-knowing maid.
Certainly the two Beulah shows were a lot better than the third sitcom item Charles put on this disc: an episode of an early-1950’s sitcom variously known as The Stu Erwin Show and Trouble with Father, in which the whiny-voiced comedian from all too many 1930’s movies got to play a school principal and his real-life wife June Collyer played his on-screen wife — though the show wasn’t really I Love Lucy except in reverse: she was the level-headed one and he was the scatterbrain who came up with various mad schemes — in this show, running his own chicken farm on his premises so he doesn’t have to buy eggs. It was a perfectly decent but pretty uninspired show — and let’s face it, as a real-life married couple playing husband and wife on a sitcom they were a far cry below either Lucy and Desi or George and Gracie.
Charles’ disc also included a couple of other items, one of which was a half-hour show called Joe Santa Claus in which the central character is Joe Peters (Ray Montgomery), who’s appointed to play Santa Claus at the department store where he works because he’s considered the most expendable — he’s had a series of jobs he’s walked out on, and he doesn’t seem to be long for this one either. In a series of flashbacks it’s revealed that he served in World War II and brought home a German war bride, Maria (Maria Palmer), fathered a daughter by her and attempted to maintain a family, but his scattered work history, exaggerated sense of his own importance and general failure to Play Well With Others led to a separation, and at the moment he’s drafted to play Santa he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his wife and daughter. Needless to say, daughter herself shows up at the store to see Santa Claus and, with neither knowing who the other is, she pours out her heart to the department-store Santa and says all she wants for Christmas is her daddy back. This could have been insufferably treacly but for the writer and director, Alex Gruenberg (adapting a story by Howard J. Green), who not only plays down the obvious opportunities for cheap sentimentality but even gets a refreshingly hard-nosed performance out of the actress who plays the girl, Jeri James — she’s more bitter than sad over her dad’s disappearance and she pleads for his return with a grim determination that probably softens Joe’s heart far more than a more openly emotional tear-jerking one would have. It certainly moved me more than a more sentimental presentation of this material would have!
Also on the disc was an intriguing excerpt from the famous 1957 TV special that introduced the Edsel — it would be interesting to see the whole thing if it survives “complete” — featuring Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong in a sort-of duet on the song “The Birth of the Blues.” It’s mainly Sinatra singing it to the George Siravo arrangement he’d recorded it with five years earlier and Armstrong doing his level best to squeeze himself into it somehow — and it doesn’t help that Armstrong cracks on a few trumpet notes (his intonation was usually astonishingly close to perfect) or that the balance is pretty wretched, favoring Frank Sinatra’s singing over Armstrong’s contributions (it figures) and Armstrong’s trumpet playing over his singing. Given the beauty of Armstrong’s duets with Bing Crosby (they seem to have played well together because they’d both come up in the 1920’s and they’d known each other since 1931, when Crosby frequently played hooky from his own engagement at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. to see Armstrong perform at Sebastian's New Cotton Club — an establishment that got put out of business when the gangsters who owned the original Cotton Club in New York sued Frank Sebastian for plagiarizing the name!) it’s rather disappointing that he and Sinatra didn’t do better together — they both seemed nervous, as if all too aware that this was a Big Event and it was going out live to a presumably enormous audience (though the post-show ratings were as disappointing as the sales of the Edsel itself), and they were both so scared of making a mistake that they couldn’t relax and show off their talents at their best. Still, this clip is well worth having, especially since Armstrong and Sinatra did almost nothing together — even when they were all in the film High Society it was Crosby, not Sinatra, who partnered Armstrong in the duets!
••••••••••
One of the items we watched last night was a third episode of Beulah that I’d spotted on archive.org, “Beulah Goes Gardening,” from the Hattie McDaniel season, in which the Hendersons, Beulah’s employers, decide to economize by firing their gardener. Supposedly dad Harry (David Bruce) is going to mow the lawn, mom Alice (Jane Frazee) is going to trim the rose bush (a particularly prized possession of Harry’s) and son Donnie (Stuffy Singer) is going to pull the weeds — but on the first Saturday when they have to do all this, they go out on various (separate) outings and each one in turn sticks Beulah with their job. There’s also a subplot in which Beulah takes the rose bush to a plant store to have it resuscitated — and the owner sells it instead, leading Beulah to take a couple of “loaner” rose bushes that are successively larger than the old one, which earns her an inaccurate reputation as a green thumb. While hardly in the same league as “The Waltz” episode, this is still an incredibly warm, funny show highlighted by the marvelous acting of McDaniel, who as she did throughout her career turned the “Mammy” stereotype into Earth Mother, all-seeing, all-knowing and telling us through a loving wink at the camera that she knows she’s really in charge, even though she’s nominally the maid, and without her all these white people would hardly be able to find the floor with thelr legs when they got out of bed in the morning. (Like the other two Beulah episodes on archive.org, this one was directed by Richard Bare — and the script is by Nathaniel Curtis, a reasonable enough author but hardly in the same league as Ian McClellan Hunter.)
I also paired this with a cartoon from Universal from about 1940 to 1940 called Scrub Me, Mama, with a Boogie Beat — essentially a cartoon video for the song of that title, which was recorded both by Will Bradley’s band and the Andrews Sisters. I thought it would be an interesting companion piece for Beulah since it was criticized on the archive.org Web site for its demeaning depictions of Black people — but while that’s there (the opening scene is of a stereotypically shiftless, lazy Black guy with a prominent nose getting stung in it by a bee, and him barely waking up long enough to say “ouch” and then going back to sleep), so is a dazzling use of color (by the time this was made Walt Disney’s three-year monopoly of three-strip Technicolor for animation was long over) and a fast, energetic presentation quite suited to the exuberance of the song by Don Raye. (I’d thought he wrote this one with his frequent collaborator, Gene DePaul, but no-o-o-o-o: this one is credited to Raye solo.) This cartoon, produced by Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz, is also noteworthy for a dazzling color palette, mostly greens and reds, and for one of the rare times the “New Universal” (1937-1946) studio logo was shown in color (the sky was dark green — not deep blue or black, as I’d have expected — and the Universal letters were a kind of blue-white, while the stars in the sky were orange. Nice going!
••••••••••
In my researches into songwriter Arthur Johnston on archive.org I had run across a 1939 Popeye cartoon called It’s the Natural Thing to Do, a typical cross-promotion from Paramount (the song was written by Johnston and Sam Coslow for Bing Crosby’s 1937 film Double or Nothing) with a fascinating and surprisingly modern-sounding premise: Popeye and Bluto receive a fan letter saying that the author likes their movies but wants an end to the roughhouse stuff between them; instead they should treat each other with decency and decorum because “it’s the natural thing to do.” They reach a level of exquisite boredom with each other Dorothy Parker joked about when she reviewed Emily Post’s Etiquette — until Popeye and Bluto start crashing into each other as homoerotically as the Fleischer brothers and their animators dared, and soon they’ve abandoned all pretense of etiquette and “the natural thing to do” as they go at each other hammer-and-tongs. It’s a clever movie and has its share of physically impossible gags — including Popeye flying through the air from one of Bluto’s punches, landing inside a portrait of a woman and then her face dissolves into his — that made 1930’s cartoons watchable and readily distinguishable from the live-action silent comedies that had preceded them.
After that I screened the other “filler” on my disc, an episode of the rather interesting 1950’s British TV show The Invisible Man (ostensibly based on the character created by H. G. Wells but really a hero rather than a villain — his street name was Peter Brady and, like the modern-day superheroes but not the ones in the classic canon, he’s known to almost everybody else in the dramatis personae — the moment he shows up at an airport in the telltale bandages around his neck, everyone knows who he is) called “The Mink Coat,” featuring a relatively prestigious guest star, Hazel Court, as a ventriloquist puppeteer who’s en route to Paris to perform in a French nightclub when she’s waylaid at the airport by a man who’s part of a two-person team who sneaked into a secret installation, photographed some important plans (they’re shown as blueprints and I joked he had actually taken pictures of the plant head’s plans to remodel his house rather than getting the nuclear secrets he was clearly after) and put them into a small canister, only to avoid a security screening he sneaked up behind this woman, cut open the liner of her mink coat and put the microfilm inside.
Once all the principals — including Brady and his girlfriend — were in Paris, the man made some incredibly clumsy passes at the woman to try to get close enough to her to recover her microfilm — she puts him off the first time (it’s obvious she doesn’t realize he’s a spy; he just thinks he’s harassing her to try to get in her pants) and her husband (the spy didn’t realize she had one), a juggler on the same bill as her, blocks the second. It’s a nice, fast little vest-pocket adventure — it had to be because it was shot for a half-hour time slot (it times out as a little over 26 minutes to make room for commercials — gradually a half-hour commercial TV show shrank to 24 minutes and now the standard is 22!) and the hero has to get the villains quickly; the coolest moment in the show is towards the end, when the Invisible Man grabs the precious microfilm from one of the villains (the husband found it in the wife’s mink coat and, curious about what it was, took it to a film director friend of theirs and had it developed) and sets it afire, thereby preserving whatever the atomic secrets were — and it’s a delight (the sort of delight one watches invisible-man movies for) to see it go up in flames in mid-air.
While not a patch on the movies Universal made in the 1930’s and 1940’s on this premise, the Invisible Man TV show (one of my most curious memories from my childhood is of Peter Brady driving a convertible down a freeway — and he’s dressed but his head is invisible) is well done and reasonably engaging — it holds up pretty well, and to see an actress with the reputation of Hazel Court as guest star was a special treat.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
The Monster Walks (Action/Mayfair/International/Commonwealth, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Monster Walks was a 1932 independent film — essentially a murder mystery disguised as a horror movie — whose entry in the American Film Institute Catalog lists it as a Ralph M. Like production for Action Pictures, Inc. (quite a misnomer given how little action there actually is in this film!) but which Carlos Clarens’ history of horror films identified as a Mayfair production (according to the AFI that was because Action Pictures went bankrupt while the film was in release — it was the middle of the Depression, after all — and Mayfair bought the rights), the AFI’s vaunted “modern sources” say Ralph M. Like owned a studio called International Film Corporation, and the print we were watching, a download from archive.org, had a credit on the title card to “Commonwealth Pictures.”
The Monster Walks was made the same year as The Old Dark House, and the two stand together as examples of what to do (The Old Dark House) and not to do (The Monster Walks) with the old-dark-house genre. There aren’t really any stars in this movie — the male lead is Rex Lease, a “B”-lister during the silent era (mostly in Westerns) who was already on his way down in 1932 without ever having been that high up in the first place. The story and script are by Robert Ellis and the director is Frank Strayer, who made some quite atmospheric little horror films for better indie studios — The Vampire Bat in 1933 for Majestic and the very impressive Condemned to Live in 1935 for Chesterfield — before signing with Columbia and wasting his flair for horror by taking the reins of the long-running Blondie series based on the comic strip.
The film centers around the Earlton brothers, one of whom has just died when the film begins while the other one, Robert Earlton (Sheldon Lewis, who played in the 1920 Louis B. Mayer version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — a film overshadowed then and now by the bigger-budgeted Paramount production of the same story the same year with John Barrymore, but one which has its points), is wheelchair-bound. The dead Earlton brother’s estranged daughter Ruth (Vera Reynolds) comes to the Earlton mansion to collect her inheritance — much to the bitterness of her uncle Robert, who believes she means to take over the entire estate and throw him out of it. Since he’s also the next in line for the estate if she should die before him, he’s got an obvious motive for her murder. As if that weren’t enough of a plot, it also turns out that the late Earlton was a research scientist who kept an ape in a cage in his basement and was planning to use it for an experiment in a human-to-ape brain transplant (not that old gimmick, again!).
Earlton’s will left a pension to the elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Krug (Martha Mattox), and her son and assistant Hanns (Mischa Auer — I was going to say “cast against type” but he played so many of these sinister, skulking hangers-on in the early 1930’s that it was actually his later comic roles, for which he’s best known now, that were against his early “type”). Also in the cast is Willie Best, the Black comedian who was still being billed as “Sleep ’n Eat” — he later rebelled and insisted studios credit him under his real name, but he still had to play the stupid shuffling servant stereotype — and he actually gets a few funny moments in this one (notably in which his foot gets caught in the jaw of a bearskin rug and he thinks he’s being attacked by the ape on the premises) but mostly it’s the same racist dreck he always played.
Indeed the biggest problem with The Monster Walks is that almost nothing actually happens — it’s mostly just people skulking around an old-dark-house set and acting mildly afraid of each other. There are a few red herrings — like the hairy, apelike arm that emerges in Ruth’s room one night and tries to strangle her, leading us to wonder if Robert Ellis is going to tell us that the supposedly “dead” Earlton brother is still alive but did one of his human-to-ape transplants on himself and became a were-ape — and a few good points, like the filmmakers’ resistance to using the gimmick of having Robert Earlton only fake his disability.
In the end, if you cared, Hanns Krug was the attempted strangler of Ruth, he tried again later but ended up killing his mom because she and Ruth had switched rooms, then killed Robert because he blamed Robert for having made him kill his mom, and finally trapped Ruth in the basement with the ape (a chimpanzee — a real one — instead of the usual gorilla-suited human who generally got cast in these roles), tried to get it to kill her, but the ape decided to play deus ex machina and kill Hanns instead. The closing gag contains a reference to Darwin and yet another racist gag for Willie Best, who’s told that he’s descended from apes and says he knew creatures like that in his family, “but they was less active.” The Monster Walks was just another Poverty Row quickie, clearly sucking off whatever star blood was left in Rex Lease’s bone marrow, and though it was only an hour long it still managed to bore.
The Monster Walks was a 1932 independent film — essentially a murder mystery disguised as a horror movie — whose entry in the American Film Institute Catalog lists it as a Ralph M. Like production for Action Pictures, Inc. (quite a misnomer given how little action there actually is in this film!) but which Carlos Clarens’ history of horror films identified as a Mayfair production (according to the AFI that was because Action Pictures went bankrupt while the film was in release — it was the middle of the Depression, after all — and Mayfair bought the rights), the AFI’s vaunted “modern sources” say Ralph M. Like owned a studio called International Film Corporation, and the print we were watching, a download from archive.org, had a credit on the title card to “Commonwealth Pictures.”
The Monster Walks was made the same year as The Old Dark House, and the two stand together as examples of what to do (The Old Dark House) and not to do (The Monster Walks) with the old-dark-house genre. There aren’t really any stars in this movie — the male lead is Rex Lease, a “B”-lister during the silent era (mostly in Westerns) who was already on his way down in 1932 without ever having been that high up in the first place. The story and script are by Robert Ellis and the director is Frank Strayer, who made some quite atmospheric little horror films for better indie studios — The Vampire Bat in 1933 for Majestic and the very impressive Condemned to Live in 1935 for Chesterfield — before signing with Columbia and wasting his flair for horror by taking the reins of the long-running Blondie series based on the comic strip.
The film centers around the Earlton brothers, one of whom has just died when the film begins while the other one, Robert Earlton (Sheldon Lewis, who played in the 1920 Louis B. Mayer version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — a film overshadowed then and now by the bigger-budgeted Paramount production of the same story the same year with John Barrymore, but one which has its points), is wheelchair-bound. The dead Earlton brother’s estranged daughter Ruth (Vera Reynolds) comes to the Earlton mansion to collect her inheritance — much to the bitterness of her uncle Robert, who believes she means to take over the entire estate and throw him out of it. Since he’s also the next in line for the estate if she should die before him, he’s got an obvious motive for her murder. As if that weren’t enough of a plot, it also turns out that the late Earlton was a research scientist who kept an ape in a cage in his basement and was planning to use it for an experiment in a human-to-ape brain transplant (not that old gimmick, again!).
Earlton’s will left a pension to the elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Krug (Martha Mattox), and her son and assistant Hanns (Mischa Auer — I was going to say “cast against type” but he played so many of these sinister, skulking hangers-on in the early 1930’s that it was actually his later comic roles, for which he’s best known now, that were against his early “type”). Also in the cast is Willie Best, the Black comedian who was still being billed as “Sleep ’n Eat” — he later rebelled and insisted studios credit him under his real name, but he still had to play the stupid shuffling servant stereotype — and he actually gets a few funny moments in this one (notably in which his foot gets caught in the jaw of a bearskin rug and he thinks he’s being attacked by the ape on the premises) but mostly it’s the same racist dreck he always played.
Indeed the biggest problem with The Monster Walks is that almost nothing actually happens — it’s mostly just people skulking around an old-dark-house set and acting mildly afraid of each other. There are a few red herrings — like the hairy, apelike arm that emerges in Ruth’s room one night and tries to strangle her, leading us to wonder if Robert Ellis is going to tell us that the supposedly “dead” Earlton brother is still alive but did one of his human-to-ape transplants on himself and became a were-ape — and a few good points, like the filmmakers’ resistance to using the gimmick of having Robert Earlton only fake his disability.
In the end, if you cared, Hanns Krug was the attempted strangler of Ruth, he tried again later but ended up killing his mom because she and Ruth had switched rooms, then killed Robert because he blamed Robert for having made him kill his mom, and finally trapped Ruth in the basement with the ape (a chimpanzee — a real one — instead of the usual gorilla-suited human who generally got cast in these roles), tried to get it to kill her, but the ape decided to play deus ex machina and kill Hanns instead. The closing gag contains a reference to Darwin and yet another racist gag for Willie Best, who’s told that he’s descended from apes and says he knew creatures like that in his family, “but they was less active.” The Monster Walks was just another Poverty Row quickie, clearly sucking off whatever star blood was left in Rex Lease’s bone marrow, and though it was only an hour long it still managed to bore.
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